This is so weird. They are mad that they didn't get paid for voluntarily participating in a program that never offered any pay? There are legitimate artist complaints around AI (I don't always agree with them, but they are reasonable complaints to have and are part of very important conversations about how society chooses to interact with AI), but this has got to be the silliest one I have heard so far.
I’m guessing they gave feedback and felt that it was ignored. So rather than let the trial end and let OpenAI say “we even ran it past a bunch of artists, there’s no problem here” - someone decided to flip the table, since they were unheard anyway and felt there were unresolved issues
I suspect their protests stem from those legitimate artist complaints.
Basically that they aren’t being compensated for testing a tool that is ultimately intended to replace them.
I can definitely forgive their complaints when it’s framed that way. But I do agree that the article doesn’t do a particularly good job representing their view point.
But... why were they using/testing it in the first time? It's not like not being paid was a secret. Or maybe they registered exactly to setup this sort of protest? Because they are totally entitled to protest against AI taking jobs, just the particular conditions are a bit weird to me.
If I were to give them the benefit of doubt, I’d guess they joined because they initially saw this more like the AI vs chess type contribution where their contributions would be publicly demonstrated and praised rather than just used to beta test.
They might not have been aware of how many other people were asked.
They probably also underestimated the tool’s capabilities and then got worried for their careers after using it.
It’s pretty common for people’s perception of an opportunity to change after agreeing to it. I’d bet you’ve taken on paid jobs that were less exciting than advertised. Or gone to a party that was completely mis-sold by your friends.
I don’t think we’ll ever truly know the motives that lead up to this leak.
Maybe they realised what they were really doing after the fact and changed their minds. They can’t really do anything about it so they are doing what they can.
It a bit silly to think people won’t learn new information and change their minds.
> This is so weird. They are mad that they didn't get paid for voluntarily participating in a program that never offered any pay?
Companies have been getting ever bolder about abusing volunteer and crowd sourced labor. When the participants are bound by strict NDAs, I think some skepticism is in order.
All we really can tell is that non-neglibigle percentage of the participants in a limited access program were creeped out enough to be willing to blow up their access to call attention to it.
I don't think this story is really even about AI at all, but about labor practices.
I think that's quite different, though. If someone is currently doing paid labor, they indeed can't just quit in most cases, because they depend on the income.
But there's no such thing with volunteering to try a new service. That's just something people do because they feel like it, are bored, enjoy it in their spare time?
Unless those artists depended on (free) access to the model for monetization purposes. There have been some AI videos popping up in Youtube and other platforms. Creating a video using traditional CGI techniques is many orders of magnitudes more work than writing (even pages of) prompts.
To that, I will add that there is a large market for content outside mainstream media[^1]. I'm sure there are creative folk out there which are not visual artists as their main thing[^2], but can use cheap visual art coming from AI to generate some sort of income...
> That's just something people do because they feel like it, are bored, enjoy it in their spare time?
It's an emerging technology and platform. There are economic advantages to having early access to learn what it can do.
Furthermore, this specific colunteer program appears to have an associated contest that pays creators who win. Thus you have a lot of volunteers, limited under NDA, being pushed to compete for vert limited renumeration for their efforts. I doubt most of the volunteers are bored people doing it as a hobby.
Not really a reasonable comparison - paid labour is more likely linked to income that is used for basic necessities, whereas volunteering implies freely offering to take part in an enterprise/task - thus no consequence for just choosing not to partake. Honestly seems like a bit of an emotional overreaction.
That's not how markets work though. If someone is willing to do it for free, and you are happy with what that person produces, why would a company pay them anyway?
Because we have laws to protect workers. You can't just not pay an employee and call them a volunteer as a for profit company.
There a legal limitations on what a for profit company can do with volunteer labor but companies have been increasingly bold about pushing those limits.
Often times it is hard to tell if a program violates those limits since particpants are put under strict NDAs.
That sounds like a definitional problem though. If a person is choosing to volunteer are they really an employee?
I general don't agree with NDAs though, so on that front we definitely agree there's an issue there. Especially for a volunteer, I would never sign an NDA when I'm volunteering my time and effort.
Volunteers can be abused in many of the same ways employees can be. In general, if a volunteer at a for profit compan is doing work that benefits that company, this can be considered "competing" with paid employees and mean the volunteer position must also be paid
By the time the volunteer quits due to abuse, it's too late. If Mr asshole goes off and yells a bunch of obscenities at someone, sure, they can respond by quitting, but they've already been yelled at and called a bunch of names.
I think that everyone at this point just distrusts the board who isn’t paid to say otherwise.
OpenAI is the new high watermark in moral, ethical, social, and intellectual corruption and anyone who works there who has any moral sense is deeply conflicted.
It’s cancer that has cancer. To defeat it would be like discovering a vaccine.
There are degrees of infamy: clearly Larry Summers is the highest profile person who is universally loathed, but people are starting to know the other key players. It’s on TV.
I really dislike the meme that the typical person is stupid.
The typical person is the result of a ruthless Darwinian selection process that has left the typical person savvy, agile, aware, alert, and capable.
The typical person might be coded inarticulate because the education available to the typical person stresses different vocabulary than people not subject to ruthless selection pressure recently.
