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petterroea 1 days ago [-]
> The timing wasn’t right. We depended on artists helping us to promote the platform, and they didn’t.
There's a certain arrogance to believing the timing "simply wasn't right". It looks really bad if you try it with any recent controversy:
* "The timing wasn't right to charge people for heated car seats"
* "The timing wasn't right to make Photoshop a subscription service"
* "The timing wasn't right to increase fees"
It's a way of talking yourself away from the fact that what you are making may, inherently, be disliked. The cited survey even seems to have been read as favourably as possible:
> Surveys consistently showed that consumers believed artists deserved payment when AI generated content in their style.
This doesn't mean people want artists style to be generated by AI. It could mean they think it's horrible, but if it happens they should at least be compensated for it. In fact, the quotes survey even says 43% believe companies should ban copying artists styles. I could make the exact opposite argument with the same data:
"Many consumers believe companies should ban copying styles, and this may be a more common opinion than measured as most people have no experience with modern AI tools and therefore no chance to have made an opinion yet. What is known is that the majority believe that if artists were to be copied, they should at least be compensated"
edit: formatting, typo
raincole 1 days ago [-]
Making Photoshop a subscription service was an extremely successful business decision, so I'm not sure what the comparison is supposed to mean here.
I say this as someone who switched to Krita and canceled CC subscription.
danlitt 1 days ago [-]
"extremely successful business decision" and "inherently disliked" can both be true. Increasing fees quite often works out for the business too, but consumers don't generally like it.
logifail 1 days ago [-]
> consumers don't generally like it
I'd prefer looking at what (potential) consumers actually do rather than what they say. "Saying" is a really weak signal.
NikolaNovak 1 days ago [-]
Yes, and, op's point stands.
I am one of those people: 1. Absolutely despise the lightroom being subscription and 2. Haven't switched yet.
There are moats and capabilities and friction. Not every vote with your wallet is a ringing endorsement. I have 15 years of lightroom databases over 100k photos so switching is hard. At the same time those are from the time I did a photography side gig, now I don't so monthly cost for no monthly gains really peeves me.
So it absolutely is a successful business decision and it absolutely is widely despised by customer base. Both are true :-)
SiempreViernes 1 days ago [-]
Ok mr sceptic, where are your numbers showing consumers buy more of a thing after it becomes more expensive?
logifail 1 days ago [-]
Was merely commenting on the observed preference vs stated preference issue (aka "the Say/Do Gap"), not the underlying point about raising prices.
isnxjsjdn 23 hours ago [-]
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skeeter2020 23 hours ago [-]
Apple has done pretty well historically walking the line between mass consumer and Veblen good. Without them I don't believe we'd see the same variety of high-end devices, they somehow convinced a lot of people that the price of a phone is a signal of it's value.
isnxjsjdn 23 hours ago [-]
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noosphr 1 days ago [-]
Enshificstion kills companies slowly, then all at once.
abustamam 24 hours ago [-]
I agree, to an extent. It reminds me of the Simpsons meme[1]: it's the children who are wrong!
But sometimes timing is indeed wrong, not because of anything you did, but just because no one wanted it _yet_. Google Glass from a few years ago comes to mind. Now Meta has a similar idea and it does seem successful, much to society's dismay.
But sometimes it is worth asking, "does the idea actually suck and that's why no one likes it? Or is it actually a good idea that is muddied with other issues that no one likes?"
The article doesn't make it clear that they were that introspective.
yeah I agree -- There are countless examples with almost every invention of someone else who got there first but couldn't market it successfully at least partially because of timing.
skeeter2020 23 hours ago [-]
For most examples you need to squint pretty hard to make them "the same" though. In a world of "x, but for y" these are essentially new inventions, it's only our human brains in hindsight that look for the continuity. It's also an interesting question to ask if you can really seperate the idea from the execution when defining an "invention".
pwillia7 22 hours ago [-]
fair point
Terr_ 1 days ago [-]
Speaking in generalities, we underestimate how many things fail due to circumstances like "the market wasn't read for it." (In contrast to the more dramatic and common "all great success stories are due to leaders singularly imbued with unique and ineffable Greatness and Genius.")
abustamam 1 days ago [-]
Yeah, ten or so years ago, Google glass flopped spectacularly. Now for whatever reason, Meta Raybans are actually somewhat successful, much to the world's dismay.
Bad timing can be to a number of factors, some can be good, some can be bad.
codechicago277 24 hours ago [-]
Google Glass looked dorky, Meta Ray-Bans look cool.
isnxjsjdn 23 hours ago [-]
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squidbeak 24 hours ago [-]
> What is known is that the majority believe that if artists were to be copied, they should at least be compensated.
I get the emotional side of this argument - artists going hungry while someone else cashes in on their ideas. But compensation is a dangerous premise, because derivative art is an established type of artistic freedom. Artists routinely mimic styles, or work within the bounds of styles established by masters, but they've never been expected to compensate those styles' pioneers. Imagine it as a precedent:
"Your stuff borrows from Warhol? Guess what buddy, you owe the Warhol estate x% of your sale."
Perhaps you're arguing things change when commercial interests are involved? But again, this has never been the case for advertising companies (with their hired artistic guns) or any kind of graphic design leaning on established artistic styles for effect and making a killing in the process.
In the case of AI, even if it has a commercial master, it seems much closer to the borrowing of an ordinary artist. It's a trained entity, with deep understanding of styles, capable of making new works. On top of that, it works under the instruction of a user with their own ideas, whose guidance is crucial in deciding the work's final state. The user is the artist here - like one of the visionaries who delegate the nitty gritty of production to helpers. In this case the helper is leased from the AI company, which is more like an agency supplying those helpers.
All in all it's hard to see how any compensation model wouldn't end up constricting the artistic freedom most of these artists depend on.
tartoran 23 hours ago [-]
You can’t derive works at scale manually. We’re talking about a machine here.
rickydroll 22 hours ago [-]
I suggest you look into the history of art, specifically how artists have operated studios or "factories" where apprentices produced replicas of the master's work. Modern artists have numbered prints, where they reproduce their work at scale to as a revenue source. Sol Lewitt produced instructions for his art, and people reproduce them as public murals all over the place. see: https://massmoca.org/event/sol-lewitt-a-wall-drawing-retrosp...
squidbeak 22 hours ago [-]
The 'machine' existed long before the AI companies in university art studies, galleries and republication, and the scale came from the graduates or ordinary acolytes borrowing wholesale the ideas and techniques they admired. Scale shouldn't alter the principle. Once there's a right to compensation established for derivation, you have to explain why it doesn't apply to the millions of artists making a living from exactly that.
isnxjsjdn 23 hours ago [-]
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codemog 1 days ago [-]
It’s not arrogant to be firm in your beliefs. You’re not arrogant for believing the timing is never right. You may even be 100% right, but you don’t have to belittle or put down the other side. In this case, they already lost, what more do you want?
petterroea 1 days ago [-]
How is it not arrogant to be firm in your belief, even if signals say otherwise? If I believe it is OK not to shower, and everyone around me complains about it, is it not arrogant of me to ignore the signals because "they just don't understand yet"?
I think a much more useful question is whether some arrogance is necessary to succeed. I personally think it is. But we are discussing a post mortem here, and the author is (in my opinion) clearly beating around the bush and using "the time wasn't right" to hide what may be uncomfortable truths.
Is a post mortem valuable if it doesn't address these face first? I am not the one with all the answers here, but what I am used to in mature tech teams is that the uncomfortable parts are usually the most important in any post mortem.
There are plenty of stories about companies that failed because the timing was wrong, and then see another company succeed in their place later on. That doesn't mean failure simply means "the timing was wrong" - you are putting a lot of weight on society adjusting to your belief. Consider that venture capital often invests in hundreds of founders like this, betting that at least one of them wasn't wrong. That's not statistically in your favor.
It is OK (in fact it is valuable) to fail and conclude that your signals may have been wrong. There's a reason some venture capital funds prefer investing in people who have failed before.
codemog 1 days ago [-]
Personally, I don’t know how you can say the timing was never right and will never be right at any point in the future. That frankly seems impossible, unless it was something like a B2B SaaS that gouges out your eyeballs, but I guess we’ll agree to disagree.
wolvesechoes 1 days ago [-]
> It’s not arrogant to be firm in your beliefs
I mean, if you keep ignoring stuff that undermines your beliefs that's the definition of arrogance.
antonvs 1 days ago [-]
If your beliefs are in conflict with reality, then holding them firmly may indeed be arrogant.
spudlyo 1 days ago [-]
> Surveys consistently showed that consumers believed artists deserved payment when AI generated content in their style.
It's interesting that "consumers" are generally for the expansion of IP laws. At at the moment, I'm fairly certain that "style" is not something protected by Copyright. I personally do not want this, and I'm sure there are likely many like me. Poorly thought out IP laws lead to chilling-effects, DRM, stupid and unnecessary litigation, and ultimately a loss of digital freedoms.
> What 325 Cold Emails to Artists Taught Us
I'm surprised 1% didn't respond with "EAT HOT FLAMING DEATH SPAMMER" for sending them unsolicited commercial email. ;)
Gigachad 1 days ago [-]
Trying to protect a particular style is just unworkable for obvious reasons. The only solution I can think of is requiring AI companies to license all of the content they have in their training set so artists get paid for the training rather than trying to work out which source material links to which outputs which is impossible.
spudlyo 1 days ago [-]
When I buy a book, I don't buy a license to read it, I don't sign an EULA that says I won't scan it, digitize it, or write a program to analyze the word frequencies it contains. Do you want buy a license to read a book, because this is how you get there.
tdb7893 1 days ago [-]
You don't sign an EULA saying you can't do those things because scanning then distributing is already prohibited by copyright. The way to start a license war is to keep the status quo of these companies being able to ingest and essentially reproduce human work for free. One of my big worries about AI is that it will accelerate companies locking everything down and hoarding their own data.
pastel8739 1 days ago [-]
I suspect it’s already has a dampening effect on individuals sharing. It leaves a bad taste in the mouth to know that anything you share intending to help fellow humans will immediately be ripped and profited from by companies that want to take your job and profit from it.
