this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
280 points (83.2% liked)
Technology
58507 readers
5433 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
There is so much wrong with just the title of this article:
Get the fuck outta here! This two bit blog want to call itself "a 404 Media investigation"? Maybe don't tackle subjects you have no knowledge or expertise in.
Repeat: FOR FREE! No product!
Have you seen Danbooru? Or F95 Zone? This shit is out there, everywhere. Rule 34 has existed for decades. So has the literal site called "Rule 34". You remember that whole Tifa porn video that showed up in an Italian court room? Somebody had to animate that. 3D porn artists takes its donations from Patreon. Are you going to go after Patreon, too?
These dumbasses are describing things like they've been living in a rock for the past 25 years, watching cable TV with no Internet access, just NOW discovered AI porn as their first vice, and decided to write an article about it to get rid of the undeserved guilt of what they found.
What a shitty, pathetic attempt at creating some sort of moral panic.
The danbooru aspect of the "AI" moral panic is what annoys me.
So many of my friends - many of whom are amateur artists - hate computer generated images because the copyright of the artists were violated, and they weren't even asked. And I agree that does kinda suck - but - how did that happen?
Danbooru.
The art had already been "stolen" and was available online for free. Where was their morality then? For the last decade or whatever that danbooru has been up? Danbooru is who violated the copyright, not stable diffusion or whatever.
At least computer generated imagery is different, like, the stuff it was trained on was exactly their art, while this stuff, while might look like theirs, is unique. (And often with a unique number of fingers.)
And, if "copyright" is their real concern, them surely they understand that copyright only protects against someone making a profit of their work, right? Surely they'll have looked into it and they already know that "art" made by models that used copyrighted content for training are provided from being copyrighted themselves, right? And that you can only buy/sell content made from models that are in the copyright clear, surely they know all this?
No, of course not. They don't give a shit about copyright, they just got the ickies from new tech.
no one is moral panicking over ai. people just want control over their creation, whether it's profit sharing or not being used to train models.
you really can't see how an imageboard has completely different considerations over image generating models?
or that people are going after ai because there is only like a couple of models that everyone uses vs uncountable image hosts?
both danbooru and stable diffusion could violate copyright, not one or the other.
why would someone want training models to ingest their creation just to spit out free forgeries that they cannot claim the copyright to?
This is one of the most inaccurate statements I've seen in 2023.
Everybody is morally panicking over AI.
Or they don't, because Stable Diffusion is a 4GB file of weights and numbers that have little to do with the content it was trained on. And, you can't copyright a style.
Of course I see the difference - direct, outright theft and direct profiting from the theft is much worse then using content that's been stolen to train computer image generation software.
If your complaint is about the copyright infringement, then danbooru should be the target of your complaint - but no one seems to care about that. Why don't people care about that?
If the concern is that this software makes it easier to commit crimes, sure, I guess? But, again, danbooru. And like every other site on the internet.
The concern, it seems to me, is with person A being an artist, person B makes art and tries to pass it off as an original work by person A. And that's valid - but I still don't feel like it's worse than actually just taking the artwork and calling it "content" and using it to generate as revenue.
The main problem i have with this criticism is that (imo) there are much more important issues at stake with midjourney or whatever - and this (alleged) concern (alleged because it only seems to go skin-deep) prevents people from caring about the real issues.
Many many many jobs now, when a person leaves, they're replaced with 2 part time people. This benefits profits and hurts everyone else.
The issue with computer generated images is that, when a movie studio needs a sci fi background, it used to require an artist; now, it just requires midjourney - and you can hire the artist for 4 hours (instead of 4 days) to touch it up, fix the fingers, etc - which not only takes less time, but also less talent, which increases the labor supply, which pushes wages down.
This technology has the potential to take the career of being an artist and turns out into a low-wage, part time thing that you can't live off of. This has happened in so many parts of our economy and it's really bad, and we need to protect artists from that fate.