I’m home schooled to put it mildly, more accurate is that I was presented books and an admiration for acumen, and I deliberately delineate by degree the dramatic dismissal of people on HN who condescend to typical people.
The typical person on HN would survive about three minutes in a legitimately menacing environment.
Summers was on Jon Stewart recently. People know who he is. They might not know his long-time advocacy for maximum toxic waste disposal in Africa, but in fairness Rubin helped quiet that down. They might have forgotten that he personally knew-capped Brooksley Born at the exact perfect time to demonstrate that LTCM was the prototype for ever godawful prop deak today.
I’ll refrain from commenting on Fidji Simo out of personal experience because it would be unfair given that I’ve known her for 12 years and merely remark that the public record is a litany of OSHA violations handled more clumsily than the already low bar Amazon set.
The typical person is a lot savvier than the typical HN hot take smartass who is dramatically out of their depth.
I absolutely agree with you regarding "typical person is not stupid" point. People just don't care about it, and don't know. It's not about stupidity, it's just not a useful information for majority of people. Knowing about internal OpenAI drama, the board members, everything that happened in the last couple of years is just very out of reach for most of the people.
It's the same if I mentioned some random people from my interest circles that you definitely won't know, but I can guarantee at least millions of people who share the same interests know about those names.
Obviously I can be wrong, but my simple sniff test is asking a couple of friend groups and bar chats with regulars, who are not in tech. Some people don't even know about OpenAI despite using ChatGPT (basically a household name now)! I'm also clueless when my friends in finance/law throw in some names and companies that I have no connection to and knowledge of.
Sorry, I didn't mean to sound dismissive, probably shouldn't write comments during work hours.
Maybe they agreed first and later realized that if they help ClosedAI murder their future careers and careers of other artists they might as well get paid for it.
A huge company is using unpaid artist's labour to create tools that will reduce the potential for these and all future artists to get any paid work at all in the future.
It seems like signing up as the volunteer with the goal of derailing the company as much as possible is a highly valid form of ptotest.
> A huge company is using unpaid artist's labour to create tools that will reduce the potential for these and all future artists to get any paid work at all in the future.
"Will" is a strong claim. If the Jevons Paradox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox) applies in this case - and it may well do so - the new technology will lower costs, and the increased productivity will increase demand. If so, it will require artists to work in a different way but they'll earn more.
Tbh a lot of art people want money for is garbage, and most money goes to a few corporations anyways.
It would be nice to see that system rearranged. Even if there’s more art, money could instead fund artistic ventures people actually want rather than keeping powerful entities afloat/entrenched.
Maybe the number of major corporations decreases (towards a permanent handful) as the number of paid artists increases (towards basically everyone who could desire payment for art that’s actually in demand).
A system being rearranged is tempting, and yes, a very likely outcome. Hollywood depends on its advantage in production values, which is quickly being eroded by AI.
However, if recent history is a guide, we won't see an increase in the number of paid artists, I'd say looking at the music industry, what we saw was the increase in the number of artists in general, but success seems to me as fickle as ever. Now, apparently, thanks to Ticketmaster monopoly, even live tours barely make any money and musicians are turning to Onlyfans (not porn, just direct support) to make money.
So here's the state of the music industry (partially due to unchallenged monopolies):
You, for the most part, don't make money making music and distributing it online
You don't make money from a live tour either.
Amazing outcome for an industry where the cost of production and distribution has collapsed. No one makes money except for the monopolies in streaming (Spotify) and ticketing (Ticketmaster).
Without monopoly protections, that's what you get. Thankfully, there's a bit more competition in the audiovisual realm with Youtube and multiple streamers. Still, I don't know what to think about what might happen.
Most artists / people in audiovisual production will likely make less money. Some will likely make a lot of money. My (kind of unfounded atm) assumption is that AI will just increase the differences in Paretto distribution of income, making the top 20% very rich and the bottom 80% very poor. Before genAI, you had a very large and vibrant VFX industry, with relatively well paid workers, which is likely to be cut down by huge numbers (it's already been cut by around 50%).
> Audiovisual entertainment is already beyond capacity. We make more stuff than people have the time to consume it.
No we don't. I rarely find anything that I like in Netflix, Amazon Prime or HBO. Those services are stuffed with brain bleach that I don't even find entertaining. There are "gold nuggets"[^1] I have enjoyed in those sites, but it's like one or two per year. The rest of my watching time goes to videos of people camping in the wilderness, for lack of a better thing.
[^1]: As in, they are entertaining. Rarely, they are imaginative. Even more seldom, they are educational or contribute to my personal growth.
You don’t get it. Those programs are made because they make money. Netflix is profitable because it makes shows that X number of people want to see.
The number of people like yourself who are underserved by stuff to watch is too low to be profitable - or they don’t know how to make a show that would appeal to this group yet.
The dark truth about TV is that it’s what people want to watch. There is no conspiracy. Here is a good Steve Jobs quote on the subject:
“ When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a
conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But
when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks
are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far
more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot
the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really
in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.”
Anyway assuming that an industry screwed up because you personally don’t like their product is pretty incredible. No they didnt screw up. They’re just serving people who aren’t quite like yourself.
