Imagine fighting against the tools that will drive all of us into the future because of your own personal ego. People who actively try to limit the ability of others to advance our knowledge and capacity as individuals deserve to find themselves left behind in the dust.
These people are the same wannabe gatekeeper ‘traditional artists’ that complained about cameras being invented, or digital imagery, or photoshop. These people will deride anything that is beyond their chosen personal scope of what is ‘OK to be art’.
We try to stand on the shoulders of giants who came before us and use their knowledge to do what they couldn’t, and these pathetic parasites of humanity try to trip the giant.
Knowlege should be free, anyone who actively prevents others from learning and doing and advancing are troglodyte remnants of a bygone era, you’re the punch card operators that refuse to learn how to write code, the taxi driver that refuses to use nav systems, the pilot that refuses to leave their propellers behind, the builder using a hammer instead of a nailgun.
As someone who values freedom of access to knowledge I find these people utterly pathetic in their ego driven attempts to hamstring humanity. I’ve been a digital artist for 25 years, and I hear the same shit from traditional artists all the time when you’d bring up photoshop, all tools have their place and AI can’t replace traditional artists because we still need traditional artists to come up with concepts and styles for training data. AI assisted creation processes benefit from traditional art skills, knowing composition helps make better images, knowing cinematic terminology makes it easier to replicate those things. These people just refuse to advance their own skill sets. You’d give them a lighter and they’d deride you for not rubbing sticks together for an hour.
It’s ego driven hubris and I hope all of these people who fail to adapt get left behind.
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.
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.
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.
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.
these models are not tools of the future unless all the the research and code is public.
You’re confusing freedom of access to knowledge with the application of said knowledge here. I’m not necessarily disagreeing with the rest, but I don’t like you calling this “freedom of information” when it’s clearly not, and is much better described as a kind of technological progressivism. What I mean is the idea that technology always progresses forwards, improving society as it goes forward. So, all technology ought to make people’s lives better, even though that’s not always true. I’ve been reading “The evolution of technology” by George Basalla for a philosophy course, and in it Basalla makes it clear that a lot of things that are commonly thought of technology, like that it necessarily comes from science and that it’s most times revolutionary, arguing that they aren’t always inspired by science, and isn’t always discontinuous. So I don’t think that this is as straight forward as you make it out to be. (it’s actually a good read and I definitely recommend it. Basalla actually draws upon many different examples to showcase his points, and even accepts when no general theory can be proposed, for instance, to describe how novelty arises) I understand that AI has its place, but I would argue that AI isn’t being used in the right way most times. Rather than being something used as a tool, it’s being used as a replacement for artists. Again, I’m not necessarily disagreeing with you here, it’s just I think you’re being harsh and making wild accusations, like claiming “These people just refuse to advance their own skill sets”, which makes me want to try to refute this.
Anyways I’m done with my stupid rant, I guess.
No, it’s being used as a replacement for old artists, just like we stopped hiring painters to paint window signs and advertising and now we print them on fancy technology that puts images on paper like magic. Just like we stopped using hand drawn architectural designs, and those that had the old skills needed to learn new skills. Just like morse code operators gave way to the radio operator, and sketch artists gave way to photographers, and traditional artists who made way for digital artists, like the dumb phone to the smart phone, new tech, new skills, new abilities to do more with the experience and knowledge of others. Now you need an AI prompt artist with a plethora of AI and digital image related knowledge and skills.
Yeah. Watching white collar working get upset about AI is very eye-opening.
They legitimately believe that it’s okay to replace blue-collar workers with automation, but not white-collar ones. They don’t actually care about progress. They care about doing as little work as possible while making as much money as possible.
I’ll agree with you if copyright gets abolished. Until then creators have rights.
Creators do have rights to their works, but I can view their works and make something entirely derivative, and have rights to that myself. This is no different with AI. AI can only do so much, and it’s ability to imitate is a facsimile not a direct one to one. Not one of those artists would make something with AI using their own images as training and be impressed by the results unless their results are so mediocre to be so easily duplicated to perfection. It’s also still just a tool. Yes you can create AN image with a simple prompts and AI. But to create anything of specific use or value still takes time and knowledge and skills, utilising hundreds of gigabytes of training data, models, specific trained data sets for styles, all based on the creators ideals as to what they are trying to achieve, and that’s not to mention the weeks and months to learn said skills as well as the use of other digital modelling and imaging software to construct poses, depth maps, scene construction, and a dozen other pre and post-processing actions. I worked with photoshop and was told my work was worthless because it wasn’t traditional, 25 years ago, now if you turned your nose up at photoshop image generation you’d be looked at as a caveman, it’s basically industry standard. AI is just another tool in the digital image generation playground, anyone scared of it either no longer values their own talent, or refuses to adapt to the times.
