If I took a few hours to make an impressive AI generated price of art, that’s still %0.0001 the amount of time an actual a real artist would’ve spent developing the skill and then taking the time to make the peice. I get to skip all that because AI stole the real artists’ works.
Comment on US rejects AI copyright for famous state fair-winning Midjourney art
nxfsi@lemmy.world 1 year ago
If those people have ever tried actually using image generation software they will know that there is significant human authorship required to make something that isn’t remotely dogshit. The most important skill in visual art is not how to draw something but knowing what to draw.
dfc09@lemmy.world 1 year ago
NotAPenguin@kbin.social 1 year ago
What about photographers?
dfc09@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I’m pretty specifically trying to bring to mind the time it takes to hone the skill. Photography is similar in that it takes many many hours to get to the point where you can produce a good work of art.
If an artist (or photographer) spends a couple hours on a peice, that’s not the actual amount of time needed. It takes years to reach the point where they can make art in a few hours. That’s what people are upset about, that’s why nobody cares about “it took me hours to generate a good peice!”, because it takes an artist 10,000 hours.
What AI art is doing is distilling that 10,000 hours (per artist) into a training set of 99% stolen works to allow someone with zero skill to produce a work of art in a few hours.
What’s most problematic isn’t who the copyright of the AI generated age belongs to, it’s that artists who own their own works are having it stolen to be used in a commercial product. Go to any AI image generator, and you’ll see “premium” options you can pay for. That product, that option to pay, only exists on the backs of artists who did not give licensing for their works, and did not get paid to provide the training data.
greenskye@lemm.ee 1 year ago
People have made millions off of photographs despite having zero training and only casually snapping the photo. You can get lucky, or the subject of your photo might be especially interesting or rare (such as from a newsworthy event).
I think we need something more nuanced than ‘effort input’
Natanael@slrpnk.net 1 year ago
The law is about human expression, not human work. That which a human expressed (with creative height) is protected, all else is not
akulium@feddit.de 1 year ago
So if I tell someone else to draw something, who gets the copyright?
trashgirlfriend@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Depends on your agreement.
I think by default if there’s no contract saying otherwise, the copyright stays with the original artist.
Fisk400@feddit.nu 1 year ago
I would argue that the artist produces the copyright and transfers it to you. If the artist isn’t human and cant produce copyrights then it cant sell it to you. A lot of argumentation here is that we should treat AI like we treat a human artist. That is an insane line to go down because that would make any AI work effectively slavery.
Eccitaze@yiffit.net 1 year ago
Hahaha, hahaha, no. That is absolutely NOT the default arrangement. Unless otherwise negotiated in the contract, the artist retains the copyright for the produced work and is free to use it as they please, including putting it in their portfolio, making further edits to the work, reusing it for other purposes, etc. The commissioner gets a copy of the finished product, but by default has few rights to use it themselves. Technically, I’ve personally infringed an artist’s copyright by cropping a work I commissioned from them to use as an icon. However, the vast majority of artists don’t typw enforce this aspect of their IP rights, due to a lack of resources and also because it would shred their reputation and kill their business.
Explicit transfer/licensure of copyright can be negotiated, but the most artists charge an extremely hefty fee for transferring the full copyright, often double or triple the price of the work itself. Most individual commissioners don’t bother as a result, but commercial organizations looking to reuse the commissioned work must negotiate a license for the work in order to avoid a nasty infringement lawsuit.
chemical_cutthroat@lemmy.world 1 year ago
It’s actually gotten significantly easier, which makes this artist’s work even more impressive. There is a very real chance they spent more time on this piece than other artists they were up against spent on theirs. I generate thousands of images a month, and sure, I can just take the first thing midjouney throws at me and be satisfied with 80% accuracy, or I can work and rework, each generation with diminishing returns, until I get to 98% accuracy and just accept that it’s not capable of 100% yet.
Squids@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
There is a very real chance they spent more time on this piece than other artists they were up against spent on theirs. I generate thousands of images a month
… you’ve never actually made art, have you? The sort of stuff that you enter into contests takes months to make, from the actual painting to rough sketches to reference gathering, and that’s just the basics
Clicking a button a thousand times isn’t really comparable
greenskye@lemm.ee 1 year ago
I’m not at all disagreeing with the overall sentiment here, but having given it a go, I will say AI image generation is a very tedious endeavor many times.
It’s not just clicking a button. It’s closer to trying to Google some very specific, but hard to find medical problem. You constantly tweak and retweak your search terms, both learning from what has been output so far and as you think of new ways to stop it from giving you crap you don’t want. And each time you hit search the process takes forever, anywhere from 5 minutes to 5 hours.
I don’t really feel like this constitutes skill, but it does represent a certain amount of brute force stubbornness to try to get AI image generation to do what you want.
Squids@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
Ok using your Google analogy - there’s a reason why “librarian” is a job and “Googler” isn’t. One requires years of skill and practice to interpret a request and find the right information and do all sorts of things, and the other is someone kinda bashing keys to make Google give them what they want. You wouldn’t put them in remotely the same class
kmkz_ninja@lemmy.world 1 year ago
… you’ve never actually made art, have you?
I drew a pony when I was 6? Does that count? Or does gatekeeping art go that far?
trashgirlfriend@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Maybe if you spent some of that time you spend tweaking settings on midjourney practicing art, you’d make something worthwhile and not just generated content slop. :)
chemical_cutthroat@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Yeah, or I could continue doing what I enjoy in the way that I enjoy it, and you can fuck off with your judgemental comments.
trashgirlfriend@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Enjoy adding negative value to the world
Th4tGuyII@kbin.social 1 year ago
Look, if I train a monkey to draw art, no matter how good my instructions or the resulting art is, I don't own that art, the monkey does.
