I didn't expect to be here. I'm small time.
January 16, 2024 9:36 AM Subscribe
Dorothy Gambrell of Cat and Girl (which has been running for almost 25 years now... pre·vi·ous·ly) has a new comic reflecting "on being listed in the court document of artists whose work was used to train Midjourney with 4,000 of my closest friends and Willem de Kooning."
A bit more context on the court case, including this gem:
A bit more context on the court case, including this gem:
Supporting evidence includes screenshots of what appear to be internal conversations between Holz and other staff at Midjourney discussing copyright infringement and knowingly scraping artists' work. "All you have to do is just use those scraped datasets and then conveniently forget what you used to train the model. Boom legal problems solved forever," one Discord message read.The full artist list is available under the artist tab here.
Since I'm not one of the select group of 4,000 (or 16,000, or whatever the actual number is), I guess I've no right to speculate on how I'd feel if my visual style was churned into the enormous melting pot of references used by MJ's remarkable image-making machine. I would not, however, rule out "flattered" and "slightly-more-immortal-feeling" as potential emotional reactions.
Skimming through the delightful archives of Cat and Girl, it seems to me that the truly charming illustrations take something of a back seat to the clever ideas that make those comics work. Having made (summoned, called forth, whatever) around 90,000 images in MJ over past two years across a very, very wide variety of styles and subjects -- all for my own personal enjoyment and procrastination purposes -- I have marveled at many a wondrous machine-made image. I can report, however, that I have never seen anything that I would mistake for a Dorothy Gambrell work, much less a fully-formed, delightful Cat and Girl panel. Even if I set out specifically to make one, I wouldn't get anywhere close to a convincing imposter.
Unless Gambrell herself is extra anomalous, she herself has undoubtedly taken in and mysteriously assimilated the visual works of many thousands of living and dead artists without permission, and each of those artists have done the same. In fact, if I was more of a dedicated comics nerd, I suspect I could rattle off a dozen or so other comic artists that her work seems to derive inspiration from -- some probably eerily similar, graphically. If Gambrell had become as rich as, say, Matt Groening, you can be sure that one or two of those inspirational artists might also be howlingly off-put at the injustice of her commercial success. Picasso has famous quotes about all that.
Because Midjourney is a commercial enterprise and likely a top-heavy one at that, there will be insufferable billionaires and millionaires (and probably lots and lots of shareholding thousand-aires) resulting from its activity. To say that this wealth-generation has resulted entirely from "theft" of artistic works seems to give insultingly short shrift to the freaking miraculous capabilities of the software/hivemind thing that wrangles it all together.
No one is out there ripping off fake Cat and Girl comics for profit. I'm confident in that statement because Gambrell's cartoons are clever and charming in a way that AI is miles away from being able replicate. Artists that are being directly ripped off today are, sorry, probably not super original to begin with and may need to step up their idea game.
posted by wolfpants at 10:55 AM on January 16 [9 favorites]
Skimming through the delightful archives of Cat and Girl, it seems to me that the truly charming illustrations take something of a back seat to the clever ideas that make those comics work. Having made (summoned, called forth, whatever) around 90,000 images in MJ over past two years across a very, very wide variety of styles and subjects -- all for my own personal enjoyment and procrastination purposes -- I have marveled at many a wondrous machine-made image. I can report, however, that I have never seen anything that I would mistake for a Dorothy Gambrell work, much less a fully-formed, delightful Cat and Girl panel. Even if I set out specifically to make one, I wouldn't get anywhere close to a convincing imposter.
Unless Gambrell herself is extra anomalous, she herself has undoubtedly taken in and mysteriously assimilated the visual works of many thousands of living and dead artists without permission, and each of those artists have done the same. In fact, if I was more of a dedicated comics nerd, I suspect I could rattle off a dozen or so other comic artists that her work seems to derive inspiration from -- some probably eerily similar, graphically. If Gambrell had become as rich as, say, Matt Groening, you can be sure that one or two of those inspirational artists might also be howlingly off-put at the injustice of her commercial success. Picasso has famous quotes about all that.
Because Midjourney is a commercial enterprise and likely a top-heavy one at that, there will be insufferable billionaires and millionaires (and probably lots and lots of shareholding thousand-aires) resulting from its activity. To say that this wealth-generation has resulted entirely from "theft" of artistic works seems to give insultingly short shrift to the freaking miraculous capabilities of the software/hivemind thing that wrangles it all together.
No one is out there ripping off fake Cat and Girl comics for profit. I'm confident in that statement because Gambrell's cartoons are clever and charming in a way that AI is miles away from being able replicate. Artists that are being directly ripped off today are, sorry, probably not super original to begin with and may need to step up their idea game.
posted by wolfpants at 10:55 AM on January 16 [9 favorites]
So in summary -
- she should be flattered that her work was ripped off
- you've never seen her work get ripped off
- she was ripping people off herself anyway
- AI is so clever is doesn't count as ripping people off, anyhow
- in the possible case of anyone getting directly ripped off, they deserve it because... they can only be ripped off... because they must be unoriginal?
posted by ominous_paws at 11:07 AM on January 16 [164 favorites]
- she should be flattered that her work was ripped off
- you've never seen her work get ripped off
- she was ripping people off herself anyway
- AI is so clever is doesn't count as ripping people off, anyhow
- in the possible case of anyone getting directly ripped off, they deserve it because... they can only be ripped off... because they must be unoriginal?
posted by ominous_paws at 11:07 AM on January 16 [164 favorites]
there’s this general pushback from midjourney and AI proponents that somehow the algorithmic analysis of an artwork is the same as the human work of creativity. that companies can hide behind the fact that the model is applying creativity to the work. which would be a great argument if it wasn’t being driven by prompts and forensically just layers of copyright fraud.
posted by gorestainedrunes at 11:14 AM on January 16 [30 favorites]
posted by gorestainedrunes at 11:14 AM on January 16 [30 favorites]
To my mind, there is a huge difference with individual artists copying others' work for personal enjoyment, training, and edification, than people feeding her and others' work to a machine doing it at scale and for profit.
posted by smirkette at 11:16 AM on January 16 [26 favorites]
posted by smirkette at 11:16 AM on January 16 [26 favorites]
As an author, seeing the flood of AI-gen text that's flooding the market these days, and knowing that my own work probably got scraped too, I felt a lot of things; anger, frustration, despair. I've finally come out the other side to realize that, finally, there is actually no pressure any more to even try to 'make it' as a writer. It's simply impossible now.
So if I write anything, I'll write what I want, how I want it, when I want to. I will never bother to try and promote myself, as there are thousands of AI users out there doing that much better than I ever could. I have resigned myself that I will never make money on my 'art' again. I will have to make a living, such as it is, the way everyone else does; having a 'real job'. If I write anything, it will be for myself alone; I've tried just putting my work out for free and even that is lost in the waves of crap that are spewing from all corners.
It sucks more for visual artists, I suppose, as it takes more time and practice to be able to draw well than it does to string together a coherent sentence. But I've had dreams shot out from under me before; I used to want to work in endangered species preservation, before climate change made the whole thing pointless. I used to hope for a better world, before it became apparent that a sizeable majority of humanity apparently prefers to be downright evil. I guess its all another flavor of despair, but these people going "Hey! Big Corp wrecked my dream!"-- I'm sympathetic, but join the fucking club.
posted by The otter lady at 11:18 AM on January 16 [19 favorites]
So if I write anything, I'll write what I want, how I want it, when I want to. I will never bother to try and promote myself, as there are thousands of AI users out there doing that much better than I ever could. I have resigned myself that I will never make money on my 'art' again. I will have to make a living, such as it is, the way everyone else does; having a 'real job'. If I write anything, it will be for myself alone; I've tried just putting my work out for free and even that is lost in the waves of crap that are spewing from all corners.
It sucks more for visual artists, I suppose, as it takes more time and practice to be able to draw well than it does to string together a coherent sentence. But I've had dreams shot out from under me before; I used to want to work in endangered species preservation, before climate change made the whole thing pointless. I used to hope for a better world, before it became apparent that a sizeable majority of humanity apparently prefers to be downright evil. I guess its all another flavor of despair, but these people going "Hey! Big Corp wrecked my dream!"-- I'm sympathetic, but join the fucking club.
posted by The otter lady at 11:18 AM on January 16 [19 favorites]
Chuck Wendig had a related blog post about the use of AI in art that is more about using AI than the people whose work was ground up into paste by the algorithm. (Content warning, the author describes a hypothetical work of art in enough detail that you will get the mental image and wish you hadn't. I think he also swears some.)
He does directly attack the notion that the idea is the important thing about a piece of art, suggesting that a large part of the value of art is (or should be) in craft and technique and human effort.
Maybe there is a place for AI-generated images the way AI-generated text is useful for wording emails or breaking out to-do lists. But who decides where it matters enough to have a human involved? And how much human involvement is enough? I've bought stacks of prints in my day, and even digital art that never had an original. Maybe it's time to go full hipster and demand artisanally produced art?
And that doesn't get at what the AI-owners owe artists like Dorothy Gambrell. To me there's a difference between a human person learning from your work, and your entire body of work being boiled down for stew to be used by people who will - by design - never see your art or know your name.
posted by mersen at 11:50 AM on January 16 [10 favorites]
He does directly attack the notion that the idea is the important thing about a piece of art, suggesting that a large part of the value of art is (or should be) in craft and technique and human effort.
Maybe there is a place for AI-generated images the way AI-generated text is useful for wording emails or breaking out to-do lists. But who decides where it matters enough to have a human involved? And how much human involvement is enough? I've bought stacks of prints in my day, and even digital art that never had an original. Maybe it's time to go full hipster and demand artisanally produced art?
