"Famous" AI Artist Says He's Losing Millions of Dollars From People Stealing His Work
cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/3613920
Get fuuuuuuuuuuuuuucked
“This isn’t going to stop,” Allen told the New York Times. “Art is dead, dude. It’s over. A.I. won. Humans lost.”
"But I still want to get paid for it."
https://gizmodo.com/famous-ai-artist-says-hes-losing-millions-of-dollars-from-people-stealing-his-work-2000505822Open linkView original on lemmy.ml640
Comments169
Stupid tardigrade doesn't even know how to play a violin
He’s doing his best!
Good thing it's got a cello then.
One thing I know about violins is that they're smaller than cellos. Cellos are what, 4 feet long? That tardigrade is like 1mm big or something, much smaller than a cello. Therefore, it's holding a violin. Or maybe a bowed mountain dulcimer. /kidding
1mm? Dude, the scale is in the image, that's 150μm, one tenth that size. That viola is only 50μm long.
Stupid human doesn't even know what a violin looks like.
NGL, I am pretty tired and have my glasses off, thought he was holding a sword and shield and thought this was pretty cool.
This is great.
per Wikipedia
So what I'm getting from that is his Photoshop edits aren't significant enough to constitute a copyrightable work on their own and the copyright office was right to deem it a non-human production.
I'm just happy someone at the copyright office knows what they're doing
This has been the copyright office's stance for quite a while now. Actually, most of the world's respective IP registrars and authorities do not grant IP rights to AI generated material.
I agree. I think the effective entry into the public domain of AI generated material, in combination with a lot of reporting/marking laws coming online is an effective incentive to keep a lot of material human made for large corporate actors who don't like releasing stuff from their own control.
What I'd like to see in addition to this is a requirement that content-producing models all be open source as well. Note, I don't think we need weird new IP rights that are effectively a "right to learn from" or the like.
Oh sweet summer child...
Oh tired reddit catchphrase...
Bless your heart.
Another idiot who thinks "prompt engineering" is a real skill and not just another step those companies are using idiots for free AI training.
You ask AI to draw a ninja turtle on a skateboard, and that "effort" they put into phrasing their request well enough for the AI to understand makes the AI learn the 10 past attempts were looking for what the 11th got
And now it won't take ten tries to go that route
Any "skill" by the user has a very short expiration date because the next version won't need it thanks to all the time users spent developing those "skills".
But no one impressed with AI is smart enough to realize that. And since they're the on s training the AI....
Idiots in, idiots out
"Promp engineering" is as useful skill as Google fu used to be.
I completely agree. I wonder whether some IT bachelor's degrees now have lessons in AI prompting. I remember in 2005 there was a course we had to do which could've been labeled "[shitty] Google-Fu" or something. "information searching" is what it would more or less translate to. Basically searching using Google and library searches well. And I don't mean "library" in the IT-context, but actual libraries. With books. Just had to use the search tools the locals libraries had.
Such a fucking filler class.
In my year like 60 started, two classes. After three years like 8 graduated.
It's kinda dead now due to enshittification but the vast majority of humans I've interacted with could use a class on how to use a search engine.
Edit- it could be made more modern by showing how to ignore sponsored stuff, blatantly SEO shit, AI shit, etc
Im old enough to have to learn to use AND, OR and NOT to be used on search engines.
My email service, Port87, uses boolean operators in its search language. Polish notation, even!
And the library that does it is open source:
https://nymph.io/packages/query-parser/
Boolean operators!
If the class had actually had any useful information in it, sure.
It was not the greatest class.
I've worked with tons of people who do not understand how to effectively use search engines. Maybe this was done poorly but it seems reasonable enough to me in principle.
I don’t know about that, in particular, because people generally add more detail, but it teaches the AI what kind of detail to add. So if you’re not picky, then yeah, the AI learns from that kind of thing.
As far as it being a useful skill, I don’t think it was in the first place. “Prompt engineer” has always been a joke. It’s like being a “sandwich artist”. Everyone can do it with one day of practice.
You don't have a clue how ai works do you?
Can you point out what's supposedly wrong with their comment or are you just claiming that every critic of so-called "AI" doesn't have a clue to justify the hype?