And? Two things can be true at the same time. Deadpool Wolverine was 300 million USD to produce. Nobody is going to put that amount of money into producing content for a corner wacko like myself, or Steve Jobs, whom, by your quote, apparently had the same problem (and 300 million USD to spare). But if it can be produced at a fraction of the price, then there is a market. And that's exactly my point.
* Slow, thoughtful, hard sci-fi that's well-written and well acted, with immersive (not campy) sets and effects. Enough of that to fill an evening a week.
* A spiritual successor to Firefly with the same production requirements and release schedule described above.
Even YouTube is bound by the same limitations as the AAA streaming platforms are—you can't sink money into something that's too niche, and right now doing things well costs buckets of money. So I'm sure there are a few fan films on YouTube adjacent to my interests, but their production value is going to be far below what it could be if things were made cheaper.
There are better ways to protest than violating a legally binding agreement - seems more like an emotional reaction than a properly thought through protest.
It's risky though, if the protest is annoying or damaging enough (antisocial behaviour basically) it can actively turn people away from your position. As in "Oh these are a bunch of insane/evil/violent etc people and that type of person tends to have this type of view, I as a good person do not have these kinds of views"
Meh, not entirely sure what would work better. Having read through the huggingface post a few times now, suppose it's less of an emotional reaction, more actual protest to abusive practices.
Why not organize a worldwide protest where every participant produces and shares Art denouncing generative AI? "AI might produce single pieces but this collective work, this is what AI can't do" and so on.
What they're doing is so weird and ineffective in contrast, it baffles me.
For three hours, they gave everyone access to create videos with Sora, some of which could very well be art. Not only that, but the form in which they did this and the statement they made could also be considered art. I think they've done well here.
In their statement, they make it clear that they're not opposed to the use of AI in art: they're opposed to the abuse of artists to pretend that OpenAI is doing this for their sake. This serves their perspective better than any juvenile anti-AI quilt could have.
> Why not organize a worldwide protest where every participant produces and shares Art denouncing generative AI
Ah yes, a feel good protest that can be completely ignored by everyone, especially OpenAI. Even better, maybe OpenAI could fund it? That way they get to claim they hear the protests but they don't have to actually change anything.
Say everyone completely ignores the protest; surely that's a valid data point that should in itself make those artists reflect on their own positions & ideas? Maybe, just maybe, people in the general public actually value generative AI, regardless of what artists think about it?
>It seems like signing up as the volunteer with the goal of derailing the company as much as possible is a highly valid form of ptotest.
It's the most immature and pseudointellectual form of protest I can think of. "Oh I am scared of the technology that's coming regardless, let me try and screw everybody else over as well!"
Link to the post: https://huggingface.co/spaces/PR-Puppets/PR-Puppet-Sora
If you read through it, they clearly state:
"We are not against the use of AI technology as a tool for the arts (if we were, we probably wouldn't have been invited to this program). What we don't agree with is how this artist program has been rolled out and how the tool is shaping up ahead of a possible public release. We are sharing this to the world in the hopes that OpenAI becomes more open, more artist friendly and supports the arts beyond PR stunts."
This is super interesting and seems to be the first organized push back against the platformization of 'creators' where the power imbalance is so great that corps expect free labor for the chance to become one of few outsized successes and it's whitewashed as 'democratization'.
Well, both of those are subjective terms but if it’s effective it’s effective.
The most effective movements are usually a combination of protest and civil disobedience. Considering livelihoods are under threat I wouldn’t condone nor blame anyone for even going one step further.
I don't know if protest actually does work. It can certainly be used to "legitimise" some course of action preferred by one group of elites. But there are so, so many examples of protest achieving nothing at all - or even having the opposite effect.
Maybe they object to the idea that anyone's labor should be used, for free, to enrich the wealthy. I don't think that's a terrible stance to have, abstractly. I dunno if that was the case here.
If you read it they state quite clearly that they feel like their participation was different than they expected it to be and that's why they are upset.
The fact they said yes at the start shows a form of tunnel vision. I just can't empathize that much with borderline manchildren leaking access to something they got the privilege to
A lot of people refused to hang out with Diddy even if they could put their finger on exactly why.
I know more than most, but the sexual assault allegations and shady restructuring and abuse of the the political process and the multiple firings for financial fraud and, well a lot of stuff, that’s all public record.
Basically luddites were never the bad ones, they were protestors against abusive working conditions. They did sabotage the owners of the mills that paid them so poorly, sometimes by destroying machinery, but it was really an underground labor movement that’s super cool to learn about.
No, there was nothing "super cool" about the Luddites. Stop trying to rehabilitate these thugs. Failing that, do it someplace other than a site called "Hacker News."
There's nothing wrong with resisting bad working conditions, unfair pay, or getting replaced by a machine without adequate social safety nets in place.
If businesses decide to replace workers with AI, then it's also their collective responsibility to pay for their retraining, or if that isn't possible their social security.
The Luddite "thugs" were the ones that were getting murdered by the people they were protesting against, a protest which happened because they were about to be replaced while already working in extremely dangerous conditions with terrible compensation.
