>but it is still fundamentally just copying, pasting, and then deforming lines together
That's called "photobashing", very common to see used by concept artists. Also, it's fair use.
So now you've got a bigger problem in that almost all concept artists are engaged in theft I suppose? Since they are "only" copying, pasting, and then deforming things together?
Funny how you declare photo bashing as “fair use” but a cursory glance at the actual legality shows that you’re lying and that it is also in a somewhat ambiguous grey area at the moment, with lawsuits pending.
It is also massively frowned upon in art sharing circles.
>but a cursory glance at the actual legality shows that you’re lying
[[citation needed]]
>a somewhat ambiguous grey area at the moment
That's a funny way of admitting I'm right.
>It is also massively frowned upon in art sharing circles.
Who gives a shit? What part of "commonly used in concept art", and among professionals in drafting and conceptual stages in general, do you deliberately seek to not understand?
You mentally unwell or are you just an internet troll?
Your “carte Blanche fair use” claim is nonsense. Copyright owners can, in fact, today stop derivative works that they know about, including photobashing.
By your own admission, AI is barely doing photobashing, so is very obviously not creating original works and is subject to copyright claims.
It gets tiring listening to HN AI enthusiasts pretending that AI is an actual comparison to human intelligence when it’s actually demonstrably a specialized search engine that does little more than copy and paste. If this were not the case, then:
-An AI would be able to feed itself without becoming shit tier nonsense
-An ai would be able to create materials not discernible from its training material
Neither case is true for any AI, including diffusion models.
Since you seem to not be aware of this: Fair use is an affirmative defense. By definition nothing I have written is therefore "carte blanche" as no defense of fair use can be ever said to be "carte blanche". This is pure sophistry on your part and transparently so.
>Here’s an article specifically on the legality of photo bashing
And mashups, photobashing, and many things likewise, remain legal and with fair use defenses in the courts as precedent. You continue to reach to any dishonesty or deflection including projection to avoid dealing with any of the points anyone has brought up.
Ad hominem usually demonstrates you know that you’re wrong.
I am not the one arguing that a computer has thoughts, feelings and intent as you are here. It is you that is deliberately attempting to misunderstand through ignorance, lies, and insult.
See this kind of thing here is what I think is a problem and has been a problem forever. We have two opposite laws on this,
1. Copying is theft (contents of a CD [software], movies, stuff on a website sometimes, etc)
2. Copying is not theft (VHS copies of broadcasts, cassettes, etc)
Problem is "implied license" (eula-roofie) where we've, without any good reason I think, decided that,
(a) Copying is theft when someone unilaterally declares what you buy to be different from the medium (CD vs what's on it [software, movie, etc])
(a)(2) except when it's a really old medium like a book which you're allowed to quote, and use in derivation, but don't you dare "quote a movie" by copying portions off that DVD or blu-ray because that's different. Shut up is why.
(b) Copying is theft when someone unilaterally declares their putting something up to view, which necessarily requires copying to view (sent over internet), can't be copied for derivative fair use
(b)(2) except when it's over another old medium like public broadcast because... fuck you? I haven't a clue myself how this makes any sense and I suspect it is because "it doesn't".
(c) Copying is theft if you take the copy sent you over the internet and do anything with it somebody unilaterally declares they don't want you to be able to do
(c)(2) except if it's an old medium, like a book, where you can borrow it and quote from it and do all the fair use stuff, or borrow a picture, or a painting, or...
All the fair use and copying and other sensible stuff without this weird "implied license" stuff doesn't exist for formats we've had before to the extent it does now. These formats, in principle, are still just "you get a copy of a thing on some medium", and yet we have two completely different laws based on this pure fiction of an "implied license" that declares you can't copy even portions of one on some format because... because.
I am trying, desperately, to explain there is fundamentally and in principle no difference. The root of all of our problems and why the law doesn't make any sense is the pure fiction that there IS a difference. And I feel like a goddamn madman yelling in the streets trying to explain something that feels so dog gon obvious to me but seems like is obvious to nobody else.
