[brycethornton]

I'm blown away by this:

"Starting today, users get full usage rights to commercialize the images they create with DALL·E, including the right to reprint, sell, and merchandise. This includes images they generated during the research preview."

I assumed this was going to be the sticking point for wider usage for a long time. They're now saying that you have full rights to sell Dall-E 2 creations?

[berberous]

I think they are reacting to competition. MidJourney is amazing, was easier to get into, gives you commercial rights, and frankly I found more fun to use and even better output in most instances.

[pitzips]

Midjourney recently changed their terms of service and now the creators own the image and give a license back to Midjourney. Pretty cool.

[davedx]

MidJourney seems a little less all-out commercial. The way everyone’s creations are in giant open Discord channels is great too

[hiidrew]

It's an interesting set-up. Viewing other's images and seeing their exact prompts is just as entertaining as generating your own.

[napier]

The only thing I don’t like about MidJourney is the Discord based interface. I think I can grok why Dave chose this route as it bakes in an active community element and allows users to pick up prompt engineering techniques osmotically… but I’d prefer a clean DALL-E style app and cli / api access.

[berberous]

In case you don’t know, you can at least PM the MidJourney bot so you have an uncluttered workspace.

It’s clearly personally preference, but I loathe Discord but love it for MidJourney. As you said, there’s an interactive element where I see other people doing cool things and adapting part of their prompts and vice versa. It really is fun. And when you do it in a PM, you have all your efforts saved. DALL-E is pretty clunky in that you have to manually save an image or lose it once your history rolls off.

[napier]

I've completely changed my mind after spending the last few days neck deep in it around the clock. Sleep is overrated! MidJourney is awesome and the way it's implemented within Discord is a masterstroke of elegant simplicity.

[napier]

Thanks. Yeah fair point; I haven’t ponied up for a subscription yet so am still stuck in public channels and often find my generations get lost in the stream. Imagine you’re right and having the PM option would change the experience drastically for the better albeit still within Discord’s visually chaotic environment.

[skybrian]

Don't they both give you commercial rights now?

I have access to both and they're good for different things. DALL-E seems somewhat more likely to know what you mean. Midjourney seems better for making interesting fantasy and science fiction environments.

For comparison, I tried generating images of accordions. Midjourney doesn't really understand that an accordion has a bellows [1]. DALL-E manages to get the right shape much of the time, if you don't look too closely: [2], [3]. Neither of them knows the difference between piano and button accordions.

Neither of them can draw a piano keyboard accurately, but DALL-E is closer if you don't look too hard. (The black notes aren't in alternating groups of two and three.)

Neither of them understands text; text on a sign will be garbled. Google's Parti project can do this [4], but it's not available to the public.

I expect DALL-E will have many people sign up for occasional usage, because if you don't use it for a few months, the free credits will build up. But Midjourney's pricing seems better if you use it every day?

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Accordion/comments/uuwrbj/midjourne...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Accordion/comments/vz9zxw/dalle_sor...

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/Accordion/comments/w0677q/accordion...

[4] https://parti.research.google/

[MatthiasPortzel]

MidJourney definitely struggles more with complex prompts from what I saw. If you like the output more, that’s subjective, but I think DALL•E is the leader in the space by a wide margin.

[berberous]

I think both have strengths and weaknesses, but I don’t disagree DALL-E in most instances is technically better at matching prompts. But I often enjoyed, artistically, the results of MidJourney more; it just felt fun to use and explore.

[stoicjumbotron]

Really hope I get an invite for MidJourney soon. Been on the waitlist since March :(

[ozmodiar]

Midjourney is in open beta now. Just go to their site and you can get started right away. I got in and I wasn't even on their waiting list.

[stoicjumbotron]

Thanks. Will try again.

Edit: Joined the discord via the beta and got in. Thanks a lot for the heads up!

[jaggs]

nightcafe.studio is also free and good. Very good.

[latexr]

Gave it a try. After each image (all disappointing) I dumbed down the prompt, finally ending in “dog”. Didn’t even handle that.

[jaggs]

I guess it depends on what you like/enjoy? It's not good at photorealistic, but it comes up with some pretty entertaining (and pretty?) 'arty' type stuff. I go on regularly just to play around for fun.

[minimaxir]

Previously, OpenAI asserted they owned the generated images, so the new licensing is a shift in that aspect. GPT-3 also has a "you own the content" clause as well.

Of course, that clause won't deter a third party from filing a lawsuit against you if you commercialize a generated image too close to something realistic, as the copyrights of AI generated content still hasn't been legally tested.

[pornel]

AFAIK only people can own copyright (the monkey selfie case tested this), and machine-generated outputs don't count as creative work (you can't write an algorithm that generates every permutation of notes and claim you own every song[1]), so DALL-E-generated images are most likely copyright-free. I presume OpenAI only relies on terms of service to dictate what users are allowed to do, but they can't own the images, and neither can their users.

