OpenAI whistleblower found dead (youtube.com)
Happened 3 weeks ago but only being reported now.
The man gave an interview with NYT. He joined OpenAI in 2020 when it was like a research project. He said he thought it wasn't fair how they used copyright material. He said what OpenAi was doing was illegal and destructive to the internet (although what he said could be applied to any of the current models).
Commenter: ‘Boing showed they can kill whistleblowers without consequence.’ [Two Boeing whistleblowers died this year.]
Commenter: 'I come from the CG artists community and i can tell you that everyone is very depressed here, especially the guys in the illustration and other 2D fields. Data companies scraped everything from people's portfolios without any permission or even announcement. And now any random guy can write a sentence to create pictures in a style of a certain artist and completely devalue years, and often decades, that were put into the development of that style.
'Back in the days we thought that machine learning will be used to help us do the mundane parts of the jobs quicker - like UVing, retopology, skinning and rigging in 3D - but instead we got something very sinister, meant to take everything that we've built and destroy our heritage and future. Devalue the very core of creative work in general population's eyes. And the timing couldn't be worse as tens of thousands lose their jobs to poor planning done by incompetent top management.'
You could say that prompting ‘in the style of ArtistName’ and getting results obviously trained off decades of his career is devaluing his ability and it is based on stealing his work. Just because you say a person can already draw in the style of another person, and you use the same language to say the generativeAI is drawing ‘in the style of’ doesn't mean it's the same thing.
Perhaps the generality also defines or obfuscates the issue differently than if you were to consider it by one artist. Say you train a genAI to do art in the style of StudioGhibli and then let people use it, would you say that's fair to Ghibli? Is it more fair because it is done to any public artist?
Is it an argument that if we don't do it, China still will? China doesn't protect copyright and fabricates coies of Western-copyrighted products, but we still enfoce copyright, so is there a comparison there?