A group of hackers that says it believes “AI-generated artwork is detrimental to the creative industry and should be discouraged” is hacking people who are trying to use a popular interface for the AI image generation software Stable Diffusion with a malicious extension for the image generator interface shared on Github.
ComfyUI is an extremely popular graphical user interface for Stable Diffusion that’s shared freely on Github, making it easier for users to generate images and modify their image generation models. ComfyUI_LLMVISION, the extension that was compromised to hack users, is a ComfyUI extension that allowed users to integrate large language models GPT-4 and Claude 3 into the same interface.
The ComfyUI_LLMVISION Github page is currently down, but a Wayback Machine archive of it from June 9 states that it was “COMPROMISED BY NULLBULGE GROUP.”
I get the sentiment but I don’t think anything here addresses anything I haven’t already mentioned. The labor is certainly being used and it’s certainly for profit, but not in any way that humans don’t already do.
I really am sympathetic towards artists, though. Like I get that a lot of demand for their work could one day be taken by what generative AI is working towards. I just don’t understand how we can reasonably call it theft/crime when a computer figures out how to make an image by looking at other images but not when humans do it. The whole thing seems like an appeal to emotion.