Are we all just very tired yeah?

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The day of the rescheduled tournament that they finally made it to and won before having a barbecue to celebrate.

And the last day the sky was blue.

it would be SO funny to me if Ao3 really goes down because of the AI debacle. the cognitive dissonance is unreal, imagine going against a website dedicated to protecting copyright infringement and protecting the speech of the most vile, racist, pedophilic fans of media... for not being against copyright infringement. girl u can't have it both ways!!

Théâtre d'Opéra Spatial, a work of Artificial Intelligence is free to use by all, at least in the US, because it can't be copyrighted.

Some sort of pressure must exist; the artist exists because the world is not perfect. Art would be useless if the world were perfect, as man wouldn’t look for harmony but would simply live in it. Art is born out of an ill-designed world. ― Andrei Tarkovsky

the ai art discourse is so fucking stupid man (remembers like half my friends go to art school) (clamps a hand over my mouth)

If you want to make an anime character sing a thing just get a fucking vocalsynth. Utau and synthv basic are free and have a ton of good voicebanks

.

I feel you guys forget that the current use of AI is pretty much another form of worker exploitation. Yeah yeah copyright laws are awful and idiotic but until the system becomes fair I don't think any of this will matter if they blatantly steal from us while keeping us in poverty and unable to fight back

People who latch onto ai as a buzzword thing to hate are both a) buying into the marketing of everything called 'ai' being the same magic artificial intelligence technology and b) entirely limiting their idea of what it is to how it personally affects/might affect them. You will not stick it to the exploitation of artists by loudly condemning like... Sci-fi that explores the concept of artificial nonhuman sentience just cause they refer to it as artificial intelligence.

Looking for a good article to source about illustrators and the best way to get hired, but all I'm finding is how AI is replacing artists and how illustrators are "throwing a fit" over it.

Yeah, I'm gonna make some enemies over AI art

Something I really don't understand about AI companies buying the rights to steal content from social media to feed their data training sets is, well. It's illegal as hell.

That content does not belong to the social media companies to start with. Personal data is a bit nebulous as it is, and some countries have better protection about it than others, but posting a picture on tumblr doesn't mean that Automatic automatically has the right to use, distribute and sell it as it sees fit.

I mean. Official accounts for big companies like Disney use social media for advertising. But posting a picture of Elsa on Twitter doesn't mean they're giving Twitter the right to use and sell that picture. But suddenly Twitter sells the nebulous ability to "scrape content from Twitter for AI training", so now Midjourney owns that picture of Elsa? What's the fucking ruling there?

People own the rights of what they have created even without officially registering it for trademarking (which is expensive as hell, by the way). Social media selling content means that they are selling copyrighted material created by its users- Some of it coming from big companies that have trademarked the shit out of everything, some of it coming from small creators who STILL have the rights to what they've created even without a trademark.

Curently, what you produce through AI generators is not actually copyrighted, since it was not made by a human, but what gets fed into the data training sets is often copyrighted material from unconsenting people. It basically is a copyright laundering scheme.

I do wholeheartedly hope that some regulations will be put in place, and hoping that big companies will, at least, do their best to help this case even if its just to protect their own IPs and property. Given how overprotective have Disney, Nintendo and other big names been about their content, I can't expect they'll be happy having it being sold to Midjourney, OpenAI and other crap for free, without their consent.

I just can't fathom how any artist could possibly support proposals to expand the scope of copyright so that stylistically similar works can be held to infringe as a defence against AI art. The content ID algorithms of major media platforms are implemented in a way which already establishes a de facto presumption that the sum total of humanity's creative output is owned by approximately six major media corporations, placing the burden of proof on the individual artist to demonstrate otherwise, and they've managed to do this in a legislative environment in which only directly derivative works may infringe. Can you imagine what copyright strikes on YouTube would look like if the RIAA and its cronies were obliged merely to assert that your work exhibits stylistic similarity to literally any piece of content that they own? Do you imagine that Google wouldn't cheerfully help them do it?

ok, i've gotta branch off the current ai disc horse a little bit because i saw this trash-fire of a comment in the reblogs of that one post that's going around

[reblog by user makiruz (i don't feel bad for putting this asshole on blast) that reads "So here's the thing: every Diane Duane book that I have is stolen, I downloaded it illegally from the Internet; and I am not sorry, I am a thief of books and I don't think I'm doing anything wrong, ideas are not property, they should be free to be used by anyone as they were before the invention of capitalism; for that reason I don't believe it's wrong to use books to train AI models"]

this is asshole behavior. if you do this and if you believe this, you are a Bad Person full stop.

"Capitalism" as an idea is more recent than commerce, and i am So Goddamn Tired of chuds using the language of leftism to justify their shitty behavior. and that's what this is.

like, we live in a society tm

if you like books but you don't have the means to pay for them, the library exists! libraries support authors! you know what doesn't support authors? stealing their books! because if those books don't sell, then you won't get more books from that author and/or the existing books will go out of print! because we live under capitalism.

and like, even leaving aside the capitalism thing, how much of a fucking piece of literal shit do you have to be to believe that you deserve art, that you deserve someone else's labor, but that they don't deserve to be able to live? to feed and clothe themselves? sure, ok, ideas aren't property, and you can't copyright an idea, but you absolutely can copyright the Specific Execution of an idea.

so makiruz, if you're reading this, or if you think like this user does, i hope you shit yourself during a job interview. like explosively. i hope you step on a lego when you get up to pee in the middle of the night. i hope you never get to read another book in your whole miserable goddamn life until you disabuse yourself of the idea that artists are "idea landlords" or whatever the fuck other cancerous ideas you've convinced yourself are true to justify your abhorrent behavior.

