What Was Sora Trained On? Creatives Demand Answers

> Society is built by and for humans.

These machines are also built by and for humans.

> If we want to empower humans over machines, that seems perfectly acceptable.

But that’s not what’s happening here. This is a faction of humans fighting to maintain their power and control over how the rest of humanity is allowed to produce artistic works.

Creatives who fight against generative AI are trying to empower themselves over everyone else. Corporations who develop closed-source AI like OpenAI are also trying to empower themselves over everyone else. The main problem in both cases is the way a select few are trying to amass power for themselves.

Generative AI has fundamentally shifted the scope of what it means to be creative, and prohibiting it from being trained on the collective works of humanity doesn’t empower humans over machines. It empowers some humans at the expense of other humans. Big AI companies acting exploitatively and trying to figure out how to build their own moats so only they are allowed to control the technology does the same thing, so this shouldn’t be allowed to happen either.

This is not the first time, nor is it likely to be the last, that a major disruption happened in creative arts due to technology. The invention of the phonograph decimated live musicians. Hundreds of thousands of jobs in cinemas, radio stations, and restaurants were permanently lost[0], but I don’t think anyone today would argue that we’d be better off if record labels hadn’t been allowed to reproduce the works of other artists.

Instead of retreading the same tired arguments about generative AI itself, let’s instead focus on how to ensure creatives can adapt and not end up homeless and penniless, and on how to ensure a few giant tech companies don’t monopolise an otherwise democratising technology. That, more than anything, will ensure that we are empowering humans over machines.

[0] https://slate.com/transcripts/RS94QUlwS0ZsSnZnakE4UVUzR2loUV...

We don't have to treat them the same, but that's the direction I'm leaning.

As for society, that's another topic. People really aren't all that nice to each other very often.

This will be a major point of contention if machine learning continues to go the way it’s going.

In the future if the Turing test is fully passed I think morality will boil down to preferring humans if and only if it’s a situation of competing scarcities.

In the case of “showing pictures to computer people”, showing pictures to a computer doesn’t prevent you from showing it to a human so this framework imply no moral justification for a human preference.

IP is a fiction we created to encourage artists to create. Arguably it was a trade off where we encourage producers of creative works by giving them a limited monopoly for the benefit of the consumers. IP is a price we paid for the benefit of consumers. It's not an inalienable right.

As for sustainable incomes, I'm sure you heard the arguments about buggy-whip manufacturers going out of business when we got trains and cars. It really wasn't that much of a tragedy in the big picture of things.

I'll simplify this for everyone;

(misquoted you originally, sorry!)

If you take a box and fill it with dog shit. You're more than welcome to chop, blend, dilute, fling or even eat this shit. But in the end, it's still Pepper's Poop.

Sell it like it isn't. Add sprinkles. It's Pepper's Poop.

When Pepper dies. Do you think the model is going to invent Gold all of a sudden?

They're saying that creativity isn't in a vacuum. Both Bach and Shakespeare were both inspired, and drew upon many things in their life. Just like how anyone who makes anything or does anything leans at least a little on past experiences. And I really think that line of arugment is a dead end, and only hurts, or we'd have to round up and arrest every highschooler making shitty anime fan art.

You're reaching pretty far back to find outstanding examples, and I'll agree they are way above average.

However, I'll assume you know that most of Shakespeare's works were based off of earlier works. And I doubt Bach taught himself from scratch either.

Neither Bach nor Shakespeare had copyright over their works, as the very concept of copyright didn't exist until the Statute of Anne in 1710. Germany (really, Saxony, as Germany wasn't even a unified country at the time) was much later.

Shakespeare got paid by people buying tickets to the Globe Theatre, of which he was part owner. Bach got paid by various princes and the church, and was expected to compose new music every week in return for his pay.

Neither argued that they should continue to get paid for the same work for 90 years.

I don't understand what you're saying. Am I the uncaring ignorant one? It seems unlikely that you're really referring to yourself there, and maybe you're using a rhetorical trick to try and skirt HN's policy about being civil to each other.

