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@CeePlusPlusCanFightMe
Shutterstock will start selling AI-generated stock imagery with help from OpenAI
This strikes me as fantastically stupid. Why would I buy AI-generated imagery from Shutterstock when I could just make it myself? In the near future, people who don't have high-end PCs won't even need to pay Stability or Midjourney for a subscription. Getting the open source version of SD to run smoothly on your phone is a mere engineering problem that will eventually be solved.
Maybe they just understand this market better than me? Never underestimate just how little work people are willing to put into things. Even playing around with prompts and inpainting for a few hours may be too much for most people, when they could just hand over $10 for a pretty picture on Shutterstock instead.
The "Contributor Fund" also makes me slightly more bearish on the prospect of there being any serious legal challenges to AI art. If there was any sector of the art market that I thought would have been most eager to launch a legal challenge, it would have been the stock photo industry. They seem like they're in the most obvious danger of being replaced. Undoubtedly, copyrighted Disney and Nintendo art was used to train the models, and those companies are notoriously protective of their IP, but they would also like to use the technology themselves and replace workers with automation if they can, so, they have conflicting incentives.
According to the article though, Shutterstock was already working with OpenAI last year to help train DALL-E, so apparently they made the calculation a while back to embrace AI rather than fight it. The "Contributor Fund" is pretty much a white flag. But maybe Getty will feel differently.
Edit to clarify a bit: What this seems to come down to is that they're adding a "DALL-E plugin" to their website. Why I would use Shutterstock as a middleman for DALL-E instead of just using DALL-E myself, I'm not sure. Their announcement makes it clear that they're not accepting AI submissions from sources besides their own plugin, due to outstanding legal concerns:
There's been some talk here about corporations using AI art and then simply lying about its origin in order to retain copyright. If I use Megacorp X's art without their permission and they try to claim a copyright violation, and I claim they made it with AI so I can do whatever I want with it, I wonder where the burden of proof would be in that case?
Do you have a link for that RIAA story?
As someone who grew up steeped in seething hatred for the RIAA, I look forward to watching them try and fail to halt another inexorable advance in technology.
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I’m happy that musicians have a powerful advocacy group who will defend their interests, but it’s unfortunate that artists don’t have something similar. The best I can hope for is that the RIAA does bring a lawsuit at some point and it sets a precedent that carries over to visual art.
The RIAA represents record labels, not musicians.
I’m aware. I was being intentionally cheeky. In this case their interests all happen to coincide, so they are representing the interests of musicians in this case, even if it’s just a byproduct.
Record companies care about profit and thus they stand to lose from unsigned artists creating better art, but if the calling of artists is art, they gain from having more tools to create it.
Let's try to keep things straight here.
AI is pretty much only going to harm visual artists. It's not going to "help them make better art", it's going to replace them, because people used to need artists to draw X and now they don't. One guy might get a productivity boost from using AI, but that's not going to do much for the other 10 people who got laid off.
Granted, the dynamics of the music market are quite different, because it's more dependent on live performances than commissions. But the concept of commission work still exists in music as well - lots of musicians make money by composing pieces for commercials, movies, and video games. I can't see any way that those musicians aren't going to be fully supportive of any legal action that the RIAA takes. They're at the highest risk of being replaced by AI - why hire someone to compose a jingle for my commercial when I can just type in a prompt instead?
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