Aeolun 12 hours ago

I don’t really care whose they are. I just love seeing any of these drawings.

I have to imagine that drawing was a much greater source of entertainment at the time, and I’m kind of sad that that isn’t the case any more.

  • comboy 2 hours ago

    Is it not? My kids with all technology and toys they have access to still often choose drawing. And it's not like their main thing or something they strive to get better at. It's just fun.

    So definitely no reason to be sad, it is still a great source of entertainment (and not only for the kids)

  • WalterBright 4 hours ago

    They're also surprisingly good drawings. I drew nothing like them as a kid.

    • lm28469 4 hours ago

      And given the current war against boredom it's not going to get better.

  • drzaiusx11 8 hours ago

    My kids draw constantly (including on things they shouldn't), but I also limit screen time so that may have something to do with it

    • warner25 6 hours ago

      Yeah, starting around age four, all of my kids became prolific artists, going through dozens of sheets of paper per day. With our oldest kid, we tried hanging them up on the wall, but it quickly ended up covering every inch of a long hallway. Now, to keep our house from overflowing, I just photograph[1] all the drawings every night and recycle them (see my other comment about personally using the back sides of some for my own notes).

      [1] After four kids, I've fallen behind on sorting through the photos, but we have albums for the artwork that each of them has made. It's pretty cool to see it all in one place, and how their work has become more sophisticated over time.

bloomingkales 8 hours ago

I’m not really exposed to children’s drawings, but these look particularly talented.

I always feel a little weird about generating AI art because it really is standing on the shoulders of giants. I’d say it’s the closest thing to when Napster got everyone used to theft.

Any little simple drawing you generate is really off the back of kids and teenagers that draw out of a passion. So I try not to do it, feels icky.

Ideally we want a world where we license the artist’s style, and hopefully they can get paid out like streaming music artists in the long term. Along with that, we need laws that let you sue people that copy the style with no license.

  • sebzim4500 5 hours ago

    >I’d say it’s the closest thing to when Napster got everyone used to theft.

    I think the defining feature of theft is that you deprive the victim of their property. Redefining theft to include copying just feels silly, it's fundamentally a different sin (if it's a sin at all).

    • nuc1e0n 4 hours ago

      Well it hasn't been long since Disney got everyone used to suing each other for making similar drawings either. Which is odd because Mickey wasn't the first mouse drawn with round ears at the time of his first cartoon. A whole Simpsons episode satirised the affair.

    • xp84 3 hours ago

      You can easily still get the GP’s meaning if you substitute the phrase “sneakily cheating the artist out of any compensation” for “theft” though, right?

      • yreg an hour ago

        The "kids and teenagers that draw out of a passion" in GP's comment are not being cheated out of any compensation.

  • WalterBright 4 hours ago

    > Ideally we want a world where we license the artist’s style, and hopefully they can get paid out like streaming music artists in the long term. Along with that, we need laws that let you sue people that copy the style with no license.

    Years ago, I just kind of assumed that should be true. I'm not so sure anymore. I don't see any evidence that creativity comes from copyright and patent protection. Germany flowered in the 19th century without them.

    For the last 20 years, I've been releasing my work under the Boost license which is the most permissible license out there (public domain is my preference, but it is not recognized in some countries).

  • ses1984 8 hours ago

    Napster got people used to piracy not theft.

    Tape recording was already huge before Napster and it’s also considered piracy.

    • bloomingkales 8 hours ago

      Class Piracy extends Theft.

      It’s just an abstraction. I don’t want to go down this rabbit hole though.

      • vidarh 3 hours ago

        We have laws defining copyright infringement exactly because property rights inherently do not cover piracy.

      • geon 6 hours ago

        Nonsense. Theft by definition requires the original owner to lose something. Me not buying something is not theft.

        • Retric 6 hours ago

          Depriving them the opportunity to make a sale is still depriving them of something.

          • saulpw 5 hours ago

            What if they're not selling it anymore?

            • Retric 3 hours ago

              What if you take a fallen branch from someone’s yard when they aren’t going to use it for something? Dealing with edge cases where maybe theft isn’t theft is why we have a court system.

              Words themselves are more generic in nature. It’s through phrases, sentences, etc where that ever finer nuances can be described.

              • saulpw 2 hours ago

                This is not academic: https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/video-game-preservation...

                These are old games, they can't be purchased anywhere, they aren't taking anyone's precious profits, and they still can't be (legally) played.

