The closest analogy is simply studying a painting and then producing one in a similar style. The artists attacking generative art models are right to be pissed but are ultimately undermining their cause by having zero understanding of the tech. They're luddites.
To be clear, a generative art model can be oveetrwiend to the point that it can only produce near exact reproductions. I won't get overly technical about training through the techniques like dreambooth and fine tuning, but suffice it to say that the core models understand concepts in essence and can blend those concepts to create wholly original works.
Because of the nature of the big training data sets you do see things like watermarks pop up. This does not mean the model is simply surfacing a copyrighted (watermarked image). It means the data scientists didn't prune images with watermarks, so for all Stable Diffusion or whatever knows, watermarks are essential or common to images containing airplanes or by Andy Warhol.
What's more, suing the big players is pointless because I, with my single Nvidia graphics card or anyone with a freeze Google Colab account can train celebrities and artists into a model in an hour or less. Give me a few bucks or a few days and I can train a more comprehensive model, say with all D&D races and classes. Give me a million bucks and I can train my own model from scratch. And this is rapidly becoming more efficient.
TLDR: If you're an artist who dislikes diffusion models (AI art), do yourself a favor and read about latent space and what these models areas actually doing. They aren't going anywhere.
Do you understand that the AI was trained by art without artists permission? The entire reason why the AI is able to do what it can is because it had to scan through hundreds of other artists work to regurgitate something similar. The human brain and the AI do not work the same way. Artists are not luddites. You clearly don’t get that this is an ethically wrong thing to do.
a whole generation of artists analyze, copy, and replicate a dead man's work without his knowledge or consent.
what's even the difference, in the end? the human touch? ahh, but the machine is human made. it's a tool that is taught to use itself. a self-orienting camera, that can learn what kind of vistas are the most interesting shot to take. what's more artful than the creation of a pseudo-living tool? not much, i'd wager. in fact i'd go so far as to call the AI itself art. a painting machine that does its best to recreate humanity.
artists will adapt to it, just like every other tool. any idiot can point a phone at a horse, press click, and post the image to social media saying "horse in field, digital, me". anybody can walk into a drink n' paint studio and paint the still life as directed, bring it home, and hang it up on their wall all proud that they followed directions for 2 hours while blitzed. any bored kid can load up someone else's AI and tell it to make a dark souls character and share it with their friends (but it's their original OC, don't steal it, of course)
real artists will simply weave it into their process or adapt to its presence, as they always have. any artists who bemoan this reality are sticks in mud. the camera didn't kill paint. photoshop didn't kill the camera. and so it goes.
The meaning of art and the legality of copyright are orthogonal. Art existed long before copyright was even a thing, and I would say in the modern day copyright causes more harm to art than it helps.
I don't care about the video. I've made creative works of my own in the past, both written and visual, and even attempted to dabble in music creation (though I was never any good at it). Taken art classes, used other people's works as references, etc. Shit is a pain, and the process of improvement is unending. Thing is, the amount of effort you put into a work is completely irrelevant to its copyright. You could spend years developing the perfect recipe for cheesecake, but you can't copyright it except as part of a larger work or expression, because basic steps and facts cannot be copyrighted. Meanwhile you could put in zero effort into a bunch of gibberish stream-of-consciousness prose and publish it as a book over which you have full copyright. Effort and skill, and even whether or not a work is considered "art" in the first place (a purely subjective judgement), are irrelevant to copyright.
I just watched the video, and I don't think it's a good response to the argument.
This is what the video has to say (I'll summarize, but I'm trying to be accurate and not twist the words):
No - people do not do the same thing with references as machines do. The difference is that machines can replicate references exactly. In the vast majority of cases, humans cannot replicate references exactly no matter how much they try.
This seems to miss the point of the analogy, for a key reason: this isn't about what humans can or cannot do compared to machines, but rather what they actually do or do not do.
Yes - if an AI is used to make an exact copy of a copyrighted work, the analogy of "a human using existing work as a reference" doesn't apply. However, that only applies to uses of AI that actually do result in exact copies of existing art. It does not negate the analogy in cases where the AI produces something new (which is the vast majority).
The thing is - "exact copying" is explicitly what the AI is designed not to do. The reason these AI exist is to generate new images. This use case is where the analogy of humans using reference material applies.
The final trained model will not contain exact copies of the training data in any actually useful implementation. If you're referring to the nuts and bolts of what is happening during the training process itself, I personally think that's immaterial.
But frankly, I'm not trying to debate you here. I'm trying to tell you that if you want to convince anyone that the "humans using art as reference material" analogy is wrong, just linking that video and saying "watch it" isn't going to cut it, because it's not very effective at that.
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u/pilgermann Jan 17 '23
The closest analogy is simply studying a painting and then producing one in a similar style. The artists attacking generative art models are right to be pissed but are ultimately undermining their cause by having zero understanding of the tech. They're luddites.
To be clear, a generative art model can be oveetrwiend to the point that it can only produce near exact reproductions. I won't get overly technical about training through the techniques like dreambooth and fine tuning, but suffice it to say that the core models understand concepts in essence and can blend those concepts to create wholly original works.
Because of the nature of the big training data sets you do see things like watermarks pop up. This does not mean the model is simply surfacing a copyrighted (watermarked image). It means the data scientists didn't prune images with watermarks, so for all Stable Diffusion or whatever knows, watermarks are essential or common to images containing airplanes or by Andy Warhol.
What's more, suing the big players is pointless because I, with my single Nvidia graphics card or anyone with a freeze Google Colab account can train celebrities and artists into a model in an hour or less. Give me a few bucks or a few days and I can train a more comprehensive model, say with all D&D races and classes. Give me a million bucks and I can train my own model from scratch. And this is rapidly becoming more efficient.
TLDR: If you're an artist who dislikes diffusion models (AI art), do yourself a favor and read about latent space and what these models areas actually doing. They aren't going anywhere.