Nicely done. You've convinced me on every level.

Then again, I'm not willfully rejecting objective reality to try and defend the indefensible.

Watch the video. That poor dude has been through the wringer.

And in today's news, regarding my rapidly rising blood pressure:

These sons of bitches actually think this is some kind of a cute homage to their heroes, rather than what it clearly is: outright soul sucking plagiarism.

What an utterly worthless breed of human. What a living tribute to mediocrity.

The thing is though, that AI is only going to get better. And as there is no way we can predict what the implications of AI on society are going to be, that puts all of us in a philosophically unfavorable position: we will have to adapt to something that evolves much faster than we can think and that could take any form, shape or size, and that could penetrate every aspect of our lives.

We are being forced to redefine what it means to be human, in relation to AI, but it's the AI that get's to say under what conditions we'll do that. And it not only sets the rules, but it will keep changing them constantly as well.

So in a sense, "the matrix" could come true: machines could come to determine our reality. The world as we'll see it, including ourselves, could possibly become a machine creation. Or at least a huge chunk of it. And that would essentially reduce us to piles of organic material. Mere batteries in a way.

I could hardly disagree with the statement that this is an insult to life itself.

We must somehow find a way of thinking and looking at the world and ourselves to philosophically contain this problem. Or we wíll be reducing ourselves to batteries.

I agree with all of that.

I do think there are probably a myriad of ways in which the technology COULD actually improve life for people. But people suck, and they are the ones who are unleashing this tech on the world with zero ethics - so, yes - I agree it's a runaway train which will ultimately harm us all.

Honestly, I can't think of a more awful and dehumanizing use of it than for art. But it's profitable, and corporate profit will always be the overriding factor in how this tech is implemented. So, what we are left with then is the distinct possibility of a future that looks very much like a dystopian hellscape.

Honestly, I hope I don't live to see it. I don't want to be a pile of organic material whose only purpose in life is to earn enough capital to maintain a roof over my head and eat and shit on a daily basis.

I don't think this will ever happen, no matter how many lines of code automate theft and encourage mindless enjoyment. Every single human will remain a full universe with opportunities for endless wonder and delight.

I could be wrong. Hope I'm not.

I spent the last hour and a half reading this entire thread and watching the videos shared by Bill, and I have to say I'm kind of overwhelmed with emotion and internal philosophical conflict.

Until now I hadn't really thought much about the way these MLs are being trained, and the nature of the data they use to spill out these gorgeous images. I just installed Stable Diffusion the other day and played around with it a bit.

Now having read and seen all this, I feel like I have violated the rights of so many artists. I feel like I've shamelessly slapped them in the face and ripped their cherished creation out of their shaking hands. I feel...guilt.

And it's not because of Bill's understandable hatred towards this whole thing, but because I found so much truth in the words of Steven Zapata. I can clearly imagine a future where humanity's creative core has been decimated and brutally ravaged, leaving but a thin sliver of fleeting hope behind. I can see myself become obsolete, even though I'm a software developer, because tools like ChatGPT are getting better and better at writing halfway-decent source code for various applications.

But most of all, I fear the devaluation of the very thing that makes us humans worthy of living - our creativity. In all its shapes and forms. ML is dangerously powerful. I feel like too many people underestimate just how powerful it is. The speed at which it learns new things is scary. Access to the internet makes it even scarier. At what point is it too late?

I remember watching Elon Musk's first appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast. I won't share my feelings towards these two figures because they're irrelevant to the topic at hand. But I vividly remember the point Joe asked Elon about controlling AI, and Musk said "I believe it's already too late".

This stuck with me for a while. I never was one to contemplate the dystopian future too much because I find it provides little in the way of finding ways to move away from that on a personal level. But the more I thought about the concept of AI, and the more I backed that up with ideas I've gathered over the years from all the sci-fi I've consumed, the scarier the thought of having no control over AI became.

