LLMs immediately and completely displace the bread-and-butter replacement-tier illustration and design work that makes up much of that profession, and does so by effectively counterfeiting creative expression. An coding agent writes a SQL join or a tree traversal. The two things are not the same.
Far more importantly, though, artists haven't spent the last quarter century working to eliminate protections for IPR. Software developers have.
Finally, though I'm not stuck on this: I simply don't agree with the case being made for LLMs violating IPR.
I have had the pleasure, many times over the last 16 years, of expressing my discomfort with nerd piracy culture and the coercive might-makes-right arguments underpinning it. I know how the argument goes over here (like a lead balloon). You can agree with me or disagree. But I've earned my bona fides here. The search bar will avail.
How is creative expression required for such things?
Also, I believe that we're just monkey meat bags and not magical beings and so the whole human creativity thing can easily be reproduced with enough data + a sprinkle of randomness. This is why you see trends in supposedly thought provoking art across many artists.
Artists draw from imagination which is drawn from lived experience and most humans have roughly the same lives on average, cultural/country barriers probably produce more of a difference.
Many of the flourishes any artist may use in their work is also likely used by many other artists.
If I commission "draw a mad scientist, use creative license" from several human artists I'm telling you now that they'll all mostly look the same.
> Far more importantly, though, artists haven't spent the last quarter century working to eliminate protections for IPR. Software developers have.
I think the case we are making is there is no such thing as intellectual property to begin with and the whole thing is a scam created by duck taping a bunch of different concepts together when they should not be grouped together at all.
That's exactly the point, it's hard to see how someone could hold that view and pillory AI companies for slurping up proprietary code.
You probably don't have those views. But I think Thomas' point is that the profession as a whole has been crying "information wants to be free" for so many years, when what they meant was "information I don't want to pay for wants to be free" - and the hostile response to AI training on private data underlines that.
Because it's rules for us and not for them. If I take Microsoft's code and "transform" it I get sued. If Microsoft takes everyone else's code and "transforms" it (and sells it back to us) well, that's just business, pal. Thomas's argument is completely missing this point.
> LLMs immediately and completely displace the bread-and-butter replacement-tier illustration and design work that makes up much of that profession, and does so by effectively counterfeiting creative expression. An coding agent writes a SQL join or a tree traversal. The two things are not the same.
In what way are these two not the same? It isn't like icons or ui panels are more original than the code that runs the app.
Or are you saying only artists are creating things of value and it is fine to steal all the work of programmers?
What about ones trained on fully licensed art, like Adobe Firefly (based on their own stock library) or F-Lite by Freepik & Fal (also claimed to be copyright safe)?
> LLMs immediately and completely displace the bread-and-butter replacement-tier illustration and design work that makes up much of that profession
And so what? Tell it to the Graphviz diagram creators, entry level Javascript programmers, horse carriage drivers, etc. What's special?
> .. and does so by effectively counterfeiting creative expression
What does this actually mean, though? ChatGPT isn't claiming to have "creative expression" in this sense. Everybody knows that it's generating an image using mathematics executed on a GPU. It's creating images. Like an LLM creates text. It creates artwork in the same sense that it creates novels.
> Far more importantly, though, artists haven't spent the last quarter century working to eliminate protections for IPR. Software developers have.
Programmers are very particular about licenses in opposition to your theory. Copyleft licensing leans heavily on enforcing copyright. Besides, I hear artists complain about the duration of copyright frequently. Pointing to some subset of programmers that are against IPR is just nutpicking in any case.
I get it, you have an axe to grind against some subset of programmers who are "nerds" in a "piracy culture". Artists don't deserve special protections. It sucks for your family members, I really mean that, but they will have to adapt with everybody else.
I disagree with you on this. Artists, writers, and programmers deserve equal protection, and this means that tptacek is right to criticize nerd piracy culture. In other words, we programmers should respect artists and writers too.
To be clear, we're not in disagreement. We should all respect each other. However, it's pretty clear that the cat's out of the bag, and trying to claw back protections for only one group of people is stupid. It really betrays the author's own biases.
I do have an axe to grind, and that part of the post is axe-grindy (though: it sincerely informs how I think about LLMs), I knew that going into it (unanimous feedback from reviewers!) and I own it.
I generally agree with your post. Many of the arguments against LLMs being thrown around are unserious, unsound, and a made-for-social-media circle jerk that don't survive any serious adversarial scrutiny.
That said, this particular argument you are advancing isn't getting so much heat here because of an unfriendly audience that just doesn't want to hear what you have to say. Or that is defensive because of hypocrisy and past copyright transgressions. It is being torn apart because this argument that artists deserve protection, but software engineers don't is unsound special pleading of the kind you criticize in your post.
