All of that’s great and everything, but at the end of the day all of the commercial VLM art generators are trained on stolen art. That includes most of the VLMs that comfyui uses as a backend. They have their own cloud service now, that ties in with all the usual suspects.
So even if it has some potentially genuine artistic uses I have zero interest in using a commercial entity in any way to ‘generate’ art that they’ve taken elements for from artwork they stole from real artists. Its amoral.
If it’s all running locally on open source VLMs trained only on public data, then maybe - but that’s what… a tiny, tiny fraction of AI art? In the meantime I’m happy to dismiss it altogether as Ai slop.
How is that any different from “stealing” art in a collage, though? While courts have disagreed on the subject (in particular there’s a big difference between visual collage and music sampling with the latter being very restricted) there is a clear argument to be made that collage is a fair use of the original works, because the result is completely different.
Sidestepping the debate about whether AI art is actually fair use, I do find the fair use doctrine an interesting lens to look at the wider issue — in particular, how deciding whether something is fair use is more complex than comparing a case to a straightforward checklist, but a fairly dynamic spectrum.
It’s possible that something could be:
Highly transformative
Takes from a published work that is primarily of a factual nature (such as a biography)
Distributed to a different market than the original work
but still not be considered fair use, if it had used the entirety of the base work without modification (in this case, the “highly transformative” would pertain to how the chunks of the base work are presented)
I’m no lawyer, but I find the theory behind fair use pretty interesting. In practice, it leaves a lot to be desired (the way that YouTube’s contentID infringes on what would almost certainly be fair use, because Google wants to avoid being taken to court by rights holders, so preempts the problem by being overly harsh to potential infringement). However, my broad point is that whether a court decides something is fair use relies on a holistic assessment that considers all four of pillars of fair use, including how strongly each apply.
AI trained off of artist’s works is different to making collage of art because of the scale of the scraping — a huge amount of copyrighted work has been used, and entire works of art were used, even if the processing of them were considered to be transformative (let’s say for the sake of argument that we are saying that training an AI is highly transformative). The pillar that AI runs up against the most though is “the effect of the use upon the potential market”. AI has already had a huge impact on the market for artistic works, and it is having a hugely negative impact on people’s ability to make a living through their art (or other creative endeavours, like writing). What’s more, the companies who are pushing AI are making inordinate amounts of revenue, which makes the whole thing feel especially egregious.
We can draw on the ideas of fair use to understand why so many people feel that AI training is “stealing” art whilst being okay with collage. In particular, it’s useful to ask what the point of fair use is? Why have a fair use exemption to copyright at all? The reason is because one of the purposes of copyright is meant to be to encourage people to make more creative works — if you’re unable to make any money from your efforts because you’re competing with people selling your own work faster than you can, then you’re pretty strongly disincentivised to make anything at all. Fair use is a pragmatic exemption carved out because of the recognition that if copyright is overly restrictive, then it will end up making it disproportionately hard to make new stuff. Fair use is as nebulously defined as it is because it is, in theory, guided by the principle of upholding the spirit of copyright.
Now, I’m not arguing that training an AI (or generating AI art) isn’t fair use — I don’t feel equipped to answer that particular question. As a layperson, it seems like current copyright laws aren’t really working in this digital age we find ourselves in, even before we consider AI. Though perhaps it’s silly to blame computers for this, when copyright wasn’t really helping individual artists much even before computers became commonplace. Some argue that we need new copyright laws to protect against AI, but Cory Doctorow makes a compelling argument about how this will just end up biting artists in the ass even worse than the AI. Copyright probably isn’t the right lever to pull to solve this particular problem, but it’s still a useful thing to consider if we want to understand the shape of the whole problem.
As I see it, copyright exists because we, as a society, said we wanted to encourage people to make stuff, because that enriches society. However, that goal was in tension with the realities of living under capitalism, so we tried to resolve that through copyright laws. Copyright presented new problems, which led to the fair use doctrine, which comes with problems of its own, with or without AI. The reason people consider AI training to be stealing is because they understand AI as a dire threat to the production of creative works, and they attempt to articulate this through the familiar language of copyright. However, that’s a poor framework for addressing the problem that AI art poses though. We would be better to strip this down to the ethical core of it so we can see the actual tension that people are responding to.
