Class Action Filed Against Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and DeviantArt

Doing great -- creative brain has been going somewhere between 5th and 6th gear since early December, and it feels awesome. Thanks for checking. And yeah, I was dismissive (but not necessarily wrong) because you were right last time: you're not attacking, but we aren't going to agree on certain fundamental issues. This is one of them. There is no conversation or engagement worth either of our time there. I should probably have just PMed that post to DS44, but eh, not in the habit of being that....weird. Not unless I'm worried the moderators are going to nuke a post from orbit. Sometimes, it is a legitimate concern!

Oh, I didn’t call your post dismissive; I said whataboutism is dismissive. Whataboutism is a deflection tactic, but I wasn't trying to distract from the discussion at all.

"

Foreverhappychan wrote:

But that post brought me back to what I was trying to explain regarding the potential slippery slope away from art as a creative, deliberate expression and towards simply the generation of images fitting a criterion based on existing images: what happens when the 'feed' becomes nothing but what the 'feed' generated?

I think about 99% of the time people talk about slippery slopes, it’s fairly unwarranted fear; slippery slope is more an argument-shaped hole than an argument. Generally, and I think this is the case here too, the slope tends to actually not be very slippery in reality, it just looks slippery from a distance if you abstract out enough important detail.

(Edit: probably shouldn’t have put that “argument” bit in there - as you noted, we’re not arguing, as such, so it’s not really an appropriate term. Consider it a comment about other people in other situations, I suppose)

Because people aren’t going to stop making art. I would say they can’t, really, but even if I was someone with a less broad definition of art: people make art because they like making art. They like communicating, they like creating, they like experimenting. There’s no reason to expect humanity is going to evolve out of that capacity in anything before the very long term.

Yes, there will be lots of highly commercialised, production-line art created using AI tools because of the efficiency - someone can quickly generate a hundred variations on an idea and pick out a few to tweak further. Amazing for all those artists currently tasked with pumping out six hundred sprites in four different rotations for their employer's latest Merge Wombats mobile game.

But highly commercialised, production-line art isn't new. AI didn't create the demand for that, and just as that art hasn't destroyed other art up to this point, adding a new tool into the mix won't suddenly cause other art to stop being made. The reality is that humans have lots of uses for art that isn't going to win any prizes or prompt any deep conversations or hang in any galleries. Lots of that art is already not considered "real art" by many people. That's okay.

"

Foreverhappychan wrote:

That's a closed system, cannibalising itself.

That's Earth for you!

Seriously though: it is, basically, and I feel this is a useful bit of perspective. The answer to "what happens when the feed becomes nothing but what the feed generates" is "well, all the myriad things that anyone has ever experienced". Complex systems can be cyclical and regenerative without being bland, as long as you're not Dr Manhattan or whatever.

Sorry for my english.

I won t make words about what is art and how it is important Charan hinted at it in better ways anyway.

What I want to add is that, not a lot of artist complained about websites like Fiverr where you can for 5 dollars hire some skilled folk in India to create awesome work that would cost 500 here to do .

Artist did not complain because those folks in India are in their own right very good artist creating original and new content.

On the opposite AI softwares are taking from a labor who needed long hours of work without even mentioning the references in the final product.

They make their subscribers pay to access the labor of those artist and nothing is being distributed back to the artist who like those software engineer helped create the AI by producing for them "free" samples without knowing.

Artist should have the right to opt out of helping the AI, they did not consent to do free labor for the software engineer who is now selling subscriptions to their art database .


AI art already killed low level jobs actually, Jobs from the mediocre/amateur/average artists (myself included).

For example When amateur musicians created albums they sometime needed cover for their albums. They paid some artists few bucks for art cover. Now this market is dead, most of the musicians are paying 5 euro midjourney and have infinite album covers. Life is not fair (famous philosopher quote) anyway but it is good to know that the myth of "they took our jobs" is sometime true on the least lucky/skilled people.


AI is already doing the same with code and programmers. Taking github free source codes and creating licensed product with them.

