Midjourney developers caught discussing laundering, creating database of Artists

https://twitter.com/JonLamArt/status/1741545927435784424

by wahnfrieden • 3 years ago

65 60 3 years ago

Creating a database of artists by city, to localize styles off of. Seems totally fine honestly..

justinl332• 3 years ago

I agree with that aspect of it, the democratization of individual artist's styles is okay and probably good for art. I think it's more the stuff said like:

all you have to do is just use those scraped datasets and then conveniently forget what you used to train the model. Boom legal problems solved forever

showing that they plan to do this without any intention of attributing or fairly reimbursing the artists who's 'styles' (IP) they are localizing (and profiting off)

pavel_lishin2• 3 years ago

the democratization of individual artist's styles is okay and probably good for art.

Is it? "The democratization of individual artist's styles" sure sounds like "automated ripping off" to me.

artninja19882• 3 years ago

Art styles aren't copyrighted. Who cares?

wahnfrieden2• 3 years ago

For instance, Nintendo has entries in the artist DB - those affected by Japanese law may care:

Japan’s new guidelines also sketch out pathways to protect artists’ work, but the legalities can quickly get dense. An aggrieved artist will have to prove that a commercially sold, AI-generated piece of art has “similarity” with their own work.
“If a company isn’t careful, artists can sue or demand compensation if their work is used to create parts of commercial products.” They can show the work’s “reliance on an existing image,” according to Taichi Kakinuma, an AI-focused partner at the law firm Storia. The fastest way to prove this is with evidence that the work was used as training data. But since training data sets are not publicly disclosed, they may have no knowledge of its use, let alone be able to secure evidence

artninja19882• 3 years ago

Sounds like propoyed laws crafted by those in power clinging desperately to their control in fear of becoming opsolete. At the end of the day, there is no theft, no matter the pearl clutching moral outrage by those who want to keep some false artificial scarcity for their benefit.

nhinck2• 3 years ago

I care.

ChatGTP• 3 years ago

Yeah fuck people and their work and aspirations, we could make money instead /s

sharperguy• 3 years ago

Don't really care about comercial products like midjourney. Open source models are the future, and improving them will benefit all humanity, unless they are hobbled by restrictive copyright lawsuits, forcing everyone underground who isn't a massive corporation with a huge team of lawyers.

mplewis• 3 years ago

I do.

__loam7• 3 years ago

The irony is you probably make your living producing intellectual property like proprietary code.

mobiuscog• 3 years ago

...and then having it taken away immediately on first payment, for someone else to constantly make money in the future.

There are many problems here, that society has 'built in' from the dawn of the printing press, to move the control and power into the hands of the 'publishers' and control/censorship into the hands of the government.

As a programmer, I create. Then my employer takes my work and makes it theirs, with control and ownership (and profits) going forward. I could leave my job, open source my work for the good of society, but maybe not be paid. I could 'license' my own work, and rely on copyright.

Licensing is the core of the problems here - the fact that easily (enough) reproducible creations are expected to keep bringing in payment for work done just once. It doesn't happen with most trade skills. It doesn't happen for physical works of art.

Perhaps society needs to look at this concept of 'intellectual property' and realise it's just another mechanism for control and power, that has no good effect or benefit to society, only to the wealthy and powerful.

LightFog4• 3 years ago

Just basic human decency is all - who cares about that.

maronato2• 3 years ago

The artists definitely care. Being legal doesn’t make it moral.

kylebenzle2• 3 years ago

I can assure you that it is 1000% moral, fine and historically, totally cool for artists to copy each other's styles, infact that's really the ONLY thing we do is copy each other. But sure, call it immoral if you want I guess.

williamcotton5• 3 years ago

These people are not artists. They are commercial illustrators and barely have any real impact on style to begin with. Almost all of the plaintiffs, ie, complainers, are copying Japanese animation styles from the 80s and 90s.

Artists don’t create to get paid. Artists create because their souls demand the activity. Commercial activity might have an impact on art but art will never depend on commerce.

We’re literally complaining about the death of the computer, and by that I mean the individual whose job it was to compute calculations by hand without the use of a calculating or computing machine.

I have no doubt in my mind that this will end up with negative karma. I know my audience!

