NotAwfulTech

I'll quote the WP article:

Within a week of LLaMA's release, its weights were leaked to the public on 4chan via BitTorrent.

More of this, please.

I am buying it. I don't think @[email protected] is pro AI art, just that countermeasures like Glaze and Nightshade are not great either, and I agree.

Artists don’t care about this or need it to be.

I care about it. Some artists use Debian. Please don't shit on people who care about software freedom, even if you don't.

Making artwork unusable by exploitative machine learning models is cool and based, but using a proprietary tool that's itself made by from the same pool of exploited artists' work is less so.

@[email protected] can we ban the grifter?

corbin’s track record both on and off awful.systems indicates they aren’t any kind of grifter

in fact, myself and @[email protected] have previously had a conversation about this type of technology (Nightshade and Glaze) where I was initially quite excited about it, but David and others brought up a lot of the same points corbin did here. there were some very solid social points made around the tech too, beyond the licensing and technical points we’ve seen here — should we really be establishing the expectation that artists need to defend their work using this specific proprietary technology? that feels way too close to the bullshit the NFT grifters pulled, where artists could opt out of their work being stolen and sold as an NFT only by following a specific set of steps for each and every NFT market, which doesn’t work. this kind of tech also opens the door for rent-seeking; techniques like Glaze and Nightshade can be broken by changes to generative models, which would keep artists on a treadmill continually paying for the latest versions of these proprietary tools, or else. it feels rather like a protection racket run by whoever has the most access to the models — and that’ll always be the same assholes who run the generative AI.

so I ended up with the strong impression that this technology won’t make things better for artists and other folks who are being exploited by the AI industrial complex; that this might not be something with a purely technical solution. and I think I understand your strong reaction to some of the posts here, because that fucking sucks. there isn’t a clean engineering solution to this problem that my increasingly technofascist industry created, and when you grow up being told (by some of the same techfash fucks who’re now behind some of the worst use of technology I can think of) that all you do is engineering, it’s easy to feel helpless.

but we aren’t helpless. technofascism is structured to produce and exploit that feeling when it’s engaged with on a purely technical level, but the systems established by technofascism (LLMs, generative AI, cryptocurrencies, and others) are plainly ridiculous when viewed through any other lens. the technofascist goal isn’t to win on technical merit (there isn’t any), but to normalize ridiculousness. the only way I know to push back against that is social. on a small scale, that’s part of what sneering is — any asshole pushing this ridiculous shit should feel ridiculous doing it, as a lot of the crypto grifters felt when the public at large started sneering at crypto (thanks to the efforts of David, Amy, Molly, and many others). on a larger scale, we desperately need systemic change. as engineers, we’re constantly told we don’t need unions or solidarity, particularly with folks like artists who we’re told are unimportant. it is very intentional that attitudes like that enable technofascism.

if and when we have those social factors established, a version of these tools with less potential for exploitation might be worth considering. but I see it kind of like the relationship between fediverse software and its community — federation is generally a good thing, but it’s absolutely nothing (and would probably be a net negative) without posters who generally want the fediverse to be a cozy place to make good posts; the polar opposite of the utterly hostile commercialized thing the internet at large has become.

I don't care whether you agree with me. I do think it's quite interesting that my critique of the topic of your post has you replying with personal insults; I think that you've incorrectly assumed that I am one of the capitalists who build these models, rather than an anti-capitalist who encourages destroying corporations.

When this issue is finally settled by law, history will not look back well on you.

Who are you, Lars Ulrich? Copyright is not compatible with information theory, and so far, information theory has won every contest in the court of public opinion.

The point is to alter the economics …

Help defray or establish artists' funds. Help uncover and prosecute wage theft. Advocate for basic income. If your goal is to remunerate artists, then focus on the efforts which actually help them; don't support copyright, as it is neither designed nor implemented to help individual artists.

Shame on you …

Which one of us is defending a paper which explicitly offers itself as a way for Disney to protect art which it appropriated from artists?

I don't think they were defending ai necessarily, just saying they had objections to the specific technique used by these tools. I do think that not open-sourcing the thing is probably defensible given that it exists in an adversarial context, but the technical concerns are worth being aware of

Does any license slow you down

I certainly comply with software licenses so yes, that does slow me down. As they pointed out this precludes it from appearing in Linux distros and such.

Incidentally, I've gotten into very long and stupid arguments with people about Stable Diffusion's Definitely Not Open Fucking Source license.

I'll bite...

1. Why do argue is it okay to use this "poison pill" which was created using the same "stolen data" you are railing against and not other, more open, tools?

2. You underestime how much labor already goes into cleaning/filtering datasets, this does not change the economics nearly as much as you want it to. Do you not think there are any filters in place?

3. If you want to get into it everything in the modern world is built on labor exploitation. When this issue is finally settled by the law™ it will be in the favor of increased capital consolidation built upon the arguments and misinformation you are repeating. If the law™ expands copyright protections who do you think that benefits the most?

4. Your tone, lack of research into the topic, calling others grifters, and attempts to silence any contradictory viewpoints isn't great... Why are you having such a a visceral response to this topic and where do your talking points come from?

Oh, that sucks. That brings to mind an episode of the “mystery show” podcast where someone had a lunchbox with art based on the old sitcom “Welcome back, Kotter” that depicted some scene that seemed incongruous. The episode then went into a deep dive about the show, the show’s creator, the lunchbox company, associates of the now/then-deceased artist that designed the lunchbox, and many others, all to try and justify the existence of that seemingly incorrect design.

While I doubt that any significant number of people would ever investigate the design of merchandising like the above, it is nice to think about the stories behind objects. In the quest to make things cheaper to create, we lose stories like this, and the world gets a bit darker.