It's telling that the AI sycophants side with the group that was actually murdering people, however.
a protest which happened because they were about to be replaced while already working in extremely dangerous conditions with terrible compensation.
Gee. Being "replaced" in a job like that sounds like a good career move to me.
The system that prevailed up to that point didn't give them many options, of course... but neither would their response to it. Sabotage doesn't bring progress, no matter who told you that it did, or how much you want to believe it.
Luddites were highly educated, skilled workers whose work was being replaced by machines. They just wanted to operate the machines and share in the increased productivity.
There's absolutely no parallels here, to AI. A machine that is taking work from highly skilled labor ohhhh wait
Yeah, for all the talk of Sora building an internal “world model” that could be a building block for AGI… this seems to suffer from all the same glitches as the Will Smith spaghetti video, just with much, much more polish.
I don’t think it’s that much worse than what OpenAI showed off earlier in the year when you consider that those examples were very cherry-picked, though. These new videos don’t make it seem like a bad model, they’re just a bit more realistically mediocre.
Anyone who works closely with diffusion models knows the "world model" thing was hype. Diffusion models are really good at faking, starting with nonsensical large-scale structure and forcing it towards plausibility with lots of nice details.
Yeah, I'm struggling to understand what the use case of this is. These videos aren't tricking anybody who's used a cameraphone. Just shooting video with phone costs nearly nothing. People don't particularly seem to want to generate films of places they aren't.
I’d love to see the contract those artists signed! I’m sure they did, or should have, gone in with their eyes wide open, and not sure what they expected from OpenAI (since clearly there wouldn’t have been any mention of payment in the contract), or whether OpenAI started asking them for a lot of work maybe (that’s the only thing I can think of that would give them the right to complain)?
They probably signed up for the purpose of doing this. People don't usually change their opinions that easily, especially a total 180 from "volunteering to support OpenAI" to directly the opposite.
This is so weird. They are mad that they didn't get paid for voluntarily participating in a program that never offered any pay? There are legitimate artist complaints around AI (I don't always agree with them, but they are reasonable complaints to have and are part of very important conversations about how society chooses to interact with AI), but this has got to be the silliest one I have heard so far.
I’m guessing they gave feedback and felt that it was ignored. So rather than let the trial end and let OpenAI say “we even ran it past a bunch of artists, there’s no problem here” - someone decided to flip the table, since they were unheard anyway and felt there were unresolved issues
I suspect their protests stem from those legitimate artist complaints.
Basically that they aren’t being compensated for testing a tool that is ultimately intended to replace them.
I can definitely forgive their complaints when it’s framed that way. But I do agree that the article doesn’t do a particularly good job representing their view point.
But... why were they using/testing it in the first time? It's not like not being paid was a secret. Or maybe they registered exactly to setup this sort of protest? Because they are totally entitled to protest against AI taking jobs, just the particular conditions are a bit weird to me.
I don’t know.
If I were to give them the benefit of doubt, I’d guess they joined because they initially saw this more like the AI vs chess type contribution where their contributions would be publicly demonstrated and praised rather than just used to beta test.
They might not have been aware of how many other people were asked.
They probably also underestimated the tool’s capabilities and then got worried for their careers after using it.
It’s pretty common for people’s perception of an opportunity to change after agreeing to it. I’d bet you’ve taken on paid jobs that were less exciting than advertised. Or gone to a party that was completely mis-sold by your friends.
I don’t think we’ll ever truly know the motives that lead up to this leak.
Because their work is being devalued by AI, wether they participate or not.
So you're suggesting that they joined the program specifically to leak it later?
Maybe they realised what they were really doing after the fact and changed their minds. They can’t really do anything about it so they are doing what they can.
It a bit silly to think people won’t learn new information and change their minds.
I've been eagerly awaiting access to the tool for quite a while.
I would definitely be willing to pay to try it out and provide feedback in addition. I'm genuinely surprised by this news.
You can read their open letter yourself, whether or not you agree with their logic is up for you to decide.
https://huggingface.co/spaces/PR-Puppets/PR-Puppet-Sora
> This is so weird. They are mad that they didn't get paid for voluntarily participating in a program that never offered any pay?
Companies have been getting ever bolder about abusing volunteer and crowd sourced labor. When the participants are bound by strict NDAs, I think some skepticism is in order.
All we really can tell is that non-neglibigle percentage of the participants in a limited access program were creeped out enough to be willing to blow up their access to call attention to it.
I don't think this story is really even about AI at all, but about labor practices.
How is it possible to "abuse" volunteer labor? Can't they just... stop volunteering?
The same way you can abuse paid labor, "can't they just quit?"
I think that's quite different, though. If someone is currently doing paid labor, they indeed can't just quit in most cases, because they depend on the income.
But there's no such thing with volunteering to try a new service. That's just something people do because they feel like it, are bored, enjoy it in their spare time?
Unless those artists depended on (free) access to the model for monetization purposes. There have been some AI videos popping up in Youtube and other platforms. Creating a video using traditional CGI techniques is many orders of magnitudes more work than writing (even pages of) prompts.
To that, I will add that there is a large market for content outside mainstream media[^1]. I'm sure there are creative folk out there which are not visual artists as their main thing[^2], but can use cheap visual art coming from AI to generate some sort of income...
