AI PBs
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@Tez ooooh! Thank you for the tip! Added to the knowledge bank.
It’s a jungle out here. (get it??? cuz the Amazon is like a jungle and the company is called…)
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And how we engage with people who align differently.
Sure. But there’s a big difference between “I understand the harm that Amazon does but I still choose to use it because (reasons, which may even be wholly justified given your personal situation)” and “I don’t get why everyone keeps saying Amazon is a big deal; it really does no harm when I order from them; people are just overreacting.” I see a LOT of the latter when it comes to GenAI, and that is what I push back on. (not from you specifically, just in general)
Like, piracy sites actively harm authors on a large scale. You can argue “I wouldn’t have bought the book anyway so I didn’t personally do any harm”, but that’s discounting the real harm caused by the very existence of those sites. (including that the pirated material was then used to train GenAI, bringing us full circle…)
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And how we engage with people who align differently.
Sure. But there’s a big difference between “I understand the harm that Amazon does but I still choose to use it because (reasons, which may even be wholly justified given your personal situation)” and “I don’t get why everyone keeps saying Amazon is a big deal; it really does no harm when I order from them; people are just overreacting.” I see a LOT of the latter when it comes to GenAI, and that is what I push back on. (not from you specifically, just in general)
Like, piracy sites actively harm authors on a large scale. You can argue “I wouldn’t have bought the book anyway so I didn’t personally do any harm”, but that’s discounting the real harm caused by the very existence of those sites. (including that the pirated material was then used to train GenAI, bringing us full circle…)
Yeah. I’ve only been motivated to post because in response to specific points or arguments that I find unsubstantiated. (Or, in the instance of one poster claiming that MJ’s training data was all licensed, flat out wildly false.)
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Agree w/ Faraday and Roz. We live in a world that forces us to make choices and compromise every day of our lives to try to do the most good, or at least the least harm, all while knowing that there are vast organizations constantly enacting destruction on scales we could never reach. We are only human and we have to live. We will never be perfect.
But at least make those choices with open eyes.
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But there’s a big difference between “I understand the harm that Amazon does but I still choose to use it because (reasons, which may even be wholly justified given your personal situation)” and “I don’t get why everyone keeps saying Amazon is a big deal; it really does no harm when I order from them; people are just overreacting.”
There’s also a big difference between “I don’t purchase things from Amazon” and “I feel that people who purchase things from Amazon are enabling corruption and exploitation.”
And I think that’s why you have people responding the way they are. The upstream problem is Midjourney, but there’s a sense in this thread that players who use it are somehow to blame for that corruption.
people with AI PBs : steal from artists :: people who shop on Amazon : run a sweatshop
Midjourney : steals from artists :: Amazon : runs a sweatshop
It may not be intentional, but that’s how it comes across, and why I personally felt the need to defend my use of image generators.
I’m not a bad person! I just can’t do art and get bored!
Edit to add - @sao enmeshed is a great way to put it. They’re so everywhere that even actively trying to avoid them doesn’t always work.
On Dragon Wings · https://pern.gaslightswitch.com · pern.gaslightswitch.com port 4201
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Honestly, I don’t think the vast majority of people care where someone’s PB comes from so long as it’s a reasonable image of the supposed character…and it’s hot enough to want to fuck, let’s be real.
I don’t think less of anyone who uses a Midjourney PB, and I’m pretty irritated that such a cool tool has been set up in a way that fucks over a lot of artists instead of licensing material or paying royalties or something. I don’t see it as a Big Ethical Question–I just wish the companies in question would be forced to pay the artists for the training data they’re profiting off of.
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Honestly, I don’t think the vast majority of people care where someone’s PB comes from so long as it’s a reasonable image of the supposed character…and it’s hot enough to want to fuck, let’s be real.
I don’t think less of anyone who uses a Midjourney PB, and I’m pretty irritated that such a cool tool has been set up in a way that fucks over a lot of artists instead of licensing material or paying royalties or something. I don’t see it as a Big Ethical Question–I just wish the companies in question would be forced to pay the artists for the training data they’re profiting off of.
You got a +1 for the “hot enough” aside, for the record.
More to the point, namely your last sentence in particular, is where I’m at right now (of due compensation being a necessity here).
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But there’s a big difference between “I understand the harm that Amazon does but I still choose to use it because (reasons, which may even be wholly justified given your personal situation)” and “I don’t get why everyone keeps saying Amazon is a big deal; it really does no harm when I order from them; people are just overreacting.”
There’s also a big difference between “I don’t purchase things from Amazon” and “I feel that people who purchase things from Amazon are enabling corruption and exploitation.”
I mean…presumably if a person has made the choice to not purchase things from Amazon, it’s because they identify some sort of harm in supporting Amazon’s model? If there was no perceived harm in using it, then they wouldn’t feel it necessary for themselves to personally abstain.
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I don’t like using AI PBs because they all have the same face. Especially female images.
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There’s also a big difference between “I don’t purchase things from Amazon” and “I feel that people who purchase things from Amazon are enabling corruption and exploitation.”
I purchase from Amazon and thereby enable corruption and exploitation. I have reasons, but they’re kinda selfish. I can at least admit it.
Someone using GenAI tools is supporting a tool that steals from artists. Full stop. You can argue that your support is a drop in the bucket (as someone can for Amazon), but it is undeniably contributing to that bucket. Every GenAI query harms the environment more than its alternatives. Every GenAI query is a number reported on a spreadsheet of “look how many users we have!” that is used to justify more corporate investment in tools that harm artists.
Where I draw the line is “people who ((do thing I disapprove of))” are evil/bad/scum of the earth/deserve harm/etc. That’s going too far, and I feel it can be avoided with a tiny bit of empathy.