Gigachad 1 days ago [-]
The old rules were built on based on old capabilities and and old reality which no longer exists.
squidbeak 22 hours ago [-]
This is a deceptive line of dismissal. Sound principles needs to be figured out before imposing any kind of restriction on art - "things have changed" doesn't cut it.
Gigachad 15 hours ago [-]
Figuring things out is exactly what needs to happen. I think it is valid to dismiss arguments of “this is how copyright has always worked” when those rules were written before AI completely changed the game.
aerhardt 1 days ago [-]
In Spain books include a copyright notice explicitly prohibiting reproduction and digitalization and alluding to article 270 of the Spanish criminal code.
franciscop 1 days ago [-]
The book can say anything it wants, whenever it's true and/or applicable in court later on is a very different matter. Spain's SGAE is a very powerful lobby but still needs to follow the law.
Edit: haven't followed the law in a while, but you could definitely copy, digitalize and scan documents for yourself and your friends (copia privada).
aerhardt 1 days ago [-]
In Spain EULAs cannot infringe upon the law either.
throwawaysoxjje 1 days ago [-]
Of course you don’t, because it’s not the EULA that enforces the copyright. Copyright law is what enforces the EULA. It’s right there in the fact it’s a Licensing Agreement.
squokko 1 days ago [-]
The law has always been able to recognize a distinction between Hunter S. Thompson reading Ernest Hemingway and learning from his style and a billion GPUs reading a billion books to be able to produce it on demand. It takes time for the law to catch up to the technology but it will.
squidbeak 22 hours ago [-]
It's even worse than that. You then have to pay an additional fee to use its ideas as inspiration for your own book.
mitthrowaway2 1 days ago [-]
When I buy a patented product I don't sign an EULA that says I can't manufacture and sell a copy, but I still can't manufacture and sell a copy.
add-sub-mul-div 1 days ago [-]
Perhaps it's that the transaction for you, an individual not explicitly profiting from the work, should be treated differently than a corporation using a work solely to profit from it.
croes 1 days ago [-]
The problem isn’t the reading.
The problem is the output based on somebody’s other work.
There is a reason why we call it styles, because it’s a recognizable pattern someone came up with maybe after decades of work.
JAlexoid 1 days ago [-]
The "funny" thing is that we absolutely allow people to copy style... but somehow software isn't allowed to do that?
You don't even need to have a legally acquired source material to produce work in a certain style.
The new reality allows for original creators to actually track the chain, so we're in this situation.
croes 1 days ago [-]
If people would have the same mass output as software we wouldn’t allow that too.
If one or two people take an apple from your tree it’s not a big deal, if a machine takes 10,000 it is.
esafak 1 days ago [-]
It is not an individual buying the book but a corporation, with the purpose of being able to create imitations of it, and all other books.
saaaaaam 1 days ago [-]
Copyright quite literally protects the act of copying or reproducing a work protected by copyright. And you are technically entering into something akin to an end user licensing agreement when you buy a book, the only difference being that the EULA is incorporated into law on an international basis through reciprocal copyright treaties.
So if scan a book you are making a copy. In some copyright jurisdictions this is allowed for individuals under a private copying exception - a copyright opt out, if you like - but the important thing is private use. In some jurisdictions there is also a fair use exception, which allows you to exploit the rights protected by copyright under certain circumstances, but fair use is quite specific and one big issue with fair use is that the rights you are exploiting cannot result in something that competes with the original work.
Other acts restricted by copyright include distribution, adaptation, performance, communication and rental.
So if you copy a book, digitize it, and write a program to analyze the word frequencies it contains you may, in some jurisdictions but not all, be allowed to do this.
If you’re doing it locally on your own machine you are simply copying it. If you do it in the cloud you are copying it and communicating the copy. If you copy it, analyze it and train an AI model on it that could be considered fair use in certain jurisdictions. Whether the outputs are adaptations of the training data is a matter of debate in the copyright community.
But importantly if you commercialise that model and the resulting outputs compete with the copyright protected material you used to train, your fair use argument may fail.
So when you buy a book you are actually party to what is effectively a licence granted by the copyright holder, albeit it to the publisher. But as the end user of the book you are still restricted in what you can do with that copyright protected work, through a universal end user licence encoded in law.
numpad0 1 days ago [-]
The cumulative license fees required to properly compensate all artists is so absurd that it will probably genuinely burn down the entirety of global economy if paid. The only solution I can think of is to burn down just the AI to be revisited later to be rebuilt as a tool that won't require absurd amount of training data, that also leave a lot more to its human operator beyond merely accepting literal categorical descriptions that are fundamentally tangential to artistic values of outputs.
And I think same could happen to LLM. If it took all the fossil fuel on Earth just to barely able to drive a car to a car wash, there's more things wrong with the car than in the oil price.
Retric 1 days ago [-]
> is so absurd that it will probably genuinely burn down the entire global economy if paid.
Where did you get that idea. Global economy is ~200T/year PPP. 0.1% of that split across every artist you want the training data from would be insanely difficult for the vast majority of them to turn down. Which makes sense as art isn’t that big a percentage of the global economy compared to say housing, food, medical care, infrastructure, military spending etc.
Obviously the incentive to take without compensation is far more appealing, but that doesn’t mean it was impossible to make a reasonable offer.
bjterry 1 days ago [-]
For all the people represented in the training data to receive royalties would be an incredible wealth transfer to the Extremely Online. My forum posts, StackOverflow answers etc are also contributing to the model outputs. The training data, by volume, mostly belongs to blog authors, redditors, Wikipedia editors, to us!
nneonneo 1 days ago [-]
The people in that counting to infinity subreddit would get compensated a lot if this were fully automated - their posts were so overrepresented in the training set that many of their usernames became complete tokens (e.g. SolidGoldMagikarp).
Retric 23 hours ago [-]
I object to calling people chatting online artists.
However, ultimately nobody is going to pay them more than the value of their posts to the AI company which puts a severe cap on what that’s actually worth. People who post a great deal of online content might be worth compensating a few thousand dollars, but it would be hard for them to then turn that down.
numpad0 20 hours ago [-]
I think the lower bounds of someone signing away rights to their whole art portfolio is more towards $1m than few thousands. Few k is just a month's salary that they can "make" themselves. Offers that small would be almost off-putting.
Retric 20 hours ago [-]
That would be true if they gained the exclusive ability to reproduce works etc.
AI companies want a license to train not ownership of a portfolio.
abustamam 1 days ago [-]
Hey finally my reddit and hn habit can be lucrative!
numpad0 21 hours ago [-]
There are definitely >1m artists worldwide, some popular some less so, and $1M * 1m =1T, not 0.1% * 200T =200B.
Hard cap of 200B divided by 1M equals 200k, and that would be sure more reasonable, but we aren't hearing artists responding favorably to hypotheticals in that range, so I'm skeptical that "ain't nobody gonna turn that down".
Retric 20 hours ago [-]
This isn’t ownership it’s a license.
I think the vast majority would agree to let AI companies train on their art for 10k let alone 200k. Don’t forget the average global salary is way below what you see in the US.
Put another way how many people would turn down 6+ months salary. Of course the vanishing tiny percentage people care about would want more, but that’s a separate question and not particularly valuable to AI companies.
numpad0 18 hours ago [-]
> Put another way how many people would turn down 6+ months salary.
Didn't that exact social experiment took place in the US last year? I thought the result of that was disastrous if media reports are to be believed.
OTOH I remember creator of Wordle closed the "low few mil" deal instantly, so I do believe it unlikely that people turn down few _hundred_ months worth of salary. But those artists are not from regions with 50-100x less median income and/or wider income distribution relative to US - I think they're concentrated in relatively high-income-low-disparity regions - so I don't think there's backwater wherever that lifetime income there is equivalent to no more than 6 months worth in US that has abundant supply of artists.
And IMO those artists are basically engaged in a geo-scale dumping of media contents. It's the same phenomenon as how moving consumer electronics manufacturing to US instantly multiply costs by small integers instead of just incurring premiums in percentages. If that phenomenon were to be quenched and those effects were integrated into economy anyhow, that will change the global balances of power to some statistically significant degrees, like, we'd be seeing flying rocket amphibian McBoatfaces everywhere. That might be interesting, but I'm not sure if that's an interesting kind of an interesting thing to see.
Retric 18 hours ago [-]
Wordle involved actually selling the rights to something not just allowing AI to be trained on it while he kept the website.
That’s really not a reasonable comparison to what is being sought.
As to global artists, I was suggesting the majority of artists globally make ~20k USD or less per year as artists. To get to millions of artists you need to use a generous definition, so now Hollywood is full of actors how many of them made 20+k last year as an actor? If you disagree fine let’s double it and 6 months salary is still only 20k and would I suspect be a seriously tempting offer when you retain all rights to past and future works.
palmotea 1 days ago [-]
> The cumulative license fees required to properly compensate all artists is so absurd that it will probably genuinely burn down the entirety of global economy if paid.
