AI's aren't sentient. They can't "steal."
Programmers and institutions select the data with which to train the model. They take art and writing from artists and authors without credit or payment. The software then remixes and mimics what it is given.
Displacing agency by attributing intent to the AI is exactly how people and institutions erase human action in the creation of technology. It also leads to further perceptions of technology as acultural, unbiased, and, in essence, magical.
@Manigarm All this controversy has had me wonder: why not train the AIs with only art in the public domain? That, at least, would be less problematic, wouldn't it?
Also, they should be made to list and credit their sources, regardless.
@GraysonBell @yacc143 @Manigarm
You answered your own question - it would be more work. It would also have a smaller sample size, so AI art would not be as variable.
I did some digging, and the Smithsonian released 2.8 million pieces of art to the public domain in a database anyone can access.
The existence of such databases makes it much less work.
@sinboy @GraysonBell @Manigarm Dramatically more work for a much more limited, one sided training data.
Plus conceding the precedent without even losing in court.
Honestly, because the approach wouldn't solve the underlying issue. With machine learning algorithms data science can train
and then actually develop "original works of art" using the same style/flavor/voice of the original.
Essentially, we can teach a robot to think/do the same things we believe Grayson Bell would think/do in the same scenario.
Unlike humans, computers can't make leaps of intuition. So you can know that fire is hot even though you've never touched it. AI/ML can't do that - it pretends by sheer brute force simulation. The computer asks itself twenty million times how something could be and records what answers it came up with and then references that sheet whenever you ask it a question.
The sheer amount of effort from humans to even train the smallest decisions is substantial. Entire companies
exist to just make the concept of "I asked an AI to read all of XYZ" possible within a 'reasonable' timeframe.
Ethics always fall behind the technology curve. Business doesn't want to invest in morals - they want to invest in profits. Morals and ethic business practices are what happens AFTER someone gets the first.
and my default reading is Al, as in "you can call me Al"
@Manigarm I find it hard to really see how AI software should credit the original artist.
As long as
1) They software company don't try to capitalize of those names, like "in the style of X".
Or
2) Actually re-create existing work.
If the AI creates truly new and unique work, how is that any different than us humans getting inspired by existing art.
I don't have to credit Hirst no matter how much I try to copy him.
It might not be considered art, but I'm perfectly free to do that.
@floede @Manigarm You can, right this minute, ask an AI for art "in the style of X," and it will produce exactly that.
The extent to which they re-create X's existing work depends on (1) exactly what mathematical manipulation the algorithm does, and (2) how large the X corpus in the training dataset is.
@Manigarm don't artists steal from artists? Don't artists steal daily stuff or situations and call it art?
Copy from one resource and it will be called plagiarism, copy from many and it will be called a research.
According to that, AI is doing its research and with pretty good results.
I keep thinking of Sturgeon's law:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_Law
Which means we are producing automated BS artists. While it is true that this demonstrates human level intelligence, neither do I think that is worth any effort.
Unless you want to spend eternity reading Finnegan's Wake over and over agian.
My dog ate my essay but an AI managed to borrow one from the internet for me. I plan to return it after itās marked.
@Manigarm This is an interesting point, and certainly correct.
It's also exactly how humans learn to become artists and writers - by studying, mimicking, and eventually adding to the existing body of work. We don't generally consider that theft, unless the copying is exact or deceptive.
Yet AI feels somehow different, much more like plagiarism. Perhaps it's that the ONLY input an ML system has is others' art, with no real-world human experience of its own to contribute.
In my high school arts classes, when we did reproductions of renowned art, it was known as a "Master's study" to attempt to learn, first hand, how the original creator may have gotten to an end product by attempting to mimic their output as precisely as possible.
I do not know if that nomenclature is widespread?
Steve Jobs uttering "good artist copy, great artists steal" can be attributed at least as far back as Picasso. Others cite T.S. Eliot: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/03/06/artists-steal/
@Manigarm It seems relevant that similar discussions seem to have occurred throughout history every time a new artistic medium is introduced, especially those involving some kind of automation.
Is photography art? What about music played on synthesizers? Acrylic paints? And so on. Much impassioned hand-wringing about the "end of art" with all of these, all of it seeming very silly in retrospect.
I'm only mostly comfortable saying that someone who writes his name on a urinal is not thereby making art.
I'm ENTIRELY comfortable saying that someone who commissions an artist to make a bunch of pictures is not the one making art, and that this doesn't change if you replace the (actual) artist with a machine.
@byterhymer Didn't the Steve Jobs version of that aphorism famously end, at least by implication, with "but not from me"?
I also think the comparison to training an AI and human learning, while somewhat clever, ultimately misses the mark. A human studying the old masters (or any other source of inspiration) is making conscious decisions about what to emulate.
They're not making a spreadsheet of every element of every artwork they've ever seen and picking out the elements with the strongest statistical correlation with keywords they were given.
@mattblaze @Manigarm I think photography is another useful reference--the photographer doesn't create the imagery they capture from nothing, but they choose what to photograph, tuning parameters of the camera (which they probably didn't build either), making tweaks to an image after the fact, etc.
We don't have as much trouble assigning a creator in those instances--are the AI designers like the camera makers? are the images input into the model like the made objects that appear in a photo?
@zalcarik @Manigarm Yes, I think photography is a good example. When I make a photograph (and I use the word "make" quite deliberately instead of "take"), I'm trying to produce art. We can argue about whether it's good art or bad, but there's no longer any serious question, here in the 21st century, done with intention, that photographs can be art.
Why is selecting the input and curating the output of an AI system any different?
@ShadSterling I think that's a common misconception, these AI models almost never work in a way analogous to that. To carry on the analogy about finding a photo spot (where "I" am acting like the AI now), it would be if I looked at the google image results to learn what the place looked like, then stepped over to a canvas and painted a picture of what I remembered.
A novel work is being created, but yes also one that is intrinsically derivative of the work of others.
@ShadSterling But that's pretty on par with what human artists need to do. Consider not the scenic photo spot, but instead something like a dragon--there's no real-world example an AI or human could draw from, they need to make reference to existing art.
I think that's all still mostly tangential to the issue of authorship and creative/artistic input. The AI/camera are backboxes, that take inputs and allow for creative input in turning those inputs to outputs.
Freddy's Daycare on Elm St.
Dr. Holly Walters
Grayson Bell š³ļøāš š³ļøāā§ļø
Andreas K
Josh (he/his)
Alex
gzuckier
lochlomondwhiskey
AnthonyUplandpoetWatkins
Deborah Robinson
Heather
JDWr1ghtBra1n
Matt
Christopher Walker
Scott D. Strader š
Paul HĆ©bert
Aslan French
Janus Hasseriis
chaelyc
Katherine Derbyshire
Yo Mismo 
Aral Balkan
Meow.tar.gz 
SethPFR
RRB
Allan Chow
Mark McGuire
Matt Blaze
ć°ć¬ć§ćgreyć
Steve Bellovin
Linebylineāmastoart.social
std::polar
zalcarik
ShadSterling