                This is one case at least where "piracy" is definitively not theft.

                • Retric 2 hours ago

                  > can’t be purchased anywhere

                  At a single moment sure, but many games have gone from a state where you can’t purchase them to you can. I’d be cautious of any argument which suggests watching a movie the day before it hits movie theaters has zero economic impact.

                  So you’d need to find a game that couldn’t ever be purchased until the end of copyright coverage, which is more a theoretical argument than something you can demonstrate in the moment.

                  • saulpw 10 minutes ago

                    "watching a movie the day before it hits movie theaters" is not the same thing at all. This is more like trying to show racist Looney Tunes cartoons from the 1940s in an educational setting. No one's making any money off "Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs" (1943) nor "Pitfall!" (1983) on the Atari 2600. They're not being sold, for reasonable economic reasons, and rigid copyright restrictions should not apply to them.

                    Corporations already have enough influence over copyright, so I'm loathe to defend a defunct corporation's theoretical ability to resell an ancient game, over an actual person's real interest in preserving and disseminating video game history.

      • ses1984 6 hours ago

        If we’re going by the age of sail definition then yeah.

        Is recording a song freely broadcast over the air considered piracy or theft? Courts said no.

        Is recording video (even premium cable) on your dvr considered piracy or theft? Courts said no.

        Is giving a mixtape to your friend considered piracy or theft? Actually I’m not sure…

  • WalterBright 5 hours ago

    Copyright is a very recent invention, since 1790. Ownership of property goes back long before recorded history.

  • yapyap 7 hours ago

    > I’d say it’s the closest thing to when Napster got everyone used to theft

    that’s a bit dramatic, I’d argue the way AI has been used, I.E. scraping up people’s work without consent and then using it to train models that will recreate said work to the best of their abilities so you won’t even need the artist anymore (in the ideal vision of the people running AI companies) is a much more heinous thing.

    You’re downloading and using the artist’s work without their consent to train a tool to replace them. Whereas Napster is downloading their work and you might buy their work in the future cause you love it so much.

    • bloomingkales 7 hours ago

      For the training part. Generating art off someone’s art is nuanced. Let’s say you generate art off Darwin’s kid’s art.

      - First off most people won’t ever know, so you don’t even have to hide the theft.

      - If you copied a well known style, then you would have to hide that you did so by layering another style on top

      - You don’t have to worry about the first two points if you are not stealing and just commission an artist.

      - Or you are oblivious and uncaring about all of this, and all is sound in your mind because you bought the fake gem currency fair and square to generate your image.

      So, we are talking about taking. Some people have issue with the word stealing.

grumblepeet an hour ago

Some of those drawings are copies of Edward Lear illustrations. I recognised the style. I didnt see that mentioned in the article although I might have missed it. I like the little drawings though very cute.

dennis_jeeves2 5 hours ago

>“Children are one’s greatest happiness,” he once wrote, “but often & often a still greater misery. A man of science ought to have none.”

Brats..

bag_boy 9 hours ago

Ah, how nice is this?

We’re no longer in the “they’re being auctioned off as NFTs soon” phase of digitized historical documents.

ripvanwinkle 3 hours ago

Very cool to have his kids closely involved in his work

warner25 6 hours ago

My kids just freely grab sheets of printer paper when they want to draw stuff. To save paper, I later use the other sides of their drawings for any handwritten notes or conceptual sketches that I make. I guess people will be really amused if I ever become a historical figure and they see these.

jesprenj 6 hours ago

> Error 405 Slovenian users must use proxy. > Slovenian users must use proxy.

> Guru Meditation: > XID: 66443665

> Varnish cache server

interesting ...

wslh 6 hours ago

It is like moving to the past in a time machine where you see the importance of horses as transport. Also connected to the Onfim's drawings [1]. Horses as a technology most probably will surpass cars in the way we know them now.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onfim

avian 7 hours ago

All I get is "Error 405 [country] users must use proxy."

I wonder what that's about. GDPR?

  • latexr 5 hours ago

    > GDPR?

    Unlikely. I’m in the EU and can access the website just fine.

  • welferkj 6 hours ago

    "We are currently unable to steal your data, please check back later."

dennis_jeeves2 5 hours ago

>The Darwin kids “were used as volunteers,” says Kohn, “to collect butterflies, insects, and moths, and to make observations on plants in the fields around town.”

Back then, I suppose there were no child labor laws. /s