I’m pretty sure that that’s what lawmaking is all about. The moral codes of the politicians who best appealed to the moral codes of voters, deciding what should or shouldn’t be banned.
2 Likes
Just to put a final nail in the coffin on the statistics front with this: this paper is outdated and is from 2013
It’s perfectly acceptable to get morals from any religion you may practice, and you absolutely have the right to do that.
But this statement is, once again, not true. Morals are one of the most important driving factors in creating and passing laws. Ideations such as consent, democracy, and free will are centered around morals. We have laws against things that infringe upon those concepts because it’s morally and ethically wrong to do so against another human being. Without morals, you cannot have a working justice system. Obviously it shouldn’t be by my moral code though, just as it shouldn’t be dictated by the moral code of your or anybody else’s religion, you’re right. It should be based on bipartisan and accurate evidence, research, and statistics that show the beneficial and detrimental effects of something.
Agree to disagree on this one.
That’s the thing. “To some people” isn’t good enough when we’re talking about adding to the risks of putting the planet we live on in more danger than it was before. The line for doing that should be “inarguably beneficial to the majority of the planet, and here’s the evidence to prove it”.
I never said that was just for the U.S. I said produced by agriculture in a year. 355 million tons is produced per year worldwide. It’s feeding the world. At least, it should be. But that’s a different conversation that would veer too far off course.
I cannot stress how confused I am that you came to this conclusion when the majority of my last 2-3 posts have been about the CO2 emission and carbon footprint that data centers make compared to the agriculture industry. In fact, I’m the one who brought this topic up in the first place solely because I was getting tired of the same old back and forth about whether it was stealing in the eyes of the law or not.
I wanted to bring another viewpoint to the conversation, and I did. Just because it’s not as big of a carbon footprint as other things doesn’t mean the rise of it’s prominence in that specific statistic isn’t worrying. In fact, the agriculture industry is a perfect example of that, as you helped point out. Ten years ago, according to what you were saying is stated in that paper, ghg emissions from agriculture were up to 14%. Now they’re down to 10.6%. That’s a significant drop in the last decade, and if we can continue to prioritize that, we can help it drop even further.
We need to look at data centers the same way, which means we need to look at the biggest contributing factors to the rise in carbon emissions from them, which is AI. There’s no getting around that. If we simply ignore that problem, it will have a seriously negative impact on the world as a whole.
And that’s not my moral opinion, that’s fact. Bigger carbon footprint = worse planet.
7 Likes
The latter statement is a manifestation of your moral code.
2 Likes
The Supreme Court of the United States is supposed to be based on those foundational pillars. State law varies, sure. Whether or not I agree with that is irrelevant. But the highest laws of the land are built on the foundation of bipartisan decisions of what is best for the people based on the evidence provided.
Saying more than that I fear would be better saved for the politics thread which I never go near
1 Like
I’m sure streaming services and crypto mining do their fair share too.
4 Likes
The energy consumption is almost negligible compared to the water consumption required to keep the data centres cool in some countries, particularly those that derive their energy from water. And what of those countries where water is at a premium already, and a minimal amount found on the surface so the data centres are allowed to drill down into aquifers to keep them running? You cannot eat or drink data from a data centre, even if building them creates jobs.
More frightening is the amount of skilled uni-trained specialist staff being laid off by businesses who think AI is like an extra Christmas present, particularly in those businesses that specialise in providing important factual information like law firms and accountants.
No matter which way you look at it, AI, and all its side effects, may not be the gift that keeps on giving for any length of time given the problems its going to create, whether it can predict them or not.
2 Likes
“Not yet.” /s
(but a little more seriously, putting AI in charge of automated farming, to increase efficiency of said slaughter and to reduce the costs, is a foreseeable application.)
1 Like
That’s the thing about morality, It’s all about perspective no? Besides I’m hardly the only stubborn one on here, so I think it’s somewhat fair to overstay my welcome
Got some good news for you
For the peeps that I know don’t like clicking on shit
“ U.S. District Judge William Orrick on Monday advanced all copyright infringement and trademark claims in a pivotal win for artists. He found that Stable Diffusion, Stability’s AI tool that can create hyperrealistic images in response to a prompt of just a few words, may have been “built to a significant extent on copyrighted works” and created with the intent to “facilitate” infringement. The order could entangle in the litigation any AI company that incorporated the model into its products.”
What does this mean? It means places like DeviantArt and Midjourney are about a get fucked in litigations.
Fun gem found within lol:
“In a thread on Discord, the platform where Midjourney operates, chief executive David Holz posted the names of roughly 4,700 artists he said that its AI tool can replicate. This followed Stability chief executive Prem Akkaraju saying that the company downloaded from the internet troves of images and compressed them in a way that can “re-create” any of those images.”
15 Likes
I have to admit I haven’t been keeping up, so I have to ask: what has DeviantArt to do with it? Are they providing AI image generation nowadays?
1 Like
Correcto, they turned their backs on their artists who’ve kept them alive since 2000, used their shit, and created a generation tool named Dreamup
Okay, that’s… messed up. Glad I’ve practically left.
2 Likes
Artstation was always superior anyway.
Not for setting up a community for 14-15-year old hobbyists with questionable skill.
