Who knew the first AI battles would be fought by artists?

https://vmst.io/@selzero/109512557990367884

by dredmorbius • 4 years ago

410 825 4 years ago

dredmorbius14• 4 years ago

Context, too long to fit into the HN title: "In order to protest AI image generators stealing artists work to train AI models, the artists are deliberately generating AI art based on the IP of corporations that are most sensitive to protecting it."

yreg2• 4 years ago

Interesting approach, but is drawing fan art illegal?

I would think that generating those images is okay by Disney, the same as if I painted them. The moment Disney would object is when I start selling them on merch, at which point it is irrelevant how they were created.

Am I mistaken?

onetrickwolf5• 4 years ago

Fan art is pretty much illegal or infringement actually it's just not really enforced by most companies. There are some caveats for fair use but generally most fan art could be successfully taken down if a company was motivated enough in my opinion. Nintendo is pretty notorious for this but it has rarely gone to court as most people are too scared to fight takedown requests.

Taywee10• 4 years ago

Copyright isn't level legal vs illegal, it's infringing vs non-infringing. Fan art very often could be argued to be infringing, but no company has any reason to pursue it in the vast majority of cases, so they just don't.

It's very confusing, especially when you have to consider trademark as related but separate.

astrange14• 4 years ago

Artists have a complicated ethical system where 1. reposting/tracing a solo artist's images without "citing the artist" is "stealing" (copyright violation) 2. imitating their style is also "stealing" but 3. drawing fanart of any series without asking is fine and 4. any amount of copyright violation is not only fine but encouraged as long as it's from a corporation.

The punishment for breaking any of these rules is a lot of people yell at you on Twitter. Unfortunately, they've been at it so long that they now think these are actual laws of the universe, although of course they have pretty much nothing to do with the actual copyright law.

That actual law doesn't care if you're selling it or not either, at least not as a bright line test.

(Japanese fanartists have a lot more rules, like they won't produce fan merch of a series if there is official merch that's the same kind of object, or they'll only sell fan comics once on a specific weekend, and the really legally iffy ones have text in the back telling you to burn after reading or at least not resell it. Some more popular series like Touhou have explicit copyright grants for making fanart as long as you follow a few rules. Western fanartists don't read or respect any of these rules.)

gwd2• 4 years ago

But the premise is just bad law. Disney does, in fact, hold a copyright on the Mickey Mouse character (at least until the end of 2023) [1]. It doesn't matter where the art comes from. Anyone making copies of something with Mickey Mouse in it -- whether drawn by a Disney artist, or drawn by someone else, or "drawn" by an AI -- is violating their copyright (at least for another year).

On the other hand, nobody owns a copyright on a specific style. If I go study how to make art in the style of my favorite artist, that artist has no standing to sue me for making art in their style. So why would they have standing to sue for art generated by an AI which is capable of making art in their style?

[1] https://fishstewip.com/mickey-mouse-copyright-expires-at-the...

dredmorbius14• 4 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33999491

agomez314• 4 years ago

Probably because they disdain the use of AI being used to copy their IP and distribute it at "machine" scale? Not an artist myself but can imagine I'd be pissed off that a bot is replicating my art with random changes.

HOWEVER, if a person were to ask for permission to use my pictures to feed into an AI to generate a number of images, and that person _selected_ a few and decided to sell them, I wouldn't have a problem with that. Something to do with the permission provided to the artist and an editing/filtering criteria being used by a human makes me feel ok with such use.

alxlaz• 4 years ago

What you're describing is basically copyright, which is exactly what artists are demanding: the legal protection to which they are entitled to.

Edit: Silicon Valley exceptionalism seems to preclude some thought leaders in the field to remember the full definition of copyright: it's an artist's exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work.

A number of additional provisions, like fair use, are meant to balance artists' rights against public interest. Private commercial interest is not meant to be covered by fair use.

No one is disputing that everyone, including companies in the private sector, is entitled to using artists' images for AI research. But things like e.g. using AI-generated images for promotional purposes are not research, and not covered by fair use. You want to use the images for that, great -- ask for permission, and pay royalties. Don't mooch.

phpisthebest5• 4 years ago

Copyright (in the US) also includes fair use provisions of which education and research is a fair use of copyrighted work for which no permission from the artist is needed

Double_a_924• 4 years ago

The copyright to what exactly though? Imagine you're an artist that draws abstract paintings of trees. If an AI uses those, the results it produces will be generic abstract trees in your style. And since I doubt that you can copyright trees, you would have to copyright your specific style. But is that possible?

yreg2• 4 years ago

Artists have always been inspired by each other and copied each other's styles and ideas.

rvz• 4 years ago

People who are not techies and have a clue about Stable Diffusion and DALL-E being trained on copyrighted images without their permission or attribution / credit knew this? This was absolutely unsurprising [0] [1].

Stability AI knew they would be sued to the ground if they trained their AI generating music equivalent called 'Dance Diffusion' model on thousands of musicians without their permission and used public domain music instead.

So of course they think it is fine to do it to artists copyrighted images without their permission or attribution, as many AI grifters continue to drive everything digital to zero. That also includes Copilot being trained on AGPL code.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33902341

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33005559

phpisthebest5• 4 years ago

Anything that weakens copyright is something that should be supported. Copyright has expanded well beyond its original goals to in fact be a harm to those goals

Copyright (in the US) was NOT in fact created to protect creators, it was to encourage creation and advance science. Today copyright is being used to curb and monopolize creation and prevent advancement (case in point this very story)

crote6• 4 years ago

On the other hand, copyleft licenses are being used to protect creators. Without copyright protection, what is stopping companies from blatantly violating even more open-source licenses?

cardanome3• 4 years ago

I don't see the point. There is a copyright (and in that regard most of these images are fine) and then there is trademark which they might violate.

Regardless, the human generating and publishing these images is obviously responsible to ensure they are not violating any IP property. So they might get sued by Disney. I don't get why the AI companies would be effected in any way. Disney is not suing Blender if I render an image of Mickey Mouse with it.

Though I am sure that artists might find an likely ally in Disney against the "AI"'s when they tell them about their idea of making art-styles copyright-able Being able to monopolize art styles would be indeed a dream come true for those huge corporations.

palata• 4 years ago

Well Disney would probably sue Blender if there was a "generate Mickey Mouse model" button in it. It's not a totally fair comparison.

subw00f• 4 years ago

I'm sure it's easy to write an addon for that.

idlehand3• 4 years ago

These AI models are closer to Google in that regard, yes, you can instruct them to generate a Mickey Mouse image, but you can instruct them to generate any kind of image, just like you can search for anything on Google, including Mickey Mouse. When using these models you are essentially performing a search in the model weights.

poulpy123• 4 years ago

But you can already make mickey mouse models, and people do it all the time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqVXoGCTfuk&ab_channel=Ashle...

Tepix4• 4 years ago

It boils down to this: Do you need permission if you train your AI model with copyrighted things or not?

gt565k• 4 years ago

Ehhh that’s like saying an artist who studies other art pieces and then creates something using combined techniques and styles from those set pieces is what ???? Now liable ???

ben_w9• 4 years ago

If you do need permission, is Page Rank a copyright infringing AI, or just a sparkling matrix multiplication derived entirely from everyone else's work?

cardanome3• 4 years ago

As a human, I can use whatever I want for reference for my drawings. Including copyrighted material.

Now, as for training "AI" models, who knows. You can argue it is the same thing a human is doing or you could argue it a new, different quality and should be under different rules. Regardless, the current copyright laws were written before "AI" models were in widespread use so whatever is allowed or not is more of a historic accident.

So the discussion needs to be about the intention of copyright laws and what SHOULD be.

residualmind3• 4 years ago

I would argue if people are allowed to see your art for free, so should AI models.

jefftk3• 4 years ago

Which is also what the GitHub co-pilot suit is about: https://githubcopilotlitigation.com

If you have views on whether they'll win, the prediction market is currently at 49%: https://manifold.markets/JeffKaufman/will-the-github-copilot...

wokwokwok• 4 years ago

Are you being deliberately obtuse?

It’s blatantly obvious that regardless of if it will work or not, they’re trying to get companies with enough money to file law suits to make a move and do so.

I don’t see the point.

…or you don’t agree with the intent?

I’m fine with that, if so, but you’d to be deliberately trying very hard not to understand what they’re trying to do.

Quite obviously they’re hoping, similar to software that lets you download videos from YouTube, that tools that enable things are bad, not neutral.

Agree / disagree? Who cares. I can’t believe anyone who “doesn’t get it” is being earnest in their response.

Will it make any difference? Well, it may or may not, but there’s a fair precedent of it happening, and bluntly, no one is immune to law suits.

dredmorbius14• 4 years ago

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

<https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

xg154• 4 years ago

If thouse mouse images are generated, that implies that Disney content is already part of the training data and models.

So in effect, they are pitting Disney's understanding of copyright (maximally strict) against that of the AI companies (maximally loose).

Even if it's technically the responsibility of the user not to publish generated images that contain copyrighted content, I can't imagine that Disney is very happy with a situation where everyone can download Stable Diffusion and generate their own arbitrary artwork of Disney characters in a few minutes.

So that strategy might actually work. I wish them good luck and will restock my popcorn reserves just in case :)

The problem I see though is that both sides are billion dollar companies - and there is probably a lot of interest in AI tech within Disney themselves. So it might just as well happen that both sides find some kind of agreement that's beneficial for both of them and leaves the artists holding the bag.

astrange14• 4 years ago

If thouse mouse images are generated, that implies that Disney content is already part of the training data and models.

It doesn't mean that. You could "find" Mickey in the latent space of any model using textual inversion and an hour of GPU time. He's just a few shapes.

(Main example: the most popular artist StableDiffusion 1 users like to imitate is not in the StableDiffusion training images. His name just happens to work in prompts by coincidence.)

taeric2• 4 years ago

This is a bit silly, though? Search Google images for Mickey Mouse, is the results page a possible liability for Google? Why not?

Go to a baker and commission a Mickey Mouse cake. Is that a violation if the bakery didn't advertise it? (To note, a bakery can't advertise it due to trademark, not copyright. Right?)

For that matter, any privately commissioned art? Is that really what artists want to lock away?

wnkrshm5• 4 years ago

You can search the LAION5B CLIP-space and you find a lot of mickey in it, lots of fan art between photos of actual merch. If you search with a high aesthetic score, you'll find lots of actual Disney illustrations etc. in the neighbourhood. [0]

[0] https://rom1504.github.io/clip-retrieval/

jameshart3• 4 years ago

There's nothing wrong with the model knowing what Mickey Mouse looks like.

There are noninfringing usecases for generating images containing Mickey Mouse - not least, Disney themselves produce thousands of images containing the mouse's likeness every year; but also parody usecases exist.

But even if you are just using SD to generate images, if we want to make sure to avoid treading on Disney's toes, the AI would need to know what Mickey Mouse looks like in order to avoid infringing trademark, too. You can feed it negative weights already if you want to get 'cartoon mouse' but not have it look like Mickey.

The AI draws what you tell it to draw. You get to choose whether or not to publish the result (the AI doesn't automatically share its results with the world). You have the ultimate liability and credit for any images so produced.

yellow_lead• 4 years ago

I don't get why the AI companies would be effected in any way.

It doesn't necessarily matter if they're affected. My thought when seeing this is that they want some legal precedent to be set which determines that this is not fair use.

dredmorbius14• 4 years ago

Among the goals seems to be a bit of well-poisoning. Artists have done this previously by creating art saying, say, "This site sells STOLEN artwork, do NOT by from them", and encouraging followers to reply with "I want this on a t-shirt", which had previously been used by rip-off sites to pirate artwork. See:

<https://waxy.org/2019/12/how-artists-on-twitter-tricked-spam...>

If art streams are tree-spiked with copyrighted or trademarked works, then AI generators might be a bit more gun-shy about training with abandon on such threads.

It's a form of monkeywrenching.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_spiking>

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabotage#As_environmental_acti...>

gwd2• 4 years ago

Not sure about Stable Diffusion / Metawhatsit, but OpenAI's training set is already curated to make sure it avoids violence and pornography; and in any case, the whole thing relies on humans to come up with descriptions. Not clear how this sort of thing would "spike the well" in that sense.

mattdesl2• 4 years ago

Challenging to navigate. These demonstrations are technically copyright infringement if done for financial gain (selling a T-shirt with Mickey Mouse icon). The same would be true if you were to draw by hand Mickey Mouse with a gun and sold it on a T-shirt. The only exception would be if it is a clear derivative, or satire, or parody, or personal use of course.

The challenging part is that these artists are protesting the use of 'style' in AI synthesized media. That is, an artist's style is being targeted (or, even, multiple artist's styles are combined in a prompt to create a new AI-original work). This is not protected by copyright—if you draw a new scene in another artist's style, it would be perhaps unethical, but legally derivative work.

If the artists who are challenging these AI systems do get there way, and they are able to legally copy-protect their "style" (like a certain way of brush strokes), this would inevitably backfire against them. To give an example: any artist whose work now too closely resembles the "style" of Studio Ghibli might be liable to copyright infringement, where before the work would be clearly derivative, or just influenced by another work, as is the case with most art over time.

concordDance3• 4 years ago

Trademark infringement, not copyright.

mattdesl2• 4 years ago

Technically, sure, but the artists (who are not trademarking their work) are putting this in the context of copyright infringement.

MetaWhirledPeas• 4 years ago

Challenging legally, and challenging philosophically. I would think an artist doing it for the art would embrace the fleeting nature of all things, including art. Some artists demonstrate this by creating temporary art, or even throwing their own art away after making it. The desire to make money from art is certainly reasonable, but accepting a world where all art styles are immediately mimicked, where art is trivialized and commoditized, and where there's no recognition to be had let alone money... that's going to be a tough philosophical pill to swallow.

turpialito• 4 years ago

Luddites hopping on the bandwagon for reasons unclear to themselves.

EDIT: Would Andy Warhol be sued by Campbell or Brillo?

crote6• 4 years ago

No, but his estate was sued by Lynn Goldsmith over his use of a photo of Prince - and lost.

Warhol himself said that art "is anything you can get away with." He was clearly very much aware of the dubious legality of some of his work.

nbzso• 4 years ago

As an artist, I already realized that the war is lost, without a fight. There is no way to stop the removal of human labor. At first, A.I. tools will need supervision and optimization, but soon they will do this by themselves. I moved all of my art related work into a real medium. If someone in the future finds value of owning an actual art, I will provide.

If people are happy with metaverse A.I. generated images, projected in their minds, so be it. It is over. The rest is just an echo of human civilization. Transhumanistic clones are coming to town:)

Taywee10• 4 years ago

The war is not lost. The goal isn't to try to force people to never be able to use AI to generate art, but to force them to only use input that they gave permission to use.

AI replacing artists functionally is just the surface fear. The real problem is using AI as an automated method of copyright laundering. There's only so much hand waving one can do to excuse dumping tons of art that you didn't make into a program and transform it into similar art and pretend like you own it. People like to pretend that it's like a person learning and replicating a style, but it's not. It's a computer program and it's automated. That the process is similar is immaterial.

wnkrshm5• 4 years ago

I'm thinking the same way, plein air painting is a nice activity. You get something nothing can take away from you, any kind of mark you make with your own body is yours. At least at the moment, using prompt- or inpainting-based tools feels like talking through Microsoft Sam (voice synth).

sdiupIGPWEfh5• 4 years ago

So they're protesting alleged copyright violations in the form of AI copying artistic styles (presuming an artistic style alone rises to the level of copyright protection) by committing trademark violations? Yeah, I don't get it.

I can appreciate that there are all kinds of potential "intellectual property" issues with the current glut of AI models, but the level of misunderstanding in some affected communities is concerning.

sidlls2• 4 years ago

Outside of lawyers, what communities do you think should have an "understanding" of intellectual property law, and to what degree? Or, maybe the fact that it takes a lawyer to truly understand it indicates that the complexity of applicable laws and regulations isn't beneficial to the communities they're ostensibly meant to protect?

sdiupIGPWEfh5• 4 years ago

Communities that generate and/or profit off of "intellectual property" ought to have a rudimentary understanding of the laws involved. Doubly so if they're protesting what they see as violations of those laws. It honestly does not take a lawyer to understand the distinctions at play here.

Double_a_924• 4 years ago

People that complain very vocally about some issue, should at least bother to research what they are talking about...

avereveard2• 4 years ago

I fully expect self called artist to know the law that protect their own means of living

Karawebnetwork2• 4 years ago

When I took my graphic design class in college, there was a big chunk about copyright and trademark. We had to be very cautious about images we were using and the difference between the two was drilled into our heads.

Tao33002• 4 years ago

ITT everyone similarly conflating multiple types of IP law and calling it all copyright. Palm to the face.

4bpp4• 4 years ago

Surely, if the next Stable Diffusion had to be trained from a dataset that has been purged of images that were not under a permissive license, this would at most be a minor setback on AI's road to obsoleting painting that is more craft than art. Do artists not realise this (perhaps because they have some kind of conceit along the lines of "it only can produce good-looking images because it is rearranging pieces of some Real Artists' works it was trained on"), are they hoping to inspire overshoot legislation (perhaps something following the music industry model in several countries: AI-generated images assumed pirated until proven otherwise, with protection money to be paid to an artists' guild?), or is this just a desperate rearguard action?

Tepix4• 4 years ago

Imagine you are an artist and you have developed your unique style.

Would you mind if AI starts creating art like yours?

What if your clients tell you they bought the AI generated art instead of yours?

FeepingCreature2• 4 years ago

Would you mind if there was another person who copied your style? What if your clients...?

Yeah, sure you'd mind. However, we have decided as a society that "style" is not protected.

Brushfire• 4 years ago

Imagine you are a startup business owner and you have developed a unique product or service.

And then someone comes along and competes with you?

—

No one is bothered by competition in markets.

Why do we have more or less empathy of this type for some professions?

astrange14• 4 years ago

Sure, artists don't like having competition, but that doesn't mean their competitors should listen to them.

CyanBird5• 4 years ago

The big issue is precisely this, yeah, living* artists are upset that an ai can take their own names as input and output their artistic styles, that's the big thorn with these ml systems

There is a secondary issue on that there is other people being able to craft high quality images with strong compositions without spending the "effort/training" that artists had to use over years to produce them, so they are bitter about that too, but that's generally a minor cross-section of the publicvoutcry tho they are quite vitriolic

Photobashing, tracing, etc there have always been a layer of purists whom look down on anyone that doesn't "put the effort in" yet get great results in a timely manner, these purists will always exist, just like how it was when digital painting was starting, people were looked down by oil painters for not putting the effort in, even when oil painters themselves used tricks like projectors to the empty blank canvas to get perspective perfect images, but that's just human nature to a degree, trying to put down other people while yourself doing tricks to speed up processes

sdiupIGPWEfh5• 4 years ago

Would you mind if AI starts creating art like yours?