Microsoft is getting sued for that.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvm3k5/github-users-file-a-class-action-lawsuit-against-microsoft-for-training-an-ai-tool-with-their-code


AI engineer should not "scrap" people s work for free to create their commercial tools. You cannot stop progress and innovation but it should not be done on the back of people.


To finish,

the conglomerate from Germany who created some famous AI art generator wanted to do it with AI Music.

They right away decided to use only free music samples that people agreed to be shared and used.

Why did they not do that for art but are so keen to do it for the music industry? Because they knew if they took sample from Eminem they would get their ass kicked in court. This is double standard and ugly from them.

"

lolozori wrote:

Artist should have the right to opt out of helping the AI, they did not consent to do free labor for the software engineer who is now selling subscriptions to their art database .


AI art already killed low level jobs actually, Jobs from the mediocre artists (I put myself in this category).

For example When amateur musicians created albums they sometime needed cover for their albums. They paid some artists few bucks for art cover. Now this market is dead, most of the musicians are paying 5 euro midjourney and have infinite album covers. Life is not fair (famous philosopher quote) anyway but it is good to know that the myth of "they took our jobs" is sometime true on the least lucky/skilled people.


AI is already doing the same with code and programmers. Taking github free source codes and creating licensed product with them.

Microsoft is getting sued for that.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvm3k5/github-users-file-a-class-action-lawsuit-against-microsoft-for-training-an-ai-tool-with-their-code


AI engineer should not "scrap" people s work for free to create their commercial tools. You cannot stop progress and innovation but it should not be done on the back of people.

I really feel sorry for those amateur artists gaining a buck here and there because that is not an option anymore.

I also hate the fact computer scientists almost completely got rid of the classical statistician by first copying their decade old methods, throwing cause and effect out of the window, put all focus on prediction and calling it 'machine learning'. Now you are in a position where IT-folks are analyzing your data instead of people who were trained to do this. We are living in a world where IT tries to dictate everything. Remember those jackass IT-folk who tried to replace the current financial system with crypto?

In my last consultancy project the goal was to do inverse design of optical systems with the aid of AI (notice everyone uses the word AI as it means more finances). The neural network architecture could never replace the true physical model. A physics model is vastly superior to an AI-model as the scientist knows the entire true machinery and inner workings of how nature does what it does. In the case of inverse design, the AI-model proved somewhat useful if you combined it with the physical model and selected the appropriate mathematical optimization techniques.

AI is also heavily used in fluid mechanics but it is not there yet. AI-generated fluid simulations might hold great promise for the movie- and game-industry but for truly studying fluids, you won't get much out of it.

My reference to the German software is the following:

They are originally a group of scientist engineer working for the state getting public founds. They discover their AI scrap engine was very good and of course greed ensued. In order to be able to scrap the net they did it by saying it was for research purpose.

They created many companies outside of Germany (Runway AI Inc-Stable diffusion etc etc) and sold the data to those in order to be able to commercialize the AI program without getting in trouble with the law since they are supposedly public university researchers.

"Tom Mason, the CTO of “Stability.ai,” the startup behind Stable Diffusion, says artists who don’t want to leave their art for AI training should turn to German company LAION. The company assembles AI training datasets and trains its own models with funding from Stability.ai. LAION developed the aforementioned 5B image dataset that was used to train Midjourney and Stable Diffusion."


"LAION
LAION, as a non-profit organization, provides datasets, tools and models to liberate machine learning research. By doing so, we encourage open public education ..."


Greed is what is under AI art .

"

lolozori wrote:

Greed is what is under AI art .

That's a super low bar really, that could apply to most for-profit companies. Any efforts to improve efficiency, reduce costs, eliminate waste, or otherwise increase margin could be considered greedy.

In general I might be over my skis' (no pun intended) on the technical side of things with these AI art programs. The "scraping" that Mr Chan mentioned from the piece he cited was the concept I was talking about when I said digital sampling to form a basis of AI understanding of concepts.

Again, I dont view AI art is inherently bad. I would assume opinions on its use are wildly subjective, even personal, and exacerbated by the moral issues with human artists being financially compromised. Or generally feeling like they are being outsourced by a substandard product. That's what remains to be seen, or at the very least, is in the eye of beholder.