And now it seems to have reached some kind of culmination. We all know how long it takes for an internationally accepted policy to be created and applied without exceptions. It takes years. At this point it seems we don't have that much time at hand before people with bad intentions extrapolate the available models further. If this happens, no industry will be left unaffected.

Some will take worse hits than others, but the impact will ripple throughout the entirety of human culture. The question is how can we stop it?

The code necessary to train these models is already out there. So is the data. What can stop these evil people from carrying forth what has already begun even after an appropriate legislation takes place? There's no mechanism that can flag a piece of ML-generated art as derived from a piece of copyrighted content. The similarities might be beyond obvious, but there's no solid proof. How do you prove that someone who claims they're an artist and the creator of said piece of art is lying? That they've used copyrighted art within the model's training instead of just deriving inspiration from that art?

This is a dramatically more complex problem than I had hitherto assumed or expected. I'm honestly a bit shaken by all this. I came in this thread leaning towards necromanteum's original stance, yet the stuff others shared here completely pulled the rug from underneath me and now I'm on the ground on my ass completely unsure what to feel. On one hand I absolutely adore technology and always have found vast amounts of awe and wonder in it. On the other hand I am starting to form a clear picture in my mind of just what this technology can do if used by the wrong people with the wrong intentions.

All I can say is that it hurts. Not because of the damage it's done so far, but because of the difficulty of preventing further damage in the future. I just don't see a viable way to stop it. For now though, I will surely not use any of it. You have drastically changed my POV on that situation, and I'm grateful for that.

I really hope a middle ground is reached wherein artists can give consent and will receive compensation for their work being used in training those models and generating imagery out of them. But knowing how corporations work, I am very, very sceptical about it.

Here's to hope.

Love & Light

I really appreciate your nuanced take on it, and for reading through the thread and watching all of the videos. There are a lot of artist advocates out there who are able to approach this from a more diplomatic stance than I'm capable of. I'm just so fucking angry about it, and like you (now), I'm deeply pessimistic abut the future. It's really taken a toll on me. I'm not going to lie.

I certainly hope that legislation arrives soon enough to stem the tide, but that seems like wishful thinking. The pro AI folks are banding together in increasingly disgusting ways, flooding their forums with shitty forgeries just to spite dissenting voices.

It's not about being diplomatic and level-headed or not. It's about getting a point across. It just so happens that it's a very sensitive point, because I imagine the majority of users of such tech are not artists themselves, and as such, can't really grasp the implications of this whole thing. You as an artist know the feeling, but not all people see it from your perspective, so convincing the masses this tech is being used in a malicious way is way too difficult when your average Joe can go online and craft a prompt that spits out something beautiful in a few minutes.

The odds are stacked against those of us that now see what's happening. But the most glaring issue still stands as solid as can be - how do you stop the wave? If you think about it, this is quite similar to pirated content online. Take thepiratebay as an example. It distributes copyrighted, paid content for free and has been doing so for 20 years now. How many times did they try to stop it? Did passing the anti-piracy legislations in so many countries have even the slightest effect? I don't think so. People just started using VPNs when pirating and kept doing it as if nothing happened.

The governments tried stopping it and they failed miserably. Why? Because it's on the internet. It has plenty of backups and plan Bs. They raided the supposedly "primary server" so many times and destroyed it. And it still came back from the dead and is again flourishing.

I fear the same thing will happen with those already trained models, and many more yet to come.

The only way to kill something on the internet is to kill the internet AND all local storage on the planet. In other words, saw off the branch you are sitting on...

I have a few friends who are using Midjourney to make website landing pages, and then ask websites that look ugly and out dated if they could host it and make a better website for them.

I would like to ask you people about such an activity, what is your opinion on it.
I was orinigally to do it, before midjourney was even a thing, but with the ai bot they can do it and I jst help them out. They don't have much money so this gig should really help them increase their income.

