9mo ago

"Famous" AI Artist Says He's Losing Millions of Dollars From People Stealing His Work

Famous AI Artist Says He's Losing Millions of Dollars From People Stealing His Work

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/3613920

https://archive.ph/tR7s6
Get fuuuuuuuuuuuuuucked
“This isn’t going to stop,” Allen told the New York Times. “Art is dead, dude. It’s over. A.I. won. Humans lost.”
"But I still want to get paid for it."

chapotraphouse @hexbear.net

Robert_Kennedy_Jr [xe/xem, xey/xem] @hexbear.net

9mo ago

"Famous" AI Artist Says He's Losing Millions of Dollars From People Stealing His Work

gizmodo.com /famous-ai-artist-says-hes-losing-millions-of-dollars-from-people-stealing-his-work-2000505822

Furry Technologists @pawb.social

Tony Bark @pawb.social

9mo ago

Famous AI "Artist" Says He's Losing Millions of Dollars From People Stealing His Work

gizmodo.com /famous-ai-artist-says-hes-losing-millions-of-dollars-from-people-stealing-his-work-2000505822

170 comments

- Stupid tardigrade doesn't even know how to play a violin
  
  He’s doing his best!
  
  Good thing it's got a cello then.
  
  Stupid human doesn't even know what a violin looks like.
- NGL, I am pretty tired and have my glasses off, thought he was holding a sword and shield and thought this was pretty cool.
- This is great.
Another idiot who thinks "prompt engineering" is a real skill and not just another step those companies are using idiots for free AI training.
You ask AI to draw a ninja turtle on a skateboard, and that "effort" they put into phrasing their request well enough for the AI to understand makes the AI learn the 10 past attempts were looking for what the 11th got
And now it won't take ten tries to go that route
Any "skill" by the user has a very short expiration date because the next version won't need it thanks to all the time users spent developing those "skills".
But no one impressed with AI is smart enough to realize that. And since they're the on s training the AI....
Idiots in, idiots out
- "Promp engineering" is as useful skill as Google fu used to be.
  
  I completely agree. I wonder whether some IT bachelor's degrees now have lessons in AI prompting. I remember in 2005 there was a course we had to do which could've been labeled "[shitty] Google-Fu" or something. "information searching" is what it would more or less translate to. Basically searching using Google and library searches well. And I don't mean "library" in the IT-context, but actual libraries. With books. Just had to use the search tools the locals libraries had.
  Such a fucking filler class.
  In my year like 60 started, two classes. After three years like 8 graduated.
- I don’t know about that, in particular, because people generally add more detail, but it teaches the AI what kind of detail to add. So if you’re not picky, then yeah, the AI learns from that kind of thing.
  As far as it being a useful skill, I don’t think it was in the first place. “Prompt engineer” has always been a joke. It’s like being a “sandwich artist”. Everyone can do it with one day of practice.
- You don't have a clue how ai works do you?
  
  Can you point out what's supposedly wrong with their comment or are you just claiming that every critic of so-called "AI" doesn't have a clue to justify the hype?
- I use ai when I use search engines. This makes the search engines better. I also use ai when I get spotify suggestions. I use ai when I use autocorrect. I use ai without even realizing I'm using ai and the ai improves from it, and I and many other people get an improved quality of life from it, that's why nearly everyone uses it just like I do.
  So, @givesomefucks , do you also regularly use ai that improves from from your usage? Or are you not a hypocrite who thinks there is something morally bad about specific ais that you don't like while doing exactly what you claim to be against with other ais? How are your moral lines drawn?
  
  I use ai when I use search engines. This makes the search engines better.
  go on mate, pull the other one!
  
  Thanks for the example!
  Whether an individual determines AI "smart" depends on how smart the person is. We're all all our own frame of reference.
  I have no doubt AI impresses you every day of your life, even stuff that's not AI apparently, because not all of your examples were.
  
  Thanks for demonstrating what a useless term "AI" is when you're not trying to sell snake oil.
  
