This is one among many items I will regularly tag in Pinboard as oegconnect, and automatically post tagged as #OEGConnect to Mastodon. Do you know of something else we should share like this? Just reply below and we will check it out.
Theoretically I love the idea of a space where open sharing leads to collaborative works. I took a look at Artbreeder but I am unable to just groove on it as for me it falls right into the fraught mix of AI-generated intellectual property and what we might call creative justice (or justice for creators?).
I see in their terms that Artbreeder is enabling its vision by having users agree to apply CC0 to all creations to facilitate reuse/remix. It’s a bit confused there though because they give users all IP rights to their creations, which of course would be required for users to in turn dedicate their creations to the public domain using CC0. But they mistakenly call CC0 a “license” which unfortunately muddies the waters because then it’s not clear that users are giving up copyright by using CC0. I’m not sure users will understand all that. It might work better (and be more just?) to just say that all works are automatically public domain because they are built from the commons and should therefore be a part of the commons and leave individual copyright ownership out of it. Imagine a world where this were standard practice for all generative AI…
To make things even more complex, I see a thread where someone claiming to be the creator of Artbreeder is saying that there are plans for paid subscription that would enable private creations, which I would think then would not be CC0 or it starts to make even less sense.
And beyond all that, that same thread with Artbreeder’s creator raises issues about the IP of Artbreeder’s model, which appears to be based on Nvidia’s styleGAN. I haven’t even figured out what images Artbreeder is trained on, but I imagine the training data raises all the usual concerns about its licensing and biases.
Not to harsh the glow here, but in the end, as cool as a project like this may be, it also lands me right in the messy complexity of creative justice. If AI had been brought to the world more ethically, maybe we could have nice things without all the caveats…
Right on Nate, bring on the critical lens, that’s what we need to do. I am finding most things I am spotting these days look interesting and first, and when you scrape below the front page flash, it gets to a gooey upsell.
Everything AI seems to be a free sample on a tiny spoon designed to get you to pay for a service, Artbreeder too. The whole application of CC0 and the so-called aim to be a “creative super-organism” is not rooted in any interest of public good or a commons, just a feature to put into the sales pitch.
The path is to enshittification but the pace at which AI flavored tools gets there is rapid.
That is seemingly like an alternate reality where Rod Serling is glaring in the background.
I’m not sure Artbreeder is a case of upsell so much as a slightly confused person trying to do well and do good at the same time. For example, they led with the service that promotes open sharing and only talk about maybe adding a paid option later, so perhaps their priorities are in the right order. On the other hand, as I understand it generative AI applications are not so cheap to host, so they may be looking for ways to make it sustainable. That then leads to the question whether stuff like this is worth the cost/environmental impact, cool as it may be…
I totally get why folks get confused about CC0 being a license (since licenses are the main way folks know about CC). If it were only a terminology issue, I wouldn’t bother raising it, but the difference between CC licenses and CC0 is the difference between sharing your copyright and giving up your copyright and I’m always hoping folks understand that difference.
