Transcriber: Miriam Panieri Reviewer: Mujtaba bakhet
Imagine we're a hundred years in the future. Actually, no.
The way things are going, let's talk about next year.
You go through a difficult life event,
maybe the end of a long relationship or a pet dies
or a parent dies.
Soon after this event occurs, a series of obscure processes begin.
You start to notice changes.
You see ads to download Tinder where before they were ads for engagement rings.
The local animal shelter is suddenly in your scroll.
Odd for sure, but to be expected so far. Really?
But now some new things start to happen.
Your phone offers to show you some impossible images.
Very realistic renderings of your dog happy in doggy heaven.
But your phone knows your religion.
So if you're Catholic, your dog is happy in Catholic doggy heaven.
A company tastefully, tastefully reaches out to ask if you'd like to have
a phone conversation with your recently deceased mother. In her voice.
It will sound just like her.
And they can promise you that she will apologize
for that last fight that you had.
Now many of you will hear these things and they will strike you as
gross boundary violations.
But surely there are some amongst you who think that some of this sounds genuinely
soothing. Now, whatever your appetite for high tech therapy,
the point that I want to make is that the technology needed to make this
a reality is technology that's already here.
They're generative AI systems,
and the data needed to make this
a reality is data that we already give to companies. You all know that.
You know that if you've ever uploaded art or photos on the internet,
or if you've ever left comments or written reviews,
if you liked anything really, then you have, in a sense,
done free work for tech companies.
And if you think that they are using that data just to serve you better ads.
Well, maybe once that was the case, but not anymore.
Let me read you the stated mission of OpenAI.
They're the makers of the image generator Dall-E and the chatbot chat GPT.
[OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence,
by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most
economically valuable work, benefits all of humanity.
We will attempt to directly build safe and beneficial AGI.]
So their plan is to use your data to replace you
for the benefit of you.
Cool.
Yeah.
I wish I could say that this was all still in the realm of the hypothetical,
but it has already begun. Just last year.
Of all things, automated art hit the scene
with products like Midjourney, Open AI,
Dall-E and Stable Diffusion by Stability AI.
These are text to image models,
so they take input from the user in the form of
a natural language prompt like you're seeing right there.
And then there's a complicated process,
and they return an image that matches that prompt. It automates art.
It automates art. It's exactly what you think it is.
You type in some words in a picture comes out, ooh, great. Nice. Good.
No, that’s good. You know, I have to admit I did not see that one coming.
I have yet to see any of those long promised self driving cars on the road,
but the internet is filled with machine-made art.
Do I sound mad? I mean, I am mad. I know it’s not cool to admit you are mad
but I’m just going to say: I’m mad. Of course I am,
because I’m a visual artist.
Lucky me. I’ve been a professional designer and illustrator for over a decade
I love drawing. I don’t know how to make that as clear as possible.
I really love it.
It has given me so many gifts: discipline, perseverance,
self-awareness, compassion. It’s helped me get through grief and loss.
And art making can do that because art making is a vehicle
for self transformation, and it allows you, amazingly,
to share that transformation with others.
But it's not the end product that transforms the artist.
It's the act of doing it. It's the act of making the art.
In the age of automated art, we might still have “art”.
We stand to lose everything that there is to gain in the making.
Now, these AI companies are going to say that their offerings are
All of this ethical, compliance, fair. That’s all branding.
They can just say those things.
And the experience of artists with these systems so far is anything but that.
Consider the way that these models are currently trained off of our content.
A text-to-image model needs to be trained off of millions to billions of example
images. Now these images are every kind of thing.
Some of it is art, some of it is photos, some of it is innocuous.
Some of it is more troubling.
Much of it is people's copyrighted creative content,
and all of it has been scraped from the web without consent,
credit or compensation being given to the creators,
which is, that’s really something,
because it's the quality of the training data that determines the quality of
the model. The better the creative inputs, the better the creative outputs.
Now, usually this is where I would go into some of
the details about this training process,
but I am not going to foolishly attempt that in front of
a room that probably has a lot of machine learning specialists in it.
Fortunately, the task of determining what
the precise nature of this training is and whether it is legal, ethical,
fair use, what have you. Has recently fallen to the professionals.
In the past two weeks, lawsuits have been filed against some of these companies.
One is a suit brought in the UK by Getty Images against stability AI,
and the other is a class action lawsuit filed in the US by artists.
Now that's very important to see,
to see artists coming together and collectively advocating
for their content, their data, their passion and their livelihood.
We're going to need a lot more of that.
These cases are going to give these complicated questions of copyright
and fair use their day in court,
which is desperately needed because our copyright laws and our text
and data mining exemptions were not made with these systems in mind.
Of course not. This is some sci-fi stuff that we’re dealing with
but whatever happens in court.
We as a society and machine learning as an industry,
need to establish the legal
and ethical groundwork that is going to govern all emerging systems of this sort.
