What Was Sora Trained On? Creatives Demand Answers

https://in.mashable.com/tech/69813/what-was-sora-trained-on-creatives-demand-answers

by PixelPanda • 2 years ago

44 82 2 years ago

in.mashable.com

photoGrant20• 2 years ago

I asked this question a few days ago and the responses, arrogance and ignorance was astounding. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39406709

I promise, if I'm here asking this week, there's millions more that will be asking next week. Carving out the labour market has more consequences than increasing productivity. It destroys culture, society and a will to live. Wise up.

edit: And before the inevitable responses begin pouring in. Even the argued ethically sourced material scooped up from Shutterstock, et al. is still shrouded in dark patterns, hidden automatically enabled opt-in removal of rights, automated payments to tie up the fact you accepted payment as part of the argument in court. It all stinks, it should all tumble.

edit2: People are great at recognising patterns. I've frequented this platform daily for almost a decade. The speed of engagement in this thread and the fact it doesn't exist on the front page... or the second shows, once again -- the strings can suck it. Stifling reality doesn't change it.

isodev3• 2 years ago

I still don't get how people believe one can make money out of other people's creative works (on a mass scale at that) and get away with it. Training an AI is not fair use and has nothing to do with open source. Posting content online doesn't automagically make it usable for whatever purpose.

photoGrant20• 2 years ago

The same executives that would argue and protect the IP of any major company out there right now are somehow saying the complete opposite when it reduces down to the individual. If this hasn't revealed the hypocrisy of thinking when chasing the money, nothing will. It's the first in a series of realities people are facing with this concept of AI. That in truth it is nothing more than a financial and informational bait and switch. Screw the lot who haven't revolted in pursuit of the fellow man and have instead sold their soul to a kleptocracy of babyfaced bullshitters

fatherzine• 2 years ago

the attitude of those that do it: "what are you going to do about it?". escalatory power games, not an ounce of caring for your fellow man, barely a veneer of. we have entered very dark waters. unclear where the exit is.

Throwaway1746• 2 years ago

Training an AI is not fair use

That's not for you to decide.

has nothing to do with open source

It has everything to do with open source. If only Disney and getty images are allowed to train ai, there will be extreme monopolisation.

tivert3• 2 years ago

I still don't get how people believe one can make money out of other people's creative works (on a mass scale at that) and get away with it.

They saw Uber get away with it's thing, so they're going to try to get away with theirs. IIRC, when Uber was new, it was literally illegal in many/most of the places it operated.

Turing_Machine5• 2 years ago

Training an AI is not fair use

You don't get to decide that, certainly not as a blanket statement. We're gonna have to wait for the courts.

caesil• 2 years ago

Thank you!

This is exactly why we need to BAN weaving machines. The will to live is sustained by the work of the skilled artisans who create clothing by hand with looms.

"But I don't want to pay 500 dollars for a t-shirt", you say. What astounding arrogance! Stop destroying culture and accept that we need to protect this valuable craft from technology that threatens to steamroll it.

photoGrant20• 2 years ago

As per usual, money thinks of a human as a commodity for sale, not a neighbour being exploited or livelihood being stripped.

If you think throwing life into a black box and consuming its results will improve productivity and enhance creativity. You're forgetting the only thing we feed this thing is 'results'. You're drinking the piss from a million artists and thinking it's fresh water. Eventually this filtered, censored source of creativity is AI material being used and creating for AI, not humans -- because humans quit being a source of material and nothing more than a requester.

The short sightedness of believing you can commodify the human spirit is the most incredulous shit I've ever seen.

chrisknyfe• 2 years ago

The luddites didn't destroy the power looms because they were some kind of handcrafting purists - they destroyed the machines because they took away ownership of the means of production from individual craftsmen to big businesses. The problem wasn't the machine, it was the factory and its owner.

Springtime• 2 years ago

Comments like these are kind of straw man rebuttals imo. There have been similar arguments such as 'electronic music didn't destroy musicianship', 'photography didn't destroy art', etc.

They skirt around the important details, in that in all those analogies the entire process/field wasn't replaced/impacted by automation, only facets. Advanced generative NNs aren't merely dumb automated tools that still require human craftmanship but rather, at a baseline, take the place of the humans in virtually all respects of design, implementation and continually synthesizing based on others' work.

The analogy presented in your post doesn't account for the designers still involved with the process, the real-world practicalities that involve humans of getting clothing made even with all the automation available. Generative AI doesn't have this goal; it's increasingly allowing for replacement of all humans and processes involved, besides the one wishing upon a genie lamp.

Now one can of course apply their own craftsmanship to such outputs if desired and there are examples of this from existing artists/writers where it fits more like a tool into a workflow (and such analogies would actually apply here), however as we can already observe the vast majority of uses don't and there is still at a minimum a usable result, as the tech advances.

There are also parallels one commonly reads drawn to how humans operate: if a human studied others' artwork then they too would be able to synthesize results. However no human has memory and mind's eye recall like that of advanced NNs, which is plainly observable from the output of human history. It's an unfair comparison. The goal of generative models is to be superhuman yet only human arguments are being applied.