Maybe we need a more radical approach to this problem. One interesting suggestion that I’ve seen is that we should scrap copyright entirely and implement a generous universal basic income (UBI) (and other social safety nets). If creatives were free to make things without worrying about fulfilling basic living needs, it would make the problem of AI scraping far lower stakes for individual creatives. One problem with this is that most people would prefer to earn more than what even a generous UBI would provide, so would probably still feel cheated by Generative AI. However, the argument is that GenerativeAI cannot compare to human artists when it comes to producing novel or distinctive art, so the most reliable wa**y to obtain meaningful art would be to give financial support to the artists (especially if an individual is after something of a particular style). I’m not sure how viable this approach would be in practice, but I think that discussing more radical ideas like this is useful in figuring what the heck to do.
I completely agree on pretty much the whole sweep of this. AI just exposes another way in which copyright law is insufficient for the digital age.
On a personal note, a couple of years ago I tried to use chatgpt to write a story. It was shit so I wrote my own. I’ve taken up drawing again and want to properly learn digital painting.
In my mind, AI doesn’t threaten any of this because the enjoyment I get from these things doesn’t depend on selling what I do. Artists have been stereotypically starving for a long time because the innate human desire to create exceeds the desire of people to pay.
Allowing people to satisfy that desire without literally starving should be a societal goal.
Collage art retains the original components of the art, adding layers the viewer can explore and seek the source of, if desired.
VLMs on the other hand intentionally obscure the original works by sending them through filters and computer vision transformations to make the original work difficult to backtrace. This is no accident, its designed obfuscation.
The difference is intent - VLMs literally steal copies of art to generate their work for cynical tech bros. Classical collages take existing art and show it in a new light, with no intent to pass off the original source materials as their own creations.
The original developers of Stable Diffusion and similar models made absolutely no secret about the source data they used. Where are you getting this idea that they “intentionally obscure the original works… to make [them] difficult to backtrace.”? How would an image generation model even work in a way that made the original works obvious?
Literally steal
Copying digital art wasn’t “literally stealing” when the MPAA was suing Napster and it isn’t today.
For cynical tech bros
Stable Diffusion was originally developed by academics working at a University.
Your whole reply is pretending to know intent where none exists, so if that’s the only difference you can find between collage and AI art, it’s not good enough.
If you download a checkpoint from non trustworthy sources definitely and that is the majority of people, but also the majority that does not use the technical tools that deep nor cares about actual art (mostly porn if the largest distributor of models civitai is a reference).
The technical tool that allow actual creativity is called comfyui, and this is open source. I have yet to see anything that is even comparable. Other creative tools (like the krita plugin) use it as a backend.
I am willing to believe that someone with a soul for art and complex flows would also make their own models, which naturally allows much more creativity and is not that hard to do.
Eh, I’m not so sure on that. I often find myself tripping up on the xkcd Average Familiarity problem, so I worry that this assumption is inadvertently a bit gatekeepy.
It’s the unfortunate reality that modern tech makes it pretty hard for a person to learn the kind of skills necessary to be able to customise one’s own tools. As a chronic tinkerer, I find it easy to underestimate how overwhelming it must feel for people who want to learn but have only ever learned to interface with tech as a “user”. That kind of background means that it requires a pretty high level of curiosity and drive to learn, and that’s a pretty high bar to overcome. I don’t know how techy you consider yourself to be, but I’d wager that anyone who cares about whether something is open source is closer to a techy person than the average person.
For a person who already actively uses comfyui, knows how the different nodes work,
Makes complex flows with them,
Making their own checkpoints is not a big step up.
I have not gotten to this level myself yet, i am still learning how to properly using different and custom nodes, and yes
In the mean time yes, i experiment with public models that use stolen artwork. But i am not posting any of the results, its pure personal use practice.
I have already seen some stuff about making your own models/checkpoints, if i ever get happy enough with my skills to post it as art then having my own feels like a must. The main reason i haven’t is cause it does take a lot of time to prepare the training data.