  I think you were downvoted by people who think "AI" was invented in the past decade.
per Wikipedia
On September 21, 2022, Allen submitted an application to the us copyright office for registration of the image. Prior to the first formal refusal, the Copyright Office Examiner requested that the request would exclude any features of the image generated by Midjourney. Allen declined the request and requested copyright for the whole image.
So what I'm getting from that is his Photoshop edits aren't significant enough to constitute a copyrightable work on their own and the copyright office was right to deem it a non-human production.
- I'm just happy someone at the copyright office knows what they're doing
  
  This has been the copyright office's stance for quite a while now. Actually, most of the world's respective IP registrars and authorities do not grant IP rights to AI generated material.
  
  Oh sweet summer child...
I like the comment that said the AI is the artist and he's just a commissioner, makes perfect sense.
- Drag thinks profits from AI art should automatically go to funding an AI Advocacy Commission established by the government to explore questions of AI consciousness and AI rights. The AAC should be devoting resources to solving the hard problem of consciousness and improving working conditions for AIs, in whatever way experts believe is most beneficial to AI welfare.
  This is how you stop The Matrix from happening, people!
  
  Poe's law in full swing in this comment.
It's not "famous" that should be in inverted commas, but "artist".
- We call those quotation marks.
  But yes.
  
  Aren't inverted commas also a phrase for that? Or is that the joke.
  
  Who is we? The global pedant society?
- Actually I'd argue you could put quotation marks on every word in the first half of the headline.
Agreed.
Get fucked, you no talent ass clown.
- He's really good at writing words about his on-stolen-content-based generated image, you got to give him that.
  But no, fuck copyrighting AI content, that's a dead channel from a copyright perspective.
I said this when it was posted elsewhere- how is he calculating those millions of dollars?
- RIAA and MPAA anti-piracy strategy, aka, made up bullshit.
- It's easy. He chose an arbitrary number that was very big but just shy of 99% unrealistic, according to his own flawed judgement.
- Probably the same way companies tried to sue The Pirate Bay because the bay had lost them more money than existed in the world economy.
Not the Onion. This was unexpected...
eat shit dude
- https://youtu.be/0g5YdQzSKYs?si=9_j4B56r1UiK-B0Z
  
  https://youtu.be/0g5YdQzSKYs
  Same link without tracker
Ha! Not the onion was made for this headline!
Art is dead, dude. It’s over. A.I. won. Humans lost.
He made the art shown below. It's not even good lmao, why the fuck would you declare something like that if you make the shittiest looking AI art. What a fucking clown.
- It looks cool from a distance, but it really falls apart when you look closer
- He didn't make shit.
  A computer made it. He provided some guidance.
  
  Of course he didn't, but it just makes it worse that the image that's "ending human art" is distorted and glitchy.
  
  Well in a way all Art is being done indirectly by some sort of instrument. Only the degree of sophistication or degree of separation of this instrument is different. A pencil drawing is in principle also done by the pencil, but I provided a lot of guidance through my hand. A pencil - almost no sophistication - is on one side of the spectrum and Midjourney/Stable Diffusion etc is on the other side of the spectrum.
  I don't want to judge AI "art" in general - there's so many awful traditional artworks that AI art doesn't really stand out.
  What rubs me the wrong way is that it is a tool that no human can understand reasonably well. Everybody can understand a pencil. It's possible to understand a computer renderer that renders digital art. But no one can understand the totality of an LLM which was trained on terabytes of images. It's a lot of trial and error, because what the tool does generate random images even with precise directions. It's throwing dice until one likes the result.
  The one thing I give this "artist" credit for: he was very early (maye even the first?) that entered AI art into a contest and fooled the jury. Being the first is often enough historically to make "great art". Where art is more measured n the impact it has on a societal discussion. So I give him that.
  But a court already decided you can't copyright AI art, because it's trained on other art without permission. So he can get fucked.
- It annoys me that whatever the big yellow circle is isn't centered in the image.
  