That's kind of an interesting concept: "since the scale of my transgression was so big, I should get away with it scot-free."
nickff 1 days ago [-]
That’s how eminent domain and regulatory takings work in most countries.
franciscop 1 days ago [-]
"If it took all the fossil fuel on Earth" What do you mean? To TRAIN an LLM model it takes roughly the same amount of energy as to raise a person, so it's not even really expensive in energy costs.
JAlexoid 1 days ago [-]
> I'm fairly certain that "style" is not something protected by Copyright
To a degree it is protected, but not by copyright. Design patents are a thing and companies have sued each other over them (Apple vs Samsung during the "smartphone wars" comes to mind)
abustamam 1 days ago [-]
Just out of curiosity, do you believe artists deserve to be compensated when their art is used to generate stuff in their style?
I'm staunchly against expansion of IP laws. But I personally think that when a corporate machine gobbles up an artist's works so that people like me who can't draw can generate silly memes for a few bucks a month, the artist should be compensated. The company is profiting off of other people's work! That's not right.
The mechanism by which compensation is calculated appears to be an unsolved problem currently though.
csallen 1 days ago [-]
> The company is profiting off of other people's work! That's not right.
What's wrong with it?
We live in an interconnected world. Every company or individual who profits off anything does so, in very large part, thanks to work left behind by others that they don't directly compensate each other for.
Stated differently, if we look at the other side of the coin, it's one thing to create value, and another thing to capture value. If you are a business (and artists seeking profit are businesses), you create value then try to capture that value. Creating value and trying to capture (in the form of profit) is the entire name of the game. But no business captures 100% the value they create. If you make a product/artwork/service/whatever and release it to the public, lots of people may use it, view it, be inspired by it, learn from it, and ultimately profit off it in their own way without you necessarily being able to capture some part of it. And what's wrong with that?
Do we really want the entire world to be endlessly full of cookie-licking rent seekers who demand profit every time anyone does anything? Because they failed to capture the value they created, and thus demand a piece of the pie from those who are better at capturing value?
I like the way Thomas Jefferson put it:
> If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea.
sciencejerk 1 days ago [-]
Do we really want the entire world to be endlessly full of cookie-licking rent seekers who demand profit every time anyone does anything? Because they failed to capture the value they created, and thus demand a piece of the pie from those who are better at capturing value?
The starving artists I know would be extremely happy to get even one cookie to lick. I know an artist prodogy that paints on canvas and has work in a sizable gallery, at least one institution patron, and is constantly hosting paid workshop events. He architected and built his own custom 40ft ceiling pine art house covered in beautful stained wood and arches, with large metal cuttings and engravings of wild horses on the railings. This artistic prodigy is still starving and works as a handyman/construction worker part-time. He is strongly opposed to AI, by the way.
Most artists are "starving artists"; there are extremely few artists that can support themselves by their creations alone. Many artists make no money at all, and many artists seem to work or create alone as individuals, meaning that they almost always lack the funds or community resources to protect their creative work.
pastel8739 1 days ago [-]
> Do we really want the entire world to be endlessly full of cookie-licking rent seekers who demand profit every time anyone does anything?
No, far better that we have four rent-seekers who gobble up everything that anyone is naive enough to share with the world, then turn around to demand profit in order to keep up with the new pace of the world that they’ve created.
JAlexoid 1 days ago [-]
But original artists being rent-seekers is OK, right?
PS: I categorically disagree that AI developers are rent-seekers, unless they require rent for the products their models generate
abustamam 1 days ago [-]
Uh, is there an AI developer that does not charge for their services that I don't know about? I'd love to use that one.
JAlexoid 1 days ago [-]
Charging for a service isn't rent-seeking.
JoshTriplett 1 days ago [-]
I'd love to see copyright abolished. As long as it continues to exist, however, AI should not get an exemption; that would directly advantage a few large companies over everyone else, giving them a special privilege to violate licenses that nobody else gets.
abustamam 1 days ago [-]
Yeah, that is true. I'd be on-board with abolishing copyright then.
onion2k 1 days ago [-]
It's interesting that "consumers" are generally for the expansion of IP laws. At at the moment, I'm fairly certain that "style" is not something protected by Copyright. I personally do not want this, and I'm sure there are likely many like me. Poorly thought out IP laws lead to chilling-effects, DRM, stupid and unnecessary litigation, and ultimately a loss of digital freedoms.
Kapwing is specifically designed for artists to share IP with other people in an IP-friendly and financially profitable way. A 'consumer' on Kapwing is not the same as an ordinary person browsing for AI generated art, and the fact that people who make money from selling their IP on there are in favour of expanding IP law shouldn't be a surprise.
All this really tells us is that Kapwing's artist community believe protecting their individual art style is more valuable to them than any money they'd earn from licensing it on a per-image basis to Kapwing's AI tool. I'd be willing to bet that if Kapwing changed the offer to a flat-fee-of-$50,000-a-year-plus-per-image-fee they'd find 99% of artists on there changed their minds. As with most things, people feel strongly about their rights all the way up until the price is right.
maplethorpe 1 days ago [-]
It's interesting you interpret the consumer's response as a desire for the expansion of IP laws. As an artist whose work exists in many of these training sets, I'm of a different opinion: IP laws can stay the same, but they should have purchased a license to use my art before including it in their training data.
Since the didn't, they should go to jail. The same way I would have gone to jail if I built Sora in my basement and sold it to the public.
JAlexoid 1 days ago [-]
As an artist your license didn't ban learning from your work. Unless your content was acquired without a license at all - you absolutely gave them permission to use it in training sets.
That is the gap in the legal landscape.
maplethorpe 1 days ago [-]
No I didn't. It's use in a software product without my permission. That's never been allowed.
Just because you obfuscate what's happening by calling it "learning" and pretending your model is actually just looking at pictures the same as a human, doesn't make it true.
JAlexoid 1 days ago [-]
Unfortunately you did grant that permission. Once you granted the permission for someone to hold a copy, they have the permission to process it.
I can assure you, that you didn't grant a license with an exclusive list of operations that can be performed on your work of art. At best you may have had something like "no commercial use" clause and general broad terms.
visarga 1 days ago [-]
I thought it was at most a monetary fine, do people go to jail for copyright infringement? But you seem to want to own all the air around your work, the ground beneath it too. Nothing can exist around it, so a creative person would do better to avert their eyes rather than loading useless ideas. Why should I install in my brain your "furniture" when I am not allowed to sit on it? In these cases I think authors provide a net negative to society by creating more works that further forbid others from creating in the same space.
Here, for example, any comment is open to read and respond to. On ArXiv any paper can be downloaded, read and cited. Wikipedia contains text from many thousands of editors, building on each other. We like collaboration more than asserting our exclusivity rights. That is why these places provide better quality than work for direct profit or, God forbid, ad revenue, that is where the slop starts flowing.
protocolture 1 days ago [-]
>IP laws can stay the same, but they should have purchased a license to use my art before including it in their training data.
But including your art in the training data is fair use (or otherwise exempt) by most standards, as no reproduction occurs. You are advocating for a change to IP law to make it more restrictive.
JoshTriplett 1 days ago [-]
> But including your art in the training data is fair use
The four factors of fair use in the US:
> the purpose and character of your use
Commercial, for-profit. Not scholarship, not research, not commentary, not parody, etc.
> the nature of the copyrighted work
Absolutely everything. Artistic, creative, not purely factual.
> the amount and substantiality of the portion taken, and
All of it, from everyone.
> the effect of the use upon the potential market.
Directly competing with those whose data was copied.
rcxdude 1 days ago [-]
3 and 4 are what that argument is based on, I believe. 3) on the basis that the output is not _reproduced_, and 4) on similar grounds that output that's just not at all the same as the input data isn't affecting the market for the original image (I think this is the more debatable one, but in general the existing cases have struggled at the early stages because the plaintiffs have not been able to actually point to output that is a copy of their part of the input, and this does actually matter).
oreally 1 days ago [-]
> the amount and substantiality of the portion taken, and
> All of it, from everyone.
Yea I'd like to see how drawing two circles violates the copyright of drawing one circle!
abustamam 1 days ago [-]
Fair use by most standards? Which standards are those? I don't think a standard about training an AI on billions of images exists.
protocolture 15 hours ago [-]
Google scrapes the entire internet to generate a searchable index of the internet. But the resulting search engine is only infringing where it reproduces entire copies of scraped news articles and images. Both places where they have been put back in their place through legal means.
Like LLM's, it retains the produced index but not the original data.
The big concern is whether producing an LLM is competing with artists directly, but as artists dont make LLMs, this seems to be consistently ruled as non competing.
abustamam 7 hours ago [-]
I don't quite follow. People don't go on Google and search for midieval history and pretend they wrote the Wikipedia article on it because they found it on Google.
People _do_ use LLMs to make art in someone else's style (knowingly or unknowingly) and claim it as their own creation.
Also, I wouldn't say the creators of LLMs are competing with artists. The users of LLMs are. Arists don't make LLMs, they make art, and people who use midjourney and such make art.
But I'd argue that creators of LLMs are still liable for the harm people cause using their tools. Perhaps not legally, but certainly ethically.
oreally 1 days ago [-]
By the same 'transformative' standards that allow satire, reaction and commentary videos to exist. And those take 100% from the source and add context, whereas good generated AI images that aren't wholesale copying take like less than 10% from the original source.
In addition, the idea that you need to pay rent on *your observation* of someone else's work is absurd. No one pays Newton's descendants for making lifts or hosting bungee jump sport activities.
maplethorpe 1 days ago [-]
> good generated AI images that aren't wholesale copying take like less than 10% from the original source.