And that doesn't get at what the AI-owners owe artists like Dorothy Gambrell. To me there's a difference between a human person learning from your work, and your entire body of work being boiled down for stew to be used by people who will - by design - never see your art or know your name.
posted by mersen at 11:50 AM on January 16 [10 favorites]
I am not an artist and hardly ever write for money but still. To have your work turned into feedstock feels gross.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 11:56 AM on January 16 [18 favorites]
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 11:56 AM on January 16 [18 favorites]
Unless Gambrell herself is extra anomalous, she herself has undoubtedly taken in and mysteriously assimilated the visual works of many thousands of living and dead artists without permission, and each of those artists have done the same
I don't want to downplay the importance that looking at art has when learning to make art, because it is important. But "taking in" art and "mysteriously assimilating" is not the main project of most artists.
You learn to draw by drawing. Copying other artists can be useful, but so is just looking at the world and drawing what you see. A lot of learning to paint is just fucking around with paint and seeing what happens. It's having a live human show you a trick, or explain color theory. An image might look a particular way because an artist has a message to convey. Human images reflect a cultural background that might include images but also includes myths and legends and social class and race and sex and gender and music and food and all the things.
Human image making is not just looking at images and then doing remixes of those images.
posted by surlyben at 11:59 AM on January 16 [31 favorites]
ominous_paws rebuttal to wolfpants is excellent, and >gorestainedrunes' comment gets right to heart of why "AI" proponents' arguments are so unsatisfying. Because these algorithms are not AIs, at least not in the Issac Asimov sense, which is why I've become so careful about adding scarequotes around the term. It's really a shame that brief and succinct responses can get lost after a long-winded comment they react to. (This is part of why I like MeFi's visible favorite count system, as at least we can see the weight of other users' appreciation in some way.)
The name "DALL-E," after a cute and personable, and (in its way) anthropomorphic, robot Pixar character, is a poor choice for this image generator. Might I suggest something more appropriate, like "XEROX-X."
posted by JHarris at 12:00 PM on January 16 [19 favorites]
The name "DALL-E," after a cute and personable, and (in its way) anthropomorphic, robot Pixar character, is a poor choice for this image generator. Might I suggest something more appropriate, like "XEROX-X."
posted by JHarris at 12:00 PM on January 16 [19 favorites]
Fun fact: if you train an "AI" on "AI"-generated content, it poisons the model. So if you load up your website(s) with "AI"-generated nonsense, you'll contribute to the destruction of this entire grift.
(Be sure to put it in your robots.txt and add a statement forbidding the use of your website for training data so that you'll have deniability.)
posted by suetanvil at 12:01 PM on January 16 [10 favorites]
(Be sure to put it in your robots.txt and add a statement forbidding the use of your website for training data so that you'll have deniability.)
posted by suetanvil at 12:01 PM on January 16 [10 favorites]
As remarkable as AI is, the thing I can't get past is the fact that all the cool things we see these AI tools produce could not exist without input from existing artists.
That's true of human artists, too, of course, but human artists participate in the economy of art. Even where they break the rules and pirate the art they consume, or benefit from museums or friendships to take in art for free, they are making those choices as people who participate in the economy and in society.
How would we feel about an artist who stole all the work they used for personal inspiration?
How would we feel about a *commercial artist* who did the same?
posted by billjings at 12:02 PM on January 16 [2 favorites]
That's true of human artists, too, of course, but human artists participate in the economy of art. Even where they break the rules and pirate the art they consume, or benefit from museums or friendships to take in art for free, they are making those choices as people who participate in the economy and in society.
How would we feel about an artist who stole all the work they used for personal inspiration?
How would we feel about a *commercial artist* who did the same?
posted by billjings at 12:02 PM on January 16 [2 favorites]
When an artist learns to imitate (and perhaps eventually excel) another, they have to work. That seems different to me than hoovering up a whole oeuvre and returning a pastiche at the push of a button. (I am aware a ton of compute cost is involved, but the promise is that for you the user it will be effortless).
something something quantity has a quality of its own something something scale something something.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 12:15 PM on January 16 [3 favorites]
something something quantity has a quality of its own something something scale something something.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 12:15 PM on January 16 [3 favorites]
I'm sure that when Watson and Crick used Rosalind Franklin's crystallography without crediting her in their book, she must have felt "flattered" and "immortalized" that all the credit would go to them and nobody would know who she was or what she did that was so fundamental to our understanding of DNA.
Similarly when AI generates a line because 10000 images sharing the same tags as the prompt has that line, those 10000 artists who nobody knows or will ever recognize in the output will feel sooooo warm and fuzzy.
Haha no. This is a rip-off.
And I actually need apologies from people who laughed at artists complaining because wtf. what the actual fuck
posted by picklenickle at 12:29 PM on January 16 [39 favorites]
Similarly when AI generates a line because 10000 images sharing the same tags as the prompt has that line, those 10000 artists who nobody knows or will ever recognize in the output will feel sooooo warm and fuzzy.
Haha no. This is a rip-off.
And I actually need apologies from people who laughed at artists complaining because wtf. what the actual fuck
posted by picklenickle at 12:29 PM on January 16 [39 favorites]
Also, love to see the stream of artists I follow on social media posting things like "please help, I'm starving. I'm taking commissions!" and "I'm disabled and can only do art for a living" and "all my animation coworkers hate AI but all the producers love it."
It's really great, psychologically, for me to draw with a gnawing feeling in the back of my mind that this is completely pointless and nobody will know about me or my work, but it WILL be reposted in degrading jpeg quality on reddit, twitter and discord and subsequently scraped by a machine and tagged by people getting paid $2/hour. Really. Great. All the hours, days, years I spent since childhood drawing and painting for 36 years. Really cool feeling there. Not like it isn't instilling feelings of invisibility and hopelessness and dread past being a "content creator" for people to "consume."
Yes that feeling of need from scrapers and AI users while they send us mocking messages on social media, plus the dismissive-yet-polite tone here on MeFi is uncannily similar to men who think I'm a slab of meat and a cooking generator to which they are owed. You would like us to work for free and do it with a smile? I will not.
posted by picklenickle at 12:51 PM on January 16 [41 favorites]
It's really great, psychologically, for me to draw with a gnawing feeling in the back of my mind that this is completely pointless and nobody will know about me or my work, but it WILL be reposted in degrading jpeg quality on reddit, twitter and discord and subsequently scraped by a machine and tagged by people getting paid $2/hour. Really. Great. All the hours, days, years I spent since childhood drawing and painting for 36 years. Really cool feeling there. Not like it isn't instilling feelings of invisibility and hopelessness and dread past being a "content creator" for people to "consume."
Yes that feeling of need from scrapers and AI users while they send us mocking messages on social media, plus the dismissive-yet-polite tone here on MeFi is uncannily similar to men who think I'm a slab of meat and a cooking generator to which they are owed. You would like us to work for free and do it with a smile? I will not.
posted by picklenickle at 12:51 PM on January 16 [41 favorites]
If nothing we make matters, then nothing matters but what we make.
posted by Sebmojo at 1:17 PM on January 16 [3 favorites]
posted by Sebmojo at 1:17 PM on January 16 [3 favorites]
Comparing what Midjourney (et al) do to acts of creativity performed by humans is disingenuous and misleading. It is miraculous, but it's not creativity -- it's software. It's spicy autocomplete. It determines a statistically probable color for each pixel in an image based on the text provided as input.
The i in large language model stands for "intelligence".
posted by The Lurkers Support Me in Email at 1:29 PM on January 16 [19 favorites]
The i in large language model stands for "intelligence".
posted by The Lurkers Support Me in Email at 1:29 PM on January 16 [19 favorites]
There's a real weird vibe some people have about creative work. I know (because I have met them) there are definitely some very rich and powerful people who don't see art/writing/etc. as something that *deserves* to be worth paying to produce, even in commercial contexts, but they're also always the first people who will fixate on aesthetics. They *know* high production value for photography, illustration, video, writing, etc. matter, but they really seem to REALLY hate that they have to pay skilled professionals to create these for them more than they hate paying, say, devs, accountants, etc.
(Not to say that tech workers aren't and haven't been dealing with their own employment security and compensation issues, but that's a different thread.)
posted by smirkette at 1:31 PM on January 16 [15 favorites]
(Not to say that tech workers aren't and haven't been dealing with their own employment security and compensation issues, but that's a different thread.)
posted by smirkette at 1:31 PM on January 16 [15 favorites]
If anyone wants to see a lot more iterations of wolfpants' "she should be flattered to be used as anonymous unpaid labor by the corporation that made this thing" attitude, I highly recommend the Hacker News discussion on this comic. It's fucking ghastly. Although I'm glad to see that there are a lot of people there saying "this is fucking ghastly" over there, too; when this stuff started I was one of the few voices saying "hey I am an artist and this is fucking horrible".
posted by egypturnash at 1:51 PM on January 16 [14 favorites]
posted by egypturnash at 1:51 PM on January 16 [14 favorites]
Thanks for posting this. I had never read Cat and Girl before. We always see ourselves in things, but I frankly wept to see parallels to my own struggle to live the art life. Her self-possession in the face of this monstrosity is endearing and an inspiration.
posted by cupcakeninja at 2:01 PM on January 16 [5 favorites]
posted by cupcakeninja at 2:01 PM on January 16 [5 favorites]
What otter lady said.
I shuttered my own blog and thus my realname.com website in October after the nth run of AI scraping "attacks" (spiking non stop hits sequentially running through page by page, tag by tag). Oops, there goes 20 years of field insights from less trodden paths in rural nowhere etc and a brand that the pandemic had already hobbled with travel restrictions. If I hadn't gone back to school I'd be a 57 year old left without a shred of a business I've built up over the years.
I'm in the last mile of writing my dissertation and still have time to shape it to include the key original insights that were the foundation for my online writing (articles, blogs etc). That way, the credit remains mine.
