I don't understand why everyone is all up and arms about Images / Art being generated by AI, but when it comes to code... well who cares? The people who made all the code training data are also getting nothing!
Potentially the one difference is that developers invented this and screwed themselves, whereas artists had nothing to do with AI.
You probably see that because many are low effort Reddit level comments. I’ve seen lots of long AI skeptic threads and people talking about the likely negatives of AI.
I tried setting showdead=yes but two comments I remember seeing earlier today (as replies to one of my comments) are still gone. Does anyone what else might have happened to them?
And I very much appreciate that feature, and hope it never changes.
However when I make comments here, I do it with the intention of reading what people have to say in response.
If I am making a comment with the intention to ignore the responses to it, then that’s a good signal for myself that what I am writing is likely not an appropriate comment for HN, and then delete it.
Personally I’d downvote these if not further substantiated. Flags are reserved for outright rage bait or personal insults for me.
At least I hope; can’t say I always perfectly follow “up/downvote doesn’t indicate (dis)agreement but rather contribution to the discussion” perfectly.
Maybe SWEs just can think better and see that there's nothing they can do, and to fight against this is useless. Artists still hope they can change this somehow, which is impossible, the people with money and datacenters want more money and don't really care about the people that are getting screwed over.
Just need to get AIs to purposely produce slop that has the trappings of quality to sabotage future AIs. Oh and write endless low quality PRs to all GitHub projects to build bad will.
> Potentially the one difference is that developers invented this and screwed themselves
Hopefully you mean developers invented this and screwed over other developers.
How many folks working on the code at OpenAI have meaninfully contributed to Open Source?
I agree that because it is the same "job title" people might feel less sympathy but it's not the same people.
If you look at my comment history (don't, you'll fall over from boredom), you'll see I'm also against that. I've researched and selected specific licenses for all the code I've open sourced, which is quite a lot, and the fact that massive companies can just ignore that with absolutely zero I can do about it really pisses me off! But at least I still get paid. The same can't be said about artists.
Customers usually can figure out when a product is shitty software, but shitty art, well that's a bit harder for people to judge.
Because code is fundamentally not a creative work the way art is. Code "just" has to be correct, even if that correctness has demanded to come up with ideas. And as a software developer you usually get paid a nice salary to write it, no matter if you're typing it yourself or generate it with an AI.
Art can't be generated. We can only generate artefacts mimicking art styles. So far we have no AI generated images that are considered actual Art, because Art's purpose is to express the artist's intent. And when there is no artist, there is no intent.
I have to stop now, but I guess you can see where I'm going with this.
Art can be generated perfectly fine. Only artists and connoisseurs care about details and art style. Most art is purchased by a business, and that business just wants a picture of a woman being happy next to a cake that looks similar enough to the other corporate pictures.
Code can be art the same way writing can be. There's a big difference between artistic code and business code, the same way there's a big difference between poetry and a comment chain on hacker news.
I don't mean to be mean, but I don't think you understand what Art is. For example, I don't consider a picture of a woman being happy next to a cake art. That's a decorative artefact. And I don't really consider myself a connoisseurs, nor do I particularly care about details or art style.
I'm not trying to be pretentious or precious about art. But I consider the process of creation to be as much a fundamental part of art as the resulting artefact. If I can't contextualize a work of art to a human's inner life - be it implicitly or through knowing about the artist - it's not really art to me.
Artistic code can be a work of art. But only if created by a human (in a way that humans make art), and I think the same principles should apply to it as any other medium of art. But that kind of code is so rare and insignificant compared to all other code being written and published, that I don't think it's worth watering down the discussion with it.
I would only consider AI generated output art, if the way to get there were a substantial artistic expression.
So I think visual arts and music fall in a different category because it's much more artistic, unconstrained, and personal by nature than code. Even if that difference sits on a spectrum. But on that spectrum they're worlds apart.
I struggle explaining my point of view better and hope I manage to get my point across at least to some extent.
Having said all that, I do consider training LLMs on other people's code without compensation wrong as well. Just not as wrong as I do with other stuff.
I don’t think that’s completely true, there is an art to code beyond it just being correct. There are a great many correct implementations of a program, but only some of them are really beautiful as well. Most people don’t see the code or appreciate this, but the difference between correct and art is clear to me when I see it.
Code can be beautiful or ugly but that doesn't make it art.
Art is not just about beauty, it is about expressing the mind (feelings, experience etc) of the author. AI will never do that (except if it learns to express its own experiences, which would be art, but not something competing with human art; it would be like if we had contact with alien art).
I think that's the main thing many people who've never seriously made art or aren't deeply involved with it on an emotional and psychological level are unable to grasp.
I think most of us agree that writing code can be expressive. But I don't think that alone qualifies you code as art.
I have written code myself that I deem beautiful and expressive. But I'm also a musician, and making music (and listening to it deeply) has given me such intense, mystic experiences, that they dwarf anything I've ever experienced writing code. It's also much harder to make good music because it requires a kind of courage and psychological constitution that is simply not required for writing code.
I respectfully disagree, I think code has always been more of an art than a science. It's an odd one, I'll grant you, as you need to do a lot of work to really appreciate it.
