DeviantArt upsets artists with its new AI art generator, DreamUp

These systems aggregate and interpolate human work. Interpolation: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpolation

It's like a very complicated form of linear interpolation:

  a*x + (1-a)*y

These systems do not "think". Today I spent all day mulling an idea, experimenting with variations, feeling frustrated or excited, imagining it, simulating it, making mistakes, following paths of reasoning, deducing facts, revisiting dead-ends with new insight, daydreaming, talking to my wife about it, etc. That's human thought.

These models do not "think" like a human, they do not dream or imagine or feel. They run a feed-forward system of linear equations (matrix multiplications).

They INTERPOLATE HUMAN WORK.

They don't exist without training data (huge amounts of intellectual property) aggregated and interpolated in a monstrous perversion of "fair use":

https://bugfix-66.com/7a82559a13b39c7fa404320c14f47ce0c304fa...

Starve the machine. Without your work, it's got nothing.

> Starve the machine, it doesn't exist without having your work to interpolate.

But again… aren’t people the same way? Noone exists in isolation. The Sir Isaac Newton quote comes to mine:

“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”

Edit: to be clear - these algorithms are specifically non-linear and are a far cry from ‘linear interpolation’. Yes they do involve matrix multiplication that does not make them interpolaters unless you want to water down the meaning of interpolation to be so generic it loses its meaning. Having said all that - the sophistication of the algorithm is beyond the point here as long as what they are generating is substantially transformative (which >99% of the possible outputs are legally speaking).

Are you foolishly suggesting that Sir Isaac Newton was just aggregating and interpolating others' work?

Like a feed-forward chain of matrix multiplications, trained to predict its training data?

No, of course you weren't. That would be FUCKING RIDICULOUS.

Yes… we all do that every day. Humans don’t exist in isolation, we build and learn from other’s accomplishments from the wheel to the printing press to the computer. Modern impressionists don’t owe royalties to Monet but they certainly draw from and learn from his contributions to the art world. Brand new material from art algorithms (frankly regardless of their sophistication) certainly deserve and fall under this same legal treatment.

> You just don't understand the math.

This is not in good faith, please read HN rules.

Rather than attack me (calling me foolish, swearing at me) why don’t you rebut my ideas and have a conversation if you actually have something to contribute.

I’ve read the papers, I’ve worked personally with these systems. I understand them just fine. Notice that I said earlier: “regardless of how simple they are”. I understand you are trying to water them down to be simple interpolation which they definitely are not but even if they were that simple it wouldn’t change the legal calculus here one bit. New art is being generated (far beyond any ‘transformative’ legal test precedent) and any new art that is substantively different from its inputs is legally protectable.

That or they do understand the math and they think what's going on in our own minds may not be that special.

People are the same, yes, but corporations aren’t people.

Certainly, don’t mean to imply they are (legal distinctions aside). A person can create an algorithm (or use an algorithm) and create new things, even works of art.

Ethical meat business (single farm, limited scope) = good, industrial meat grinder (huge factories) = bad.

So is any scaled up process unethical or is there another comparison you are trying to go for here?

Notably in your example both are certainly legal just varied by the level of controversy around them and on that level I would agree. Scaled up processes do tend to attract more controversy.

Humans also interpolate human work. True originality is an illusion and all creative works are based on, inspired by, or contributed to by something else. Are you implying that human thought is required to create human-level art? Because if anything, I think AI-generated art is in the process of disproving this exact hypothesis. It is unnerving to realize that something we felt up til now was fundamentally exclusive to the human experience isn't actually exclusive, but it's becoming more and more apparent.

Humans on the whole aren't capable of hoovering up basically every piece of artist content accessible on the web, storing all of it, and then creating near-faithful reproductions at a moments notice.

It's a problem of scale.

> Because if anything, I think AI-generated art is in the process of disproving this exact hypothesis

But it's not creating anything, it's regurgitating it's training material (through a suitably fine blender) in the way that scores best. These models are nothing without the actual art they've appropriated.

> Humans also interpolate human work.

Humans, artists aren't the machines other human created, they interpret or copy, not interpolate.

> So is any scaled up process unethical

If it abuses someone - yes.