I spent most of my career in the open source world and doesn’t bother me models are trained on my output. Should I feel differently? It seems there’s a kind of ego or emotional attachment to the output that is more common among artists than devs? Perhaps abundance vs scarcity mindsets?
Regarding generative images, it's more of an issue because the effects are different.
Software tends to be a "living" project, so just vibe coding with 0 software knowledge is not yet fully sustainable for maintaining a project. But with art, the AI just spits out a completed image.
The generated images compete directly with the people the data was sourced from, and there have also been many cases of abuse, eg people using AI to impersonate a popular artist and selling comissions under that artist's name.
The copyright situation for generated imagery is also tricky, so people pretending to be artists only to be sharing work that isn't copyrightable can cause a ton of trouble and financial loss for customers.
Most of these issues don't apply to software in the same way. That's why I was surprised by the backlash to this as it's just touching the software side, I don't see this as threatening artist's work.
When I was dabbling in image generation (~StyleGAN2 era), my vision for image generation models was as a support tool for artists (back then I was generating small character thumbnails to help me brainstorm ideas for drawing), believing that people valued art for the human effort. Even then I would have considered what Anthropic are trying to do here as the preferable way to use AI in art workflows.
It threatens because we aren’t just talking about selling your art. Artists get hired at companies to produce all kinds of work that will now be replaced by AI.
Artists get hired at companies because companies have the technology that made the artists work profitable, starting from book printing (public performance -> book printing -> cinema -> tv -> internet, similar to drawing -> photo -> digital). At the Public Performance / Drawing Era artists were mostly poor low class rogues. The technology made them what they are now.
They are protesting against natural technology development. To me it looks similar to taxi drivers protesting against Uber (protecting their right to scam tourists).
Did drawing artists protest against photography? Do celebrities protest against photographers selling their photos taken by them in public places?
They are right to be afraid though. What's really happening here most probably is Anthorpic buys rights to collect user trajectory data. In order to replace Blender users later.
I'm an artist turned CTO. My perspective is really simple - theft is theft. You (not you specifically per se) can sugar coat it however you like, but copying open source codebases/work is different from stealing proprietary/licensed work without permission. It would have been ok if stealing/sharing copyrighted work was heavily normalized, but no, a lot of people have gone to prison for simply pirating DVDs and CDs and now you're telling me it's somehow ok if a corporation does it?
How come? We give IP law / copyright legitimacy but it’s not clear to me the more I think about it. If you draw something you def own the physical drawing but owning the idea of the drawing during your lifetime feels strange to me. It’s also a very recent invention and humans created art before and will create after.
I agree that copyright is foundationally wrong, but the way out has to be through a culture shift of people putting their work in Public Domain.
It's not up to a private company to decide everyone else's work is public commons.
The issue is not stealing the idea itself. The issue is stealing the work in its entirety - as is - with all its flaws and character intact. That's what makes art unique, right?
I would think the same goes for codebases too. On a personal note, I wrote a CMS in Elixir from scratch way before even AI was a thing. It uses a lot of proprietary flows to make it scale, helping it serve millions of requests efficiently. I certainly did not give OpenAI nor Microsoft permission to steal my code. And yet they did.
Is that not theft of my Intellectual Property?
> It would have been ok if stealing/sharing copyrighted work was heavily normalized, but no, a lot of people have gone to prison for simply pirating DVDs and CDs and now you're telling me it's somehow ok if a corporation does it?
There is no such thing as "stealing" copyrighted work. Either you have unauthorized access and/or distribution, or you don't.
Unauthorized access to copyrighted work is perfectly legal in a big chunk of the world, including western Europe. Read up on the french tradition of copyright law, particularly the provisions for personal use.
This brings us to how "people have gone to prison for simply pirating DVDs and CDs". The bulk of the cases were focused on mass commercial distribution of verbatim copies of third-party content. I'm talking about DVD-burning factories.
> Maybe true in places with different cultural values like China or India.
No, this is a core trait of the whole concept of copyright.
Copyright is a legal tool to allow authors to claim the exclusive right to monetize their work. But from it's inception this same legal tool is designed to ensure the public has the right to access said copyrighted works without authorization, including but not limited to the right to the unauthorized access for personal use and how public domain is extended to all works.
This notion originates from France's copyright law, from which all copyright laws in the world directly or indirectly comes from. We are talking about centuries of legal history.