Yeah, I am equally confused and I fear the law is going to royally bungle this one and we'll be stuck with something really stupid for some arbitrary number of decades or generations.
It just seems obvious to me that "human made thing to transform some set of things into a composite+transformation of those things" is fair use if fair use is to make any sense at all. Since analogously, like you said, in the same way you are taking your experience including experience of copyrighted stuff as a set of things you are drawing upon producing something of your own. All art is derivative.
It makes zero sense to me at all that it's suddenly a problem that art is derived if, instead of artist directly painting something, artist sets up some device that paints something. In both cases "human takes inputs and produces something unique" (not a copy, not a scanner, in case that was not clear from context).
Unless I'm missing something too, but based on what I see so far I just feel like I'm from mars and don't belong here.
> It makes zero sense to me at all that it's suddenly a problem that art is derived if, instead of artist directly painting something, artist sets up some device that paints something.
I think a big difference in how this tech makes people feel is the amount of effort required. It's a problem we see with technology in other areas, too: it's not (much of) a problem if a cop sits outside a suspect's house for a few hours to monitor their behavior. Most people think it would be a problem if the cops pointed a camera at the house 24/7 for months. Pretty much everyone agrees canvassing society with cameras and creating a public space surveillance panopticon is bad. Where's the line?
Similarly, if some artists spend years learning the craft and mimicking a couple of styles with a relatively small output, it's not a huge problem. The scope is small. But if everyone on earth can do it to anyone on earth at massive scale just by typing "in the style of ..." to an AI, does that start to be a problem?
The line is pretty simple for me, because it's the same line that applies to people. It doesn't matter what the training set is so long as it is not reproducing either the same thing or too similar to the thing it's trained from. Somebody else linked that you can't generally copyright style for instance, and if I recall you can't copyright algorithms or things of general knowledge either. So you can copyright "a specific instance of a thing", but not "the general idea of a thing". Here, near as I can tell, these algorithms generate some general idea of the things it's trained on and produce something specific different from the specific things. What should matter is only if it is different enough, same as it matters for people.
We've got much bigger problems though but if we, we as people generally not specifically you, can't even agree on something I see as so fundamentally basic bringing up things I think are problems would start war
When things seem so obvious and simple, it can be a good mental exercise to try to put yourself in the shoes of the "other side" for whom it also seems obvious and simple.
While never my main thing, I've worked as a professional artist and know people for whom art is their livelihood. The holy grail in that world is to create a unique style that will command a premium: an art director decides your style is perfect for their new campaign, a building designer decides your style fits the lobby of the new building, etc. This style is the result of years and years of refinement, false starts, watching trends, etc. And this style is why they get paid, and how they feed their family.
When you tell such an artist that now any schmuck can create art in their style just by writing "In the style of..." you should understand that —especially to a non-technical person—the end result is just a slight deviation of from a copy machine. To them it seems "pretty simple" and "obvious" that this is just a fancy way of stealing.
(And I'm not taking sides here, just saying that step one is to realize that the issue is not simple, and is thus super interesting.)
>When things seem so obvious and simple, it can be a good mental exercise to try to put yourself in the shoes of the "other side" for whom it also seems obvious and simple.
I would if I could but as I keep tryin to explain I can't because it requires I believe something that's a contradiction.
Just because it's a contradiction that makes ya more money don't mean it isn't a contradiction. Also I am that non-technical person.
> so long as it is not [...] too similar to the thing it's trained from
Aye, there's the rub ;) How do you define "too similar"? If I invert the colors of Munch's The Scream, is that an original work? What if I pass it through a computer program I wrote to swirl it around in a spiral? I think those are clearly derivative works--you put the image in as input, put it through a mechanical transformation process, and get the same output for the given input. That description also applies to AI.
> these algorithms generate some general idea of the things it's trained on
Well, be careful here. AIs don't generate ideas. They take inputs, do some mechanical work on them, and output something derived from the inputs. There are no "ideas" involved here, it's a(n extremely complicated) mechanical transformation.
