Regarding that last boost, I'm starting to conceive of LLMs and image generators as a phenomenon of (American) society eating its seed corn. If you're not familiar with the phrase, "seed corn" is the corn you set aside to plant next year, as opposed to the corn you eat this year. If you eat your seed corn this year, you have no seeds to plant next year, and thus create a crisis for all future years, a crisis that could have been avoided with better management.
LLMs and image generators mass ingest human-created texts and images. Since the human creators of the ingested texts and images are not compensated and not even credited, this ingestion puts negative pressure on the sharing of such things. Creative acts functioning as seed for future creative acts becomes depressed. Creative people will have little choice but to lock down, charge for, or hide their works. Otherwise, they'll be ingested by innumerable computer programs and replicated ad infinitum without so much as a credit attached. Seed corn that had been freely given forward will become difficult to get. Eaten.
Eating your seed corn is meant to be a last ditch act you take out of desperation after exhausting all other options. It's not meant to be standard operating procedure. What a bleak society that does this, consuming itself in essence.
Well well well... Andreessen Horowitz admits, in no uncertain terms, that if they had to compensate artists for using their art to train their #aiart ripoff models, that their investments wouldn't be worth it.
Absolutely damning admission which spells out in no uncertain terms that these firms KNOW they are ripping artists off.
UPDATE: Seems it already happened. Content from 2014-2023 has already been shared. So your opt-out will just be honoured going forward. If and how already sent content will be handled by the receiving 3rd party after you opt-out remains a mystery
Since their arrival, generative AI models and their trainers have demonstrated their ability to download any online content for model training. For content owners and creators, few tools can prevent their content from being fed into a generative AI model against their will. Opt-out lists have been disregarded by model trainers in the past, and can be easily ignored with zero consequences. They are unverifiable and unenforceable, and those who violate opt-out lists and do-not-scrape directives can not be identified with high confidence.
In an effort to address this power asymmetry, we have designed and implemented Nightshade, a tool that turns any image into a data sample that is unsuitable for model training. More precisely, Nightshade transforms images into "poison" samples, so that models training on them without consent will see their models learn unpredictable behaviors that deviate from expected norms, e.g. a prompt that asks for an image of a cow flying in space might instead get an image of a handbag floating in space.
Une équipe de chercheurs a tenté de générer des images sur #Midjourney. Impossible d’avoir un médecin noir qui soigne des enfants blancs.
Le médecin noir il sait faire, les enfants blancs aussi. Mais les deux c’est tellement inconcevable pour lui qu’il préfère caser des girafes.
J’aimerais bien dire que c’est incroyable mais c’est très évident.
When we teach WW1 history and show photographs of men in the trenches, and no one knows if they are real or midjourney fake then we are in deep trouble. Or teach scientific principles through research papers and don't know if the text is authentic human created or response engine output, we are in deep trouble. Imagine a hundred other contexts and you understand why gen ai is such a massive problem.
Cambridge MA, 1967: Joseph Weizenbaum releases the ELIZA chatbot. The chatbot is eagerly adopted by all sectors of the US economy in key decision-making roles. Chaos ensues as workers seeking managerial guidance receive only cryptic replies, such as "EARLIER YOU MENTIONED Q2 PLANNING" and "HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT WE NEED CHEAPER SUPPLIERS?".
A reminder to #artists that there is now a tool meant to combat AI tools that are stealing creative works for use in services like #Midjourney by adding imperceptible pixels which in turn poison their databases 🤟
Among the many reasons we should resist the widespread application of generative #AI an important, if less concrete, one is to preserve the freedom to change. This class of method crystallizes the past and present and re-generates it over and over again. The net result, if it's used en masse, is foreclosing the future.
If you're stats-poisoned: human flourishing requires the joint distribution of the future to be different from that of the past and present. We, collectively, form a non-stationary system, and forcing the human system to be stationary is a kind of violence.
This is hard. My #Tumblr blog has been a main focus of my life for at least a decade. I’ve posted thousands of posts, almost all original photos, and the blog has over 100,000 followers. It felt like the one worthwhile thing I was continually doing and to delete it seems incredibly painful. But leaving it in a place that has partnered with #Midjourney feels too much like consent. How do I parse this?
This excellent comic on the history of Luddism by Tom Humberstone https://thenib.com/im-a-luddite led me to this site with folks developing 'Glaze' which is a thing artists are using to mess with AI trying to scrape their art. Check it out here:
PSA. It's time to get the newest COVID booster, if you haven't yet. The CDC says a new subvariant, JN.1, is responsible for a rise in COVID hospitalizations in the US. The new vaccine works, as it boosts antibodies 13-27-fold against JN.1, but <16% of US adults have received it. Make a plan to get it today. And if you haven't gotten your flu vaccination, you can get that at the same time. Healthy Holidays! #PSA#COVID#Midjourney