This is just the way of capitalism, and it's how the entire economy works. I mean, you're so concerned with the artists work being stolen, but what of the scientists? Yes, the art produced by Stable Diffusion isn't possible without the artists, but it's also not possible without the countless scientists who have worked over decades to get this technology to where it is. I didn't hear artists complaining when they were happily using technologies developed by people who were not compensated when their work was productized by corporations.
Where is their attribution? Should we expect Microsoft and OpenAI et al. to list the authors of the papers they used to work through the technical aspects of their product? Should all of the open source projects they leveraged be attributed and compensated? If we are going to ask Microsoft to share profits with artists, shouldn't we also ask them to share profits with scientists and open source devs?
Arguably, yes! But if so, then the focus on the poor artists being robbed is misplaced. If artists are being robbed by corporations, then they can get in line if they want a payout, because the rest of us are being robbed too. It's a much larger problem than just artists -- it's that corporations capture all of the downstream benefits of upstream content/science/technology developments, and then refuse to reinvest at a proportional rate back into the system that allowed them to profit so handsomely. This applies to the scientists and the artists.
So yes, be mad at what Microsoft is doing. But the solution isn't to get them to pay artists, that doesn't fix anything. If we want actual change, we need to fundamentally reimagine the relationship between corporations and the rest of us. If the only way to get there is for corporations to screw over more people until enough wake up, then so be it.
Scientists are generally paid, at least with public grant money or corporate sponsorship, or by working in corp labs.
Artists and writers generally earn their living by selling their works. If they are not paid for their works, they starve, which is why the stereotype of the "starving artist" exists.
This is like MS scanning all Open-Source code and generating PROPRIETARY results from that code.
Like the art, it was shared or published WITHOUT permission for commercial re-use.
Yet, here is Microsoft, hijacking and commercially re-using it. This is effectively stealing without permission or compensation. None of the artists consented for this type of re-use, especially packaged such that it would literally erase their ability to make a living.
MS has a very cool product here, except for this wholesale systematic theft.
My overall point is that if we're going to start asking for handouts due to a rearrangement of the social order, then we can't start and stop the discussion at artists and stable diffusion type technologies.
> If they are not paid for their works, they starve, which is why the stereotype of the "starving artist" exists.
Sort of. Most people actively doing the hard labor in scientific fields are in fact Ph.D. students, who are paid meager stipends, if anything. They also frequently literally starve due to how little they are paid. And yet, it's their hard work that goes into published papers, which then are read by engineers (read: highly-compensated millionaires), who then implement those ideas into production code, which is sold for profit.
Further, much of the scientific process is actually volunteer work. I don't peer edit and review for free, in my spare time, just so Microsoft has an easier time reading the papers that pass through my inbox. I do it because the scientific process requires it, and this is the process we've decided on as a society. But maybe in the future, all scientific research will be for-profit, paid access only. That's the way it will be if the profit keeps getting captured by corporations without proportional taxes being paid back into the system.
> Scientists are generally paid, at least with public grant money
That's one way to look at it. The other way to look at it is the scientists who are paid with grant money are the lucky ones, because the pie is so small. So many other scientists are doing side jobs, hustling, and giving up their dream to be a scientist because the opportunities to make a living in this field are so few and far between. Being a scientist supported by a grant or corporation is a lot like being an artist with a patron, actually.
And why is it this way? The pie is so small to begin with because science is generally not profitable, and so research cannot fund itself. Nonetheless, we as a society feel that scientific research is a worthwhile endeavor, so we fund science, and tax corporations who use the fruits of science industrially. Those funds will then be reinvested into more science.
But now Microsoft and the rest of the big corps don't want to pay their taxes, yet they still want to freely incorporate public-funded research into their for-profit technology products. If that plays out, well who is going to fund the science? The scientists can't, the public won't, the corporations won't.
Why are you conflating scientific research (something that is paid), with art that was freely uploaded to social media sites and message boards?
Microsoft Designer is not spitting out composites of stolen research, it is creating composites of art that can't be matched back to the original.
> If artists are being robbed by corporations, then they can get in line if they want a payout, because the rest of us are being robbed too.
Perhaps you should disclose what AI is stealing from you. For me, nothing, because my career is in an area where I don't have to publicly share my work.
> Why are you conflating scientific research (something that is paid), with art that was freely uploaded to social media sites and message boards?
Was it paid? How do you know? A lot of research is done by Ph.D. students, who are paid if you're lucky. Often though they are in fact paying for a degree.