People that don’t use their models while calling themselves artist are cheating themselves most of all.
All of that’s great and everything, but at the end of the day all of the commercial VLM art generators are trained on stolen art. That includes most of the VLMs that comfyui uses as a backend. They have their own cloud service now, that ties in with all the usual suspects.
So even if it has some potentially genuine artistic uses I have zero interest in using a commercial entity in any way to ‘generate’ art that they’ve taken elements for from artwork they stole from real artists. Its amoral.
If it’s all running locally on open source VLMs trained only on public data, then maybe - but that’s what… a tiny, tiny fraction of AI art? In the meantime I’m happy to dismiss it altogether as Ai slop.
How is that any different from “stealing” art in a collage, though? While courts have disagreed on the subject (in particular there’s a big difference between visual collage and music sampling with the latter being very restricted) there is a clear argument to be made that collage is a fair use of the original works, because the result is completely different.
Sidestepping the debate about whether AI art is actually fair use, I do find the fair use doctrine an interesting lens to look at the wider issue — in particular, how deciding whether something is fair use is more complex than comparing a case to a straightforward checklist, but a fairly dynamic spectrum.
It’s possible that something could be:
I’m no lawyer, but I find the theory behind fair use pretty interesting. In practice, it leaves a lot to be desired (the way that YouTube’s contentID infringes on what would almost certainly be fair use, because Google wants to avoid being taken to court by rights holders, so preempts the problem by being overly harsh to potential infringement). However, my broad point is that whether a court decides something is fair use relies on a holistic assessment that considers all four of pillars of fair use, including how strongly each apply.
AI trained off of artist’s works is different to making collage of art because of the scale of the scraping — a huge amount of copyrighted work has been used, and entire works of art were used, even if the processing of them were considered to be transformative (let’s say for the sake of argument that we are saying that training an AI is highly transformative). The pillar that AI runs up against the most though is “the effect of the use upon the potential market”. AI has already had a huge impact on the market for artistic works, and it is having a hugely negative impact on people’s ability to make a living through their art (or other creative endeavours, like writing). What’s more, the companies who are pushing AI are making inordinate amounts of revenue, which makes the whole thing feel especially egregious.
We can draw on the ideas of fair use to understand why so many people feel that AI training is “stealing” art whilst being okay with collage. In particular, it’s useful to ask what the point of fair use is? Why have a fair use exemption to copyright at all? The reason is because one of the purposes of copyright is meant to be to encourage people to make more creative works — if you’re unable to make any money from your efforts because you’re competing with people selling your own work faster than you can, then you’re pretty strongly disincentivised to make anything at all. Fair use is a pragmatic exemption carved out because of the recognition that if copyright is overly restrictive, then it will end up making it disproportionately hard to make new stuff. Fair use is as nebulously defined as it is because it is, in theory, guided by the principle of upholding the spirit of copyright.
Now, I’m not arguing that training an AI (or generating AI art) isn’t fair use — I don’t feel equipped to answer that particular question. As a layperson, it seems like current copyright laws aren’t really working in this digital age we find ourselves in, even before we consider AI. Though perhaps it’s silly to blame computers for this, when copyright wasn’t really helping individual artists much even before computers became commonplace. Some argue that we need new copyright laws to protect against AI, but Cory Doctorow makes a compelling argument about how this will just end up biting artists in the ass even worse than the AI. Copyright probably isn’t the right lever to pull to solve this particular problem, but it’s still a useful thing to consider if we want to understand the shape of the whole problem.
As I see it, copyright exists because we, as a society, said we wanted to encourage people to make stuff, because that enriches society. However, that goal was in tension with the realities of living under capitalism, so we tried to resolve that through copyright laws. Copyright presented new problems, which led to the fair use doctrine, which comes with problems of its own, with or without AI. The reason people consider AI training to be stealing is because they understand AI as a dire threat to the production of creative works, and they attempt to articulate this through the familiar language of copyright. However, that’s a poor framework for addressing the problem that AI art poses though. We would be better to strip this down to the ethical core of it so we can see the actual tension that people are responding to.
