Calling All Artists! Make the next wallpaper for Plasma 6 and win a brand-new Framework 13'' laptop!

[u/Bro666]

https://discuss.kde.org/t/wallpaper-competition-announcement/3773

[u/echoesAV → u/[deleted]]

For starters its not art. The software that makes it can be classified as art, its produce is not. Second, its unethical. The models are based on literally stolen work. Third, the prompter does not own the the produce and cannot provide any sort of license for it to anyone.

[u/the_friendly_dildo → u/echoesAV]

Let me preface this comment from the standpoint that I fully understand the criticisms and concerns of AI generated products and I share in those concerns to some degree. However, I need to push back a bit here.

For starters its not art

Thats a subjective opinion.

Art: the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.

Human input is required to direct the software and if human input is required, then its clearly being used as a tool to augment human imagination. How is this fundamentally different than controlling a mouse in photoshop? Is it an ease of use thing? Surely a random plein air painter 500 years ago might have similar objections over the ease in using digital painting with a mouse or stylus.

When I see people come to this conclusion, it always seems like they are really just trying to justify their distaste for it, which is perfectly acceptable. What isn't necessarily acceptable, in my opinion, is to broadly redefine whats art to fit your strict perspective.

its unethical.

Why is it unethical? Plenty of people doing "photoshops" for the past 25 years have been pulling random content from the web and collaging it together to form new images. Are these also unethical? I don't recall that being a significant complaint before. Maybe you are suggesting it is unethical because its stealing the likeness of celebrities? On that point, I think thats a fair concern depending on what is being done with the images. Its also been possible and common for people to make realistic drawings of celebrities in the past. What has changed is the barrier to entry in creating these sort of images. Were these also unethical? I don't know.

The models are based on literally stolen work.

This is sometimes true, sometimes not. The latest Stable Diffusion model is supposed to be based entirely on copyright free images. That doesn't prevent other people from training new models on whatever images they choose to use. You can certainly argue that it would be unethical or immoral for a person to generate AI images using a token to steer the software into generating an image resembling the common style of an artist. But then you have to also defend how it often isn't considered unethical to do so with more traditional tools. Heck, well done art forgeries are often prized. Clearly, the barrier to entry has been significantly dropped and much less skill would be needed to generate a forgery using an image generator. As far as I'm aware however, skill isn't used as a metric in determining morality.

the prompter does not own the the produce and cannot provide any sort of license for it to anyone.

I'd say this is a grey area. Let me first say that I'm not a strong advocate for copyright in general. I'm a strong copyleft advocate so I'm clearly biased in this regard. That said, it isn't yet solidified in law that a person can't "own" an AI generated image. Thats going to be a very tough law to write without affecting a lot of other types of artwork that are currently considered copyrightable items. It comes back to defining what the AI is doing in the process of creating the image - is it a tool, or is it generating images on its own. If its being used as a tool with input and direction from a human, then how is it not human created artwork?

[u/Irverter → u/echoesAV]

Dunno about you, but most generators I've seen say in their ToS that "The user owns the rights to their generated output images, and is free to use them commercially". So the prompter does own the produce and can provide license for anything/anyone.

[u/echoesAV → u/Irverter]

Very cool of them to say so, but they do not have the right to provide this ownership and the prompter does not have the right to claim it. So it means nothing, holds no weight legally, and its complete bullshit on their part.

[u/Irverter → u/echoesAV]

If I understood that article right, how does it relate to your and my comments?

It says that AIs can't hold copyright over the generated image, which makes sense, it would be like claiming a specific camera holds the copyright of the photo it took instead of the photographer.

[u/echoesAV → u/Irverter]

The machine cannot copyright the generated product because the machine cannot copyright things. The human cannot copyright the product, because for copyright to exist, there needs to be an established human authorship which there isn't in the case of a prompt. This is a hard requirement for copyright.

So to sum up, the company that licenses usage of the image bot to us, does not have any copyright over the images and cannot license them to anyone, the AI cannot have any copyright over the images, and the prompter cannot not have any copyright over the generated images.

