With all the fuzz about IA image “stealing” illustrator job, I am curious about how much photography changed the art world in the 19th century.
There was a time where getting a portrait done was a relatively big thing, requiring several days of work for a painter, while you had to stand still for a while so the painter knew what you looked like, and then with photography, all you had to do was to stand still for a few minutes, and you’ll get a picture of you printed on paper the next day.
How did it impact the average painter who was getting paid to paint people once in their lifetime.
NotAnonymousAtAll@feddit.de 1 year ago
It sure did have a big impact, comparable to what some people expect to happen soon with AI.
However, I think your framing misses the main point of why many artists today are wary about AI: They are not just being replaced, their own work is used as a building block for the tools that will replace them; and they were not asked for permission and don’t even get any compensation for that.
Vlyn@lemmy.world 1 year ago
If you have a basic understanding how AI works then this argument doesn’t hold much water.
Let’s take the human approach: I’m going to look at all the works of popular painters to learn their styles. Then I grab my painting tools and create similar works.
No credit there, I still used all those other works as input and created by own based on them.
With AI it’s the same, just in a much bigger capacity. If you ask AI to redraw the Mona Lisa you won’t get a 1:1 copy out, because the original doesn’t exist in the trained model, it’s just statistics.
Same as if you tell a human to recreate the painting, no matter how good they are, they’ll never be able to perfectly reproduce the original work.
NeoNachtwaechter@lemmy.world 1 year ago
And this bigger capacity makes a huge difference.
I try to give you an easy example:
When a company wants to fell a tree, it is no big deal. When a company wants to fell 100.000 trees, you would maybe start to think if they should be allowed to do that. Environment and all. When a company wants to fell all the trees in the whole world, you would say No to that plan (hopefully) without much thinking.
So, you see, scale makes a difference in nearly all decisions. Legal and other.
ekky43@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
But it does hold water. The original image might not be contained within the model, but the fact that it was trained on stolen data makes it problematic. Even if humans do the same, an AI model is not a human, and therefore needs to adhere to different rules.
RyanHeffronPhoto@kbin.social 1 year ago
An independent artist learning new styles and gaining inspiration in creating their own work is not at all the same as a profit driven software corperation stealing other artists works on a massive scale to develop their own commercial products. That's on top of most artists like myself prohibiting using our work for private commercial gain unless properly compensated or credited.
Pelicanen@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
The thing is, with a certain model you could get a perfect 1:1 copy but that’s not really the point. I have a degree that includes machine learning and I believe it’s imperative that we have legislation that protects content owners and puts restrictions on what data you’re allowed to use to train your models. Not because I don’t understand but because I do understand.
Haphazardly introducing this technology at a large scale in society will come with serious consequences, not to mention the consequences to privacy if we don’t curtail what data that companies are allowed to scrape from the internet just because they throw in buzzwords about “AI” in somewhere.
This is fundamentally not about being pro-technology or anti-technology, it’s about how we value private citizens versus corporations.
C4d@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Let’s explore this further. When we look at the work of a human we can often see their influences (and they can often acknowledge them or even cite specific works). In a way, they are able to credit those they were inspired by.
Would an “AI” be able to do the same? I’m guessing it probably can, but more as a statistical similarity to other works. I don’t know if it can cite its sources.
Deestan@lemmy.world 1 year ago
This is true, but the way AI differs in a problematic way is usually described in confused and incorrect terms like “stealing” or “copying without permission”.
It is, to some degree legally and to some degree culturally, not allowed to copy someone else without their permission. For human artists this problem is contained.
If I am inspired by your work and create a painting a biiit to close to your work, intentionally or not, you have the option to talk to me and we can work something out. Or worst case take me to court.
If an AI does the same, unintentionally of course, it’s not one painting after a few weeks of work. It’s thousands per day. You have no capacity to find and initiate conversations about each of those. And worse, your conversations will not be with someone who recognizes that they were inspired by your work. It will usuallt be with someone who doesn’t have the affinity to see the similarities and will shrug and says “I don’t see it sorry” and you have to take the fight to the AI supplier third party’s legal team who will also shrug and hide behind terms like “algorithm”.
MossBear@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I take it you’re not an artist? That’s not how or why you do studies.
Brainsploosh@lemmy.world 1 year ago
The difference is that we recognise humans and their history, imperfections and many many influences to be part of what makes both the human and expression unique.
A lot of the discussion doesn’t grant the machine learning models the same inherent worth as humans get, and thus is viewed as a tool trained to replicate others’ work (rather than a creative agent).
This means that where a student painter is expected to have a desire to express something, and are putting in hard work in practice and paying tutors. Replacing them with a machine without desires or stories to express, by stealing artwork without neither credit or compensation, to then replace the same people who’ve been exploited in creating the tool, seems unfair.