The law isn't there to protect my feelings, so whether I mind or not is irrelevant. Artists have had to deal with shifting art markets for as long as art has been a profession.

What if your clients tell you they bought the AI generated art instead of yours?

I'd be sad and out of a source of income. Much the same way I would be if my clients hired another similar but cheaper artist. The law doesn't guarantee me a livelihood.

4bpp4• 4 years ago

The idea that the AI will compete with you by copying your unique style seems like exactly the sort of short-sighted conceit that I alluded to in my post above. As an artist, would you be much happier if, rather than the AI copying your style, the AI generated infinitudes of pictures in a style that the overwhelming majority of humans prefers to yours, so that you couldn't hope to ever create anything that people outside of a handful of hipsters and personal friends will value?

PurpleRamen2• 4 years ago

Would they mind if another artist would create the same art-style independent of them? Or something 99% alike? 95%? How many art-styles are even possible without overlapping too much?

chrisco2552• 4 years ago

Many skilled and talented programmers work on open source software for the explicit purpose of allowing it to be copied and extended in any fashion.

Nadya3• 4 years ago

I still don't see how this isn't the "Realistic Portrait/Scenic Painters vs Photography" argument rehashed.

Imagine you are a painter and you have developed your expertise in photorealistic painting over your entire lifetime.

Would you mind if someone snaps a photograph of the same subject you just painted?

What if your commissioners tell you they decided to buy a photograph instead of your painting because it looked more realistic?

Every argument I've seen against AI art is an appeal to (human) ego or an appeal to humanity. I don't find either argument compelling. Take this video [0] for example and half of the counterarguments are an appeal to ego - and one argument tries to paint the "capped profit" as a shady dealing of circumventing laws without realizing (1) it's been done before, OpenAI just tried slapping a label on it and (2) nonprofits owning for-profit subdivisions is commonplace. Mozilla is both a nonprofit organization (the Foundation) and a for-profit company (the Corporation).

I'm going to start a series of photographs that are intentionally bad and poorly taken. Poor framing, poor lighting, poor composition. Boring to look at, poor white balance, and undersaturated photos like the kind taken on overcast days. With no discernable subjects or points of interest. I will call the photos art - things captured solely with the press of a button by pointing my camera in a direction seemingly at random. I'm afraid many won't understand the point I am making but if I am making a point it does make the photographs art - does it not? I'm pretty sure that is how modern art works. I will call the collection "Hypocrisy".

E2:

The first photo of the collection to set the mood - a picture of the curtain in my office: https://kimiwo.aishitei.ru/i/mUjQ5jTdeqrY3Vn0.jpg

Chosen because it is grey and boring. The light is not captured by the fabric in any sort of interesting manner - the fabric itself is quite boring. There is no pattern or design - just a bland color. There is nothing to frame - a section of the curtain was taken at random. The photo isn't even aligned with the curtain - being tilted some 40 odd degrees. Nor is the curtain ever properly in focus. A perfect start for a collection of boring, bland photos.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjSxFAGP9Ss&feature=youtu.be

wruza4• 4 years ago

There’s only one way to figure it out - train on a properly licensed content and show them that.

Your line of reasoning sounds like “ah, we already won so your protest doesn’t matter anyway”, but did you already win actually? Do you really not need all their development to draw on the same level? Just show that.

4bpp4• 4 years ago

I'm not in AI and my GPU barely runs games from 10 years ago, so I'll pass. To be more precise, though, I think that it _seems_ that their protest won't matter, but the one way in which I see that it may (the second out of three options) leads to an outcome that I would just consider bad in the short term (for society, and for artists that are not established enough to benefit from any emerging redistribution system; we observe cases in Germany every so often where pseudonymous musicians are essentially forced to charge for their own performances and redirect proceeds to rent-seekers and musicians that are not them, because they can't prove ownership of their own work to GEMA's satisfaction).

chrisco2552• 4 years ago

But human beings themselves are influenced by licensed content. And remix it just the same as AI.

gpderetta2• 4 years ago

Also if a theoretical purged-dataset SD were released, it would still be easy and cheap for users to extend it to imitate any art style the want. As they wouldn't be redistributing the model and presumably they would use art they have already licensed the copyright issue would be further muddled.

I think attempting to prevent this is a losing battle.

Gigachad2• 4 years ago

I’m not too sure how it works but someone commented that you can take the model and “resume training” it on the extra dataset you want to add.

Given most of the heavy lifting is already done, this seems like a pretty easy thing for anyone to do.

nwoli2• 4 years ago

I’m sure artists realise that. They also realise the power of these things and I see this more as a fight against survival. They’re up against the wall and they know it, and they’re incredibly well connected and have invested their lives up to now into this so they won’t just lie down without a fight (trying anything).

orbifold3• 4 years ago

I think this drastically overestimates what current AI algorithms are actually capable of, there is little to no hint of genuine creativity in them. They are currently severely limited by the amount of high quality training data not the model size. They are really mostly copying whatever they were trained on, but on a scale that it appears indistinguishable from intelligent creation. As humans we don't have to agree that our collective creative output can be harvested and used to train our replacements. The benefits of allowing this will be had by a very small group of corporations and individuals, while everyone else will lose out if this continues as is. This will and can turn into an existential threat to humanity, so it is different from workers destroying mechanical looms during the industrial revolution. Our existence is at stake here.

idlehand3• 4 years ago

This has been a line of argument from every Luddite since the start of the industrial revolution. But it is not true. Almost all the productivity gains of the last 250 years have been dispersed into the population. A few early movers have managed to capture some fraction of the value created by new technology, the vast majority has gone to improve people's quality of life, which is why we live longer and richer lives than any generation before us. Some will lose their jobs and that is fine because human demand for goods and services is infinite, there will always be jobs to do.

I really doubt that AI will somehow be our successors. Machines and AI need microprocessors so complex that it took us 70 years of exponential growth and multiple trillion-dollar tech companies to train even these frankly quite unimpressive models. These AI are entirely dependent on our globalized value chains with capital costs so high that there are multiple points of failure.

A human needs just food, clean water, a warm environment and some books to carry civilization forward.

XorNot2• 4 years ago

They are really mostly copying whatever they were trained on

People keep saying this without defining what exactly they mean. This is a technical topic, and it requires technical explanations. What do you think "mostly copying" means when you say it?

Because there isn't a shred of original pixel data reproduced from training data through to output data by any of the diffusion models. In fact there isn't enough data in the model weights to reproduce any images at all, without adding a random noise field.

The benefits of allowing this will be had by a very small group of corporations and individuals

You are also grossly mistaken here. The benefits of heavily restricting this, will be had by a very small group of corporations and individuals. See, everyone currently comes around to "you should be able to copyright a style" as the solution to the "problem".

Okay - let's game this out. US Copyright lasts for the life of author plus 70 years. No copyright work today will enter public domain until I am dead, my children are dead, and probably my grandchildren as well. But copyright can be traded and sold. And unlike individuals, who do die, corporations as legal entities do not. And corporations can own copyright.

What is the probability that any particular artistic "style" - however you might define that (whole other topic really) - is truly unique? I mean, people don't generally invent a style on their own - they build it up from studying other sources, and come up with a mix. Whatever originality is in there is more a function of mutation of their ability to imitate styles then anything else - art students, for example, regularly will do studies of famous artists and intentionally try to copy their style as best they can. A huge amount of content tagged "Van Gough" in Stable Diffusion is actually Van Gough look-alikes, or content literally labelled "X in the style of Van Gough". It had nothing to do with them original man at all.

I mean, zero - by example - it's zero. There are no truly original art styles. Which means in a world with copyrightable art styles, all art styles eventually end up as a part of corporate owned styles. Or the opposite is also possible - maybe they all end up as public domain. But in both cases the answer is the same: if "style" becomes a copyrightable term, and AIs can reproduce it in some way which you can prove, then literal "prior art" of any particular style will invariably be an existing part of an AI dataset. Any new artist with a unique style will invariably be found to simply be 95% a blend of other known styles from an AI which has existed for centuries and been producing output constantly.

In the public domain world, we wind up approximately where we are now: every few decades old styles get new words keyed into them as people want to keep up with the times of some new rising artist who's captured a unique blend in the zeitgeist. In the corporate world though, the more likely one, Disney turns up with it's lawyers and says "we're taking 70% or we're taking it all".

netheril963• 4 years ago

They are really mostly copying whatever they were trained on, but on a scale that it appears indistinguishable from intelligent creation.

Which is what most humans do, and what most humans need.

rperez3332• 4 years ago

Exactly this, and it was clear based on the backlash got SD 2.0 after they removing artist labels and getting 'less creative'. Most people are not interested on the creative aspect, just looking for a easy way to copy art from people they admire.

Tao33002• 4 years ago

None of the above. They don't like it being trained on and occasionally regurgitating their work.

spikeagally• 4 years ago

Does anybody else find the whole AI art generation thing both amazing and incredibly depressing at the same time? I’ve played around with it and it’s lots of fun. But I can also see a deluge of mediocre “content” taking over the internet in the near future. “Real art” will become a niche underground discipline. Most popular music will be AI generated and will have fake performers also generated to go along with it. And most people will be fine with that.

I don’t think “real art” will disappear. People will always want to create (although monetising that will now be exceedingly more difficult).

It feels like we are ripping the humanity out of life on a greater and greater scale with tech. Instead of replacing crappy jobs and freeing up peoples time to enjoy their life, we’re actually automating enjoyable pursuits.

NB: when I’m referring to art I mean of all types as that’s where we are heading.

sidlls2• 4 years ago

Near future? The internet is cesspool of mediocre and terrible content already. AI is going to have an impact on art and everything else in general. Artists may (and likely will be forced) to adapt to/adopt its use.

karmakurtisaani• 4 years ago

If you think about how much content we're already getting from mediocre artists and writers, how many tv shows are complete garbage, how much governments and corporations are promoting and trolling in online discussions, how many search results are already ruined by lazy copied content, it's difficult to see things getting orders of magnitude worse.

Good stuff will still be good stuff, and it will keep being rare. The biggest change will be that producing mediocre content will be cheaper and more accessible, but we're already drowning in it, so .. meh?

Instead of replacing crappy jobs and freeing up peoples time to enjoy their life, we’re actually automating enjoyable pursuits.

That's an interesting observation.

dredmorbius14• 4 years ago

Fair assessment, and I agree with much of your premise, though regards "it's difficult to see things getting orders of magnitude worse": Please don't challenge them.

Lichtso2• 4 years ago

I totally agree that there is a lot of low effort and consequentially low quality stuff out there in the world already. However, it still costs to make that. With this form of automation getting better it will simply become a lot cheaper to produce and is thus going to happen a lot more. So, I expect the ratio to become worse, maybe even "orders of magnitude" worse.

rco87862• 4 years ago

But I can also see a deluge of mediocre “content”

Have you been to the internet?

In all seriousness, the cream will rise to the top. The mediocre “content” will get generated and we will get better at filtering it out which will decrease the value in generating mediocre content, etc etc. The tools being produced just further level the playing field for humanity and allow more people to get “in the arena” more easily.

Humans are still the final judge of the value being produced, and the world/internet will respond accordingly.

For a thought exercise, take your argument and apply it to the internet as a whole, from the perspective of a book or newspaper publisher in the 1990s.

crote6• 4 years ago

Have you been to the internet?

High-quality content rarely rises to the top. The internet as of 2022 optimizes for mediocrity: the most popular content is the one which is best psychological manipulation using things like shock value and sexuality. Just take a look at Twitter, Facebook, or Reddit: it is extremely rare to see genuine masterpieces on there. Everything is just posted to farm as many shares and likes as possible.

If anything, this will result in the cream getting drowned in shit. Not to mention that artists do not get the space to develop from mediocre to excellent - as the mediocre market will have been replaced with practically free AI.

adamhp2• 4 years ago

I've been complaining about this with AI generated content in general as well, especially Twitter and blog posts. I worry that we're in a sort of downward spiral, creating a feedback loop of bad content. Eventually models will get trained on this badly generated content, and it will reduce the overall vocabulary of the Internet. Take this to the extreme, and we'll keep going until everything is just regurgitated nonsense. Essentially sucking the soul out of humanity (not that tweets and blog posts are high art or anything). I know that sounds a little drastic but I really think there's a lurking evil that we don't have our eye on here, in terms of humanity and AI. We've already seen glimpses of it even with basic ad targeting and various social media "algorithms".

jeremyjh• 4 years ago

Considering the level of discourse in almost any Twitter thread on any popular topic, it’s hard to be sure it hasn’t already happened.

carlmr• 4 years ago

we'll keep going until everything is just regurgitated nonsense.

I feel like this about the mostly-human-created fashion. In my not so long lifetime I've seen everything from the 90s making a comeback. Ultimately I guess in terms of clothing that is practical with the materials that are available, we've already cycled through every style there is, such that the cycle time is now <30years.

CadmiumYellow6• 4 years ago

I've been thinking the same thing. I wonder if this might give rise to some kind of analog renaissance as people get sick of all the digitally regurgitated garbage. There has to be a point of diminishing returns for this kind of content, right? Maybe there will be some kind of Made By Humans verification that will make certain content much more valuable again simply by differentiating it from all the AI-generated simulacra.

onetrickwolf5• 4 years ago

Yeah I agree. I was generally pretty pro AI art and agree with a lot of the pro AI sentiments here on a logical basis still, but as the tech develops I drift more and more towards thinking this may be a bleak path for humanity.

Instead of replacing crappy jobs and freeing up peoples time to enjoy their life, we’re actually automating enjoyable pursuits.

Yeah really hit the nail on the head here. I thought a lot of backlash against AI was due to workers not really reaping the benefits of automation and that's a solvable problem. But I've seen a lot of artists who are retired or don't need to work dive into despair over this still. It's taking their passion away, not just their job.

I don't really know how we could stop it though without doing some sweeping Dune-level "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of the human mind" type laws.

moron4hire• 4 years ago

Not to distract too much from your point, because I agree that the obviously imminent explosion of AI generated work will probably lead to a generation of stylistic stagnation, but...

We already live in a time of artistic stagnation. With how much audio engineers manipulate pop music in Pro Tools, "fake" singers have been a practical reality for 20 years. Look at Marvel movies. Go to any craft fair on a warm day, or any artists' co-op, in a major city and try, try to find one booth that is not exactly like 5 other booths on display.

People have been arguing about what is "real art" for centuries. Rap music wasn't real because it didn't follow traditional, European modes and patterns. Photography wasn't real because it didn't take the skill of a painter. Digital photography wasn't real because it didn't take laboring in a dark room. 3D rendering wasn't real. Digital painting wasn't real. Fractal imagery wasn't real. Hell, anything sold to the mass market instead of one-off to a collector still isn't "real art" to a lot of people.

Marcel Duchamp would like to have a word.

If anything, I think AI tools are one of the only chances we have of seeing anything interesting break out. I mean, 99% of the time it's just going to be used to make some flat-ui, corporate-memphis, milquetoast creative for a cheap-ass startup in a second rate co-working space funded by a podunk city's delusions they could ever compete with Silicon Valley.

But if even just one person uses the tool to stick out their neck and try to question norms, how can that not be art?

lemoncookiechip• 4 years ago

But I can also see a deluge of mediocre “content” taking over the internet in the near future.

This has always been the case. Most entertainment regardless of form (music, art, tv, games...) is mediocre or below mediocre, with the occasional good or even rarer exceptional that we all buzz about.

AI image gen is only allowing a wider range of people to express their creativity. Just like every other tools that came before it lowered the bar of entry for new people to get in on the medium (computer graphics for example allowed those who had no talent for pen and paper to flourish).

Yes, there will be a lot of bad content, but that's nothing out of the ordinary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

astrange14• 4 years ago

If you find everything incredibly depressing, that may simply mean you have depression, not that it's actually objectively bad.

PurpleRamen2• 4 years ago

Majority of everything is always mediocre at best. There is no absolute value in those things, they always get pitched against each other. Something mediocre today, could have been a masterpiece some decades ago. A masterpiece from decades ago could be hot garbage today. Those things are a constantly moving target and will always shift. People will just adapt their taste and figure out some new random rules to say why something was yesterday a masterpiece and became today mediocre and so on.

kmlx• 4 years ago

But I can also see a deluge of mediocre “content” taking over the internet

i’ve noticed this mediocrity decades ago when artists started using computers to create art. for me that’s when it went downhill.

beezlebroxxxxxx7• 4 years ago

I will say, the kind of art intended for corporate needs (much of which in the last decade in particular has been a deluge of bland vector art with weird blob people) is not the same as the art that many artists make in their own time, or would regard as good.

The through line for a lot of mediocre stuff is the intention of the artist/creator to appeal to as broad a demographic/audience as possible so as to dissolve away anything that makes the art interesting, challenging, and good.

netheril963• 4 years ago

If these generated arts just replace human created arts, then it can be construed as depressing.

But what if AI generates arts where humans do not scale?

For example, what if the AAA game you are expecting gets done in half of the time, or has ten times the size of explorable area, because it is cheap and fast to generate many of the arts needed by AI?

Or if some people excellent at story telling but mediocre at drawing can now produce world class manga due to the assistance of AI?

AlexandrB6• 4 years ago

Instead of replacing crappy jobs and freeing up peoples time to enjoy their life, we’re actually automating enjoyable pursuits.

This feels like the natural outcome of Moravec's paradox[1]. I can imagine a grim future where most intellectually stimulating activities are done by machines and most of the work that's left for humans is building, cleaning, and maintaining the physical infrastructure that keeps these machines running. Basically all the physical grunt work that has proven hard to find a general technological solution for.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox

rini172• 4 years ago

If humans end up getting expelled from virtual reality back into physical one not forcibly, but by lack of meaningful virtual pursuits... is that really a grim future?

zjp2• 4 years ago

Oh, so there's a term for this -- TIL. I've heard something along these lines. I think AI diagnostics are a good thing, but I expressed worry about the medical field going away to somebody and was unironically told "you can just be emotional support for sick people". Now that's a fulfilling volunteer activity and everyone who has the inclination to do it should, but as a matter of practicality: Does it come with a salary?

We are a long political fight away from people in industries affected by AI not feeling like their livelihoods are under attack. It would be better received, at least for me, if the AI guys would admit that under the system we have they're playing with a big heaping flamethrower in a vast ocean of gasoline.

MomoXenosaga4• 4 years ago

Musea already have basements filled with thousands of art pieces nobody has seen in decades. There's already too much content.

Workaccount22• 4 years ago

To me it's terrifying and gives me a bit of panic playing with it. This is still early stuff, like dial-up or 100Mhz processors. We all know the trajectory tech takes nowadays, and the writing on the wall here is an event horizon where it's impossible to see the full scope of how this tech will change the world.