The arms race will soon be AGI versus AGI and us humans will be on the sideline not even sure who is winning.
Do you think an authentic AGI would have ethical\moral boundaries completely divorced from what the original software programmed? In other words would it be able to make it’s own decisions without interference?
Which is incredibly favorable for the AI side. Like current countermeasures are either almost completely worthless, or degrade the quality of the protected medium so much that you wouldn’t use it.
The scary thing about this joke is that ai has been able to do hands for a relatively long time now.
its going much faster then people are able to process.
The thumbnail in this article is by Dalle-3
Not really, if you read the paper what they’re doing is creating an image that looks like a dog, is labeled as a dog, but is very close to the model’s version of a cat in feature space. This means manual review of the training set won’t help.
I don’t think the idea is to protect specific images, it’s to create enough of these poisoned images that training your model on random free images you pull off the internet becomes risky.
Hmm, sounds more like they are adding structures to the images such that what is clearly a picture of a dog registers as a picture of a cat to an AI. I suppose this can be done by altering the pixels in a way invisible to humans, but visible to AI, adding a cat into the “ghost pixels”.
I went and skimmed the paper because I was curious too.
If my skimming is correct, what they do is similar to adversarial attacks on classifiers, where a second model learns to change as few pixels as possible to confuse a classifier into giving a wrong prediction.
Looking at the examples of dogs and cats: They find pictures of dogs where by making only minimal changes, invisible to the naked eye, they can get the autoencoder to spit out (almost) the same latent representation as an image of a cat would have. Done to enough dog-images, this will then confuse the underlying diffusion model to produce latent representations of cat images when prompted to generate a dog. Edit for clarity: Those generated latent representations would then decode into cat images.
If my thinking doesn’t fail me, this attack could easily be thwarted by unfreezing the pretrained autoencoder. In the paper that introduced latent diffusion they write that such approaches already exist. If “Nightshade” takes off, I’m sure those approaches would be refined and used. Even just finetuning the autoencoder for a few epochs first should be enough to move the latent representations of the poisoned dog images and those of the cat images they’re meant to resemble far enough apart to make the attack meaningless.
Edit: I also wonder how robust this attack is against just adding an imperceptible amount of noise to the poisoned images.
Anyone who damages an AI model should be liable for the entire cost to purchase and train said model. You can’t just destroy someone’s property because you don’t like how they use it.
Maybe they should’ve thought about that before they integrated people’s content without consent???
The law would be the right response there.
Especially since malicious actors can very easily abuse the fuck out of this.
If you think there won’t be a post right on fucking lemmy itself about infecting images then posting them on free repos because “lol fuck ai” then you’re just not looking around, dude
I understand where you are coming, but most AI models are trained without the consent of those who’s work is being used. Same with Github Copilot, it’s training violated the licensing terms of various software licenses.
So artists can’t make certain art because some company’s AI might get confused. Right then.
Gaussian blur 1 px, Sharpen 1 px
Bye bye any pixel level encoding with minimal quality loss.
Why do you think this would do anything to affect training? The patterns learned by ML models are way too fuzzy to be picky about exact pixel values.
I’m not sure what your experience is with the training data but that would absolutely effect the inputs.
I’m a professional software developer with ML experience, albeit not an expert in ML specifically. It would obviously affect the literal value of the embeddings, but there’s no chance it would have a qualitative effect on a reasonably performant model.
These attacks don’t work in the long term. You can confuse current systems like clip but the moment a new one is trained your system stops working.
That’s the first big problem with stuff like this.
The second big one is that artists have to first hear about this, then take the time to actually learn how to use this software, then apply it to all of their past & future artwork, and also somehow apply it to every version of their artwork that is floating around the internet, books, or photographs and not currently in their possession. And then in a few months they have to do that all over again.
It’s insane. I look at this and think it’s cool technology, but as an artist I will never use it. I’m too busy actually creating art to mess around with poisoning my own work. I don’t even have time to do copyright takedowns on people stealing my art and passing it off as their own, or Chinese merchants on Amazon selling my art without permission. Stuff like this is well-meaning, but its absolutely unrealistic.
