AI is stealing writers’ words and jobs…

[Scribe]

More like they trained the program on whatever they could get their hands on and have since put in filters to prevent the program from generating protected content. I know this because a few weeks ago I could get it to generate an image with the words "Marvel's Incredible Hulk" no problem. At some point about a week ago, that was blocked. So too with many others. Though, as I said, their filter is spotty. You can't ask it to generate art similar to Tim Burton specifically, but you can describe Tim Burton's art and get a close enough approximation.

My last exercise weeks ago at this point was trying to trick it into generating what it seemed specifically trained not to. I was able to get quite a bit of success, but I foolishly didn't save the most successful prompts.

What this exercise told me, is that the "knowledge" exists to do likely anything we want, but the company is controlling or trying to control, what we see.

Which tracks with all these naughty word tech companies.

 

[trappedslider]

My last exercise weeks ago at this point was trying to trick it into generating what it seemed specifically trained not to. I was able to get quite a bit of success, but I foolishly didn't save the most successful prompts.

What this exercise told me, is that the "knowledge" exists to do likely anything we want, but the company is controlling or trying to control, what we see.

Which tracks with all these naughty word tech companies.

which tracks with the actual meaning of "safety" in regards to SD3, safe from being sued directly, safe for the share holders etc And why Midjounry and Dall-E are met with eye rolls at least on reddit.

 

[Scribe]

which tracks with the actual meaning of "safety" in regards to SD3, safe from being sued directly, safe for the share holders etc And why Midjounry and Dall-E are met with eye rolls at least on reddit.

Yeah, pretty much to your first points. It doesn't take a genius to understand what a program generating images based on "the internet" is going to provide lol

 

[overgeeked]

My last exercise weeks ago at this point was trying to trick it into generating what it seemed specifically trained not to. I was able to get quite a bit of success, but I foolishly didn't save the most successful prompts.

What this exercise told me, is that the "knowledge" exists to do likely anything we want, but the company is controlling or trying to control, what we see.

Which tracks with all these naughty word tech companies.

Exactly. They were indiscriminate when they illegally gathered up images from the net for use with their program. So the program has filters tacked on the back end. At a guess it wouldn't take much searching at all to find unfiltered programs. Though I have no interest in even thinking about that subject beyond that sentence.

 

[trappedslider]

Yeah, pretty much to your first points. It doesn't take a genius to understand what a program generating images based on "the internet" is going to provide lol

yeah, meanwhile folks who are on discord/reddit/grouphugging/civitai are pushing what can supposedly be done under Fair Use laws, (side note I'm still waiting for companies to pay for selling my data)

There's arguments to be made around copyright for fine-tunes that basically only work to directly duplicate a work (and, in fact, are clearly labeled as such - ie "Artist X Style Lora"), although even here one can debate fair use, which is a shield almost all of those artists themselves highly value.

 

[Ryujin]

yeah, meanwhile folks who are on discord/reddit/grouphugging/civitai are pushing what can supposedly be done under Fair Use laws, (side note I'm still waiting for companies to pay for selling my data)

There's arguments to be made around copyright for fine-tunes that basically only work to directly duplicate a work (and, in fact, are clearly labeled as such - ie "Artist X Style Lora"), although even here one can debate fair use, which is a shield almost all of those artists themselves highly value.

Social media platforms and forums have, in the past, been forced to rewrite their terms of use because of how they could impact photographers. They rather naively put in their terms expressions like "give license to share their images",without any qualifications on how that sharing was to occur. Photographers fought back and, when successful, the terms were changed to something like "for purposes of sharing on this platform."

I'm sure there's been some drift since this came up. When a forum I was a member of was bought out by a rather large company, that was cornering the market on sports related fora, they changed the terms of service. I made it quite clear that if I saw them using any of my copyrighted work, they'd be facing a lawsuit. It helped that they're based in Canada, so couldn't skate on being outside my jurisdiction. Eventually I was successful in having them remove my work from the forum.