[^1]: See, for example, https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-strategies/data-an...
They aren't free to post videos they generated with sora. It must be reviewed before hand
> That's just something people do because they feel like it, are bored, enjoy it in their spare time?
It's an emerging technology and platform. There are economic advantages to having early access to learn what it can do.
Furthermore, this specific colunteer program appears to have an associated contest that pays creators who win. Thus you have a lot of volunteers, limited under NDA, being pushed to compete for vert limited renumeration for their efforts. I doubt most of the volunteers are bored people doing it as a hobby.
In that case the paid labor loses their livelihood.
What do they lose when they weren't being paid in the first place?
Not really a reasonable comparison - paid labour is more likely linked to income that is used for basic necessities, whereas volunteering implies freely offering to take part in an enterprise/task - thus no consequence for just choosing not to partake. Honestly seems like a bit of an emotional overreaction.
It’s a company that has raised billions, they can afford to pay for labor.
That's not how markets work though. If someone is willing to do it for free, and you are happy with what that person produces, why would a company pay them anyway?
> why would a company pay them anyway?
Because we have laws to protect workers. You can't just not pay an employee and call them a volunteer as a for profit company.
There a legal limitations on what a for profit company can do with volunteer labor but companies have been increasingly bold about pushing those limits.
Often times it is hard to tell if a program violates those limits since particpants are put under strict NDAs.
That sounds like a definitional problem though. If a person is choosing to volunteer are they really an employee?
I general don't agree with NDAs though, so on that front we definitely agree there's an issue there. Especially for a volunteer, I would never sign an NDA when I'm volunteering my time and effort.
Volunteers can be abused in many of the same ways employees can be. In general, if a volunteer at a for profit compan is doing work that benefits that company, this can be considered "competing" with paid employees and mean the volunteer position must also be paid
By the time the volunteer quits due to abuse, it's too late. If Mr asshole goes off and yells a bunch of obscenities at someone, sure, they can respond by quitting, but they've already been yelled at and called a bunch of names.
I think that everyone at this point just distrusts the board who isn’t paid to say otherwise.
OpenAI is the new high watermark in moral, ethical, social, and intellectual corruption and anyone who works there who has any moral sense is deeply conflicted.
It’s cancer that has cancer. To defeat it would be like discovering a vaccine.
Who is everyone? Outside of very online tech enthusiasts like ourselves, nobody cares.
There are degrees of infamy: clearly Larry Summers is the highest profile person who is universally loathed, but people are starting to know the other key players. It’s on TV.
Ask an average person who Larry Summers is. Again, different bubbles different priorities.
I really dislike the meme that the typical person is stupid.
The typical person is the result of a ruthless Darwinian selection process that has left the typical person savvy, agile, aware, alert, and capable.
The typical person might be coded inarticulate because the education available to the typical person stresses different vocabulary than people not subject to ruthless selection pressure recently.
I’m home schooled to put it mildly, more accurate is that I was presented books and an admiration for acumen, and I deliberately delineate by degree the dramatic dismissal of people on HN who condescend to typical people.
The typical person on HN would survive about three minutes in a legitimately menacing environment.
Summers was on Jon Stewart recently. People know who he is. They might not know his long-time advocacy for maximum toxic waste disposal in Africa, but in fairness Rubin helped quiet that down. They might have forgotten that he personally knew-capped Brooksley Born at the exact perfect time to demonstrate that LTCM was the prototype for ever godawful prop deak today.
I’ll refrain from commenting on Fidji Simo out of personal experience because it would be unfair given that I’ve known her for 12 years and merely remark that the public record is a litany of OSHA violations handled more clumsily than the already low bar Amazon set.
The typical person is a lot savvier than the typical HN hot take smartass who is dramatically out of their depth.
I absolutely agree with you regarding "typical person is not stupid" point. People just don't care about it, and don't know. It's not about stupidity, it's just not a useful information for majority of people. Knowing about internal OpenAI drama, the board members, everything that happened in the last couple of years is just very out of reach for most of the people.
It's the same if I mentioned some random people from my interest circles that you definitely won't know, but I can guarantee at least millions of people who share the same interests know about those names.
Obviously I can be wrong, but my simple sniff test is asking a couple of friend groups and bar chats with regulars, who are not in tech. Some people don't even know about OpenAI despite using ChatGPT (basically a household name now)! I'm also clueless when my friends in finance/law throw in some names and companies that I have no connection to and knowledge of.
Sorry, I didn't mean to sound dismissive, probably shouldn't write comments during work hours.
I prefer Pepsi to Coca Cola. I sometimes pose as a Coca Cola drinker to suddenly instigate protests among Coca Cola drinkers.
Some people think I am acting strange but I'd argue they don't see my point.
The less reasonable artist complaints are the ones where they just straight up accuse AI of stealing their work, when that's not how it works at all.
The problem stems when they change their mind but there is no new information.
Maybe they agreed first and later realized that if they help ClosedAI murder their future careers and careers of other artists they might as well get paid for it.
Probably blown away by what was possible so they panicked.
By judging from those videos, nothing can be further from the truth.
