[hambes]

Maybe, but that is a different issue.

The use of generative AI for art is being rightfully criticised because it steals from artists. Generative AI for source code learns from developers - who mostly publish their source with licenses that allow this.

The quality suffers in both cases and I would personally criticise generative AI in source code as well, but the ethical argument is only against profiting from artists' work eithout their consent.

[NitpickLawyer]

> rightfully criticised because it steals from artists. Generative AI for source code learns from developers

The double standard here is too much. Notice how one is stealing while the other is learning from? How are diffusion models not "learning from all the previous art"? It's literally the same concept. The art generated is not a 1-1 copy in any way.

[oneeyedpigeon]

IMO, this is key to the issue, learning != stealing. I think it should be acceptable for AI to learn and produce, but not to learn and copy. If end assets infringe on copyright, that should be dealt with the same whether human- or AI-produced. The quality of the results is another issue.

[magicalhippo]

> I think it should be acceptable for AI to learn and produce, but not to learn and copy.

Ok but that's just a training issue then. Have model A be trained on human input. Have model A generate synthetic training data for model B. Ensure the prompts used to train B are not part of A's training data. Voila, model B has learned to produce rather than copy.

Many state of the art LLMs are trained in such a two-step way since they are very sensitive to low-quality training data.

[thatswrong0]

> The art generated is not a 1-1 copy in any way.

Yeah right. AI art models can and have been used to basically copy any artist’s style many ways that make the original actual artist’s hard work and effort in honing their craft irrelevant.

Who profits? Some tech company.

Who loses? The artists who now have to compete with an impossibly cheap copy of their own work.

This is theft at a massive scale. We are forcing countless artists whose work was stolen from them to compete with a model trained on their art without their consent and are paying them NOTHING for it. Just because it is impressive doesn’t make it ok.

Shame on any tech person who is okay with this.

[NeutralCrane]

Copying a style isn’t theft, full stop. You can’t copyright style. As an individual, you wouldn’t be liable for producing a work of art that is similar in style to someone else’s, and there is an enormous number of artists today whose livelihood would be in jeopardy if that was the case.

Concerns about the livelihood of artists or the accumulation of wealth by large tech megacorporations are valid but aren’t rooted in AI. They are rooted in capitalism. Fighting against AI as a technology is foolish. It won’t work, and even if you had a magic wand to make it disappear, the underlying problem remains.

[tstrimple]

It's almost like some of these people have never seen artists work before. Taping up photos and cutouts of things that inspire them before starting on a project. This is especially true of concept artists who are trying to do unique things while sticking to a particular theme. It's like going to Etsy for ideas for projects you want to work on. It's not cheating. It's inspiration.

[blackbrokkoli]

It's a double standard because it's apples and oranges.

Code is an abstract way of soldering cables in the correct way so the machine does a thing.

Art eludes definition while asking questions about what it means to be human.

[danielbln]

I love that in these discussions every piece of art is always high art and some comment on the human condition, never just grunt-work filler, or some crappy display ad.

Code can be artisanal and beautiful, or it can be plumbing. The same is true for art assets.

[NitpickLawyer]

Exactly! Europa Universalis is a work of art, and I couldn't care less if the horse that you can get as one of your rulers is aigen or not. The art is in the fact that you can get a horse as your ruler.

[viraptor]

In this case it's this amazing texture of newspapers on a pole: https://rl.bloat.cat/preview/pre/bn8bzvzd80ye1.jpeg?width=16... Definitely some high art there.

[kome]

I agree, computer graphics and art were sloppified, copied and corporate way before AI, so pulling a casablanca "I'm shocked, shocked to find that AI is going on in here!" is just hypocritical and quite annoying.

[IshKebab]

Yeah this was probably for like a stone texture or something. It "eludes definition while asking questions about what it means to be human".

[perching_aix]

That's a fun framing. Let me try using it to define art.

Art is an abstract way of manipulating aesthetics so that the person feels or thinks a thing.

Doesn't sound very elusive nor wrong to me, while remaining remarkably similar to your coding definition.

> while asking questions about what it means to be human

I'd argue that's more Philosophy's territory. Art only really goes there to the extent coding does with creativity, which is to say

> the machine does a thing

to the extent a programmer has to first invent this thing. It's a bit like saying my body is a machine that exists to consume water and expel piss. It's not wrong, just you know, proportions and timing.

This isn't to say I classify coding and art as the same thing either. I think one can even say that it is because art speaks to the person while code speaks to the machine, that people are so much more uppity about it. Doesn't really hit the same as the way you framed this though, does it?

[surgical_fire]

Are you telling me that, for example, rock texture used in a wall is "asking questions about what it means to be human"?

If some creator with intentionality uses an AI generated rock texture in a scene where dialogue, events, characters and angles interact to tell a story, the work does not ask questions about what it means to be human anymore because the rock texture was not made by him?

