> This reads like you know what’s best for artists and takes their point of view completely for granted.
I think I know that little better than lawyers do. Even if only because I had zero financial incentive when I formed my opinions.
> As a photographer, I can’t claim to have or require a fraction of the skills used by creators of hand-made art. And even I am not excited about some AI slurping up my best work and commoditizing it.
I know it doesn't feel great. But your art has already been commoditized. There are hundreds photographers perfectly capable of replicating your style and many of them do it completely accidentally. The value of your art is a personal element not the content itself. What's valuable is your service and the name you made for yourself.
AI gives an artist a ticket to a lottery that can strongly boost their name without doing any additional service.
> The amount of literal content stealing and “creative reposting” that happens with absolutely zero attribution to the actual artist is quite extensive.
I wonder how much money you've lost due to that. Besides, attribution is naturally built into those "plagiarist" prompts for AI.
As for prompts that don't mention specific authors ... you shouldn't kid yourself that AI won't be able to completely naturally recreate your style from styles similar to yours even it it never seen yours. After all that's what you did to create your style. You created a variation on similar styles you saw during your education as an artist.
> ... just make it far easier to steal content while making it harder to detect or take action against such theft.
steal, theft ... what do artists actually loose in those brazen robberies?
Copyright conglomerates created language that doesn't reflect reality. But it reflects most primitive human instincts evolved in the world of scarcity not abundance.
AI gives an artist a ticket to a lottery that can strongly boost their name without doing any additional service.
Fame has a very short half-life and unless you have all the licensing/contractual machinery in place beforehand, you probably won't be able to cash on that boost. The line of thinking you articulate here is extremely familiar to anyone who does creative work. It's the same argument that producers use to get people to work for free or cheap on films, that broadcast or streaming services use to justify very low payouts to content creators, that commercial commissioners use to try and get art for free etc. The creative field is absolutely full of promoters who offer to match artist to audience, with the promoters getting the first cut of ticket sales and the artist getting the last or none.
Besides, attribution is naturally built into those "plagiarist" prompts for AI.
Only if you are already kinda famous. Suppose you have a distinctive visual style that's a great fit with a genre, like ghost stories. I, an unscrupulous publisher, note that the market for ghost stories is currently booming and decide to buy, or perhaps generate from AI, and bunch of mediocre ghost stories, and then publish them with 'art in the style of scotty79.' I make a little app offering 'best new ghost stories every day!!' for $1, put it in app stores, and make $7 million before the ghost story fad runs its course. You get nothing, and consumers who got familiar with your style by paying $1 or looking at ads to use my app don't care about you because I never gave you credit and in their mind the style is associated with Best Daily Ghost Stories, not you.
Maybe a few of them will do the work of combing back through the history of the fad and to find which artists influenced the 'daily ghost story' aesthetic. Maybe this will lead to a revival of interest in your work even though the fad it was associated with has come and gone. Good luck with that.
The dirty secret of the creative industries is that if you don't get paid up front for your contribution, you will probably never get paid at all.
> Fame has a very short half-life and unless you have all the licensing/contractual machinery in place beforehand, you probably won't be able to cash on that boost.
I'm not sure how did you manage to miss thousands of artists able to capitalize on sudden and accidental fame for decades without any prior arrangements. I'm not saying it's easy. I'm saying it's possible. Also to put this in context compare this with how often very popular artists get completely screwed by huge copyright behemoths earning a score of money but mostly for someone else, someone completely uncreative.
Trying to buy something for exposure is absolutely abhorrent because you try to coax someone into doing work for no money. And for nothing basically because people who try to pay with exposure don't really provide any significant exposure 99.99% of times.
If AI people were forcing artist to create new art and paying them with the promise of exposure in their generated works I'll be completely on your side. However it requires zero work from artist to have their already published work to be used as learning material. That's why they never opposed it when other artists were learning from their art. That and of course that target of their wrath would be basically the entire rest of the art community which wouldn't make them very popular.
> Suppose you have a distinctive visual style that's a great fit with a genre, like ghost stories. .... I never gave you credit and in their mind the style is associated with Best Daily Ghost Stories, not you.
That's completely fine in my book. And if those generated stories get really popular so I learn about them I might do just a little bit of online marketing to inject my name in the discussions about them and publish new ones to my fresh new subscribers ahead of time. Heck, I could create my own generated and fine-tuned manually content and sell it just like that guy does since he's already proven a business model for me.