We're like people getting the very first electric light bulbs in their home, trying to speculate how electricity will change the world. The pace of change however will be orders of magnitude faster than that.

woeirua2• 4 years ago

We've seen this before when CGI first came out, then with the proliferation of Photoshop and other cheap editors. Now fake garbage is everywhere on the internet. Did that make human life substantially different? Nope. Everyone just ignores most of it and only believes stuff that comes from "reputable sources." That will be the end game here too. A flight to quality.

nonbirithm3• 4 years ago

But also, the explosion in interest means there had been a latent interest in instantly generating pictures to begin with.

I think this situation says a lot about the nature of human desire, not just the fact that a few people were ingenious to come up with the idea of diffusion models. A lot of ingenious inventions are relatively boring when exposed to the broader populace, and don't hit on such an appealing latent desire.

What will this say about the limitless yet-to-be-invented ideas that humanity is just raring to give itself, if only someone would hit on the correct chain of breakthroughs? Would even a single person today be interested in building a backyard nuclear warhead in an afternoon, and would attempt to if the barrier of difficulty in doing so was solved?

nonbirithm3• 4 years ago

Instead of replacing crappy jobs and freeing up peoples time to enjoy their life, we’re actually automating enjoyable pursuits.

But in my case, I don't happen to find drawing or painting enjoyable. I simply don't, for nature- or nurture-based reasons. I also don't believe that everyone can become a trained manual artist, because not everyone is interested in doing so, even if they still (rightly or wrongly) cling to the idea of having instant creative output and gratification.

I think this lack of interest is what makes me and many other people a prime target for addiction to AI-generated art. Due to my interest in programming I can tweak the experience using my skills without worrying about the baggage people of three years ago had to deal with if they wanted a similar result.

So without any sort of generation, how does one solve the problem of not wanting to draw, but still wanting one's own high-quality visual product to enjoy? I guess it would be learning to be interested in something one is not. And that probably requires virtuosity and integrity, a willingness to move past mistakes, and a positive mindset. The sorts of things that have little to do with the specific mechanics of writing code in an IDE to provoke a dopamine response. Also, the ability to stop focusing so hard on the end result, a detriment to creativity that so many (manual) art classes have pointed out for decades.

I sometimes feel I lack some of those kinds of qualities, and yet I can somehow still generate interesting results with Stable Diffusion. It feels like a contradiction, or an invalidation of a set of ideas many people have held as sacred for so long, a path to the advancement of one's own inner being.

I will relish the day when an AI is capable of convincing me that drawing with my own two hands is more interesting than using its own ability to generate a finished piece in seconds.

So I agree that, on a bigger scale beyond the improvement of automated art, this line of thinking will do more harm to humanity than good. An AI can take the fall for people who can't or don't want to fight the difficult battles needed to grow into better people, and that in turn validates that kind of mindset. It gives even the people who detest the artistic process a way to have the end result, and a decent one at that.

I think this is part of the reason why the anti-AI-art movement has pushed back so loudly. AI art teaches us the wrong lessons of what it means to be human. People could become convinced to not want to go outside and walk amongst the trees and experience the world if an AI can hallucinate a convincing replacement from the comfort of their own rooms.

ur-whale• 4 years ago

Art has historically always been about copy and improve.

This whole copyright / intellectual property idea is something that unfortunately cropped up in the 20th century, and the fact that it was codified into law is certainly not something 20th century humanity should be proud of or regard as progress.

Juliate3• 4 years ago

Nope.

Intellectual property concepts in their current form started to appear as soon as prints, so about the 15th century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright#Early_dev...

Valmar• 4 years ago

Intellectual property concepts in their current form started to appear as soon as prints, so about the 15th century.

They're very different things, though often conflated.

anonyfox• 4 years ago

Abolish copyrights. At all. Unrestricted exchange boosts learning curves of societies and benefits everyone in the long run, except a few won't become too rich in the process. There are several downsides attached to that, but I am willing to accept that.

nwoli2• 4 years ago

People should be rewarded for finding a unique artistic innovation that lots of people enjoy I’d think

someNameIG• 4 years ago

Yes, people, not AI.

I wonder if that could be a solution to this. Anything AI generated is public domain, no one can own the IP to it. It would allow it to be used for research and education, hobbyists, but hinder how large corporations could use it.

Maybe even have it like GNU license, anything using AI generated stuff must also be public domain.

benreesman• 4 years ago

I’m going to be a broken record here: both of the words “artificial” and “intelligent are hellaciously difficult to define, put them together and you’ve got a real epistemological quantum on your hands.

What we’re actually always talking about is “applied computational statistics”, otherwise known as ML.

And if an artist wants to sample from the distribution of beautiful images and painting and photographs as a source of inspiration, why not? We do it in other fields.

But using a computer to sample from that same distribution and adding nothing will be rightly rewarded by nothing.

residualmind3• 4 years ago

You don't need AI to create these, you just have to be a d*ck.

vgatherps2• 4 years ago

As a thought experiment, let's say that the next version of stable diffusion is able to integrate large text datasets into the training set and can generate an accurate Mickey Mouse without ever having to be trained on an image of Mickey Mouse since it's integrated enough information from the text.

What then? Certainly an individual artist can't go and sell images of Mickey Mouse since it's still copyright infringement, but what claim would Disney have against the AI company?

I wrote in another comment that if you make the training of such models illegal regardless of distribution, it's essentially making certain mathematics illegal. That poses some very interesting questions around rights, whether others will do it anyways, and the practicality of enforcing such a rule in the first place.

crote6• 4 years ago

Would an SVG image count as text? How about an SVG automatically transformed into human-readable language?

adenozine• 4 years ago

Nobody because these aren’t the first. Aviation, gaming, finance, logistics, etc… there’s huge industries that are already inundated with AI tools.

meebob4• 4 years ago

I've been finding that the strangest part of discussions around art AI among technical people is the complete lack of identification or empathy: it seems to me that most computer programmers should be just as afraid as artists, in the face of technology like this!!! I am a failed artist (read, I studied painting in school and tried to make a go at being a commercial artist in animation and couldn't make the cut), and so I decided to do something easier and became a computer programmer, working for FAANG and other large companies and making absurd (to me!!) amounts of cash. In my humble estimation, making art is vastly more difficult than the huge majority of computer programming that is done. Art AI is terrifying if you want to make art for a living- and, if AI is able to do these astonishingly difficult things, why shouldn't it, with some finagling, also be able to do the dumb, simple things most programmers do for their jobs?

The lack of empathy is incredibly depressing...

CyanBird5• 4 years ago

Lack of empathy is because we are discussing about systems, not feelings

At the dawn of mechanization, these same arguments were being used by the luddites, I'd recommend you to read them, it was quite an interesting situation, same as now

The reality is that advances such as these can't be stopped, even if you forbid ml legislation in the US there are hundreds of other countries which won't care same as it happens with piracy

astrange14• 4 years ago

I recommend reading the part in Capital where Marx makes fun of them for being opposed to productivity.

CuriousCosmic• 4 years ago

Remember, luddites largely weren't against technology.

What they were however was against was companies using that technology to slash their wages in exchange for being forced to do significantly more dangerous jobs.

In less than a decade, textile work went from a safe job with respectable pay for artisans and craftsmen into one of the most dangerous jobs of the industrialised era with often less than a third of the pay and the workers primarily being children.

That's what the luddites were afraid of. And the government response was military/police intervention, breaking of any and all strikes, and harsh punishments such as execution for damaging company property.

hippie_queen• 4 years ago

I don't disagree, except I don't get what you mean with "because we are discussing systems, not feelings."

I think artists feeling like shit in this situation is totally understandable. I'm just a dilettante painter and amateur hentai sketcher, but some of the real artists I know are practically in the middle of an existential crisis. Feeling empathy for them is not the same as thinking that we should make futile efforts to halt the progress of this technology.

locopati• 4 years ago

Perhaps we should learn some of the lessons from that time. A large group of people's lives became markedly worse while a small group profited from their labors.

odessacubbage3• 4 years ago

the luddites may be one of the most singularly wrongly vilified groups in human history.

meroes4• 4 years ago

If the advances create catastrophic consequences there will be a stop by definition. Death of art(ists) and coders may not be a catastrophe, but it could be coincident with one. From OP, "Art AI is terrifying if you want to make art for a living". Empathize a little with that to see coding AI making coding not a way of life. Empathize even more and see few people having productive ways of life due to general purpose AI. The call to empathize is not about "feelings" necessarily, it is a cognitive exercise to imagine future consequences that aren't obvious yet.

conviencefee999• 4 years ago

Its not that terrifying the way the these models work they aren't really creating new works, just taking other ones and basically copying them. Honestly, new laws for copyright have to be made I wonder when it will happen. And how the judical systems in the world will deal with it. Or if big tech has enough in the pockets to pretend it isn't an issue.

FamosoRandom2• 4 years ago

being afraid is the best way to run away from what's coming. If a computer can easily do some work, simply use that work to your advantage, and do something more complicated. If a computer can generate art, use what's generated to your advantage and do something better.

As long as the world is not entirely made of AI, there will always be some expertise to add, so instead of being afraid, you should just evolve with your time

amelius4• 4 years ago

You are assuming that AI will always be "open" and accessible to anyone.

telesilla• 4 years ago

Exactly! Didn't the rise of abstract art coincide with the ubiquity of photography? Realism in painting was no longer needed by the populace to the previous extent.

Artists will survive through innovation.

ImHereToVote• 4 years ago

What if everything more complicated can have a neural tool that is equivalent in some respects?

boredemployee6• 4 years ago

> making art is vastly more difficult than the huge majority of computer programming that is done.

I completely agree with it. Take a contemporary pianist for example, the amount of dedication to both theory and practice, posture, mastering the instrument and what not, networking skills, technology skills, video recording, music recording, social media management, etc.

drinfinity2• 4 years ago

You think music theory is more demanding than CS? I've dedicated decades and probably 75% of my youth to mastering this instrument called a computing device. It has numerous layers, each completely different and each significant enough to build a standalone career out of (OS, networking, etc). I feel insulted if you think playing and mastering a piano is the same thing.

Extreme specialists are found everywhere. Mastering skateboarding at world level will eat your life too, but it's not "harder" than programming. At least, for any commonsensical interpretation of "harder".

All the rest, we do too. Except I don't record videos and I'm sure it is not childishly easy, but it will not eat my life.

CuriouslyC8• 4 years ago

It isn't harder to be an artist or pianist, it's just that the cutoff of employability for these professions is much higher. It's like saying playing baseball is harder than programming because only a few thousand people are good enough to play baseball for a living.

rhn_mk12• 4 years ago

Not being afraid of AI is not necessarily due to the lack of empathy. It could be due to acceptance: perhaps AI will make programmers obsolete. That is fine, programming is really boring most of the time, when it's just cobbling things together. Even if it will be to the short term disadvantage of some people (including the speaker), AI taking over tedious programming tasks will make humanity richer.

It's up to us to distribute those gains back.

alxlu• 4 years ago

I think the issue is that our laws and economy are not structured in a way that makes it likely for those gains to be distributed back to anyone other than the ultra wealthy. Not that I expect AI to take over most programming jobs anytime soon (or ever), but if it does, it would almost certainly happen long before society manages to agree on a system to distribute those gains back in a way that benefits the average person.

eddiewithzato• 4 years ago

yea no, the difficulty in programming as a career is interaction with other humans. I would like AI to reach the stage where it can comprehend solutions that stakeholders don’t know themselves.

Because in my time the stakeholders in companies have never actually been decisive when scoping features.

Co-pilot is indeed the endgame for AI assisted programming. So I would say for art, someone mindful could train an AI on their own dataset and use that to accelerate their workflow. Imagine it drawing outlines instead of the full picture.

mysterydip• 4 years ago

the difficulty in programming as a career is interaction with other humans

It would be great if there was an AI that could be a liaison between developers and stakeholders, translating the languages of each side for mutual understanding.

VoodooJuJu• 4 years ago

Oh don't worry, they'll learn empathy real fast when Co-pilot becomes just Pilot and they have to take a passenger seat.

CuriouslyC8• 4 years ago

Except engineers won't become passengers, they will become air traffic controllers.

ReptileMan• 4 years ago

I think that programmers are safe for now - because of the law of leaky abstractions. And there is hardly bigger and leakier abstraction than AI generated code.

cardanome3• 4 years ago

I mean sure things will get harder for some artists but what is to be done about it? What will feeling sorry for them accomplish?

The job market will always keep on changing, you have to adept to it to a certain degree.

Now we can talk about supporting art as a public good and I am all for that but I don't see how artists are owed a corporate job. Many of my current programming skill will be obsolete one day, that's part of the game.

gus_massa3• 4 years ago

I think the correct way to get empathy is to use an equivalent that technical people understand, like Copilot:

* Can a Copilot-like generator be trained with the GPL code of RMS? What is the license of the output?

* Can a Copilot-like generator be trained with the leaked source code of MS Windows? What is the license of the output?

imgabe4• 4 years ago

If a human learns to program by reading GPL code, what is the license of future code they write?

Terretta2• 4 years ago

Your example is like saying we should have empathy for people who can whittle when a 3D printer can now extrude the same design in bulk. Or like empathy for London cabbies having to learn roads when "anyone" can A-to-B now with a phone.

Code should not need to be done by humans at all. There's no reason coding as it exists today should exist as a job in the future.

Any time I or a colleague are "debugging" something, I'm just sad we are so "dark ages" that the IDE isn't saying "THERE, humans, the bug is THERE!" in flashing red. The IDE has the potential to have perfect information, so where is the bug is solvable.

The job of coding today should continue to rise up the stack tomorrow to where modules and libraries and frameworks are just things machines generate in response to a dialog about “the job to be done”.

The primary problem space of software is in the business domain, today requiring people who speak barely abstracted machine language to implement -- still such painfully early days.

We're cavemen chipping at rocks to make fire still amazed at the trick. No empathy, just, self-awareness sufficient to provoke us into researching fusion.

PeterisP2• 4 years ago

I don't think that's a road to empathy, because if we're talking about the matter of empathy i.e. "emotional should's" instead of nuances of current legal policy, then I'd expect a nontrivial part of technical people to say that a morally reasonable answer to both these scenarios could (or should) be "Yes, and whatever you want - not treated as derivative work bound by the license of the training data", which probably is the opposite of what artists would want.

While technically both artists and developers make their living by producing copyrighted works, our relationship to copyright is very different; while artists rely on copyright and overwhelmingly support its enforcement as-is, many developers (including myself) would argue for a significant reduction of its length or scale.

For tech workers (tech company owners could have a different perspective) copyright is just an accidental fact of life, and since most of paid development work is done as work-for-hire for custom stuff needed by one company, that model would work just as well even if copyright didn't exist or didn't extend to software. While in many cases copyright benefits our profession, in many other cases it harms our profession, and while things like GPL rely on copyright, they are also in large part a reaction to copyright that wouldn't be needed if copyright for code didn't exist or was significantly restricted.

XorNot2• 4 years ago

No one is in programming to "do programming". They're in it to get things done. I didn't learn C++ in high school to learn C++, I learned it to make games (then C++ changed and became new and scary to me and so I no longer say I know C++, possibly I never did).

If an AI will take care of most of the finicky details for me and let me focus on defining what I want and how I want it to work, then that is nothing but an improvement for everyone.

meebob4• 4 years ago

I would point out that many (most?) people are in programming to make money, rather than get things done per se.

If an AI were to make it impossible to make a living doing programming, would that be an improvement for most readers of this site?

ben_w9• 4 years ago

I'm mostly seeing software developers looking at the textual equivalent, GPT-3, and giving a spectrum of responses from "This is fantastic! Take my money so I can use it to help me with my work!" to "Meh, buggy code, worse than dealing with a junior dev."

I think the two biggest differences between art AI and code AI are that (a) code that's only 95% right is just wrong, whereas art can be very wrong before a client even notices [0]; and (b) we've been expecting this for ages already, to the extent that many of us are cynical and jaded about what the newest AI can do.

[0] for example, I was recently in the Cambridge University Press Bookshop, and they sell gift maps of the city. The background of the poster advertising these is pixelated and has JPEG artefacts.

It's highly regarded, and the shop has existed since 1581, and yet they have what I think is an amateur-hour advert on their walls.

meebob4• 4 years ago

I do appreciate that the way in which a piece of code "works" and the way in which an piece of art "works" is in some ways totally different- but, I also think that in many cases, notably automated systems that create reports or dashboards, they aren't so far apart. In the end, the result just has to seem right. Even in computer programming, amateur hour level correctness isn't so uncommon, I would say.

I would personally be astonished if any of the distributed systems I've worked on in my career were even close to 95% correct, haha.

jimmaswell• 4 years ago

code that's only 95% right is just wrong

It's still worth it on the whole but I have already gotten caught up on subtly wrong Copilot code a few times.

edanm5• 4 years ago

code that's only 95% right is just wrong,

I know what you mean, but thinking about it critically, this is just wrong. All software has bugs in it. Small bugs, big bugs, critical bugs, security bugs, everything. No code is immune. The largest software used by millions every day has bugs. Library code that has existed and been in use for 30 years has bugs.

I don't think you were actually thinking of this in your comparison, but I think it's actually a great analogy - code, like art, can be 95% complete, and that's usually enough. (For art, looks good and is what I wanted is enough, for code, does what I want right now, nevermind edge cases is enough.)

edanm5• 4 years ago

EDIT: I posted this comment twice by accident! This comment has more details but the other more answers, so please check the other one!

code that's only 95% right is just wrong,

The reason ChatGPT isn't threatening programmers is for other reasons. Firstly, it's code isn't 95% good, it's like 80% good.

Secondly, we do a lot more than write one-off pieces of code. We write much, much larger systems, and the connections between different pieces of code, even on a function-to-function level, are very complex.

Kye• 4 years ago

> "I think the two biggest differences between art AI and code AI are that (a) code that's only 95% right is just wrong, whereas art can be very wrong before a client even notices [0];"

Art can also be extremely wrong in a way everyone notices and still be highly successful. For example: Rob Liefeld.

itronitron3• 4 years ago

> whereas art can be very wrong before a client even notices

No actually, that's not how that works. You're demonstrating the lack of empathy that the parent comment brings up as alarming.

Regarding programming, code that's only 95% right can just be run through code assist to fix everything.

asdf123wtf• 4 years ago

A lot depends what the business costs are of that wrong %5.

If the actual business costs are less than the price of a team of developers... welp, it was fun while it lasted.

toomanydoubts• 4 years ago

The other day I copied a question from leetcode and asked GPT to solve it. The solution had the correct structure to be interpreted by leetcode(Solution class, with the correct method name and signature, and with the same implementation of a linked list that leetcode would use). It made me feel like GPT was not implementing the solution for anything. Just copying and pasting some code it has read on the internet.

segmondy• 4 years ago

Tools happen, folks get automated away and need to retool to make themselves useful. It will happen in computing, as a matter of fact, it has happened in computing.