Also, what are your thoughts on AI art being made without these companies? AI is spreading like wildfire at the moment, Google has its personal AI for coding, Github has one for coding, chatgpt is online ofc. What I'm trying to say is, even if they don't steal artists data and pictures, it would only inevitabely delay the process I think, and not stop it. This is what I would like your opinion about also.

I would like to ask what about people that casually use the AI, like if I want to make a big poster, or pictures in my room, of course I don't have cash on me and this tool will give me the pictures I would like to put on the wall. Or even give me a picture that I would paint on my whole wall. I would be "feeding the AI and making it better, again, contributing to something bad in life. But on the other hand, at this point does it even matter? If the AI has already won, there is no going back, would it not be counter productive for someone not to use the tool when they can and will gain something out of it?

I hope we can answer these questions in peace and not leash out on one another.

And lastly, what I want to say as a personal note, people get their things stolen cosntantly. I'm living in an area where I personally know a physicist who had his project stolen, and his whole family threatened, so he completely left the field. I know a beekeeper who was to stop his business or they would boil his family in his honey. He stopped as well.
These things happen in life, they are treacherous and disgusting.
The people who do it with artists, will do it with me and everyone else if the opportunity arises.
The people who did it with the bees, and physics, will do it with artists and anyone else if they can.
In these instances, most if not all of the time, being angry and lashing out is counterproductive.
It's similar to being in court. You want to remain silent and let your lawyer do the talking, you don't want to insult the opposition publicly. It is the most difficult, but a lot of the time we just get into more trouble if we let our emotions go.

I really hope legal action goes through, or some kind of redemption, at this point this might be wishful thinking, I still want to say my heart is with all of you against the tide.
But (!) would not like to see arguments and hate in this forum spread because of the AI tool.

What I think is this: My primary issue is the unethical use of the tech - which, where visual art is concerned, is the only available option. It can't be used by anyone ethically while it operates on stolen data. When the models change (and they may; the first class action lawsuit was just filed three days ago), I won't have the same concerns. I still probably won't like it much, but my overriding concern is theft.

I have no particular issue with people who are playing with it for fun - although again, if you're using it now in any capacity, you are contributing to data theft. Where I get upset with end users is their claiming the images as original art (because it's not in any way), sometimes hiding the fact that it is AI when they publicly share the content, using it to make money (which is rampant) and using it vindictively as some kind of weapon, as you saw in the other thread last night.

Your website scenario is pretty typical, and as you might expect, I don't like it. This stuff is already replacing artists at an alarming rate, and it's using their own prior work to do so. That's just wrong to me on a very elemental level.

I would very much like to see a consensus that these images aren't welcome here, but that is really for The Traveler and other mods to agree on jointly. I would like to see this new lawsuit prevail and pave the way for others. I'd like to see Midjourney buried in court judgments, bankrupted and put out of business. And I'd like to see whatever AI 2.0 models that come afterward to be trained on images from the Public Domain only, then allowing artists to opt in if they like with compensation.

Would you say you still don't like the website scenario if the ai was trained on legally and ethically obtained art?

Thank you for answering though. Much appreciated.

I still wouldn't be crazy about machines replacing people and interfering with their livelihoods, but I would be less opposed to it, yes. The thing is, people like to say no no no, I fed my own art into Midjourney, so what came out is all my creation. It's not. There is no AI output without prior input. You may feed the machine your own art, but it's already been trained to draw from a massive, massive data set which consists of exclusively stolen material.

I think there is a degree of naïveté in uploading all your work onto the internet, to be honest. I realize some artists don't have control of who is putting their work where, so I can feel for that; total reliance on the internet for getting yourself "out there" though? ehh.. online commissions only as your source of income? is that really making a living off your craft? serious inquiries for those who really care about this. seems like most artists coming about in the information age have a fleeting quality anyway. chasing likes across media platforms, content for the sake of content-- a lot of this stuff was "disposable" to begin with. in the cases you (editorial) shared it, tough. this was always a possibility, right? you just weren't thinking about it.

a lot of the stuff you uploaded across platforms, was immediately owned in part by said platform anyway...

there's a degree of you-asked-for-it to this heated debate that I can't really ignore

also, admittedly, I am a bit of a luddite. I dislike AI; probably more than bill cipher. the legal shake out on all of this will be really entertaining either way it goes, you have to admit! big implications on the relationship with this technology we've blindly gone whole-hog with for just a few short years!