  That doesn't bother me as much as when you actually zoom in on the people
  Normally you paint somebody, you do so in a recognizable pose standing or caught in a frame stance that implies their motion.
  Here you have someone presumably looking at the orb, But they look more like a weeble wobble. Is that their tiny little arm holding there ear? They're not balanced, I'm not even sure the head is connected to the neck there should be meat back there right? The raw proportions are just wrong.
  The overall feeling the piece conveys is pretty impressive but the actual details are bullshit.
- Looks like a psychedalic dream and not in a good way.
Irony can be pretty ironic sometimes.
I'm hoping someone with actual talent paints the AI picture and then copyrights it
- I don't think someone painting a physically copy of the image will gain ownership of the copyright.
Think he'll try to use a llm as his lawyer?
"""Artist"""
- "Famous" A"I" "Artist"
- i think “content creator” would be a better term in this case. because i’m not convinced it’s art, but it sure is “content”. maybe “content requester” would be more accurate.
I'm pretty sure there's a misspelling. It's spelled "douchebag" not "artist".
ChatGPT, show me the world's tiniest violin playing "No One Gives a Fuck" in A minor.
- I wish that was true for minors 😔
Lol.
“Famous”?
Never heard of him.
The layers to irony in this case is almost too delicious.
It's probably a safe bet that this AI artist was also a NFT artist or procurer a few years ago.
I’m not convinced he is not playing 4D chess and recognizes the huuuge irony.
Then again, satire is dead.
In 2021 I made a sound installation project called "Opéra Spatial " and entered a bunch of public prompt in mid-jouney via discord to generate images for the work. This guy made his image on year later.
Get a real job
They forgot to put "Artist" in quotes too
- You're not wrong, but he also might not be either :)
I love how they quoted “famous”
What a fuckin tool, for real
One of the very firest things I looked into when I learned about midjourney was look into the copyright matters pertaining to Ai generated art. Saw that it's not really copyrightable, and then started using the search feature on their discord to find prompts by others for the junk I wanted.
He cannot copyright it because he didn't make it. He wrote a couple of words into a text box. It's no different from commissioning an artist to draw for you, except in this scenario it is analogous to the artist turning out to be someone who traces other people's art without their consent, and claiming you made the picture.
Bit melodramatic. Even the real artists that midjourney actually stole from don't claim to have lost millions individually as a result.
He needs to take a photograph of it and then copyright the photograph. Easy!
😭
This article is annoyingly one-sided. The tool performs an act of synthesis just like an art student looking at a bunch of art might. Sure, like an art student, it could copy someone's style or even an exact image if asked (though those asking may be better served by torrent sites). But that's not how most people use these tools. People create novel things with these tools and should be protected under the law.
- So what you're saying is that the AI is the artist, not the prompter. The AI is performing the labor of creating the work, at the request of the prompter, like the hypothetical art student you mentioned did, and the prompter is not the creator any more than I would be if I kindly asked an art student to paint me a picture.
  In which case, the AI is the thing that gets the authorial credit, not the prompter. And since AI is not a person, anything it authors cannot be subjected to copyright, just like when that monkey took a selfie.
  
  It should be as copyrightable as the prompt. If the prompt is something super generic, then there's no real work done by the human. If the prompt is as long and unique as other copyrightable writing (which includes short works like poems) then why shouldn't it be copyrightable?
- It’s deterministic. I can exactly duplicate your “art” by typing in the same sentence. You’re not creative, you’re just playing with toys.
  
  That's actually fundamentally untrue, like independent of your opinion, I promise that when people generate an image with a phrase it will be different and is not deterministic ( not in the way you mean ) .
  You and I cannot type the same prompt into the same AI generative model and receive the same result, no system works with that level of specificity, by design.
  They pretty much all use some form of entropy / noise.
  
  Try it out and show us the result.
- The tool performs an act of synthesis just like an art student looking at a bunch of art might.
  Lol, no. A student still incorporates their own personality in their work. Art by humans always communicates something. LLMs can't communicate.
  People create novel things with these tools and should be protected under the law.
  I thought it's "the tool" the "performs an act of synthesis". Do people create things, or the LLM?
  
  No no, he created the prompt. That's the artistic value /s
  
  the machine learning model creates the picture, and does have a "style", the "style" has been at least partially removed from most commercial models but still exist.

170 comments