What do you think cloud computing did? A lot of sysadmins, networking, backups, ops went the way of dinosaurs. A lot of programmers have also fallen on the side by being replaced with tech and need to catch up.

Wallowing in pity is not going to make help, we saw a glimpse of this with github-copilot. Some people built the hardware, the software behind these AIs, some others are constructing the models, applying it to distinct domains. There's work to be done for those who wish to find their place in the new world.

spinach• 4 years ago

But people aren't being automated away - their work is input, and for the AI generated art to remain fresh and relevant instead of rehashing old stuff it would need artists to continue creating new art. It's not a tool that exists independently of people's creative work (although this is true of most AI, though it seems particularly terrible with art).

imgabe4• 4 years ago

I've played around a bit with Stable Diffusion and as far as I can tell, it's just a new tool, like a much better paintbrush.

It still needs a human to tell it what to paint, and the best outputs generally require hours of refinement and then possibly touch-up in photoshop. It's not generating art on its own.

Artists still have a job in deciding what to make and using their taste to make it look good, that hasn't changed. Maybe the fine-motor skills and hand-eye coordination are not as necessary as they were, but that's it.

kecupochren2• 4 years ago

require hours of refinement

Not disagreeing with your comment but this is not the case with Midjourney. Very little is needed to produce stunning images. But afaik they modify/enhance the prompts behind the screen

mypastself• 4 years ago

Tangentially, this is something I think about from time to time: in tech, you can be mediocre and live a very comfortable life. In art (and many other areas), you often have to be extraordinary just to make ends meet.

So I don’t think art is “harder”. It’s just harder for the average practitioner/professional to find “success” (however you like to define it).

ajmurmann4• 4 years ago

I wonder if this is due to existing forms of automation in art. Artists have been competing with reproductions of art in the form of recordings and prints for a long time now. That creates a really high floor. How many people who play an instrument have people around them genuinely want to listen to them play rather than a recording? How much lower would the bar be if recordings didn't exist?

Of course software gets copied all the time, but we have jobs because so much bespoke software is needed. Looking at some of what AI can do now, I wouldn't need surprised if our floor gets raised a lot in the next few years as well.

anticristi• 4 years ago

I think about this too and I wonder why?

Are artists really "doomed"? Or are they just worse at redistribution?

helsinkiandrew• 4 years ago

making art is vastly more difficult than the huge majority of computer programming that is done

Art and programming are hard for different reasons.

The difference in the AI context is that a computer program has to do just about exactly whats asked of it to be useful, whereas a piece of art can go many ways and still be a piece of art. If you know what you want its quite hard to get DALL-E to produce that exactly (or it has been for me), but it still generates something that is very good looking.

mtrower8• 4 years ago

Consider the compiler.

There’s an awful lot of analogy there, if you think about it.

BurningFrog4• 4 years ago

This has been going on for 250 years, and humanity still hasn't quite grasped it.

The steady progress of the Industrial Revolution that has made the average person unimaginably richer and healthier several times over, looks in the moment just like this:

"Oh no, entire industries of people are being made obsolete, and will have to beg on the streets now".

And yet, as jobs and industries are automated away, we keep getting richer and healthier.

thedorkknight2• 4 years ago

Collectively, sure. How did that go for the people who's livelihoods got replaced though? I've had family members be forced to change careers from white-collar work after being laid off and unable to find engineering jobs due to people decades younger taking them all nearby. I saw firsthand the unbelievable amount of stress and depression they went through, and it took them years to accept that their previous life and career were gone.

"It'll massively suck for you, but don't worry, it'll be better for everyone else" is little comfort for most of us

koshnaranek2• 4 years ago

"It hasn't happened in the past, therefore it won't happen in the future" is simply just a fallacy.

elektrontamer• 4 years ago

There's nothing to be depressed about. It's not a lack of empathy it's recognition of the inevitable. Developers realize that there is no going back. AI art is here to stay. You can't ban or regulate it. It would be extremely hard to police. All there is left to do is adapt to the market like you did, even if it's extremely difficult. It's not like AI made it significantly harder anyway. The supply for artists far surpassed the demand for them before the advent of AI art.

Edit: Typo

broast• 4 years ago

I'm both a digital artist and programmer. I never thought it would happen before, but I accept that this technology can easily replace some aspects of my professional value. But i don't let it take away from my experience and capacity to be creative, so I still think I have an advantage when leveraging these tools- and I've started to use them every day.

Rendering was only ever a small part of the visual arts process anyway. And you can still manually add pixel perfect details to these images by hand that you wouldn't know how to create an AI prompt for. And further, you can mash together AI outputs in beautifully unique and highly controlled ways to produce original compositions that still take work to reproduce.

To me, these AI's are just a tool for increased speed, like copy and paste.

bryanrasmussen• 4 years ago

Much of the history of programming has been programmers making other jobs obsolete, and indeed there is a saying that a good programmer makes themselves obsolete.

dumbaccount123• 4 years ago

If tech that makes programmers obsolete comes then we are living in a new era. Pretty much every single job will obselete by then

anothernewdude3• 4 years ago

I don't care. After decades of having no TV, film, books or video games aimed at me, they might finally be generated instead of the bullshit written by committees.

yunwal5• 4 years ago

Oh yeah I’m sure the AI that was trained on decades of tv, movies, and books that didn’t appeal to you will do a great job of creating things that appeal to you.

gitfan86• 4 years ago

Most of us in technology have had to learn new skills. I used to rack up and wire servers in a lab as part of my dev work. I don't do that anymore and instead had to learn aws and terraform. Personally I don't expect any empathy due to my lab racking skills no longer being as relevant to many jobs.

netheril963• 4 years ago

if AI is able to do these astonishingly difficult things, why shouldn't it, with some finagling, also be able to do the dumb, simple things most programmers do for their jobs?

Art is more difficult than programming for people with talents in programming but not in arts. Art is easier than programming for people with talents in arts but not in programming. Granted, those two sentences are tautology, but nonetheless a reminder that the difficulty of art and programming does not form a total order.

MrPatan• 4 years ago

Because we know it's not going to happen any time soon, and when it does happen it won't matter only to devs, that's the singularity.

You'll find out because you're now an enlightened immortal being, or you won't find out at all because the thermonuclear blast (or the engineered plague, or the terminators...) killed you and everybody else.

Does that mean there won't be some enterprising fellas who will hook up a chat prompt to some website thing? And that you can demo something like "Add a banner. More to the right. Blue button under it" and that works? Sure. And when it's time to fiddle with the details of how the bloody button doesn't do the right thing when clicked, it's back to hiring a professional that knows how to talk to the machine so it does what you want. Not a developer! No, of course not, no, no, we don't do development here, no. We do prompts.

nonameiguess• 4 years ago

The entire history of computer programming is using code generation tools to increase the level of abstraction most programmers work at. Having yet another one of those doesn't seem to present any realistic chance of replacing all of the development, testing, maintenance, and refinement of that entire stack. If your job is literally just being handed over a paragraph or so written requirement for a single function or short script, giving back that function/script, and you're done, then sure, worry.

But at least every job I've had so far also entailed understanding the entire system, the surrounding ecosystem, upstream and downstream dependencies and interactions, the overall goal being worked toward, and playing some role in coming up with the requirements in the first place.

ChatGPT can't even currently update its fixed-in-time knowledge state, which is entirely based on public information. That means it can't even write a conforming component of a software system that relies on any internal APIs! It won't know your codebase if it wasn't in its training set. You can include the API in the prompt, but then that is still a job for a human with some understanding of how software works, isn't it?

threatofrain• 4 years ago

One of the things that I find problematic is that we enjoy so many conveniences or efficiencies where taking a step back feels unimaginable. We used to have human computers. Going back on this to rescue an old profession would seem unimaginable. Paying individual taxes is very easy for many nations. Going to what the US has just to rescue many accounting jobs seems absurd.

Now imagine a future where AI can assist in law. Or should we not have that because lawyers pay so much for education and they work so bitterly? Should we do away with farm equipment as well? Should we destroy musical synths so that we can have more musicians?

It’s one thing to say we should have a government program to ease transitions in industry. It’s something else to say that we should hold back technological progress because jobs will be destroyed.

How do we develop a coherent moral framework to address this matter?

knighthack2• 4 years ago

If "making art is vastly more difficult than the huge majority of computer programming that is done" - then I'm sorry, you must not be doing very difficult computer programming.

NateEag3• 4 years ago

what's the most difficult art project you've produced?

Comparing these is very "apples and oranges", but I think you'd better have a strong background in both if you're gonna try.

odo12422• 4 years ago

the vast majority of computer programming is “not very difficult” computer programming

mrbombastic3• 4 years ago

I feel like I am missing something or holding it wrong, I would personally love if we had a tool that i could describe problems at a high level and out comes a high quality fully functional app. Most software is shit and if we are honest with ourselves there is a huge amount of inessential complexity in this field built up over the years. I would gladly never spend weeks building something someone else already built in a slightly different way because it doesn’t meet requirements, I would gladly not end up in rabbit holes wrestling with some dependency compatibility issue when I am just trying to create value for the business. If the tools get better the software gets better and the compexity we can manage gets larger. That said while these tools are incredibly impressive, having messed with this for a few days to try to even do basic stuff, what am I missing here? It is a nice starting point and can be a productivity boost but the code produced is often wrong and it feels a long way away from automating my day to day work.

kypro• 4 years ago

I would personally love if we had a tool that i could describe problems at a high level and out comes a high quality fully functional app.

I'm sure your employer would love that more than you. That's the issue here.

That said while these tools are incredibly impressive, having messed with this for a few days to try to even do basic stuff, what am I missing here? It is a nice starting point and can be a productivity boost but the code produced is often wrong and it feels a long way away from automating my day to day work.

This is the first irritation of such a tool and it's already very competent. I'm not even sure I'm better at writing code than GPT, the only thing I can do that it can't is compile and test the code I produce. If you asked me to create a React app from a two sentence prompt and didn't allow me to search the internet, compile or test it I'm sure I'd probably make more mistakes than GPT to be honest.

NoPicklez• 4 years ago

I think a lot of people are coming at this from an all or nothing approach. Does the current solution do everything we keep expecting ML to do? No, does it do way more than before and get us x percent closer? Yes.

Think of the 80/20 model, if it gets you 80% there (don't take that literally) then that's huge in it of itself. This tool is getting us closer to the example you mention and that in of itself is really cool.

chii• 4 years ago

The empathy you imply might also require that the artists (or programmer's) jobs be preserved, for the sake of giving them purpose and a way to make a living.

I dont think that is absolutely something a society must guarantee. People are made obsolete all the time.

What needs to be done is to produce new needs that currently cannot be serviced by the new AI's. I'm sure it will come - as it has for the past hundred years when technology supplanted an existing corpus of workers. A society can make this transition smoother - such as a nice social safety-net, and low-cost/free education for retraining into a different field.

In fact, these things are all sorely needed today, without having the AIs' disruptions.

drinfinity2• 4 years ago

Making art is not "vastly more difficult" or at least it is (IMO) highly debatable. Some parts of it require decades of experience to do with any kind of excellence, yes. That's also the case with powerlifting, figure skating and raising children and indeed programming. It's just that your boss made a money printer that takes in bullshit and outputs bullshit which gives you your cosy job.

But that is not "programming". That is glueing together bullshit until it works and the results of that "work" are "blessing" us everyday. The gift that keeps on giving. You FAANG people are indeed astronomically, immorally, overpaid and actively harm the world.

But, luckily, the world has more layers than that. Programming for Facebook is not the same as programming for a small chemical startup or programming in any resource-restricted environment where you can't just spin up 1000 AWS instances at your leisure and you actually have to know what you're doing with the metal.

nikanj• 4 years ago

Coders have been using "AI" for ages. You used to write assembly by hand, then got a compiler that you could just instruct to generate the code for you. I don't worry about my job, even though a single prompt to REPL can now replace thousands of hand-crafted machine instructions

majani• 4 years ago

It's quite typical of devs in my experience. I remember during the MegaUpload/Pirate Bay arrests, devs were quite up in arms about big media going after pirates, but when it came to devs going after app pirates with everything they've got, they were real quiet

Mountain_Skies• 4 years ago

While it was far from all of them, lots of the people who are decrying AI art were recently gleefully cheering the destruction of blue-collar jobs held by people with what they view as unacceptable value systems. "Learn to code" was a middle finger both to the people losing their jobs and to those who already code and don't want to see the value of their skills diluted. There's been plenty of "lack of empathy" going around lately, mostly because of ideological fault lines. Perhaps this will be a wake-up call that monsters rarely obey their masters for very long before turning on them.

thedorkknight2• 4 years ago

lots of the people who are decrying AI art were recently gleefully cheering the destruction of blue-collar job

I hear these sorts of statements a lot, and always wonder how people come to the conclusion that "people who said A were the ones who were saying B". Barring survey data, how would you know that it isn't just the case that it seems that way?

The idea that people who would tell someone else to learn to code are now luddites seems super counter-intuitive to me. Wouldn't people opposing automation now likely be the same ones opposing it in the past? Why would you assume they're the same group without data showing it?

I know a bunch of artists personally and none of them seem to oppose blue-collar work

zztop44• 4 years ago

Many of the artists I know personally are blue collar workers. One is a house painter, one an airport luggage handler, one works in a restaurant (which is perhaps working class rather than blue collar per se).

Honestly, I think “learn to code” is mostly used sarcastically?

Kalium5• 4 years ago

What's going to happen if technologists collectively come to the table and engaging in sincere discussion rooted in kindness, compassion, and empathy?

I fully expect there will be zero reciprocation. There will, instead, be a strong expectation that that empathy turns into centering of fear and a resulting series of economic choices. AI systems are now threatening the ability of some artists to get paid and those artists would like that to stop.

I think we're seeing it right now. You shift effortlessly from talking about empathy to talking about the money. You consider the one the way to get the other, so you deplore the horrifying lack of empathy.

Let me put it another way. Would you be happy if you saw an outpouring of empathy, sympathy, and identification with artists coupled with exactly the same decisions about machine learning systems?

lilactown• 4 years ago

Yes, an outpouring of sympathy, empathy, etc combined with the same unilateral decision making that technologists make would be terrible. I would call continuing to do that unempathetic.

Technologists acting like technocrats and expecting everyone to give them sympathy, empathy and identification is laughably rude and insulting.

Mezzie3• 4 years ago

I do find it funny that artists are complaining about things like AI generated art clogging up art sites/reducing commissions/etc. because my particular artistic outlet of choice is writing and visual art has completely overtaken text based content online, particularly for anything fandom or nerd adjacent. The visual artists are also responsible for the monetization of fandom to begin with which I'm still pretty salty about. We moved from discussions and fanfic to 500+ 'commission me to draw your OTP!' and 'Look at this skimpy character art!' daily posts.

Shoe's on the other foot now and they don't like it.

sacado2• 4 years ago

In art, you can afford a few mistakes. Like, on many photo-realistic pictures generated by midjourney, if you look closely you'll see a thing or two that are odd in the eyes of characters. In an AI-generated novel, you can accept a typo here and there, or not even notice it if it's really subtle.

In a program, you can't really afford that. A small mistake can have dramatic consequences. Now, maybe in the next few years you'll only need one human supervisor fixing AI bugs where you used to need 10 high-end developers, but you probably won't be able to make reliable programs just by typing a prompt, the way you can currently generate a cover for an e-book just by asking midjourney.

As for the political consequences of all of this, this is yet another issue.

mullingitover4• 4 years ago

I'm not sure that humans are going to beat AI in terms of defect rate in software, especially given that with AI you produce code at a fast enough rate that corner cutting (like skipping TDD) often done by human developers is off the table.

I don't think this is going to put developers out of work, however. Instead, lots of small businesses that couldn't afford to be small software companies suddenly will be able to. They'll build 'free puppies,' new applications that are easy to start building, but that require ongoing development and maintenance. As the cambrian explosion of new software happens we'll only end up with more work on our hands.

strken3• 4 years ago

My empathy for artists is fighting with my concern for everyone else's future, and losing.

It would be very easy to make training ML models on publicly available data illegal. I think that would be a very bad thing because it would legally enshrine a difference between human learning and machine learning in a broader sense, and I think machine learning has huge potential to improve everyone's lives.

Artists are in a similar position to grooms and farriers demanding the combustion engine be banned from the roads for spooking horses. They have a good point, but could easily screw everyone else over and halt technological progress for decades. I want to help them, but want to unblock ML progress more.

allturtles• 4 years ago

My empathy for artists is fighting with my concern for everyone else's future, and losing.

My empathy for artists is aligned with my concern for everyone else's future.

I want to help them, but want to unblock ML progress more.

But progress towards what end? The ML future looks very bleak to me, the world of "The Machine Stops," with humans perhaps reduced to organic effectors for the few remaining tasks that the machine cannot perform economically on its own: carrying packages upstairs, fixing pipes, etc.

We used to imagine that machines would take up the burden our physical labor, freeing our minds for more creative and interesting pursuits: art, science, the study of history, the study of human society, etc. Now it seems the opposite will happen.

6gvONxR4sf7o4• 4 years ago

I think that would be a very bad thing because it would legally enshrine a difference between human learning and machine learning in a broader sense, and I think machine learning has huge potential to improve everyone's lives.

How about we legally enshrine a difference between human learning and corporate product learning? If you want to use things others made for free, you should give back for free. Otherwise if you’re profiting off of it, you have to come to some agreement with the people whose work you’re profiting off of.

yamtaddle9• 4 years ago

Everyone else's future?

I see this as another step toward having a smaller and smaller space in which to find our own meaning or "point" to life, which is the only option left after the march of secularization. Recording and mass media / reproduction already curtailed that really badly on the "art" side of things. Work is staring at glowing rectangles and tapping clacky plastic boards—almost nobody finds it satisfying or fulfilling or engaging, which is why so many take pills to be able to tolerate it. Work, art... if this tech fulfills its promise and makes major cuts to the role for people in those areas, what's left?

The space in which to find human meaning seems to shrink by the day, the circle in which we can provide personal value and joy to others without it becoming a question of cold economics shrinks by the day, et c.

I don't think that's great for everyone's future. Though admittedly we've already done so much harm to that, that this may hardly matter in the scheme of things.

I'm not sure the direction we're going looks like success, even if it happens to also mean medicine gets really good or whatever.

Then again I'm a bit of a technological-determinist and almost nobody agrees with this take anyway, so it's not like there's anything to be done about it. If we don't do [bad but economically-advantageous-on-a-state-level thing], someone else will, then we'll also have to, because fucking Moloch. It'll turn out how it turns out, and no meaningful part in determining that direction is whether it'll put us somewhere good, except "good" as blind-ass Moloch judges it.

kevingadd5• 4 years ago

It would be very easy to make training ML models on publicly available data illegal

This isn't the only option though? You could restrict it to data where permission has been acquired, and many people would probably grant permission for free or for a small fee. Lots of stuff already exists in the public domain.