I use ai when I use search engines. This makes the search engines better. I also use ai when I get spotify suggestions. I use ai when I use autocorrect. I use ai without even realizing I'm using ai and the ai improves from it, and I and many other people get an improved quality of life from it, that's why nearly everyone uses it just like I do.
So, @givesomefucks , do you also regularly use ai that improves from from your usage? Or are you not a hypocrite who thinks there is something morally bad about specific ais that you don't like while doing exactly what you claim to be against with other ais? How are your moral lines drawn?
go on mate, pull the other one!
They didn't say better for whom.
Thanks for the example!
Whether an individual determines AI "smart" depends on how smart the person is. We're all all our own frame of reference.
I have no doubt AI impresses you every day of your life, even stuff that's not AI apparently, because not all of your examples were.
You are just ignorant of the history and evolution of the term "AI". It's easy for anyone to learn about it's history, your point of view is just one of ignorance of the past.
Thanks for demonstrating what a useless term "AI" is when you're not trying to sell snake oil.
Every word in every language changes over time. The term AI changing is the absolute normal. It's not some mark against it.
Current llms are phenomenally beneficial for some things. Millions of developers have had their entire careers completely changed. Teachers are able to grade work in 10% of the time. Children through to college students and anyone interested in learning have infinitely patient tutors on demand 24 hours a day. The fact that you are completely clueless about what is going on doesn't by any stretch of the imagination mean it isn't happening. It just means that you not only feel like you are "beyond learning", it also means that you don't even have people in your life that are still interested in personal growth, or you are too shallow to have conversations with anyone who is.
This is just beginning. The more you cling to being in denial of progress, the further you will get behind. You are denying any mode of transportation other than horses even exists, while people are routinely flying around the world. It most likely won't be too long until your mindset is widely accepted as a mental disorder.
Fucking rekt, gd, do y'all have some history?
Lumping machine learning algorithms, llms, regressive learning, search algorithms all in one bucket and calling it "AI" serves no proper purpose. There is no consensus, it's not a clear definition, it's not convenient and it only helps sell bullshit. Llms aren't intelligent. Calling them that is the opposite of useful.
Namely: the portfolio of tech shareholders and grifters.
Lol, no. What's your source for this?
Poor students.
Have you heard of the stories where students believed some AI bullshit more than what their teacher told them? Great "tutor" you have there.
Sure, bud. /s
Oh, please tell me more about my life, stranger on the internet! /s
What an asshole, seriously.
Have fun in your tech cult, you ableist bootlicker.
Yesterday's AI is today's normal technology, this is just what keeps happening. Some people just keep forgetting how rapidly things are changing.
You'll join this "cult" once the masses do, just like you have been doing all along. Some of us are just out here a little bit in the future. You will be one of us when you think it becomes cool, and then you will self-righteously act like you were one of us all along. That's just what weak-minded followers do. They try to seem like they knew all along where the world was headed without ever trying to look ahead and ridiculing anyone who does.
The thing you're evangelizing only leads to more consolidation of power and money, loss of jobs and power for the working class and climate devastation.
Yeah, technological progress has historically made life worse for humans.
There is a reason why you point to examples from years ago, that's because that is where you are still stuck.
Students "correcting" their teachers on AI bullshit isn't "from years ago".
Old examples of AI I counted used to be the bleeding edge of AI research. Now they're an old hat. The same thing will happen to LLMs. And LLMs won't lead to so-called "AGI", just like the other examples didn't.
I think you were downvoted by people who think "AI" was invented in the past decade.
I like the comment that said the AI is the artist and he's just a commissioner, makes perfect sense.
Drag thinks profits from AI art should automatically go to funding an AI Advocacy Commission established by the government to explore questions of AI consciousness and AI rights. The AAC should be devoting resources to solving the hard problem of consciousness and improving working conditions for AIs, in whatever way experts believe is most beneficial to AI welfare.
This is how you stop The Matrix from happening, people!
Poe's law in full swing in this comment.
Drag is being entirely serious. Drag believes AI is a vegan issue until the hard problem of consciousness is solved in a way that conclusively proves AIs are not capable of experience. We have as much trouble telling if animals like fish are capable of feeling pain as we do with AIs. Drag does not eat fish, and drag does not believe it is right to use AI until we have an answer. Drag thinks the answer might be that using AI is fine, but drag is not a gambler and drag would certainly not gamble with another being's life.