I can't agree with wolfpants.
I do agree with egypturnash: It is horrible for all creatives.
posted by infini at 2:06 PM on January 16 [21 favorites]
I shuttered my own blog and thus my realname.com website in October after the nth run of AI scraping "attacks" (spiking non stop hits sequentially running through page by page, tag by tag). Oops, there goes 20 years of field insights from less trodden paths in rural nowhere etc and a brand that the pandemic had already hobbled with travel restrictions. If I hadn't gone back to school I'd be a 57 year old left without a shred of a business I've built up over the years.
I'm in the last mile of writing my dissertation and still have time to shape it to include the key original insights that were the foundation for my online writing (articles, blogs etc). That way, the credit remains mine.
I can't agree with wolfpants.
I do agree with egypturnash: It is horrible for all creatives.
posted by infini at 2:06 PM on January 16 [21 favorites]
I'm not very savvy on AI stuff, but given that Dorothy Gambrell's work is protected by Creative Commons, using it as input for an algorithm to produce commercial images (which is my understanding of what Midjourney does, or aims to do) strikes me pretty clearly as theft, as picklenickle suggested.
What I find extracreepy here is that the Midjourney folks went further and singled her out as someone they specifically wanted their model to be able to emulate. This suggests more than just the garden-variety feedstocking of art, alienation from one's labor, etc. I find it more personally disturbing. They cared enough about her art to put her on a special list, but not enough to engage with her about the fact they're making a machine specifically designed to mimic her, among others.
It's like Watson and Crick made a robot version of Rosalind Franklin, that aims to do a spot on impression of her science, that's available to do any sort of scientific project you want, for their own profit. On top of theft, that feels like a very personal type of violation.
posted by nightcoast at 2:07 PM on January 16 [10 favorites]
What I find extracreepy here is that the Midjourney folks went further and singled her out as someone they specifically wanted their model to be able to emulate. This suggests more than just the garden-variety feedstocking of art, alienation from one's labor, etc. I find it more personally disturbing. They cared enough about her art to put her on a special list, but not enough to engage with her about the fact they're making a machine specifically designed to mimic her, among others.
It's like Watson and Crick made a robot version of Rosalind Franklin, that aims to do a spot on impression of her science, that's available to do any sort of scientific project you want, for their own profit. On top of theft, that feels like a very personal type of violation.
posted by nightcoast at 2:07 PM on January 16 [10 favorites]
Maybe there is a place for AI-generated images the way AI-generated text is useful for wording emails
Yep all government funded messaging, comms and advertising in Kenya, for example, has shifted to weird AI generated images and here's a video by a leading Kenyan photographer on this wanton destruction.
posted by infini at 2:10 PM on January 16 [3 favorites]
Yep all government funded messaging, comms and advertising in Kenya, for example, has shifted to weird AI generated images and here's a video by a leading Kenyan photographer on this wanton destruction.
posted by infini at 2:10 PM on January 16 [3 favorites]
I miss 1995.
posted by infini at 2:15 PM on January 16 [14 favorites]
posted by infini at 2:15 PM on January 16 [14 favorites]
Also otter lady, don't give up on endangered species. Think solar punk and radical optimism. The kids on tumblr are a lifeline to sheer creativity and futures thinking imo.
posted by infini at 2:24 PM on January 16 [3 favorites]
posted by infini at 2:24 PM on January 16 [3 favorites]
The whole AI "debate" keeps making my mind circle back to the holodeck (bear with me). People in Star Trek say that they've created new holodeck programs, and other people are like "I can't wait to see the new holodeck program you made!" but every time we see someone actually interacting with the holodeck it's just "Show me the bridge of the USS Enterprise and put Mark Twain in it." And that, minus a few centuries of technological advancements, is exactly what people are doing with these AI image generators.
So what's the difference? Is it just that the Federation is a post-scarcity socialist utopia so nobody has to rely on proprietary rights and all art goes into the public domain by default?
It's the post-scarcity socialist utopia thing, isn't it.
posted by Faint of Butt at 2:44 PM on January 16 [3 favorites]
So what's the difference? Is it just that the Federation is a post-scarcity socialist utopia so nobody has to rely on proprietary rights and all art goes into the public domain by default?
It's the post-scarcity socialist utopia thing, isn't it.
posted by Faint of Butt at 2:44 PM on January 16 [3 favorites]
To say that this wealth-generation has resulted entirely from "theft" of artistic works seems to give insultingly short shrift to the freaking miraculous capabilities of the software/hivemind thing that wrangles it all together.
No one is out there ripping off fake Cat and Girl comics for profit. I'm confident in that statement because Gambrell's cartoons are clever and charming in a way that AI is miles away from being able replicate.
Whiplash from seeing the worst and best possible takes literally back to back, here. No matter how difficult the software was to implement (and it was, insanely so) the availability of massive amounts of high quality input is a hard requirement of this and all related systems.
And no matter what your feelings on whether training a model is the same as human art education (and I’m in the “enh, close enough…ish” camp), it is indisputable that without those artists it doesn’t exist, period.
That aside, while I strongly agree with the assertion that nobody is ripping off Cat and Girl comics for profit and treating this like a cut and dried royalties situation is absurd, profit is nevertheless being made and she was never asked. It may not be copyright violation as we know it (here I’m in the “all this is the copyright equivalent to an Outside Context Problem”), but it can still be pretty shitty for the artist in question.
My professional writing, what little there is, is in the soup of all this. Ditto a bunch of my technical/systemic “art” (postprocess shaders with a very distinctive look, etc). I wasn’t asked and I’m honestly fine with it, but that’s just for me personally - I assume a lot of people feel differently and they have every right to.
posted by Ryvar at 2:50 PM on January 16
No one is out there ripping off fake Cat and Girl comics for profit. I'm confident in that statement because Gambrell's cartoons are clever and charming in a way that AI is miles away from being able replicate.
Whiplash from seeing the worst and best possible takes literally back to back, here. No matter how difficult the software was to implement (and it was, insanely so) the availability of massive amounts of high quality input is a hard requirement of this and all related systems.
And no matter what your feelings on whether training a model is the same as human art education (and I’m in the “enh, close enough…ish” camp), it is indisputable that without those artists it doesn’t exist, period.
That aside, while I strongly agree with the assertion that nobody is ripping off Cat and Girl comics for profit and treating this like a cut and dried royalties situation is absurd, profit is nevertheless being made and she was never asked. It may not be copyright violation as we know it (here I’m in the “all this is the copyright equivalent to an Outside Context Problem”), but it can still be pretty shitty for the artist in question.
My professional writing, what little there is, is in the soup of all this. Ditto a bunch of my technical/systemic “art” (postprocess shaders with a very distinctive look, etc). I wasn’t asked and I’m honestly fine with it, but that’s just for me personally - I assume a lot of people feel differently and they have every right to.
posted by Ryvar at 2:50 PM on January 16
I'm both glad and sad to have served as a drubbing-board here for the embittered. A few points of clarification and self-defense:
My good friends and family members are mostly artists, designers, illustrators, film-makers, and architects of various sorts (as are many of my neighbors, as I think about it). I truly love art, (most) humans, and the human artistic process.
My family and I have never talked more, and more deeply, about art and learned more about art history, and actual human artists, than we have in the past year of dicking around with Midjourney and DallE. I've seen and appreciated way more human-made art and design directly because of being inspired by the crazy capabilities of those image generation things. In fact, I myself have made, or attempted to make, more real, physical art than I ever have as a result of said inspiration.
99% of what gets generated by MJ and DallE is awful dreck -- at least as far as I can tell from occasionally looking at what others post. I'm not the least bit surprised that people, especially those already predisposed to hate MJ and the like, think that it's only capable of homogenized garbage. As with photography, which I'm sure was roundly shat upon by non-photographer artists back in the old days, its likely that very few practitioners are even attempting to generate something artistically interesting. Those that are trying to make art of a sort are discovering that it takes some human thought and patience to do so (like with photography), and that the approaches are evolving pretty fast, like they have with every other image-making technology.
I find that capitalism, for the most part, is a bane on the human soul. I have zero love for the agglomerators and skimmers of that world. I'm deeply pessimistic about humanity's prospects for escaping the rat trap of capitalism (and competitive powermongering in general). That said, I do see in AI at least a glimmer of hope for a genuine elimination of scarcity on many fronts and possibly an agent for meaningful individualized mental health therapy that might help promote empathy and work wipe out such historically destructive toxins as misogyny (at least it seems within the realm of possibility).
For the glib haters, I'm not kidding when I say I'd personally feel both flattered and strangely immortalized to have my own works included in the imagery training paste. I'm fascinated by the differences in how others are emotionally reacting, but there is no "should" implied in my hypothetical feelings. In case I wasn't clear, I think Dorothy Gambrell is immensely clever and talented, and I personally think she has nothing to fear from non-human, barely intelligent text-to-image generators.
posted by wolfpants at 2:56 PM on January 16 [6 favorites]
My good friends and family members are mostly artists, designers, illustrators, film-makers, and architects of various sorts (as are many of my neighbors, as I think about it). I truly love art, (most) humans, and the human artistic process.
My family and I have never talked more, and more deeply, about art and learned more about art history, and actual human artists, than we have in the past year of dicking around with Midjourney and DallE. I've seen and appreciated way more human-made art and design directly because of being inspired by the crazy capabilities of those image generation things. In fact, I myself have made, or attempted to make, more real, physical art than I ever have as a result of said inspiration.