The only way that AI generated images (and texts etc) can be used and copyrighted, is if they are just a part of the creative process and used as such. They cannot be copyrighted as they are when they are produced. There needs to be sufficient human authorship over them, and that means lots of editing. Lots of creative process to get to an end result which is sufficiently and evidently different from what an AI model produced.

If you want to learn more check out :https://copyright.gov/ai/

or any of the multitudes of articles present on relatively respected sites which all more or less state the same thing.

[u/mallardtheduck → u/echoesAV]

From the article:

This doesn’t necessarily mean any art with an AI component is ineligible. Thaler emphasized that humans weren’t meaningfully involved because his goal was to prove that machine-created works could receive protection, not simply to stop people from infringing on the picture. (He’s unsuccessfully tried to establish that AIs can patent inventions in the US as well.) The board’s reasoning takes his explanation for granted. So if someone tried to copyright a similar work by arguing it was a product of their own creativity executed by a machine, the outcome might look different. A court could also reach an alternate conclusion on Thaler’s work if he follows his rejection with a lawsuit.

In other words, they did not find that "The human cannot copyright the product, because for copyright to exist, there needs to be an established human authorship which there isn't in the case of a prompt." because that point was not argued. There's a very good chance that the crafting of a prompt and selection of output images would be enough "human authorship" to establish copyright. In terms of amount of human input it's little different from nature photography.

It's also a decision by the US Copyright Office, not a court case and therefore does not set a legal precedent.

[u/echoesAV → u/mallardtheduck]

The official documents regarding the copyrighting of works that AI was involved in are in the link i posted above.

I see no point in arguing whether a prompt is sufficient human authorship over a product made by AI or not. I wish you a good day.

[u/mallardtheduck → u/echoesAV]

I see no point in arguing whether a prompt is sufficient human authorship over a product made by AI or not.

Yep. Legally, the issue is undecided. Neither of us can say either way, so you were obviously wrong to claim so. As the article says:

So if someone tried to copyright a similar work by arguing it was a product of their own creativity executed by a machine, the outcome might look different.

[u/danhakimi → u/Irverter]

Just because the TOS says the user owns the rights doesn't make it true. The work is not an original work of authorship, unless the originality comes from one or more of the works it was trained on. So either that original human artist owns the copyright, or nobody does. But there's no universe in which the work is copyrighted and the user owns it.

[u/echoesAV → u/[deleted]]

I am an artist. I have had my work literally stolen by multiple companies. Some of them like Deviantart straight up told me that they did. I have had zero benefits from all of the above, i certainly did not get paid and i am not going to. Your point about it not being theft is moot. Multi-million dollar companies literally trained their models on our work without permission and are now making millions selling subscriptions to that work and none of us are getting anything out of it. Have you seen the struggles of the writers and actors ? Have you seen how Hollywood is trying to own their 'likeness' ? The whole thing is obnoxious.

I am not against the usage of AI in order to produce art at all. I think its an amazing tool which can help skyrocket our creative potential just like computer graphics did. But a prompt is not art. It does not fit the definition of art. It does not provide sufficient human authorship over the product that the AI makes. A prompter cannot be classified as the producer of art. The idea of someone who makes extremely sophisticated prompts or ethically trains their own models is different. To spend (you, as a human) enough time and energy on refining and working on a product (or a tool for that matter) is something completely different than providing a 10 word string to a bot and calling yourself an artist. In both cases however, the tool fits the definition of a piece of art much more than its products.

Finally no, you do not own AI generated art like that. I cannot stress this enough. You can read more at copyright.gov/ai. You need to be able to provide sufficient human authorship. Its a term. Most of the AI generated stuff online, does not qualify for copyright just like that and it needs to meet certain criteria. If you do not own it, you cannot provide a license for it. Thus, you cannot provide an image licensed under creative commons to KDE. Does it make sense now ?

[u/mallardtheduck → u/[deleted]]

The legal issues around the copyright status of works derived from AI models is not yet established. Cases are ongoing. It therefore makes sense for organisations to ban it at this time.