Every single video is riddled by visual artifacts just like the still images.
I saw a shaking rubiks cube, a shrinking cola bottle, and two dogs jumping into eachother and swapping places in a ridiculous way.
No artist should be threatened by this nonsense. Can't wait for the hype to die.
“Hundreds of artists provide unpaid labor through bug testing, feedback and experimental work for the program for a $150B valued company”
This is a hilarious basis for protest
A huge company is using unpaid artist's labour to create tools that will reduce the potential for these and all future artists to get any paid work at all in the future.
It seems like signing up as the volunteer with the goal of derailing the company as much as possible is a highly valid form of ptotest.
> A huge company is using unpaid artist's labour to create tools that will reduce the potential for these and all future artists to get any paid work at all in the future.
"Will" is a strong claim. If the Jevons Paradox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox) applies in this case - and it may well do so - the new technology will lower costs, and the increased productivity will increase demand. If so, it will require artists to work in a different way but they'll earn more.
The Baumol Effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect) may also lead to increased wages.
No that won’t happen. Audiovisual entertainment is already beyond capacity. We make more stuff than people have the time to consume it.
The idea that this will raise wages is hilarious. I don’t see how that would be possible.
Tbh a lot of art people want money for is garbage, and most money goes to a few corporations anyways.
It would be nice to see that system rearranged. Even if there’s more art, money could instead fund artistic ventures people actually want rather than keeping powerful entities afloat/entrenched.
Maybe the number of major corporations decreases (towards a permanent handful) as the number of paid artists increases (towards basically everyone who could desire payment for art that’s actually in demand).
A system being rearranged is tempting, and yes, a very likely outcome. Hollywood depends on its advantage in production values, which is quickly being eroded by AI.
However, if recent history is a guide, we won't see an increase in the number of paid artists, I'd say looking at the music industry, what we saw was the increase in the number of artists in general, but success seems to me as fickle as ever. Now, apparently, thanks to Ticketmaster monopoly, even live tours barely make any money and musicians are turning to Onlyfans (not porn, just direct support) to make money.
So here's the state of the music industry (partially due to unchallenged monopolies):
You, for the most part, don't make money making music and distributing it online
You don't make money from a live tour either.
Amazing outcome for an industry where the cost of production and distribution has collapsed. No one makes money except for the monopolies in streaming (Spotify) and ticketing (Ticketmaster).
Without monopoly protections, that's what you get. Thankfully, there's a bit more competition in the audiovisual realm with Youtube and multiple streamers. Still, I don't know what to think about what might happen.
Most artists / people in audiovisual production will likely make less money. Some will likely make a lot of money. My (kind of unfounded atm) assumption is that AI will just increase the differences in Paretto distribution of income, making the top 20% very rich and the bottom 80% very poor. Before genAI, you had a very large and vibrant VFX industry, with relatively well paid workers, which is likely to be cut down by huge numbers (it's already been cut by around 50%).
> Audiovisual entertainment is already beyond capacity. We make more stuff than people have the time to consume it.
No we don't. I rarely find anything that I like in Netflix, Amazon Prime or HBO. Those services are stuffed with brain bleach that I don't even find entertaining. There are "gold nuggets"[^1] I have enjoyed in those sites, but it's like one or two per year. The rest of my watching time goes to videos of people camping in the wilderness, for lack of a better thing.
[^1]: As in, they are entertaining. Rarely, they are imaginative. Even more seldom, they are educational or contribute to my personal growth.
Yes we do.
You don’t get it. Those programs are made because they make money. Netflix is profitable because it makes shows that X number of people want to see.
The number of people like yourself who are underserved by stuff to watch is too low to be profitable - or they don’t know how to make a show that would appeal to this group yet.
The dark truth about TV is that it’s what people want to watch. There is no conspiracy. Here is a good Steve Jobs quote on the subject:
“ When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.”
Anyway assuming that an industry screwed up because you personally don’t like their product is pretty incredible. No they didnt screw up. They’re just serving people who aren’t quite like yourself.
And? Two things can be true at the same time. Deadpool Wolverine was 300 million USD to produce. Nobody is going to put that amount of money into producing content for a corner wacko like myself, or Steve Jobs, whom, by your quote, apparently had the same problem (and 300 million USD to spare). But if it can be produced at a fraction of the price, then there is a market. And that's exactly my point.
What kind of content could you want that’s not on YouTube today?
A few examples:
* Slow, thoughtful, hard sci-fi that's well-written and well acted, with immersive (not campy) sets and effects. Enough of that to fill an evening a week.
* A spiritual successor to Firefly with the same production requirements and release schedule described above.
Even YouTube is bound by the same limitations as the AAA streaming platforms are—you can't sink money into something that's too niche, and right now doing things well costs buckets of money. So I'm sure there are a few fan films on YouTube adjacent to my interests, but their production value is going to be far below what it could be if things were made cheaper.
Yeah afaik Firefly didn't make money even back then. In 2-10 years the tech might be there for this, but it's not there yet.
If you're looking for hard sci fi I really recommend Andor.
Yep, I've watched Andor—it's great sci-fi, but not hard sci-fi.
Just because they make money from one nich doesn't mean they will appeal to another
They have limited amount of resources and people have limited time capacity.