While parts of this are somewhat true, it's not really the point. It's about someone potentially making income from an AI piece they generated using someone else's custom made images, as well as simply using them in general without permission to make something "original." Should all the artists in which the AI copied not also be compensated?

And many did not opt in hence why so many online platforms now have opt-out options; people caused a stink because they didn't like it. However, many feel they need to move with the changing tide of the times (which is outside their control), and that happens to be technological and digital in this day and age. This leads to, for some people, necessity of things like the internet.

Again, it's an ethical concern that I don't feel should be shrugged off just because it's already here. So I congratulate and applaud whoever brought about the first lawsuit.

One love

I quit chat because of this. I can't be around all the pro AI sentiment. It is already hard enough trying to survive as a creative in a world where you make very little and that treats you as an expense rather than an asset. Now AI wants to take away the only good part of my job so that I can do more of the shit I don't want to do?!? AI was supposed to free up my time so that I could design more, not so I could design less and do the part of my job that absolutely sucks (if I even get to keep my job as AI takes over more)

Now I'm looking at a future where I'm not needed, and my job security is even more threatened.

Well by now I feel it's too late to stop it anyways. People have realized the full potential of AI and of course how much easy money is potentially to be made, by using it. It's just as much money in AI (if not more) as in the weapon, oil or pharma industry and humans tend to be greedy, milk things that bring money, forgetting any ethics.

I don't want to be part of this and might therefore limit my internet use to the absolute essential. Even if it means that I need to sacrifice things I concider important along the way.

I do not understand how people can be so enthusiastic about AI, celebrating giving away more than they are maybe aware of right now. Maybe it's the younger generation that grew up with tablets and smartphones that are more accepting/looking at it differently?

Yesterday I saw members of another forum being in awe about another side of AI. They asked it for medical advise and a trained nurse confirmed that the answers given by it were accurate. So it's not just art it's taking from us it's going to be present in all areas of life. I wonder what todays doctors say to tomorrows "AI hospitals".
Generally I think universities and degrees are going to be worthless. Why study anything if you can just lazily let AI take over the show.

I absolutely hate the thought that very soon we will watch movies, listen to music, get medical advice, etc all created by AI. There'sno soul in anything it creates.
Also look at how the masses get manipulated today already and now imagine how AI could help to control the masses. I am sure governments observe the developments in this field very closely.

I just had an idea for a children's book the other day. I put in a lot of time into drawing, so a little book might take me 6 months of work. I keep on thinking "what's the point" though, if we get flooded with AI stuff soon. Nobody will really be able to tell apart what's human made and what's AI made.

Sorry for the word salad above, but I kept it in for as long as I could. Also I just had my morning coffee.

Your discouraged Fridge

Nah, I don't think that for cinema and music that's a threat. They are arts that play with time, while painting is something immediate.
There have already been experiments with music, but they have always brought quite embarrassing results.


I don't think we should panic. Here we say "don't wrap your head before hurting it". Work, and do it because you love it. Then what will come, will come. In case, the book will be a little jewel that your son, grandson or who knows who will have.

I understand you well, and I know motivation is hard to have...but the essence of making art is not the potential for sales or appreciation. At least in pure theory.

I hope you are right Magma.

I just can't help to see the huge potential for missuse. I can imagine lot's of ways this technology being used in ways that it's not for the benefit or the interest of the average human being. But that's another topic...



I like that saying!
I am in a position where creating art isn't something I need to do to make a living (even though I wouldn't mind it). I agree with you, money shouldn't be priority, but rather a nice side effect. As soon as money becomes an artist's priority the quality of the outcome often seems to suffer.

