So what you are saying is open ai should get the public grants for artists to give to artists?

No. What in the world gave you that idea? I'm saying artists or companies employing artists should get grants, just like is the case for a large number of grants now. I'm saying I'd like to see more of that to compensate for the effects being liberal about copyright would have.

I understand it isn’t trained for anything, I have done training with them. The training leads to homogeneous outcomes. It had been studied as well. You can look it up.

There is no "the training". There are a huge range of models trained with different intent producing a wide variety in output to the point that some produces output that others will just plain refuse.

Dall-e 3 still isn’t good enough to be competitive.

Dall-E 3 isn't anywhere near leading edge of diffusion models. It's OpenAI playing catch up. Now, neither Midjourney or Firefly, nor any of the plethora of Stable Diffusion derived models are good enough to be competitive with everyone without significant effort either, today, but that is also entirely irrelevant. Diffusion models are two years old, and the pace of the progress have been staggering, to the point where we e.g. already have had plenty of book-covers and the like using them. Part of the reason for that is that you can continue training of a decent diffusion model even on a a somewhat beefy home machine and get a model that fits your needs better to an extent you can't yet do with LLMs.

Asking and crediting would go a long way to help fix the financial challenge. Because it is a start to adding a financial component. If you have to credit someone there becomes an obligation to that person.

If there is a chance crediting someone will lead to a financial obligation, people will very quickly do the math on how cheaply they can buy works for hire instead. And the vast bulk of this is a one-off cost. You don't need to continue adding images to teach the models already known thing, so the potential payout on the basis of creating some sort of obligation. Any plan for fixing the financial challenge that hinges on copyright is a lost cause from the start because unless it's a pittance it creates an inherent incentive for AI companies to buy themselves out of that obligation instead. It won't be expensive.

I don’t see these grants or public funding ever covering a private company for one.

Companies are by far the largest recipients of public funding for art in many countries and sectors. Especially for e.g. movie production in smaller languages, but also in other sectors.

And for two, I don’t see AI art ever actually getting to the point where it fully replaces artists.

I do agree it won't fully replace artists, but not because it won't get to the point where it can be better than everyone, but because a huge part of art is provenance. A "better Mona Lisa" isn't worth anything, while the original is priceless, not because a "better" one isn't possible, but because it's not painted by Da Vinci.

But that will only help an even narrower sliver than the artists who are making good money today.

It will take time, but AI will eat far more fields than art, and we haven't even started to see the fallout yet.

Because it is trained to make a homogeneous rendering of what you are looking for

Diffusion models are not trained "for" anything other than matching vectors to denoising to within your own tolerance levels of matching to what you are looking for. Accordingly, you'll see a whole swathe of models tuned on more specific types of imagery, and tooling to more precisely control what they generate. The "basic" web interfaces are just scratching the surface of what you can do with e.g. Controlnet and the like. It will take time before they get good enough, sure. They are also only 2 years old, and people have only been working on tooling around then for much less than that.

Open AI might be sitting on Microsoft money, but how many other companies has Microsoft gobbled up over the years? Open AI if it starts to struggle will just fall under the Microsoft umbrella and become part of its massive conglomerate, integrated into it. Where are our AR goggles that we are supposed to all be wearing, Microsoft and Google both had those? So many projects grow and die with multiple millions thrown at them. All end up with crazy valuations based on future consumer usage. As we all can’t even afford rent.

OpenAI is just one of many in this space already. They are in the lead for LLMs, that is text-based models. But even that lead is rapidly eroding. They don't have any obvious lead for diffusion models for images. Having used several, it was first with the recent release of DallE 3 that it got "good enough" to be competitive.

At the same time there are now open models getting close enough to be useful, so even if every AI startup in the world collapsed this won't go away.

There is also this idea that people wouldn’t willing contribute if just asked.

That's fine, but that doesn't fix the financial challenge.

If you work on commission only online, or never went to art school those won’t cover you.

There's no reason it has to stay like that. And most people in that position are not making a living from art as it is; expanding public funding to cover a large proportion of working artists at a better level than today would cost a pittance.

These large tech companies become so highly valued at the start because of venture capital and then in 5-10 years collapse under their own weight. How many of these have come up and are now close to drowning after pushing out all competitors? Sorry if I’m not excited about an infusion of cash into a large for profit company that is just gobbling up anything anyone posts online without consent to make a quick buck.

MS, Apple, Meta, Google etc. are massively profitable. OpenAI is not, but sitting on a huge hoard of Microsoft cash. It doesn't matter that many are close to drowning. The point is the amount of cash floating around that enable the big tech companies to outright buy more than enough content if they have to means that regulation to prevent them from gobbling up anything anyone posts online without consent will not stop them. So that isn't a solution. It will stop new entrants with little cash, but not the big ones. And even OpenAI can afford to buy up some of the largest content owners in the world.

The point was not to make you excited about that, but to illustrate that fighting a battle to restrict what they can train on is fighting a battle that the big AI companies won't care if they lose - they might even be better off if they lose, because if they lose, while they'll need to pay more money to buy content, they won't have competition from open models or new startups for a while.

So we need to find other solutions, because whether or not we regulate copyright to training data, these models will continue to improve. The cat is out of the bag, and the computational cost to improving these models keeps dropping. We're also just a few years away from people being able to train models competitive to present-day models on computers within reach of hobbyists, so even if we were to ban these models outright artists will soon compete with output from them anyway, no matter the legality.