So would the model work if it only trained on the top 10% of pixels in every image? Or do they in fact need the entire image before they begin processing it, and therefore use the entire image?
> In addition, the idea that you need to pay rent on your observation of someone else's work is absurd.
I agree that's absurd. But training a model is no more "observing images" than an F1 car is "walking" down a race track. Just because a race car uses kinetic energy, gravity, and friction to propel itself, the same way a human does, doesn't mean it's doing the same thing as a human. That comparison you're making is the real absurdity.
oreally 23 hours ago [-]
> So would the model work if it only trained on the top 10% of pixels in every image? Or do they in fact need the entire image before they begin processing it, and therefore use the entire image?
The model works by training on what features humans can make sense out of the image they're presented with, if the image and the observations of the image's feature were clear/observable enough. Then the generation makes use of those observations. I'm just using 10% as an arbitrary number to describe proportions. If the generation were 100% of the observations from the same image, the model would be overfitting, and many would have deemed it to have produced a copy.
> Just because a race car uses kinetic energy, gravity, and friction to propel itself, the same way a human does, doesn't mean it's doing the same thing as a human.
WTF does this even mean? A race car uses concepts from Newton, just as how a human uses gravity to train it's muscles to move be it knowingly or unknowingly. But you don't see them (car makers/humans) paying rent to Newton after he discovered gravity. Come on!
tovej 1 days ago [-]
Is it transformative if I take all the pages in Hanya Yanagiharas A Little Life and use a thesaurus to change every second word?
Or a more realistic scenario: what if I translate it to Spanish without license from the author? That's not allowed, and yet I have "transformed" the work in the same way that an LLM does.
protocolture 14 hours ago [-]
If I buy a book entitled "How to make a table" and then make a table, the author does not own the table I made.
If I buy a book and use it to prop up a table, the author likewise does not own the table, or any works I undertake on that table.
If I buy a book and rip out the pages to make a collage, the US is the only legal jurisdiction where I run even slight risk of civil penalties.
An LLM is downstream of a book. Using a book to make an LLM does not confer any rights or privilges towards the LLM on the original author, just as using a hammer or nails dont permit the hammer or nail manufacturers any royalties on what I make, even if I build a hammer making machine with them. Theres no right to the works of people who build on your work without reproducing your work, at least outside of strict copyleft.
Its like demanding a cut from people who learned how to use photoshop by watching your photoshop tutorial youtube videos.
This is why the most successful cases against LLMs have been on the "Did they purchase the book" side of the fence, and not on the "What did they do with it" outside of the one case, where the legal company tried to use the LLM to 1:1 reproduce the content they had a limited license to, but thats obviously a no go and they should have known better.
oreally 1 days ago [-]
These are my opinions ofc.
> Is it transformative if I take all the pages in Hanya Yanagiharas A Little Life and use a thesaurus to change every second word?
If you meant it literally.. I'd think that such a version would be a sort of parody. It'd be up to lawyers doing their cross-examinations to prove the work was intended for such a purpose though..
> Or a more realistic scenario: what if I translate it to Spanish without license from the author? That's not allowed, and yet I have "transformed" the work in the same way that an LLM does.
Probably a lawyer would answer this better than me, but the 'content' is the same and would violate copyright. There's also other factors, like if it was translated/distributed for free.
Besides that I regard that LLMs to hold mathematical observations in contrast to a translated work. So long as the user ensures the output isn't close to what's already available imo it fits the transformative criteria.
tovej 6 hours ago [-]
You cannot claim that a formulaic thesaurusing of a text is parody, not unless the process is related to the message of the original text itself. Even then, that's a dubious claim. Especially if it was done automatically.
I can just as well say that a translated work contains "linguistic observations". In fact a translator has to do a lot of transformative work in order to translate a text.
An LLM just takes a set of texts, looks at n-gram distributions, and generates similar text. It is quite literally a fuzzy way of copying. There aren't any mathematical observations in the output. Any math (statistics) is done in the copying process.
oreally 3 hours ago [-]
> You cannot claim that a formulaic thesaurusing of a text is parody, not unless the process is related to the message of the original text itself. Even then, that's a dubious claim. Especially if it was done automatically.
Oh even if it's not a parody it would look transformed enough that a first-time reader would be getting a completely different interpretation of the story* compared to the original source. And that's all that matters.
> There aren't any mathematical observations in the output. Any math (statistics) is done in the copying process.
Wrong. Weights, which these models comprise of, are literally numbers to an extensive mathematical equation.
> It is quite literally a fuzzy way of copying.
And no one knows/there is no consensus on what a 'fuzzy way of copying' is. It is either copying or it is not. You could say that training an LLM is abstracting and integrating various text into it's weights, hereby transforming the source material and again transforming it a second time via integrating it into its weights.
heavyset_go 1 days ago [-]
No precedent has been set when it comes to training and fair use
throwawaysoxjje 1 days ago [-]
Which case decided that?
bluefirebrand 1 days ago [-]
> But including your art in the training data is fair use
It shouldn't be!
protocolture 14 hours ago [-]
Why? I dont undertand this take at all.
j16sdiz 1 days ago [-]
> It's interesting that "consumers" are generally for the expansion of IP laws.
It's not. This total depends on how you ask it.
Q: Do you think artists deserved payment?
A: YES.
Q: Will you pay for art?
A: MAYBE.
Q: Do you think people should go to jail not paying for art
A: NO.
fennecfoxy 1 days ago [-]
Yeah as a furry (exposed to commission scene a lot) the number of commissions available for "Disney" or "Pixar" or whatever style art even before the whole AI era really tells you that they're hypocrites.
NateEag 24 hours ago [-]
As others have pointed out in this discussion, there's a big difference between some humans producing drawings in a given style and a machine producing millions of illustrations per day in that style.
I have rarely been as disheartened as I am by the transformation of Studio Ghibli's beautiful art style, painstakingly developed over decades, into a heap of slop-trash that actively erases the human connections so artfully depicted in Hayao Miyazaki's work.
All that sorrow and it's not even my style.
So, no - a human who's willing to draw an illustration in a particular style, perhaps one they live and admire, is not necessarily a hypocrite for seeing genAI's ability to produce billions of images in that style.
AnthonyMouse 1 days ago [-]
> It's interesting that "consumers" are generally for the expansion of IP laws.
Don't forget how polling works. Change the wording of the question and you get a different answer.
Try asking them if they think Comcast or Sony should be able to sue individuals for posting memes that don't even contain any copyrighted material.
SpicyLemonZest 1 days ago [-]
I don't think you can infer consumer positions on IP law from positions on who ought to get paid or how much they should be paid. Many of those same consumers, and indeed many of the artists, feel that fan art of your favorite characters should be legal and unrestricted so long as nobody's making too much money off of it.
spudlyo 1 days ago [-]
You're right. It's wrong to think that all of those people are busy writing to congress demanding new laws be enacted. The problem is, the vast majority of people (while possessing a vague sense of right and wrong) do not understand how IP law works, and what the tradeoffs vis-a-vis the public good are. I'm sure many among the supposed consumers in this survey think something akin to "there ought to be a law" -- a sentiment somtimes echoed by readers of this very forum.
gedy 1 days ago [-]
Yes this is where I fear big corps leverage hate for AI into adding even more nonsense copyright rules like protecting "style" which has never been under copyright in the US at least. Not defending AI scraping and training! But this will be abused even if no AI is involved.
ptmkenny 1 days ago [-]
I evaluated Tess.design about a year ago for an app I was building. At first I was excited because I wanted a service that compensated artists. However the number of artists was very limited and the blog post said “more will be added soon” but it had already been a year and it seemed like none had been added, not a good sign.
Then I tested out the image generation itself and I was unable to come up with prompts that achieved the kind of images I wanted. My only prior experience at the time was OpenAI API. With OpenAI I usually got what I wanted on the first or second try, but with Tess, I couldn’t get a usable result even after 20 tries.
So in addition to the limited number of artists, I think the quality of outputs vs. competing models was a huge factor. I needed to generate thousands of images, so I couldn’t afford to do dozens of attempts for each one.
Hopefully one day there will be a service that can match the quality of OpenAI Image API and Flux but with compensation for artists.
abustamam 1 days ago [-]
Yeah this just shows that ergonomics matters. I use Nano Banana and Grok Imagine to generate silly images for my friends and siblings (instead of reaction gifs I do reaction slop). The workflow is quite easy. Just plop in a prompt and usually the first image is good enough to share. Not that my standards are high anyway.
Would I pay extra to ensure that the artists that these models were trained on were compensated fairly? Absolutely! Would I pay extra for that but with degraded ergonomics? Given that this is just a silly hobby, probably not, if I'm being honest.
I think if that problem can be solved, and it's marketed to the correct group, a player in this space could certainly do well.
JAlexoid 1 days ago [-]
Most people can't even imagine the complexity it would require to actually build a system that correctly tracks down the sources for image generation.
Not to mention that each image is generated from literally every single training image in a very small percentage.
It's not hard when someone inputs "create in style of studio ghibli" to say that studio Ghibli should get a cut. It's very different when you don't specify the source for the origin style.
And if you tried to identify the source material owner, the percentage of the output image that their work contributed to would be extremely - if not infinitely - small. You'd get minuscule payouts.
5 hours ago [-]
abustamam 1 days ago [-]
Most people can't even imagine the complexity required to build an LLM. But here we are.
We throw plenty of smart people at plenty of hard ideas. If a company really wanted to, they would find a way to make this feasible.
JAlexoid 1 days ago [-]
Funny thing is that building an LLM isn't as complex as you might think.
But the problem of attribution is easily understandable to any human with a modicum of intelligence.
