Thursday Things: Counting Ants Edition
22 September 2022. Vol 4 No 38 By Dan McGirt. #163
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“One … two … wow, this could take a while.” Photo by Maksim Shutov on Unsplash
Hold Your Bunny Horses
We were wowed by art-generating AI’s a few weeks ago. (See the 1 September Bunny Horse Edition of Thursday Things if you missed that:)
Now reality is catching up with this amazing new technology. So as a follow up I note a couple of recent developments in the artificial intelligence art sphere.
First, it seems these art-spitting AIs are trained on massive datasets of images scraped from the internet for research purposes. In and of itself, that’s no problem. But many artists have concerns about an AI gobbling up examples of their (often copyrighted) work without their knowledge, permission, or compensation and then producing imitative images that copy their style.
One response has been creation of a tool to help artists determine if any of their work is found in the datasets that the AIs are trained on:
Have AI image generators assimilated your art? New tool lets you check
In response to controversy over image synthesis models learning from artists' images scraped from the Internet without consent—and potentially replicating their artistic styles—a group of artists has released a new website that allows anyone to see if their artwork has been used to train AI.
The website "Have I Been Trained?" taps into the LAION-5B training data used to train Stable Diffusion and Google's Imagen AI models, among others. To build LAION-5B, bots directed by a group of AI researchers crawled billions of websites, including large repositories of artwork at DeviantArt, ArtStation, Pinterest, Getty Images, and more. Along the way, LAION collected millions of images from artists and copyright holders without consultation, which irritated some artists.
Related to this are copyright issues concerning AI-generated images that have led some major online image markets to ban AI art from their platforms:
Getty Images bans AI-generated content over fears of legal challenges
Getty Images has banned the upload and sale of illustrations generated using AI art tools like DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion. It’s the latest and largest user-generated content platform to introduce such a ban, following similar decisions by sites including Newgrounds, PurplePort, and FurAffinity.
Getty Images CEO Craig Peters told The Verge that the ban was prompted by concerns about the legality of AI-generated content and a desire to protect the site’s customers.
“There are real concerns with respect to the copyright of outputs from these models and unaddressed rights issues with respect to the imagery, the image metadata and those individuals contained within the imagery,” said Peters. Given these concerns, he said, selling AI artwork or illustrations could potentially put Getty Images users at legal risk. “We are being proactive to the benefit of our customers,” he added.
New technology can astound us and offer amazing possibilities — but these advances never happen in a vacuum or come without consequences. Training artificial intelligence programs to digest teraflops of images and then produce new images in response to a text prompt (“Bunny horse!”) looks very different if you are an artificial intelligence researcher, a visual artist, the owner of an online image marketplace platform, a copyright lawyer … or someone who just wants a bunny horse!
I will never give up my bunny horse! Never! Image: Stable Diffusion AI (and maybe some dubious scraped images in a massive research data set 👀)
So Many Ants, So Little Time
Have you ever wondered just how many ants there are in the world? You’re either the kind of person who wonders about useless information like that or you’re not.
I’ll admit the “how many ants are there?” question had never occurred to me before. But I have sometimes wondered how many grains of sand there are. Of course, you’d first have to define what counts as a grain of sand, versus “small pebble”. But once you settle on a definition that is a question with an answer — just not an answer that’s knowable. By which I mean, there is a definite number of grains of sand that meet whatever definition of sand you settle on. But there is no way for anyone to know with precision and certainty what that number is.
It is the same with ants. There is a definite number of ants in the world at any given moment. But we can never know the exact number. All we can do it make our best estimate. And a team of researchers has done just that:
How Many Ants Live on Earth? Scientists Came Up With an Answer
Have you ever wondered exactly how many ants live on Earth? Possibly not, but it's certainly a question we've asked ourselves.
Our research published today provides an approximate answer. We conservatively estimate our planet harbors about 20 quadrillion ants. That's 20 thousand million millions, or in numerical form, 20,000,000,000,000,000 (20 with 15 zeroes).
We further estimate the world's ants collectively constitute about 12 million tons of dry carbon. This exceeds the mass of all the world's wild birds and wild mammals combined. It's also equal to about one-fifth of the total weight of humans.
That’s a lot of ants. If you want to check their math by counting for yourself, you’d better get started. At one ant per second it would take you until — well, I think the sun would go supernova before you finished counting ants. 20 quadrillions sounds about right to me anyway. Let’s just go with that!
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