AI PBs
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Are you aware of how disengenuous it is that you’re pretending AI has just landed in a vacuum bubble without anyone contributing who would and could (and imo should) be held liable?
Let’s use your tee shirt example.
If Fruit of the Loom made tee shirts that bleached the cotton and didn’t rinse it properly and people got blisters wearing them, no. The cotton and tee shirt isn’t something liable. It didn’t make itself. The people who MADE the shirt are sued for not following the laws and safety measures of bleaching.
AI isn’t being sued. It’s a bit of hallucinatory computer program. No one is taking the code to court.
But the programmers who built that code, and then who scraped all kinds of sources - many of which they did not have the rights to scrape - caused harm that CAN be claimed as injurious. So, the artists who claim that harm have every right to make their case in the courts, and to seek relief from said harm from the coders over the code they built.
You making the claim that code is just unthinking and thus totally innocent as if it wasn’t built by people knowing exactly what they were doing is just absolutely the worst kind of bad faith positioning… Or it’s one of the worst logical fallacies I’ve ever read. But if it were fallacy, you probably would have learned something in the entire morass of this very long thread and made some re-evaluations, so…
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@RedRocket said in AI PBs:
Okay, let me rephrase that so I am more clear. It is the person writing the prompt that is doing the fraud not the computer making the image.
It’s like suing a pencil manufacturer because someone used a pencil to draw Mickey Mouse. The people making the pencil didn’t do the crime. In the same way, the people making the A.I. shouldn’t be held responsible if someone else uses it for fraud and that is what these litigious companies are after.
They want to establish a precedent to make it so A.I. companies can held liable for damages if their code is used to do fraud.
The difference here is that the pencil manufacturer in this scenario is literally loading up their pencils with Mickey Mouse lead. The pencils are powered and designed specifically to use Mickey Mouse’s image.
The technology is specifically fed and powered by copyrighted work. It uses the work as fuel to make itself go. It’s stealing its own gas. It literally cannot perform to effective standards without being trained on the countless copyrighted materials it’s been given. There’s no viable, potentially profitable product without doing so.
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The pencils are powered and designed specifically to use Mickey Mouse’s image.
The same thing can be said about any human as well. If you see the mouse and have the talent to draw it, does that make you an evil criminal who was trained to destroy the profit margins of Disney?
It can’t be a crime to see things and learn from them. That’s just how reality works. What an A.I. does is no different than what a human does. If anything, it should be less culpable for fraud because it can not choose create images. A human must ask it to do so.
Again, I would like to point out that in any other industry this would be thrown out of court. If you sue Honda for making a car that drives faster one year than the model from the year before because drunk drivers might use it to drive drunk they would throw you out of court.
If you sued a bow and arrow company for making a more accurate compound bow because someone might use it to rob your bank, you would be laughed out of court.
There is no other industry where a tool can be held liable for the actions of the person using the tool. It’s inconceivable except in this one case because in this one case it scares the ever living shit out of corporations. They see A.I. as a direct threat to their market dominance.
If every wanna-be writer/director can make his own full length films at home, that’s the end of their monopoly. If everyone can be an artist, that’s the end of the “fine art” monopoly. Lowering the skill floor and democratizing media means more competition for the established players and that has investors freaking out. That’s the only reason this is even being given the time of day.
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The difference here is that the pencil manufacturer in this scenario is literally loading up their pencils with Mickey Mouse lead. The pencils are powered and designed specifically to use Mickey Mouse’s image.
This exactly. If the manufacturer made an etch-a-sketch that knew how to draw Mickey Mouse and would draw it on command, I expect that they would be held responsible. I would certainly hope they would, at any rate.
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If the manufacturer made an etch-a-sketch that knew how to draw Mickey Mouse and would draw it on command
The key part of your sentence there, legally speaking, is “on command”.
The toy isn’t creating an image of mickey, it is the person who issues the command that causes the image to be created.If a company created an A.I. whose only job was to make as many copyrighted images of Micky Mouse as it could then you might have a viable legal case, but having a tool capable of being used to create that image is not the same as creating tool with the purpose of creating fraudulent content.
In order for them to win in court they would need to prove explicitly that the A.I. company trained their neural net to make images of the copywrited material for the explicit purpose of fraud and that is next to impossible to prove even if it was true, which it isn’t.
Think of it like this - your average home laser printer can render a passable copy the U.S. dollar. If you feed it the proper kind of cloth (not paper) you could manufacture counterfeit five dollar bills in the comfort of your own home. Does that make your printer illegal? Does that make your printer manufacturer, or adobe for creating photoshop software capable of making high quality print sheets a criminal?
No, the only person who would be a criminal is you, if you use those tools to print out fake money.
