Comment by rhubarbtree

Comment by rhubarbtree 17 hours ago

11 replies

I think many artists will see that if they publish anything original then AI companies will immediately use it as training data without regards to copyright.

The result will be less original art. They will simply stop creating it or publishing it.

IMO music streaming has similarly lead to a collapse in quality music artistry, as fewer talented individuals are incentivised to go down that path.

AI will do the same for illustration.

It won’t do the same for _art_ in the “contemporary art” sense, as great art is mostly beyond the abilities of AI models. That’s probably an AGI complete task. That’s the good news.

I’m kinda sad about it. The abilities of the models are impressive, but they rely on harvesting the collective efforts of so many talented and hardworking artists, who are facing a double whammy: their own work is being dubiously used to put them out of a job.

Sometimes I feel like the tech community had an opportunity to create a wonderful future powered by technology. And what we decided to do instead was enshittify the world with ads, undermine the legal system, and extract value from people’s work without their permission.

Back in the day real hackers used to gather online to “stick it to the man”. They despised the greed and exploitation of Wall Street. And now we have become torch bearers for the very same greed.

rererereferred 11 hours ago

> music streaming has similarly lead to a collapse in quality music artistry, as fewer talented individuals are incentivised to go down that path.

Is there data for this? I feel there's more musicians than ever and there's more very talented musicians than ever and the most famous ones are more famous than ever so I would like to see if that's correct.

  • rhubarbtree 8 hours ago

    I’ve heard other people say that.

    I think there are more musicians with reach than ever.

    I would say it’s very likely there are far fewer musicians making a living out of their music than there were in the last. That’s the key difference.

    And the truth is that for most people incentives matter, so not being able to make a living from music means very talented people who are financially motivated (ie most of them) do something else instead.

numpad0 16 hours ago

I don't think future tense is appropriate here as it's been few years since appearance of open weights image models. We're already transitioning into the gap phase between Napster to Vocaloid.

aaclark 15 hours ago

100% Agree.

I wonder if there is a mitigation strategy for this. Is there a way to make (human-made-art) scraping robustly difficult, while leaving human discovery and exploration intact?

  • danielbln 13 hours ago

    Yes, going offline/physical only. If it's digital, it can be scraped/ingested/trained on.

xyzal 16 hours ago

It is a fluke visual training sets are far less amenable to sabotage than textual ones. Not that I suggest engaging in such a horrible, terrible, very bad manners, do I?

  • falsaberN1 10 hours ago

    I'm sorry to inform you that the mere automated pre-processing used in building of a training set will most likely disable any form of poisoning because the image is being altered before training. All popular training tools do this.

    Art stealing is a thing. I've had by art stolen regularly. Multiple Doom mods use sprites I made and only one person (the DRLA guy) asked for permission. I've had my art traced and even used in advertisements with me only finding out by sheer chance. I've had people use it for coloring without crediting the source. This has happened for more than thirty years. You can only learn to live with it, lest you risk going absolutely insane. If you are popular, people will do stupid stuff with your stuff. And if you aren't popular, you art is not going to be used to train, anyway (sets are ordered by popularity and only the top stuff gets used. The one with 3 upvotes is not going in.)

[removed] 11 hours ago
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