And in the same vein, all code is soldering cables so the machine does a thing? Intentionality of game mechanics represented in code, the technical bits to adhere or work around technical constraints, none of it matters?

Your argument was so bad that it made me reflexively defend Gen AI, a technology that for multiple reasons I think is extremely damaging. Bad rationale is still bad rationale though.

[Jensson]

The images clair obscur generated hardly "eludes definition while asking questions about what it means to be human.".

The game is art according to that definition while the individual assets in it are not.

[tpmoney]

> Art eludes definition while asking questions about what it means to be human.

All art? Those CDs full of clip art from the 90's? The stock assets in Unity? The icons on your computer screen? The designs on your wrapping paper? Some art surely does "[elude] definition while asking questions about what it means to be human", and some is the same uninspired filler that humans have been producing ever since the first the first teenagers realized they could draw penis graffiti. And everything else is somewhere in between.

[booleandilemma]

You're just someone who can't see the beauty of an elegant algorithm.

[saubeidl]

Speak for yourself.

I consider some code I write art.

[theshrike79]

The obfuscated C competition is definitely art

[eucyclos]

I really don't agree with this argument because copying and learning are so distinct. If I write in a famous author's style style and try to pass my work off as theirs, everyone agrees that's unethical. But if I just read a lot of their work and get a sense of what works and doesn't in fiction, then use that learning to write fiction in the same genre, everyone agrees that my learning from a better author is fair game. Pretty sure that's the case even if my work cuts into their sales despite being inferior.

The argument seems to be that it's different when the learner is a machine rather than a human, and I can sort of see the 'if everyone did it' argument for making that distinction. But even if we take for granted that a human should be allowed to learn from prior art and a machine shouldn't, this just guarantees an arms race for machines better impersonating humans, and that also ends in a terrible place if everyone does it.

If there's an aspect I haven't considered here I'd certainly welcome some food for thought. I am getting seriously exasperated at the ratio of pathos to logos and ethos on this subject and would really welcome seeing some appeals to logic or ethics, even if they disagree with my position.

[pona-a]

> Generative AI for source code learns from developers - who mostly publish their source with licenses that allow this.

I always believed GPL allowed LLM training, but only if the counterparty fulfills its conditions: attribution (even if not for every output, at least as part of the training set) and virality (the resulting weights and inference/training code should be released freely under GPL, or maybe even the outputs). I have not seen any AI company take any steps to fulfill these conditions to legally use my work.

The profiteering alone would be a sufficient harm, but it's the replacement rhetoric that adds insult to injury.

[starkparker]

This cuts to the bone of it tbqh. One large wing of the upset over gen AI is the _unconsenting, unlicensed, uncredited, and uncompensated_ use of assets to make "you can't steal a style" a newly false statement.

There are artists who would (and have) happily consented, licensed, and been compensated and credited for training. If that's what LLM trainers had led with when they went commercial, if anything a sector of the creative industry would've at least considered it. But companies led with mass training for profit without giving back until they were caught being sloppy (in the previous usage of "slop").

[SirHumphrey]

No, the only difference is that image generators are a much fuller replacement for "artists" than for programmers currently. The use of quotation marks was not meant to be derogatory, I sure many of them are good artists, but what they were mostly commissioned for was not art - it was backgrounds for websites, headers for TOS updates, illustrations for ads... There was a lot more money in this type of work the same way as there is a lot more money in writing react sites, or scripts to integrate active directory logins in to some ancient inventory management system than in developing new elegant algorithms.

But code is complicated, and hallucinations lead to bugs and security vulnerabilities so it's prudent to have programmers check it before submitting to production. An image is an image. It may not be as nice as a human drawn one, but for most cases it doesn't matter anyway.

The AI "stole" or "learned" in both cases. It's just that one side is feeling a lot more financial hardship as the result.

[surgical_fire]

Finally a good point in this thread.

There is a problem with negative incentives, I think. The more generative AI is used and relied upon to create images (to limit the argument to inage generation), the less incentive there is for humans go put in the effort to learn how to create images themselves.

But generative AI is a deadend. It can only generate things based on what already exists, remixing its training data. It cannot come up with anything truly new.

I think this may be the only piece of technology humans created that halts human progress instead of being something that facilitates further progress. A dead end.

[tstrimple]

I feel like these exact same arguments were made with regard to tools like Photoshop and Dreamweaver. It turns out we can still build websites and artists can still do artist things. Lowering the bar for entry allows a TON of people to participate in things that they couldn't before, but I haven't seen that it kills curiosity in the folks who are naturally curious about things. Those folks will still be around taking things apart to see how they work.

[ahartmetz]

> Generative AI for source code learns from developers - who mostly publish their source with licenses that allow this.

As far as I'm concerned, not at all. FOSS code that I have written is not intended to enrich LLM companies and make developers of closed source competition more effective. The legal situation is not clear yet.

[orwin]

To me, if the AI is trained on GPLv3/AGPL code, any code it generate should be GPLv3/AGPL too, the licence seems clear imho.