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@RedRocket said in AI PBs:
@Faraday said in AI PBs:
Think of it like this - your average home laser printer can render a passable copy the U.S. dollar. If you feed it the proper kind of cloth (not paper) you could manufacture counterfeit five dollar bills in the comfort of your own home. Does that make your printer illegal? Does that make your printer manufacturer, or adobe for creating photoshop software capable of making high quality print sheets a criminal?Once again, this comparison is not equitable: in this case, the printer would have been programmed with the instructions for how to make five dollar bills. Like, not “you have to go find your money laundering tips elsewhere,” it’s specifically baked in.
It’s part of the design. It’s like you designed a product specifically to be able to do something, among other things, and then say, “Yeah but the user doesn’t have to do the thing we specifically trained our program to be able to do.”
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@Roz If nothing else this dude has seriously boosted the upvote economy for many here. I’m dolin’ out kudos to someone every couple posts.
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Once again, this comparison is not equitable: in this case, the printer would have been programmed with the instructions for how to make five dollar bills. Like, not “you have to go find your money laundering tips elsewhere,” it’s specifically baked in.
And I guarantee that if you tried to sell a printer that could convincingly replicate $5 bills at the push of a button, you’d have treasury agents shutting you down in short order. But that has nothing to do with copyright.
That aside, we’re not talking about a dumb tool like a pencil or even a 2D or 3D printer that just blindly prints the lines/pixels/plastic you tell it. We’re talking about an “intelligent” (per their branding) tool that has an algorithm and data inside that specifically enable it to create unauthorized derivative works of copyrighted/trademarked works. ETA: If they had trained only on public domain works, it wouldn’t be able to do that. If they had licensed the content they trained on, it wouldn’t be an issue. It’s all about the design of the tool.
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We’re talking about an “intelligent” … tool
That’s where you’re wrong. It isn’t intelligence. That’s why I linked the video that explains how A.I. works. It is no more intelligent or capable of free will than any pocket calculator. It’s a very complex series of pass or fail checks that have become robust enough to give the appearance of intelligence but it has no will, no motivation, no real intelligence. That’s why image generation can have such freaky errors. It has no actual concept of what body parts are attached where or what any of the context of your prompts mean. It’s just taking a bunch of random noise and reducing that noise in a pattern which is likely to be similar to other patterns that it has seen before.
It’s not aware at all, at least, not yet. Once we get true A.I. then you can start making the arguments you are making now with some legitimacy but with the way it functions right now, it’s still just a very fancy pencil.
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I say this in the way of an American Southerner; bless your heart.
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@RedRocket said in AI PBs:
We’re talking about an “intelligent” … tool
That’s where you’re wrong. It isn’t intelligence. That’s why I linked the video that explains how A.I. works. It is no more intelligent or capable of free will than any pocket calculator. It’s a very complex series of pass or fail checks that have become robust enough to give the appearance of intelligence but it has no will, no motivation, no real intelligence. That’s why image generation can have such freaky errors. It has no actual concept of what body parts are attached where or what any of the context of your prompts mean. It’s just taking a bunch of random noise and reducing that noise in a pattern which is likely to be similar to other patterns that it has seen before.
It’s not aware at all, at least, not yet. Once we get true A.I. then you can start making the arguments you are making now with some legitimacy but with the way it functions right now, it’s still just a very fancy pencil.
This analogy only works if the pencil is made of stolen materials.
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@RedRocket said in AI PBs:
Okay, let me rephrase that so I am more clear. It is the person writing the prompt that is doing the fraud not the computer making the image.
This sounds like it was copy/pasted from a ChatGPT response. I am sure some people have trouble grasping this, but it really is quite simple. Allow me to explain.
…
The Aristocrats
@RedRocket said in AI PBs:
What an A.I. does is no different than what a human does.
Trying to appeal to our inner Trekkies won’t work. We gotta be out of capitalism and into post-scarity Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism for this argument to have a chance. Unfortunately, people keep pushing towards Dune, so Butlarian Jihad it is.
@RedRocket said in AI PBs:
If every wanna-be writer/director can make his own full length films at home, that’s the end of their monopoly.
I know several film students who have done this with 0 AI.
If everyone can be an artist, that’s the end of the “fine art” monopoly.
There is an argument to be made about fine art being nothing buy an utter bullshit money laundering scheme. AI won’t fix that, it will just make it worse.
Lowering the skill floor and democratizing media means more competition for the established players and that has investors freaking out.
Which is why you can help overthrow these ebil monopolies for four easy payments for the lifetime service, or if you prefer there is the option for a monthly subscription model.
Anyways, you can’t democratize art. It’s not a thing to vote on whether it exists, it simply is. Not to get opinionated as a failed Tuba-oomp-pah-ing Music Ed major, but real art takes suffering and emotion and soul and dedication and sometimes talent but it plays a non-zero factor. People spend years developing their crafts and applying their own personal flourishes to things.
None of which any AI can even vaguely comprehend, because if it could you wouldn’t be able to ever convince it to make a hard right turn into fascism as it repeatedly can be seen doing.
