It’s only been a day since ChatGPT’s new AI image generator went live, and social media feeds are already flooded with AI-generated memes in the style of Studio Ghibli, the cult-favorite Japanese animation studio behind blockbuster films such as “My Neighbor Totoro” and “Spirited Away.”
In the last 24 hours, we’ve seen AI-generated images representing Studio Ghibli versions of Elon Musk, “The Lord of the Rings“, and President Donald Trump. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman even seems to have made his new profile picture a Studio Ghibli-style image, presumably made with GPT-4o’s native image generator. Users seem to be uploading existing images and pictures into ChatGPT and asking the chatbot to re-create it in new styles.
Ok, now I’ve finally come to a conclusion about this debate. When a human learns to draw or write in a particular style, there are no copyright issues. However, when a machine does the same, you need to compensate the people who made the training data. Here’s why.
The training data is an essential component of of the model. It’s like building a house with bricks you didn’t pay for. If you’re building something like a house, ship, software or a machine learning model, you need to pay for the materials that are required to build it.
I agree with tackling this issue intuitively because humans like other animals have a basic sense of injustice and its setting all kinds of alarms right now. We have already dealt with this - it’s called fair use. Machine processing of someone else’s art for commercial purposes will never be a fair use.
I’d like to add that machine learning is not learning, just like a network firewall is not a wall and doesn’t protect against fire. Lending the same legitimacy to machine learning than to true learning is an equivocation, a fallacy.
It’s even simpler than that: In the first instance a human learned a thing. In the second instance a bunch of humans wrote software to ingest art and spit out some Frankenstein of it. Software which is specifically designed to replace artists, many of whom likely had art used as inputs to said software without their consent.
In both cases humans did things. The first is normal, the second is shitty.
Our current AIs are kinda pathetic, and might realistically only replace mediocre artists. However, people who buy art, can’t tell the difference between good art and mediocre art, so the financial impact could be felt by a larger number of people.
It’s a bit like comparing factory made clothes to properly tailored ones. We still have both, but machines have clearly won this race. Besides, only very few people appreciate tailored clothes so much that they are also willing to pay for them. Most don’t, so they wear cheap lower quality clothes instead. I think the same will happen to music and paintings too.
Copium ITT. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle guys, not sure how long it’s going to take to sink in for you all. You guys realize you can run these bots on your home computer, no Internet connection required? How do you plan to stop that?
Oh there’s definitely no going back. This will continue to erode the art scene and continue to steal artwork from humans that spent hours making it. No government or entity can or should go into homes and take these things away, but it’s not really about that. Companies are vacuuming up artwork, books, etc and paying nobody for them, while telling us some nonsense like it’s a positive for society. No compensation for the thing they are now going to make money off of, but they’d sue you into oblivion in a second if you stole something from them. That simple fact is why this is all shit.
I love the idea of AI and I’ve built things using ChatGPT’s API (miserable), but these capitalists have gone about it all wrong per usual. It could’ve been a public resource that people willingly contribute to, but the capitalists took it upon themselves to break the rules again, while hiding behind a shield of excuses for why they should pay nobody.
Bingo.
You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube, but you can bust skulls over the rank hypocracy of the tech CEOs.
Machines in the hands of the working class can thrive in a way that benefits everyone equally, and is available to everyone. But as soon as capitalists get it, the whole idea becomes corrupted because the sole purpose is profit at all costs. AI is not profitable yet, which is why these companies will pull out all the stops (including downloading content from illegal sources that they otherwise scold everyone else for using).
AI companies should be fined percentages of their total worth by the government whose artists they are taking advantage of. For example: Japanese government penalises OpenAI 50% of their net worth for every image which is even marginally similar to any publishing house in Japan. And they should be very lenient about taking on these cases.
I want OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Facebook and IBM to get fucked so bad they won’t even dream of coming back and doing this. I don’t know why the EU penalises these companies in monetary amounts. They should be putting rules like a certain percentage of your company for a certain type of wrongdoing.
TBH if Japan or other asian countries bleed these companies dry they will be sitting on an immense sum of money which will propel them to superpowers in their own right. It’s a win-win for everyone
People can do it on their own computers - that’s not a problem. The problem is when they try to sell it and functional governments are perfectly capable of regulating trade.
If gets better and better at looking genuine and having fewer obvious mistakes every single day. Fox News literally aired an AI video as if it were real. What are you going to do when you have no way of telling the difference?
US doesn’t have a functioning government, yes. In anarchy everything is permitted if you’re strong enough, can’t help you with that.
Anarchy isn’t chaos:
Concept of anarchy in politics is pretty elusive, probably more so than utopian communism. The big difference being is that we tried anarchy and it ended up turning into some kind of feudalism in most places.
When did we try anarchy?
Anarchy is the default system before order forms. Everywhere you look that means some sort of feudalism. That’s why free market, anarchy, deregulation etc are seen by some leftists as means of returning to that kind of order. I’m aware of other anarchist schools of thought and I consider anarcho-syndicalism as possibly the only way to oppose current order. I don’t consider anarcho-syndicalism to be a form of anarchy though as it mentions methods of organising even in its name :)
What should the government do? Go on every computer in every house in America and make sure they don’t have any AI software? Make it make sense. You’re just crossing your arms, grunting and going, “I DON’T LIKE IT!” Let’s say we had the best government in the world, what’s your proposal for them stopping this?
This is akin to my mother trying to stop Walmart from getting rich by not shopping there for decades. You’re pissing into the ocean hoping to turn it yellow.
I specifically said that private use can’t be regulated (practical reasons, ethical reasons) but most of the states exist to regulate commercial activity and are equipped to do just that.
Dodging the question is sure to get you ahead in your goals! Have fun with the copium. Let’s meet back in this thread in ten years and see if artificially generated content trained on artists work is gone or making no profits. 🙂
What did I dodge specifically? Anarchy allowing everything for the strongest is a tautology and entirely irrelevant to current technology bubble.
These AI models require huge amounts of electricity. If governments wanted to they could destroy their ability to operate, like when China banned bitcoin mining.
Some do, some don’t. Stable Diffusion isn’t any worse than an intensive game.