I was alluding to the lack of Software Patent and Copyright enforcement in some jurisdictions, and hoping people would connect the issue of isomorphic plagiarism on their own.
We are in the age of "Napster" for nonsense, and "free" stuff other people made is certainly a crowd-pleaser. =3
For example, you could least feel that the world is large enough to have people with other needs, drives and ownership levels of their work.
You could also consider that this is not an even trade; artists had all their works ingested and didn’t get a commensurate stake in openAI.
You can consider that you had a choice to share when you contributed to open source. Then imagine how a counter culture artist, who despises corporate culture, must feel to have their work consumed by another rapacious tech entity.
Or you can be the filmmaker whose clients are now showing up with entire ad clips, and then decide they would rather not spend the money on CGI to complete the video - essentially demolishing work overnight.
This isn’t to say that there are not artists who are excited by this, or artist who are happy to have their art ingested. Just that the way you phrased your question evoked this answer.
This is cool. I envy you for being able to work on projects like this.
There's a spectrum of intellectual ability, and I tend to find myself interested in things far lower on the scale - insects, worms, amoebas, etc. I have a strong interest in GOFAI - pathfinding, goal-oriented action planning, expert systems, etc, and have played a lot over the past decade or two with implementing these things in roguelikes - simple 2D-ish world, sensory stimuli, etc.
So the recent stories about teaching a wad of human neurons to play _DOOM_ and this specific model are pretty interesting to me, even if, again, it's a few orders of magnitude in complexity higher than my focal point.
Are you aware of any similar work that's going on at lower levels with simulations like this? Did TRIBE v1 follow from simpler models or was it "greenfield", so to speak?
(Apologies... I figure I could Google my questions but sometimes I learn more from an HN comment than I would in hours of trying to parse a graph of scientific papers and news articles.)
Thanks for the kind words. I helped on the brain rendering side of things but I’m not an expert in the field he he. You seem to be way more knowledgeable than me. Do you have any of your work out there? I would love to check it out.
I don't know anything about anything TBH. I'm just an interested dude. My day job is just working with microservices and stuff, nothing related to AI or ALife.
I've started making some other sketches like https://bitterbridge.github.io/p5js-sketches/monsters/ to set up this kind of roguelike idea for demoing some more of these things, like Goal-Oriented Action Planning, but I haven't made much progress yet.
I also have this Lisp rules engine VM I created over the winter break, https://github.com/ndouglas/longtable/ , which might become the core of a more complex reasoning system. IDK though.
Sales are artificial boosts yes. The difference is in the connotation. A sale is given for something that people generally would buy anyway, but now more people will. An artificial boost is given to stuff nobody wants, but at a lower price can be convinced to buy.
Or in other words, sales raise $high_number to $higher_number while artificial boosts raise $essentially_zero to $acceptable_number.
the claim is that it moved sales forward in time, but it'll have a corresponding dip in sales later, whereas a good sales campaign increases total volume (virtually no dip, brings in new customers, etc)
look around your house and see how much shit you got that you really want(ed). great salesman (and elon is the best in the history of the civilization) will sell you shit you never thought you wanted :)
The motivation to buy something is always because you want it. That a product doesn’t meet your needs or expectations later is a different story. What’s your evidence to claim that people spending 60k in a cybertruck don’t want it? What’s your evidence to make a similar claim or the opposite for any other purchase? Without evidence it feels you are making baseless claims about peoples motivations.
Is it still your claim that people spending 60k on Cybertruck don’t want it? How do you know? Given the lack evidence feels like motivated thinking. You don’t like Elon and can’t accept that tons of people actually like him and his products.
I think you might be slightly misinformed on how many 10,000+ dollar purchases the average person makes in their lifetime to make sweeping statements of that nature. Advertizing sales on medical procedures or daycare could have the opposite effect I would imagine
Look up what their production targets were and compare that to their sales. A small temporary demand surge isn't going to be enough to chew through their current inventory, let alone keep the production lines busy.
It definitely feels less fun. Harder to get attribution, build a reputation, a community… Common driving forces for people to contribute to open source.
AI mediation between end dev and open source definitely reduces the incentives for maintainers that look to build community, visibility, reputation, collaborate with others… I also love AI so not sure what the solution could be.
It’s a point cloud where each point is a semitransparent blob that can have a view dependent color: color changes depending on direction you look at them. Allowing to capture reflections, iridescence…
You generate the point clouds from multiple images of a scene or an object and some machine learning magic
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