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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36197 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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@CeePlusPlusCanFightMe

Shutterstock will start selling AI-generated stock imagery with help from OpenAI

Today, stock image giant Shutterstock has announced an extended partnership with OpenAI, which will see the AI lab’s text-to-image model DALL-E 2 directly integrated into Shutterstock “in the coming months.” In addition, Shutterstock is launching a “Contributor Fund” that will reimburse creators when the company sells work to train text-to-image AI models. This follows widespread criticism from artists whose output has been scraped from the web without their consent to create these systems. Notably, Shutterstock is also banning the sale of AI-generated art on its site that is not made using its DALL-E integration.

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:

In this spirit, we will not accept content generated by AI to be directly uploaded and sold by contributors in our marketplace because its authorship cannot be attributed to an individual person consistent with the original copyright ownership required to license rights. Please see our latest guidelines here. When the work of many contributed to the creation of a single piece of AI-generated content, we want to ensure that the many are protected and compensated, not just the individual that generated the content.

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?

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.

Spending $10 instead of a few hours sounds like a good deal to me.

Yeah, 100% agree here. Also never underestimate how reluctant/incompetent people are at engaging with new tech. My DND group includes a couple of graphic designers and several people working in tech and aside from a couple of them mucking around on Dreamstudio all have claimed that they don’t have the time to figure out how to run a local instance of Stable Diffusion. Maybe that’s right, although I did it in a couple of hours (and that’s including training up several models on Dreamstudio to recognise pictures of me, my wife, a couple of friends, etc.).

Having to set up SD locally is an absolute hardstop for non-technical people right now. They’re going to see that you have to “clone a repo” and “run a script” and they’re just going to nope out. Someone will come up with a true idiot-proof GUI solution soon enough though.

There's already this creatively-named guide to get started.

In my case the power of horniness won through and helped galvanise my loins through the technical parts. I’ve now found a 0.3/0.7 merge of f111’s female anatomy model and SD 1.5 gives some very impressive results.

Same here.

I'm a programmer and was well aware of the marvel that is txt2img but the reason I immediately got it running the moment it came out was so that I can create the dankest porn.

I'm half curious, half terrified to see what kind of abominations motters are creating with this stuff. Fuck it, we must have nsfw tags for a reason, right?

Few random results. I only played with it for a few minutes after setting it up so far.

I like how #4 is practically just Projekt Melody.

I’ve now found a 0.3/0.7 merge of f111’s female anatomy model and SD 1.5 gives some very impressive results.

On first read I thought there was yet another mechamusume or moe anthropomorphism IP that I hadn't heard of featuring Aardvark-chan.

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