Just look at the latest policy for developing for the Playdate console. They explicitly banned AI generated art because they said it takes jobs away from artists, but in the same post said that AI code is allowed
There's a lot of detail lost when you collapse towards "everyone". Some portion of that set is not the same as the other part of it, but both make sounds.
People get up in arms according to what seems acceptable to be complaining about. Voices get amplified similarly.
And sometimes the people complaining about AI in art are completely different people from those that might do so about code.
It is the same thing. There is no good excuse to claim a defense or objection for one group of people and not apply that fairly to others. All that "is it art" discussion is just noise.
But then again maybe artists feel more vulnerable than coders. People generally don't hire coders for their output but more for what their output will do. Coders create and maintain a money printer. A successful artist will create an output that immediately becomes scarce and in-demand; the output is the money and the artist then becomes the money printer. It's not hard to see that one is under more immediate threat than the other. So they scream louder.
Just a bunch of thoughts. In good faith, take from it what you will.
Because artists generally own thier material (with exceptions at the very high end) whereas professional coders have generally abandoned ownership by seeding it as "work product" to thier employers. Copy my drawings and you steal from me, a person. Copy a bit of code or a texture pack from a game and you steal from whatever private equity owns that game studio. Private equity doesnt have feelings to hurt.
> Because artists generally own thier material (with exceptions at the very high end)
This has not been generally true IME. It follows the same pattern as code quite often.
When you pay an artist for their work, many times you also acquire copyright for it. For example if you hire someone to build you a company logo, or art for your website, etc the paying company owns it, not the artist.
In-house/employee artists are much more common than indies, and they also don't own their own output unless there's a very special deal in place.
That is a rarified high end, commissioned artists hired for a paticular task. The vast majority of artists do art without tasking and sell copies, a situation where no copyright moves. I have a Bateman print on my wall. I own the print, not the image. Bateman has not licensed anything to anyone, just selling a physical copy. So scraping his work into AI land is more damaging to him than to a coder who has already signed away most copy/use rights via a FOSS license.
> The vast majority of artists do art without tasking and sell copies, a situation where no copyright moves.
I suspect we may have different definitions of what constitutes an "artist". I include digital art in my definition, and your statement above definitely isn't true for that. Are you just talking about painters/sketchers/etc who are doing it by hand?
If so, limiting the definition to that doesn't make a lot of sense to me, especially given that AI isn't replacing those gigs. If somebody already creates analog art, I don't see AI as being that much of a change for them
Artist is everyone who creates copyrighted works. You, me, everyone with a camera. Everyone with a guitar who records. Digital art or paintbrushes, lines of code or lines in the next harry potter novel, it is legally all the same. The artist/creator gets total copyright, then either licenses those rights away or sells copies.
I even have rights over that pervious paragraph. It aint worth much but if someone wanted to monitize it i would have rights i could assert.
Heh, nice, your definition is even more broad than mine! Ok going by your definition (which I think is quite reasonable), I think we're close to agreement. Appreciate the discussion
Arent't the models trained on open source code though? In which case OpenAI et al should be following the licenses of the code on which they are trained.
Yup, but contributors to OSS have generally given away thier rights by contributing to the project per the license. So stealing from OS isnt as bad as stealing material still totally owned by an individual, such as a drawing scraped from a personal website.
From a common FOSS contributor license...
>>permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions...
... As opposed to a visual artist who has signed away zero rights prior to thier work being scraped for AI training. FOSS contributors can quibble about conditions but they have agreed to bulk sharing whereas visual artists have not.
No, contributors to FOSS generally do not give away their rights. They contribute to the project with the expectation that their contributions will be distributed under its license, yes, but individual contributors still hold copyright over their contributions. That's why relicensing an existing FOSS project is such a headache (widely held to require every major contributor to sign off on it), and why many major corporate-backed “FOSS” projects require contributors to sign a “contributor license agreement” (CLA) which typically reassigns copyright to the corporate project owner so they can rugpull the license whenever they want.
Stealing from FOSS is awful, because it completely violates the social contract under which that code was shared.
You're still mixing up contributor license agreements with the kind of arrangements where the copyright is actually transferred and assigned "away" from the creator to another copyright holder (generally a copyright assignment agreement). This is far less common than CLAs.
I don't know what you mean by a rugpull exactly, but of course in theory you can grant/obtain very extensive rights under a CLA as well, including eg the permission to relicense your contributions under whatever terms the licensee prefers. CLAs are a great way to centralize the IPR in an open source project for practical purposes like license enforcement, but in case the CLA terms allow it, the central governing entity could also obtain the right to switch the license even to a, say, commercial one. (Such terms would usually be a red flag for contributors though.) And in any case, that kind of CLA wouldn't still close off the code already released under the previous open-source license, and neither would it prevent you from licensing your own contributions under terms of your choice.
The whole point of software licenses is that the copyright holder DOESN'T change. The author retains the rights, and LICENSES them. So, in fact, no rights are given away, they are licensed.
It is still that person creation.
Not sure about American law, but AFAIR in my country you can't remove the author from creative work (like source code), you can move the financial beneficiary of that code, but that's it.
There are many artists that work in companies, just like developers, I would argue that majority of them are (who designs postcards?)
Potentially the one difference is that developers invented this and screwed themselves, whereas artists had nothing to do with AI.