What ML people seem to want is the ability to just scoop up a billion images off the net with a spider and then feed it into their network, utilizing the unpaid labor of thousands-to-millions for free and turning it into profit. That is transparently unfair, I think. If you're going to enrich yourself, you should also enrich the people who made your success possible.

Mezzie3• 4 years ago

I find it weird that they're considered separate talents. Programming is a creative task for me, and one reason I never took it up as a full time job is that I learned I hate trying to do creative work on demand. (I've been paid for both fiction writing and dev work and they produce very similar feelings in me.)

Programming is definitely easier to make a living from. I'm a very mediocre artist and developer and I'm never making enough off of art to live on, but I could get a programming job at a boring company and it would pay a living wage. In that sense, it's definitely 'easier'.

runald• 4 years ago

Sorry, I have no reason to be afraid of AI taking my job, not now, not ever. You seem to have a condescending idea of what programming is, given how you describe it as simple and dumb, but I can assure you, programming would be one of the last jobs to be deprecated by AI. If you think ChatGPT is enough to put programmers on the street, I would question what kind of programming you do.

I would turn this around to you: if a braindead AI can do these astonishingly difficult art, maybe art was never difficult to begin with, and that artists are merely finagling dumb, simple things to their work. Sounds annoying and condescending right? If you disagree what I said about art, maybe you ought to be more aware of your own lack of empathy.

CuriouslyC8• 4 years ago

If you were transported back to the 19th century, would you have empathy for the loom operators smashing mechanical looms?

Art currently requires two skills - technical rendering ability, and creative vision/composition. AI tools have basically destroyed the former, but the latter is still necessary. Professional artists will have to adjust their skillset, much like they had to adjust their skillset when photography killed portrait painting as a profession.

yunwal5• 4 years ago

AI tools have basically destroyed the former

Do you people think art is relegated to digital images only? No video? No paintings, sculptures, mixed media, performance art, lighting, woodwork, etc etc. How is it possible that everyone seems to ignore that we still have massive leaps required in AI and robotics to match the technical ability of 99% of artists.

jhbadger3• 4 years ago

I think it's more a lack of historical perspective on the part of artists. I remember when Photoshop and other digital art tools became available and many artists were of the opinion "Feh! Digital art isn't really art. Real artists work with pens, brushes, and paper!". Fast forward a couple of decades and you won't find many artists still saying that. Instead they've embraced the tools. I expect the future won't be AI art vs human art but rather a hybrid as art tools incorporate the technique and artists won't think it is any less art than using other digital tools.

odessacubbage3• 4 years ago

the issue at hand has nothing to do with gatekeeping, elitism or any kind of psued debate about what constitutes real art.

people are mad because job & portfolio sites are being flooded with aishit which is making them unusable for both artists and clients .

people are mad because their copyright is being scraped and resold for profit by third parties without their consent.

whether ai is the future is an utterly meaningless distraction until these concerns are addressed. as an aside, ai evangelists telling working professionals that they 'simply don't get' their field of expertise has been an incredibly poor tact for generating goodwill towards this technology or the operations attempting to extract massive profit from it's implementation.

unshavedyak2• 4 years ago

I think i have a fair bit of empathy in this area and, well like you said, i think my job (software) is likely to be displaced too. Furthermore, i think companies have data sets regardless of if we allow public use or not. Ie if we ban public use, then only massive companies (Google/etc) will have enough data to train these. Which.. seems worse to me.

At the end of the day though, i think i'm an oddball in this camp. I just don't think there's that much difference between ML and Human Learning (HL). I believe we are nearly infinitely more complex but as time goes on i think the gulf between ML and HL complexity will shrink.

I recently saw some of MKBHD's critiques of ML and my takeaway was that he believes ML cannot possibly be creative. That it's just inputs and outputs.. and, well, isn't that what i am? Would the art i create (i am also trying to get into art) not be entirely influenced by my experiences in life, the memories i retain from it, etc? Humans also unknowingly reproduce work all the time. "Inspiration" sits in the back of their minds and then we regurgitate it out thinking it as original.. but often it's not, it's derivative.

Given that all creative work is learned, though, the line between derivative and originality seems to just be about how close it is to pre-existing work. We mash together ideas, and try to distance it from other works. It doesn't matter what we take as inspiration, or so we claim, as long as the output doesn't overlap too much with pre-existing work.

ML is coming for many jobs and we need to spend a lot of time and effort thinking about how to adapt. Fighting it seems an uphill battle. One we will lose, eventually. The question is what will we do when that day comes? How will society function? Will we be able to pay rent?

What bothers me personally is just that companies get so much free-reign in these scenarios. To me it isn't about ML vs HL. Rather it's that companies get to use all our works for their profit.

wnkrshm5• 4 years ago

We mash together ideas, and try to distance it from other works. It doesn't matter what we take as inspiration, or so we claim, as long as the output doesn't overlap too much with pre-existing work.

I feel a big part what makes it okay or not okay here is intention and capability. Early in an artistic journey things can be highly derivative but that's due to the student's capabilities. A beginner may not intend to be derivative but can't do better.

I see pages of applications of ML out there being derivative on purpose (Edit: seemingly trying to 'outperform' given freelance artists with glee, in their own styles).

lolinder4• 4 years ago

Making money through art is already not a feasible career, as you yourself learned. If you want a job that millions of people do for fun in their free time, you can expect that job to be extremely hard to get and to pay very little.

The solution isn't to halt technological progress to try to defend the few jobs that are actually available in that sector, the solution is to fight forward to a future where no one has to do dull and boring things just to put food on the table. Fight for future where people can pursue what they want regardless of whether it's profitable.

Most of that fight is social and political, but progress in ML is an important precursor. We can't free everyone from the dull and repetitive until we have automated all of it.

stemlord• 4 years ago

The solution isn't to halt technological progress

Technological progress is not a linear deterministic progression. We decide how to progress every step of the way. The problem is that we are making dogshit decisions for some reason

Maybe we lack the creativity to envision alternative futures. How does a society become so uncreative I wonder

kg• 4 years ago

If it's so important, we could at least pay the people who create the training set. Otherwise, we're relying on unpaid labor for this important progress and if the unpaid labor disappears, we're screwed. How does it seem sensible to construct a business this way?

syntheweave• 4 years ago

I have crossed over the other direction from coding to drawing and suspect that neither side understands their craft well enough to assess what'll happen.

Most of coding is routine patterns that are only perceived as complex because of the presence of other coders and the need to "talk" with them, which creates a need for reference materials(common protocols, documentation, etc.)

Likewise, most of painting is routine patterns complicated by a mix of human intent(what's actually communicated) and the need for reference materials to make the image representational.

Advancements in Western painting between the Renaissance and the invention of photography track with developments in optics; the Hockney-Falco thesis is the "strong" version of this, asserting that specific elements in historical paintings had to have come through the use of optical projections, not through the artist's eyes. A weaker form of this would say that the optics were tools for study and development of the artist's eye, but not always the go-to tool, especially not early on when their quality was not good.

Coding has been around for a much shorter time, but mostly operates on the assumptions of bureaucracy: that which is information is information that can be modelled, sorted, searched. And the need for more code exists relative to having more categories of modelled data.

Art already faced its first crisis of purpose with the combination of photography and mass reproduction. Photos produced a high level of realism, and as it became cheaper to copy and print them, the artist moved from a necessary role towards a specialist one - an "illustrator" or "fine artist".

What an AI can do - given appropriate training, prompt interfaces and supplementary ability to test and validate its output - is produce a routine result in a fraction of the time. And this means that it can sidestep the bureaucratic mode entirely in many circumstances and be instructed "more of this, less of that" - which produces features like spam filters and engagement-based algorithms, but also means that entire protocols are reduced to output data if the AI is a sufficiently good compiler; if you can tell the AI what you want the layout to look like and it produces the necessary CSS, then CSS is more of a commodity. You can just draw a thing, possibly add some tagging structure, and use that as the compiler's input. Visual coding.

But that makes the role a specialized one; nobody needs a "code monkey" for such a task, they need a graphic designer...which is an arts job.

That is, the counterpoint to "structured, symbolic prompts generating visual data" is "visual prompts generating structured, symbolic data". ML can be structured in either direction, it just takes thoughtful engineering. And if the result is a slightly glitchy web site, it's an acceptable tradeoff.

Either way, we've got a pile of old careers on their way out and new careers replacing them.

odessacubbage3• 4 years ago

it's been very frustrating to see how much ignorance and incuriosity is held by what i assume to be otherwise very worldly, intelligent and technical people in regards to what working artists actually do.

incrudible• 4 years ago

In my humble estimation, making art is vastly more difficult than the huge majority of computer programming that is done.

The value of work is not measured by its difficulty. There's a small amount of people who make a living doing contract work that may be replaced by an AI, but these people were in a precarious position in the first place. The well-to-do artists are not threatened by AI art. The value of their work is derived from them having put their name on it.

If you assume that most programming work could be done by an AI "soon", then we really have to question what sort of dumb programming work people are doing today and whether that wouldn't disappeared anyway, once funding runs dry. Mindlessly assembling snippets from Stackoverflow may well be threatened by AI very soon, so if that's your job, consider the alternatives.

davidguetta• 4 years ago

Or its a big non event.. tech change, culture change, people hange #shrug

What about the horse-powered carrioles devastated by cars !!

lordfrito4• 4 years ago

I want to apologize in advance if my response here seems callous considering your personal experience as an artist. I'm trying to talk about AI and labor in general here, and don't mean to minimize your personal experience.

That said, I don't think AIs ability to generate art is a major milestone in the progress of things, I think it's more of the same, automating low value-add processes.

I agree that AI is/will-be an incredibly disruptive technology. And that automation in general is putting more and more people out of jobs, and extrapolated forward you end up in a world where most humans don't have any practical work to do other than breed and consume resources at ever increasing rates.

As much as I'm impressed by AI art (it's gorgeous), at the end of the day it's mainly just copying/pasting/smoothing out objects it's seen before (training set). We don't think of it as clipart, but that's essentially what it is underneath it all, just a new form of clipart. Amazing in it's ability to reposition, adjust, smooth images, have some sense of artistic placement, etc. It's lightyears beyond where clipart started (small vector and bitmap libraries). But at the end of the day it's just automating the creation of images using clipart. Re-arranging images you've seen before so is not going to make anyone big $$$. End of the day the quality of the output is entirely subjective, just about anything reasonable will do.

This reminds me a lot of GPT-3... looks like it has substance but not really. GPT-3 is great at making low value clickbait articles of cut-and-paste information on your favorite band or celebrity. GPT-3 will never be able to do the job of a real journalist, pulling pieces together to identify and expose deeper truths, to say, uncover the Theranos fraud. It's just Eliza [1] on steroids.

The AI parlor tricks started with Eliza, and have gotten quite elaborate as of late. But they're still just parlor tricks.

Comparing it to the challenges of programming, well yes I agree AI will automate portions of it, but with major caveats.

A lot of what people call "programming" today is really just plumbing. I'm a career embedded real-time firmware engineer, and it continues to astonish me that there's an entire generation of young "programmers" who don't understand basic computing principles, stacks, interrupts, I/O operations.. at the end of the day their knowledge base seems comprised of knowing which tool to use where in orchestration, and how to plumb it together. And if they don't know the answer they simply google and stack overflow will tell them. Low code, no code, etc. (python is perfect for quickly plumbing two systems together). This skill set is very limited and wouldn't even get you a junior dev position when I started out. I'm not suprised it's easy to automate, as it will generally have the same quality code (and make the same mistakes) as a human dev that simply copies/pastes Stack Overflow solutions.

This is in stark contrast to the types of problems that most programmers used to solve in the old days (and a smaller number still do). Stuff that needed an engineering degree and complex problem solving skills. But when I started out 30 years ago, "programmers" and "software engineers" were essentially the same thing. They aren't now, there is a world of difference between your average programmer and a true software engineer today.

Not saying plumbers aren't valuable.. they absolutely are as more and more of the modern world is built on plumbing things together. Highly skilled software engineers are needed less and less, and that's a net-good thing for humanity. No one needs to write operating systems anymore, lets add value building on top of them. Those are the people making the big $$$, their skillset is quite valuable. We're in the middle of a bi-furcation of software engineering careers. More and more positions will only require limited skills, and fewer and fewer (as a percentage) will continue to be highly skilled.

So is AI going to come in and help automate the plumbing? Heck yes, and rightly so... They've automated call centers, warehouse logistics, click-bait article writing, carry-out order taking, the list goes on and on. I'd love to have an AI plumber I could trust to do most of the low-level work right (and in CI/CD world you can just push out a fix if you missed something).

I don't believe for a second that today's latest and greatest "cutting edge" AI will ever be able to solve the hard problems that keep highly skilled people employed. New breakthroughs are needed, but I'm extremely skeptical. Like fusion promises, general purpose AI always seems just a decade or two away. Skilled labor is safe, for now.. maybe for a while yet.

The real problem as I see it, is that AI automation is on course to eliminate most low skilled jobs in the next century, which puts it on a collision course with the fact that most humans aren't capable of performing highly skilled work (half are below average by definition). Single parent workig the GM line in the 50's was enough afford an average family a decent life. Not so much where technology is going. At the end of the day the average human will have little to contribute to civilization, but still expects to eat and breed.

Universal basic income has been touted as a solution to the coming crisis, but all that does is kick the can down the road. It leads to a world of too much idle time (and the devil will find work for idle hands) and ever growing resource consumption. A perfect storm.... at the end of the day what's the point of existing when all you do is consume everything around you and don't add any value? Maybe that's someone's idea of utopia, but not mine.

This has been coming for a long time, AI art is just a small step on the current journey, not a big breakthrough but a new application in automation.

/rant

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA

unity10014• 4 years ago

entire generation of young "programmers" who don't understand basic computing principles, stacks, interrupts, I/O operations

Why would software engineers who work on web apps, kubernetes, and the internet in general need to understand interrupts. Not only they will never ever deal with any of that, but also they are supposed not to. All of those have been automated away so that what we call the Internet can be possible.

All of those stuff turned into specializations as the tech world progressed and the ecosystem grew. A software engineer specialized in hardware would need to know interrupts while he wouldnt need to know how to do devops. For the software engineer who works on Internet apps, its the opposite.

6gvONxR4sf7o4• 4 years ago

It’s especially absurd that they have no empathy for this exploiting artists’ work, and then get upset when it spits out GPL code.

The people who generated the training data should have a say in how their work is used. Opt-in, not opt-out.

pkdpic• 4 years ago

Sidenote, you don't sound like a failed artist to me man. You sound like someone who survived the art machine and worked hard to make a smart career transition capable of supporting whatever kind of art you want to make. PS I did the same thing, painting MFA --> software development. Wish I was making FAANG money tho...

akiselev4• 4 years ago

It’s not about empathy but about the fundamental nature of the job.

Developers will be fine because software engineering is an arms race - a rather unique position to be in as a professional. I saw this play out during the 2000s offshoring scare when many of us thought we'd get outsourced to India. Instead of getting outsourced, the industry exploded in size globally and everything that made engineers more productive also made them a bigger threat to competitors, forcing everyone to hire or die.

Businesses only need so much copy or graphic design, but the second a competitors gains a competitive advantage via software they have to respond in kind - even if it's a marginal advantage - because software costs so little to scale out. As the tech debt and the revenue that depends on it grows, the baseline number of staff required for maintenance and upkeep grows because our job is to manage the complexity.

I think software is going to continue eating the world at an accelerated pace because AI opens up the uncanny valley: software that is too difficult to implement using human developers writing heuristics but not so difficult it requires artificial general intelligence. Unlike with artists, improvements in AI don’t threaten us, they instead open up entire classes of problems for us to tackle

oldstrangers3• 4 years ago

Technically I'd imagine AI threatens developers (https://singularityhub.com/2022/12/13/deepminds-alphacode-co...) a lot more than artists because there's a tangible (or 'objectively correct') problem being solved by the AI. Whereas art is an entirely subjective endeavor, and ultimately the success of what is being made is left up to how someone is feeling. I also imagine humans will begin to look at AI generated art very cynically. Maybe we all collectively agree we hate AI art, and it becomes as cliché as terrible stock photography. Or, we just choose not to appreciate anything that doesn't come with a 'Made By Humans' authentication... Pretty simple solution for the artists.

Obviously a lot of money will be lost for artists in a variety of commercial fields, but the ultimate "success of art" will be unapproachable by AI given its subjective nature.

Developers though will be struggling to compete from both a speed and technical point of view, and those hurdles can't be simply overcome with a shift in how someone feels. And you're right about the arms race, it just won't be happening with humans. It'll be computing power, AIs and the people capable of programming those AIs.

lxe• 4 years ago

In my humble estimation, making art is vastly more difficult than the huge majority of computer programming that is done.

You're comparing apples to oranges. Digging a trench by hand is also vastly more difficult than art or programming.

There's just as much AI hype around code generation, and some programmers are also complaining (https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/8/23446821/microsoft-openai...).

Overall though the sentiment is that AI tools are useful and are a sign of progress. The fact that they are stirring so much contention and controversy is just a sign of how revolutionary they are.

medellin• 4 years ago

The lack of empathy in general on online forums is incredible. I don’t think NH is any worse than other places but it would be nice if we could be a little better as it would lead to some more interesting and nuanced topics.

As a developer/manager i am not yet scared of AI because i have had to already correct multiple people this week who tried to use chatGPT to figure something out.

It’s actually pretty good but when it’s wrong it seems to be really wrong and when you don’t have the background to figure that out a ton of time is wasted. It’s just a better Stackoverflow at the end of the day imo.

toldyouso2022• 4 years ago

The arithmetic a computer can do instantly is much more difficult to me that writing this sentence. Point being: we can't compare human and computer skills. As if I'm worried, I'm not because, if there is no government intervention to ruin things, even if I lose my job as a programmer society becomes richer and I can always move to do another thing while having access to cheaper goods

People should stop giving work all this meaning and also they should study economics so they chill.

Learn and chill.

sciclaw• 4 years ago

The thing with programming is that it either works or does not work, but there is a huge window of what can be called art.

With no training, I, or even a 1 year old, could make something and call it art. I wouldn't claim it's very good but I think most people would accept it as art. The same cannot be said for programming.

furyofantares• 4 years ago

it seems to me that most computer programmers should be just as afraid as artists, in the face of technology like this!!!

I'm just as excited for myself as I am for artists. The current crop of these tools look like they could be powerful enablers for productivity and new creativity in their respective spaces.