Moreover, science and art are often held as two sides of the same coin, because they are both fields that don't generate profit, yet society has deemed socially necessary enough to fund them. So even though scientists and artists are held to be opposites personality wise, the roles they play in society are actually very similar. This means their works are also exploited in a similar way.
> Microsoft Designer is not spitting out composites of stolen research, it is creating composites of art that can't be matched back to the original.
We could accurately say that Microsoft is profiting off of research done by students who go uncompensated. If a starving artist should be paid because their drawing went into a diffusion model that Microsoft profits off of, why shouldn't a starving student who wrote a paper that MS read to create their diffusion model be compensated as well?
> Perhaps you should disclose what AI is stealing from you. For me, nothing, because my career is in an area where I don't have to publicly share my work.
Well, that's one of the problems isn't it? Microsoft doesn't have to disclose or attribute any of the works that went into the production of this technology. But in the general case, if you walk through the OpenAI offices, you'll find stacks of research papers, whose authors are listed readily on those papers. If the artists get in on a royalty cut, I don't see why every one of those authors shouldn't as well (and for that matter all the open source devs whose code is running on their systems).
While most works of are re-combinations (up in the how many 9s after 99% region?), it is pretty hard to say that there has never been a new idea. Humanity has come from apes without art, up to modern digital art painted with lasers in the sky with drones.... From cave painting through Greek & Roman art, through Renaissance through modern art, and it's not merely new mediums for the same painting (and even so, "the medium is the message", so there's new stuff there). Same for music, text, etc...
This is a very interesting discussion. Now zoom in into your understanding of "new idea". You can also call it "refinement of existing idea". "New" can be (and maybe always is? ) a combination or transformation of "existing". Just like any number is a combination of other numbers.
So, if we're to establish (I won't say "prove") the idea of [everything is transformation], we'd need to sort out the list of primitives, which are being re-combined.
Conversely, for the [some things are really new], we'd have to find the new items. That said, the new items will almost popup in the context of other transformations, e.g., a new innovation in painting would still likely occur within some more normal transformations.
Take for example the Abstract Art movement, which was about painting not representations of real things, but exploring the elements of form, color, line, texture, but not painting people or landscapes (or only doing so in a very abstract way). So, painting a person on a digital medium vs oil & canvas or watercolor is a transformation. But my sense is that some of these abstract artists were actually digging down into the lower levels of subconscious visual processing, where the initial processing is to find edges, colors, movement, textures, and this was entirely new in the history of painting.
What about concepts, from the flat earth to the round earth, from geocentricism to heliocentrism, to no special location in the universe, or from earth-water-fire-air to alchemy, to structure-of-the-atom-based chemistry? Are there no new ideas here, or are they just out of scope?
To your example, is any number just a combination of other numbers? The concept of Zero didn't exist for a long time in recorded history (how long is debated). What about negative numbers, imaginary numbers? Do we consider these new or combinations?
Or, are we just discussing the Ship of Theseus, a fundamentally unsolvable question that depends on our concept of "new"? (still a fun rabbit hole!)
1. You know that these tools are known to sometimes output a result that is 1:1 copy of a work from training data. Even those cases aside, in many (most?) cases a few or even one specific artist served as the source (sometimes the prompt is specifically created that way).
2. Human mind can recombine all it wants. It’s called a homage, a reproduction, or a cover. When a software tool does that automated and at scale, though, it is copyright violation.
Where is their attribution? Should we expect Microsoft and OpenAI et al. to list the authors of the papers they used to work through the technical aspects of their product? Should all of the open source projects they leveraged be attributed and compensated? If we are going to ask Microsoft to share profits with artists, shouldn't we also ask them to share profits with scientists and open source devs?
Arguably, yes! But if so, then the focus on the poor artists being robbed is misplaced. If artists are being robbed by corporations, then they can get in line if they want a payout, because the rest of us are being robbed too. It's a much larger problem than just artists -- it's that corporations capture all of the downstream benefits of upstream content/science/technology developments, and then refuse to reinvest at a proportional rate back into the system that allowed them to profit so handsomely. This applies to the scientists and the artists.
So yes, be mad at what Microsoft is doing. But the solution isn't to get them to pay artists, that doesn't fix anything. If we want actual change, we need to fundamentally reimagine the relationship between corporations and the rest of us. If the only way to get there is for corporations to screw over more people until enough wake up, then so be it.