Firstly, the idea that programmers are uniquely hypocritical about IPR is hyperbole unsupported by any evidence you've offered. It is little more than a vibe. As I recall, when Photoshop was sold with a perpetual license, it was widely pirated. By artists.
Secondly, the idea -- that you dance around but don't state outright -- that programmers should be singled out for punishment since "we" put others out of work is absurd and naive. "We" didn't do that. It isn't the capital owners over at Travelocity that are going to pay the price for LLM displacement of software engineers, it is the junior engineer making $140k/year with a mortgage.
Thirdly, if you don't buy into LLM usage as violating IPR, then what exactly is your argument against LLM use for the arts? Just a policy edict that thou shalt not use LLMs to create images because it puts some working artists out of business? Is there a threshold of job destruction that has to occur for you to think we should ban LLMs use case by use case? Are there any other outlaws/scarlet-letter-bearers in addition to programmers that will never receive any policy protection in this area because of real or perceived past transgressions?
Adobe is one of the most successful corporations in the history of commerce; the piracy technologists enabled wrecked most media industries.
Again, the argument I'm making regarding artists is that LLMs are counterfeiting human art. I don't accept the premise that structurally identical solutions in software counterfeit their originals.
> Adobe is one of the most successful corporations in the history of commerce; the piracy technologists enabled wrecked most media industries.
I guess that makes it ok then for artists to pirate Adobe's product. Also, I live in a music industry hub -- Nashville -- you'll have to forgive me if I don't take RIAA at their word that the music industry is in shambles, what with my lying eyes and all.
> Again, the argument I'm making regarding artists is that LLMs are counterfeiting human art. I don't accept the premise that structurally identical solutions in software counterfeit their originals.
I'm aware of the argument you are making. I imagine most of the people here understand the argument you are making. Its just a really asinine argument and is propped up by all manner of special pleading (but art is different, programmers are all naughty pirates that deserve to be punished) and appeals to authority (check my post history - I've established my bona fides.)
There simply is no serious argument to be made that LLMs reproducing one work product and displacing labor is better or worse than an LLM reproducing a different work product and displacing labor. Nobody is going to display some ad graphic from the local botanical garden's flyer for their spring gala at The Met. That's what is getting displaced by LLM. Banksy isn't being put out of business by stable diffusion. The person making the ad for the botanical garden's flyer has market value because they know how to draw things that people like to see in ads. A programmer has value because they know how to write software that a business is willing to pay for. It is as elitist as it is incoherent to say that one person's work product deserves to be protected but another person's does not because of "creativity."
Your argument holds no more water and deserves to be taken no more seriously than some knucklehead on Mastodon or Bluesky harping about how LLMs are going to cause global warming to triple and that no output LLMs produce has any value.
Well, I disagree with you. For the nth time, though, I also don't grant the premise that LLMs are violative of the IPR of programmers. But more importantly than anything else, I just don't want to hear any of this from developers. That's not "your arguments are wrong and I have refuted them". It's "I'm not going to hear them from you".
> For the nth time, though, I also don't grant the premise that LLMs are violative of the IPR of programmers.
I wish you all the best waiting for a future where the legislature and courts decide that LLM output is violative of copyright law only in the visual arts.
> I just don't want to hear any of this from developers.
Well, you seem to have posted about the wrong topic in the wrong forum then. But you’ve heard what you’ve wanted to hear in the discussion related to this post, so maybe that doesn’t really matter.
This is the only piece of human work left in the long run, and that’s providing training data on taste. Once we hook up a/b testing on ai creative outputs, the LLM will know how to be creative and not just duplicative. The ai will never have innate taste, but we can feed it taste.
We can also starve it of taste, but that’s impossible because humans can’t stop providing data. In other words, never tell the LLM what looks good and it will never know. A human in the most isolated part of the world can discern what creation is beautiful and what is not.
Everything is derivative, even all human work. I don't think "creativity" is that hard to replicate, for humans it's about lived experience. For a model it would need the data that impacts its decisions. Atm models are trained for a neutral/overall result.
Far more importantly, though, artists haven't spent the last quarter century working to eliminate protections for IPR. Software developers have.
Finally, though I'm not stuck on this: I simply don't agree with the case being made for LLMs violating IPR.
I have had the pleasure, many times over the last 16 years, of expressing my discomfort with nerd piracy culture and the coercive might-makes-right arguments underpinning it. I know how the argument goes over here (like a lead balloon). You can agree with me or disagree. But I've earned my bona fides here. The search bar will avail.