Google Docs, Sheets, and Forms should also get a mention. People forget that before that the only way to work together on documents was a shared drive with file locking while 1 person can work on a file at a time, complicated and unpractical. There are still no massively adopted replacements for these (Or they’re made by Microsoft, lol)

Awesome and great explanation for a layperson. Because the industry has been faking lighting for so long and lighting is quite important, the industry has become incredibly good at it. But it also takes a lot of development time that could be spent on adding more content or features. There’s a reason the opinion about ray tracing is extremely positive within the game development industry. But also nobody’s expecting it to become the norm over night, and the period with hybrid support for both raytracing and legacy lighting is only just starting.

Oh yeah, shame on me, spending a part of my day ‘shilling’ for myself and my friends and colleagues. And ‘shilling’ for a better future for us all by dissuading people from weaponizing bad arguments and misunderstandings to defend themselves, because that will not help them one bit. The latter part of you sentence is such utter nonsense that I don’t even need to respond to that.

Oh cool, you think misrepresenting and overly simplifying other people’s points of view and an accurate representation of how certain copyright laws work (even when that’s an inconvenient truth) is ethically justified as long as I can tell my anti AI homies that I stood up for them by ‘dunking’ on a person arguing in good faith for them to fight the right battles, and not cling to false ideas which will lead them to suffer more in the long term and turn people who would support them against them by spouting easily disputed lies.

But sure, go ahead! I’m sure you’ll change so many minds by immediately disregarding everything they say by putting them in a box of “thiefs” because they said something that didn’t fit very specifically within your “Guidebook to hating anything related to AI”.

Now back to a serious discussion if you’re up for it. Creative freedom is built on the notion that ideas are the property of nobody, it is a requirement since every artist in existence has derived their work from the work of others. It’s not even controversial, using your definition of stealing means all artists ‘steal’ from each other all the time, and nobody cares. But because a robot does it (despite that robot being in 100% control of the artist using it), it’s suddenly the most outrageous thing.

I know for sure my ideas have been ‘stolen’ from my publicized works, but I understand I had no sole right to that idea to begin with. I can’t copyright it. And if a ‘thief’ used those ideas in a transformative manner rather than create something that tries to recreate what I made (which would be actual infringement), they have every right to as without that right literally nobody would be allowed to make anything since everything we make is inspired by something that we don’t hold a copyright over. Most of the people actually producing stuff that will be displayed publicly so other people will experience and pull it apart to learn from understand we have no right to those ideas to begin with, except in how we applied those ideas in a specific work.

Because AI wasn’t a big thing before 2020, and no such permission in obtained material has been legally necessary so far (lawsuits are pending of course). If something has no incentive to exist it will not be created. There’s plenty of ethical justifications why no such permission is needed as well.

The fact they are not people does not mean they can’t use the same legal justifications that humans use. The law can’t think ahead. The justification is rather simple, the output is transformative. Humans are allowed to be inspired by other works because the ideas that make up such a concept can’t be copyrighted because they can be applied to be transformative. If the human uses that idea to produce something that’s not transformative, it’s also infringement. AI currently falls into that same reasoning.

You call it a self serving lie, but I could easily say that about your arguments as well that you only have this opinion because you don’t like AI (it seems). That’s not constructive, and since I hope you care about artists as well, I implore you actually engage in good faith debate other than just assuming the other person must be lying because they don’t share your opinion. You are also forgetting that the people that benefit from image generators are people. They are artists too. Most from before AI was a thing, and some because it became a thing.

Again, sorry to hear your husband feels that way. I feel he is doing himself a disservice to dismiss a new technology, as history has not been kind to those who oppose inevitable change, especially when there are no good non-emotional reasons against this new technology. Most companies have never cared about artists, that fact was true without AI, and that fact will remain true whatever happens. But if they replace their artists with AI they are fools, because the technology isn’t that great on it’s own (currently). You need human intervention to use AI to make high quality output, it’s a tool, not the entire process.

The Hollywood strikes is a good example of what artists should be doing rather than making certain false claims online. Join a union, get protection for your craft. Just because something is legal doesn’t mean you can’t fight for your right to demand specific protections from your employer. But they do not affect laws, they are organizational. It has no ramifications on people not part of the guilds involved. If a company which while protecting their artists, allows them to use AI to accelerate their workflow, and comes out on top against the company that despite their best intentions, made their art department not as profitable anymore, that will also cause them to lose their jobs. Since AI is very likely not to go away completely even in the most optimistic of scenarios, it’s eventually a worse situation than before.

And lastly, I guess your husband does different work than the digital artists I work with then. You have a ton of generation tools for meshes and textures. I also never equated it directly to AI, but you stated that they use no tools which do all the work for them (such as building a mesh for them), which is false. You wouldn’t use the direct output of AI as well. I implore you to look at “algorithmic art”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_art

That’s true, but the reason behind that is reasonable. There has been no human intervention, and so like photos taken by animals, they hold no copyright. But that’s not what you should be doing anyways, a tool must be used as part of a process, not as *the process*.

