'I’ve known a lot of people who are very pro internet piracy but for some reason very anti AI models “stealing” art.'
Great to see someone make this point. As someone who makes and sells copyrighted content for a living, I've spent twenty years hearing from everyone online that piracy (i.e. swiping a copy of my work instead of paying me for it) is actually progressive and fine. Now the same voices are insisting that AI art (i.e. using a model where my work might represent one ten millionth of the training data) is an intolerable act of theft. That makes no sense to me. As a creator I would so much rather people use LLMs than use torrents.
I think this is another exceptionally well-researched, well-written and well-argued piece.
On the topic of whether AI art is stolen art, I agree with you, because I understand how LLMs work, but that is not how regular people think about this.
1. Regular people don't see further than, training input goes in and output comes out. The point that the model will pick up vibes from a multitude of artwork doesn't make this not stealing in their mind, it just steals from all of them. This view operates with a different definition, i.e. what makes it not stealing is the artist adding their unique individuality to the many influences they had. What this means is of course not well defined, nevertheless it will be very difficult to convince someone who operates under a different definition. So it would have been good to elaborate a bit on why stick to your definition.
2. Modern AI is not seen as something open and democratic, but controlled by big tech and as such exploiting people to make huge profits in the hands of few. Regardless of how much truth is in this view, people don't judge AI art in a vacuum just purely from a technological POV, but they consider the social context (which might in part also explain why piracy might be judged differently).
Great post, thanks for writing. I'm going to plagiarize it now by using ideas in it to inform my later posts :)
Jokes aside I really appreciated the level-headed and thoughtful tone of this piece. There's so much crazy valence -- both positive and negative -- around AI art, it's good to just see someone write about it in a more directly descriptive way. It is a very nuanced thing! It's not just the worst, most unskilled outputs of DALL-E.
Unfortunately I am quite pessimistic that the public will ever accept the argument that AI doesn't literally encode images. Maybe better to say, look, why would I run DALL-E to generate a plagiarized image when I can just go steal it myself at the (very public) location DALL-E got its data from?
As you say, many anti AI art folks today would've probably been opposed to Warhol and likely also e.g. digital art. And in some ways this is a rational response for an existing artist who has benefited from the "old system" and invested time into succeeding under it – they don't want it disrupted.
RE: the way LLMs of functionin, it strikes me that their "neurons" with their "weights" don't seem fundamentally that different from the neurons in our brains that require varying amounts electrical potential before they discharge into other neurons.
RE: the Spotify EP, nice work! I'm enjoying giving Suno a melody via GarageBand or whistling and seeing where it takes it. What was your process like for this?
Mostly just playing around with Suno's built-in editor tools and getting better at prompting! I was trying to find very specific descriptions for sounds that reminded me of some artists I like like Boards of Canada
The end section re: how to think of human artist job loss is either very naive or deeply ghoulish. You don’t at all confront the reality of working professionals losing their jobs, having their careers go up in smoke, and the destitution this can inflict on them. Instead, you’re gushing about how much fun it is to use AI image generators and breezing over the human cost with “Artists find other jobs” as if starting a new career were some trivial task. You even seem to understand that it’s wrong to take people’s work and use it to automate them out of a living with no recompense, but this pales in comparison to your new toy.
Imagine some recent illustration school grad, faced with rising costs of living, massive amounts of debt, and dismal job prospects, reading this post. Watching you merrily churn out images while saying “we just have to live with this!” Do you hear yourself? Is this what effective altruism is? Is this your idea of “authentic care and company?” If so, keep them to yourself next time.
I mean first this has nothing to do with EA. This is coming from me being a mainstream liberal capitalist, not from anything associated with EA. Second if you find “Making a scarce resource less scarce is inherently bad for the people who depend on it being scarce, and that is very bad for them and we should be empathetic to their situation, but we shouldn’t artificially restrict the resource” ghoulish to the point that you can’t engage with it then I just don’t see how we can have a serious conversation 🤷♂️. If someone had gone to school to study an older computer technology that became less valuable because newer computers came along, I also think we as a society should support them with resources and avenues to other fields, but I wouldn't push a button to hold back the tech.