Maybe we need a more radical approach to this problem. One interesting suggestion that I’ve seen is that we should scrap copyright entirely and implement a generous universal basic income (UBI) (and other social safety nets). If creatives were free to make things without worrying about fulfilling basic living needs, it would make the problem of AI scraping far lower stakes for individual creatives. One problem with this is that most people would prefer to earn more than what even a generous UBI would provide, so would probably still feel cheated by Generative AI. However, the argument is that GenerativeAI cannot compare to human artists when it comes to producing novel or distinctive art, so the most reliable wa**y to obtain meaningful art would be to give financial support to the artists (especially if an individual is after something of a particular style). I’m not sure how viable this approach would be in practice, but I think that discussing more radical ideas like this is useful in figuring what the heck to do.
I completely agree on pretty much the whole sweep of this. AI just exposes another way in which copyright law is insufficient for the digital age.
On a personal note, a couple of years ago I tried to use chatgpt to write a story. It was shit so I wrote my own. I’ve taken up drawing again and want to properly learn digital painting.
In my mind, AI doesn’t threaten any of this because the enjoyment I get from these things doesn’t depend on selling what I do. Artists have been stereotypically starving for a long time because the innate human desire to create exceeds the desire of people to pay.
Allowing people to satisfy that desire without literally starving should be a societal goal.
Collage art retains the original components of the art, adding layers the viewer can explore and seek the source of, if desired.
VLMs on the other hand intentionally obscure the original works by sending them through filters and computer vision transformations to make the original work difficult to backtrace. This is no accident, its designed obfuscation.
The difference is intent - VLMs literally steal copies of art to generate their work for cynical tech bros. Classical collages take existing art and show it in a new light, with no intent to pass off the original source materials as their own creations.
The original developers of Stable Diffusion and similar models made absolutely no secret about the source data they used. Where are you getting this idea that they “intentionally obscure the original works… to make [them] difficult to backtrace.”? How would an image generation model even work in a way that made the original works obvious?
Copying digital art wasn’t “literally stealing” when the MPAA was suing Napster and it isn’t today.
Stable Diffusion was originally developed by academics working at a University.
Your whole reply is pretending to know intent where none exists, so if that’s the only difference you can find between collage and AI art, it’s not good enough.
only a note: LLMs are for text
Thanks. I edited
If you download a checkpoint from non trustworthy sources definitely and that is the majority of people, but also the majority that does not use the technical tools that deep nor cares about actual art (mostly porn if the largest distributor of models civitai is a reference).
The technical tool that allow actual creativity is called comfyui, and this is open source. I have yet to see anything that is even comparable. Other creative tools (like the krita plugin) use it as a backend.
I am willing to believe that someone with a soul for art and complex flows would also make their own models, which naturally allows much more creativity and is not that hard to do.
Eh, I’m not so sure on that. I often find myself tripping up on the xkcd Average Familiarity problem, so I worry that this assumption is inadvertently a bit gatekeepy.
It’s the unfortunate reality that modern tech makes it pretty hard for a person to learn the kind of skills necessary to be able to customise one’s own tools. As a chronic tinkerer, I find it easy to underestimate how overwhelming it must feel for people who want to learn but have only ever learned to interface with tech as a “user”. That kind of background means that it requires a pretty high level of curiosity and drive to learn, and that’s a pretty high bar to overcome. I don’t know how techy you consider yourself to be, but I’d wager that anyone who cares about whether something is open source is closer to a techy person than the average person.
I should nuance,
For a person who already actively uses comfyui, knows how the different nodes work,
Makes complex flows with them,
Making their own checkpoints is not a big step up.
I have not gotten to this level myself yet, i am still learning how to properly using different and custom nodes, and yes
In the mean time yes, i experiment with public models that use stolen artwork. But i am not posting any of the results, its pure personal use practice.
I have already seen some stuff about making your own models/checkpoints, if i ever get happy enough with my skills to post it as art then having my own feels like a must. The main reason i haven’t is cause it does take a lot of time to prepare the training data.
People that don’t use their models while calling themselves artist are cheating themselves most of all.