I think there are a bunch of positives and negatives to this but it's hard not to see the impact it will have particularly on human motivation and societal expectations, regardless of financial incentives, apart from the general shut-up-and-take-it attitude one sees. There are some pretty impactful legitimate concerns to be had that warrant thoughtful discussion.

LudwigNagasena• 2 years ago

Well, Alegria art and Marvel movies destroy my will to live. Yet I don’t advocate to ban them.

skepticATX2• 2 years ago

I don't know if it's illegal, because I'm not a lawyer.

I do know that it is completely unethical. A few large companies should not be able to package up and sell the totality of humanity's creative output at the expense of humanity itself.

The backlash is certainly just beginning. Thus far, AI usage beyond brief exploration have mostly been driven by tech folks. As more people outside of the bubble get clued into what is happening, I think that reputations will take a serious hit.

fithisux2• 2 years ago

This a real threat to democracy (maybe it is not there anymore)

r721• 2 years ago

The speed of engagement in this thread and the fact it doesn't exist on the front page... or the second

These two things are connected, actually:

The FAQ notes that submission rank is impacted by "software which downweights overheated discussions." A good rule of thumb for this effect is when the number of comments on a submission exceeds its score.

https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented?tab=re...

gmerc• 2 years ago

This is predictable.

Next: “China will win if copyright is enforced” or “National Supremacy or Copyright, pick one”

They are right of course, but the questions is what “wins” means and what Washington money expects.

ikekkdcjkfke• 2 years ago

Imagine the music progression from blues->black metal if every band had copyright to their style. This critique assumes the AI is ingesting material and not reproducing it 1:1

xscott13• 2 years ago

I'll care a little more about the creatives' arguments when they start paying royalties to every drawing, painting, illustration, tv show, or movie they've ever seen. Until then, it's just a cash grab. No individual is all that creative, and anyone accomplished is standing on the shoulders of past giants to get there.

The "what will we do for jobs argument?!?" would've applied to stage actors when movies came out a century ago and farm workers before the invention of tractors. Audio records, printing press, and so on. The world keeps getting better as technology advances, and people will adapt to the new changes.

And if you think art created by real people is more valuable, then there will be a market for the creatives. Focus on that.

metacritic12• 2 years ago

And the genie is already out of the bottle. As we've seen with LLMs, soon there will be open sourced versions of this essentially trained on everything. And with transfer learning the training will probably promiscuously propagate to inform future models. In essence in the limit case, all future models 5 years from now will have been "influenced" by nearly all work on the publicly accessible web today.

And there's no problem with that really -- all humans are a bit influenced by everything they've seen in their lives like you said, including tons of heavily copyrighted and trademarked stuff.

photoGrant20• 2 years ago

I'll start caring about my fellow humans rights when I see each and everyone one of their tax returns. Until then my assumptions will appease my ability to remain ignorant.

xscott13• 2 years ago

I don't understand what you're saying. Am I the uncaring ignorant one? It seems unlikely that you're really referring to yourself there, and maybe you're using a rhetorical trick to try and skirt HN's policy about being civil to each other.

skepticATX2• 2 years ago

We don't have to treat humans and machines the same.

Even if it were true that these models learn exactly like humans (which is patently false), we can still differentiate between the two.

Society is built by and for humans. If we want to empower humans over machines, that seems perfectly acceptable.

gfodor• 2 years ago

This will be a major point of contention if machine learning continues to go the way it’s going.

In the future if the Turing test is fully passed I think morality will boil down to preferring humans if and only if it’s a situation of competing scarcities.

In the case of “showing pictures to computer people”, showing pictures to a computer doesn’t prevent you from showing it to a human so this framework imply no moral justification for a human preference.

xscott13• 2 years ago

We don't have to treat them the same, but that's the direction I'm leaning.

As for society, that's another topic. People really aren't all that nice to each other very often.

csnover2• 2 years ago

Society is built by and for humans.

These machines are also built by and for humans.

If we want to empower humans over machines, that seems perfectly acceptable.

But that’s not what’s happening here. This is a faction of humans fighting to maintain their power and control over how the rest of humanity is allowed to produce artistic works.

Creatives who fight against generative AI are trying to empower themselves over everyone else. Corporations who develop closed-source AI like OpenAI are also trying to empower themselves over everyone else. The main problem in both cases is the way a select few are trying to amass power for themselves.

Generative AI has fundamentally shifted the scope of what it means to be creative, and prohibiting it from being trained on the collective works of humanity doesn’t empower humans over machines. It empowers some humans at the expense of other humans. Big AI companies acting exploitatively and trying to figure out how to build their own moats so only they are allowed to control the technology does the same thing, so this shouldn’t be allowed to happen either.

This is not the first time, nor is it likely to be the last, that a major disruption happened in creative arts due to technology. The invention of the phonograph decimated live musicians. Hundreds of thousands of jobs in cinemas, radio stations, and restaurants were permanently lost[0], but I don’t think anyone today would argue that we’d be better off if record labels hadn’t been allowed to reproduce the works of other artists.