The inverse is also true. Disney will make their own AI regardless of being able to use anyone else’s data for training. Because they have a ton of data already. The only ones that will be shafted if that freedom is restricted is that those without a library of data to train will have no access to AI.

Hence why it’s important that open source models should keep the support of the public. If they have to close shop, what remains will be those made by tech giants. They will be censored, they will be neutered, except if you pay enough for them. The power should remain with the artists, and not those with the money.

Care to point to those Ls in court? Because as far as I’m aware they are mostly still ongoing and no legal consensus has been established.

It’s also a bit disingenuous to boil his argument down to what you did, as that’s obviously not what he said. You would most likely agree that a human would produce transformative works even when basing most of their knowledge on that of another (such as tracing).

Ideas are not copyrightable, and neither are styles. You could use that understanding of another’s work to create forgeries of their work, but hence why there exist protections against forgeries. But just making something in the style of another does not constitute infringement.

EDIT:

This was pretty much the only update on a currently running lawsuit I could find: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/us-judge-finds-flaws-artists-lawsuit-against-ai-companies-2023-07-19/

“U.S. District Judge William Orrick said during a hearing in San Francisco on Wednesday that he was inclined to dismiss most of a lawsuit brought by a group of artists against generative artificial intelligence companies, though he would allow them to file a new complaint.”

"The judge also said the artists were unlikely to succeed on their claim that images generated by the systems based on text prompts using their names violated their copyrights.

“I don’t think the claim regarding output images is plausible at the moment, because there’s no substantial similarity” between images created by the artists and the AI systems, Orrick said."

Hard to call that an L, so I’m eagerly awaiting them.

Those 10000 tabletop RPGs will almost certainly be completely worthless on their own, but might contain some novel ideas. Until a human comes by and scours it for ideas and combines it. It could very well be that in the same time it could only create 1 coherent tabletop RPG idea.

Should be mentioned though, AIs don’t run for free either, they cost quite a lot of electricity and require expensive hardware.

Except they totally could. But a data source of such size of material where everyone opted in to use for AI explicitly does not exist. The reason they fight it is in part also because training such models isn’t exactly free. The hardware that it’s done on costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and must run for long periods. You would not just do that for the funsies unless you have to. And considering the data by all means seems to be collected in legal ways, they have cause to fight such cases.

It’s a bit weird to use that as an argument to begin with since a party that knows they are at fault usually settles rather than fight on and incur more costs. It’s almost as if they don’t agree with your assertion that they needed permission, and that those imagines were IP violating 🤔

First of all, your second point is very sad to hear, but also a non-factor. You are aware people stole artwork before the advent of AI right? This has always been a problem with capitalism. It’s very hard to get accountability unless you are some big shot with easy access to a lawyer at your disposal. It’s always been shafting artists and those who do a lot of hard work.

I agree that artists deserve better and should gain more protections, but the unfortunate truth is that the wrong kind of response to AI could shaft them even more. Lets say inspiration could in some cases be ruled to be copyright infringement if the source of the inspiration could be reasonably traced back to another work. This could allow companies big companies like Disney an easier pathway to sue people for copyright infringement, after all your mind is forever tainted in their IP after you’ve watched a single Disney movie. Banning open source models from existing could also create a situation where the same big companies could create internal AI models from the art in their possession, but anyone with not enough materials could not. Which would mean that everyone but the people already taking advantage of artists will benefit from the existence of the technology.

I get that you want to speak up for your friends and family, and perhaps they do different work than I imagine, but do you actually talk to them about what they do in their work? Because digital artist also use non-AI algorithms to generate meshes and images. (And yes, that could be summed down to ‘type shit in and a 3D model appears’) They also use building blocks, prefabs, and use reference assets to create new unique assets. And like all artists they do take (sometimes direct) inspiration from the ideas of others, as does the rest of humanity. Some of the digital artists I know have embraced the technology and combined it with the rest of their skills to create new works more efficiently and reduce their workload. Either by being able to produce more, or being able to spend more time refining works. It’s just a tool that has made their life easier.

And this, is a strawman. If this argument is being made, it’s most likely because of their own misunderstanding of the subject. They are most likely trying to make the argument that the way biological neural networks and artificial neural networks ‘learn’ is similar. Which is true to a certain extent since one is derived from the other. There’s a legitimate argument to be made that this inherently provides transformation, and it’s exceptionally easy to see that in most unguided prompts.

I haven’t seen your version of this argument being spoken around here at all. In fact it feels like a personal interpretation of someone who did not understand what someone else was trying to communicate to them. A shame to imply that’s an argument people are regularly making.