Compare now this with the world of strict copyright where this guy doesn't even know I exist, same goes for swaths of fans of ghost stories. Or let's assume he knows and wants to deal with me. Since he's the one with the money I'll be severely dependent of him and strongly disadvantaged in any deal. But let's assume we struck a deal that's nice for me. There's no way I'll be able to produce new ghost stories every day. Not to mention I wouldn't wish that workload on my worst enemy. So no business happens and many people have their love for ghost stories un-satiated, many didn't discover their love for ghost stories and I am 100% still poor struggling author who's known by nobody.
World without copyright and zero publishing cost is the one where authors and consumers are in control and negotiate through attention economy. World of copyright is the world where copyright hoarding dragon starve both artists and consumers.
> The dirty secret of the creative industries is that if you don't get paid up front for your contribution, you will probably never get paid at all.
And yet you vehemently defend the system that created this situation and refuse to even consider alternatives.
> If AI people were forcing artist to create new art and paying them with the promise of exposure in their generated works I'll be completely on your side. However it requires zero work from artist to have their already published work to be used as learning material.
This seems like an odd way to frame this. The reality is closer to "artists were never included in the conversation to begin with". Arguing that "no one forced them to create anything new" seems irrelevant when you consider that without the content, none of this exists to begin with.
The problem is the assumption that artists are or should be universally fine with this.
> World without copyright and zero publishing cost is the one where authors and consumers are in control and negotiate through attention economy. World of copyright is the world where copyright hoarding dragon starve both artists and consumers.
If you want to argue against copyright, that's fine, and I have plenty of issues with the current iteration of this framework of rules. But that is not the same argument as "Tools like Stable Diffusion aren't infringing because xyz technical reasons".
I think it'd be helpful to be clearer about arguments for/against the spirit of the rules themselves vs. arguments about why generative AI tools do or do not create content that infringes those rules as currently designed or require an entirely new framework of thinking about the problem.
> The problem is the assumption that artists are or should be universally fine with this.
I don't think anybody assumes all artists will be fine with it. But being disgruntled doesn't automatically mean you should be the one who makes the decisions. Virtually every human has a stake in this because nearly everybody consumes some art. It's time we put stronger emphasis on the rights of everybody else, instead of just mostly people who bought copyright, and artists those people think have the right to exploit.
> "Tools like Stable Diffusion aren't infringing because xyz technical reasons"
I don't think I'm saying there's some technical reasons those tools aren't infringing. Just overwhelming moral, practical and economical reasons that they should be allowed to operate and treated just like human artists who too can mimic and mix styles and nobody can deny them authorship unless they copy specific complex elements nearly verbatim.
Btw if human artist think AI got to close to one of his works he can prove it
beyond all doubt by registering their creations on some blockchain with his key and timestamp and I wouldn't be against banning this specific AI artwork that got too close.
Banning use of all published art as teaching material by default is not the way to go in my opinion.
Banning imitating specific style is bad too.
Imagine portrait painters banned photography from using classical portrait compositions to protect their jobs. Or denied photographers even looking at portraits so they can never learn to imitate.
> I think it'd be helpful to be clearer about arguments for/against the spirit of the rules themselves vs. arguments about why generative AI tools do or do not create content that infringes those rules as currently designed or require an entirely new framework of thinking about the problem.
Maybe, but AI is the wonderful opportunity to discuss the spirit of horrible rules we currently have. Best opportunity we had since creation of social networking sites that chipped those rules away a bit.
AI "artists" are commissioners in my view. If the learning and creating is done by the model, the model is the rights holder. Can't have your cake and eat it too.
> I think I know that little better than lawyers do. Even if only because I had zero financial incentive when I formed my opinions.
This still doesn't give you standing to speak on behalf of artists, and "because I know better than lawyers do" is generally a problematic form of argument. It continues to ignore the key people that matter: the individuals with the creativity and skills to create the content that started this whole IP conundrum in the first place.
> I know it doesn't feel great. But your art has already been commoditized. There are hundreds photographers perfectly capable of replicating your style and many of them do it completely accidentally. The value of your art is a personal element not the content itself. What's valuable is your service and the name you made for yourself.
This is a very one-dimensional view of what makes art, and how the broader community plays a role. I have no illusions about where I stand as an individual photographer among the multitude of photographers in terms of raw technical talent and capability. But I'd argue that you are deeply misinterpreting the implications of that reality, and imposing your own definition of value on a category of human expression that is by definition deeply subjective and far more complex than a simple formula of exposure and conversion rate with some resulting monetary return.
> I wonder how much money you've lost due to that. Besides, attribution is naturally built into those "plagiarist" prompts for AI.