(To repeat myself, I don't know where I stand on the issue. I think there's good arguments on both sides.)
>Aye, there's the rub ;) How do you define "too similar"?
... Same ways I do for humans. That's why I wrote "the same as for people" that line was supposed to contextualize everything else I wrote and somehow it hasn't.
edited to fix a screwup. because somehow I swear I hit "copy" but it didn't copy
That doesn't make any sense to me as a line, as the human set up the machine to generate some way to generate images. The human still did "it", the "it" is just one step removed, and we've tons of things where some "it" is one step removed from the human where your line doesn't apply in law or people's concepts.
Furthermore, but even if a human creates something directly, they've still "trained" on all sorts of things that include copyrighted images--and, yes, if they create something too close to one particular copyrighted image, they can be found to have infringed copyright.
Yeah you see that a lot when all of a sudden every single one in the US market yanks out every affordable option all at the same time or "mysteriously" makes them impossible to buy but somehow that isn't collusion or anything. Then these same lying fuckers in suits declare americans "don't want" those options they conspired to make as difficult as possible to get in the first place.
You saw the same thing with microcars or anything especially affordable the past couple years. They only want to sell giant gas guzzling insanely expensive XXL crap and are doing their best to keep affordable shit off the market meanwhile it all sells just fine everywhere else. It's obvious how rigged the whole thing is same with real estate and "automatic price adjustments" that coincidentally biases things in favor of landlords, same for other software that biases things in favor of other colluding fucks like the auto industry so they merely "coincidentally" conspire. It's all total bullshit.
What pisses me off is the fact people somehow think an industry agreeing to use algorithms that only go in their favor and most of all if they all use those algorithms together doesn't count as collusion.
That's not fair. More like "cannot afford" as in can't afford to live anywhere close enough to anything paying enough to afford to live near enough to work for it. Add to that XXXL trucks and giant SUV's that can't see crap and irrational hatred for bikes on the road and you've got a double whammy of being both too scared even if you're close or too far to be practical. Add on top the insane weather most of the country has, and total complete lack of path maintenance for bikes even when you've got bike paths. This ain't like some country like finland where I've seen videos where they plow and prepare roads for bikes half the time sidewalks and bike lanes are just impassable mounds of ice and sludge if you're up north.
Now course everyone and their mother may wanna chime in and go off about some anecdote in their city for them but you really gotta ask yourself how normal is your personal experience really? Just lookin it up various averages say 41 mile commute, 16 mile commute, 20-30 minute commutes, don't matter what estimate I pull up the average is way too high to make biking feasible.
So no it ain't "americans dumb ha ha" it's "most people can't do it" and redesigning the whole country to be able to is gon take a hot minute
The South Bay Area has nice weather for cycling and decent bike paths along the major rivers/creeks. But local governments have allowed some of those paths to be taken over as homeless encampments. Now some women I know are afraid to ride through there.
Don't even have to be about science, it can just be random little myths that spring up people try to correct. I happen to know stuff about firearms, got quite a few, from one of those places people can have quite a few. One day I'm scrollin down reading history on the M16 trying to remember something and I find the dumbest goddamn thing I ever heard, this claim the M16 got issued without cleaning kits and Colt claimed it was "entirely self-cleaning". I don't know if ya ever used firearms but that would never happen, and is the absolute dumbest claim I ever saw in my life. "reduced fouling" don't mean "entirely self-cleaning".
Now I don't really know how to use wikipedia but I thought it was one of those fake edits people might do as a joke. Went checking edit history and stuff to find out and turns out someone else tried to point out the myth too and some jackass with authority is jealously guarding that myth to keep it on the page forever.