99% of what gets generated by MJ and DallE is awful dreck -- at least as far as I can tell from occasionally looking at what others post. I'm not the least bit surprised that people, especially those already predisposed to hate MJ and the like, think that it's only capable of homogenized garbage. As with photography, which I'm sure was roundly shat upon by non-photographer artists back in the old days, its likely that very few practitioners are even attempting to generate something artistically interesting. Those that are trying to make art of a sort are discovering that it takes some human thought and patience to do so (like with photography), and that the approaches are evolving pretty fast, like they have with every other image-making technology.
I find that capitalism, for the most part, is a bane on the human soul. I have zero love for the agglomerators and skimmers of that world. I'm deeply pessimistic about humanity's prospects for escaping the rat trap of capitalism (and competitive powermongering in general). That said, I do see in AI at least a glimmer of hope for a genuine elimination of scarcity on many fronts and possibly an agent for meaningful individualized mental health therapy that might help promote empathy and work wipe out such historically destructive toxins as misogyny (at least it seems within the realm of possibility).
For the glib haters, I'm not kidding when I say I'd personally feel both flattered and strangely immortalized to have my own works included in the imagery training paste. I'm fascinated by the differences in how others are emotionally reacting, but there is no "should" implied in my hypothetical feelings. In case I wasn't clear, I think Dorothy Gambrell is immensely clever and talented, and I personally think she has nothing to fear from non-human, barely intelligent text-to-image generators.
posted by wolfpants at 2:56 PM on January 16 [6 favorites]
It's the post-scarcity socialist utopia thing
It’s the “we’re not yet in the post-scarcity” bit that’s the problem. We could already be in vastly-reduced-scarcity if a small percentage of our society weren’t functionally sociopaths, regardless of whether they meet the formal diagnostic. But they are, we aren’t, and some artists are gonna go hungry in between.
posted by Ryvar at 2:58 PM on January 16 [7 favorites]
It’s the “we’re not yet in the post-scarcity” bit that’s the problem. We could already be in vastly-reduced-scarcity if a small percentage of our society weren’t functionally sociopaths, regardless of whether they meet the formal diagnostic. But they are, we aren’t, and some artists are gonna go hungry in between.
posted by Ryvar at 2:58 PM on January 16 [7 favorites]
Something else that stands out for me in this (excellent) comic, that I haven't seen remarked on as much as the general AI topic:
posted by CrystalDave at 2:59 PM on January 16 [28 favorites]
And I believed I could do my best to distribute [my work] ethically, by making it free to read, free to copy or reprint to anyone not making a profit. By refusing to do unpaid work for anyone who was making a profit.In particular, the desire to do right by the world (as much as it's possible) while not severing oneself entirely from the world; and what that feels like to have even that choice taken away.
[...]
But I can't even get cartoons to most people for free, now // without doing unpaid work for the profit-making companies who own the most-used channels of communication. And now even that nominal opt-in option is gone. They just take it. Whatever they want.
[...]
I want to make my little thing and put it out in the world and hope that sometimes it means something to somebody else. Without exploiting anyone. And without being exploited.
posted by CrystalDave at 2:59 PM on January 16 [28 favorites]
Once again I miss oneswellfoop's contributions. I found out about Cat And Girl through him, he was a big fan of webcomics generally and I'm sure he would have been an important voice in this conversation.
posted by JHarris at 3:00 PM on January 16 [9 favorites]
posted by JHarris at 3:00 PM on January 16 [9 favorites]
There's a real weird vibe some people have about creative work.
It's because we live in a society that in so many ways denigrates the idea of creative labor. There is a genuine expectation that creative laborers should be doing their work for "the love of art", and so when creative laborers instead point out that they would like to be compensated for their labor, it goes against that expectation, and thus people become indignant at the idea that they have to pay for the labor of others.
posted by NoxAeternum at 3:50 PM on January 16 [14 favorites]
It's because we live in a society that in so many ways denigrates the idea of creative labor. There is a genuine expectation that creative laborers should be doing their work for "the love of art", and so when creative laborers instead point out that they would like to be compensated for their labor, it goes against that expectation, and thus people become indignant at the idea that they have to pay for the labor of others.
posted by NoxAeternum at 3:50 PM on January 16 [14 favorites]
> I think Dorothy Gambrell is immensely clever and talented, and I personally think she has nothing to fear from non-human, barely intelligent text-to-image generators.
So let her opt in, if she wants. But let it be her decision.
posted by The corpse in the library at 4:06 PM on January 16 [31 favorites]
So let her opt in, if she wants. But let it be her decision.
posted by The corpse in the library at 4:06 PM on January 16 [31 favorites]
Yeah, the nub of her comic is "They just take it."
And you know sometimes taking things and turning them around is great art, or at least great fun, in satire or detournement. But there the person taking is (as Gambrell says she is) small time, subversively getting one over the big time folks. This is the opposite, and that's why it feels bad. Robin Hood is a thief but cool. These people are the sheriff (or maybe magnates who pay off the sheriff). We don't root for them, we root for Robin Hood and the poor folks.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 4:12 PM on January 16 [10 favorites]
And you know sometimes taking things and turning them around is great art, or at least great fun, in satire or detournement. But there the person taking is (as Gambrell says she is) small time, subversively getting one over the big time folks. This is the opposite, and that's why it feels bad. Robin Hood is a thief but cool. These people are the sheriff (or maybe magnates who pay off the sheriff). We don't root for them, we root for Robin Hood and the poor folks.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 4:12 PM on January 16 [10 favorites]
I find that capitalism, for the most part, is a bane on the human soul. I have zero love for the agglomerators and skimmers of that world. I'm deeply pessimistic about humanity's prospects for escaping the rat trap of capitalism (and competitive powermongering in general). That said, I do see in AI at least a glimmer of hope for a genuine elimination of scarcity on many fronts and possibly an agent for meaningful individualized mental health therapy that might help promote empathy and work wipe out such historically destructive toxins as misogyny (at least it seems within the realm of possibility).
I often see this sort of sentiment, even from people who I would characterize as anti-AI. There must be some potential use for it! If not in this context, than in some context! It's not AI's fault, it's the world's fault! And I often wonder what drives so many people to believe this.
I wonder if it is, to most people, inconceivable that humanity could invent a technology that is, in fact, just bad, and should never have been invented, and cannot be un-invented. Maybe it almost seems anti-human to imagine that we could create and use something that is fundamentally wrong.
posted by nosewings at 5:09 PM on January 16 [9 favorites]
I often see this sort of sentiment, even from people who I would characterize as anti-AI. There must be some potential use for it! If not in this context, than in some context! It's not AI's fault, it's the world's fault! And I often wonder what drives so many people to believe this.
I wonder if it is, to most people, inconceivable that humanity could invent a technology that is, in fact, just bad, and should never have been invented, and cannot be un-invented. Maybe it almost seems anti-human to imagine that we could create and use something that is fundamentally wrong.
posted by nosewings at 5:09 PM on January 16 [9 favorites]
I am not entirely anti-AI. I see it already making some valuable contributions in medical research. Fantastic.
The giant plagarism engine side of it all though, that needs to die in a fire. I will be there pouring on the gasoline with glee.
I spent parts of decades as a designer, a writer, an artist, an artisan, always with minimal success. And I will always do some sort of art and writing, for it soothes my brain and pleases my soul. I wish it garnered the respect it deserves. Yet I now also understand art will always generate some contempt and unease in those who are moved only by money, and never the sublime.
posted by birdsongster at 5:32 PM on January 16 [5 favorites]
The giant plagarism engine side of it all though, that needs to die in a fire. I will be there pouring on the gasoline with glee.
I spent parts of decades as a designer, a writer, an artist, an artisan, always with minimal success. And I will always do some sort of art and writing, for it soothes my brain and pleases my soul. I wish it garnered the respect it deserves. Yet I now also understand art will always generate some contempt and unease in those who are moved only by money, and never the sublime.
posted by birdsongster at 5:32 PM on January 16 [5 favorites]
I wonder if it is, to most people, inconceivable that humanity could invent a technology that is, in fact, just bad, and should never have been invented, and cannot be un-invented.
The internal combustion engine? Gunpowder? Capitalism? Humans are really good at inventing technology that is just bad, and should never have been invented, and cannot be un-invented.
posted by Faint of Butt at 6:02 PM on January 16 [6 favorites]
The internal combustion engine? Gunpowder? Capitalism? Humans are really good at inventing technology that is just bad, and should never have been invented, and cannot be un-invented.
posted by Faint of Butt at 6:02 PM on January 16 [6 favorites]
I'm gonna get hate for this, but I find the latest versions of AI image generators useful. I have zero talent for drawing or painting art, I'm basically at stick figure level.
I use AI art generators not for any commercial purpose of any kind, but to do stuff like create personalised character portraits. e.g. I have a resin 3d printer, so I can print and paint custom Heroquest models (weirdly enough, painting models is something I'm quite good at after a couple of decades), and then use say midjourney to create the pictures that fit with the models I've painted to have custom character cards so my kids can play as heroes that are unique to us. Yes, the AI is not stunningly good quality (though the speed at which the models are improving is staggering even without prompt fiddling) or what a good artist could do, but they really don't need to be.
Yes, I pay for the STL files for the models I print. I think artists and creatives should be compensated fairly for their work. I think that AI companies are absolutely ripping off everybody for training data, and that should count as derivative works for copyright purposes so only public domain/CC0 or licenced works should be able to be used for that, and the sooner we get there the better.
I just... find it amazing that we can create machines that democratises the ability to create things way beyond your personal ability. I still remember when the internet was an amazing invention that allowed people to meet and talk and share their lives with people from all over the world, and we weren't just stuck in our tiny little circles of people we saw every day in person (despite the ad-laden far-right hellscape it's largely become). I get that we live in a world where only the value of your labour matters, and 'AI' generators drive a coach and horses through the ability of a creative to get compensated for real skilled work and unique talent. I hope we can find some kind of viable middle ground where creative work is fairly compensated (or we get post-scarcity utopia, that works too!) yet tools to create something interesting or useful or just fun without needing to spend 20 years learning how can still exist.