[1]: https://felixreda.eu/2021/07/github-copilot-is-not-infringin...

[leereeves]

> DALL-E-generated images are most likely copyright-free

The US Copyright Office did make a ruling that might suggest that recently[1], but crucially, in that case, the AI "didn't include an element of human authorship." The board might rule differently about DALL-E because the prompts do provide an opportunity for human creativity.

And there's another important caveat that the felixreda.eu link seems to miss. DALL-E output, whether or not it's protected by copyright, can certainly infringe other copyrights, just like the output of any other mechanical process. In short, Disney can still sue if you distribute DALL-E generated images of Marvel characters.

1: https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/21/22944335/us-copyright-off...

[unnah]

DALL-E can generate recognizable pictures of Homer Simpson, Batman and other commercial properties. Such images could easily be considered derivative works of the original copyrighted images that were used as training input. I'm sure there are plenty of corporate IP lawyers ready to argue the point at court.

[numpad0]

I'm kind of surprised that no one had found "verbatim copy" cases as were made with GitHub Copilot. Such exact copies in photography are likely easier to go for than with code snippets.

[Nition]

It might be interesting to find an image in the training set with a long, very unique description, and try that exact same description as input in DALL·E 2.

Of course it's unlikely to produce the exact same image, or if it does, you've also discovered an incredible image compression algorithm.

[numpad0]

Oh I don’t have problems with DALL-E doing its thing, I just think it’s wrong if the purpose will be to cleanse off copyrights from images.

[TaylorAlexander]

The monkey selfie was not derived from millions of existing works, and that is the difference. If an artist has a well-known art style, and this algorithm was trained on it and can copy that style, would the artist have grounds to sue? I don't know.

[Melting_Harps]

> If an artist has a well-known art style, and this algorithm was trained on it and can copy that style, would the artist have grounds to sue? I don't know.

While nothing has been commercialized yet on the DALLE2 subreddit, I know that it can do Dave Choe's work remarkably well. I also saw Alex Gray's work to be close, but not really identical either. It wasn't as intricate as his work is.

It will be interesting if this takes off and you have a sort of Banksy effect take over where unless it's a physical piece of art it doesn't have much value and is only made all the better because of some sort polemic attached to it, eg Girl with balloon.

[lancesells]

I'm going to guess there's not going to be much value placed on anything out of DALLE for a long while. Digital art is typically worth much less than physical art and I would say these GAN images are going to worth less than digital art generated by human hand.

There will be outliers of course but I would be shocked if there's much of a market in it for at least the present.

[TaylorAlexander]

I think the value will be in work produced that gets attached to things which are being sold. So, a book cover or an album cover. If a best selling novel used artwork from this system and it happened to be a very close copy of existing work, I could imagine the author of the original work suing for royalties.

[napier]

When these tools can generate layered tiff/psd images, polygon meshes and automate UV packing; then we’ll be talking.

[lbotos]

Well, music is not "pictures" but Marvin Gaye's family got 5 million because Blurred Lines sounds similar enough to a Marvin Gaye song (even though it was not a sample): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharrell_Williams_v._Bridgepor...

[ChadNauseam]

Even if you imitate someone's style intentionally, they don't have grounds to sue. Style isn't copyrightable in the US. Whether DALL-E outputs are a derivative work is a different question, though

[l33t2328]

If I write a song am I not deriving it from the existing works I’ve been exposed to?

[TaylorAlexander]

Sure but if you just release a basic copy of a Taylor Swift song you will get sued to oblivion. So the law seems (IANAL) to care about how similar your work is to existing works. DALL-E does not seem capable of showing you the work that influenced a result, so users will have no idea if a result might be infringing. What this means to me is that with many users, some of the results would be legally infringing.

[ZetaZero]

> If an artist has a well-known art style, and this algorithm was trained on it and can copy that style...

A lawyer could argue that the algorithm is producing a derivative work of the copyrighted input.

[TaylorAlexander]

Right but if that work isn’t significantly changed from the source, it could be ruled as infringement. DALL-E cannot tell the users (afaik) if a result is close to any source material.

[fanzhang]

If this were a concern, a user can easily bypass this by having a work-for-hire person add a minor transform layer on top of the DALL-E generated images right?

[JacobThreeThree]

Wouldn't it have to meet the threshold of being a "transformative" work?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_use

[totetsu]

Can I infringe another Dalle users rights if I take an image generated by their acount and sell prints of it..?

[mensetmanusman]

Image generating artificial intelligence is very analogous to a camera.

Both technologies have billions of dollars of R&D and tens of thousands of engineers behind supply chains necessary to create the button that a user has the press.