So no, I really can't muster up giving a shit about whether someone on pixiv copies your art and makes 3$ a month from a patreon. The entire field of visual arts is under threat of complete annihilation from greedy capitalists. They're the villains here, not some neckbeard's patreon.
I'm guessing that the "marketplace" and "sale" refers to sites like "Mage Space" which charge money per image generated or offer subscriptions. The article mentions that the model trainers also received a percentage of earnings off of the paid renderings using their models.
Obviously you could run these models on your own, but my guess is that the crux of the article is about monetizing the work, rather than just training your own models and sharing the checkpoints.
The article is somewhat interesting as it covers the topic from an outsider's perspective more geared towards how monetization infests open sharing, but yeah the headline is kinda clickbait.
Well, instead of bitching about the AI porn aspect, perhaps they should spend more time talking about how much of a scam it is to charge for AI-generated images.
Compute costs money, it’s more ethical to charge your users than it is to throw shady ads at them which link to malware.
Also buying and eventually replacing expensive hardware. Running AI at scale requires hundreds of thousands of dollars of GPUs.
I took their comment to mean running the generation locally is almost free.
Sure, if you have hardware and/or time to generate it client side. I’m just saying that if you run a web service and decide to charge for it, that’s better than most of the alternative monetization strategies.
I get no malware or shady ads when I generate AI images with Stable Diffusion. I don't know what kind of sites or tools you're using where you're getting shady ads, but you're getting ripped off.
Just because something is free it does not mean that there is no marketplace or product. Sozial Media is generally free, but I would still call Facebook, Tiktok or Instagram a product.
Nowadays a lot of industries start out completely free, but move into paid subscription models later.
Okay. There is still no product involved with AI porn.
People buy and sell paintings despite the fact that you could also make paintings pretty easily. You're paying for the time they spent creating it and the expertise it required. Just because some people scan and upload their paintings for free, doesn't mean that all paintings are not products. I don't see why the same couldn't be true for AI porn.
You pay in giving up your free time which they sell. Technically we're just working for free and the product is our attention
Well, fuck, I better log off of Lemmy because it costs me too much damn money.
I just wanted to say I love your comment. Your totally correct and I enjoyed the passion in your words. That's how we got to deal with shit article more often. Thx
If it's free, chances are you're the product. I assume that there is a market for user-generated "prompts" somewhere.
No, that's not how open-source or open-source philosophies work. They share their work because they were able to download other people's work, and sometimes people improve upon their own work.
These aren't corporations. You don't need to immediately jump to capitalistic conclusions. Just jump on Unstable Diffusion Discord or CivitAI yourself. It's all free.
Maybe there's commissions for specific people/poses, cause I certainly couldn't keep a hard on long enough to generate a spakin worth image
I know, I know: "but the website is free" (for now). However, Civit AI, Inc. is not a loose community. There must be something that pays their bills. I wonder what it is.
Yeah, I wonder what that is.
I feel like you're implying people should look into things before making accusations. Like, find out if what they're saying is true before they say it. And that's why no one asked you to the prom.
They’re probably losing money now and just trying to build a user base as a first-mover. They accept donations and subscriptions with fairly minor benefits, but I imagine hosting and serving sizable AI models is not cheap.
They’ll probably have to transition to paid access at some point, but I don’t see it as particularly unethical as they have bills to pay and do attempt to moderate content on the site.
I tend to agree generating adult content of real people is unethical, but probably less so than how a lot of real porn is made. I don’t think there should be open avenues for sharing that kind of stuff online, and their rules should be better enforced.
Well, even if that were the case, the "real porn" is still required to train the model in the first place.
So, it's unethical shit on top of what you think was even more unethical.
Sure, and “impossible” meat wouldn’t have existed if people weren’t already eating actual meat. But it’s a better alternative. Porn is not going anywhere. If generative AI means less real people get exploited that’s a win in my book.
There's a market for commission artists doing this for money since the dawn of art