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 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’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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
>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
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.
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.
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 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’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'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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Probably blown away by what was possible so they panicked.
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.
“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.
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
You'd rather a politely worded letter to the artist's local newspaper?
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.
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.
If you want to make a legally binding agreement you better pay me first.
>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
"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
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.
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.
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.
I wish the slop era would just get up to speed already so it can be seen for what it is.
Doesn't the law establish a minimum wage? Who violates the rights of the working person?