[minimaxir]

There have been decades of litigation around when/where/of whom you can take a photo. AI generated art isn't there.

[obert]

they still own the generated content, only grant usage. I have mixed feelings about this confused approach, it won’t last long.

> …you own your Prompts and Uploads, and you agree that OpenAI owns all Generations…

[LegitShady]

As far as I can tell they still own the images they just license your use of them commercially.

[nutanc]

And I just used it to create cover art for a book published in Amazon :)

https://twitter.com/nutanc/status/1549798460290764801?s=20&t...

[pqdbr]

What was your prompt?

[nutanc]

"girl with a cap standing next to a shadow man having a speech bubble, digital art"

[pferdone]

Does DALL-E create different outputs for the same input? How does ownership work there?

[minimaxir]

Not only that, but you can also upload an image (that doesn't depict a real person) and generate variations of it without providing a prompt.

[flatiron]

yes it will. it'll keep on augmenting the image until it recognizes it as the input

[mensetmanusman]

They will benefit by getting additional feedback on which output images are most useful.

[minimaxir]

DALL-E 2 has a "Save" feature which is likely a data gathering mechanism for this use case.

[vlunkr]

Is the lesson here that these images are worth nothing so they lose nothing by giving them away?

[Melting_Harps]

> "Starting today, users get full usage rights to commercialize the images they create with DALL·E, including the right to reprint, sell, and merchandise. This includes images they generated during the research preview."

>> And I just used it to create cover art for a book published in Amazon :)

Man... what a missed opportunity for Altman... he could have had a really good cryptocurrency/token with a healthy ecosystem and a creative based community if he didn't push this Worldcoin biometric harvesting BS had he just waited for this to release and coupled it with access to GPT.

This is the kind of thing that Web3 (a joke) was pushing for all along: revolutionary tech that the everyday person can understand with it's own token based ecosystem for access with full creative rights from the prompts.

I wonder if he stepped down from Open AI and put it in a figurehead as CEO could this still work?

> Why is using a token better than using money, in this case?

It would be better for OpenAI if it can monetize not just its subscription based model via a token to pay for overhead and for further R/D but also for it's ability to issue tokens it can freely exchange for utility on it's platform for exclusive access outside of it's capped $15 model and allow for pay as you go models for those who don't have access to it like myself as it's limited to 1 million users.

I don't want an account, and I think that type of gatekeeping wasn't cool during the gmail days either and I had early access back then too, but I'd still personally buy $100s of dollars worth of prompts right now since I think it is fascinating use of NLP and I'm just one of many missed opportunities and represent a lost userbase who just want access for specific projects. By doing this they can still retain the caps of useage on their platform and expand and contract them as they see fit without excluding others.

This in turn could justify the continual investment from the VC World into these projects (under the guise of web3) and allow them to scale into viable businesses and further expand the use of AI/ML into other creative spaces, which as a person studying AI and ML and a background in BTC, is what we all wanted to see instead of these aimless bubbles in things like Solana or yield farming via fake DeFi projects like Calesius that we've seen.

It would legitimize the use of a token for use of an ecosystem model outside of BTC, which to be honest doesn't really exist and has still a tarnished view with all these failed projects, while gaining reception amongst a greater audience since it's captivated so many since it's release.

[pliny]

Why is using a token better than using money, in this case?

[mod]

I assume something to do with proving ownership via NFT.

[bilsbie]

Every tech should do this. Could google maps silently change your designation to a minority owned alternative?

[rvz]

It also means there will possibly be another renaissance of fully automated, mass generated NFTs and tons of derivatives and remixes flooding the NFT market in an attempt to pump the NFT hype again.

It doesn't matter, OpenAI wins anyway as these companies will pour hundreds of thousands into generated images.

It seems that the NFT grift is about to be rebooted again, such that it isn't going to die that quickly. But still, eventually 90% of these JPEG NFTs will die anyway.

[WalterSear]

NFTs were never limited by artwork availability - they are limited by wash-trading ability.

[rvz]

These high photorealistic images can be generated on a mass-scale, completely automated without a human which ultimately cuts the need for an artist to do that.

They will be replaced by DALL·E 2 for creating these illustrations, book covers, NFT variants, etc opening up the whole arena to anyone to do this themselves. All it takes is to describe what they want in text and less than a minute, the work is delivered as little as $15.

OpenAI still wins either way. If a crypto company goes to using DALL·E 2 to generate photorealistic NFTs, they won't stop them and they will take the money.

[WalterSear]

I'm not sure I understand the point you are trying to make.

Art is already dirt cheap. People aren't buying NFTs for their content. This doesn't make it appreciably easier to con rubes.

[Shorel]

A massive increase in the offer will mean the price of these NFTs will tend towards zero.