 

[trappedslider]

Social media platforms and forums have, in the past, been forced to rewrite their terms of use because of how they could impact photographers. They rather naively put in their terms expressions like "give license to share their images",without any qualifications on how that sharing was to occur. Photographers fought back and, when successful, the terms were changed to something like "for purposes of sharing on this platform."

I'm sure there's been some drift since this came up. When a forum I was a member of was bought out by a rather large company, that was cornering the market on sports related fora, they changed the terms of service. I made it quite clear that if I saw them using any of my copyrighted work, they'd be facing a lawsuit. It helped that they're based in Canada, so couldn't skate on being outside my jurisdiction. Eventually I was successful in having them remove my work from the forum.

So, this got me thinking and I looked at photbucket's ToS

• Notwithstanding any other terms contained herein or in our Privacy Policy, you expressly grant Photobucket the unrestricted right to collect, convey, share, sell, use, analyze and create new and derivative materials from any Content you upload after the date first referenced above or that was previously uploaded at any time previously for the limited purpose of training artificial intelligence ("AI") algorithms and/or machine learning models, including any subsequent uses derived from the same.

Meanwhile Deviantart has their own AI and is also currently being sued as part of the lawsuit against Stability AI, Midjourney, but it was initially dismissed and I believe the ones behind the suit have since filed a new complaint. Imgur however doesn't mention artificial intelligence currently but does say you can't take them to court.

 

[Ryujin]

So, this got me thinking and I looked at photbucket's ToS

• Notwithstanding any other terms contained herein or in our Privacy Policy, you expressly grant Photobucket the unrestricted right to collect, convey, share, sell, use, analyze and create new and derivative materials from any Content you upload after the date first referenced above or that was previously uploaded at any time previously for the limited purpose of training artificial intelligence ("AI") algorithms and/or machine learning models, including any subsequent uses derived from the same.

Meanwhile Deviantart has their own AI and is also currently being sued as part of the lawsuit against Stability AI, Midjourney, but it was initially dismissed and I believe the ones behind the suit have since filed a new complaint. Imgur however doesn't mention artificial intelligence currently but does say you can't take them to court.

Fortunately, I opted out of Photobucket and Imgur, long ago. I've never been on Deviantart. It just made more sense to run my own site/server. I do, however, frequently see crawls of my photo section. I block them when I can, but it would be really nice if I could just firewall against that specific behaviour. Unfortunately, the firewall app I used in the past for that sort of thing doesn't exist anymore.

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

So, this got me thinking and I looked at photbucket's ToS

• Notwithstanding any other terms contained herein or in our Privacy Policy, you expressly grant Photobucket the unrestricted right to collect, convey, share, sell, use, analyze and create new and derivative materials from any Content you upload after the date first referenced above or that was previously uploaded at any time previously for the limited purpose of training artificial intelligence ("AI") algorithms and/or machine learning models, including any subsequent uses derived from the same.

At least it's not hidden. For Adobe, some contend that the very general wording used in the Tos didn't make contractors aware that it included AI training, but here it's crystal clear.

 

[trappedslider]

Let's set aside the the philosophical issues of fair use and learning for now.

Models like Stable Diffusion are trained with billions of images. An individual artist's contribution is rather minimal. If stability paid a dollar for each reference, they would have to pay billions overall but an individual artist wouldn't make more that a few hundred if they were prolific enough.

Let's say that we do make it that you do have to pay for references. That instantly makes it so only large corporations that own enough IP or can afford to license out libraries could afford the cost of training models with copyrighted materials. This does not stop anything, it just consolidates power.

There could be models that are trained entirely from public domain and CCs and open source projects. The problem with this is that there's no really a definitive way of determining if someone's personal model was trained with copyrighted materials without getting ahold of it or the training set. You'll see people constantly harassed by corporate lawyers because their style is roughly similar to said corporation's. This will affect traditional artists as well. What worse is if styles themselves are copyrighted as a way to enforce this.


EDIT: @Ryujin Someone pointed out elsewhere that the internet is the Wild West of data. If you post on the internet people can do anything with it if they choose. Post at your own risk.