I can’t interact with this person without my blood pressure soaring to dangerous levels but I also can’t leave my astonishment at this unvoiced.

I can’t believe I have to say this but an AI algorithm isn’t a human being or a human brain and an AI algorithm mindlessly tracing over someone’s work isn’t the same as someone learning how to draw by being inspired by another person’s work.

the AI doesn’t have a brain and neither does this person.

Often when I post an AI-neutral or AI-positive take on an anti-AI post I get blocked, so I wanted to make my own post to share my thoughts on "Nightshade", the new adversarial data poisoning attack that the Glaze people have come out with.

I've read the paper and here are my takeaways:

Firstly, this is not necessarily or primarily a tool for artists to "coat" their images like Glaze; in fact, Nightshade works best when applied to sort of carefully selected "archetypal" images, ideally ones that were already generated using generative AI using a prompt for the generic concept to be attacked (which is what the authors did in their paper). Also, the image has to be explicitly paired with a specific text caption optimized to have the most impact, which would make it pretty annoying for individual artists to deploy.

While the intent of Nightshade is to have maximum impact with minimal data poisoning, in order to attack a large model there would have to be many thousands of samples in the training data. Obviously if you have a webpage that you created specifically to host a massive gallery poisoned images, that can be fairly easily blacklisted, so you'd have to have a lot of patience and resources in order to hide these enough so they proliferate into the training datasets of major models.

The main use case for this as suggested by the authors is to protect specific copyrights. The example they use is that of Disney specifically releasing a lot of poisoned images of Mickey Mouse to prevent people generating art of him. As a large company like Disney would be more likely to have the resources to seed Nightshade images at scale, this sounds like the most plausible large scale use case for me, even if web artists could crowdsource some sort of similar generic campaign.

Either way, the optimal use case of "large organization repeatedly using generative AI models to create images, then running through another resource heavy AI model to corrupt them, then hiding them on the open web, to protect specific concepts and copyrights" doesn't sound like the big win for freedom of expression that people are going to pretend it is. This is the case for a lot of discussion around AI and I wish people would stop flagwaving for corporate copyright protections, but whatever.

The panic about AI resource use in terms of power/water is mostly bunk (AI training is done once per large model, and in terms of industrial production processes, using a single airliner flight's worth of carbon output for an industrial model that can then be used indefinitely to do useful work seems like a small fry in comparison to all the other nonsense that humanity wastes power on). However, given that deploying this at scale would be a huge compute sink, it's ironic to see anti-AI activists for that is a talking point hyping this up so much.

In terms of actual attack effectiveness; like Glaze, this once again relies on analysis of the feature space of current public models such as Stable Diffusion. This means that effectiveness is reduced on other models with differing architectures and training sets. However, also like Glaze, it looks like the overall "world feature space" that generative models fit to is generalisable enough that this attack will work across models.

That means that if this does get deployed at scale, it could definitely fuck with a lot of current systems. That said, once again, it'd likely have a bigger effect on indie and open source generation projects than the massive corporate monoliths who are probably working to secure proprietary data sets, like I believe Adobe Firefly did. I don't like how these attacks concentrate the power up.

The generalisation of the attack doesn't mean that this can't be defended against, but it does mean that you'd likely need to invest in bespoke measures; e.g. specifically training a detector on a large dataset of Nightshade poison in order to filter them out, spending more time and labour curating your input dataset, or designing radically different architectures that don't produce a comparably similar virtual feature space. I.e. the effect of this being used at scale wouldn't eliminate "AI art", but it could potentially cause a headache for people all around and limit accessibility for hobbyists (although presumably curated datasets would trickle down eventually).

All in all a bit of a dick move that will make things harder for people in general, but I suppose that's the point, and what people who want to deploy this at scale are aiming for. I suppose with public data scraping that sort of thing is fair game I guess.

Additionally, since making my first reply I've had a look at their website:

Used responsibly, Nightshade can help deter model trainers who disregard copyrights, opt-out lists, and do-not-scrape/robots.txt directives. It does not rely on the kindness of model trainers, but instead associates a small incremental price on each piece of data scraped and trained without authorization. Nightshade's goal is not to break models, but to increase the cost of training on unlicensed data, such that licensing images from their creators becomes a viable alternative.

Once again we see that the intended impact of Nightshade is not to eliminate generative AI but to make it infeasible for models to be created and trained by without a corporate money-bag to pay licensing fees for guaranteed clean data. I generally feel that this focuses power upwards and is overall a bad move. If anything, this sort of model, where only large corporations can create and control AI tools, will do nothing to help counter the economic displacement without worker protection that is the real issue with AI systems deployment, but will exacerbate the problem of the benefits of those systems being more constrained to said large corporations.

Kinda sucks how that gets pushed through by lying to small artists about the importance of copyright law for their own small-scale works (ignoring the fact that processing derived metadata from web images is pretty damn clearly a fair use application).