Imagine that you have a trillion input images, with every single one having a source associated.
When training they go through lots of processes and every single image contributes a varying degree to a subset of 8billion parameters. That alone would produce a dataset that is 1T * 8B to just say how much a particular image contributed to the output...
To mimic intelligence the output is also randomized - the association is not static and every single pixel in the output has it's own lineage.
So as you can probably imagine that to calculate the actual source weights on the output you'd require to do at least 8e+21 calculations per output pixel... and require double precision floating point while you do it.
We know how to do it. It's just ridiculously expensive.
(The above example is for demonstrative purposes only)
abustamam 1 days ago [-]
Insults aside, you chose a very expensive way to solve the attribution problem. But my rebuttal is simple: we are literally commenting in a thread about an AI image generator that paid people. It didn't work, but if a company I've never heard of can try an experiment like this, I'm sure our billion dollar AI overlords could if they wanted to.
nakedgremlin 1 days ago [-]
I thought this was a great write up on the current state for artists and AI engines. I'm honestly surprised by this nugget:
> A free Tess subscription to use their own model for brainstorming and scaling repetitive work (roughly 1 in 4 artists took advantage of this)
So based on the math I'm seeing... the 21 artists in the system, only 5 ("1 in 4") optioned to use the tool for their own productivity? That seems really low and makes me wonder what the user experience for creation feels like. I would assume if you decided to commit to this endeavor, you would want to see what derivative results will look like.
sciencejerk 1 days ago [-]
Only 21 artists??
supermatt 1 days ago [-]
> …every image was traceable to a single consenting artist
> …fine-tune a Stable Diffusion base model.
So your entire business proposition was a lie, as you literally used a base model trained on billions of images by other artists too!
kennywinker 1 days ago [-]
They took a base model, so something trained on stolen work - and then added a vaneer of non-stolen work. I too would be skeptical of their legal position.
iso-logi 1 days ago [-]
I believe a service like this could succeed if the initial base model wasn't Stable Diffusion and wasn't trained internet scrapes without the copyright permissions.
Their solution basically just amounts of "Ethically sourced Styles" which still has all the red tape that a normal text2image model has because majority of the data is still unapproved for use in an AI model.
Businesses didn't want to get wrapped up in a pesudolegal model that really has no better legality than base SD.
protocolture 1 days ago [-]
They took a base model, trained on but not reproducing work, so entirely fair with no theft, and then tried to tweak it so it could make money for an artist.
kennywinker 1 days ago [-]
Except that as soon as it is used to create work, it’s reproducing work that is derived from what it was trained on. Not just the stuff it was TUNED on or asked to derive style from.
protocolture 15 hours ago [-]
Its derivative but not to any infringing extent.
Timwi 5 hours ago [-]
Are you a lawyer? If not, you can't make that assertion with that level of confidence.
peyton 4 hours ago [-]
As somebody who occasionally votes for laws I’ll make whatever assertions I want with whatever confidence I want. Lawyers are for legal advice, which isn’t what’s being discussed AFAICT.
ocdtrekkie 1 days ago [-]
If anything the legal position is probably the opposite: The law is leaning towards AI training being transformative/fair use and AI generated content not getting any copyright protection at all. So something paying artists for style-rips probably was a net positive for artists, because it's very possible it will end up outright legal to have gen AI
rip off artists' styles wholesale.
kennywinker 1 days ago [-]
In which case they would have zero business model.
Kim_Bruning 1 days ago [-]
Cite one legal case where an AI company trained on a particular work, and the judge ruled that they quote-stole it-unquote.
kdheiwns 1 days ago [-]
Courts pretty much always rule in favor of rich corps that steal from individuals, and increasingly so. AI companies have money. Artists don't. That makes AI thievery fine, doubly so since AI corps have financially contributed to the government.
Kim_Bruning 20 hours ago [-]
Look, you've made a closed argument. Now if I mention small labs or floss projects that got litigated against, first I'd need to 'stop beating my wife'.
No one is stealing anything. It's not theft. There has been no crime. None of this is anywhere near criminal law.
I could make a more nuanced argument on copyright infringement. But to make that steelman, I'd need to accept a too large overton window shift, so I'll decline to do so here.
kdheiwns 19 hours ago [-]
It can output books verbatim. It often "mistakenly" embeds watermarks from famous artists into generated pictures. Arguing that it's not stealing because a bought and owned legal system, which worked at a glacial pace even before it was completely bought off, isn't theft just because a law doesn't exist yet is silly. It's analogous to saying that dumping uranium and blowing up nukes everywhere in the 1940s and 1950s was great and non-polluting because there wasn't a law against it and nobody is being hurt (and cancer takes a while to develop, so nobody can prove their cancer was from nukes nearby). People argued back and forth back in the day about it. Now we realize that waiting for laws was dumb because it was pretty obviously bad not just in retrospect, but at the time. AI makes shoddy copies of good stuff. It pollutes the internet in ways that'll outlive us, just like a nuke does to the world. And it's pure cancer.
Timwi 5 hours ago [-]
You missed Kim’s point entirely. The point was that the term “stealing” is simply the wrong term. I agree with the rest of your argument, but we really really need to stop calling it “stealing”. That really doesn't help anyone.
Kim_Bruning 19 hours ago [-]
Nope. Besides not stealing, it's also not nuclear proliferation, cancer, or pollution either. Nor are courts ever likely to call it that. Not even if the defendant is a poor European student. Especially not if the court is actually clean.
The problem is that you're putting it in the wrong legal framing, and it just won't fly. Willing to engage, but not on these terms.
JAlexoid 1 days ago [-]
You should realize that this is happening not only in the space of images(where conglomerates aren't a thing), but also in music.
Music conglomerates have money and their lawsuits will probably settle the issue.(unless they settle) That will be applied for all copyrighted works, regardless of the medium.
I believe going against the big guys is the reason why the big ones don't yet have music generation LLMs.
They failed because they gave advances that were never going to be paid back and expected artists to bring in customers.
The demand to produce something in an artists style is low. The volume required to make it interesting to artist isn't present.
AI adoption and pushed back is greatest with artists you would be better off asking for money to shutdown AI.
The tech itself sounds interesting and would love that writeup.
jowsie 1 days ago [-]
The tech doesn't sound that interesting at all. Every AI Degen thread on 4chan and similar has included model fine tuning instructions for a few years now, for the express purpose of cloning an existing artists style.
I also find it interesting that they included a quote from an artist pointing out the hypocrisy of using an existing model, trained on unlicensed material, but never actually discussed that particular issue in the article.
fennecfoxy 1 days ago [-]
I think you mean LORAs more than a fine tune. Yes, plus there are plenty of online resources to train a LORA as well, CivitAI you can just give it a bunch of images + labels and it just does it for you, the bar is pretty low.
Terr_ 1 days ago [-]
Props for a postmortem, much like scientific studies that publish negative results.
instagib 20 hours ago [-]
Fairly surprised they admit the project burned out an engineer enough that they quit.
“One engineer who left Kapwing in fall of 2025 said that the short-lived Tess investment contributed to burnout.”
john-radio 1 days ago [-]
really well written and generous with interesting details, too.
Hansenq 1 days ago [-]
I love this writeup--it's one of the refreshing looks into how startup innovation happens on-the-ground. We're inundated with new products and startups so often that it's easy to forget that the people working on the product are taking a bet with no promise of future payoff. In this case, it didn't work out, despite the team putting in their hard work, sweat, and clearly lots of stress.
Startups are not for the weak but the process detailed here is how we've gotten some of the most transformative and innovative products in technology. Props on attempting this unique idea; very sad that it didn't work out, but sometimes the market just can't support certain ideas!
s1mon 1 days ago [-]
This reminds me of the articles I occasionally see in the local newspaper about a restaurant that is closing down. So often it’s one that I’ve never heard of before that. To me, that’s the number one issue. If your likely customer base (or at least an audience member who reads a lot about the industry/market) hasn’t heard about your product, how are you going to have a successful business?
nickcoffee 10 hours ago [-]
The supply side problem is what killed this. Asking artists to opt in to something that most of their peers openly oppose is a brutal cold outreach problem before you even get to the product. 1 in 4 artists using the free tier for their own work is actually the most telling stat in here. If the people being compensated don't want to use it themselves, the ethical framing alone isn't enough to drive adoption.
Props for the postmortem.
herrfinste 1 days ago [-]
> One engineer who left Kapwing in fall of 2025 said that the short-lived Tess investment contributed to burnout.
Don’t take this personally.
Even if you told this person to work constantly and they believed in you and the business, it’s not totally your fault that they burned out. I say this as someone that has burned out twice, is currently burned out, and blames those that I currently and formerly worked for. I know the problem is as much me as them. Yes, employers have a responsibility to their employees not to burn them out. But, if they do, even if the employer is in a power position where the employee felt they had no other choice, and I felt that both times, the employee can choose not to work that much or care that much for almost whatever that means- if you’re literally holding a gun it’s different of course.
I know of a developer that committed suicide and the toll that took on the employer. But the employer can’t take on all of that themselves.
I’m sorry that your business failed, but I hope that something good comes out of this.
Also- I’m not saying that any part of your responsibility in burning out this person was ok. Just that not all of it is your fault.
jplusequalt 22 hours ago [-]
>Don’t take this personally.
No, they should take it personally. Leadership is 9/10 times the culprit.
bandrami 1 days ago [-]
As somebody who occasionally gets tiny ASCAP checks I think an ASCAP/BMI model might work for artists (and maybe even writers?) I guess this is more like SESAC, but maybe that's how this will end up working.
rambambram 1 days ago [-]
I'm not a native English speaker, but since when became 'lessons' a 'learnings'?
defrost 1 days ago [-]
As a native (Commonwaelth) english speaker of six decades+ .. it only really "appeared" in frequency during the past decade, more heavily in the past five years or so, in central north American settings.