Instead of retreading the same tired arguments about generative AI itself, let’s instead focus on how to ensure creatives can adapt and not end up homeless and penniless, and on how to ensure a few giant tech companies don’t monopolise an otherwise democratising technology. That, more than anything, will ensure that we are empowering humans over machines.

[0] https://slate.com/transcripts/RS94QUlwS0ZsSnZnakE4UVUzR2loUV...

norir• 2 years ago

No individual is all that creative, and anyone accomplished is standing on the shoulders of past giants to get there.

Are you seriously going to argue that, say, Bach or Shakespeare were not all that creative?

xscott13• 2 years ago

You're reaching pretty far back to find outstanding examples, and I'll agree they are way above average.

However, I'll assume you know that most of Shakespeare's works were based off of earlier works. And I doubt Bach taught himself from scratch either.

atrus• 2 years ago

They're saying that creativity isn't in a vacuum. Both Bach and Shakespeare were both inspired, and drew upon many things in their life. Just like how anyone who makes anything or does anything leans at least a little on past experiences. And I really think that line of arugment is a dead end, and only hurts, or we'd have to round up and arrest every highschooler making shitty anime fan art.

Turing_Machine5• 2 years ago

Neither Bach nor Shakespeare had copyright over their works, as the very concept of copyright didn't exist until the Statute of Anne in 1710. Germany (really, Saxony, as Germany wasn't even a unified country at the time) was much later.

Shakespeare got paid by people buying tickets to the Globe Theatre, of which he was part owner. Bach got paid by various princes and the church, and was expected to compose new music every week in return for his pay.

Neither argued that they should continue to get paid for the same work for 90 years.

cageface• 2 years ago

The world keeps getting better as technology advances, and people will adapt to the new changes.

That's making the very large assumption that there are no qualitative differences among our various leaps in technology. It's not hard to make the argument that AI is a different and larger and more disruptive leap than the invention of the tractor.

This is a complex issue that people on both sides of the argument tend to oversimplify. Figuring out how we should regulate and integrate this new technology is going to take time and a lot of back and forth.

w______roy• 2 years ago

People do pay to see movies, to read books, to go to the museum, and for formal education… Do you think the ratio of cost to go to film school per video made for an individual is the same ratio as the cost for stock video library per video made for an AI?

The world keeps getting better as technology advances

Will it, forever? Is that a given? Technology might also destroy the planet.

fithisux2• 2 years ago

You seem to mix a lot.

The first part is pseudo-argument. You compare apples and oranges. You treat education and massive steal of IP the same.

The second part seems to be a religious rehash of "The world keeps getting better as technology advances" this is not something guaranteed to continue and the world is not getting better from everyone. You seem to "overfit".

The third part does not guarantee a sustainable income for human creativity. Again your argument is shallow at best.

photoGrant20• 2 years ago

I'll simplify this for everyone;

(misquoted you originally, sorry!)

If you take a box and fill it with dog shit. You're more than welcome to chop, blend, dilute, fling or even eat this shit. But in the end, it's still Pepper's Poop.

Sell it like it isn't. Add sprinkles. It's Pepper's Poop.

When Pepper dies. Do you think the model is going to invent Gold all of a sudden?

xscott13• 2 years ago

IP is a fiction we created to encourage artists to create. Arguably it was a trade off where we encourage producers of creative works by giving them a limited monopoly for the benefit of the consumers. IP is a price we paid for the benefit of consumers. It's not an inalienable right.

As for sustainable incomes, I'm sure you heard the arguments about buggy-whip manufacturers going out of business when we got trains and cars. It really wasn't that much of a tragedy in the big picture of things.

_zagj• 2 years ago

It's incredible how unsympathetic these threads are to artists.

I remember the HN threads covering the FAANG (or whatever they're called now) laysoffs, where people would get flagged just for pointing out that tech workers earning $150-350k-a-year aren't sympathetic, exploited proletarians and that these companies have obligations to shareholders, which includes ordinary Americans with 401(k)s, IRAs, or pension plans (which, even if public sector, are still usually funded with public equities)--not just to people who got lucky and won the FAANG job lottery.

bugbuddy• 2 years ago

It was trained on billions on hours of media that they paid for and costing them hundreds of billions of dollars. /s

tarr11• 2 years ago

Software developers don’t seem to care that their code is used to train LLMs. It seems most programmers have embraced it as a tool to make themselves more efficient, even if that means some jobs may get automated away.

I am not really sure why the reception is so different with “creatives”.

photoGrant20• 2 years ago

One is an expression of all through self, another is a skill to a solution. One is given value by society's response, the other by a companies incentives.

When you take an artists desire to speak to the world through self expression, and believe it's equivalent to building software you're forgetting that one of them is already extremely well compensated, the other is not aligned with those incentives.

But to be extremely well compensated, and then try to rob artists of their livelihoods for profit and convenience -- yes, folks are going to think this argument isn't quite as balanced as you're painting it.

What Was Sora Trained On? Creatives Demand Answers

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