I happen to also welcome being fully replaced, which is another conversation and isn't really where I see these current tools going, though it's hard to extrapolate.

eatsyourtacos• 4 years ago

it seems to me that most computer programmers should be just as afraid as artists

That is absurd. Sure some basic AI tools have been helpful like co-pilot and it's sometimes really impressive how it can help me autofill some code instead of typing it out... but come on, there is no way we are anywhere close to AI replacing 99.99% of developers.

making art is vastly more difficult than the huge majority of computer programming that is done

I don't know.. art is "easy" in the sense that we all know what art looks like. You want a picture of a man holding a cup with a baby raven in it? I can picture that in my head to some degree right away, and then it's just "doing the process" to draw it in some way using shapes we know.

How in the heck can you correlate that to 99% of business applications? Most of the time no one even knows exactly what they want out of a project.. so first there is the massive amount of constant changes just from using stuff. Then there is the actual way the code is created itself. Let's even say you could tell it "Make me an angular website with two pages and a live chat functionality" and it worked. Well, ok great it got you a starting template.. but first, maybe the code is so weird or unintuitive that it's almost impossible to really keep building upon- not helpful. Now let's say it is "descent enough", well fine.. then it's almost like an advanced co-pilot at this point. It helps with boilerplate boring template.

But comparing this all to art is still just ridiculous. Again, everyone can look at a picture and say "this is what I wanted" or "this is not what I wanted at all". Development is so crazy intricate that it's nothing like art.. I could look at two websites (similar to art) and say "these look the same", but under the hood it could be a million times different in functionality, how it works, how well it's structured to evolve over time.. etc etc. But if I look at two pictures that look exactly the same, I don't care how it got there or how it was created- it's done and exactly the same. Not true of development for 99% of cases.

quonn8• 4 years ago

This comment is downvoted, but it makes an important point. AI systems that produce an outcome that can be easily verified by non-experts are far more practical. If my mom can get an illustration out of the AI that she wants, she is done. Not so for software, where she cannot really verify it‘s that going to reliably do what was specified.

This is especially true for complex pieces.

If an AI could produce a world-class totally amazing illustration or even a book I will afterwards easily see or read it.

On the other hand real-world software systems consist of hundreds of thousands or lines in distributed services. How would a layman really judge if they work?

Nevertheless I also expect AI to have a big impact since less engineers can do much more.

AlexandrB6• 4 years ago

Setting aside questions of whether there is copyright infringement going on, I think this is an unprecedented case in the history of automation replacing human labor.

Jobs have been automated since the industrial revolution, but this usually takes the form of someone inventing a widget that makes human labor unnecessary. From a worker's perspective, the automation is coming from "the outside". What's novel with AI models is that the workers' own work is used to create the thing that replaces them. It's one thing to be automated away, it's another to have your own work used against you like this, and I'm sure it feels extra-shitty as a result.

wwweston3• 4 years ago

Absolutely this -- and in many (maybe most cases), there was no consent for the use of the work in training the model, and quite possibly no notice or compensation at all.

That's a huge ethical issue whether or not it's explicitly addressed in copyright/ip law.

andrepew• 4 years ago

I wouldn't say saying it came from the inside is unique to AI art. You very much need a welder's understanding of welding in order to be able to automate it for example.

I'd just say the scale is different. Old school automation just required one expert to guide the development of an automation. AI art requires the expertise of thousands.

Archelaos2• 4 years ago

From a worker's perspective, the automation is coming from "the outside".

Not, if the worker is an engineer or similar. Some engineers built tools that improved building tools.

And this started even earlier than the industrial revolution. Think for example of Johannes Gutenberg. His real important invention was not the printing press (this already existed) and not even moveable types, but a process by which a printer could mold his own set of identical moveable types.

I see a certain analogy between what Gutenberg's invention meant for scribes then and what Stable Diffusion means for artists today.

Another thought: In engineering we do not have extremly long lasting copyright, but a lot shorter protection periods via patents. I have never understood why software has to be protected for such long copyright periods and not for much shorter patent-like periods. Perhaps we should look for something similar for AI and artists: An artist as copyright as usual for close reproductions, but after 20 years after publication it may be used without her or his consent for training AI models.

MSFT_Edging3• 4 years ago

I don't know why we keep framing artists like they're textile workers or machinists.

The whole point of art is human expression. The idea that artists can be "automated away" is just sad and disgusting and the amount of people who want art but don't want to pay the artist is astounding.

Why are we so eager to rid ourselves of what makes us human to save a buck? This isn't innovation, its self destruction.

gottebp• 4 years ago

We need a better way to reward the contributing artists making the diffusion models possible. Might we be able to come up with a royalty model, where the artist that made the original source content used in training the diffusion model, gets a fractional royalty based on how heavily it is used when generating the prompted art piece? We want to incentivize artists to feed their works, and original styles, into future AI models.

xwdv• 4 years ago

I have zero empathy for “artists”. Art produced for commercial purposes is no art at all, a more apt title for such a job is “asset creator”, and these people are by no means banned from using AI generation tools to make their work easier. Already artists will generate some logo off a prompt that takes a few minutes and charge full price for it. Why cry about it?

I would argue because most AI imagery right now is made for fun and not monetary gains, so it is actually a purer form of art.

imknewhere• 4 years ago

What I find interesting is how people literally cannot see any alternative besides, "This is just the way capitalism works", which implicitly acknowledges "capitalism is the only way it can work".

exceptione14• 4 years ago

Spot on. Our thinking on these matters is more adherence to faith than reason. We are stuck in a collective meme.

A belief system that centers around human well being sounds more reasonable than *unbounded* capitalism. We know it, we don't know what to do with it.

mallvinegar• 4 years ago

Reminds me of this quote from Mark Fisher:

"Observing humans under capitalism and concluding it's only in our nature to be greedy is like observing humans under water and concluding it's only in our nature to drown."

r3trohack3r• 4 years ago

I’m empathetic, but my empathy doesn’t overcome my excitement.

This is a moment where individual humans substantially increase their ability to affect change in the world. I’m watching as these tools quickly become commoditized. I’m seeing low income first generation Americans who speak broken English using ChatGPT to translate their messages to “upper middle class business professional” and land contracts that were off limits before. I’m seeing individuals rapidly iterate and explore visual spaces on the scale of 100s to 1000s of designs using stable diffusion, a process that was financially infeasible even for well funded corps due to the cost of human labor this time last year. These aren’t fanciful dreams of how this tech is going to change society - Ive observed these outcomes in real life.

I’m empathetic that the entire world is moving out from under all of our feet. But the direction it’s moving is unbelievably exciting. AI isn’t going to replace humans, humans using AI are going to replace humans who don’t.

Be the human that helps other humans wield AI.

klooney• 4 years ago

https://githubcopilotlitigation.com/

Some programmers are upset and already filing suit.

spitBalln3• 4 years ago

What empathy were you expecting in a nation that refuses to pass easy access to healthcare for all?

When was making living through art guaranteed? Society has mocked artists for centuries.

Let them make art and give them a UBI.

AI will replace programmers too; if a user can ask a future AI to organize their machines state into an arbitrary video game, photorealistic movie, generate reports from sources abc, weighing for xyz on a bar chart; only the AI code base (whatever boot strapping and runtime it needs) becomes necessary.

Why would I ask an AI that can produce the end result to produce code? Code is just minimized ideal machine state.

You’re correct; there is a lot of empathy lacking in our culture, but it’s not just when it comes to art.

golemotron• 4 years ago

The lack of empathy is incredibly depressing...

The thing is, empathy doesn't really do anything. Pandora's Box is open and there's no effective way of shutting it that is more than a hopeful dream. Stopping technology is like every doomed effort that has existed to stop capitalism.

LarryMullins3• 4 years ago

The lack of empathy

Probably has something to do with years of artists trash talking engineers.

meroes4• 4 years ago

Forgive me but I would be lucky to have artists saying anything, positive or negative, about my way of life. Being knowledgeable in something critically studied is very rewarding. You are forsaking opportunity if I dare say so.

exceptione14• 4 years ago

You have my sympathy.

I think you need to see there are 2 types of people:

- those who want to generate results ("get the job done, quickly"), and

- those who enjoy programming because of it.

The first one are the ones who can't see what is getting lost. They see programming as an obstacle. Strangely, some of them believe that on the one hand that many more people can produce lots more of software because of AI, and simultaneously expect to keep being in demand.

They might think your job is producing pictures, which is just a burden.

I am from the second group. I never choose this profession because of the money, or dreaming about big business I could create. I dread pasting generated code all over the place. The only one being happy would be the owner of that software. And the AI model overlord of course.

I hope that technical and artistic skill will gain appreciation again and that you will have a happy live in doing what you like the most.

astrange14• 4 years ago

If you think code generating AI will take your job, you should also never hire junior engineers because one of them might take your job.

Nevertheless, having more engineers around actually causes you to be more valuable, not less. “Taking your job” isn’t a thing; the Fed chairman is the only thing in our economy that can do that.

beardedetim• 4 years ago

making art is vastly more difficult than the huge majority of computer programming that is done.

I'd reframe this to: making a living from your art is far more difficult than making money from programming.

also be able to do the dumb, simple things most programmers do for their jobs?

I'm all for Ai automating all the boring shit for me. Just like frameworks have. Just like libraries have. Just like DevOps have. Take all the plumbing and make it automated! I'm all for it!

But. At some point. Someone needs to take business speak and turn it into input for this machine. And wouldn't ya know it, I'm already getting paid for that!

CamperBob2• 4 years ago

The lack of empathy is incredibly depressing...

You're projecting your own fears on everyone else. I'm a programmer, too, among other things. I write code in order to get other things done. (Don't you?) It's fucking awesome if this thing can do that part of my job. It means I can spend my time doing something even more interesting.

What we call "programming" isn't defined as "writing code," as you seem to think. It's defined as "getting a machine to do what we (or our bosses/customers) want." That part will never change. But if you expect the tools and methodologies to remain the same, it's time to start thinking about a third career, because this one was never a good fit for you.

This argument has come up many times in history, and your perspective has never come out on top. Not once. What do you expect to be different this time?

rightbyte2• 4 years ago

"The cut" for artists is just way closer to 100% than for programmers. It is that simple.

mattr47• 4 years ago

Art is not harder than coding. What is hard is for an artist to make a living because the market for artwork is very, very low.

aaroninsf• 4 years ago

These are society-wide problems, not a failure of empathy on the part of "technical people."

The lack you find depressing is natural defensiveness in the face of hostility rooted in the fear, and in most cases, broad ignorance of both the legal and technical context and operation of these systems.

We might look at this and say, "there should have been a roll out with education and appropriate framing, they should have managed this better."

This may be true but of course, there is no "they"; so here we are.

I understand the fear, but my own empathy is blocked by hostility in specific interactions.

Der_Einzige2• 4 years ago

A lot of coders have radical open source beliefs.

Basically, the argument is that you should not have ever charged for your art, since its viewing and utility is increased when more people see it.

The lack of empathy comes from our love of open source. That's why. These engineers have been pirating books, movies, games for a long time. Artists crying for copyright has the same sound as the MPAA sueing grandma 20 years ago.

meroes4• 4 years ago

This could easily be flipped on it's head. Artists wanting more control over their creations ensures bad actors can't use/misuse as easily. Freely creating tools for any bad actors to use/misuse appears incredibly naive in this light.

Now was Aaron Schwartz (what I view as on ultimate example of this open source idea you cite) naive, no. Maybe he knew in his heart the greater good would outweigh anything.

But I don't think we should judge too harshly merely falling on one side of this issue or not. Perhaps it's down to a debate about what creation/truth/knowledge actually are. Maybe some creators (of which aritsts and computer scientists are) view creations as something they bring into the world, not reveal about the world.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 4 years ago

I think that programmers here have a lot riding on the naive belief that all new tools are neutral, and there is no pile of bodies under these advances.

eiiot• 4 years ago

making art is vastly more difficult than the huge majority of computer programming that is done

Creating art is not that much harder than programming, creating good art is much harder than programming. That's the reason that a large majority of art isn't very good, and why a large majority of Artists don't make a living by creating art.

Just like the camera didn't kill the artist, neither will AI. For as long as art is about the ideas behind the piece as opposed to the technical skills required to make it (which I would argue has been true since the rise of impressionism) then AI doesn't change much. The good ideas are still required, AI only makes creating art (especially bad art) more accessible.

shadowgovt• 4 years ago

Software engineers are in the business of self-replacement. The idea they could be replaced by an AI doesn't engender fear; it marks a success.

kmeisthax3• 4 years ago

Computer programmers have a general aversion to copyright, for a few reasons:

1. Proprietary software is harmful and immoral in ways that proprietary books or movies are not.

2. The creative industry has historically used copyright as a tool to tell computer programmers to stop having fun.

So the lack of empathy is actually pretty predictable. Artists - or at least, the people who claim to represent their economic interests - have consistently used copyright as a cudgel to smack programmers about. If you've been marinading in Free Software culture and Cory Doctorow-grade ressentiment for half a century, you're going to be more interested in taking revenge against the people who have been telling you "No, shut up, that's communism" than mere first-order self-preservation[1].

This isn't just "programmers don't have fucks to give", though. In fact, your actual statements about computer programmers are wrong, because there's already an active lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft over GitHub Copilot and it's use of FOSS code.

You see, AI actually breaks the copyright and ethical norms of programmers, too. Most public code happens to be licensed under terms that permit reuse (we hate copyright), but only if derivatives and modifications are also shared in the same manner (because we really hate copyright). Artists are worried about being paid, but programmers are worried about keeping the commons open. The former is easy: OpenAI can offer a rev share for people whose images were in the training set. The latter is far harder, because OpenAI's business model is charging people for access to the AI. We don't want to be paid, we want OpenAI to not be paid.

Also, the assumption that "art is more difficult than computer programming" is also hilariously devoid of empathy. For every junior programmer crudly duck-taping code together you have a person drawing MS Paint fanart on their DeviantART page. The two fields test different skills and you cannot just say one is harder than the other. Furthermore, the consequences are different here. If art is bad, it's bad[0] and people potentially lose money; but if code is bad it gets hacked or kills people.

[0] I am intentionally not going to mention the concerns Stability AI has with people generating CSAM with AI art generators. That's an entirely different can of worms.

[1] Revenge can itself be thought of as a second-order self-preservation strategy (i.e. you hurt me, so I'd better hurt you so that you can't hurt me twice).

themagician2• 4 years ago

I never thought leopards would eat MY face!

Creative professionals might take the first hit in professional services, but AI is going to come for engineers at a much faster and more furious pace. I would even go so far as to say that some (probably a small amount) of the people who have recently gotten laid off at big tech companies may never see a paycheck as high as they previously had.

The vast majority of software engineering hours that are actually paid are for maintenance, and this is where AI is likely to come in like a tornado. Once AI hits upgrade and migration tools it's going to eliminate entire teams permanently.

willsmith72• 4 years ago

The vast majority of software engineering hours that are actually paid are for maintenance

Do you have a source for that? Doesn't match my experience unless your definition of maintenance is really broad

scj• 4 years ago

I believe the current generation of AI would be better suited to augmenting human understanding of code (through static analysis tools and the like), rather than generating it.

On an infinite timeline humans will no longer be needed in the generation of code (we hopefully will still study and appreciate it for leisure), but I doubt we're there yet.

SkyPuncher• 4 years ago

The vast majority of software engineering hours that are actually paid are for maintenance, and this is where AI is likely to come in like a tornado.

I have the exact, almost completely opposite opinion. Greenfield is where AI going to shine.

Maintenance is riddled with "gotcha's", business context, and legacy issues that were all handled and negotiated over outside of the development workflow.

By contrast, AI can pretty easily generate a new file based on some form of input.

grandmczeb• 4 years ago

The vast majority of software engineering hours that are actually paid are for maintenance, and this is where AI is likely to come in like a tornado. Once AI hits upgrade and migration tools it's going to eliminate entire teams permanently.

There's been huge improvements in automating maintenance, and yet I've never once heard someone blame a layoff on e.g. clang-rename (which has probably made me 100x more productive at refactoring compared to doing it manually.)

I'd even say your conclusion is exactly backwards. The implicit assumption is that there's a fixed amount of engineering work to do, so any automation means fewer engineers. In reality there is no such constraint. Firms hire when the marginal benefit of an engineer is larger than the cost. Automation increases productivity, causing firms to hire more, not less.

tshaddox• 4 years ago

My (admittedly totally non-rigorous) intuition is that the advances in AI might "grow the pot" of the software engineering, IT, and related industries at roughly the same rate that they can "replace professionals" in those industries. If that's the case, then there wouldn't be some existential threat to the industry. Of course, that doesn't mean that certain individuals and entire companies aren't at risk, and I don't want to minimize the potential hardship, but it doesn't seem like a unique or new problem.

As a crude analogy, there are a lot of great free or low-cost tools to create websites that didn't exist 15 years ago and can easily replace what would be a much more expensive web developer contract 15 years ago. And yet, in those last 15 years, the "size of the web pot" has increased enough that I don't think many professional web developers are worried about site builder tools threatening the entire industry. There seem to be a lot more web developers now then there were 15 years ago, and they seem to be paid as well or better than they were 15 years. And again, that doesn't mean that certain individuals or firms didn't on occasion experience financial hardship due to pressure from cheaper alternatives, and I don't want to minimize that. It just seems like the industry is still thriving.

To be clear, I really have no idea if this will turn out to be true. I also have no idea if this same thing might happen in other fields like art, music, writing, etc.

A4ET8a8uTh0• 4 years ago

I don't think there is no empathy here, but there are clear divisions on whether this tech will help advance humankind or further destabilize the society as a whole.

To be perfectly honest, I absolutely love that particular attempt by artists, because it will likely force 'some' restrictions on how AI is used and maybe even limit that amount 'blackboxiness' it entails ( disclosure of model, data set used, parameters -- I might be dreaming though ).

I disagree with your statement in general. HN has empathy and not just because it could affect their future world. It is a relatively big shift in tech and we should weigh it carefully.

cyborgx7• 4 years ago

To be honest, I have been forced to choose a side during all those debates about copyright and advertising/adblocking. And it was artists who forced me to make that choice. It's hard not to see this as just another way in which artist are trying to limit how people use their own computing devices in a way that provides the most value to them.