[glimshe]

FOSS code is the backbone of many closed source for-profit companies. The license allows you to use FOSS tools and Linux, for instance, to build fully proprietary software.

[m4rtink]

Well, if its GPL you are supposed to provide the source code to any binaries you ship. So if you fed GPL code into your model, the output of it should be also considered GPL licensed, with all implications.

[ahartmetz]

Sure, that usage is allowed by the license. The license does not allow copying the code (edit: into your closed-source product). LLMs are somewhere in between.

[jzebedee]

"Mostly" is doing some heavy lifting there. Even if you don't see a problem with reams of copyleft code being ingested, you're not seeing the connection? Trusting the companies that happily pirated as many books as they could pull from Anna's Archive and as much art as they could slurp from DeviantArt, pixiv, and imageboards? The GP had the insight that this doesn't get called out when it's hidden, but that's the whole point. Laundering of other people's work at such a scale that it feels inevitable or impossible to stop is the tacit goal of the AI industry. We don't need to trip over ourselves glorifying the 'business model' of rampant illegality in the name of monopoly before regulations can catch up.

[protimewaster]

I'm not sure how valid it is to view artwork differently than source code for this purpose.

1. There is tons of public domain or similarly licensed artwork to learn from, so there's no reason a generative AI for art needs to have been trained on disallowed content anymore than a code generating one.

2. I have no doubt that there exist both source code AIs that have been trained on code that had licenses disallowing such use and art AIs have that been trained only on art that allows such use. So, it feels flawed to just assume that AI code generation is in the clear and AI art is in the wrong.

[stinkbeetle]

> The use of generative AI for art is being rightfully criticised because it steals from artists. Generative AI for source code learns from developers - who mostly publish their source with licenses that allow this.

This reasoning is invalid. If AI is doing nothing but simply "learning from" like a human, then there is no "stealing from artists" either. A person is allowed to learn from copyright content and create works that draw from that learning. So if the AI is also just learning from things, then it is not stealing from artists.

On the other hand if you claim that it is not just learning but creating derivative works based on the art (thereby "stealing" from them), then you can't say that it is not creating derivative works of the code it ingests either. And many open source licenses do not allow distribution of derivative works without condition.

[program_whiz]

Everyone in this thread keeps treating human learning and art the same as clearly automated statistical processes with massive tech backing.

Analogy: the common area had grass for grazing which local animals could freely use. Therefore, it's no problem that megacorp has come along and created a massive machine which cuts down all the trees and grass which they then sell to local farmers. After all, those resources were free, the end product is the same, and their machine is "grazing" just like the animals. Clearly animals graze, and their new "gazelle 3000" should have the same rights to the common grazing area -- regardless of what happens to the other animals.

[stinkbeetle]

I'm not sure why you are replying to me. I made no such treatment of them.

The analogy isn't really helpful either. It's trivially obvious that they are different things without the analogy, and the details of how they are different are far too complex for it to help with.

[joquarky]

Isn't this expected of late stage capitalism?

[stinkbeetle]

Isn't what to be expected? And define late stage capitalism.

[m-schuetz]

Most OS licenses requires attribution, so AI for code generation violates licenses the same way AI for image generation does. If one is illegal or unethical, then the other would be too.

[tstrimple]

I've always thought it was weird how artists are somehow separate and special in the creation process. Sometimes to the point of getting royalties per copy sold which is basically unheard of for your meager code monkey.

[conradfr]

Is there a OSS licence that excludes LLM?

[david_shaw]

I'm not sure about licenses that explicitly forbid LLM use -- although you could always modify a license to require this! -- but GPL licensed projects require that you also make the software you create open source.

I'm not sure that LLMs respect that restriction (since they generally don't attibute their code).

I'm not even really sure if that clause would apply to LLM generated code, though I'd imagine that it should.

[1gn15]

Very likely no license can restrict it, since learning is not covered under copyright. Even if you could restrict it, you couldn't add a "no LLMs" clause without violating the free software principles or the OSI definition, since you cannot discriminate in your license.

[hofrogs]

"Learning" is what humans can do. LLMs can't do that.

[NeutralCrane]

“Learning” as a concept is too ill defined to use as a distinction. What is learning? How is what a human does different from what an LLM does?

In the end it doesn’t matter. Here “learning” means observing an existing work and using it to produce something that is not a copy.

[glimshe]

They don't require it if you don't include OSS artifacts/code in your shipped product. You can use gcc to build closed source software.

[swiftcoder]

> You can use gcc to build closed source software

Note that this tends to require specific license exemptions. In particular, GCC links various pieces of functionality into your program that would normally trigger the GPL to apply to the whole program, and for this reason, those components had to be placed under the "GCC Runtime Library Exception"[1]

[1]: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gcc-exception-3.1.html

[blibble]

those that require attribution

so... all of them

[wiseowise]

> The quality suffers in both cases

According to your omnivision?