> because it competes with their work.

it really doesn't

This a real threat to democracy (maybe it is not there anymore)

>Training an AI is not fair use

That's not for you to decide.

>has nothing to do with open source

It has everything to do with open source. If only Disney and getty images are allowed to train ai, there will be extreme monopolisation.

> I still don't get how people believe one can make money out of other people's creative works (on a mass scale at that) and get away with it.

They saw Uber get away with it's thing, so they're going to try to get away with theirs. IIRC, when Uber was new, it was literally illegal in many/most of the places it operated.

the attitude of those that do it: "what are you going to do about it?". escalatory power games, not an ounce of caring for your fellow man, barely a veneer of. we have entered very dark waters. unclear where the exit is.

> Training an AI is not fair use

You don't get to decide that, certainly not as a blanket statement. We're gonna have to wait for the courts.

The same executives that would argue and protect the IP of any major company out there right now are somehow saying the complete opposite when it reduces down to the individual. If this hasn't revealed the hypocrisy of thinking when chasing the money, nothing will. It's the first in a series of realities people are facing with this concept of AI. That in truth it is nothing more than a financial and informational bait and switch. Screw the lot who haven't revolted in pursuit of the fellow man and have instead sold their soul to a kleptocracy of babyfaced bullshitters

The luddites didn't destroy the power looms because they were some kind of handcrafting purists - they destroyed the machines because they took away ownership of the means of production from individual craftsmen to big businesses. The problem wasn't the machine, it was the factory and its owner.

Comments like these are kind of straw man rebuttals imo. There have been similar arguments such as 'electronic music didn't destroy musicianship', 'photography didn't destroy art', etc.

They skirt around the important details, in that in all those analogies the entire process/field wasn't replaced/impacted by automation, only facets. Advanced generative NNs aren't merely dumb automated tools that still require human craftmanship but rather, at a baseline, take the place of the humans in virtually all respects of design, implementation and continually synthesizing based on others' work.

The analogy presented in your post doesn't account for the designers still involved with the process, the real-world practicalities that involve humans of getting clothing made even with all the automation available. Generative AI doesn't have this goal; it's increasingly allowing for replacement of all humans and processes involved, besides the one wishing upon a genie lamp.

Now one can of course apply their own craftsmanship to such outputs if desired and there are examples of this from existing artists/writers where it fits more like a tool into a workflow (and such analogies would actually apply here), however as we can already observe the vast majority of uses don't and there is still at a minimum a usable result, as the tech advances.

There are also parallels one commonly reads drawn to how humans operate: if a human studied others' artwork then they too would be able to synthesize results. However no human has memory and mind's eye recall like that of advanced NNs, which is plainly observable from the output of human history. It's an unfair comparison. The goal of generative models is to be superhuman yet only human arguments are being applied.

I think there are a bunch of positives and negatives to this but it's hard not to see the impact it will have particularly on human motivation and societal expectations, regardless of financial incentives, apart from the general shut-up-and-take-it attitude one sees. There are some pretty impactful legitimate concerns to be had that warrant thoughtful discussion.

As per usual, money thinks of a human as a commodity for sale, not a neighbour being exploited or livelihood being stripped.

If you think throwing life into a black box and consuming its results will improve productivity and enhance creativity. You're forgetting the only thing we feed this thing is 'results'. You're drinking the piss from a million artists and thinking it's fresh water. Eventually this filtered, censored source of creativity is AI material being used and creating for AI, not humans -- because humans quit being a source of material and nothing more than a requester.

The short sightedness of believing you can commodify the human spirit is the most incredulous shit I've ever seen.

Nah it's different because it's different. A machine is copying the entire contents of the copywritten work to "learn" from it. Humans don't.

I also don't get the cheerleading here. You aren't getting free access to this tech. Cheap access maybe, for now, but the only outcome is to suppress labor and maximize profit, because that's what the market demands.

What do we tell people in an unaffordable world dealing with the impacts of climate change when their jobs are gone? That they can't be a software engineer, or an artist, or an animator because we've taken that work - and money - and handed it to a chosen few when using their own labor to bootstrap it? This is how riots happen.