Went and checked the government documents myself, among other things there is no Colt material making that claim in that context. Government also ordered cleaning kits, Colt supplied cleaning kits, so it's also contradicted by fact there too. Simple thing is there just weren't enough to go around, supply shortages, and someone at some point created the myth by misunderstanding that a design to "reduce fouling" thereby "reduce cleaning" don't in any way no hell no how imply "self-cleaning" in that way. Yet the claim remains on wikipedia, without clarification, because I guess some idiots repeating the myth in a book makes the myth okay.
I went and checked that book, too. No source of the myth in the cited book. It's completely fuckin made up and anyone with half a brain and a day using a firearm would know that, but there it is. All because someone, for some reason only God knows, personally wants it to be there and has the authority to keep it there.
I tracked down the book wikipedia cites for that self-cleaning claim (it's on Library Genesis).
Wikipedia presently says:
> However, the rifle was initially delivered without adequate cleaning kits[43] or instructions because advertising from Colt asserted that the M16's materials made the weapon require little maintenance, and was capable of self-cleaning.[67]
The book, The M16 by Gordon L. Rottman, says on page 20:
> Most Marine units began receiving the XM16E1 in April 1967 and immediately experienced problems arising from several factors. Most units received little if any cleaning gear beyond some cleaning rods and bore brushes. Some units had never heard of chamber brushes. Colt is said to have hyped the weapon as futuristic, requiring little maintenance owing to new materials. This was interpreted to mean the black rifle was “self-cleaning.”
So Colt supposedly saying the rifle requiring "little maintenance" was then subsequently interpreted (by the Marines I think) to mean the rifle was "self-cleaning". The book doesn't say Colt made the "self-cleaning" claim, but whoever wrote that part on wikipedia is attributing the claim to Colt.
Hard to say if even the book's claim is right.. "Colt is said to have..." said by who? The book doesn't actually cite any Colt marketing material or anything like that.
See what I mean? Book just repeats the myth in my mind, though as you say I guess a tweak of the myth. But you're Exactly right. Said by who? According to what? It's just a claim, and in my opinion contradicted by every single public document and contemporary marketing or Colt related material I could find from the time period. Same thing with military, of course that would be contradicted by any/every military related service rifle training program or materials ever.
Still on wikipedia though. Because writing bullshit without any source is fine as long as it's in print, I guess?
Well at some point, Wikipedia became less about writing an encyclopedia and more about creating and enforcing a set of rules that (hopefully) would eventually lead to a "high-quality" encyclopedia. So if you want to fix Wikipedia, you can't just edit Wikipedia (it'll be reverted), you have to justify your edits according to Wikipedia's core policies (Verifiability, no original research, and neutral point of view). Probably you could also explain why those policies are wrong and need to be changed, but that would be a longer discussion and wouldn't necessarily take place in the context of a specific article. Just guessing, but probably in this case the issue is a lack of secondary/tertiary sources - there is material from that period, but nobody has analyzed it and come to a conclusion on this sub-subject besides this author. So because (per verifiability) secondary trumps primary, the secondary is what is in the article. I think all you could do is get those claims removed, because synthesizing a different conclusion than the book would be original research.
Seems to me it'd be a lot more high quality if you could simply have points about truth or things being opinions, or speculation, or rumors, or myth, stuff like that. Or simply noting there's disagreement or things about truth. Maybe you can but I ain't about to spend my whole year learning a bureaucratic jargon just to "sneak in" what should be effortless to put there. Get my frustration?
I can kind of get Wikipedia's stance here. They're really not supposed to be litigators of "what actually happened," which may not be knowable. They have defined rules for what counts as an authoritative source and nonfiction books that are generally taken seriously are in that set. So if a book says it, it's good enough to be on a Wikipedia page.
Does that means it's true? I highly doubt it. I wasn't alive in the 60s, but I've known a lot of Marines in my life. I was in the Army myself. I've known people who were Marines in Vietnam. I've never known anyone who ever operated a rifle who would interpret a claim this way or belief a self-cleaning rifle was a possible thing.