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 6:24 PM on January 16 [4 favorites]
I use AI art generators not for any commercial purpose of any kind, but to do stuff like create personalised character portraits. e.g. I have a resin 3d printer, so I can print and paint custom Heroquest models (weirdly enough, painting models is something I'm quite good at after a couple of decades), and then use say midjourney to create the pictures that fit with the models I've painted to have custom character cards so my kids can play as heroes that are unique to us. Yes, the AI is not stunningly good quality (though the speed at which the models are improving is staggering even without prompt fiddling) or what a good artist could do, but they really don't need to be.
Yes, I pay for the STL files for the models I print. I think artists and creatives should be compensated fairly for their work. I think that AI companies are absolutely ripping off everybody for training data, and that should count as derivative works for copyright purposes so only public domain/CC0 or licenced works should be able to be used for that, and the sooner we get there the better.
I just... find it amazing that we can create machines that democratises the ability to create things way beyond your personal ability. I still remember when the internet was an amazing invention that allowed people to meet and talk and share their lives with people from all over the world, and we weren't just stuck in our tiny little circles of people we saw every day in person (despite the ad-laden far-right hellscape it's largely become). I get that we live in a world where only the value of your labour matters, and 'AI' generators drive a coach and horses through the ability of a creative to get compensated for real skilled work and unique talent. I hope we can find some kind of viable middle ground where creative work is fairly compensated (or we get post-scarcity utopia, that works too!) yet tools to create something interesting or useful or just fun without needing to spend 20 years learning how can still exist.
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 6:24 PM on January 16 [4 favorites]
I just want to point out that if you love Cat and Girl and Dorothy Gambrell's work more generally, you can get her zine in the mail a few times a year for the low low price of 5 bucks a month and it's absolutely the most charming and thought provoking thing I get in the mail. I completely love it and I want to get it for everyone I know.
posted by potrzebie at 6:32 PM on January 16 [16 favorites]
posted by potrzebie at 6:32 PM on January 16 [16 favorites]
OpenAI (and by extension DALL-E) are worth $29 billion, by a recent estimate. Their products, and that value, would not exist if not for the thousands of authors and artists that they knowingly, brazenly, stole from to feed their machine.
There's no way to properly compensate the creatives whose work and experience were ground up and fed into the machine, and there's no stopping it now either, that genie is out of the bottle and not going back in. But a massive lawsuit to redistribute some or all of that $29 billion in value back to the folks without whose work it would not exist seems like the least we can do.
We won't, of course, because the people who designed the "freaking miraculous capabilities of the software" are now worth $29B, while the people they stole from are largely poor and powerless.
Hopefully generations to come will learn to recognize and appreciate the freaking miraculous capabilities of the software that generate all of their written and graphical media, soulless remixes of soulless remixes of what was once real art. Maybe if we're lucky some shred of meaning or aesthetic value will still occasionally leach through the machine's endless sequence of algorithms and filters, and some future child will find a spark of inspiration in an otherwise homogeneous ocean of empty meaningless pap.
posted by Two unicycles and some duct tape at 6:43 PM on January 16 [20 favorites]
There's no way to properly compensate the creatives whose work and experience were ground up and fed into the machine, and there's no stopping it now either, that genie is out of the bottle and not going back in. But a massive lawsuit to redistribute some or all of that $29 billion in value back to the folks without whose work it would not exist seems like the least we can do.
We won't, of course, because the people who designed the "freaking miraculous capabilities of the software" are now worth $29B, while the people they stole from are largely poor and powerless.
Hopefully generations to come will learn to recognize and appreciate the freaking miraculous capabilities of the software that generate all of their written and graphical media, soulless remixes of soulless remixes of what was once real art. Maybe if we're lucky some shred of meaning or aesthetic value will still occasionally leach through the machine's endless sequence of algorithms and filters, and some future child will find a spark of inspiration in an otherwise homogeneous ocean of empty meaningless pap.
posted by Two unicycles and some duct tape at 6:43 PM on January 16 [20 favorites]
I have zero talent for drawing or painting art, I'm basically at stick figure level.
Ditto. And I'm often frustrated because I get the visual equivalent of plot-bunnies. But I still won't use these AI generators. I'll share my ideas where passing artists might see; maybe I'll eventually commission someone to draw things for me.
But I can't justify screwing over artists just because I really want it.
posted by cheshyre at 7:12 PM on January 16 [14 favorites]
Ditto. And I'm often frustrated because I get the visual equivalent of plot-bunnies. But I still won't use these AI generators. I'll share my ideas where passing artists might see; maybe I'll eventually commission someone to draw things for me.
But I can't justify screwing over artists just because I really want it.
posted by cheshyre at 7:12 PM on January 16 [14 favorites]
> wolfpants: "If you're putting your imagery out into the world, it will be seen by human and machine eyes, and both will copy it (if it's good) in some very fractional way."
I recently saw a clip of Sam Altman (recently of OpenAI) answering a question in an interview regarding whether or not ChatGPT should have been trained on copyrighted works. In his explanation, Altman says something about how "well, people are allowed to read books and it wouldn't be fair if ChatGPT wasn't able to read the same books".... Except, ChatGPT never read any books. Humans working for OpenAI and Sam Altman acquired texts and then used those texts as input to the pile of software that would eventually come to be called ChatGPT. Similarly, "machine eyes" did not see the imagery used to train Midjourney. Human eyes saw them, human brains thought that they looked cool, humans acquired the imagery, and humans fed that imagery into their machine to make Midjourney. There is often a tendency to anthropomorphize these systems into having their own independent initiative or will but let's try to remember what's actually happening here.
posted by mhum at 7:37 PM on January 16 [30 favorites]
I recently saw a clip of Sam Altman (recently of OpenAI) answering a question in an interview regarding whether or not ChatGPT should have been trained on copyrighted works. In his explanation, Altman says something about how "well, people are allowed to read books and it wouldn't be fair if ChatGPT wasn't able to read the same books".... Except, ChatGPT never read any books. Humans working for OpenAI and Sam Altman acquired texts and then used those texts as input to the pile of software that would eventually come to be called ChatGPT. Similarly, "machine eyes" did not see the imagery used to train Midjourney. Human eyes saw them, human brains thought that they looked cool, humans acquired the imagery, and humans fed that imagery into their machine to make Midjourney. There is often a tendency to anthropomorphize these systems into having their own independent initiative or will but let's try to remember what's actually happening here.
posted by mhum at 7:37 PM on January 16 [30 favorites]
I get dunking on the AI art people, but this seems deliberately misleading. Reading the Discord screenshots this is all sourced from, the spreadsheet seems to not be a list of artists whose work was used to train Midjourney, but rather a list of artist names scraped from Wikipedia for experimenting with as potential prompt keywords.
Again: totally cool with the dunking. Not cool with spreading blatant misinformation. Like, has no one reporting on this done the most basic research? Thia took me five minutes to look into.
posted by Spinda at 8:01 PM on January 16 [10 favorites]
Supporting evidence includes screenshots of what appear to be internal conversations between Holz and other staff at Midjourney discussing copyright infringement and knowingly scraping artists' work. "All you have to do is just use those scraped datasets and then conveniently forget what you used to train the model. Boom legal problems solved forever," one Discord message read.This is also misleading. I joined the Midjourney Discord and searched for this quote. It's from a public conversation, not an "internal" one, and it's in the context of source code licensing for the BLIP project, which is why the red-boxed message in the tweeted screenshot refers to Codex, a programming-oriented model for generating code, not images. The screenshots look to be deliberately cropped to obscure this. And the "all you have to do..." message was sent by some random Discord user (in a server with 1M+ members) who does not appear to be a Midjourney developer. I would hazard a guess that the pixelation of that person's username and no one else's was intended to mask that fact. Both messages seem to be jokes.
Again: totally cool with the dunking. Not cool with spreading blatant misinformation. Like, has no one reporting on this done the most basic research? Thia took me five minutes to look into.
posted by Spinda at 8:01 PM on January 16 [10 favorites]
Every apologetic hand-waiving and philosophizing of exploitation sounds like this to me:
- Yes, I understand that Chick-Fil-A donates to anti-LGBT groups but their chicken just tastes so GOOD and it's very convenient for me to go there. I'm gay and Chick-Fil-A is delicious.
- Ambulance drivers were conned out of overtime, but is there any functional difference between an ambulance ride from a driver getting overtime vs. a driver not getting overtime? It's the same output, so they should both be okay.
- Cat's out of the bag for this new technology. Once it's out there it cannot be replaced with anything better and we'll never go back to the old stuff. LaserDisc WILL live forever.
- Sure I acknowledge that 70% of the world's cocoa beans are harvested by child labor and slaves, but I assure you that the chocolate I buy is not going into any commercial products and it's just for me to eat. Perhaps one day this style of work will become universal and we'll live in a post-scarcity utopia where EVERYTHING is free!
posted by picklenickle at 8:25 PM on January 16 [24 favorites]
- Yes, I understand that Chick-Fil-A donates to anti-LGBT groups but their chicken just tastes so GOOD and it's very convenient for me to go there. I'm gay and Chick-Fil-A is delicious.
- Ambulance drivers were conned out of overtime, but is there any functional difference between an ambulance ride from a driver getting overtime vs. a driver not getting overtime? It's the same output, so they should both be okay.
- Cat's out of the bag for this new technology. Once it's out there it cannot be replaced with anything better and we'll never go back to the old stuff. LaserDisc WILL live forever.