All these talking points about lack of empathy for poor suffering artists have already been made a million times in those other debates. They just don't pack much of a punch anymore.

orbital-decay4• 4 years ago

Artists have all my sympathy. I'm also a hobbyist painter. But I have very little sympathy for those perpetuating this tiresome moral panic (a small amount of actual artists, whatever the word "artist" means), because I think that:

a) the panic is entirely misguided and based on two wrong assumptions. The first is that textual input and treating the model as a function (command in -> result out) are sufficient for anything. No, this is a fundamentally deficient way to give artistic directions, which is further handicapped by primitive models and weak compute. Text alone is a toy; the field will just become more and more complex and technically involved, just like 3D CGI did, because if you don't use every trick available, you're missing out. The second wrong assumption is that it's going to replace anyone, instead of making many people re-learn a new tool and produce what was previously unfeasible due to the amount of mechanistic work involved. This second assumption stems from the fundamental misunderstanding of the value artists provide, which is conceptualization, even in a seemingly routine job.

b) the panic is entirely blown out of proportion by the social media. Most people have neither time nor desire to actually dive into this tech and find out what works and what doesn't. They just believe that a magical machine steals their works to replace them, because that's what everyone reposts on Twitter endlessly.

thordenmark• 4 years ago

You are demonstrating that lack of empathy. Artist's works are being stolen and used to train AI, that then produces work that will affect that artist's career. The advancement of this tech in the past 6 months, if it maintains this trajectory, demonstrates this.

dtn2• 4 years ago

But I have very little sympathy for those perpetuating this tiresome moral panic (a small amount of actual artists, whatever the word "artist" means)
A small amount of actual artists

It's extremely funny that you say this, because taking a look at the Trending on Artstation page tells a different story.

https://www.artstation.com/?sort_by=trending

jacquesm5• 4 years ago

That's exactly that lack of empathy the OP was on about: if you don't see that there is something wrong by a bunch of programmers feeding everybody's work into the meatgrinder and then to start spitting out stuff that they claim is original work when they probably couldn't draw a stick figure themselves then it is clear that something isn't quite right. At least, to me.

slimebot80• 4 years ago

"The first is that textual input and treating the model as a function (command in -> result out) are sufficient for anything. No, this is a fundamentally deficient way to give artistic directions, which is further handicapped by primitive models and weak compute."

This is the first wave of half decent AI.

But more importantly, you are vastly underestimating the millions of small jobs out there that artists use as a stepping stone.

Think of the millions of managers who would happily be presented with a choice of 10 artistic interpretations, and pick one for the sake of getting a quick job done.

No way on earth this isn't going to make a major impact. Empathy absolutely required.

vl3• 4 years ago

Artists have all my sympathy.

Humans have my sympathy. We are literally at the brink of the multiple major industries being wiped out. What was only theoretical for the last 10-15 years started to happen right now.

In few short years most humans will not be able to find any employment because machine will be more efficient and cheaper. Society will transform beyond any previous transformations in history. Most likely it's going to be very rough. But we just argue that of course our specific jobs are going to stay.

dubya• 4 years ago

The first is that textual input and treating the model as a function (command in -> result out) are sufficient for anything. No, this is a fundamentally deficient way to give artistic directions, which is further handicapped by primitive models and weak compute. Text alone is a toy

Some artists just do the descriptive part though, right? The name I can think of is Sol LeWitt, but I'm sure there are others. A lot of it looks like it could be programmed, but might be tricky.

calebcannon• 4 years ago

This has happened to developers multiple times. Frankly it’s happened so many times that it’s become mundane. These programs are tools, and after a while you realize having a new tool in the bag doesn’t displace people. What it does is make the old job easy and new job has a higher bar for excellence. Everyone who has been writing software longer than a few years can name several things that used to take them a long time and a lot of specialization, and now take any amateur 5 minutes. It might seem scary, but it’s really not. It just means that talented artists will be able to use these tools to create even more even cooler art, because they don’t need to waste their time on the common and mechanical portions.

cwmoore• 4 years ago

AI art will become most valuable posthumously.

nitwit005• 4 years ago

It's a bit tiresome having people demand you demonstrate empathy in every single post. Do you truly want everyone typing up a paragraph of how sad they are in every comment? It won't actually help anything.

dlkf• 4 years ago

why shouldn't it, with some finagling, also be able to do the dumb, simple things most programmers do for their jobs?

Because those things, while dumb and simple, are not continuous in the way that visual art is. Subtle perturbations to a piece of visual art stay subtle. There is room for error. By contrast, subtle changes to source code can have drastic implications for the output of a program. In some domains this might be tolerable, but in any domain where you’re dealing significant sums of money it won’t be.

lkbm• 4 years ago

It's worth noting that there are at least two very different things being expressed by artists, at least on Twitter:

1. This is theft and that's bad.

2. People who do this are getting gains without putting the work and that's bad. (And, per quite a few commenters I've seen, are talentless hacks.)

I have a lot of empathy for the first, and think it has merit, and have a much smaller amount of empathy for the second.

I ended up reading a lot of the quote tweets on this guy the other day: https://twitter.com/ammaar/status/1601284293363261441/retwee...

Here's just a few of thousands in the vein of number 2:

No talent or passion whatsoever
He thinks he created something
Why don't you subscribe to writing and art classes?
This so ugly and shows real disrespect for people who have made stuff by themselves for years.
Men will literally sell AI trash and call it "art" instead of go to therapy
Can’t write or draw but wants to do both
This is nothing but a HUGE disrespect to all the writers and artists around the world, and all it does is belittle their REAL work and effort. This is not art. Nothing to be proud of.
I just spent 8 months illustrating a children’s book by hand—working, not “playing”—after a lifetime of training. FUCK OFF!

There are also plenty people are complaining about "theft", but it honestly, re-reading through it now, it feels like a minority. If this were done using fully public-domain content, does it sound like any of the people I quoted above been okay with it?

There's a clear disdain for "non-artists" creating art in a new way. I very much feel for the people who see their careers going away, and I can also empathize people who spent a long time acquiring a creative skill that's now "unnecessary". Programming has this too—those darn kids programming in Python rather than Assembly, or doing bootcamps that don't teach big-O notation. This is a normal, human way to feel, and I feel that too from time to time. BUT, I also resist that feeling. I choose not to express disdain for newcomers using new technology, or skipping the old ways.

A large (or at least loud) part of the art community seen here is expressing absolute disdain for those of us who are "cheating" not because "copyright infringement" but because we're using new technology that bypasses years of learning and that's very much eating into my empathy for the community in general. I find it toxic in the programming community and I find it toxic in the art community. Right now, it's exploding in the art community in a way far beyond what I've witnessed in programming.

skor• 4 years ago

lets just start a “no AI” movement. Humans appreciate effort and when everyone could become a dj, it just got boring, so some people (those exact people that you want at your show) will start looking for that when there is so much AI art that it just becomes dull.

int_19h8• 4 years ago

Societies that choose to do this kind of thing would fall behind those that do not very quickly. One may argue that it doesn't matter so long as it leads to comfortable life, but the problem is that one day you'll wake up to the sound of Commodore Perry's guns.

melagonster6• 4 years ago

I don't know, happily let someone starve is very obvious. when I read Japanese artists talk about how to treat AI now, it is difficult to feel sad. they don't know that they are impossible to fight against it. almost ten years ago, someone in Silicon Valley had decided all of them should starve and vanish. no one can stop technology.

gerdesj• 4 years ago

"so I decided to do something easier and became a computer programmer"

Get a grip me old fruit. You've basically described "growing up". The world is a pretty wild place and you need to find your niche or not (rince/repeat). You are not a failed artist at all. You probed at something "had a dabble" if you like and it didn't work out. Never mind. Move on and try something else but keep your interest in mind.

There are loads of professions that I'd like to have done but as it turns out I'm me and that's who I am. Personally speaking I'm a MD of a little IT firm in the UK that can fiddle up a decent 3-2-1 conc mix and do fairly decent first and second fix wood work. I studied Civ Eng.

"The lack of empathy" - really?

If you fancy your chances as an artist then go for it. At worst you will fulfill your ambition and create some daubs. At best, you will traverse reality and be a wealthy living artist.

Just do it.

nonbirithm3• 4 years ago

If you fancy your chances as an artist then go for it. At worst you will fulfill your ambition and create some daubs. At best, you will traverse reality and be a wealthy living artist.

With AI art gradually improving, I think that line of reasoning will convince less and less people that would otherwise have second thoughts. They would spend a couple of hours on Midjourney and decide that's as far they want to take their "art" hobby. The power of instant gratification will convince many faster than spending hundreds of hours honing a craft.

I think in the future a lot of people's gut reaction to failing as a manual artist will be to retreat to Midjourney or similar to satisfy their remaining desire to have creative work they can call their own instead of trying again. I personally find the near-instant feedback loop very addicting, and I think it will have a similar effect to social platforms in normalizing a desire for quick results over the patience needed to hone a craft.

But as opposed to scrolling newsfeeds for hours, at least the user obtains a creative output through generative art, and it doesn't carry the same type of guilt for me. This kind of thing is unprecedented and I don't look forward to how it will polarize the various communities involved in the coming years.

huggingrear• 4 years ago

Well of course AI is going to take the programmer jobs, as a developer, this is practically the focal point of all discussions I've had with colleagues the past month, the consensus seem to be that within a 10 year window, software developer is going to be an almost niche occupation.

And yes, it will transform art completely, initially by lowering the barrier for producing quality art, and then by raising the bar in terms of quality, it's coming for every artistic field, 3d, film, music etc

If you want a career in these fields, you will need to ride this AI wave from the get go, but even that career will eventually succumb to automation, this is the inevitable end point, as an example, eventually you will be able to give a brief synopsis to an AI and it will be able to flesh that out and create a full movie of it with the actors you choose.

fn1• 4 years ago

In my humble estimation, making art is vastly more difficult than the huge majority of computer programming that is done.

That is only because the vast majority of computer programming that is done is not very good.

zajio1am• 4 years ago

The lack of empathy is incredibly depressing...

My primary empathy is with end users, who could be empowered with AI-based tools to express their dreams and create graphics or software without need to pay professional artists or programmers.

Saigonauticon• 4 years ago

I agree, but perhaps not in the expected way.

For me at least, Stable Diffusion has been this great tool for personal expression in a medium that was previously inaccessible to me: images. Now I could communicate with people in this new, accessible way! I've learned more about art history and techniques in the last 3 months than in my entire life up to that point.

So I came up with a few ideas about making some paintings for my mother, and children's books for my nieces and nephew. The anger I received from my artistically inclined colleagues over this saddened me greatly, so I tried to talk to more people to see if this was an anomaly. There was more anger, and argument for censorship! I have to admit I struggled to maintain any empathy after receiving that reception.

I'm personally really excited about a future where we don't have to suffer to create art, whether it's code, an image, or music. Isn't more art and less suffering in our lives a good thing? If there are economic structures we've set up that make that a bad thing, maybe it would be fruitful take a critical look at those.

Presently I'm looking at creating a few small B2B products out of various fine-tuned public AI models. The first thing I realized is that I'd be addressing niches that were just not possible to tackle before (cost, scale, latency). The second thing I noticed is I'd need to hire designers, copywriters, etc. for their judgement -- at least as quality control. So at least in my limited scope of activity, the use of AI permits me to hire creative professionals, to tackle jobs that previously employed zero creative professionals (because previously they weren't done at all, or just done very poorly, e.g. English website copy for small business in non-English-speaking developing economies).

I do feel for people that have decided that they need to retool because they feel AI threatens their job. I do that every couple of years when some new thing threatens an old thing that I do, it's a chunk of work, and not always fun. To show better empathy, I think I'm going to reach out to more artists and show them what the current AI tools can and cannot do, to help them along this path. So thank you for your post, because it gave me the idea to take this approach!

...and on the weekends, I can still write code in hand-optimized assembly, because that's the brush I love painting with.

liberty-bzmh• 4 years ago

Why must I be afraid? It's not even started...

scotty792• 4 years ago

AI art and reactions to it remind me of open source software. Yes, it's chipping into someones profits. But it's a benefit for vast majority and society as a whole. It's democratizing what was scarce and expensive. I really can't be mad at that.

Ultimately those who are able to integrate it into their creative process will be the winners. There will always be small niche for those who oppose it out of principle.

j0hnyl• 4 years ago

Neither artists nor programmers should be afraid. "AI's" are nice tools, but I think they are very far off from being able to navigate office politics, client relationships, etc.

namelessoracle3• 4 years ago

The slice Im curious about is what happens, when you let loose your AI art generator and start copy/trademarking everything it creates to basically make sure all kinds of art that could have been created is potentially infringing for you?

The art equivalent of patent trolling or domain squatting basically. Is that possible legally?

cobertos• 4 years ago

I hope that AI companies don't end up implementing another system like Youtube's DMCA system. Right holders and trolls alike can scrub these "black boxes" of whatever content they want, adding more garbage and uncertainty to their output.

Then again, there should be some sort of solution so this can coexist with artists, and not replace them

mensetmanusman• 4 years ago

AI enables fast-fashion-like competition. There will still be winners and losers.

Use these tools to 10x your own output and create new markets that arise due to the 10x modifier.

amelius4• 4 years ago

Not just artists, also product designers like Jony Ive.

bigbacaloa2• 4 years ago

One traditional way of learning to make art was to go to the museum and copy the works of masters ... What's the difference in principle if one trains AI on them?

dredmorbius14• 4 years ago

Work-factor, most obviously.

Targeting and distribution as well. AI has the edge on individual creators here.

avereveard2• 4 years ago

"images trascend copyright" https://cdn.vmst.io/media_attachments/files/109/512/541/929/...

you can still copyright characters separatedly. he's feigning ignorance of how copyright work to make a sensationalistic point, which pretty much invalidate and poison what is otherwise an interesting argument at the boundary between derivative work and generative art.

WanderPanda• 4 years ago

I think what these generative models reveal is that the vast majority of art is just interpolation.

crote6• 4 years ago

Was there ever any doubt about that? There are literally entire graduate studies on it.

However, art isn't solely interpolation. The critical part is that art styles shift around due to innovations or new viewpoints, often caused by societal development. AI might be able to make a new Mondriaan when trained on pre-existing Mondriaans but it won't suddenly generate a Mondriaan out of a Van Gogh training set - and yet that's still roughly what happened historically.

beezlebroxxxxxx7• 4 years ago

Lots of people in these comments trying to reduce art in a way that is pretty hilarious. You hit the nail on the head. Art is only interpolation if you....remove the human that created it, in which case you would not call the image art. AI "art" is computational output, to imply otherwise is to mistakenly imply a family resemblance to human (and uniquely human I would argue) creation.

Tycho• 4 years ago

What about an AI that can write unit tests for any codebase… seems like the overall benefit of that would be huge.

OctopusLupid4• 4 years ago

I find it weird how I don’t see any mention of the TDM exceptions (“Text and Data Mining”) that already explicitly allows AI companies to train on copyrighted data, in some cases even allowing them to ignore opt-outs (such as in research institutions). This is already implemented in the UK, EU, Japan and Singapore.

It seems to me that the online discourse is very US-centric, thinking that the AI regulatory battles are in the future, when in some other countries it’s already over.

mdrzn2• 4 years ago

This should have (2019) in the title

dredmorbius14• 4 years ago

Um, why? (As submitter.)

The linked item was posted within the past 24 hours. The referenced images also appear to be current so far as I can tell.

(I'd looked for a more substantial post or article without luck when submitting this.)

mdrzn2• 4 years ago

My bad, the mastodon thread is actually fresh, I got it mixed up with the article linked in the 3rd reply to it, which is a 2019 story:

https://waxy.org/2019/12/how-artists-on-twitter-tricked-spam...

Juliate3• 4 years ago

Lawyers.

Lawyers are going to have a lot of fun$$ with the copyright/trademark violation flood that is coming (and not only for high profiles).

BurningFrog4• 4 years ago

A fascinating angle I heard recently is that when the new tech of photography swept the world, it made tons of painters unemployed.

And that was the main reason for "modern art". A camera can do a portrait or landscape instantly and more precise than a painter, but it can't compete on abstract or imagined pictures.

Will something analogous happen when AIs takes over other industries? I have no clue, but it will, as always, be interesting to see what happens.

dredmorbius14• 4 years ago

Any references you can recall on the emergence of modern art as a response to photography?

BurningFrog4• 4 years ago

Not really. Don't remember where I read it. It was a few months ago.

I like the explanation a lot, and I think the timelines line up pretty well.

But sure, it could be one of those stories that sound true, but isn't.

anothernewdude3• 4 years ago

So either they are hypocrites, or art can be made by AI. Probably both.

jmyeet• 4 years ago

One bone to pick: this says "artists" are fighting this and mentions Disney, Nintendo and Marvel. "Corporations" would be more accurate than "artists".

Training a model with artists' work seems completely fine to me. If something is out in the world and you can see it, you can't really control how that affects a person or a model or whatever.

The actual issue is reproduction of trademarked and copyrighted material. There are already restrictions on how you can use Mickey Mouse's likeness in any derivative work. That's not an AI issue. It's an IP issue. The derivative works are no different than if I, a person, produced the same derivative work.

It would be funny to me that we had to turn our attention to training AIs in IP laws.

Imnimo• 4 years ago

If you create a trademark-violating image using an AI model does that demonstrate anything more than that that particular image is violating? Like it's also violating if I hand draw those images, the fact that they're AI-generated doesn't enter into it.

throwawayoaky• 4 years ago

See you guys in five years!

marmetio2• 4 years ago

My memory of this is really fuzzy, so I'm probably getting the details wrong.

I watched a documentary in roughly the early oughts about AI. The presenter might have been Alan Alda.

In one segment, he visited some military researchers who were trying to get a vehicle to drive itself. It would move only a few inches or feet at a time as it had to stop to recalculate.

In another segment, he visited some university researchers who set up a large plotter printer to make AI-generated art. It was decent. He saw it could depict things like a person and a pot, so he asked if it would ever do something silly to us like put a person in a pot. The professor said not to be silly.

To jokingly answer the title question: everyone who saw that one specific documentary 20 years ago knew that AI art was way ahead of AI machines.

Art is useful when someone subjectively finds it enjoyable or meaningful. While it might not achieve all of what humans can, the barrier to entry is relatively lower.

fullshark• 4 years ago

If it was Alan Alda it was probably a Scientific American Frontiers episode

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_American_Frontier...

Edit: confused SAF with Nova!

marmetio2• 4 years ago

Wow, good call. The car part was probably from season 7 episode 5, which first aired in 1997. I skimmed the video and didn't see the art part, so maybe that was a different show. Apparently it's was 25 years ago, which explains my fuzzy memory of it.

https://youtu.be/2aa6vMpMSho

alexfromapex• 4 years ago

It seems like the least-regulated professions will be the front lines, due of course to the friction created by getting AI operating in regulated environments.

Karawebnetwork2• 4 years ago

If someone builds an AI self-driving car and feeds it images of Honda cars. Should the company be required, under threat of legal action, to remove the Honda from the model? What if this makes the model less accurate and causes more accidents?

In other words, I am wondering if the current issue here is the model being trained or the model being able to generate images.

