AI/LLMs AI art bans are going to ruin small 3rd party creators

[Dyson Logos]

just admit that only companies large enough to pay for such human artists should be in the marketplace.

You realize most of the artists who create this stuff AREN'T large companies, right?

We are individual artists who sell our stuff. We are the exact third party small companies you claim can't compete.

 

[VHawkwinter]

Well, they might have to actually start paying for the right to train, including possibly hiring legions of creators to generate content just for training. Either of which they definitely should have done the first time(s) around. I'm certainly not arguing with that.

[Edit] Nope. I'm wrong. They pushed out a ToS that made it sound like they were doing the below, and then within 2 weeks put out a new ToS that made it explicit they would not be doing that.

[This is ultimately incorrect, it sounded like it was the case and they made it clear it was not, but I missed the update].
Didn't some recent adobe announcement change their ToS that the work you make in Photoshop can be used to train their AI? I forget if there was an opt out, but just by making it opt out they'll harvest a ton of data from people who didn't read the ToS.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Two things. But I feel like I keep saying this over and over and over again. It’s clearly pointless as I'm restating, again, the basic, primary objections to LLMs like it's new news this many months/years into the constant avalanche of identical threads. I find it utterly bizarre that anybody on these forums (or anywhere else, frankly) even vaguely interested in this topic could possibly not know the basic premises of the anti-LLM argument, even if they disagree with them. I certainly know the constantly repeated pro-LLM arguments verbatim, as they get repeated identically time and time again (usually by the same people). But here it is, again, for the record. I'm sure I'll be typing this out again next week.

Like I've said, I've mostly stayed away from these threads.

And there are some issues I care deeply about (such as the mathematics of voting systems) in which I sometimes find it astonishing that anybody who claims to be vaguely interested in the topic (like democracy?) is still unaware of the arguments. So I get it.

On the other hand, I'm also thinking back to some of the debates about orcs and racism, or whether accusations without trial about sexual misbehavior at conventions is sufficient to blacklist an author, or whether we should stop buying from a publisher because they said something bigoted in another context, and realizing that I had the same thought as you have now: "How on earth can you possibly be blind to the obvious logic here? Clearly you just don't want to give up your bigotry and misogyny."

And I pigpiled on, and said some things that, in retrospect, probably should have earned me some Red Text.

So I'm developing some understanding about how at least some of those posters felt. And realizing that attacking them for being Bad People probably (obviously) did little to persuade them.

1) the mass piracy (they've been caught illegally torrenting massive archives of pirated books) and the plagiarism (you can literally see artists' signatures in some of the outputs, which belies the claims that the LLMs are making something new, though they’ve coded the LLMs to hide that better these days)

2) the massive environmental impact with entire power plants being built to power enormous server farms

Both of these things do harm. And until LLMs can operate without doing harm, the process continues to matter.

Got it. Thank you for clarifying "process". I feel similarly about crypto, but I'm not there on AI. Maybe "yet". Not sure.

I would have a problem with an art student pirating millions of books and then burning down a rainforest, too.

True fact: art students can be blamed for some of the greatest atrocities ever committed by humans.

Well, one art student. Former art student.

 

[VHawkwinter]

On the other hand, I'm also thinking back to some of the debates about orcs and racism,

Ah yes. I remember those social panics a few years ago. Had some very heated Facebook arguments, blocked a lot of people who were making / liking explicitly hateful statements, (very few of which were interacting with me, but I did not want to interact with them in the future, and the terrible people were coming out of the woodwork to fight over it). I think across three or four threads I blocked like 900 people. Facebook was (temporarily) much more peaceful after that. Years later, the RPG groups are still better than they were prior to that particular moral panic.

or whether accusations without trial about sexual misbehavior at conventions is sufficient to blacklist an author

Not entirely sure which authors you mean here. Could be a few people. But yes it's always good to get your fact straight before trying to blacklist people from the economy. It should be a felony to spread slanderous gossip which turns out to be false.

And I pigpiled on, and said some things that, in retrospect, probably should have earned me some Red Text.

We have all said things we regret. I think. It's good to recognise those mistakes and try to do better in the future. I try to start from the assumption other people may have informed positions that are built on information I do not have. But that can be hard sometimes. And you need to check, because many people do not, they're running solely on a handful of overgeneralised anecdotes; confirmation bias; tribalism; baseless assumptions; and gut reactions—without employing logic or fact checking or clarifying questions before jumping to absurd conclusions.

So I'm developing some understanding about how at least some of those posters felt. And realizing that attacking them for being Bad People probably (obviously) did little to persuade them.

I am still strongly of the persuasion that the people who claimed D&D Orcs were black people in any way, were being deeply racist in equating black-people with what I think are very clearly genocidal supremacist iron age monster Germanic tribesfolk who worship monster odin (even in an edition where they don't look Pig-like). So, yes I was not convinced by the name calling on Facebook. It just looked like bigoted projections to me.

Well, one art student. Former art student.

Yep. They should have just let him go paint his mediocre landscapes, and taught him to do a better job.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Yep. They should have just let him go paint his mediocre landscapes, and taught him to do a better job.

I mean, if for no other reason, the thought of AI leaving thousands of artists unemployed, angry, and looking for something to do is TERRIFYING...

 

[VHawkwinter]

I mean, if for no other reason, the thought of AI leaving thousands of artists unemployed, angry, and looking for something to do is TERRIFYING...

Thousands of angry unemployed anybody is terrifying. But artists do have a tendency for deep thinking, which may lead to a higher percentage of politically engaged angry unemployed people.

 

[Bill Zebub]

I was being facetious. But ok.

 

[Umbran]

No, I wasn't making an ends justifies the means argument.

You said, "My initial reaction is that the process doesn't matter, that it's the result that counts..."

That is an "end justify the means" argument. The result (ends) matter, the process (means) doesn't.

If you don't want to be Machiavelli, maybe it is time to question that maybe the process does matter. Indeed, significant branches of philosophy tell us that the journey is what matters, not the destination.

 

[Bill Zebub]

You said, "My initial reaction is that the process doesn't matter, that it's the result that counts..."

That is an "end justify the means" argument. The result (ends) matter, the process (means) doesn't.

If you don't want to be Machiavelli, maybe it is time to question that maybe the process does matter. Indeed, significant branches of philosophy tell us that the journey is what matters, not the destination.

If you don't think the process* needs to be justified, then it's not an ends-justifies-the-means argument.

Q.E.F.D.

It's ok, no apology necessary for the sneering. I've already forgiven you.


*Although please note that at the time that I wrote that I was thinking of "process" only in terms of the computer science of how an already-trained LLM generates content. I do think other aspects...environmental, training...need to be justified.

 

[VHawkwinter]

I was being facetious. But ok.

I don't always pick up on sarcasm, particularly not over text. My mistake.