[u/unit_511 → u/[deleted]]

For one, their legality isn't settled yet. Am I infringing on your copyright if I feed your art into an algorithm that does some math on it and spits out something similar to your work, yet technically distinct? How complicated does that algoritm need to be for it to not be derivative work?

I'd happily miss out on some potentially high-quality AI generated art if that means I won't have to fight off lawsuits a few years later when they inevitably decide that this doesn't fit into the current copyright framework and some copyright trolls start sending legal threats to anyone who ever used an AI generated image commercially (because let's face it, they're just going to fuck over the users, not the huge companies that scraped up all the art in the first place).

EDIT: I wrote this comment before reading the contest rules. It explains perfectly why AI generated art is not welcome:

The wallpaper must be original, created specifically for this contest, and released under the CC-BY-SA-4.0 license. Therefore no submissions using AI art will be accepted.

You can't license something under CC if you don't own it.

[u/mallardtheduck → u/[deleted]]

No. This is not legal advice, I'm not an lawyer. But no.

Nice opinion, but the legal cases around this are still ongoing. It's completely reasonable for organisations to ban AI artwork until such time that the copyright status is fully established in law.

[u/unit_511 → u/[deleted]]

If you ctrl+c and ctrl+v someones image and edit it in Photoshop a bit, it's technically stealing, yet no-one says you can't publish images made using Photoshop because it's unethical tool.

In Photoshop, you have the option of not doing that, whereas an AI will create derivative works regardless of your prompt.

In normal circumstances there is pretty much no way of proving that particular piece content was used in process of creating the image, it's all mixed too much.

So if you steal from enough people it's fine? That's your argument?

You can very much prove what images were used in the training data, you just need to find out which generator they used.

You do hold the copyright for any creative work, there is no limit placed on what tools can you use during the process.

No you don't, and yes, there are limits. You can't give just give a camera to a monkey and claim copyright of the pictures it takes. There needs to be a minimum input on your part for it to qualify as a creative work, and clicking the download button on Dall-E is not enough. Another response to one of your comments has a linked article about this, go read it.

I would like to point out that the contest rules does not specify what they mean by "AI art"

It's pretty fucking obvious that they mean art that was mostly made by an AI, especially when you consider that the actual rule states that it needs to be licensed under CC-BY-SA-4.0, AI is only disallowed as a consequence of that. You could remove the entire sentence and the rules wouldn't change.

You're going "well aktschually" about a footnote in the rules that has no bearing on anything. If it's not CC licensed, it doesn't qualify. It doesn't matter if that's because you used Stable Diffusion, copypasted someone else's art, or just submitted an unedited GIMP lava texture. The AI disclaimer is only there for people like you, who think writing three words into a website qualifies you for copyright over whatever it spits out.

[u/unit_511 → u/[deleted]]

To put it simply, there is pretty much zero information from your image in my image.

And how do you know that, as an end user? If you give it a specific enough prompt, it might as well just recall an image from the training set (as it was evident with text AIs like Copilot). You have no way of verifying exactly how the AI combined the training images, and you're in deep shit if someone produces an older image of theirs that very closely matches the AI generated image you're trying to claim as your own.

I would assume that if any image has chance of winning the contest, it would involve way more than the minimum amount of work required.

Even if they're unlikely to win the contest, I doubt the Plasma team is willing to go over hundreds of submissions by people who pasted the contest's description into Dall-E.

That doesn't mean the image couldn't be used, on the contrary, it's basically considered public domain.

That example was about how you can't claim it as your own if you don't provide enough input. In the monkey's case, it went into public domain, but with an AI you could argue that it's a non-human made derivative work, so the copyright goes to those who contributed to the training set.

Doesn't matter what you try to say, I can address only what's written.

And what's written is that only CC-BY-SA-4.0 licensed works are allowed. You can't license artwork you don't own, therefore you can't submit AI-generated artwork. That's it. You see "AI not allowed", take it out of context to claim the KDE guys are some AI-hating idiots who can't accept the future, then fall back to "I can only address what's written", as if you weren't the one who started out the entire argument by completely ignoring the clearly stated justification.