They make the most profitable content they can think of.
[dead]
There are better ways to protest than violating a legally binding agreement - seems more like an emotional reaction than a properly thought through protest.
In fairness, some of the most effective protests have gone much further than that — they've broken laws. (See basically every civil rights protest)
Breaking contracts seems tame by comparison.
Fair point - and I suppose we are on HACKERnews - and they are OPENAI, so helping them be more open is an effective form of protest.
The most effective forms of protest usually are illegal
It's risky though, if the protest is annoying or damaging enough (antisocial behaviour basically) it can actively turn people away from your position. As in "Oh these are a bunch of insane/evil/violent etc people and that type of person tends to have this type of view, I as a good person do not have these kinds of views"
True, true - didn't think that one through
the ONLY effective forms of protest
You'd rather a politely worded letter to the artist's local newspaper?
Meh, not entirely sure what would work better. Having read through the huggingface post a few times now, suppose it's less of an emotional reaction, more actual protest to abusive practices.
I'd rather they do... art?
Why not organize a worldwide protest where every participant produces and shares Art denouncing generative AI? "AI might produce single pieces but this collective work, this is what AI can't do" and so on.
What they're doing is so weird and ineffective in contrast, it baffles me.
For three hours, they gave everyone access to create videos with Sora, some of which could very well be art. Not only that, but the form in which they did this and the statement they made could also be considered art. I think they've done well here.
In their statement, they make it clear that they're not opposed to the use of AI in art: they're opposed to the abuse of artists to pretend that OpenAI is doing this for their sake. This serves their perspective better than any juvenile anti-AI quilt could have.
> Why not organize a worldwide protest where every participant produces and shares Art denouncing generative AI
Ah yes, a feel good protest that can be completely ignored by everyone, especially OpenAI. Even better, maybe OpenAI could fund it? That way they get to claim they hear the protests but they don't have to actually change anything.
Say everyone completely ignores the protest; surely that's a valid data point that should in itself make those artists reflect on their own positions & ideas? Maybe, just maybe, people in the general public actually value generative AI, regardless of what artists think about it?
I’m comfortable saying that there has never been a good protest in modern history that didn’t violate a legally binding agreement.
If you want to make a legally binding agreement you better pay me first.
They’re artists. Theory of mind is important here.
>It seems like signing up as the volunteer with the goal of derailing the company as much as possible is a highly valid form of ptotest.
It's the most immature and pseudointellectual form of protest I can think of. "Oh I am scared of the technology that's coming regardless, let me try and screw everybody else over as well!"
Link to the post: https://huggingface.co/spaces/PR-Puppets/PR-Puppet-Sora If you read through it, they clearly state: "We are not against the use of AI technology as a tool for the arts (if we were, we probably wouldn't have been invited to this program). What we don't agree with is how this artist program has been rolled out and how the tool is shaping up ahead of a possible public release. We are sharing this to the world in the hopes that OpenAI becomes more open, more artist friendly and supports the arts beyond PR stunts."
This is super interesting and seems to be the first organized push back against the platformization of 'creators' where the power imbalance is so great that corps expect free labor for the chance to become one of few outsized successes and it's whitewashed as 'democratization'.
Well, both of those are subjective terms but if it’s effective it’s effective.
The most effective movements are usually a combination of protest and civil disobedience. Considering livelihoods are under threat I wouldn’t condone nor blame anyone for even going one step further.
I don't know if protest actually does work. It can certainly be used to "legitimise" some course of action preferred by one group of elites. But there are so, so many examples of protest achieving nothing at all - or even having the opposite effect.
Yes, and bombing openai's headquarters is effective too. Effectiveness isn't a moral compass.
Unless they volunteered precisely so that they would have early access and could leak it, which would be sensible.
Which is what they did. So openAI was tricked, boohoo. Should be applauded here on h@x0rn3wz
It's Y-Combinator tech-startup-in-a-garage-type-of-hacker news, not CCC-type-of-hacker news or Anonymous-type-of-hacker news.
I thought it was Levy Hackers?
"We are doing labor, and are not being fairly compensated for our labor" is a hilarious basis? How so?
They are free to stop doing it for free? I don't understand.
Maybe they object to the idea that anyone's labor should be used, for free, to enrich the wealthy. I don't think that's a terrible stance to have, abstractly. I dunno if that was the case here.
Then they simply should not have opted in. I didn’t?
Someone linked the actual open letter above: https://huggingface.co/spaces/PR-Puppets/PR-Puppet-Sora
If you read it they state quite clearly that they feel like their participation was different than they expected it to be and that's why they are upset.
They opted in with the express purpose of protesting, it seems.
You mean sabotaging.
The fact they said yes at the start shows a form of tunnel vision. I just can't empathize that much with borderline manchildren leaking access to something they got the privilege to
A lot of people refused to hang out with Diddy even if they could put their finger on exactly why.
I know more than most, but the sexual assault allegations and shady restructuring and abuse of the the political process and the multiple firings for financial fraud and, well a lot of stuff, that’s all public record.
Matt Gaetz got run out of DC for less.
So stupid. I realize artists are panicking but this angle just makes them look like Luddite villains.