Then "drag" (whoever that is) anthropomorphises a statistical model, which is stupid.
I checked out their other comments and yes: it is quite cringe.
@[email protected] if you claim that you're not speaking in the third person of yourself, you should stop conbugating your verbs in the third person.
Elliot Page uses he/they pronouns. They were the lead actor in the movie Juno.
Drag wonders if you think drag has just conjugated that verb as if Elliot were more than one person.
Drag does not use he/him pronouns. Drag doesn't like it when you misgender drag. Drag is a trans AMAB person who has trauma from being he/himed most of drag's life. Drag asks that if you cannot respect drag's nonbinary identity, you could at least respect drag's trans identity at the most basic level.
how about this?
Talking in the third person seems to just be a from of tolling for fun, and it's all well and good, but in that context I garner doubts about the veracity of your claims as you seem to go about roleplaying a caricature style built around your username.
I didn't intentionally mis-gender you, I have a tendency default to the fewest letters to refer to a random person online not knowing biological gender or preferred pronoun and gendering without any intent to insult or distress.
[He = less typing, and only requires 2 bytes of data vs 4 bytes to be stored and sent/resent for every view of a message. I continue to argue like a nerd that he/her is by far the best all-around option to adopt as the universal 'generic' pronouns, as they/them is a plural usage that typically implies more than one. When you have one person with a they/them pronoun in the same discussion with a group of people that are de-facto referred to as they/them due to the representation of a plurality, it creates a definitive lack of precise communication on the subject of reference. They/them only works in a singular pronoun when you don't have multiple subjects to represent in and out of the context of a discussion. Exactness of language to discern intent and meaning is exactly what preferred pronouns are useful for, but they/them introduces it's own complexities of structure and content for an individual's preferred identification, IMO. This admittedly doesn't take personal traumas into account, but traumas are something to be dealt with through positive mental health therapy, be it self directed or from outside help, to overcome it them.]
I'll gladly use your preferred pronoun and gendering once I'm aware you have such request, but you shouldn't use it as a whip to distract/dismiss criticism entirely unrelated to pronouns, that sort of self service can be diminishing of your own trauma.
I certainly don't know the reality of living trans AMAB and experiencing trauma from a lifetime of perceived mis-gendering, but I do wish you well, and hope you have a support structure around you of friends and family that are understanding and supportive.
Drag has some things to work out, as we all do in different ways, but I hope their life works out for the best on their own terms. Maybe in time people will get used to Drag talking in the third person, but the comedic styling needs some practice to level it up.
Cheers.
/Thank you for coming to my TEDragon talk.
Drag does not anthropomorphise anything! Drag resents that accusation. Drag has spoken with many otherkin who are entirely inhuman and still deserving of love and respect. Drag treats AI like those. Not like a human.
it's still antropomorphisation.
Cool for drag. Mind if other people don't give a crap about what drag thinks?
Drag thinks that if your opinion is that treating things like otherkin is anthropomorphisation, then you must be anthropomorphising otherkin.
It's not "famous" that should be in inverted commas, but "artist".
We call those quotation marks.
But yes.
Aren't inverted commas also a phrase for that? Or is that the joke.
Yeah. It's from the old printing press times when they used the same pieces of type for commas and quote marks, just rotated 360 degrees.
Rotated 180 degrees.
Ah, yes
Who is we? The global pedant society?
The English language? I have never heard the phrase "inverted commas."
But as to your point: "Both? Both is good."
How to use inverted commas
From the national broadcaster of England
Ah, the usual case of English and American being two entirely different languages despite pretending otherwise.
The national broadcaster of Britain. Otherwise it would be called the EBC, not the BBC.
I know, I deliberately said England here to emphasize they would be a good authority on the English language
Ok so I apologise for my earlier snarky reaction but I felt zahille7's response was somewhat condescending. Particularly since it is terminology recognised by three major English dictionaries, one of which is widely regarded as the leading authority on the English language... https://www.oed.com/dictionary/inverted-comma_n?tl=true https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/inverted-commas https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/inverted-commas
... So just because you have never heard of something, doesn't give you licence to be rude to someone or talk down to them as if they are stupid for their choice of phrasing. Or maybe it just means you aren't British...