5 Likes
This is why we should still use pen and paper.Once in a while, not to avoice this site and these apps ofcourse. lol
I mean, I agree that we whould use pen and paper every once in a while because pens are awesome and it just has this specific feel, but it’s not like that’s incompatible with having an online gallery. Most of my old art definitely was made on actual, physical paper, even if I colored some of them digitally.
5 Likes
Maybe. But I do think it’s more complicated than that.
I do think these artists have an uphill battle in front of them.
A Washington Post article about this case does make a good point that “…it’s not always clear exactly what data was used to train a given AI model. Second, the responses an AI tool generates for a user often are not identical to the works it was trained on, though there can be a strong resemblance.”
Also, artists cannot copyright a style. The article further goes on to quote a law professor that “It won’t be enough for them to say the AI was trained on their works; they’ll probably need to show that the AI is actually imitating their specific works.”
There needs to be context on what David Holz was saying. Holz was talking about how Midjourney could replicate the style of 4700 artists and another 1000 art styles in general, which he said they got from Wikipedia and other places.
Here is the article in question: AI image generation company has list of artists it deliberately copied
This article also has images of that Discord conversation
Clearly David Holz was referring to re-creating the styles of these artists.
I think reasonable minds can disagree on whether an AI company should allow users to input the names of a living artist in their prompt. Personally, I think it’s best to allow users to only input the names of long dead artists. But again, artists can’t copyright an art style, only the artwork they produce.
While I do think the case not being dismissed is a victory for the artists, it’s not a major one. Companies like Midjourney could adapt by preventing users from inputting artist names directly, instead encouraging them to describe the desired art style. It likely won’t hurt their business.
And I’m sure these AI companies have plenty of Computer Scientists and Researchers that they can bring before the judge who can clarify how these models function in reality. Based on my understanding, I don’t think they’ll assert these models copy-paste images together like some kind of Frankenstein image monster. I’m sure they’ll emphasize how these models create new content (like an image of a cat in space drinking milk) from learned patterns they got from their database.
And the use of copy-righted images, Midjourney is certainly going to argue that using these images falls squarely into fair use.
Pivoting to the AI industry as a whole, I found this Politico article interesting.The lobbying efforts of AI tech companies in Washington is seemingly paying off.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/12/ai-lobbyists-gain-upper-hand-washington-00157437
Here is a quote that I find quite telling:
“What we don’t want to have happen is have [advanced AI] development occur outside of the United States,” Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), one of four lawmakers in Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s AI working group, told POLITICO. “So we’re not going to try to restrict development here.”
AI tech companies are going to drive the fear of God into lawmakers. Well, maybe the fear of China surpassing them in AI is likely to get lawmakers to back off and let the industry grow… for national security 
These companies are going to be fine, lawsuits and all. The key question is how to make these models profitable. Investors have at times shown great patience with certain companies being in the red for a long time like Amazon. So long growth is strong of course.
AI promises to be useful not only in image generation but also in video, military, medicine, businesses like call centers and others.
I don’t have a crystal ball. The AI hype train could collapse or achieve all of its goals. But I think what is likely is something in between. The dotcom bubble bursting killed many internet companies but it didn’t kill the internet. And some companies, like Amazon, survived and grew to be quite big.
So it’s reasonable that some of these AI tech companies will collapse. But I doubt all of them will die. And I do think the industry as a whole shows great promise in many fields.
7 Likes
how the hell did you arrive at this conclusion when all this says is that the claim is not getting dismissed outright? just because it’s getting to court doesn’t mean you’ll win.
“In another loss for the AI companies, the court rebuffed arguments that the lawsuit must identify specific, individual works that each of the artists who filed the complaint alleges were used for training. “Given the unique facts of this case — including the size of the LAION datasets and the nature of defendants’ products, including the added allegations disputing the transparency of the ‘open source’ software at the heart of Stable Diffusion — that level of detail is not required for plaintiffs to state their claims,” the order stated.“
Court said that level of detail is not required for plaintiffs, so the law professor was wrong, woohoo!
Also, in regards to the rest of your response, well said! I’d like to state my position though.
My greatest problem with AI at present isn’t resource use, or the fact that it IS AI, my issue is AI being used for something as non-important (in the context of national military, science, research, and medicine) as fucking art. All that resource drain just so people can produce shitty art and stories.
Especially when they can pick up writing or art in their own time without needing a machine to do it for them.
“But we don’t have the time to do that!” I can hear the imaginary person exclaim.
Yeah? Well fuck you imaginary person, neither do any of the authors or artists on this forum and elsewhere.
Biggest hope is that AI will pivot away from art and writing due to copyright litigation and instead focus on more important things like the betterment of mankind.
Robots are supposed to take away hard labor, not our creative pursuits.
…litigation is “ the act, process, or practice of settling a dispute in a court of law”. I arrived at the conclusion because the court literally opened the floodgates to bring grievances against these companies. Couldn’t ChatGPT have told you this? Hold up, i gotchu
8 Likes
Glad it’s cleared up that AI is free to take work from others that you perceive as meaningless and hard work, I’m sure they have the same opinion if we ask them in this area. And for those that want to use these tools for the intended purpose, their opinion doesn’t really matter because “fuck them”, whatever that means.
All I have to say in response to that is I’m extremely glad that I live in a capitalistic society in this case, where research is supported by its utility by people who want them.
Also why are you quoting the definition of litigation to me? how does this case not being dismissed open the floodgates? I mean I guess we’ll see what happens but these two facts don’t relate to each other.