I hope every artist starts using it.
AI art isn’t real art.
The tool’s creators are seeking to make it so that AI model developers must pay artists to train on data from them that is uncorrupted.
That’s not something a technical solution will work for. We need copyright laws to be updated.
Disney lawyers just started salivating
Seems like Disney is as eager to adopt this technology as anyone
A few goofy Steamboat Willie knock offs pale beside the benefit of axing half your art department every few years, until everything is functionally a procedural generation.
They’re playing both sides. Who do you think wins when model training becomes prohibitively expensive to for regular people? Mega corporations already own datasets, and have the money to buy more. And that’s before they make users sign predatory ToS allowing them exclusive access to user data, effectively selling our own data back to us.
Regular people, who could have had access to a competitive, corporate-independent tool for creativity, education, entertainment, and social mobility, would instead be left worse off and with less than where we started.
Who do you think wins when model training becomes prohibitively expensive to for regular people?
We passed that point at inception. Its always been more efficient for Microsoft to do its training at a 10,000 Petaflop giga-plant in Iowa than for me to run Stable Diffusion on my home computer.
Regular people, who could have had access to a competitive, corporate-independent tool for creativity, education, entertainment, and social mobility
Already have that. It’s called a $5 art kit from Michael’s.
This isn’t about creation, its about trade and propagation of the finished product within the art market. And its here that things get fucked, because my beautiful watercolor that took me 20 hours to complete isn’t going to find a buyer that covers half a week’s worth of living expenses, so long as said market place is owned and operated by folks who want my labor for free.
AI generation serves to mine the market at near-zero cost and redistribute the finished works for a profit.
Copyright/IP serves to separate the creator of a work from its future generative profits.
But all this ultimately happens within the context of the market itself. The legal and financial mechanics of the system are designed to profit publishers and distributors at the expense of creatives. That’s always been true and the latest permutation in how creatives get fucked is merely a variation on a theme.
instead be left worse off and with less than where we started.
AI Art does this whether or not its illegal, because it exists to undercut human creators of content by threatening them with an inferior-but-vastly-cheaper alternative.
The dynamic you’re describing has nothing to do with AI’s legality and everything to do with Disney’s ability to operate as monopsony buyer of bulk artistic product. The only way around this is to break Disney up as a singular mass-buyer of artwork, and turn the component parts of the business over to the artists (and other employees of the firm) as an enterprise that answers to and profits the people generating the valuable media rather than some cartel of third-party shareholders.
copyright laws need to be abolished
That would be an update, not sure it would be a good thing. As an artist I want to be able to tell where my work is used and where not. Would suck to find something from me used in fascist propaganda or something.
As an artist I want to be able to tell where my work is used and where not.
that would be nice. a government-enforced monopoly isnt an ethical vehicle to achieve your goal.
I’m open for other ideas, until then I take laws. I don’t see anything wrong with people making rules for interactions.
rules are ok. laws are unjust.
Rules that are not enforced don’t make any sense whatsoever.
wrong
Truly a “Which Way White Man” moment.
I’m old enough to remember people swearing left, right, and center that copyright and IP law being aggressively enforced against social media content has helped corner the market and destroy careers. I’m also well aware of how often images from DeviantArt and other public art venues have been scalped and misappropriated even outside the scope of modern generative AI. And how production houses have outsourced talent to digital sweatshops in the Pacific Rim, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America, where you can pay pennies for professional reprints and adaptations.
It seems like the problem is bigger than just “Does AI art exist?” and “Can copyright laws be changed?” because the real root of the problem is the exploitation of artists generally speaking. When exploitation generates an enormous profit motive, what are artists to do?
You should check out this article by Kit Walsh, a senior staff attorney at the EFF. The EFF is a digital rights group who recently won a historic case: border guards now need a warrant to search your phone.
A few quotes:
and
Yeah, that’s what I’m saying - our current copiright laws are insufficient to deal with AI art generation.
The issue is simply reproduction of original works.
Plenty of people mimic the style of other artists. They do this by studying the style of the artist they intend to mimic. Why is it different when a machine does the same thing?
No, the issue is commercial use of copirighted material as data to train the models.
Is there a similar tool that will “poison” my personal tracked data? Like, I know I’m going to be tracked and have a profile built on me by nearly everywhere online. Is there a tool that I can use to muddy that profile so it doesn’t know if I’m a trans Brazilian pet store owner, a Nigerian bowling alley systems engineer, or a Beverly Hills sanitation worker who moonlights as a practice subject for budding proctologists?
The browser addon “AdNauseum” can help with that, although it’s not a complete solution.
Mbyae try siunlhffg the mldide lterets of ervey wrod? I wnedor waht taht deos to a luaangge medol?
Begun, the AI Wars have.
Excited to see the guys that made Nightshade get sued in a Silicon Valley district court, because they’re something something mumble mumble intellectual property national security.
They already stole GPLv2 code for their last data poisoning scheme and remain in violation of that license. They’re just grifters.
sigh Grifts all the way down, it seems.