And for what's its worth Charan I think the pumping of a fist in the air decrying robot and technology advancements is a meh argument at best. We will absolutely get to a point in time where automation and technology eliminate the need for humans to participate on a large scale. Its already happened to a significant degree in a few areas of manufacturing, security, customer service, logistics, and fulfillment. Its very very real. I dont know if it will happen in my lifetime, but it's very possible technology will push us to a UBI (universal basic income), eliminating most mid-tier to low-skill jobs.

"

DarthSki44 wrote:

That's a super low bar really, that could apply to most for-profit companies.

Sorry, I didn t want my arguments to sound childish but my weak level of english make it sound that way, it is hard to argument what I think on foreign language forum so this is why I try not to write too long.

I wanted to express the idea that if they switched from non profit project and hide behind smoke companies to use it to make money, then they should pay those who helped like the artist they vacuumed on the net.

I heard the guys in charge of Midjourney saying it was a project to help people, to make the commoner to become the artist they dreamed to be and they didn t want to hurt real artists or abuse them but in fact it is a paying site that was created just to pump money. So they are lying about the purpose of this experiment.




I Know art is also something more than just money, it is human passion and envy, it is dreams and deep feelings and ideally this should not be put into a machine to mass produce but I didn t want to argue about that part because it was too complicated to argument for me, but I though talking about how they depraved the idea of science to make money on the back of artist was worth mentioning.

I know anti-tech arguments are meh. I'm here, aren't I? I've been here, i.e. the internet, longer than a lot of people. I was using it for things considered quite unethical and 'dangerous' back in the 90s...only took the world 10-20 years to catch up and figure out not everyone on here was, in fact, an axe murderer.

But then I stopped because I was done with it, and it just kept going. Do I get the tech behind Tinder and Uber? Sure, it's pretty simple. Do I use either? I am extremely grateful that I don't need to, because neither strike me as particularly well regulated.

And that's the problem with the whole getting older thing, getting more conservative: you start to see the logic behind regulation. You'll never scream 'Metallica was right!' but you do see the importance of protecting one's work. The value of it. The effort that went into it. Dunno about you guys but with, say, music, I try to buy/support indie/up and comings, but still happily yoink the latest big release for a band that clearly doesn't need my 10 bucks and makes most of their cash from gigs and merch.

So like I said, I try not to be anti-science or anti-tech about it all. I think this whole shebang is less anti-tech and more pro-regulation, which I can get behind. Whether it's a new form of currency, a challenging abuse of freedom of information on the internet, long-time substances being made legal...all of these things need to be regulated for human consumption by humans who understand how fucking stupid humans can be if left unregulated.

(Google 'walks into a bear' for more information -- to provide any more details would be breach CoC, but I promise, it's totally worth even taking just a glance to see what happened.)

I also think the pro-AIers are too quick to accuse those criticising the lack of regulation as 'luddites', because it's an easy and lazy dismissal. I assume in any debate between large groups of people, most of them on both sides will be lazy and work purely with what their respected higher-ups tell them. It is not wrong to be dismissive of such people because, to use the language of that video I watched and described, their attitudes are not ready to change. Can't reason with someone who's allowed themselves to become a signal booster of an inadequate, misleading message.

And of course the Anti-AI folk are too quick to simplify it to get more people on side. The tone of that class action and the misrepresentation of the tech is atrociously sensationalised, but that's how you get creatives to add support against a tech movement that refuses to be transparent and thus seems, even to a lay person, just a little suspicious.

https://www.theredhandfiles.com/chat-gpt-what-do-you-think/

This seemed somewhat relevant. Also, fuck me drunk, murdered by words much?

This part screams to me about not just AI, but also a certain game some of you may have played recently:

"

ChatGPT is in its infancy but perhaps that is the emerging horror of AI – that it will forever be in its infancy, as it will always have further to go, and the direction is always forward, always faster.

ChatGPT caught the eye of the NYT and some major universities as well recently. These are not easy topics to navigate, as the technology isnt easy to navigate, nor the questions that slide into morality, obligation, and accountability.

It's a mess to be sure, or at least promises to become a bigger one, in the not too distant future.