- Sure I acknowledge that 70% of the world's cocoa beans are harvested by child labor and slaves, but I assure you that the chocolate I buy is not going into any commercial products and it's just for me to eat. Perhaps one day this style of work will become universal and we'll live in a post-scarcity utopia where EVERYTHING is free!
posted by picklenickle at 8:25 PM on January 16 [24 favorites]
OpenAI (and by extension DALL-E) are worth $29 billion
DallE is a relatively small part of OpenAI, revenue-wise. Midjourney made $200M last year, and is not far behind DallE in subscribers. It would be pretty ballsy to value DallE at much more than 20 years of current revenue (especially if it might be a fad destined to increasingly suck in terms of quality any day now).
And, while the model has depended on input from billions of images of all sorts including artwork from thousands of artists, the vast majority of revenue DallE does generate simply would not have happened without that model (or its AI competition) doing what it does. Like it or not, the suckers spending money to mess around with image generators are probably not substituting that subscription money outlay for spending money on your art. If anything, it might even be getting new people interested in the idea of buying quality human-made artistic products when they grow up. Again, I can see some sort of compensation arrangement being worked out, say akin to Spotify, but DallE and Midjourney are adding far more value to their particular equations than Spotify is by pressing play on unaltered audio files.
If it's any consolation, Midjourney seems to have zero idea what the style of Dorothy Gambrell looks like. Unlike the hundreds of artists that it will at least try to emulate when prompted directly, it doesn't even to seem to know that that name is associated with the realm of comic line art. Inclusion of her images in the training feedstock may have helped the model make fractionally better cartoons (if they were actually included in any quantity), but the influence of any one artist on that improvement is incredibly diluted. I can get being annoyed at the idea of strangers making money that nobody was previously making -- I can hardly stand the rich myself --but let's get a grip on the degree to which you're contributing to their filthy lucre.
posted by wolfpants at 9:14 PM on January 16
DallE is a relatively small part of OpenAI, revenue-wise. Midjourney made $200M last year, and is not far behind DallE in subscribers. It would be pretty ballsy to value DallE at much more than 20 years of current revenue (especially if it might be a fad destined to increasingly suck in terms of quality any day now).
And, while the model has depended on input from billions of images of all sorts including artwork from thousands of artists, the vast majority of revenue DallE does generate simply would not have happened without that model (or its AI competition) doing what it does. Like it or not, the suckers spending money to mess around with image generators are probably not substituting that subscription money outlay for spending money on your art. If anything, it might even be getting new people interested in the idea of buying quality human-made artistic products when they grow up. Again, I can see some sort of compensation arrangement being worked out, say akin to Spotify, but DallE and Midjourney are adding far more value to their particular equations than Spotify is by pressing play on unaltered audio files.
If it's any consolation, Midjourney seems to have zero idea what the style of Dorothy Gambrell looks like. Unlike the hundreds of artists that it will at least try to emulate when prompted directly, it doesn't even to seem to know that that name is associated with the realm of comic line art. Inclusion of her images in the training feedstock may have helped the model make fractionally better cartoons (if they were actually included in any quantity), but the influence of any one artist on that improvement is incredibly diluted. I can get being annoyed at the idea of strangers making money that nobody was previously making -- I can hardly stand the rich myself --but let's get a grip on the degree to which you're contributing to their filthy lucre.
posted by wolfpants at 9:14 PM on January 16
These days I generally can't even find aesthetic value in the output, even the non-dreck ones. It's hard to objectively convey my subjective experience of finding the line work, colour choices, etc, beautiful but empty. The typos or not (say in a scene of a man reading the news) aren't a result of specific comic choices or otherwise. If we find it 'funny', it's because we ascribe meaning to it. After a certain mental tipping point, I do find most of them not just off-putting but also horrific. It's like watching make-up'd cadavers being paraded not even by a culture who would'd loved and cared for the souls that left those bodies behind. The make up follows some kind of formula, picking from here or there, based on how commonly it's found. But altogether it barely says anything. I can't imagine seeing your intellectual output reduced to its most physical attribute and parsing it by probability not by why. Why was this style married to this prompt? Don't know but that's what the stats say. Even Kincade's drawings was calling back to something.
posted by cendawanita at 9:35 PM on January 16 [9 favorites]
posted by cendawanita at 9:35 PM on January 16 [9 favorites]
What if we tabled the tired debate about ai generation of art, and instead moved to the tired debate about guaranteed incomes and living wages? That's also an implicit part of this comic.
posted by Pitachu at 9:51 PM on January 16 [7 favorites]
posted by Pitachu at 9:51 PM on January 16 [7 favorites]
So what's the difference? Is it just that the Federation is a post-scarcity socialist utopia so nobody has to rely on proprietary rights and all art goes into the public domain by default?
I think many people who object to rich corporations eating their artwork and regurgitating it to compete with them today would be okay with their artwork passing into the public domain a few hundred years from now and used freely in holodeck simulations.
posted by straight at 9:58 PM on January 16 [4 favorites]
I think many people who object to rich corporations eating their artwork and regurgitating it to compete with them today would be okay with their artwork passing into the public domain a few hundred years from now and used freely in holodeck simulations.
posted by straight at 9:58 PM on January 16 [4 favorites]
Thank you for reminding me about one of my favorite comics of all time, about the most restrictive of all sandwich forms.
posted by Jon_Evil at 11:13 PM on January 16 [6 favorites]
posted by Jon_Evil at 11:13 PM on January 16 [6 favorites]
(reads the thread)
Ah, I see marketing decision to use phrases like "Artificial Intelligence" and "learning" to unconsciously bias people toward thinking that what computers do has anything to do with what humans do is still working very well on some folks.
Unrelated, the human tendency to "double down" when confronted with uncomfortable opposition still seems to be in full effect.
posted by jscalzi at 5:43 AM on January 17 [24 favorites]
Ah, I see marketing decision to use phrases like "Artificial Intelligence" and "learning" to unconsciously bias people toward thinking that what computers do has anything to do with what humans do is still working very well on some folks.
Unrelated, the human tendency to "double down" when confronted with uncomfortable opposition still seems to be in full effect.
posted by jscalzi at 5:43 AM on January 17 [24 favorites]
jscalzi, right on the money on both points.
Referring to Spinda's claims that this list isn't what it's being presented as being, I have no extra insight into that, except that a list of sources with Dorothy Gambrell's name in it was submitted in court (PDF), as discussed in this previous Metafilter post. That's not the same link as presented in the post, which is a Wayback Machine link, it's a list submitted as evidence in a court case. In the MeFi thread, no such accusation came up, at least.
posted by JHarris at 5:55 AM on January 17 [2 favorites]
Referring to Spinda's claims that this list isn't what it's being presented as being, I have no extra insight into that, except that a list of sources with Dorothy Gambrell's name in it was submitted in court (PDF), as discussed in this previous Metafilter post. That's not the same link as presented in the post, which is a Wayback Machine link, it's a list submitted as evidence in a court case. In the MeFi thread, no such accusation came up, at least.
posted by JHarris at 5:55 AM on January 17 [2 favorites]
If you're putting your imagery out into the world, it will be seen by human and machine eyes, and both will copy it (if it's good) in some very fractional way.
I may well shut up, but only to avoid further toxicity rather than to spare your delicate ears from ideas you disagree with.
Your fundamental misunderstanding of copyright (a system which every single day protects creators from having their works copied, and which I have had to use myself to have stolen work taken down by those who would profit from my labor without compensation or permission), and your incredible lack of empathy towards creative people whose work is stolen and then used to batter them into economic tatters using a machine that could not function without this theft, is incredible.
This technology does not exist without the labor that is stolen to generate these images or that text. Period. It is no way functionally equivalent to a living being influenced by pre-existing art. The images that are being produced by this technology even include signatures of the artists whose work is being straight-up copied. This is not "fractional" copying. Only the most disingenuous argument would claim that as similar to "inspiration."
The livelihood of many urban planning consultants is probably roughly as threatened as that of comic book colorists, but less so than decent artists and writers, if I had to guess.
The only toxicity in this thread is found in the attitude that you're espousing.
"If I had to guess." Some of us don't have to guess - I've been a professional writer for 15 years now, and my clients have been experimenting with LLMs for the past three to four years specifically to replace people like me. For artists, the timeline is even more accelerated.
"decent artists and writers" - great underhanded insult toss there. Yes, the only people who have anything to worry about are those without the talent to overcome the onslaught of artificially-generated, inexpensive text and imagery. You're so right.
Why can't people just be better, then they'd never be threatened by technology? Why can't peasants just work faster, then they'd never be threatened by machinery? Why can't people work entirely for free, then there'd be no impetus for capitalism to replace their labor? Why can't they do all of the above while smiling and whistling a happy tune? Why must they disagree with ideas??!?!?!
posted by jordantwodelta at 6:06 AM on January 17 [22 favorites]
I may well shut up, but only to avoid further toxicity rather than to spare your delicate ears from ideas you disagree with.
Your fundamental misunderstanding of copyright (a system which every single day protects creators from having their works copied, and which I have had to use myself to have stolen work taken down by those who would profit from my labor without compensation or permission), and your incredible lack of empathy towards creative people whose work is stolen and then used to batter them into economic tatters using a machine that could not function without this theft, is incredible.
This technology does not exist without the labor that is stolen to generate these images or that text. Period. It is no way functionally equivalent to a living being influenced by pre-existing art. The images that are being produced by this technology even include signatures of the artists whose work is being straight-up copied. This is not "fractional" copying. Only the most disingenuous argument would claim that as similar to "inspiration."
The livelihood of many urban planning consultants is probably roughly as threatened as that of comic book colorists, but less so than decent artists and writers, if I had to guess.
The only toxicity in this thread is found in the attitude that you're espousing.
"If I had to guess." Some of us don't have to guess - I've been a professional writer for 15 years now, and my clients have been experimenting with LLMs for the past three to four years specifically to replace people like me. For artists, the timeline is even more accelerated.