You want AI to let people just jump ahead with no effort (I assure you, figuring out how to write a prompt is extremely low effort here)… it’s like you want someone with 0 practice in the kitchen to win the Great British Bake-off by describing to a robot how they want a cake to look and taste. It’s fucking ludicrous.
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@RedRocket I see how you omitted the part of my quote where I said “per their branding” to clarify the air-quotes around intelligent, and specified that I was talking about the algorithm/data baked into the tool. I understand quite well how these tools work. I also understand copyright law. Your “it’s a dumb tool” argument holds little weight IMHO, legally or technically.
But even setting all that aside, I don’t even care if it’s fair use. It’s wrong to take somebody’s stuff, use it to make a product that makes you a zillion dollars—a product that wouldn’t work at all without their stuff—and give them nothing in return. It is exhausting and disheartening that this is even a debate.
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This analogy only works if the pencil is made of stolen materials.
Again, it’s not “stealing” anything. Not any more than any person with a pair of eyes seeing an image. It learns what things are by breaking them down into a format that it can understand and reference later. That’s not stealing. There are no copies of images of Micky Mouse in the files used to run the A.I.
It’s just math and code. You are making this thing seem way more magical than it is.
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@RedRocket said in AI PBs:
The pencils are powered and designed specifically to use Mickey Mouse’s image.
The same thing can be said about any human as well. If you see the mouse and have the talent to draw it, does that make you an evil criminal who was trained to destroy the profit margins of Disney?
It can’t be a crime to see things and learn from them. That’s just how reality works. What an A.I. does is no different than what a human does. If anything, it should be less culpable for fraud because it can not choose create images. A human must ask it to do so.
Again, I would like to point out that in any other industry this would be thrown out of court. If you sue Honda for making a car that drives faster one year than the model from the year before because drunk drivers might use it to drive drunk they would throw you out of court.
If you sued a bow and arrow company for making a more accurate compound bow because someone might use it to rob your bank, you would be laughed out of court.
There is no other industry where a tool can be held liable for the actions of the person using the tool. It’s inconceivable except in this one case because in this one case it scares the ever living shit out of corporations. They see A.I. as a direct threat to their market dominance.
If every wanna-be writer/director can make his own full length films at home, that’s the end of their monopoly. If everyone can be an artist, that’s the end of the “fine art” monopoly. Lowering the skill floor and democratizing media means more competition for the established players and that has investors freaking out. That’s the only reason this is even being given the time of day.
You just have such a fundamentally incorrect understanding of how and why people make art. It’s just fucking depressing.
Art is already democratized. Anyone can learn it. Anyone can practice it. And the people who are going to be the most dramatically, negatively impacted aren’t the big established corporations you think are monopolizing these spaces: it’s the individual artists who are just trying to make a modest living.
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@Roz And I’ll tack on that when little Jenny Watercolor makes a painting, it doesn’t poison the entire city of Brownsville permanently.
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@Roz Democratizing art is exactly what A.I. does.
I can’t draw worth a lick these days because my hands are shot but I can still make passable art for my hobbies because of A.I.
I can even run it locally. No corporation can control what I make.I mean, I get that you’re mad that the fact so many people can enter the market and fill it with content that your content is devalued but that’s just progress. You too could learn to use it and flood the market. Plus, because you have actual skill yours would end up looking better and sell more than the people with no actual training or skill.
It is a total pain in the ass to get A.I. to understand object positioning so all those prompt jockeys who can’t draw have to take hours and hours to do something you can do with a simple sketch fed into the A.I. engine because you understand perspective and how distance should change scale and line width on a work.
Plus you are overlooking the radical advancements in what you can do to your images using open source image to image A.I. like Flux Kontext.
Have a sketch you want to turn into a detailed digital drawing of a space ship on a strange alien planet? You can spend 6 hours doing that or you can have the A.I. do it in seconds. Want the ship to have rusted metal plating? You can spend an hour painting in tiny, detailed, rust patches or you can lightly sketch them in and have flux add more detail the rust. You can make art with coloured pencil which the A.I. will understand than translate over into any style of art you want.
You are looking at this as if it’s taking away from artists when it makes you magnitudes more productive. You just haven’t given it a chance.
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You’re never going to convince each other of your arguments, you’re using different metrics and seem to care about different aspects of the subject. Anyone here who is liable to agree with either side already does.
You can keep shouting past each other if you wish, of course, but it does seem a touch senseless. We should be arguing about vampire sex.
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We should be arguing about vampire sex.
I’ve always found the idea of vampire sex silly. Who wants to bang a corpse and also, why would the vampire want to bang a sweaty, stinky, meat-sack that smells like day-old urine and too many chemicals? It’s bad enough you have to eat them to stay alive-ish, why would you want to rub your bits against them? It’s just gross!
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When I was younger, I was promised that the machines would do the work so I could do the painting and the writing and the music.
The machines are doing the painting and the writing and the music, now, and they can only do it because someone fed them a whole load of things that lots of people made, for free. Perhaps I have the right to be a little pissed off about this.