If we don’t,
if we allow the appropriation of everybody’s creative
work for the benefit of technology,
that is just going to turn around
and compete directly against them in their very markets,
we are going to do untold damage to the vigor and energy that people have
for their work. People like me, and my students, and my friends and you
because you don't know what they're going to automate next.
I mean, they came for art sooner than anybody would have thought was possible.
My peers have had the dismaying experience of finding their work in
the data sets that is being used to train these systems that are going to undermine
them in the marketplace forever.
Some of them have found that their names are being used on
the prompting side to elicit work specifically in their style.
Like Greg Rutkowski, whose name has been used in prompts hundreds of thousands
of times against his will.
And then there are those, like Sam Yang, who has had fine-tuned models,
trained on his work and released that specialize in replicating his look.
Now he has these models floating around, putting out images in his style,
and the models have his name attached to them.
I don't think any of us could imagine what that feels like,
unless we've been put in that position ourselves.
To have all of your hard work turned against you like that.
To think that every time you share your creativity,
you are tacitly complying with your own replacement.
This is a suffocating atmosphere to ask artists to live in.
And it's clear that they won't.
I hear from the students, I get messages from them every day sharing their
disbelief and discouragement with these developments.
They worry that they're going to teach
an AI system their style before they’ve had a chance to do anything
good with it in the first place.
I wish I could tell them that that wasn't going to happen. So they're retracting.
They're hiding away. They're not posting their work online.
They're going into closed communities. They're moving behind paywalls.
This is pretty antithetical to the spirit of art as we know it,
and in this day and age, we need to be connecting with people more, not less.
And the void that artists will leave behind can be filled
a trillion times over by AI.
It can produce work at unprecedented rate.
And whatever it may currently lack in finesse or specificity,
it can certainly make up for in sheer volume.
I actually expect that the people currently prompting these systems will
soon find themselves to be the all too human,
in a process that could run much faster without them.
In October of last year, I posted a video on my YouTube where
I talk about all of this. Don't don't read the comments on that one. Not good.
And in it, I speculate that these image generator systems could be combined with
text generating systems to remove the need for human prompting.
In November of last year. That very next month, OpenAI released ChatGPT,
their shockingly naturalistic text generator.
I mean, you know the one.
The one that I used to write this entire speech that I’m giving right now
I’m just kidding
Man, that would have been messed up. Right?
I could have done that. I didn’t do that.
No, that was just a joke.
Anyway. Yeah, it wasn’t long before people found out
Yeah, you could use ChatGPT to write your prompts for you. Yeah. Oh, no.
You need a picture of a person in a boat,
but don't know what to write to get a sophisticated generation.
Just ask ChatGPT to write you a gutsy prompt and paste it right in.
You don't need a person to write a prompt.
It might just seem like you need a person to know what to want in
the first place. I mean, there’s something we’re all good at.
Wanting things! You don’t even need to know what you want.
We live in a society where companies are happy to tell you what to want.
Facebook, Google. YouTube.
They're investing billions
and developing this ever clearer picture of us through
the one way mirror of their services.
Every day we tell them more about what we want to see, hear, play, buy, everything.
It won't be long before those data streams are plugged into
the generative AI models
and then those combined systems will just automatically
emit art.
Images, music.
Film, VR experiences about every true and false thing,
about every global and personal event,
and they'll just pipe them directly at you.
What are we going to do when within these tailored content streams,
we can’t tell what was made by a person and what was made by a machine?
After a while, would you even keep trying to figure it out?
Wouldn't you just start to assume that everything was made by a machine?
That's a bad day for everyone, not just for artists.
Is that the world that you want to live in?
Do you think that you should be forced to contribute to that world?
Against your will. Just because you shared your work online.
Clearly not.
Models that automate creative work by training off of creative
work need to be built on ethical grounds that honor the rights of content creators,
and that allowed them to opt in to systems that they’re interested in
rather than scramble to opt out. I also want to say that every noble,
exciting and fantastical thing that we can hope to do with
the current crazy models we can hope to do with an ethical version of them.
I know people want these systems.
I do think some version of these systems is part of our future,
but we need to answer the tremendous question of how we're going to integrate
them into our work and our lives without supplanting ourselves and each other.
We need to figure out who exactly we think the future is for.
I think it's for people, not for machines. So what can we do?
Well, first off, we need to acknowledge that we have power.
These systems would not exist without our data and our content.
And if the people making these things don't want
the valuable data that they use to train their products to up and vanish,
they're going to have to help keep the markets healthy. So resist. Speak up.
Tell these companies and lawmakers and
the websites that you use that you want your data and your content protected.
This is an opportunity for artists, creatives,
people of all sorts to come together and defend each other.
We have never had such a desperate need for collective action.
The very heart of creation could be on the line.
And if we really want the future to be aligned for our benefit
we need to remember why we got into art in the first place.
Because we get an experiential joy from doing it. From making it.
Is that something that we are really ready to give up to machines today?
I’m not.
Thank you.
(Applause)