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by bambax 1403 days ago
> If you spend a lifetime mastering some skill, and then it's just not valued anymore, it sucks, and you get pretty mad about it.

That is absolutely not what the OP is complaining about. They're not saying that because AI is good, they won't find work. They are complaining that in training AI for art generation, builders took works from living artists, without consent from them, and that in so doing allowed generators to make new art in the style of said artists.

The example given is that Stable Diffusion even tries to reproduce logos/signatures of living artists.

If I produced a rubbish search engine that bore a malformed "gigggle" logo using Google colors, how long do you thing I would survive before being sued out of existence by an army of Google lawyers?

But that's exactly what many AI generators are doing here.

Edit: the first version of this comment confused Stable Diffusion with OpenAI, and stated that OpenAI was owned by Google. OpenAI has a strong partnership with Microsoft. Stable Diffusion is not OpenAI. Sorry for the errors.

2 comments

This is frankly what humans have always done, learning and taking inspiration from other artists. Now we have made a machine that can do the same thing.

In the case of exact reproductions, we have copyright and IP laws.

No. This argument comes up over and over and over again and it is wrong.

These models are not learning or being inspired in the same sense humans are. The laws tgat apply to humans should not be applied to them.

You're right, AI generated pictures should not be copyrighted, as is the case today. People should be free to mix and remix pictures via AI as much as they desire.
This is where I imagine things are going to get into trouble because how are you going to determine what is AI and what isn't? Especially when Stable Diffusion is directly classifying artist and cloning their signatures and watermarks. What about things that are started with AI and refined by human?
Exactly. The relevant law is with regard to the use of artwork on the part of the people who feed the index. Artists should have a say on whether their work gets included in a training set, if their works are not public domain.
It feels like a big stretch to consider an algorithm to be 'inspired'. Where are the bits that correspond to 'inspiration'? Seems like that would answer a lot of big questions in philosophy.
Where are the neurons that correspond to "inspiration?" It's algorithms all the way down.
I claim that claiming computer algorithms are inspired is a big stretch.

I claim humans can be inspired.

I don't claim to know how human inspiration happens, or if neurons have anything to do with it. (They may, but I make no claim). Not being able to describe the process by which human inspiration happens doesn't invalidate either of my claims.

If there is a satisfactory non-bit based explanation to how computer algorithms achieve inspiration, I would accept that to. We have the advantage with computers, that their activity is conveniently summarized by their programs which are represented in bits, so expecting an explanation in that form I think is reasonable.

The defense if the claim of human inspiration is (1) we have that word for the concept (2) we have thousands of years of thought, philosophy and literature giving support and definition to the concept.

Not only is your rant about Google misplaced considering Dall-E is OpenAI, not Google, but the thread is also not complaining about Dall-E. It's about Stable Diffusion (https://stability.ai/blog/stable-diffusion-announcement) which is explicitly trained on working artists. That's why it tries to reproduce the logo.
Dall-E has also been trained on watermarked art. Here [1] [2] are some examples from images I've generated exhibiting that.

[1] https://ibb.co/Q86zDSw

[2] https://ibb.co/njvLMQ2

You're right of course! I don't know what I was thinking. Dall-e is MS. I will edit.
Thanks! Good edit. For the record I agree with your comment but got distracted by the error.
Still wrong. DALL-E is Open AI
Yes, that's what the edited comment says. Dall-e is OpenAI; OpenAI has strong links with MS.