"AI image generators will put people out of work. This sucks for them, and we ought to help them, but being able to generate AI art is ultimately more important than them being able to put food on the table."
^ This is the ghoulish take. It's how your post reads.
If you meant something like:
"AI art is neat, actually. We should implement it en masse AFTER making sure it's not pushing people into poverty."
Then...say that. In plain English in your post somewhere, assert that you value people's welfare over your AI gen impressionism.
If people are paid to manually do a lot of calculations on paper, and then Excel is invented, and they have to go through the (I completely agree, horrible and painful) process of getting new jobs, is it true that anyone using Excel thinks it’s more important to have access to spreadsheets than that people eat? This isn’t how we think about any other profession.
If you advocate for the mass adoption of excel, without advocating for the people it's replacing first, then yes, you're saying that exact thing. I don't know where you got "using excel" from. You can use excel and also think that everyone it replaced should have been compensated as part of the process.
Who is "we?" I talked about artists because this post is about artists. It wasn't less bad somehow when weavers starved to death on the streets in England, or when American coal miners were left to rot. It was awful then, and still is.
Well I’m advocating for artists in this post in the same way you’re saying we should advocate for people who lose work to excel, don’t know what else you want. I also want every single coal mine to close because of climate change. That doesn’t mean I have to add that I don’t hate coal miners because people don’t jump to that conclusion.
I don’t think it’s ever been bad or evil to advocate for excel.
'I’ve known a lot of people who are very pro internet piracy but for some reason very anti AI models “stealing” art.'
Great to see someone make this point. As someone who makes and sells copyrighted content for a living, I've spent twenty years hearing from everyone online that piracy (i.e. swiping a copy of my work instead of paying me for it) is actually progressive and fine. Now the same voices are insisting that AI art (i.e. using a model where my work might represent one ten millionth of the training data) is an intolerable act of theft. That makes no sense to me. As a creator I would so much rather people use LLMs than use torrents.
I think this is another exceptionally well-researched, well-written and well-argued piece.
On the topic of whether AI art is stolen art, I agree with you, because I understand how LLMs work, but that is not how regular people think about this.
1. Regular people don't see further than, training input goes in and output comes out. The point that the model will pick up vibes from a multitude of artwork doesn't make this not stealing in their mind, it just steals from all of them. This view operates with a different definition, i.e. what makes it not stealing is the artist adding their unique individuality to the many influences they had. What this means is of course not well defined, nevertheless it will be very difficult to convince someone who operates under a different definition. So it would have been good to elaborate a bit on why stick to your definition.
2. Modern AI is not seen as something open and democratic, but controlled by big tech and as such exploiting people to make huge profits in the hands of few. Regardless of how much truth is in this view, people don't judge AI art in a vacuum just purely from a technological POV, but they consider the social context (which might in part also explain why piracy might be judged differently).
not surprised that we both share an interest in AI art and why people object to it. A wrote a somewhat similar themed post earlier this winter: https://danfrank.ca/deconstructing-arguments-against-ai-art/
This was really great!
I wish I could heart this piece 50x because I wish I wrote it!
I'm an artist.
I'm a geek.
I've been working with AI even before LLMs took off.
And so many people don't really understand what they're mad about.
It can be hard to articulate how it's not stealing and your example is chef's kiss, perfect!
Thank you!
Thanks so much! Really happy you liked it!
Thank you so much. It puts to visuals what I wrote about text
Your post is well positioned now with OpenAI’s new image model
Great post, thanks for writing. I'm going to plagiarize it now by using ideas in it to inform my later posts :)
Jokes aside I really appreciated the level-headed and thoughtful tone of this piece. There's so much crazy valence -- both positive and negative -- around AI art, it's good to just see someone write about it in a more directly descriptive way. It is a very nuanced thing! It's not just the worst, most unskilled outputs of DALL-E.