I highly recommend reading about luddites! This Smithsonian article covers the topic well: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-rea...
Basically luddites were never the bad ones, they were protestors against abusive working conditions. They did sabotage the owners of the mills that paid them so poorly, sometimes by destroying machinery, but it was really an underground labor movement that’s super cool to learn about.
No, there was nothing "super cool" about the Luddites. Stop trying to rehabilitate these thugs. Failing that, do it someplace other than a site called "Hacker News."
There's nothing wrong with resisting bad working conditions, unfair pay, or getting replaced by a machine without adequate social safety nets in place.
If businesses decide to replace workers with AI, then it's also their collective responsibility to pay for their retraining, or if that isn't possible their social security.
Surely the morality depends on how they go about their protest.
The Luddite "thugs" were the ones that were getting murdered by the people they were protesting against, a protest which happened because they were about to be replaced while already working in extremely dangerous conditions with terrible compensation.
It's telling that the AI sycophants side with the group that was actually murdering people, however.
a protest which happened because they were about to be replaced while already working in extremely dangerous conditions with terrible compensation.
Gee. Being "replaced" in a job like that sounds like a good career move to me.
The system that prevailed up to that point didn't give them many options, of course... but neither would their response to it. Sabotage doesn't bring progress, no matter who told you that it did, or how much you want to believe it.
Luddites were highly educated, skilled workers whose work was being replaced by machines. They just wanted to operate the machines and share in the increased productivity.
There's absolutely no parallels here, to AI. A machine that is taking work from highly skilled labor ohhhh wait
If a machine can take your work, perhaps you weren't as "highly skilled" as you thought you were.
Sounds like your idea of a machine is a little outdated.
[dead]
[flagged]
Part of the hacker ethos is being counter to mainstream and challenging authority. Luddites fit in with that perfectly.
Taking out your frustrations on the hardware isn't part of any hacker ethos I'm familiar with. I guess times have changed.
Or like cool activists that made a stupid-but-rich corp accept them despite their obvious activist goals — who knows.
You assume they changed their mind, there is no data point for that as of now.
Hilariously correct you mean?
Yeah, hilarious. Now lets go back to working on open source so that corporations can use it and openai can train on it
> > unpaid labor through bug testing, feedback and experimental work for the program for a $150B valued company”
> This is a hilarious basis for protest
Of course. Every CEO works for free these days. /s
Looking at the examples here: https://x.com/kimmonismus/status/1861450051085545880
It seems pretty underwhelming compared to what was shown in early 2024 no?
There's a bunch of commercial options live right now that have comparable results. Not sure what all the hype is about, here are a few:
https://runwayml.com/
https://klingai.com/
https://hailuoai.video/
https://lumalabs.ai/
https://pika.art/
https://viggle.ai/
I don't think it's worse, just that the standards moved up, the expectations are now much higher. Sam forgot YC's advice to launch fast.
Apparently they only had access to the light/turbo model, not the full one.
Source for this claim? I've never heard it before.
https://xcancel.com/legit_rumors/status/1861448164084978157#...
> It seems pretty underwhelming compared to what was shown in early 2024 no?
People seem to have five fingers so I would say that as a win.
Yeah, for all the talk of Sora building an internal “world model” that could be a building block for AGI… this seems to suffer from all the same glitches as the Will Smith spaghetti video, just with much, much more polish.
I don’t think it’s that much worse than what OpenAI showed off earlier in the year when you consider that those examples were very cherry-picked, though. These new videos don’t make it seem like a bad model, they’re just a bit more realistically mediocre.
Anyone who works closely with diffusion models knows the "world model" thing was hype. Diffusion models are really good at faking, starting with nonsensical large-scale structure and forcing it towards plausibility with lots of nice details.
Yeah, I'm struggling to understand what the use case of this is. These videos aren't tricking anybody who's used a cameraphone. Just shooting video with phone costs nearly nothing. People don't particularly seem to want to generate films of places they aren't.
Wow yeah. The pixelation makes it hard but chopstick pens, pages moving, cars crossing over eachother.
Demo's gonna demo.
https://archive.is/8sKXF
I’d love to see the contract those artists signed! I’m sure they did, or should have, gone in with their eyes wide open, and not sure what they expected from OpenAI (since clearly there wouldn’t have been any mention of payment in the contract), or whether OpenAI started asking them for a lot of work maybe (that’s the only thing I can think of that would give them the right to complain)?
They probably signed up for the purpose of doing this. People don't usually change their opinions that easily, especially a total 180 from "volunteering to support OpenAI" to directly the opposite.
I’m convinced Sora will finally motivate me to finish my novel, and I’m so excited about that.
GenAI has been a huge boon to my creativity as well. It does the donkey work.
A bit of buzz, free publicity if anything. It's a competitive space.
The top Video models will not arise in the west where Hollywood rules.
I wish the slop era would just get up to speed already so it can be seen for what it is.
It's already here even without pervasive video AI. We had text slop before LLMs too.
In other news, Sora still exists. I thought they were never going to release it, there are comparable/better commercial options now.
[dead]
[dead]
Doesn't the law establish a minimum wage? Who violates the rights of the working person?