The thing is, twenty years ago I couldn't have imagined what kind of technological goodies we will play around with in the future, but here I sit with this little computer in my hands. Twenty years isn't a long time. In the same way, shouldn't it be possible for AI to become advanced enough to write books or create movies? Maybe not tomorrow, but I don't think it's impossible for it to happen one day.
There's some kind of AI chat, which you can ask to write a poem for you for example. The outcome is not yet perfect, but it does what you ask it to do. It's the same chat people used to ask for medical advice, so you can ask it anything and you'll always get an answer.
I just know what lazy-teenage-me would have done back in school if I would have had access to such technology.

I don't know, but I am just very skeptical about this development.

I guess reading through the last couple of posts in both threads made me see things in a dystopian light.
I'll start with the book anyways, thanks Magma .

Fridge. A couple of points:

If you would have used the AI to generate homework for you, written stuff, as a teacher myself I would notice that ~3 sentences in and would fail you around the 10th sentence. People and kids in general will have a style, after reading a few of your work and homework I know if your brother or mom wrote that essay, let alone an AI lol
There are already tools that detect the AI generated text aswell.

As for the doctors part, I am baffled, truly. Living in an area where doctors are much needed, people die left and right and can not diagnose their illnesses because we lack proper equipment and manpower, such a thing would save lives and bring this place at least some stability on the healthcare. It feels alien yeah, but if it saves my child from cancer without causing any other trouble it's just a new penicilin in my books. It is prone to misuse and potentially government will not use it to help the people in need, then I don't know why we are talking about AI instead of the corruption that rules over us? Since they will do it with ai, and with everything else.

Also people are already writing open source AI programs and putting them out there. A lot of things online and in the coding world revolve around replicating pay to do things freely. I am using a linux myself, an open source Midjourney will eventually come out and in due time will be competing with the real deal. I am pretty confident in saying this.

Lastly, a lot of us do "care" about it. We just don't have the power to do anything about it. Let me be honest, last time I've logged in the midjourney discord there were over 8 million members. 700,000 online users. Not counting the bot that's invited (my friends group have a discord server, you can invite the midjourney bot and then don't have to log on their official discord server, so the 700k is the minimum, possibly 1million ppl using it right now.)
Try to think about that for another second. One million people, generating pictures, every god damned second, while you sleep, eat, do anything. In a minute they generate what, 100k? 50k? images???
The fk you want me to do? Me not using this thing does not matter the least. If everyone on the Nexus stops using it, and we completely ban it, it is still so insignificant it is absolutely not relevant at all.
And am saying this as someone who kinda wants to ban it from the Nexus, keeping the forums clean and ethical. Even if it wouldn't stop it, it would send the message to our users on where we stand in the world.
But in the world, it will not send no message. And not make no difference either.
No amount of hate, sadness or arguments on here will do anything to this. You'r best bet (afaik) is to ask the people who are openly attacking these corporations how you could help. Idk what teh legislation is, or what action who is taking, but thats the ppl you want to be talking to.
Honestly at this point, if you can make money out of it, you would be stuped not to do it. At least that's the world I'm coming from. And as soon as we can do something that really has an impact, let me know. If you dissagree with my points I'm willing to change them but right now this is basically how I see things unfolding. And it does make me sad, and scared too. It's just reality.

Of course I agree, and surely there's a lot we can't predict. But it's one thing to map pixels and colors onto something "on your face" like painting. It is an another thing to program a progression of images (acted by real human beings) put in a way that causes a particular emotion after 1 hour. It's not something that can be copied because I don't think there are AIs today that are able to feel emotions and therefore "understand and feel" a film. Just as they don't understand the meaning of a painting and what it wants to convey.


Let's say that it becomes very important for those who have to bring bread to the table...but from what I've seen, the artists who have really done something that goes beyond didn't give a damn about it, usually.


Finally some good news today! Thanks to you