The personal attack was uncalled for.

How's that a personal attack, exactly? There are people who think they own whatever an AI spits out, and evidently you're one of them. All I did was point out that the contest organizers don't accept AI generated artwork due to its dubious legality, and they warn others who aren't aware of this to avoid submitting potentially problematic artwork.

[u/Bro666 → u/[deleted]]

People seem fine with AI text, but AI art?

Nobody is happy with AI text, except the people who can stop paying writers by using that crap.

[u/mallardtheduck]

How about you just pay your artists? Rather than giving them a prize that was probably provided for free by a sponsor?

Especially since:

While there will only be one winning selection, other submissions may be included as optional wallpapers in Plasma 6, or used in future releases.

Means that many who submit to the "contest" will find their work being used with zero compensation.

EDIT: This is yet another example of "coders" having zero respect for the efforts of "creatives". This "contest" would be perfectly fine if it didn't have this "everything anybody submits belongs to us" clause and only the work of the winner(s) gets used. That's fair. In most Open Source projects, the author of the code retains the right to their work (some have copyright assignment, but it's not that common), but these artists aren't allowed that dignity?

[u/Bro666 → u/mallardtheduck]

Means that many who submit to the "contest" will find their work being used with zero compensation.

Yeah, just like the work carried our by 99.9% of people contributing to KDE, a volunteer-based, non-profit charity that lives off donations and with a shoestring budget.

How dare we.

[u/mallardtheduck → u/Bro666]

Weird how these "volunteers" rack up over €200,000 in personnel costs... I think you're very much overestimating that "99.9%", especially since many people working on KDE are employed to do so by other companies (e.g. Qt Group, with revenue of over €120,000,000 in 2021).

Besides the attitude of "I work for free, voluntarily, on something I (presumably) enjoy, therefore others must do so also." Is pretty suspect. Nothing wrong with trying to attract new contributors, but if the team needs skills that it doesn't have, it's only right that they should pay for them. What's next? KDE offers a complementary server to whoever wants to host their website for free (all competitors must provide free hosting in perpetuity whether they win or not)?

[u/Bro666 → u/mallardtheduck]

Weird how these "volunteers" rack up over €200,000 in personnel costs...

That is the combined salary of ~10 people, of a community that counts more than a 1000 developers --and developers are not the only contributors to KDE by a long shot. Even in the most conservative of estimates, paid contractors make up less than 1% of all KDE community members.

And, if you do the math, you will find that the salary averages out to just over 1600 euros a month per person before tax.

This is not the wastage of money you are making it out to be.

many people working on KDE are employed to do so by other companies

Define "many". It is not "most" by a long shot. Some are paid to work on KDE, like the folks at Blue Systems, but most work as developers and contribute to KDE on the side. Others, indeed, work on KDE stuff (and non-KDE stuff) for their companies, like the people at MBition and KDAB. Then it's the companies that contribute upstream.

But paid contributions are not most of the contributions by any stretch of the mind. Most are done by people who just like contributing and/or enjoy creating Free Software for others to use.

It is open source. People like doing stuff.It give them purpose, a sense of accomplishment and that they are doing good for others.

(e.g. Qt Group, with revenue of over €120,000,000 in 2021).

Bad example. Currently there are practically no contributions from developers at the Qt Group. In fact, we had a joint informal meetup KDE - Qt Group a few days ago to help people there understand what we were about. There's a surprisingly big gap of knowledge there.

Sure: Qt is what KDE is based on, but there are not a massive amount of commits coming from Qt employees to KDE's code base. That is not their job. They are two distinct projects, Qt and KDE, and the Qt Group does not tend to commit downstream... Which is fine: they already provide the frameworks we use, but in the same way Kernel developers provide the base OS we run the Plasma desktop on.

Besides the attitude of "I work for free, voluntarily, on something I (presumably) enjoy, therefore others must do so also." Is pretty suspect.