"decent artists and writers" - great underhanded insult toss there. Yes, the only people who have anything to worry about are those without the talent to overcome the onslaught of artificially-generated, inexpensive text and imagery. You're so right.
Why can't people just be better, then they'd never be threatened by technology? Why can't peasants just work faster, then they'd never be threatened by machinery? Why can't people work entirely for free, then there'd be no impetus for capitalism to replace their labor? Why can't they do all of the above while smiling and whistling a happy tune? Why must they disagree with ideas??!?!?!
posted by jordantwodelta at 6:06 AM on January 17 [22 favorites]
Say more why sure thanks for asking--
I've seen people connect copyright into this, and truthfully any computer generated means that can closely reproduce a source image, sometimes down to including part of a watermark included in the original, is definitely being stored in some fashion, even if it's obfuscated and lossy, and has serious implications of copyright.
But copyright, broken and twisted as it is, isn't the only consideration. Someone can own the copyright of an item, but that doesn't make them its author. Just because you own it doesn't mean you can say you made it. "AI"s, in addition to being "money laundering for copyright," attempt to launder even authorship.
Anyway, I still think the only sane legal interpretation here under current copyright law is that "AI"-produced art should be considered a derivative work based on every work in its training corpus. All the works have been glommed together so they can't be distinguished from each other in that, so the result is based on every one of them.
If it's this whole mess that results in substantive reform of copyright after so many decades, when it threatens to restrain the interests of big companies and Thiel-like moneymen being able to do what they want with the works of a million Dorothy Gambrells, what with the early history of the internet warped by damnable copyright extensions and things like the DMCA, then I will vibrate so violently with anger that I will give off visible light.
posted by JHarris at 6:07 AM on January 17 [10 favorites]
I've seen people connect copyright into this, and truthfully any computer generated means that can closely reproduce a source image, sometimes down to including part of a watermark included in the original, is definitely being stored in some fashion, even if it's obfuscated and lossy, and has serious implications of copyright.
But copyright, broken and twisted as it is, isn't the only consideration. Someone can own the copyright of an item, but that doesn't make them its author. Just because you own it doesn't mean you can say you made it. "AI"s, in addition to being "money laundering for copyright," attempt to launder even authorship.
Anyway, I still think the only sane legal interpretation here under current copyright law is that "AI"-produced art should be considered a derivative work based on every work in its training corpus. All the works have been glommed together so they can't be distinguished from each other in that, so the result is based on every one of them.
If it's this whole mess that results in substantive reform of copyright after so many decades, when it threatens to restrain the interests of big companies and Thiel-like moneymen being able to do what they want with the works of a million Dorothy Gambrells, what with the early history of the internet warped by damnable copyright extensions and things like the DMCA, then I will vibrate so violently with anger that I will give off visible light.
posted by JHarris at 6:07 AM on January 17 [10 favorites]
(I guess that's what being incandescently angry means....)
posted by JHarris at 6:16 AM on January 17 [6 favorites]
posted by JHarris at 6:16 AM on January 17 [6 favorites]
I’ve looked at Cat and Girl now and then for years, and I never thought about the creator. I would have guessed they were an academic with a solid career. I must get back to Patreon.
posted by Phanx at 6:32 AM on January 17 [2 favorites]
posted by Phanx at 6:32 AM on January 17 [2 favorites]
According to this page at the Washington Post, we here at Metafilter have contributed 1.3M tokens to Google's large language model, and presumably the others.
posted by The Half Language Plant at 7:16 AM on January 17 [4 favorites]
posted by The Half Language Plant at 7:16 AM on January 17 [4 favorites]
Mod note: Comment removed, please avoid using ChatGPT or similar to post answers!
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 7:37 AM on January 17 [7 favorites]
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 7:37 AM on January 17 [7 favorites]
Mod note: different comment and response removed, please avoid telling others to “shut up”.
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 7:40 AM on January 17 [2 favorites]
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 7:40 AM on January 17 [2 favorites]
Here's my deleted comment, with the offensive verbiage removed:
I am a comic book writer who pays artists and colorists for their work. Anything else is theft.
posted by jordantwodelta at 8:16 AM on January 17 [11 favorites]
I am a comic book writer who pays artists and colorists for their work. Anything else is theft.
posted by jordantwodelta at 8:16 AM on January 17 [11 favorites]
Saying that Midjourney democratizes the ability to make art is like saying that breaking a supermarket window and stealing a six-pack democratizes shopping.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 11:23 AM on January 17 [5 favorites]
posted by kittens for breakfast at 11:23 AM on January 17 [5 favorites]
So if the machine learning implementation that produces novel images from its corpus is indeed effectively a kind of lossy compression, does that make the novel image a derivative work?
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 11:53 AM on January 17
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 11:53 AM on January 17
Big technology companies are recklessly pursuing profits from artificial intelligence and urgent action is needed to mitigate the risks from the rapidly growing sector, the head of the United Nations has warned.
17th January 2024
posted by infini at 1:16 PM on January 17 [3 favorites]
17th January 2024
posted by infini at 1:16 PM on January 17 [3 favorites]
i_am_joe’s_spleen, i think fairey vs associated press would say no:
casetext link ny times link
posted by gorestainedrunes at 1:17 PM on January 17 [1 favorite]
casetext link ny times link
posted by gorestainedrunes at 1:17 PM on January 17 [1 favorite]
Gotta say I'm really hating the repeated argument in this thread that Gambrell has no basis for concern here, since Midjourney isn't ostensibly vomiting out functionally identical Cat and Girl comics for someone to collect and sell? Like somehow that's the only negative outcome she's allowed to care about--the individualized replacement of her exact work with a doppelganger--and thus we should ignore the enormous constellation of concerns the situation raises, including the actual point she's making right there in the fucking linked comic? Ugh capitalism is brain poison
posted by churl at 1:28 PM on January 17 [13 favorites]
posted by churl at 1:28 PM on January 17 [13 favorites]
This is a "Walk Away from Omelas" situation. Up here is a beautiful city where anyone can make art or literature just by thinking about it. How marvelous! Who wouldn't want to live there!
But down in the basement all the artists are locked away, starving.
posted by Ishbadiddle at 2:13 PM on January 17 [10 favorites]
But down in the basement all the artists are locked away, starving.
posted by Ishbadiddle at 2:13 PM on January 17 [10 favorites]
I feel like this creates a moral imperative to make pirating "AI" produced media product trivial. We can't stop people from selling them, we can't stop people from consuming them, but we can at least make sure there is no money in it.
As far as I am concerned, anyone who mixes their labor with stolen goods has volunteered to have the lot of it given away for free. It is only treating their efforts with the same respect they have shown others.
posted by The Manwich Horror at 2:20 PM on January 17
As far as I am concerned, anyone who mixes their labor with stolen goods has volunteered to have the lot of it given away for free. It is only treating their efforts with the same respect they have shown others.
posted by The Manwich Horror at 2:20 PM on January 17
I've been struggling with this, lately. I run a D&D campaign, and DALL-E has given us some truly delightful images of memorable campaign events.
There is zero chance I would ever pay a real person to produce those images. Further, I already have a chatGPT Pro account for my work, so I'm not giving OpenAI any additional money for their thievery.
But still. I'm benefiting from the thievery. I could just stop.
30,000 innocent children had to die to make this hammer I'm holding in my hand. Do I use it to pound this nail in? Why or why not?
posted by gurple at 2:22 PM on January 17 [1 favorite]
There is zero chance I would ever pay a real person to produce those images. Further, I already have a chatGPT Pro account for my work, so I'm not giving OpenAI any additional money for their thievery.
But still. I'm benefiting from the thievery. I could just stop.
30,000 innocent children had to die to make this hammer I'm holding in my hand. Do I use it to pound this nail in? Why or why not?
posted by gurple at 2:22 PM on January 17 [1 favorite]
>But still. I'm benefiting from the thievery. I could just stop.
You aren't hurting anyone, so from a consequentialist point of view you are in the clear. You aren't putting this back into the market to undercut artists financially. I wouldn't see this as very different from taking images of an image search to illustrate a monster or object from your game. In neither case are the artists being paid for their work.
But maybe you could make a point of commissioning an artist every once in a while for one of these images. That way your game is actively putting money in artists' pockets.
posted by The Manwich Horror at 2:28 PM on January 17 [2 favorites]
You aren't hurting anyone, so from a consequentialist point of view you are in the clear. You aren't putting this back into the market to undercut artists financially. I wouldn't see this as very different from taking images of an image search to illustrate a monster or object from your game. In neither case are the artists being paid for their work.
But maybe you could make a point of commissioning an artist every once in a while for one of these images. That way your game is actively putting money in artists' pockets.
posted by The Manwich Horror at 2:28 PM on January 17 [2 favorites]
My logic for abstaining from AI art is that I don't want to contribute to its improvement. Actions as seemingly trivial as choosing among multiple options can be very useful training data.
posted by cheshyre at 2:48 PM on January 17 [8 favorites]
posted by cheshyre at 2:48 PM on January 17 [8 favorites]
But maybe you could make a point of commissioning an artist every once in a while for one of these images. That way your game is actively putting money in artists' pockets.
I love that idea. It honestly hadn't occurred to me, and it never would've occurred to me if I weren't using AI for campaign art. So, the existence of AI images would actually contribute to an artist getting paid!
My whole party is struggling with this dilemma, and I bet they're going to love this idea. Thanks!
posted by gurple at 3:05 PM on January 17 [2 favorites]
I love that idea. It honestly hadn't occurred to me, and it never would've occurred to me if I weren't using AI for campaign art. So, the existence of AI images would actually contribute to an artist getting paid!