Grammerly will tell us:
Despite being more popular than “lessons” in the corporate setting, “learnings” is still incorrect. It's an erroneous plural form of the colloquial term “learning.”
As a business-speak buzz-word it might fade, or it may end up with a greater global footprint outside of the Biz-speak Babel tower.
billyjobob 1 days ago [-]
Probably due to the movie "Borat! Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan".
People missed the joke that it was poor English on purpose.
fennecfoxy 1 days ago [-]
I mean there's no point; everyone still gets super mad even in the cases where models where trained only on content that a company owns or has paid for.
I wish artists would stop with the "it stole our work bullshit" and just be more honest about the "it can do what we do and we're terrified and scare for our future" part.
Because that I can 100% understand, and contrary to previous jobs just disappearing, we do live in "the future" and things like UBI or free cross-training should be available for this sort of thing.
1 days ago [-]
Yizahi 1 days ago [-]
I wonder, did they pay for the artists whose art they took without paying or asking to train that LLM model they are promoting? I guess we know the answer :)
squeefers 1 days ago [-]
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Papazsazsa 1 days ago [-]
The individual who figures out how to do this will be both wealthy and beloved.
minimaxir 1 days ago [-]
The majority of the artist responses were "hard no" in 2024. There's no way the artist demographic such a service would appeal to would be on board with anything even tangent to AI in 2026 (even done ethically) where the professional liability far exceeds the potential revenue.
bluefirebrand 1 days ago [-]
Most artists I have spoken to don't believe it's possible to do this AI stuff ethically
Maybe they're wrong but I tend to agree. Or even if it is possible to do it ethically, it still never will be done that way because there's just too much money in behaving unethically
JAlexoid 1 days ago [-]
The only problem that people see in these models is the money flows.
If it all was non-profit - then no one would raise the ethical issue.
bluefirebrand 1 days ago [-]
I don't know
I still think cutting artists livelihood from under them with tooling built on top of their work is unethical no matter how you cut it
Timwi 4 hours ago [-]
In a world where artists’ livelihood depends on their output, yeah. But that's not a force of nature. Our society is making the choice of letting them starve for not producing enough art. We need to decouple this. UBI now.
hendry 1 days ago [-]
Are there successful non-AI artist platforms for works of art?
tcbrah 1 days ago [-]
the spotify comparison is telling because spotify succeeded by being better than piracy, not by being more ethical. tess was trying to compete on ethics against tools that were just flat out better at the actual job.
i generate hundreds of images weekly for video content and the honest truth is i never think "i want this specific artist's style." i think "i need a documentary still that looks like 1970s film grain" or "i need a character that matches my last 50 frames." consistency and speed matter way more than provenance. the few times i tried artist-specific fine tunes the quality was noticeably worse than just prompting a good base model well.
the 6.5% artist signup rate buried in there is actually the real story. they cold emailed 325 high end editorial artists and got 21. those artists didn't want passive income from AI - they wanted AI to not exist in their market at all. paying someone royalties to automate away their livelihood is a weird value prop no matter how you frame it.
kingkawn 1 days ago [-]
How about that few want one artist’s particular style reproduced, instead they want what they are vaguely seeing in their head produced from a cacophony of styles
shevy-java 1 days ago [-]
I don't understand why we should pay for AI.
dragonwriter 1 days ago [-]
Is that because you don't believe we should use AI, or because you do not agree with “if you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product.”
JAlexoid 1 days ago [-]
Currently it's mostly to pay for running and training the models.
throwaway314155 1 days ago [-]
This article is bullshit. You can't get a full model from training on just one artist's work. A pretrained model is required. The pretrained model was likely one which was indeed trained on the works of others without consent.
What's more, their reasoning for abandoning the company was to build out another company with a suspiciously similar idea...
devonkelley 1 days ago [-]
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croes 1 days ago [-]
Or those 75% don’t want to work with that kind of tools no matter the compensation
There's a certain arrogance to believing the timing "simply wasn't right". It looks really bad if you try it with any recent controversy:
* "The timing wasn't right to charge people for heated car seats"
* "The timing wasn't right to make Photoshop a subscription service"
* "The timing wasn't right to increase fees"
It's a way of talking yourself away from the fact that what you are making may, inherently, be disliked. The cited survey even seems to have been read as favourably as possible:
> Surveys consistently showed that consumers believed artists deserved payment when AI generated content in their style.
This doesn't mean people want artists style to be generated by AI. It could mean they think it's horrible, but if it happens they should at least be compensated for it. In fact, the quotes survey even says 43% believe companies should ban copying artists styles. I could make the exact opposite argument with the same data:
"Many consumers believe companies should ban copying styles, and this may be a more common opinion than measured as most people have no experience with modern AI tools and therefore no chance to have made an opinion yet. What is known is that the majority believe that if artists were to be copied, they should at least be compensated"
edit: formatting, typo
I say this as someone who switched to Krita and canceled CC subscription.
I'd prefer looking at what (potential) consumers actually do rather than what they say. "Saying" is a really weak signal.
I am one of those people: 1. Absolutely despise the lightroom being subscription and 2. Haven't switched yet.
There are moats and capabilities and friction. Not every vote with your wallet is a ringing endorsement. I have 15 years of lightroom databases over 100k photos so switching is hard. At the same time those are from the time I did a photography side gig, now I don't so monthly cost for no monthly gains really peeves me.
So it absolutely is a successful business decision and it absolutely is widely despised by customer base. Both are true :-)
But sometimes timing is indeed wrong, not because of anything you did, but just because no one wanted it _yet_. Google Glass from a few years ago comes to mind. Now Meta has a similar idea and it does seem successful, much to society's dismay.
But sometimes it is worth asking, "does the idea actually suck and that's why no one likes it? Or is it actually a good idea that is muddied with other issues that no one likes?"
The article doesn't make it clear that they were that introspective.
[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/am-i-so-out-of-touch
Bad timing can be to a number of factors, some can be good, some can be bad.
I get the emotional side of this argument - artists going hungry while someone else cashes in on their ideas. But compensation is a dangerous premise, because derivative art is an established type of artistic freedom. Artists routinely mimic styles, or work within the bounds of styles established by masters, but they've never been expected to compensate those styles' pioneers. Imagine it as a precedent:
"Your stuff borrows from Warhol? Guess what buddy, you owe the Warhol estate x% of your sale."
Perhaps you're arguing things change when commercial interests are involved? But again, this has never been the case for advertising companies (with their hired artistic guns) or any kind of graphic design leaning on established artistic styles for effect and making a killing in the process.
In the case of AI, even if it has a commercial master, it seems much closer to the borrowing of an ordinary artist. It's a trained entity, with deep understanding of styles, capable of making new works. On top of that, it works under the instruction of a user with their own ideas, whose guidance is crucial in deciding the work's final state. The user is the artist here - like one of the visionaries who delegate the nitty gritty of production to helpers. In this case the helper is leased from the AI company, which is more like an agency supplying those helpers.
All in all it's hard to see how any compensation model wouldn't end up constricting the artistic freedom most of these artists depend on.
I think a much more useful question is whether some arrogance is necessary to succeed. I personally think it is. But we are discussing a post mortem here, and the author is (in my opinion) clearly beating around the bush and using "the time wasn't right" to hide what may be uncomfortable truths.
Is a post mortem valuable if it doesn't address these face first? I am not the one with all the answers here, but what I am used to in mature tech teams is that the uncomfortable parts are usually the most important in any post mortem.
There are plenty of stories about companies that failed because the timing was wrong, and then see another company succeed in their place later on. That doesn't mean failure simply means "the timing was wrong" - you are putting a lot of weight on society adjusting to your belief. Consider that venture capital often invests in hundreds of founders like this, betting that at least one of them wasn't wrong. That's not statistically in your favor.
It is OK (in fact it is valuable) to fail and conclude that your signals may have been wrong. There's a reason some venture capital funds prefer investing in people who have failed before.
I mean, if you keep ignoring stuff that undermines your beliefs that's the definition of arrogance.
It's interesting that "consumers" are generally for the expansion of IP laws. At at the moment, I'm fairly certain that "style" is not something protected by Copyright. I personally do not want this, and I'm sure there are likely many like me. Poorly thought out IP laws lead to chilling-effects, DRM, stupid and unnecessary litigation, and ultimately a loss of digital freedoms.
> What 325 Cold Emails to Artists Taught Us
I'm surprised 1% didn't respond with "EAT HOT FLAMING DEATH SPAMMER" for sending them unsolicited commercial email. ;)
Edit: haven't followed the law in a while, but you could definitely copy, digitalize and scan documents for yourself and your friends (copia privada).
There is a reason why we call it styles, because it’s a recognizable pattern someone came up with maybe after decades of work.
You don't even need to have a legally acquired source material to produce work in a certain style.
The new reality allows for original creators to actually track the chain, so we're in this situation.
If one or two people take an apple from your tree it’s not a big deal, if a machine takes 10,000 it is.
So if scan a book you are making a copy. In some copyright jurisdictions this is allowed for individuals under a private copying exception - a copyright opt out, if you like - but the important thing is private use. In some jurisdictions there is also a fair use exception, which allows you to exploit the rights protected by copyright under certain circumstances, but fair use is quite specific and one big issue with fair use is that the rights you are exploiting cannot result in something that competes with the original work.