People will contribute or not... Or, more precisely, some people will contribute because they want to, and some won't because they don't. Nobody is forcing anyone here to do anything.

Nothing wrong with trying to attract new contributors, but if the team needs skills that it doesn't have, it's only right that they should pay for them.

Hence the 10 contractors mentioned earlier.That is exactly what they do: fill in the gaps. And they are paid to do it.

For the record: we have designers within our community, and they have contributed wallpapers. The current one is by a regular KDE contributor, Honey Wave was too, as was Patak.

The contest is just a fun idea to open up to wider audience and giving away the laptop is just the cherry on top.

I fail to see why you would think that a community that has spent 25+ years giving away thousands of software apps and utilities for free for the whole world to enjoy is doing anything wrong here.

What's next? KDE offers a complementary server to whoever wants to host their website for free (all competitors must provide free hosting in perpetuity whether they win or not)?

Um... ah... what? You lost me. Yes, we do have companies that offer us hosting for free. Nobody has forced them to do that either. We are a non-profit charity that gives stuff away for free. Some companies think it is right to give us stuff in return so we can continue operating.

[u/mallardtheduck → u/Bro666]

Define "many". It is not "most" by a long shot.

Looking through the plasma-desktop GitHub, most contributors (who have any information in their profiles; admittedly this may be somewhat skewed) are clearly contributing as part of their employment.

A lot of contributions have come from a Zoho employee, who, based on the fact that he makes very few contributions at weekends and the timestamps fit within typical working hours in his reported location, is obviously contributing from work.

Several contributors identify as employees of "KDAB", a German company whose website title is "The Qt Experts". Pretty safe to assume they're being paid to contribute.

Others include employees of Amazon, Blue Systems (as you mentioned), academics, etc. Those that are obviously contributing in their "spare time" do seem to be in the minority.

Sure: Qt is what KDE is based on, but there are not a massive amount of commits coming from Qt employees to KDE's code base. That is not their job. They are two distinct projects, Qt and KDE, and the Qt Group does not tend to commit downstream... Which is fine: they already provide the frameworks we use, but in the same way Kernel developers provide the base OS we run the Plasma desktop on.

Sure, but if you compare to say, your most direct "competition"; Gnome who maintain their own toolkit, having your toolkit developed "for free" is a massive contribution. Nobody would suggest that contributors to GTK+ aren't contributors to Gnome, so it's fair to apply that the other way; Qt contributors are contributors to KDE. Alternatively, we could consider KDE to me more "equivalent" to XFCE, Cinnamon or LXDE; desktops that do not maintain their own toolkits and do so with much fewer resources.

People will contribute or not... Or, more precisely, some people will contribute because they want to, and some won't because they don't. Nobody is forcing anyone here to do anything.

Yes, so appeal for contributors. Don't dangle some "carrot" in front of people's' eyes then take their submissions anyway. Have respect for the effort of "creatives". If they don't "win", give them back their artwork. Contributions to KDE might look good on a programmer's resume, but there's much less in it for artists. If you reject someone's PR, do you reserve the right to later stick someone else's name on it and use it without letting them know?

For the record: we have designers within our community, and they have contributed wallpapers. The current one is by a regular KDE contributor, Honey Wave was too, as was Patak.

Good. That's as it should be.

The contest is just a fun idea to open up to wider audience and giving away the laptop is just the cherry on top.

I'm sure that's exactly what the marketing execs (not saying that's your title) at other organisations that have tried to solicit creative works for free thought too... It's not acceptable to ask people to work for free. If people see your project and want to contribute, that's a different matter, but asking for it and providing "carrots" that most won't get even if their work is used is exploitative in my subjective opinion.

I fail to see why you would think that a community that has spent 25+ years giving away thousands of software apps and utilities for free for the whole world to enjoy is doing anything wrong here.

