BUT IS IT ART?

[sunland]

New Data Poisoning Tool Lets Artists Fight Back Against Generative ai

Article on Slashdot that was very interesting. Thought it might fit in with this conversation.

https://slashdot.org/story/23/10/24/...-generative-ai

sunland

[gwpriester]

Love it. Thanks for posting from your fellow Nuevo Mexicano, Bookmarked. — Gary

[Egg Bramhill]

That's refreshing news Sunland.

[gwpriester]

I wonder how soon this will be available. It sounds great though of course there has been so much material scraped already.

[gwpriester]

Glaze, developed by the same team that is working on Nightshade have a product called Glaze, in beta that does much the same thing. 500MB file size. https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/what-is-glaze.html

[Acorn]

I wonder how soon this will be available. It sounds great though of course there has been so much material scraped already.

If you read the article and the considered Comments then I wouldn't hold your breath. The processes have not yet been peer reviewed; others have already worked out counter strategies; the billions of images so far scraped will not be affected; you may just be adding noise to your image; lawyers have already argued there is no copyright infringement, citing fair use.

If you were to go down this rabbit hole and present using a Xara product, you would have to check every image section is covered by it or has a watermark. Quite difficult, especially if using HighSlide.js.

Acorn

[gwpriester]

Is it fair use to scrape every one of Stephen King's novels? Or everyone of Margarete Atwood's novels?

Fair Use is a very weak argument and generally refers to non-commercial use. I see an image of yours on the web, I download it for a class project. But if I download that image of yours and repackage it as my image — even with a few modifications (this happens all the time with our images being offered as NFTs) then that is a copyright violation.

But yes, these apps amount to locking the barn door after the horses have been stolen. It would have to be going forward. If there is any going forward at this point.

[Chris M]

Is it fair use to scrape every one of Stephen King's novels? Or everyone of Margarete Atwood's novels?

Fair Use is a very weak argument and generally refers to non-commercial use. I see an image of yours on the web, I download it for a class project. But if I download that image of yours and repackage it as my image — even with a few modifications (this happens all the time with our images being offered as NFTs) then that is a copyright violation.

But yes, these apps amount to locking the barn door after the horses have been stolen. It would have to be going forward. If there is any going forward at this point.

I'm not taking sides here, just adding food for thought.

The scraping of existing work, be it art, science, coding or literature, isn't the hill to make your stand on. Stephen King learnt to read and write by (essentially) scraping knowledge from people before him. I don't know in Mr King's case, but a lot of creators will say they were influenced by other people. The problem that will need addressing in the near future is precisely replicating existing works.

Two real world examples.
There are AI voice changers using famous singers. My son sent me a track he was working on, saying that Taylor Swift had emailed him begging to do the vocals. He even sent a sample. It was, indeed, Taylor Swift...AI Taylor Swift.
Mr Trump has been popping up all over social media in all sorts of places, poses and scenarios that the real Mr Trump would not be seen in.

Both of those examples are here, today. Both will fool the vast majority of people. How long will it be before lobbyists, lawyers, politicians, corporate HR etc. are caught proving that Mr Trump actually was drunk as a skunk on the number 77 bus singing like Taylor Swift. We have video proof. Here's a picture. We have audio.

Anyone can look at a painting and emulate the style, adding their own 'flair'. Anyone can read Mr King's novels and write about a possessed car. As long as they don't claim to be that actual someone, then that's acceptable. Why is AI any different?

I genuinely think that vandalising an LLM is rather petty and completely pointless. Anyone remember dual cassettes, VCRs, DRM, DVD burners, 3D printers. All of them were going to be the ruin of something.