As non-human animals cannot copyright their works, it then thusly defaults to the public domain.
The same applies to AI. You train it to make the art you want, but you're not the one making the art, the AI is. There's no human element in the creation itself, just like with the monkey.
You can edit or make changes as you like to the art, and you own those, but you don't own the art because the monkey/AI drew it.
kmkz_ninja@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Does my camera own my art, and not me?
Th4tGuyII@kbin.social 1 year ago
No, because there's a fundemental difference between a tool that functions directly as a consequence of what you do, and an independent thing that acts based on your instruction.
When you take a photo, you have a direct hand in making it - when you direct an AI to make art, it is the one making the art, you just choose what it makes.
It's as silly as asking if your paintbrush owns your art as a response to being told that you can't claim copyright over art you don't own.
uint8_t@feddit.de 1 year ago
you control the seed, control the prompt — you can get the “AI” to produce the very same image if you want. so yes, you do have
a tool that functions directly as a consequence of what you do
A_Wild_Alt_Appears@lemmynsfw.com 1 year ago
Thats honestly a fair point. I think I often feel lot of hostility towards ai, because a lot of aspects of how its being used or the arguments made by its proponents don’t sit right with me, but its clear our systems need to evolve to handle ai and ai created content more appropriately
Fisk400@feddit.nu 1 year ago
Then why does all AI need to harvest the work of millions of artists in order to create one mediocre painting? Millions upon millions of hours of blood sweat and tears is hidden behind that algorithm. Thousands of people starting to draw when they are 5 and never stopping in order to get as good as they are.
All big AI services refuse to disclose the training set they use and those that we know anything about absolutely uses copyrighted material from artist that didn’t consent to be part of the training set.
This is what fuels my contempt for AI. People that uses literal billions of dollars of stolen time and talent and then pretend that actually having ideas is the important bit.
Skua@kbin.social 1 year ago
I mean, I agree that the developers of these AI tools need to be made to be more ethical in how they use stuff for training, but it is worth noting that that's kind of also how humans learn. Every human artist learns, in part, by absorbing the wealth of prior art that they experience. Copying existing pieces is even a common way to practice.
Fisk400@feddit.nu 1 year ago
Yeah, that shrug you did about how it would be nice if AI didn’t steal art is part of the problem. Shrugging and saying joink doesn’t work when you want to copyright stuff.
Human learns by assimilating other people work and working it into their own style, yes. That means that the AI is the human in this and the AI owns the artistic works. Since AI does not yet have the right to own copyrights, any works produced by that AI is not copyrightable.
That is if you accept that AI and humans learn art in the same way. I don’t personally think that is analogous but it doesn’t matter for this discussion.
Skua@kbin.social 1 year ago
There's a reason I said "they should be made to be more ethical" and not just "they should be more ethical". I know that they aren't going to do it themselves and I'll support well-written regulations on them.
Isn't it what almost your entire comment was about?
Venat0r@lemmy.world 1 year ago
To play devil’s advocate: What about artists that use assistants, is using AI not the same as using an assistant?
drewdarko@kbin.social 1 year ago
The difference is a human artist can then make new unique art and contribute to the craft so it can advance and they can make a living off it. AI made art isn’t unique, it’s a collage of other art. To get art from AI you have to feed it prompts of things it’s seen before. So when AI is used for art it takes jobs from artists and prevents the craft from advancing.
Skua@kbin.social 1 year ago
My point is that this description literally applies just as much to humans. Humans are also trained on vast quantities of things they've seen before and meanings associated with them.
This is genuinely a misunderstanding of how these programs work.
Because the only art anyone has ever done is when someone else paid them for it? There are a lot of art forms that generally aren't commercially viable, and it's very odd to insist that commercial viability is what advances an art form.
I do actually get regularly paid for a kind of work that is threatened by these things (although in my case it's LLMs, not images). For the time being I can out-perform ChatGPT and the like, but I don't expect that that will last forever. Either I'll end up incorporating it or I'll need to find something else to do. But I'm not going to stop doing my hobby versions of it.
Technology kills jobs all the time. We don't have many human calculators these days. If the work has value beyond the financial, people will keep doing it.
Meowoem@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
All those artists did the same thing, they’re also only able to pursue art because the work of so many people before has made a world in which we’re so surrounded by luxury that they don’t need to work the fields just to survive.
As the famous meme so rightly states, we live in a society. I get that a lot of modern artists don’t want to help build a better society for all because they want to protect their privileged position in capitalism but that’s not really an option, you live by the sword of capitalism you die by the sword of capitalism.
Fisk400@feddit.nu 1 year ago
Artists. Famously part of the ruling class.
Meowoem@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
You can have a privileged position in capitalism without being the ruling class, beside we’re not talking about all the artists because a huge amount do art because they love creativity, expression and visual beauty - the ones who wage this absurd battle against emerging technology are either in a privileged position or who envision themselves in that privileged position in the future.
mriormro@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Jesus, you AI people are idiots.
Meowoem@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
And you haters have nothing substantial to say beside screaming that the whole world should stop just so you don’t have to adapt to a changing world
The funniest thing is the current system isn’t even very good for artists, you’re fighting to protect capitalism when capitalism is shitting all over you but because you can imagine a situation where you’re slightly higher up the stack than other people you’re fighting desperately for your chance to shit on people below you. It really is shameful tbh.
kmkz_ninja@lemmy.world 1 year ago
See ya in 10 years, friend. We’ll revisit this conversation.
Honytawk@lemmy.zip 1 year ago
It is funny how that “one mediocre painting” won the award while the human art did not.