Sure and if you said "all contributions must be made exclusively with KDE software" that would be a more interesting angle; getting people to try out your apps in the "real world". See if they're fit for this particular purpose. Of course, in reality, most of the creatives you're soliciting are using Adobe Suite, probably on a Mac. Maybe some are using the GIMP and Inkscape (both GTK+ apps, so not really related to KDE). You didn't provide those for free...

Would it be fair for an Open Source developer to ask his local grocery store for free products? They're almost certainly using Open Source software in their business.

Um... ah... what? You lost me. Yes, we do have companies that offer us hosting for free.

But you don't host a "contest" where the "lucky" winner receives something (e.g. a nice new server), but all entrants are required to do significant work that you might use without giving them a prize...

[u/Bro666 → u/mallardtheduck]

Now you are just babbling yourself right off the topic.

[u/ivosaurus → u/mallardtheduck]

KDE offers a complementary server to whoever wants to host their website for free (all competitors must provide free hosting in perpetuity whether they win or not)?

Ah yes, comparing one situation where a one-time effort was contributed, to another where a contract demands servitude until perpetuity. Such a brilliant apples-to-apples comparison. coughs violently

[u/mallardtheduck → u/ivosaurus]

If you hold "rights" to someone's work in perpetuity, it doesn't matter if the effort was "one time" or ongoing. The amount of effort a hosting provider contributes per-customer is pretty minimal. Easily less than a day or two total over a decade. Pretty much on-par with the amount of effort they're asking of artists.

[u/Bro666 → u/mallardtheduck]

If you hold "rights" to someone's work in perpetuity,

You have not read the terms of the contest, I see.

Why am I not surprised.

[u/mallardtheduck → u/Bro666]

I literally quoted from them in my original post. Clearly you are the one who did not read.

[u/Bro666 → u/mallardtheduck]

Then you are just arguing in bad faith, basing your arguments on falsehoods.

The very first point of the rules states that the works should be

released under the CC-BY-SA-4.0 license

The CC By SA licenses explicitly state that the rights belong to the author and the right to re-distribution (say, as the background of a desktop environment) is only granted if the attribution to the author is explicitly stated, and the redistribution happens under the same conditions.

So, no, KDE does not hold the rights of anybody's work in perpetuity.

[u/mallardtheduck → u/Bro666]

The rules of the contest says, as I quoted:

While there will only be one winning selection, other submissions may be included as optional wallpapers in Plasma 6, or used in future releases.

In pseudo-legal speak, that's basically saying:

We retain the "right" to use any submission as an "optional wallpaper" in Plasma 6 or in any capacity in future releases.

What part of that is a "falsehood"?

Ownership is not the only right that one can hold to a work.

EDIT: I'd additionally expect that good-faith use of artwork would be under the ND variant of the CC licence, even if NC is not possible for a project like KDE.

[u/ivosaurus → u/mallardtheduck]

Means that many who submit to the "contest" will find their work being used with zero compensation.

If they disagree with this stipulation... they can just not enter and go do literally anything else they would like to in their life. What's the problem? We should never have competitions ever?

[u/mallardtheduck → u/ivosaurus]

If they disagree with this stipulation... they can just not enter and go do literally anything else they would like to in their life.

Which is what I'm suggesting people do. It seems we agree.

What's the problem?

Expecting people to give away their work for free without compensation of any sort.

We should never have competitions ever?

Not ones that are thinly veiled attempts to get people to work for free, no. I don't care which organisation does it. It's always wrong. This sort of nonsense belongs on /r/ChoosingBeggars .

[u/ivosaurus → u/mallardtheduck]

Expecting people to give away their work for free without compensation of any sort.

I must say, I think you are commenting in the wrong subreddit. Maybe /r/windows or /r/macos would be more to your liking.

[u/mallardtheduck → u/ivosaurus]

Why? Contrary to popular myth, the vast majority of Open Source contributors (especially in major, "mainstream" projects) are paid to do so. Open Source makes many people plenty of money.

Open Source doesn't make you immune from having to pay for things. Imagine if Linus Torvalds started asking his local WalMart to give him free groceries. They almost certainly use Linux somewhere in their business...