But unfortunately, even if you are personally an expert, Wikipedia doesn't let you come in and tell a page it's wrong. You have to publish your knowledge in an authoritative archival source and then it can be cited. I get that it can be frustrating as a subject-matter expert, but I don't know what better sourcing and citation rules an encyclopedia can have. They don't internally litigate the validity of a claim. They define what outside sources count as citable and then trust those sources.
Hell, I experiened a fairly stupid version of this a few months ago. I edited the page for Slayer's Reign in Blood in the section for pop culture references, adding a mention that Angel of Death was used in the Leftovers when Nora pays a prostitute to shoot her and uses the song to cover the gunshot sound. I linked to an episode summary on another wiki and that got deleted because apparently Wikipedia doesn't allow other wikis to be cited as sources. Fair enough as a general rule, though I think it doesn't make sense in this context because Wikipedia has episode summaries of television shows that don't cite sources at all. So I just removed the cite and linked to HBO's home page for the episode and that stuck, even though it doesn't have a description and you'd have to actually watch the episode to confirm I'm not lying.
But hey, whatever, rules are rules. No rules are perfect. Courts get it wrong sometimes, too.
> They're really not supposed to be litigators of "what actually happened," which may not be knowable
seems like best thing would be to be able to say "this is not verifiable" or similar. seems to me these issues people have could be solved or improved a lot by having more and more nuanced info not less. Like if people are just so damn insistent the myth stay up there it should also be fine to point out "though there seems to be no evidence supporting this claim or claimed notion" when the books or stuff cited have nothing but more claims. More info, more context, not less
The image of wikipedia editors jealously guarding pages (which makes me think of a dragon hoarding treasure) is entirely accurate and widespread. I've seen it happen on all kinds of pages from pages about some religious event/person to pages about highly technical subjects. I honestly don't know what the solution is because there are definitely people who continually try to edit history by changing wikipedia pages, but the scales right now are way tilted toward preserving bad info, which includes fixing errors and also adding expansions.
Well maybe I'm a bumpkin but seems to be the fix is the truth, and if the truth ain't clear there's no reason you can't have explanations or explain claims repeated elsewhere aren't evident in something like source materials. It isn't like you got a floppy disk and have to cram an encyclopedia on it.
Simple enough fix to my mind. If them "dragons", and I like that image there I think it fits, pull bullshit like that you just remove them. Which you can now easily do because whether or not Colt claimed something is a matter of truth that can be checked. In this case obviously not. Simplifies everything and gets people talking about the truth and how to best represent what's true, even if it's disputed, instead of having what's very clearly false with no hope of even clarifying "this appears to be a myth".
problem is that stance is like a vicious cycle. Can't get worthwhile employment screws everything from your family to your social life, worse if you can't drive anymore too, and all that is right back into why those people would be alcoholics or using other drugs and stuff in the first place.
my thing is I'm all for justice but not justice that creates more of the same problem in others or the same people giving them even more reason to give up with, well, it's like branding people on the forehead. Why be surprised when the outcast keeps doing outcast stuff when they're never allowed to be anything but an outcast? it's like if society shot itself in the foot then is outraged demanding to know who shot it in the foot.
tryin to say it feels good but just feelin good don't fix nothin
What the other person seems to want is revenge or some arbitrary punitive action against someone, perhaps decades, after they've already been through the legal system and answered for their actions.
I reckon it has got to do with bein rural and poor, or maybe different kinds of european family cultures preserving different attitudes? Where I'm from in the south you didn't ask at all if you knew what was good for you all about keepin up appearances and you had to be all sly about helping people out. More poor somebody is more sly you got to be. Bein in a city nobody gives a darn but way back when that darn was given pretty darn hard.
Just a guess but could be that attitude has lots more to do with how many are poor or not and how many generations they've been poor, or lived in cities, like a lag time sorta thing. Nothing I really know about just sharing because it might be interesting even if wrong
That's called "photobashing", very common to see used by concept artists. Also, it's fair use.
So now you've got a bigger problem in that almost all concept artists are engaged in theft I suppose? Since they are "only" copying, pasting, and then deforming things together?