Coming back to my example, if the car displayed the closest vehicle on the HUD. Would Honda ask the car company to replace the likeness of their car with a generic car icon or would they ask for the model to be scrubbed?

yeknoda3• 4 years ago

If regulation is found to be necessary, here are some options

- government could treat open ai like an electricity utility, with regulated profits

- open ai could be forced to come up with compensation schemes for the human source images. The more the weights get used, the higher the payout

- the users of the system could be licensed to ensure proper use and that royalties are paid to the source creators. We issue driving licenses, gun licenses, factory permits etc. Licenses are for potentially dangerous activities and powers. This could be one of those.

- special taxation class for industries like this that are more parasitic and less egalitarian than small businesses or manufacturing

- outright ban on using copyrighted work in ai training

- outright ban on what can be considered an existential technology. This has been the case for some of the most important technologies in the last 100 years including nuclear weapons.

mwigdahl• 4 years ago

We already have a great example of a group that has fought technological development of a synthetic alternative to their product -- the diamond industry.

For years DeBeers and other diamond moguls have run extensive propaganda campaigns to try to convince people that lab-grown diamonds are physically, emotionally, and morally inferior. They had a lot of success at first. Based on lobbying, the US FTC banned referring to lab-grown diamonds as "real", "genuine", or even "stone". It required the word "diamond" be prefixed with "lab-grown" or "synthetic" in any marketing materials.

Technology kept improving, economies of scale applied, and consumer demand eventually changed the balance. The FTC reversed its rulings and in 2022 demand for lab-grown stones (at small fractions of equivalent natural prices) is at an all-time high.

Artists (and writers, and programmers) can fight against this all they like, and may win battles in the short term. In the end the economic benefits accruing to humankind as a result of these technologies is inexorably going to normalize them.

standardly• 4 years ago

It is pretty ironic.

"AI will outdo us at repetitve, mindless tasks, but it will NEVER be able to compete with humans at, like, ART, and stuff"

silent_cal• 4 years ago

The way these image generating neural nets are trained is illegal. They copy and use other artists' work without asking them or paying them. There's a lot of legal exposure here - why hasn't anyone taken advantage of that yet?

ChadNauseam2• 4 years ago

In the US we have fair use, and it's not clear at all to me that this wouldn't count. If I took every image on artstation and averaged all of them (creating a muddy mess), I think I would be legally able to distribute the result without compensating or crediting the original artists.

OctopusLupid4• 4 years ago

What makes you say it's illegal?

In the EU, UK, Japan and Singapore, it is explicitly legal to train AI on copyrighted work. I saw another comment say that AI companies train in those countries.

esotericsean• 4 years ago

This will be a losing battle for artists. Anyone can train any data they want. It's the equivalent of a human learning to draw someone else's art style or take photos the same as a famous photographer. There is no stopping it now and it's only going to get better and easier. Video is getting close to being just as accessible as image or text generation. Regardless of how you feel about all this, there's no stopping it. It's the future.

seydor• 4 years ago

The problem is copyright laws , not the models (which are inevitable and impossible to stop anyway). The sketch of a mouse should not be protected more than the artistic style of any guy. IP laws are ancient concept and it s a mystery why people still cling to them so tightly

hectorlorenzo3• 4 years ago

I'm still organising my thoughts on the subject so please feel free to push back.

This ongoing discussion feels classist. I've never seen such strong emotions about AI (and automation) taking blue-collar jobs, some shrugs at most. It's considered an unavoidable given, even though it has been happening for decades. The only difference now is that AI is threatening middle-upper class jobs, which nobody saw coming.

I do not see the difference between both. Can somebody that does explain to me why now is "critical" and not so much before?

pram• 4 years ago

You never heard of the Luddites?

hectorlorenzo3• 4 years ago

Yes I have, care to explain?

automatoney• 4 years ago

It probably has to do with the desirability of the replaced jobs. There's definitely an element of classism, but also people /really/ want to be artists and make a living doing that specific thing. There's the "starving artist" who will take little pay just as long as they can do art, but I don't think we have a similar idea for lots of blue collar work. How much do factory workers have passion for their work, vs it being the best paying option for them? Not to say there aren't any, but there's for sure a desirability difference.

Also I'm not sure most artist jobs are middle-upper class.

hectorlorenzo3• 4 years ago

That is true: that's why certain industries endure more mistreatment than others (acting, fashion, design in general). Passion can be a pain in the ass when it gets in the way of just making a living.

However, these are individual reactions, not behaviours as a community/society. If you read comments around HN or some other liberal circles, you have the feeling that is our human-ness is being threatened, one of our core defining traits. It seems like "artistic creativity" is being enshrined as a circular argument (also I'm wary of calling startup-landing-page illustrators "artists" – more like craftpeople, although this distinction might hurt the conversation).

My broader point is that ChatGPT is not "the beginning of the end", but another chapter in a history of automation and replacement that will pose serious challenges for humankind. That treating it as more critical than factory automation is demeaning to blue-collar workers and also untrue. Everything we do is what defines us as people: cherry-picking some skills is a relic from Enlightenment we should get rid of.

Also I'm not sure most artist jobs are middle-upper class.

I do not have any data at hand, only my circle of friends and former colleagues (I was formerly a graphic designer). Few people endure being a "starving artist" without a little financial safety coming from above. Also, it is a profession that only provides status to a certain socio-economic milieu.

zjp2• 4 years ago

I have to wonder whether there's a relationship between the stage you're at in your career and your level of panic over AI. There's a lot of hope among students that a job in the technology sector will pull a person into the middle class -- and with significantly less weird antiquated institutional classism than in other lines of work like law.

Personally, I'm new in my career, and I'd like to not have the rug pulled out from under me. If I were a student again, I would have to consider whether the university debt was going to be worth it in the long term or if I should look at a more traditional field to be in.

ccanassa• 4 years ago

My job as a dev is literary to automate human work.

My first job was to write C code for industrial machines that replaced humans doing manual work. Sometimes I even had to go watch them work so I could fully understand what they were doing.

In my second job as a developer, I wrote a Django application that automated away a whole department in the company. I saw 100 people getting fired due to a script that I wrote.

That was all happening in the third world country were I came from. These were real people getting fired, with families that depend on them. Most of them were already in poverty even before being fired.

These artists complaining sound like a very 1st world problem to me. I doubt that anyone actually "lost a job" because of this technology so far.

29athrowaway• 4 years ago

The previous generation of illustrators got disrupted by digital illustration.

The number of people required to publish a magazine, or to create an ad, went down significantly with digital tools.

rozgo• 4 years ago

In our game studio, engineers are creating lots of developer art on their own. But the real productivity booster is coming from artists using language models to generate entire art pipeline scripts. Several Python scripts to automate Blender3D and offline asset post-processing. Many artists are also changing shaders by asking language models to modify existing code.

cwkoss• 4 years ago

If a human wrote the prompt, how is AI different from a paintbrush or any other tool of the trade?

Every tool makes some of the 'decisions' about how the artwork results by adding constraints and unexpected results. If anything I'd argue that AI art allows for more direct human expression: going from mental image to a sharable manifestation has the potential to be less lossy with art than with paint.

This feels like a bunch of misplaced ludditism. We need to implement a UBI because 99.9% of human labor is going to be valued below the cost of survival in the next 50-100 years. Always fun to see people thumbing their nose at Disney though.

rperez3332• 4 years ago

I think it is different because you don't need any pictures to create a paintbrush or a pencil. You can still have the AI code as tool, but without the dataset (images), it won't go anywhere.

Double_a_924• 4 years ago

You would still need some reference images (or memories) if you e.g. wanted to paint Mickey Mouse.

jelliclesfarm• 4 years ago

Art is now low value. It has no value addition. Technology in the palm of our hands and higher quality of life is also the reason.

Let’s not forget the very impressive population explosion in the past century. Every ‘job’ is a skill that has been out streamed so the needs of the population are satisfied by skills of the population so resources are distributed evenly.

Art is no longer a need and there are way too many artists simply proportional to the population.

Further, a lot of ‘art’ taught is technique. It’s not creativity. Can creativity be taught? I don’t think so.

Culture played a part in preserving artists and honoring their skills. But as ‘culture’ becomes global, mainstream is adopted more as it’s more accessible. And mainstream is subject to the vagaries of market as well as vulnerable to market manipulation.

Contrary to population notions, our world is very homogenous. Somehow the promotion of diversity has ended up with the tyranny of conformity. How did this happen? This is the biggest puzzle of this past few decades.

Der_Einzige2• 4 years ago

This is the kind of post that I come on HN to read.

charlescearl• 4 years ago

The title is an erasure of the minoritized workers who've been exploited in labeling and curation and moderation who've been raising concerns; it's an erasure of the many who've been raising concerns about the misogyny and predation involved in the construction of the data sets (e.g. https://www.image-net.org/) which make these models possible https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.16923.

Marx makes the case in Grundisse https://thenewobjectivity.com/pdf/marx.pdf that the automation of work could improve the lives of workers -- to "free everyone’s time for their own development". Ruth Gilmore Wilson observes that capital's answer is to build complexes of mass incarceration & policing to deal with the workers rendered jobless by automation https://inquest.org/ruth-wilson-gilmore-the-problem-with-inn... -- that is, those who have too much "free" time. In such a world, Marx speculates that "Wealth is not command over surplus labour time’ (real wealth), ‘but rather, disposable time outside that needed in direct production", but Wilson reminds us that capital's apparent answer to date has been fascism.

kmeisthax3• 4 years ago

Vaguely related: Mickey Mouse will actually be hitting the public domain in 2024. That's a year and a few weeks away.

sdiupIGPWEfh5• 4 years ago

More specifically, certain works featuring Mickey Mouse may actually be hitting the public domain. Mickey Mouse himself is trademarked, and there's no limited duration on trademarks.

kmeisthax3• 4 years ago

Yes, but a trademark only prohibits you from putting the word on a box or a store listing page. And only in source-identifying contexts - purely descriptive or nominative ones don't count[0]. This is the sort of thing where you would have to think ahead of time about the context of certain uses. But generally speaking, after January 1st, 2024, the balance is in the favor of the public domain:

- If I draw an animation and post it to YouTube, and one of the characters happens to be Mickey Mouse, that will be legal. But I still can't name my channel "Mickey Mouse Official" or put the character's face in my channel profile, since that's source-identifying material.

- If I just flat-out reupload Steamboat Willie to YouTube, with the (possibly incorrect) title "Walt Disney's FIRST EVER CARTOON", that also will be legal - because the title is purely nominative and does not imply that I'm licensed by Disney.

- If I release STL or STEP files on Thingiverse for printing Mickey Mouse christmas ornaments, that will be legal - but I have to make sure that nobody thinks this is actually made by Disney.

- Mass-produced merchandise sold in stores will be very difficult to sell legally, since generally speaking the whole object is considered source-identifying when you put it on a store shelf. About the only thing you could do is sell figurine blind-bags with no indication that there's public-domain Disney stuff in there.

That last one is probably why Disney isn't trying to, say, push Mexican life+100 terms[1] on everyone. Mickey Mouse is more valuable as a branding and merchandising tool than as a creative work.

Copyright law itself also has a preemption clause[2] which prohibits making copyright-shaped claims under other laws. This is usually mentioned in the context of state right-of-publicity laws[3], but the text of the clause would also apply to trying to "trademark a copyright" to keep the mouse in his cage.

[0] This is part of "trademark fair use", which is an entirely different concept to the copyright fair use one.

[1] Oh, yeah, I forgot - in all those YouTube examples you need to convince YouTube to block your upload in Mexico, which they are unwilling to do. The stated reason is that pirates could be harder to catch if they geoblocked their uploads. However, this already causes problems for, say, people reviewing anime - which is actually illegal in Japan! So I suspect that YouTube might have to change their policies on this at some point as more large publishers' work hits the public domain in certain countries but not others.

[2] 18 USC 301

[3] https://www.sheppardmullin.com/media/article/753_CL%2025-4%2...

fallingfrog• 4 years ago

To be honest: I'm not generally a luddite, but in this case- I think we should nip this in the bud. I can see where this is going. You can argue back and forth about whether this will make the economy grow, but that's not the point. The profits from increased productivity do not accrue to the workforce but to the owners of the capital, in the absence of concerted, organized resistance, so I would not expect the quality of life for the majority of people to improve because of this.

The question is: do you like human beings? Because there is really no job that can't be replaced, if the technology goes far enough. And then the majority of the population, or all of the population, becomes dead weight. I'm a musician; how long before an AI can write better songs than I can in a few seconds?

This is fundamentally different than past instances of technology replacing human labor, because in the past, there was always something else that humans could do that the machines still could not. Now- that may not be the case.

There is only one choice: I think we should outlaw all machine learning software, worldwide.

smrtinsert• 4 years ago

This is like monks fighting the printing press. Sorry guys, this is only going one direction.

quonn8• 4 years ago

It‘s amusing how so many on this thread assume to be able know what will happen to this or that profession.

We don‘t know. We just don‘t.

It‘s too difficult to predict what, say, software developers will do in a few years and how demand or salary or competition will be.

Look at this final video of the 2012 Deep Learning course by Hinton that I still remember from a long time ago: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FOqMeBM3EIE

What I do know however is this:

- Short term nothing special will happen.

- In the actually interesting projects that I worked on I always ran out of time. So much more could be imagined that could have been done but there was no time or budget to do it. Looking forward to AI making a dent in this a bit.

sircastor• 4 years ago

I feel for artists who feel like they’re losing their livelihood. Art has always been a tough profession, and this doesn’t help because late-stage capitalism all but guarantees that a lot of potential customers will just skip the human-made article in favor of the “good-enough” mechanical production.

That said, automation is coming for all of us. The problem is not “we Need to stop these AIs/robots from replacing humans.” It’s “We need to figure out the rules for taking care of the humans when their work is automated”

rangersanger• 4 years ago

They aren't. the first battles were fought by victims of deepfakes.

1auralynn2• 4 years ago

To me, it's an art vs. craft issue and there are many shades of gray to the discussion, because the root is really based in the question that every first-year art student is tasked with answering for themselves "What is art?"

If art for you is primarily centered on fidelity of implementation (i.e. "craft") then you will be very threatened by AI, particularly if you've made it your livelihood. However, if your art is more about communication/concepts, then you might even feel empowered by having such a toolset and not having to slog through a bunch of rote implementation when developing your ideas/projects. Not to mention that a single person will be able to achieve much much more.

I feel like it's possibly a good thing for art/humanity overall to stop conflating craft with art, because new ideas will rise above all of the AI-generated images. i.e. splashiness alone will no longer be rewarded.

In an ideal future when we all live in the Star Trek universe, none of it will matter and whoever loves crafting stuff can do it all day long. Until then of course, it's tragic and lots of people will be out of jobs.

1auralynn2• 4 years ago

Not to mention it also may spur innovations in different mediums: More time-based art, installations, video games, etc.

fleddr2• 4 years ago

I sympathize with artists on this matter, but they're really bad at protesting.

AI Mickey Mouse is a possible copyright as well as trademark violation which would likely be enforced in the exact same way if you were to hand draw it. This type of violation is not AI specific.

The main threat that AI poses is not that it outputs copyrighted characters, instead brand new works that are either totally new (idea is never drawn before but the style is derived) or different enough from a known character to be considered a derived work.

Another way to put it: artists' current job is not to draw mickey. It is to draw new works, which is the part AI is threatening to replace. Sure, Disney may chase the AI companies to remove Mickey from the training set, and then we lost AI Mickey. That doesn't solve any problem because there are no artist jobs that draw Mickey.

Even in the case of extreme success where it becomes illegal to train a copyrighted image without explicit consent, the AI problem doesn't go away. They'll just use public domain images. Or sneak in consent without you knowing it. As was the case with your "free and unlimited" Google Photos.

Finally, if there's any player interested in AI art, it has to be Disney. Imagine the insane productivity gains they can make. It's not reasonable to expect that they would fight AI art very hard. Maybe a little, for the optics.

itronitron3• 4 years ago

I think you are giving the AI too much credit in being able to pull out the trademarked bits. Artists can introduce trademark iconography into their work as a poision pill. Sort of like GPL but with more powerful allies.

fleddr2• 4 years ago

I don't really believe that. An example: "Robot owl in the style of van Gogh".

This will closely mimic van Gogh's style but nobody cares because style cannot be copyrighted in itself. So it draws a robot owl, which for the sake of this example, is a new character.

Zero copyright violations.

My point remains that AI users aren't going to aim for output that directly looks like an existing character. These artists are now intentionally doing that for the sake of the protest but this is not how AI is used. It's used to create new works or far-derived works.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF• 4 years ago

With this line of reasoning, I'd bet on a cat-and-mouse game between "poison pill"-removing AI generators and new tools and techniques for introducing the pill.

rafaelero3• 4 years ago

Chill out, people. Humans are still great generalists. We are pretty capable of leveraging these tools to amplify our productivity. It's only the specialists between us that are going to suffer a lot with these new developments. All these AI innovation is truly showing us how pathetic our ability to deeply understand and specialize at something is. We are always going to lose to computers, be it in chess, go or art. Therefore, we should cultivate our generalist skills and stop fighting AI progress.

NicoleJO2• 4 years ago

This is false.

Several people, including myself, have been fighting AI IP theft for years. I filed the first BBB complaint, in fact...

NicoleJO2• 4 years ago

This is false. In fact, I filed the first BBB complaint.

Vivtek• 4 years ago

I am laughing in technical translator.

norwalkbear• 4 years ago

I'm sympathetic,but the demon is unleashed.

No one WANTED to pay artists to begin with if they could bring their own ideas to life. Artists should realize they were just a necessary evil to many other people's creative endeavors.

Every single human being alive has the creative spark.

kweingar• 4 years ago

Copyright infringement is a backbone of the digital world. People remix others’ music, write fanfiction of others’ works, draw fan art of others’ characters, write and distribute clones of others’ games, etc. Much of internet culture involves drawing captions on others’ art and spreading it around, i.e. memes.

Twitch pulls in multiple billions of dollars of revenue from video game streaming, which hasn’t been tested in court and may very well be copyright infringement. People regularly pirate games, movies, television shows, music, books, software, research papers, etc.

I believe that the culture benefits tremendously from this. My question is, why should we draw the line exactly here, at AI generated images, code, and writing?

smaddox• 4 years ago

Copyright != Trademark. Independently generated images of Mickey Mouse are litigated under Trademark law, not Copyright law.

Disclaimer: I am not an IP lawyer and have roughly no idea what I'm talking about.

neontomo• 4 years ago

As an artist who makes money from selling art, I find the panic to be ridiculous. The tide doesn't wait for you. Find new ways of understanding and creating art, move with the flow, don't stand in one place, shouting at the Gods to, "stop this damn technological advancement!" serves no purpose. It's not protesting, it's fear of the unknown.

rockzom• 4 years ago

One year ago:

https://www.amazon.com/Realtors-are-Not-Allowed-Moon-ebook/d...

Who knew the first AI battles would be fought by artists?

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