“We need more AI chatbots, artbots, and musicbots” is like saying “You need an Alexa in every room in your house and a Ring camera on your front and back door.”
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I don’t see the connection. It’s misplaced to compare these to products that only make Jeff Bezos richer. AI programs don’t have to be corporate products. It’s entirely possible for them to be open source programs belonging to everyone (and some already are).
You have to feed the ai on something. Sourcing the corpus is often done unethically.
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It can be seen that way. But it is kind of funny that much the same crowd that defends the existence of things like Pirate Bay and Library Genesis gets all in a huff about AI training sets just because their drawings of catgirls or something on DeviantArt may have been included. The whole point of having all this information on the Internet is to use it.
Regardless of your feelings on AI, you don’t have to go out of your way to be dismissive of the artists whose hard work is being used without credit, you know. In fact it’s probably a bad sign you felt the need?
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I’m not “being dismissive” of anything. I just find it weird that people can be in favor of the right of people to share and make mashups of corporate-generated media (and find it terrible that the corporations object to their work being shared or mashed up) and yet turn into little Sonys or Disneys when it’s their work being subject to mashups.
Dude, I read your post. You’re honestly claiming “drawings of catgirls or something on DeviantArt” wasn’t meant to downplay the work of artists that is being plagiarized without even acknowledgment? Sure, Jan. 
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Yeah, you are… and you just did it again. An individual creator does not have a team of lawyers and millions of dollars to throw at a problem like this. Assuming that they have the exact same amount of power in this situation as Disney is very much being dismissive of their concerns.
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The point isn’t what they can do about it in terms of hiring lawyers if they want to sue – it’s the coherence of the underlying assessment as to whether a wrong has even been committed – people can, and some do, think that intellectual property is a concrete thing that can be “stolen” when others use their works without permission and other people disagree and think that sharing works is a good and proper thing that leads to the creation of more works. Both of these standpoints are coherent and can be defended (although I personally prefer the latter). But when people say mashing-up Disney works is okay (because they are “the Man” or some such thing) but not their own works, it is just not defendable.
Everything looks hypocritical if you ignore all the differences. For one thing, plagiarism can be an issue even IP isn’t. For instance a lot of people would agree academic works should be available for other people to build on, but that doesn’t mean I get to put my name on someone else’s paper.
So how many people think you should be able to commercialize Disney mash-ups without so much as acknowledging who’s work you are using? Because what AI art has been doing, and my guess is very few artists would fall into that camp.
(Although for the record, saying it’s all right to steal from corporations who have gone out of their way to lock up intellectual property beyond anything sensible but not from small creators struggling to get by isn’t nearly as inconsistent a position as you suggest.)
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Have AI bots post crap to all their pools that they train from.
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Context matters…
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Article mentioned in the CBC program:
How long before we can give a rough plot for a Star Wars movie and have an AI generate it? I think Disney would kvetch about that.
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So how many people think you should be able to commercialize Disney mash-ups without so much as acknowledging who’s work you are using? Because what AI art has been doing
I use InvokeAI (Home - InvokeAI Documentation) for my AI art generation. This is an open source project which is not a commercial project in any way. You can argue that it incorporates some of the code for Stable Diffusion that Stability (a corporation) openly released, but by the very nature of open source even if Stability decided tomorrow to make their code closed, InvokeAI would still be open under the MIT License.
The issue of attribution of sources is a complex one, but in the case of InvokeAI, if you specifically mention that you want a picture in the style of Greg Rutkowski (for example), this is noted in the prompt which is embedded in the generated image file and which can be queried later. So attribution there. Yes, you can say “what about all the other thousands of artists that the training set used and which could influence the picture even if not specified?” Good point, but exactly the same problem faces human artists. It’s unlikely that very many artists drawing space ships haven’t seen Star Wars, 2001 and other such movies and had the spaceships in those movies influence their idea of how spaceships should look but nobody expects them to mention that unless they were deliberately trying to draw an X-Wing or something.
Except it’s not exactly the same problem because as a human artist, I am expected to understand the difference between being influenced by something and tracing it. I can get in trouble for plagiarism otherwise. The AI doesn’t have any such understanding.
The AI doesn’t even really the ability to invent anything new in the sense of extrapolating beyond its training set. It just very cleverly interpolates between those points – you can see it in the way they sometimes regurgitate watermarks or even signatures. That is not the same as human artists, and it is entirely legitimate to want to make sure it is done without ripping off the people whose work was necessary to make any of it possible.
And frankly, every time I hear this kind of defense it makes me distrust the whole thing that much more. I started from “this is such a great tool for people to make their own things, I hope we can address these concerns”, but it seems like almost everyone who uses it would rather pretend there are none. That kind of approach is how you make sure people will be taken advantage of.
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That’s not entirely true. Whenever I have asked it questions that are somewhat readily available on the internet bit also somewhat specialist and would be hard to collate by hand,.at least in the few seconds it takes ChatGPT to produce an answer,.it has been actually accurate. For example:
Q: Hi, could you tell me the difference between a gennaker, a spinnaker and a code 0? When am I supposed to use which sail?
"A:* Sure! A gennaker, spinnaker, and code 0 are all types of sails that are used on sailboats. The main difference between these sails is their shape and the type of wind conditions they are best suited for.
A gennaker is a sail that is similar in shape to a genoa jib, but is larger and usually made of lighter material. It is typically used in downwind sailing, where the wind is coming from behind the boat.
A spinnaker is a large, balloon-like sail that is used for downwind sailing. It is typically triangular in shape and is designed to fill with wind and provide a lot of power.
A code 0 sail is a lightweight, high-performance sail that is used in place of a traditional jib or genoa sail when sailing downwind in very windy conditions. Code 0 sails are typically made of very lightweight materials and are designed to be easily furled and unfurled.
As for when to use each sail, it really depends on the specific conditions you are sailing in. In general, a gennaker is best for downwind sailing in moderate to light wind conditions, a spinnaker is best for downwind sailing in heavier wind conditions, and a code 0 sail is best for downwind sailing in very windy conditions. Ultimately, it is up to the sailor to decide which sail to use based on the current wind and weather conditions.
As you can see it’s not perfect. A real human would have probably summarised that all three are for downwind sailing, before describing the shapes and use cases. But the info is correct and actually actionable, and as I said would have taken longer to collate by hand.
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