Strongly disagree.
If artists don’t want their data, their art being scraped by giant machines without any human oversight for profit they should be within their right to opt out. If they cannot opt out, why not poison the ill-gotten gains.
If the corporations behind these Machine Learning Algorithms were altruistic or open source, like Wikipedia is, perhaps I’d see your point. But not wanting your art to be sucked into a black hole to then be sold to others without credit or compensation I find more than fair.
Being someone with a foot in both worlds gives me a slightly robust viewpoint on this topic, so I try to chime in whenever I see this argument pop up. For reference, I have an MA in Visual Effects and a BS in Applied Mathematics, and work closely with artists and technologists in my job. I say this to support my credibility.
- You are absolutely correct in who we should be mad at. Not the AI developers, many of whom are just trying to explore what is possible and make something cool, but the megacorps who are profiteering from the invention. All of the companies that are pushing AI as another SaaS and the ones who are trying to use it to replace artists instead of augment them. 1a. The other two specific groups we should be getting the torches and pitchforks for are the politicians who put so much legislation through that they circumvent our legal right to negotiate contracts we have to sign (EULAs in this case) and the companies and individuals who take advantage of our impotence to negotiate by placing abusive and abhorrent IP rights clauses in the contracts. To be 100% clear, when Deviant Art was scraped, nothing was stolen from the artists. They had all signed away the rights to their artwork when they uploaded it. The material was stolen from or provided by DA. They owned the rights, they owned the art, they were the ones who were ripped off.
- “Ill-gotten gains” is a little strong of a terminology. At worst, it was dubiously obtained. The training of an AI is not that dissimilar to an artist looking at art they like and trying to recreate it to learn from the other artist, then attempting to make original pieces with what they learned. The only difference is scale. If you ask a practiced artist to recreate Water Lilies, if they have studied it and practiced Monet’s style, they would be able to recreate it with varying degrees of success. AI training is entirely destructive to the input material, nothing of the actual original survives, just an abstracted mathematical representation.
- You are so close to right on what the rights of artists should be. It should definitely be opt-in, not out. When posting anything online, the displaying company should only be provided a license to display the material, not ownership or non/exclusive transfer of any rights. Any and all uses of submitted materials should need to be expressly and explicitly requested from the content owner without exception. The fact that Disney can sue an elementary school for self-writing and self-producing a Frozen musical for the kids but I cannot tell Facebook that they cannot use the artwork I post to a group in their advertising is asinine. If they want to use my art, they should be using their wonderful chat system to send me a message and asking me to sign a consent form to license the art.
All in all, I advise to avoid blaming the AI engineers (most of whom are altruistic in their motives) and the users (most of whom just want to have fun and play) and focus on the politicians and profiteers. They are the real villains in the story, and also the ones who seem to manage to stay under the radar.
With the opt-out bit I was trying to get at consent, I should’ve worded that better.
I don’t know what exact argument to use, but a machine using art to “learn” feels very different from a human doing the same.
This comment deserved to be separated from the other discussion. I am studying some LLM stuff as a side project for myself and the author of the book I am reading was discussing the history of AI training a bit in the chapter I was reading. I personally did not realize that LLM models dated back to the very early 200X years. The whole “training on works of art” dates all the way back to the earliest days using non-licensed books and manuscripts in addition to emails, text messages, blog posts, news articles, etc. Scraping whatever content is needed to train an AI from the internet without really worrying about permission is very much so nothing new. It is just something that came to the forefront of the cultural zeitgeist with the release of SD and the clamor of attention it got.
I think the reason it was never really worried about is precisely how destructive the whole process is. The “Vectorization” step that is common to most if not all AI training algorithms fundamentally disassembles whatever the input is and applies statistical methods to make it something a computer can understand. How many times was each word used, what are the odds of two colors being next to each other, how many times did person A tap their foot? Once this is done, the original work is gone. There are no discernable features of the source material save for perhaps words that are unique to that, but most of the time those are filtered out, so even those are gone. That vector is what the AI is actually trained on, not the original work. All the sources are are chaos to derive statistics from. Nothing more, nothing less.
Does an author get to request consent before you read their book? Or is consent implied because they published it?
It is a humanist perspective. We feel uneasy about it because it is something that we thought was ours and maybe a couple of other animals.
In abstraction (boiling the idea down to the most basic form it can be stated), something that is not a human learned from our art to do it as well as we can. What the something is is borderline immaterial.
(being really careful not to strawman with this) If we select a description of something else that is doing the learning and see if it leaves an uneasy feeling. Maybe a bacterial colony was genetically engineered to have a sort of memory that allowed them to remember images that the colony had been on in the past and when exposed to a disorganized pigment environment, they would redistribute the pigment into a pattern similar to the images they had experienced previously. So scientists culture billions of bacteria and print off tens of thousands of images then expose the colony en mass to them. Now the colony can recreate many many art forms.
Is that the same, better, or worse than a computer? On one hand, the computer method gives access to everyone. There are profiteers, but there are also FOSS solutions that do not harvest data or transmit your personal info home. With the bacteria example, the spread may be smaller and slower, but you better believe that every major publisher and marketing firm would be lining up to purchase the Bactereo-5000 printer that could replace their entire art department the same as many are doing with Stable Diffusion.
When you contribute to society you don’t get to opt out of having your contribution used.
Someone writes a book or makes a piece of art there’s nothing in the world stopping a human from using that inspiration to create. Why would I want to limit the tools that make my work flow easier from making my work flow easier?
If you want to keep your ideas to yourself then keep them in your head.
Someone else using my work as inspiration is different from ripping my works off.
A machine learning algorithm falls in the latter category in my opinion.
Then perhaps you should look at using them so you can waylay your fears with knowledge.
They shouldn’t post their art online then. I draw digitally and on other mediums. I have used AI as a base when I have an idea but need a visual representation that matches what I see in my head and work off of that. That is what AI tools are meant for. You do have lazy hacks who just pump out ainart and don’t alter it or barely alter it and sell it.
There’s no point in complaining about AI. Adapt and learn to use the tool. Just like trad artists bitched when digital artists began being recognized as artist like they should have been. Different medium same outcome.
Same energy “oh you don’t like capitalism? Then why do you participate in it”.
Just because someone wants to share their work with others online doesn’t mean others should be allowed to indiscriminately absorb it into their black box.