Other acts restricted by copyright include distribution, adaptation, performance, communication and rental.
So if you copy a book, digitize it, and write a program to analyze the word frequencies it contains you may, in some jurisdictions but not all, be allowed to do this.
If you’re doing it locally on your own machine you are simply copying it. If you do it in the cloud you are copying it and communicating the copy. If you copy it, analyze it and train an AI model on it that could be considered fair use in certain jurisdictions. Whether the outputs are adaptations of the training data is a matter of debate in the copyright community.
But importantly if you commercialise that model and the resulting outputs compete with the copyright protected material you used to train, your fair use argument may fail.
So when you buy a book you are actually party to what is effectively a licence granted by the copyright holder, albeit it to the publisher. But as the end user of the book you are still restricted in what you can do with that copyright protected work, through a universal end user licence encoded in law.
And I think same could happen to LLM. If it took all the fossil fuel on Earth just to barely able to drive a car to a car wash, there's more things wrong with the car than in the oil price.
Where did you get that idea. Global economy is ~200T/year PPP. 0.1% of that split across every artist you want the training data from would be insanely difficult for the vast majority of them to turn down. Which makes sense as art isn’t that big a percentage of the global economy compared to say housing, food, medical care, infrastructure, military spending etc.
Obviously the incentive to take without compensation is far more appealing, but that doesn’t mean it was impossible to make a reasonable offer.
However, ultimately nobody is going to pay them more than the value of their posts to the AI company which puts a severe cap on what that’s actually worth. People who post a great deal of online content might be worth compensating a few thousand dollars, but it would be hard for them to then turn that down.
AI companies want a license to train not ownership of a portfolio.
Hard cap of 200B divided by 1M equals 200k, and that would be sure more reasonable, but we aren't hearing artists responding favorably to hypotheticals in that range, so I'm skeptical that "ain't nobody gonna turn that down".
I think the vast majority would agree to let AI companies train on their art for 10k let alone 200k. Don’t forget the average global salary is way below what you see in the US.
Put another way how many people would turn down 6+ months salary. Of course the vanishing tiny percentage people care about would want more, but that’s a separate question and not particularly valuable to AI companies.
Didn't that exact social experiment took place in the US last year? I thought the result of that was disastrous if media reports are to be believed.
OTOH I remember creator of Wordle closed the "low few mil" deal instantly, so I do believe it unlikely that people turn down few _hundred_ months worth of salary. But those artists are not from regions with 50-100x less median income and/or wider income distribution relative to US - I think they're concentrated in relatively high-income-low-disparity regions - so I don't think there's backwater wherever that lifetime income there is equivalent to no more than 6 months worth in US that has abundant supply of artists.
And IMO those artists are basically engaged in a geo-scale dumping of media contents. It's the same phenomenon as how moving consumer electronics manufacturing to US instantly multiply costs by small integers instead of just incurring premiums in percentages. If that phenomenon were to be quenched and those effects were integrated into economy anyhow, that will change the global balances of power to some statistically significant degrees, like, we'd be seeing flying rocket amphibian McBoatfaces everywhere. That might be interesting, but I'm not sure if that's an interesting kind of an interesting thing to see.
That’s really not a reasonable comparison to what is being sought.
As to global artists, I was suggesting the majority of artists globally make ~20k USD or less per year as artists. To get to millions of artists you need to use a generous definition, so now Hollywood is full of actors how many of them made 20+k last year as an actor? If you disagree fine let’s double it and 6 months salary is still only 20k and would I suspect be a seriously tempting offer when you retain all rights to past and future works.
That's kind of an interesting concept: "since the scale of my transgression was so big, I should get away with it scot-free."
To a degree it is protected, but not by copyright. Design patents are a thing and companies have sued each other over them (Apple vs Samsung during the "smartphone wars" comes to mind)
I'm staunchly against expansion of IP laws. But I personally think that when a corporate machine gobbles up an artist's works so that people like me who can't draw can generate silly memes for a few bucks a month, the artist should be compensated. The company is profiting off of other people's work! That's not right.
The mechanism by which compensation is calculated appears to be an unsolved problem currently though.
What's wrong with it?
We live in an interconnected world. Every company or individual who profits off anything does so, in very large part, thanks to work left behind by others that they don't directly compensate each other for.
Stated differently, if we look at the other side of the coin, it's one thing to create value, and another thing to capture value. If you are a business (and artists seeking profit are businesses), you create value then try to capture that value. Creating value and trying to capture (in the form of profit) is the entire name of the game. But no business captures 100% the value they create. If you make a product/artwork/service/whatever and release it to the public, lots of people may use it, view it, be inspired by it, learn from it, and ultimately profit off it in their own way without you necessarily being able to capture some part of it. And what's wrong with that?
Do we really want the entire world to be endlessly full of cookie-licking rent seekers who demand profit every time anyone does anything? Because they failed to capture the value they created, and thus demand a piece of the pie from those who are better at capturing value?
I like the way Thomas Jefferson put it:
> If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea.
The starving artists I know would be extremely happy to get even one cookie to lick. I know an artist prodogy that paints on canvas and has work in a sizable gallery, at least one institution patron, and is constantly hosting paid workshop events. He architected and built his own custom 40ft ceiling pine art house covered in beautful stained wood and arches, with large metal cuttings and engravings of wild horses on the railings. This artistic prodigy is still starving and works as a handyman/construction worker part-time. He is strongly opposed to AI, by the way.
Most artists are "starving artists"; there are extremely few artists that can support themselves by their creations alone. Many artists make no money at all, and many artists seem to work or create alone as individuals, meaning that they almost always lack the funds or community resources to protect their creative work.
No, far better that we have four rent-seekers who gobble up everything that anyone is naive enough to share with the world, then turn around to demand profit in order to keep up with the new pace of the world that they’ve created.
PS: I categorically disagree that AI developers are rent-seekers, unless they require rent for the products their models generate
Kapwing is specifically designed for artists to share IP with other people in an IP-friendly and financially profitable way. A 'consumer' on Kapwing is not the same as an ordinary person browsing for AI generated art, and the fact that people who make money from selling their IP on there are in favour of expanding IP law shouldn't be a surprise.
All this really tells us is that Kapwing's artist community believe protecting their individual art style is more valuable to them than any money they'd earn from licensing it on a per-image basis to Kapwing's AI tool. I'd be willing to bet that if Kapwing changed the offer to a flat-fee-of-$50,000-a-year-plus-per-image-fee they'd find 99% of artists on there changed their minds. As with most things, people feel strongly about their rights all the way up until the price is right.
Since the didn't, they should go to jail. The same way I would have gone to jail if I built Sora in my basement and sold it to the public.
That is the gap in the legal landscape.
Just because you obfuscate what's happening by calling it "learning" and pretending your model is actually just looking at pictures the same as a human, doesn't make it true.
I can assure you, that you didn't grant a license with an exclusive list of operations that can be performed on your work of art. At best you may have had something like "no commercial use" clause and general broad terms.
Here, for example, any comment is open to read and respond to. On ArXiv any paper can be downloaded, read and cited. Wikipedia contains text from many thousands of editors, building on each other. We like collaboration more than asserting our exclusivity rights. That is why these places provide better quality than work for direct profit or, God forbid, ad revenue, that is where the slop starts flowing.
But including your art in the training data is fair use (or otherwise exempt) by most standards, as no reproduction occurs. You are advocating for a change to IP law to make it more restrictive.
The four factors of fair use in the US:
> the purpose and character of your use
Commercial, for-profit. Not scholarship, not research, not commentary, not parody, etc.
> the nature of the copyrighted work
Absolutely everything. Artistic, creative, not purely factual.
> the amount and substantiality of the portion taken, and
All of it, from everyone.
> the effect of the use upon the potential market.
Directly competing with those whose data was copied.
> All of it, from everyone.
Yea I'd like to see how drawing two circles violates the copyright of drawing one circle!
Like LLM's, it retains the produced index but not the original data.
The big concern is whether producing an LLM is competing with artists directly, but as artists dont make LLMs, this seems to be consistently ruled as non competing.
People _do_ use LLMs to make art in someone else's style (knowingly or unknowingly) and claim it as their own creation.
Also, I wouldn't say the creators of LLMs are competing with artists. The users of LLMs are. Arists don't make LLMs, they make art, and people who use midjourney and such make art.
But I'd argue that creators of LLMs are still liable for the harm people cause using their tools. Perhaps not legally, but certainly ethically.
In addition, the idea that you need to pay rent on *your observation* of someone else's work is absurd. No one pays Newton's descendants for making lifts or hosting bungee jump sport activities.
So would the model work if it only trained on the top 10% of pixels in every image? Or do they in fact need the entire image before they begin processing it, and therefore use the entire image?
> In addition, the idea that you need to pay rent on your observation of someone else's work is absurd.
I agree that's absurd. But training a model is no more "observing images" than an F1 car is "walking" down a race track. Just because a race car uses kinetic energy, gravity, and friction to propel itself, the same way a human does, doesn't mean it's doing the same thing as a human. That comparison you're making is the real absurdity.
The model works by training on what features humans can make sense out of the image they're presented with, if the image and the observations of the image's feature were clear/observable enough. Then the generation makes use of those observations. I'm just using 10% as an arbitrary number to describe proportions. If the generation were 100% of the observations from the same image, the model would be overfitting, and many would have deemed it to have produced a copy.
> Just because a race car uses kinetic energy, gravity, and friction to propel itself, the same way a human does, doesn't mean it's doing the same thing as a human.
WTF does this even mean? A race car uses concepts from Newton, just as how a human uses gravity to train it's muscles to move be it knowingly or unknowingly. But you don't see them (car makers/humans) paying rent to Newton after he discovered gravity. Come on!
