The reason we can't have a discussion is because you think you're justified in sh*tting on others since you believe your view to be more ethical and then put anyone who has a different opinion in the same boat as pedophiles.

I'm sure you will get far with advocating for your point by doing that.


You could literally have said the same thing about the internet before Web 2.0 and increased regulation... But yet here you are Mr. High Horse... In the same pit of depravity as the rest of us evil folk deserving to burn in the cauldron of Satan.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I don't believe I did equate you with pedophilia, but the fact remains that everyone who uses this stuff chooses to overlook the proven objective fact that all currently available models operate on the inclusion of tens of thousands of child porn images in their datasets. This isn't up for debate. It simply is.

The same applies to the issue of copyright infringement. You can take the position that artists are "paintpigs" and "drawcels" and "#creativityprivileged", or that copyright itself is fascistic (which unbelievably, many do...), but the fact that all of this data was purposely scraped without consent or compensation is simply irrefutable.

Could I better insulate myself from a host of ethical concerns by opting out of engaging with the internet altogether? Most probably I could, but that is a very tall order in today's world and not really feasible for most people (myself included). Regardless, there is a pretty wide chasm between going online and using text to image AI generators simply because you can.

Sorry you feel shit on, but that's on you. These aren't difficult moral questions to answer, in my humble opinion.

Locked

One love

Thanks for the link. We can see from the figures that a picture is in fact worth (an absolute minimum of) about six thousand words!



PS - Please remember that Bill is specifically exempted from the attitude rules because reasons. If anything, he's mellowed over the years so consider yourselves lucky

I'm not trying to attack anyone specifically or personally. But when I post specific, accurate information about pending court cases, the discovery of CSAM in the datasets, and leaked evidence of an attempt to cover up data theft, and then the best people can offer up in response is "people and machines learn the same", "it's here; just get used to it", "people said the same thing about the camera" and "the problem is people taking sides", I do tend to get testy.

Because there aren't two equally valid points of view here. There is data theft by corporations on a massive global scale, and there's obfuscation and misdirection from those who want continued access.

I don't quite get why this thread was locked, but this would be me unlockin' it.

Because there are no little babies here in need of sheltering and pacification.

In any case, please read the linked article below, which was posted today by Gary Marcus, a noted AI expert/ethicist and Reid Southern, industry artist/scourge of the text to image community. It clearly demonstrates the endemic copyright infringement issues of Midjourney, OpenAI and others - and in the specific case of Midjourney, a purposeful campaign to cover up findings and indemnify the company by changing Terms of Service/shifting liability to subscribers, in real time, as mounting evidence surfaced following the release of its latest version.

It also contains links to a private, leaked text conversation between Midjourney devs and CEO, David Holz, discussing the incorporation of 5,000 new, additional artist names/styles which can be easily accessed by users, as well as discussion of laundering the data to make it untraceable, AND the document itself containing artist names.

I defy anyone to read through all of this in its entirety (complete with output from Chat-GPT that directly plagiarizes entire pages of text from the NY Times) and explain their belief that these models somehow "learn just like humans", or to justify the current business models as ethical, non-infringing, and ultimately in line with the intent of copyright law.

2024 is the year. A bunch of billion dollar companies are going under, and some execs are headed to prison. End users would be well advised to wise up right now, before doing additional irreparable harm to their careers and reputations.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/midjourney-copyright

...and more converging evidence from TomsHardware.com regarding six different generators, also released today:

https://www.tomshardware...t-copyrighted-characters

Real Artists are here to stay.

To be an artist you can learn to evolve and adopt and go with the time.

Maybe A.I. can be a tool for you too Bill

Just hate to see the farmer killing a work-horse because it is doing all the plowing for him.

Learn to live with it and apriciate the time it grants you so you can ponder on making

new art

Thank you to Bill for unlocking the thread again, agreed no babies in need of sheltering or pacification. I wouldn't put much hope in these kinds of lawsuits tbh it looks kind of shady and a lot of the lawyers are probably just in it for the money etc etc. Also there is so many open source models already its going to be extremely hard to shut it all down to the point you might be imagining. You might be right that they could get some money out of midjourney, but would they want to kill it? How would it pay it's legal fees then? It needs to keep operating. OPENAI/DALLE3 is fighting its own lawsuits but its trained on an entirely different dataset.

Also, I'm sure Bill would probably be able to apply all the skills he's gained through his own artist's journey to the AI as well and create some pretty good stuff. If you use the AI just to reproduce stolen stuff you still won't really improve/progress that much as an artist, you still need to try to do something unique/novel/tell a story, and use your own life experiences to make something really powerful. The AI is just kind of bumper guard rails if you don't have a huge amount of focused raw talent but used correctly it can benefit whomever decides to interact with it.