shakenvac
10mo ago
If you get a surgery done the person operating on you might be on hour 28 and gotten 4 hours of sleep the night before that long ass shift.
I'm from the UK, where a typical long shift for a doctor is 13 hours, so I cant really tell if this is an exaggeration.
But if this is true, holy shit. That is absolutely outrageous. how can you with a straight face protest that doctors are so desperately committed patient wellbeing, while accepting a 28 hour long surgery shift? There's no other way to describe it - that's dangerous. You, above all, should know what the science tells us about decreasing performance with fatigue. Any airline pilot that accepted a shift even close to that would lose their license.
shakenvac
11mo ago
This is a really interesting perspective, but I admit I have a hard time vibing with it. I tried to get into art appreciation when I was younger. Went to the national galleries and the Tate modern, hemmed and hawed at paintings and modern art pieces. This was the top 1% of the top 1% of art, and yet I was disappointed that there was usually very little explanatory notes to go along with the piece. Often when I did find some guide to the 'canon' meaning of the art it was usually perfunctory and not terribly interesting. Usually I preferred my own interpretation to the one I was apparently supposed to draw from the piece. I fully admit this was probably a 'me' problem. Perhaps art appreciation is a deliberately clutivated skill and I simply wasn't able to develop it
All this to say that I'm a 'meaning is in the eye of the beholder' kinda guy when it comes to art. If I draw something meaningful from a piece, I'm not sure it matters if it wasn't the meaning the creator intended, or even if the creator intended no meaning at all.
Besides, what proportion of art that a person consumes on a daily basis actually has layers of meaning deliberately packed into it, let alone deep or philosophical meaning? 1%? Less?
shakenvac
11mo ago
I think that human, natural language definitions of 'stealing', 'plaigiarism', 'copying' etc are not totally fluid. These are words with specific meanings. If someone wants to argue that AI-art is bad on consequentialist grounds then sure, crack on. But 'stealing' is not a catch all term for 'bad'
Whether or not AI-art is bad, I maintain it is not theft.
shakenvac
11mo ago
If your view is that we need to redefine what 'stealing' is in order to specifically encompass what AI does then yes, you can make the argument that AI art is stealing, but if you do that you can make the argument that literally anything is stealing, including things that blatantly aren't stealing.
AI training is novel, but I don't at all agree that it is so novel that it cannot possibly be placed into the existing IP framework. In fact I think it fits reasonably comfortably. I do not believe there is anything that AI training and AI generation does that could be reasonably interpreted to violate any part of IP law, nor the principles upon which IP law is based. You cannot IP protect a style, genre, composition, or concept. You cannot prevent people using a protected work as an inspiration or framework for another work. You cannot prevent people from using techniques, knowledge, or information gleaned from copyrighted work to create another original work. You cannot prevent an individual or company from examining your protected work. You cannot induce a model to reproduce any copyrighted work, nor reverse engineer any from the model itself. Indeed, carveouts in IP law like 'fair use' - which most people who decry AI art would defend passionately - gives far more leeway to individuals than would be required to justify anything generated by an AI.
I wouldn’t want to accuse everyone who is down on AI art as being insincere or a dirty rotten motivated-reasoner -many people freely admit their concern is mainly for the livelihood of artists-, but I have seen these discussions play out many times on many different forums. I have rarely seen the ‘AI-art is stealing’ argument withstand even the barest scrutiny. It is often pushed by people who clearly do not understand how these models work, while aggressively accusing their opponents of not understanding how they work. As @Amadan pointed out in his far-better-than-mine post, when faced with the hypothetical of an ethically trained AI, people do not declare their issues are resolved, which indicates that the core of the disagreement is elsewhere. It smacks of post-hoc reasoning.
Which is evidence that the objections are principled rather than merely opportunistic.
I think the actual root of the objections are sympathetic. Artists are high status in online communities. People see a threat to them, empathise, and develop the core feeling of ‘AI-art bad’. From there we are into arguments-as-soldiers territory. Everyone knows that stealing is bad, so if you can associate AI art with stealing, even if the association makes little sense, then that’s a win.
shakenvac
11mo ago
Yes, the blowback against AI art seems to me a little insincere.
Ostensibly, it's about the AI 'stealing' public art to train itself. (I agree with you that this argument is nonsense)
More realistically, it's people disliking the idea of robots putting artists out of work.
Cynically, it's artists being sore that their highly developed skills can suddenly be near-replicated by a computer in 15 seconds.
Many times over the past few centuries, skilled workers have found themselves driven into obsolescence by technology. Very few of them succeeded in holding back the tide for long. If I were a digital artist, I would urgently be either swapping to a physical medium, or figuring out how I could integrate AI into my workflow.
Of course there is another option - you don't put yourself in that position in the first place. you don't bite off more than you can chew, as an institution. and if you fuck up and end up overbooked, then you take the hard choice and start cancelling surgeries. There might not be another airline pilot available, you think that excuse would fly when a pilot crashes an airliner into a mountain because he was exhausted? of course not. So why should it fly when an exhausted surgeon perforates a bowel or misreads a chart?
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