This assumes the only reason I would be upset is because of lost sales. I take photos for the love of it. I don't currently sell them. If someone else starts making money on my work, it takes on a different meaning entirely. And even if I turned this into a business, "lost sales" is still only one of multiple factors.
Regarding prompts, how is attribution built in? Nothing requires an individual to reveal their prompts, currently. There are AI-art sharing communities emerging where prompts are held tight, because the authoring of the prompt is the only thing the "AI artist" brings to the table. Even if prompts were universally provided, that doesn't solve the issue of permission, or imply that this is automatically an acceptable form of attribution to all artists overnight.
When video game companies use stolen artwork, they are ridiculed and derided for blatantly profiting from the work of individuals. Even if it was an honest mistake, this kind of misuse is always a headline.
And yet, when we talk about a system that unlocks a seemingly limitless portal through which the life's work of every artist is made systematically available to the entire world without limit, with no consultation with the original creators, those worries about unattributed benefit just disappear.
I'm curious how you feel about the video game scenario?
> This still doesn't give you standing to speak on behalf of artists
Sure. That's why I don't speak on their behalf. I'm just voicing my opinion about harmful silliness of the scheme they allowed themselves to be coaxed into.
> It continues to ignore the key people that matter: the individuals with the creativity and skills to create the content that started this whole IP conundrum in the first place.
Silently ignored in lawyers arguments are all the consumers of culture. All the people who wrote the prompts and all the people who drew great joy from looking at AI creation. They'd get literally nothing if the case of strict copyright so their collective loss is great because they are many.
> But I'd argue that you are deeply misinterpreting the implications of that reality, and imposing your own definition of value on a category of human expression that is by definition deeply subjective and far more complex than a simple formula of exposure and conversion rate with some resulting monetary return.
Sure, opinions may vary. Only actual data can resolve who's wrong. And the number for compensation of artists in copyright industry are not great when compared to viral gains from attention based, open economy.
> If someone else starts making money on my work, it takes on a different meaning entirely.
If you haven't lost anything why do you care? Why do you want to devoid others of joy they draw from availability of artwork?
> Regarding prompts, how is attribution built in? Nothing requires an individual to reveal their prompts, currently.
It's the internet. People talk. Nothing stays secret. And at any point in time original artist or their fan can chip in and say, "yeah, that's exactly like mine, see?". And no-one can do anything about it.
> When video game companies use stolen artwork, they are ridiculed and derided for blatantly profiting from the work of individuals. Even if it was an honest mistake, this kind of misuse is always a headline.
Yeah. Using AI artwork in a very specific style would generate same kind of news. And those games are not very good and they don't make much money. So not only there's no harm, severe ostracism. There's also not much opportunity to have any gain if copyright was strictly observed. And as you noticed it already happens. Darkest Dungeon had very fresh and attractive art-style. Now it's very easy to randomly encounter in Play Store cheap clicker games blatantly ripping off that esthetics. It's not directly stolen, but it's pretty much what AI would do if someone was hell bent on replicating the esthetics. Yet humans did it. What's the loss to Darkest Dungeon graphic designer? Exactly zero.
And I think games that would start with AI art and got really popular ... they'd invite original artist for DLC or to get on the news or for just good will of the public. Public relationships is very important when selling games.
I think I know that little better than lawyers do. Even if only because I had zero financial incentive when I formed my opinions.
> As a photographer, I can’t claim to have or require a fraction of the skills used by creators of hand-made art. And even I am not excited about some AI slurping up my best work and commoditizing it.
I know it doesn't feel great. But your art has already been commoditized. There are hundreds photographers perfectly capable of replicating your style and many of them do it completely accidentally. The value of your art is a personal element not the content itself. What's valuable is your service and the name you made for yourself.
AI gives an artist a ticket to a lottery that can strongly boost their name without doing any additional service.
> The amount of literal content stealing and “creative reposting” that happens with absolutely zero attribution to the actual artist is quite extensive.
I wonder how much money you've lost due to that. Besides, attribution is naturally built into those "plagiarist" prompts for AI.
As for prompts that don't mention specific authors ... you shouldn't kid yourself that AI won't be able to completely naturally recreate your style from styles similar to yours even it it never seen yours. After all that's what you did to create your style. You created a variation on similar styles you saw during your education as an artist.
> ... just make it far easier to steal content while making it harder to detect or take action against such theft.
steal, theft ... what do artists actually loose in those brazen robberies?
Copyright conglomerates created language that doesn't reflect reality. But it reflects most primitive human instincts evolved in the world of scarcity not abundance.