Or a more realistic scenario: what if I translate it to Spanish without license from the author? That's not allowed, and yet I have "transformed" the work in the same way that an LLM does.
If I buy a book and use it to prop up a table, the author likewise does not own the table, or any works I undertake on that table.
If I buy a book and rip out the pages to make a collage, the US is the only legal jurisdiction where I run even slight risk of civil penalties.
An LLM is downstream of a book. Using a book to make an LLM does not confer any rights or privilges towards the LLM on the original author, just as using a hammer or nails dont permit the hammer or nail manufacturers any royalties on what I make, even if I build a hammer making machine with them. Theres no right to the works of people who build on your work without reproducing your work, at least outside of strict copyleft.
Its like demanding a cut from people who learned how to use photoshop by watching your photoshop tutorial youtube videos.
This is why the most successful cases against LLMs have been on the "Did they purchase the book" side of the fence, and not on the "What did they do with it" outside of the one case, where the legal company tried to use the LLM to 1:1 reproduce the content they had a limited license to, but thats obviously a no go and they should have known better.
> Is it transformative if I take all the pages in Hanya Yanagiharas A Little Life and use a thesaurus to change every second word?
If you meant it literally.. I'd think that such a version would be a sort of parody. It'd be up to lawyers doing their cross-examinations to prove the work was intended for such a purpose though..
> Or a more realistic scenario: what if I translate it to Spanish without license from the author? That's not allowed, and yet I have "transformed" the work in the same way that an LLM does.
Probably a lawyer would answer this better than me, but the 'content' is the same and would violate copyright. There's also other factors, like if it was translated/distributed for free.
Besides that I regard that LLMs to hold mathematical observations in contrast to a translated work. So long as the user ensures the output isn't close to what's already available imo it fits the transformative criteria.
I can just as well say that a translated work contains "linguistic observations". In fact a translator has to do a lot of transformative work in order to translate a text.
An LLM just takes a set of texts, looks at n-gram distributions, and generates similar text. It is quite literally a fuzzy way of copying. There aren't any mathematical observations in the output. Any math (statistics) is done in the copying process.
Oh even if it's not a parody it would look transformed enough that a first-time reader would be getting a completely different interpretation of the story* compared to the original source. And that's all that matters.
> There aren't any mathematical observations in the output. Any math (statistics) is done in the copying process.
Wrong. Weights, which these models comprise of, are literally numbers to an extensive mathematical equation.
> It is quite literally a fuzzy way of copying.
And no one knows/there is no consensus on what a 'fuzzy way of copying' is. It is either copying or it is not. You could say that training an LLM is abstracting and integrating various text into it's weights, hereby transforming the source material and again transforming it a second time via integrating it into its weights.
It shouldn't be!
It's not. This total depends on how you ask it.
Q: Do you think artists deserved payment?
A: YES.
Q: Will you pay for art?
A: MAYBE.
Q: Do you think people should go to jail not paying for art
A: NO.
I have rarely been as disheartened as I am by the transformation of Studio Ghibli's beautiful art style, painstakingly developed over decades, into a heap of slop-trash that actively erases the human connections so artfully depicted in Hayao Miyazaki's work.
All that sorrow and it's not even my style.
So, no - a human who's willing to draw an illustration in a particular style, perhaps one they live and admire, is not necessarily a hypocrite for seeing genAI's ability to produce billions of images in that style.
Don't forget how polling works. Change the wording of the question and you get a different answer.
Try asking them if they think Comcast or Sony should be able to sue individuals for posting memes that don't even contain any copyrighted material.
Then I tested out the image generation itself and I was unable to come up with prompts that achieved the kind of images I wanted. My only prior experience at the time was OpenAI API. With OpenAI I usually got what I wanted on the first or second try, but with Tess, I couldn’t get a usable result even after 20 tries.
So in addition to the limited number of artists, I think the quality of outputs vs. competing models was a huge factor. I needed to generate thousands of images, so I couldn’t afford to do dozens of attempts for each one.
Hopefully one day there will be a service that can match the quality of OpenAI Image API and Flux but with compensation for artists.
Would I pay extra to ensure that the artists that these models were trained on were compensated fairly? Absolutely! Would I pay extra for that but with degraded ergonomics? Given that this is just a silly hobby, probably not, if I'm being honest.
I think if that problem can be solved, and it's marketed to the correct group, a player in this space could certainly do well.
It's not hard when someone inputs "create in style of studio ghibli" to say that studio Ghibli should get a cut. It's very different when you don't specify the source for the origin style.
And if you tried to identify the source material owner, the percentage of the output image that their work contributed to would be extremely - if not infinitely - small. You'd get minuscule payouts.
We throw plenty of smart people at plenty of hard ideas. If a company really wanted to, they would find a way to make this feasible.
But the problem of attribution is easily understandable to any human with a modicum of intelligence.
Imagine that you have a trillion input images, with every single one having a source associated. When training they go through lots of processes and every single image contributes a varying degree to a subset of 8billion parameters. That alone would produce a dataset that is 1T * 8B to just say how much a particular image contributed to the output...
To mimic intelligence the output is also randomized - the association is not static and every single pixel in the output has it's own lineage.
So as you can probably imagine that to calculate the actual source weights on the output you'd require to do at least 8e+21 calculations per output pixel... and require double precision floating point while you do it.
We know how to do it. It's just ridiculously expensive.
(The above example is for demonstrative purposes only)
> A free Tess subscription to use their own model for brainstorming and scaling repetitive work (roughly 1 in 4 artists took advantage of this)
So based on the math I'm seeing... the 21 artists in the system, only 5 ("1 in 4") optioned to use the tool for their own productivity? That seems really low and makes me wonder what the user experience for creation feels like. I would assume if you decided to commit to this endeavor, you would want to see what derivative results will look like.
> …fine-tune a Stable Diffusion base model.
So your entire business proposition was a lie, as you literally used a base model trained on billions of images by other artists too!
Their solution basically just amounts of "Ethically sourced Styles" which still has all the red tape that a normal text2image model has because majority of the data is still unapproved for use in an AI model.
Businesses didn't want to get wrapped up in a pesudolegal model that really has no better legality than base SD.
No one is stealing anything. It's not theft. There has been no crime. None of this is anywhere near criminal law.
I could make a more nuanced argument on copyright infringement. But to make that steelman, I'd need to accept a too large overton window shift, so I'll decline to do so here.
The problem is that you're putting it in the wrong legal framing, and it just won't fly. Willing to engage, but not on these terms.
Music conglomerates have money and their lawsuits will probably settle the issue.(unless they settle) That will be applied for all copyrighted works, regardless of the medium.
I believe going against the big guys is the reason why the big ones don't yet have music generation LLMs.
The demand to produce something in an artists style is low. The volume required to make it interesting to artist isn't present.
AI adoption and pushed back is greatest with artists you would be better off asking for money to shutdown AI.
The tech itself sounds interesting and would love that writeup.
“One engineer who left Kapwing in fall of 2025 said that the short-lived Tess investment contributed to burnout.”
Startups are not for the weak but the process detailed here is how we've gotten some of the most transformative and innovative products in technology. Props on attempting this unique idea; very sad that it didn't work out, but sometimes the market just can't support certain ideas!
Props for the postmortem.
Don’t take this personally.
Even if you told this person to work constantly and they believed in you and the business, it’s not totally your fault that they burned out. I say this as someone that has burned out twice, is currently burned out, and blames those that I currently and formerly worked for. I know the problem is as much me as them. Yes, employers have a responsibility to their employees not to burn them out. But, if they do, even if the employer is in a power position where the employee felt they had no other choice, and I felt that both times, the employee can choose not to work that much or care that much for almost whatever that means- if you’re literally holding a gun it’s different of course.
I know of a developer that committed suicide and the toll that took on the employer. But the employer can’t take on all of that themselves.
I’m sorry that your business failed, but I hope that something good comes out of this.
Also- I’m not saying that any part of your responsibility in burning out this person was ok. Just that not all of it is your fault.
No, they should take it personally. Leadership is 9/10 times the culprit.
Grammerly will tell us:
~ https://grammarist.com/usage/learnings/As a business-speak buzz-word it might fade, or it may end up with a greater global footprint outside of the Biz-speak Babel tower.
People missed the joke that it was poor English on purpose.
I wish artists would stop with the "it stole our work bullshit" and just be more honest about the "it can do what we do and we're terrified and scare for our future" part.
Because that I can 100% understand, and contrary to previous jobs just disappearing, we do live in "the future" and things like UBI or free cross-training should be available for this sort of thing.
Maybe they're wrong but I tend to agree. Or even if it is possible to do it ethically, it still never will be done that way because there's just too much money in behaving unethically
If it all was non-profit - then no one would raise the ethical issue.
I still think cutting artists livelihood from under them with tooling built on top of their work is unethical no matter how you cut it
i generate hundreds of images weekly for video content and the honest truth is i never think "i want this specific artist's style." i think "i need a documentary still that looks like 1970s film grain" or "i need a character that matches my last 50 frames." consistency and speed matter way more than provenance. the few times i tried artist-specific fine tunes the quality was noticeably worse than just prompting a good base model well.
the 6.5% artist signup rate buried in there is actually the real story. they cold emailed 325 high end editorial artists and got 21. those artists didn't want passive income from AI - they wanted AI to not exist in their market at all. paying someone royalties to automate away their livelihood is a weird value prop no matter how you frame it.
What's more, their reasoning for abandoning the company was to build out another company with a suspiciously similar idea...