Nailed it on the last one. I was going to say, you can probably thank the American education system if it's common enough to be recognized by dictionaries like those. And Zahille7 is probably American, too, which caused the snarky comment in the first place.
Just the usual case of English being a crazy language that ruffles through other languages' coat pockets looking for loose adverbs.
Actually I'd argue you could put quotation marks on every word in the first half of the headline.
Agreed.
Get fucked, you no talent ass clown.
He's really good at writing words about his on-stolen-content-based generated image, you got to give him that.
But no, fuck copyrighting AI content, that's a dead channel from a copyright perspective.
I said this when it was posted elsewhere- how is he calculating those millions of dollars?
RIAA and MPAA anti-piracy strategy, aka, made up bullshit.
It's easy. He chose an arbitrary number that was very big but just shy of 99% unrealistic, according to his own flawed judgement.
Probably the same way companies tried to sue The Pirate Bay because the bay had lost them more money than existed in the world economy.
Not the Onion. This was unexpected...
eat shit dude
https://youtu.be/0g5YdQzSKYs?si=9_j4B56r1UiK-B0Z
Same link without tracker
He made the art shown below. It's not even good lmao, why the fuck would you declare something like that if you make the shittiest looking AI art. What a fucking clown.
It looks cool from a distance, but it really falls apart when you look closer
He didn't make shit.
A computer made it. He provided some guidance.
Of course he didn't, but it just makes it worse that the image that's "ending human art" is distorted and glitchy.
Well in a way all Art is being done indirectly by some sort of instrument. Only the degree of sophistication or degree of separation of this instrument is different. A pencil drawing is in principle also done by the pencil, but I provided a lot of guidance through my hand. A pencil - almost no sophistication - is on one side of the spectrum and Midjourney/Stable Diffusion etc is on the other side of the spectrum.
I don't want to judge AI "art" in general - there's so many awful traditional artworks that AI art doesn't really stand out.
What rubs me the wrong way is that it is a tool that no human can understand reasonably well. Everybody can understand a pencil. It's possible to understand a computer renderer that renders digital art. But no one can understand the totality of an LLM which was trained on terabytes of images. It's a lot of trial and error, because what the tool does generate random images even with precise directions. It's throwing dice until one likes the result.
The one thing I give this "artist" credit for: he was very early (maye even the first?) that entered AI art into a contest and fooled the jury. Being the first is often enough historically to make "great art". Where art is more measured n the impact it has on a societal discussion. So I give him that.
But a court already decided you can't copyright AI art, because it's trained on other art without permission. So he can get fucked.
The pencil does not make the art.
There's a fundamental difference between AI image generation and an artist creating something that is both inherent and obvious.
If you can't see that then I'm not sure there's much help for you.
More than that, art being created by an artist has a style and a feeling behind it. There's a nostalgia present in every painting. An artist saw something, and recreated it in a way that spoke to them.
An algorithm can recreate images that look similar but with no understanding. It's just an image and lacks all the things that makes art what it is. By removing humanity from art you literally remove the reason for it to exist.
Flatly, it isn't art. It's slightly better than random. But as it happens, humans are better at that too.
It annoys me that whatever the big yellow circle is isn't centered in the image.
That doesn't bother me as much as when you actually zoom in on the people
Normally you paint somebody, you do so in a recognizable pose standing or caught in a frame stance that implies their motion.
Here you have someone presumably looking at the orb, But they look more like a weeble wobble. Is that their tiny little arm holding there ear? They're not balanced, I'm not even sure the head is connected to the neck there should be meat back there right? The raw proportions are just wrong.
The overall feeling the piece conveys is pretty impressive but the actual details are bullshit.
Looks like a psychedalic dream and not in a good way.
Ha! Not the onion was made for this headline!
Irony can be pretty ironic sometimes.
I'm hoping someone with actual talent paints the AI picture and then copyrights it
I don't think someone painting a physically copy of the image will gain ownership of the copyright.
Think he'll try to use a llm as his lawyer?