Aeolun3• 3 years ago

There is nothing about midnourney that makes me appreciate artists less. In fact it’s the opposite. It’d be a thousand times easier to describe what I want to a human.

Imnimo• 3 years ago

I'm not clear on what the "laundering" is supposed to be here. I feel like that screenshot doesn't give me any context for what the user is saying. Given that Codex is a code model, it seems unlikely it's directly related to artists.

The artist list looks to me like a list of names to try in a prompt - my guess is they were creating something like this: https://remidurant.com/artists/, a reference for how different styles and names affect the model's outputs. I don't think an artist's name being on the list implies that Midjourney was specifically trained to mimic that artist. At least that's not my reading of the little snippets we have here.

I feel like if you're going to be upset about Midjourney, you'd be upset about the training data. Not a compilation of names to try in prompts. That list of names doesn't change the model (assuming I've understood what it is, of course - and I could very well be wrong, given how little context we're given).

kylebenzle2• 3 years ago

People's lack of understanding of statistics seems to grow everyday, even moreso no that they started calling statistics, "AI".

The attacks will keep coming as people get dumber and dumber.

__loam7• 3 years ago

The entitlement of AI developers towards the collective labor of millions of artists will never cease to disgust me.

Aeolun3• 3 years ago

Why put shit on the internet if you don’t want people to see and use it?

The collective naivete of artists continues to astound me.

If a human can look at your art and learn from it, replicate it, and sell it, then so can an AI. If the human doesn’t pay for it, then neither should the AI.

Of course you are not allowed to use the exact same (or close enough) piece of art, but that’s no different for a human.

LightFog4• 3 years ago

There are many reasons artists make their work available for others - enriching hustlers who crap on the artist’s work while making a buck is probably low on the list though.

__loam7• 3 years ago

It's astounding to me that people still don't seem to understand the difference between chopping down a tree and clear cutting a forest. Your callous disrespect for the people who made these ai systems possible proves my point, so thanks I guess.

dorkwood2• 3 years ago

The developer community has done such a poor job explaining to artists why using their work without compensation is necessary. It's unrealistic to expect that a startup could purchase hundreds and millions of artists' images for training. The only alternative would be to not use them at all, and then things like Midjourney and Dall-E wouldn't even exist!

figassis• 3 years ago

I assume in the perspective of artists that is not a bad thing. Why should MJ exist in its current form if it has to take earnings from artists? Maybe science and engineering could have found another way to do this, but this seems like the easy way out and now we’re trying to rationalize it.

meepmorp• 3 years ago

The developer community has done such a poor job explaining to artists why using their work without compensation is necessary

"We want to use your work so you can be replaced many in jobs, but it's expensive to actually license your work, so we aren't paying."

There, that's easy!

doxick• 3 years ago

The taxi community has done such a poor job explaining to the car industry why using their cars without paying for them is necessary. It's unrealistic to expect that a starting driver could pay for a drivers license, a car and a taxi-license. The only alternative would be...

...loans or investment. It would be loans or investments. Like any other business.

You can't just steal cars either just to kickstart your taxi business...

slavik81• 3 years ago

This has a striking similarity to the classic, "You Wouldn't Steal a Car" PSA. https://youtu.be/HmZm8vNHBSU

maronato2• 3 years ago

They don’t have to purchase millions of artists’ images for training. They just have to purchase as many as their budget allows. That’s what VC money is for.

If their business model requires either infringing copyright or paying billions of dollars for the rights, then perhaps it is a bad business model.

I’m glad midjourney and dall-e showed us what’s possible, but now we must take a step back, delete those models, and do it right. Single companies should not hold the power to steal whatever they want from humanity and then capitalize on it.

rsynnott• 3 years ago

The only alternative would be to not use them at all, and then things like Midjourney and Dall-E wouldn't even exist!

Oh, no, what a tragedy.

Like, seriously, "our business model relies on stealing all the art in the world, therefore it is right and proper that we do that" is a bit of a Bond villain take, when you think about it.

actuallyrizzn• 3 years ago

Completely unsurprising misinterpretation of the word "launder."

Midjourney developers caught discussing laundering, creating database of Artists

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