alt Hacker NewsI 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?
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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?
Yes?
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.
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.