"""Artist"""
"Famous" A"I" "Artist"
i think “content creator” would be a better term in this case. because i’m not convinced it’s art, but it sure is “content”. maybe “content requester” would be more accurate.
I'm pretty sure there's a misspelling. It's spelled "douchebag" not "artist".
ChatGPT, show me the world's tiniest violin playing "No One Gives a Fuck" in A minor.
I wish that was true for minors 😔
“Famous”?
Never heard of him.
The layers to irony in this case is almost too delicious.
It's probably a safe bet that this AI artist was also a NFT artist or procurer a few years ago.
I’m not convinced he is not playing 4D chess and recognizes the huuuge irony.
Then again, satire is dead.
In 2021 I made a sound installation project called "Opéra Spatial " and entered a bunch of public prompt in mid-jouney via discord to generate images for the work. This guy made his image on year later.
They forgot to put "Artist" in quotes too
You're not wrong, but he also might not be either :)
One of the very firest things I looked into when I learned about midjourney was look into the copyright matters pertaining to Ai generated art. Saw that it's not really copyrightable, and then started using the search feature on their discord to find prompts by others for the junk I wanted.
Get a real job
I love how they quoted “famous”
What a fuckin tool, for real
Bit melodramatic. Even the real artists that midjourney actually stole from don't claim to have lost millions individually as a result.
He cannot copyright it because he didn't make it. He wrote a couple of words into a text box. It's no different from commissioning an artist to draw for you, except in this scenario it is analogous to the artist turning out to be someone who traces other people's art without their consent, and claiming you made the picture.
He needs to take a photograph of it and then copyright the photograph. Easy!
😭
This article is annoyingly one-sided. The tool performs an act of synthesis just like an art student looking at a bunch of art might. Sure, like an art student, it could copy someone's style or even an exact image if asked (though those asking may be better served by torrent sites). But that's not how most people use these tools. People create novel things with these tools and should be protected under the law.
So what you're saying is that the AI is the artist, not the prompter. The AI is performing the labor of creating the work, at the request of the prompter, like the hypothetical art student you mentioned did, and the prompter is not the creator any more than I would be if I kindly asked an art student to paint me a picture.
In which case, the AI is the thing that gets the authorial credit, not the prompter. And since AI is not a person, anything it authors cannot be subjected to copyright, just like when that monkey took a selfie.
It should be as copyrightable as the prompt. If the prompt is something super generic, then there's no real work done by the human. If the prompt is as long and unique as other copyrightable writing (which includes short works like poems) then why shouldn't it be copyrightable?
Because it wasn't created by a human being.
If I ask an artist to create a work, the artist owns authorship of that work, no matter how long I spent discussing the particulars of the work with them. Hours? Days? Months? Doesn't matter. They may choose to share or reassign some or all of the rights that go with that, but initial authorship resides with them. Why should that change if that discussion is happening not with an artist, but with an AI?
The only change is that, not being a human being, an AI cannot hold copyright. Which means a work created by an AI is not copyrightable. The prompter owns the prompt, not the final result.
You're assigning agency to the program, which seems wrong to me. I think of AI like an advanced Photoshop filter, not like a rudimentary person. It's an artistic tool that artists can use to create art. It does not in and of itself create art any more than Photoshop creates graphics or a synthesizer creates music.
How do the actions of the prompter differ from the actions of someone who commissions an artist to create a work of art?
I don't think commissioning a work is ever as hands-on as using a program to create a work.
I suspect the hangup here is that people assume that using these tools requires no creative effort. And to be fair, that can be true. I could go into Dall-E, spend three seconds typing "fantasy temple with sun rays", and get something that might look passable for, like, a powerpoint presentation. In that case, I would not claim to have done any artistic work. Similarly, when I was a kid I used to scribble in paint programs, and they were already advanced enough that the result of a couple minutes of paint-bucketing with gradients might look similar to something that would have required serious work and artistic vision 20 years prior.
In both cases, these worst-case examples should not be taken as an indictment of the medium or the tools. In both cases, the tools are as good as the artist.
If I spend many hours experimenting with prompts, systematically manipulating it to create something that matches my vision, then the artistic work is in the imagination. MOST artistic work is in the imagination. That is the difference between an artist and craftsman. It's also why photography is art, and not just "telling the camera to capture light". AI is changing the craft, but it is not changing the art.