My whole party is struggling with this dilemma, and I bet they're going to love this idea. Thanks!
posted by gurple at 3:05 PM on January 17 [2 favorites]
JHarris: "Referring to Spinda's claims that this list isn't what it's being presented as being, I have no extra insight into that, except that a list of sources with Dorothy Gambrell's name in it was submitted in court (PDF), as discussed in this previous Metafilter post. That's not the same link as presented in the post, which is a Wayback Machine link, it's a list submitted as evidence in a court case. In the MeFi thread, no such accusation came up, at least."
That's Exhibit J from this court filing. You can find a description on page 62:
That took two minutes of Googling on my phone this time 😅
posted by Spinda at 4:08 PM on January 17 [1 favorite]
That's Exhibit J from this court filing. You can find a description on page 62:
Holz then said, “here is our style list” and posted a link to a spreadsheet on Google Docs called “Midjourney Style List.” One of the tabs on the spreadsheet was called “Artists” and listed over 4700 artist names. In other words, Holz published a list of artists who the Midjourney Image Product recognizes with the express purpose of these names being used by users and licensees of the Midjourney Image Product as terms in prompts. Holz’s comment, and the list, have remained available ever since.So—as implied in the Jon Lam tweet I linked—Exhibit J is just the list of names taken from the spreadsheet. Which is, again, not a list of artists whose work Midjourney was trained on, but rather a compilation of artist and genre names pulled from places like Wikipedia. The previous MeFi thread is also misrepresenting the nature of the document.
Below, this list is called the Midjourney Name List. A copy of this list appears in
Exhibit J: Midjourney Name List.
That took two minutes of Googling on my phone this time 😅
posted by Spinda at 4:08 PM on January 17 [1 favorite]
Spinda: I've skimmed my way through the filing. Isn't the important thing whether the named artists are in the LAION datasets used by Midjouney for training? And it doesn't seem unreasonable to infer that if an artist's name can be used as a prompt, that the reason is that they are in that dataset? When I looked at the docs for the LAION 400 set, it seems they were as it were promiscuous in their choices of what to collect and how. I haven't the time or bandwidth to download their index, but it wouldn't surprise me in the least if every Cat and Girl image is in there with an URL that makes it possible to infer that Gambrel should be associated with the relevant images.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 5:00 PM on January 17 [2 favorites]
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 5:00 PM on January 17 [2 favorites]
gurple, I had friends in high school back in the 90s who made decent pocket money drawing campaign art for friends who did tabletop gaming. It's absolutely something lots of artists do for money and probably way easier to find now that you can have them dial into a videoconference from anywhere to listen in on your gaming sesh.
posted by potrzebie at 5:03 PM on January 17
posted by potrzebie at 5:03 PM on January 17
i_am_joe's_spleen: I've skimmed my way through the filing. Isn't the important thing whether the named artists are in the LAION datasets used by Midjouney for training?
If they are, then we should be talking about that instead!
And it doesn't seem unreasonable to infer that if an artist's name can be used as a prompt, that the reason is that they are in that dataset?
Well, the spreadsheet is a compilation of names from various sources that could be tried as prompt keywords. Being in there doesn't mean that your work was part of the training data or actually works as a prompt keyword, it just means your name is somewhere on Wikipedia or one of the other sources that were crawled for names to try.
If we wanted to get really technical, we could say that because there's a natural-language component to the system, an artist's name working as a prompt keyword could indicate that their work was described somewhere in the textual data consumed in training that part of the model.
But now we're several steps away from the original claim, which remains untrue.
I haven't the time or bandwidth to download their index, but it wouldn't surprise me in the least if every Cat and Girl image is in there with an URL that makes it possible to infer that Gambrel should be associated with the relevant images.
I would hope that the conversation around this important, fraught, emotionally-charged issue would be driven by reporters and the like who do have the bandwidth for that kind of legwork! That's what journalism is supposed to be for! I don't think we should be rewarding and allowing the conversation to be led by those that misrepresent, selectively quote, and straight-up make things up (e.g., the supposed internal conversation amongst staff that wasn't, quoted from The Register in this FPP), in order to drive clicks to rage-bait.
posted by Spinda at 6:05 PM on January 17 [1 favorite]
If they are, then we should be talking about that instead!
And it doesn't seem unreasonable to infer that if an artist's name can be used as a prompt, that the reason is that they are in that dataset?
Well, the spreadsheet is a compilation of names from various sources that could be tried as prompt keywords. Being in there doesn't mean that your work was part of the training data or actually works as a prompt keyword, it just means your name is somewhere on Wikipedia or one of the other sources that were crawled for names to try.
If we wanted to get really technical, we could say that because there's a natural-language component to the system, an artist's name working as a prompt keyword could indicate that their work was described somewhere in the textual data consumed in training that part of the model.
But now we're several steps away from the original claim, which remains untrue.
I haven't the time or bandwidth to download their index, but it wouldn't surprise me in the least if every Cat and Girl image is in there with an URL that makes it possible to infer that Gambrel should be associated with the relevant images.
I would hope that the conversation around this important, fraught, emotionally-charged issue would be driven by reporters and the like who do have the bandwidth for that kind of legwork! That's what journalism is supposed to be for! I don't think we should be rewarding and allowing the conversation to be led by those that misrepresent, selectively quote, and straight-up make things up (e.g., the supposed internal conversation amongst staff that wasn't, quoted from The Register in this FPP), in order to drive clicks to rage-bait.
posted by Spinda at 6:05 PM on January 17 [1 favorite]
4000 artists seems like an implausibly small number to me. The Getty case against Stability AI accuses them of training on 12 million images owned by Getty. But then I just googled how to set up Stable Diffusion and it looks like you can get it running with only a few dozen images, which confuses me. I thought these things worked by looking at unimaginably huge datasets? Is the small number just for fine tuning? I know that during the release of Dall-E 2, they had it do something in the style of Vermeer, and there are only 34 extant Vermeers...
posted by surlyben at 8:23 PM on January 17
posted by surlyben at 8:23 PM on January 17
So criticism of AI is reserved only for journalists who have weeks to spend fucking around in its bowels, but actual AI generation is for anyone who taps two words into an engine and clicks run? Nah.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 4:24 AM on January 18 [4 favorites]
posted by kittens for breakfast at 4:24 AM on January 18 [4 favorites]
Surlyben: you don't need images to set up a local version of Stable Diffusion. The structure is basically there's some code for the interface which is comparatively small, an appropriate version of python, and then a big, single lump of ~6gb which is the model itself - the black box collection of pseudo-neural connections and weightings that does the diffusing stuff based on however many terabytes of other people's work and associated labels it's looked at. Think of this as the general model - eg, stable diffusion v1.4, 1.5, and SDXL are really just multi-GB blobs with different weightings.
These models can be further trained, by yourself or another, with a specialist focus which changes certain of the weightings, eg, pushing the anime levels of faces and textures way up, or making all cars vintage. You don't need a huge number of images to do this (though you may get better results if you do), as you're really just 'pushing down on the scales'. You can then hook your interface up to this new model and achieve different results.
Source: me mucking about non-professionally
posted by Sparx at 12:47 PM on January 18 [3 favorites]
These models can be further trained, by yourself or another, with a specialist focus which changes certain of the weightings, eg, pushing the anime levels of faces and textures way up, or making all cars vintage. You don't need a huge number of images to do this (though you may get better results if you do), as you're really just 'pushing down on the scales'. You can then hook your interface up to this new model and achieve different results.
Source: me mucking about non-professionally
posted by Sparx at 12:47 PM on January 18 [3 favorites]
kittens for breakfast: "So criticism of AI is reserved only for journalists who have weeks to spend fucking around in its bowels, but actual AI generation is for anyone who taps two words into an engine and clicks run? Nah."
...No? It's completely possible to criticize AI without spreading misinformation? You can't just say finding real evidence is too hard, let's use fake evidence instead. If you're mad at tapping words into an engine and calling it art, why aren't you mad at copy/pasting false info and calling it a news story?
posted by Spinda at 11:31 AM on January 19
...No? It's completely possible to criticize AI without spreading misinformation? You can't just say finding real evidence is too hard, let's use fake evidence instead. If you're mad at tapping words into an engine and calling it art, why aren't you mad at copy/pasting false info and calling it a news story?
posted by Spinda at 11:31 AM on January 19
> You can't just say finding real evidence is too hard, let's use fake evidence instead.
Why not? LLMs do this all the time. And you're defending them.
posted by urbanwhaleshark at 8:18 AM on January 20 [3 favorites]
Why not? LLMs do this all the time. And you're defending them.
posted by urbanwhaleshark at 8:18 AM on January 20 [3 favorites]
I like having accurate information. It makes arguments against machine art more rigorous when the argument comes from a place of facts, and if the argument against AI isn't coming from a factual place, why make it at all?
The claim is that Midjourney took a bunch of artists work without permission, and used it to make a machine that would compete with the very same artists whose work was taken, then they schemed to make sure the machine could compete with the 4000 artists specifically, and while they were doing it they had a good laugh about it on the company discord. If they didn't do those last two things, there is no reason to be upset about those last two things.
posted by surlyben at 3:58 PM on January 20 [1 favorite]
The claim is that Midjourney took a bunch of artists work without permission, and used it to make a machine that would compete with the very same artists whose work was taken, then they schemed to make sure the machine could compete with the 4000 artists specifically, and while they were doing it they had a good laugh about it on the company discord. If they didn't do those last two things, there is no reason to be upset about those last two things.
posted by surlyben at 3:58 PM on January 20 [1 favorite]
Scott Meyer of Basic Instructions was on the list too, and just posted his own reaction comic.
posted by mbrubeck at 10:34 AM on February 5 [2 favorites]
posted by mbrubeck at 10:34 AM on February 5 [2 favorites]
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posted by nightcoast at 9:45 AM on January 16 [13 favorites]