Unfortunately I am quite pessimistic that the public will ever accept the argument that AI doesn't literally encode images. Maybe better to say, look, why would I run DALL-E to generate a plagiarized image when I can just go steal it myself at the (very public) location DALL-E got its data from?
Another mindful & multifaceted post, thanks Andy!
As you say, many anti AI art folks today would've probably been opposed to Warhol and likely also e.g. digital art. And in some ways this is a rational response for an existing artist who has benefited from the "old system" and invested time into succeeding under it – they don't want it disrupted.
RE: the way LLMs of functionin, it strikes me that their "neurons" with their "weights" don't seem fundamentally that different from the neurons in our brains that require varying amounts electrical potential before they discharge into other neurons.
RE: the Spotify EP, nice work! I'm enjoying giving Suno a melody via GarageBand or whistling and seeing where it takes it. What was your process like for this?
Mostly just playing around with Suno's built-in editor tools and getting better at prompting! I was trying to find very specific descriptions for sounds that reminded me of some artists I like like Boards of Canada
The end section re: how to think of human artist job loss is either very naive or deeply ghoulish. You don’t at all confront the reality of working professionals losing their jobs, having their careers go up in smoke, and the destitution this can inflict on them. Instead, you’re gushing about how much fun it is to use AI image generators and breezing over the human cost with “Artists find other jobs” as if starting a new career were some trivial task. You even seem to understand that it’s wrong to take people’s work and use it to automate them out of a living with no recompense, but this pales in comparison to your new toy.
Imagine some recent illustration school grad, faced with rising costs of living, massive amounts of debt, and dismal job prospects, reading this post. Watching you merrily churn out images while saying “we just have to live with this!” Do you hear yourself? Is this what effective altruism is? Is this your idea of “authentic care and company?” If so, keep them to yourself next time.
I mean first this has nothing to do with EA. This is coming from me being a mainstream liberal capitalist, not from anything associated with EA. Second if you find “Making a scarce resource less scarce is inherently bad for the people who depend on it being scarce, and that is very bad for them and we should be empathetic to their situation, but we shouldn’t artificially restrict the resource” ghoulish to the point that you can’t engage with it then I just don’t see how we can have a serious conversation 🤷♂️. If someone had gone to school to study an older computer technology that became less valuable because newer computers came along, I also think we as a society should support them with resources and avenues to other fields, but I wouldn't push a button to hold back the tech.
Here, I'll simplify:
"AI image generators will put people out of work. This sucks for them, and we ought to help them, but being able to generate AI art is ultimately more important than them being able to put food on the table."
^ This is the ghoulish take. It's how your post reads.
If you meant something like:
"AI art is neat, actually. We should implement it en masse AFTER making sure it's not pushing people into poverty."
Then...say that. In plain English in your post somewhere, assert that you value people's welfare over your AI gen impressionism.
If people are paid to manually do a lot of calculations on paper, and then Excel is invented, and they have to go through the (I completely agree, horrible and painful) process of getting new jobs, is it true that anyone using Excel thinks it’s more important to have access to spreadsheets than that people eat? This isn’t how we think about any other profession.
If you advocate for the mass adoption of excel, without advocating for the people it's replacing first, then yes, you're saying that exact thing. I don't know where you got "using excel" from. You can use excel and also think that everyone it replaced should have been compensated as part of the process.
Who is "we?" I talked about artists because this post is about artists. It wasn't less bad somehow when weavers starved to death on the streets in England, or when American coal miners were left to rot. It was awful then, and still is.
Well I’m advocating for artists in this post in the same way you’re saying we should advocate for people who lose work to excel, don’t know what else you want. I also want every single coal mine to close because of climate change. That doesn’t mean I have to add that I don’t hate coal miners because people don’t jump to that conclusion.
I don’t think it’s ever been bad or evil to advocate for excel.