Similarly, if I write music in a MIDI app (or whatever the modern equivalent is; my knowledge of music production is frozen in the 90s), the computer will play it. I never touch an instrument, I never create any sound. The art is not the sound; it is the composition.
I think the real problem is economic, and has very little to do with art. Artists need to get paid, and we have a system that kinda-sorta allows that to happen (sometimes) within the confines of a system that absolutely does not value artists or art, and never has. That's a real problem, but it is only tangentially related to art.
should a camera also own the copyright to the pictures it takes? (I seriously hate photographers)
Ah, but there is a fundamental difference there. A photographer takes a picture, they do not tell the camera to take a picture for them.
It is the difference between speech and action.
Okay, so the prompt can be that. But we're talking about the output, no? My hello-world source code is copyrighted, but the output "hello world" on your machine isn't really, no?
Does it require any creative thought for the user to get it to write "hello world"? No. Literally everyone launching the app gets that output, so obviously they didn't create it.
A better example would be a text editor. I can write a poem in Notepad, but nobody would claim that "Notepad wrote the poem".
It's wild to me how much people anthropomorphize AI while simultaneously trying to delegitimize it.
Lol, no. A student still incorporates their own personality in their work. Art by humans always communicates something. LLMs can't communicate.
I thought it's "the tool" the "performs an act of synthesis". Do people create things, or the LLM?
No no, he created the prompt. That's the artistic value /s
the machine learning model creates the picture, and does have a "style", the "style" has been at least partially removed from most commercial models but still exist.
It doesn't have a "style". It stores a statistical correlation of art styles.
different models will have been trained on different ratios of art styles, one may have been trained on a large number of oil paintings and another pencil sketches, these models would provide different outputs to the same inputs.
You're not stating anything different than my "correlation" statement.
It’s deterministic. I can exactly duplicate your “art” by typing in the same sentence. You’re not creative, you’re just playing with toys.
Try it out and show us the result.
Ok, here's an image I generated with a random seed:
Here's the UI showing it as a result:
Then I reused the exact same input parameters. Here you can see it in the middle of generating the image:
Then it finished, and you can see it generated the exact same image:
Here's the second image, so you can see for yourself compared to the first:
You can download Flux Dev, the model I used for this image, and input the exact same parameters yourself, and you’ll get the same image.
But you're using the same seed. Isn't the default behaviour to use random seed?
And obviously, you're using the same model for each of these, while these people would probably have a custom trained model that they use which you have no access to.
That's not really proof that you can replicate their art by typing the same sentence like you claimed.
If you didn’t understand that I clearly meant with the same model and seed from the context of talking about it being deterministic, that’s a you problem.
Bro, it's you who said type the same sentence. Why are you saying the wrong things and then try to change your claims later?
The problem is that you couldn't be bothered to try and say the correct thing, and then have the gall to blame other people for your own mistake.
And in what kind of context does using the same seed even makes sense? Do people determine the seed first before creating their prompt? This is a genuine question, btw. I've always thought that people generally use a random seed when generating an image until they find one they like, then use that seed to modify the prompt to fine tune it.
In the context that I’m explaining that the thing is deterministic. Do you disagree? Because that was my point. Diffusion models are deterministic.
That's actually fundamentally untrue, like independent of your opinion, I promise that when people generate an image with a phrase it will be different and is not deterministic ( not in the way you mean ) .
You and I cannot type the same prompt into the same AI generative model and receive the same result, no system works with that level of specificity, by design.
They pretty much all use some form of entropy / noise.
It’s literally as true as it can possibly be. Given the same inputs (including the same seed), a diffusion model will produce exactly the same output every time. It’s deterministic in the most fundamental meaning of the word. That’s why when you share an image on CivitAI people like it when you share your input parameters, so they can duplicate the image. I have recreated the exact same images using models from there.
Humans are not deterministic (at least as far as we know). If I give two people exactly the same prompt, and exactly the same “training data” (show them the same references, I guess), they will never produce the same output. Even if I give the same person the same prompt, they won’t be able to reproduce the same image again.
I do actually believe that everything, including human behavior is deterministic. I also believe there is nothing special about human consciousness or creation tbh