Focusing on the copyright issue is a distraction from focusing on ensuring there is funding for art. One presumes the survival of only one specific model that doesn't really work very well even today and which is set to fail irrespective of regulation, while the latter opens up the conversation to a much broader set of options and has at least a chance of providing working possibilities.

Frankly, I've seen it more often from Emacs users themselves, including while I used it myself for ~20+ years.

Thanks for the interesting overview.

To be honest, I mostly like dragging that quote out because it confounds people's expectations.

Marx certainly wasn't arguing against universal provisioning of education - that had been a demand in the Communist Manifesto for example - but against state control of the curriculum, which really must be understood in large part I suspect as a direct outcome of his own personal experience with the Prussian government repression before he left, and fear it'd end up used for government propaganda, rather than any kind of objective assessment of quality.

But that was very much a product of a very specific time, and quite possibly personal resentments mixed in. I suspect had he seen the relative state of the US and German education systems today, he'd certainly have preferred the German model.

Weird fact: In 1875, Karl Marx ripped what became the SDAP (which eventually through mergers and name changes became the SDP) a new one when they argued for state-provided education, and argued that rather than people getting an education from the state, "the state has need, on the contrary, of a very stern education by the people" (Critique of the Gotha Programme)

In the same section he argued that the then-US model of private or locally run education to publicly set standards was far preferable.

Of course, this was at a time when the German/Prussian government was deeply authoritarian, something Marx and his family had experienced first-hand, so I'm sure that coloured his views of state-run education.

What matters is that they must unequivocally reject Hamas, and work with Israel to eradicate these factions as best they can so that Israel can trust their populace to not harbor terrorists. Only then can the Israeli leadership end the restrictions placed upon the Palestine territories that seek to prevent the inflow of arms and rocket artillery to Hamas.

Asking an oppressed population to collaborate with their oppressors like a bunch of quislings in order to appease the oppressor before they can get peace has never worked.

It is not an illogical act that Israel has done to secure the safety and security of their people.

The have not secured the safety and security of their people, though. What their decades of oppression has bought them is continuous warfare.

With the recent artillery attack by Hezbollah, I don’t think there is much question as to where the Palestinian people stand with regards to the Hamas attack on Israel.

So doubling down on the approach of assigning collective blame to a whole population for the actions of some. Who typically assigns collective blame to a whole people for the actions of some? Can you tell me?

Israel does not owe the Palestinians a good outcome. If they keep testing Israel, there is no limit to what Israel can do short of mass-killing genocide. Displacement is the best outcome in an Israeli victory.

So you keep arguing for massive war crimes of a level too extreme even for the far-right Israeli government, in other words.

False. It takes the will and the courage to out the terrorists amongst them to the Israelis so that the terrorists will be hindered and slowly wiped from prominence.

Ah, so you just want them to be quislings and collaborate with their own oppressors. When has that ever worked again, remind me? This is nothing but an excuse to justify your support for continued oppression.

Or perhaps Hamas will benefit from the reprieve in state suppression, and use the opportunity to import more arms, equipment, and training from Arab countries and bide their time.

That is the risk you run when you oppress a population for decades. But if that were to happen, at least they would actually have a moral leg to stand on. Now they do not.

Which is why I said it would be so much easier if it could be done. It regretfully can’t be done which is why there’s so much conflict up till this day. The keyword is “if”.

So to make this clear: You're regretful Israel is unable to carry out what would be one of the worst crimes against humanity since World War 2? Something which would reach stage 8 of Stantons 10 stages of Genocide?

Yikes.

And besides, the Israeli goodwill is running out.

Well, yes, gross human rights violations for decades do eventually tend to piss people off.

I wonder if they might just throw caution to the wind and just do it, given how right wing their government is getting. It would be just, and there will be popcorn in the aftermath and subsequent war for sure.

Calling crimes against humanity "just". So much for caring about the millions of innocents you casually are arguing for harming.

Time for a block - debating people who openly not just argue for crimes against humanity, but describe them as "just" is giving extremism unjustified attention.

The abuser in this case being Israel, and its decades of crimes, yes, Israel loves that excuse when the Palestinians fight back

Thanks. I'm in no rush, but yeah, it's all very small. They depend pretty much on a handful of X calls at the moment, and aiming to isolate that in a couple of very small classes, so should be very simple. Hoping to clean it up and push more of these to github soon.

Not trying to convince you - people have different preferences, but Ruby does exactly what you say and nothing else unless you start pulling in gems that do lots of monkey patching or metaprogramming cleverness.

This is one of the reasons I dislike Rails in particular - it twists people's idea of what clean Ruby can be like and introduces a lot of "magic" conventions that makes the code hard to read for someone who doesn't know Rails.

A lot of Ruby programmers do overdose on the "clever", often inspired by Rails. You can do some truly insane things with metaprogramming in Ruby, but a lot of the time the cleverness is unnecessary and a bit of a footgun that people grab too early instead of thinking the problem through and realising there are simpler solutions.

The most delciously evil part of INTERCAL is "COMEFROM" (though COMEFROM was proposed a number of times as a joke long before INTERCAL)

By fully funding them. The return from a lifetime annuity bought at 65 is just marginally higher than a reasonable expected safe return from the same investment. (A lifetime annuity pays out on the basis that the provider needs to guarantee an income until you die, so if it returns so much that it eats too much into the capital, it'll be unprofitable for the provider). At the margins, the expected remaining life years of someone at 65 in a developed country is long enough that you can't safely offer that much more without eating away too much at the capital too quickly.