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There’s also a big difference between “I don’t purchase things from Amazon” and “I feel that people who purchase things from Amazon are enabling corruption and exploitation.”
I purchase from Amazon and thereby enable corruption and exploitation. I have reasons, but they’re kinda selfish. I can at least admit it.
Someone using GenAI tools is supporting a tool that steals from artists. Full stop. You can argue that your support is a drop in the bucket (as someone can for Amazon), but it is undeniably contributing to that bucket. Every GenAI query harms the environment more than its alternatives. Every GenAI query is a number reported on a spreadsheet of “look how many users we have!” that is used to justify more corporate investment in tools that harm artists.
Yes. There’s a difference between “I use this knowing the tool is exploitative, but I really don’t think my tiny usage is going to make a real difference” and “I use this because I think it’s less harmful.”
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I’m thoroughly confused by what the argument is at this point. Is it ok to use AI as long as i acknowledge it’s harmful to artists?
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@bear_necessities I’ve been arguing primarily in response to the posited idea that generative AI is less harmful or objectionable to the involved creatives than using existing imagery.
I don’t like the growing prevalence of AI imagery in the hobby, but that’s not a crusade I’m particularly willing to take on, and hasn’t been the point of my arguments. I’m just arguing about the framing that’s been centered on “AI is less exploitative to the creatives.”
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The problem with that theory is that most of the current generation of LLMs only work at scale. Unless you had a gazillion of your own photos, or had written an entire series of novels, it’s unlikely that you could train an AI model just on your own work and have it work effectively.
I don’t think it’s possible even then. Even if you it was solely trained to replicate a single artists style, I believe we’d only end up with something that worked within the limited variety of the artist’s work, and attempting it to produce something outside of that would produce non-useful, though perhaps morbidly entertaining results. There would still exist a need to train it on a library of stock images to allow it a wider breadth of subject matter.
For example, if we fed an LLM only the entire catalog of Van Gogh’s art, and asked it to produce an image of an sports car, it would probably either fail to produce anything, or just produce something random and call it a ‘sports car’.
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@MisterBoring That’s an interesting point. There do exist models for SD that are fed on images in public domain, but I’m curious how well they really hold up because of the sorts of examples you mention.
@bear_necessities said in AI PBs:
I’m thoroughly confused by what the argument is at this point. Is it ok to use AI as long as i acknowledge it’s harmful to artists?
It’s okay to use AI. Maybe it’s not perfect, but fuck it. I use AI, but I acknowledge the technology has some real flaws, and I don’t try to pretend that it is ethically better than alternatives. I’ve used AI for images and AI for code. I’ve even used AI to help me figure out why an update failed for BMD, so abandon ship if that’s a problem!!
I use it. I do sometimes think about whether I should buy carbon credits or something to feel like I use it ethically, but on the other hand, I don’t worry about the carbon credits I burn playing video games. I don’t know. On my fucks given scale, it doesn’t really rate, but it does sometimes itch.
In this discussion, I find the approach that AI PBs are ethically preferable to using PBs of existing persons hard to swallow.
What is the line of thinking? Many of these models have used those very same images in their training data. Like, you’re just using the exact same images with an extra layer of ‘and also other copyrighted works’, in a way that is still very much under debate for how much actual harm it causes.
Then there are some harmful beliefs out there which make people blind to potential issues:
Secondly, if the model is made for a for-profit system like Midjourney, then they already have the requisite rights and permissions. That’s part of what you’re paying for when you buy a license for Midjourney.
That’s just incorrect. Make your judgments on the matter based on fact, at least.
she/they
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How can I solve a problem in a complicated way that’s already been solved two simple ways 40 years ago? -
In this discussion, I find the approach that AI PBs are ethically preferable to using PBs of existing persons hard to swallow.
This is where I’m at. I don’t care for how Midjourney stuff looks, but I also don’t care if people like playing with it as a toy, even if the company sucks and the whole industry needs to pay the contributors it sucks inspo from and also be regulated. A lot of MUSHing exists in a fair use gray area, I’m not going to clutch my pearls about a new toy just because I don’t like it.
The whole ‘AI is more ethical actually’ thing just feels like false equivalency bullshit, though, given the many ways it is…demonstrably not.
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@Third-Eye said in AI PBs:
I also don’t care if people like playing with it as a toy, even if the company sucks and the whole industry needs to pay the contributors it sucks inspo from and also be regulated.
Yeah I mean… in the grand scheme of the AI industry, is MUSHing going to be the make-or-break thing? Obviously not.
It just bothers me. These tools are literally destroying the livelihoods of people I care about right now and threatening to do the same to more people in the future. So it just really hurts to see people shrug and be like: “Eh, whatever, I’m gonna still play with it because it’s a fun toy.” I wish more people would take a principled stand against it, because that can actually make a difference to their bottom lines.
Most of us are old enough to remember Napster. Imagine what would have happened to the music industry if that had been Apple’s model instead of some little indie that could get crushed by the big corps. If they had just said: “Yeah we know it’s illegal, but we don’t care. Come sue us. By the time it gets through the courts, we’ll have a monopoly and nobody will be able to stop us.” I don’t really like that image. Yeah, I know the current streaming services aren’t great to musicians either, but it could have been a lot worse.
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me. These tools are literally destroying the livelihoods of people I care about right now and threatening to do the same to more people in the future. So it just really hurts to see people shrug and be like: “Eh, whatever, I’m gonna still play with it because it’s a fun toy.” I wish more people would take a principled stand against it, because that can actually make a difference to their bottom lines.
Honestly, I don’t know how you can say this and then also say
I purchase from Amazon and thereby enable corruption and exploitation. I have reasons, but they’re kinda selfish. I can at least admit it.
when the exact same argument could be made for Amazon and I would argue those very real people being exploited are being hurt a bit worse here.
