[HN Gopher] Copyright infringement in AI art
___________________________________________________________________
Copyright infringement in AI art
Author : AndrewDucker
Score : 119 points
Date : 2022-08-12 09:24 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.technollama.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.technollama.co.uk)
| xor99 wrote:
| If this all worked in a fair way it would be treated similarly to
| sampling in music where the original artists get a royalty each
| time a track is used. If that source is clear like where it's "x
| in the style of y" using these elements of x explicitly. However,
| the complexity is often too great and how can you prove
| fractional sampling of your work? Very tricky as the article
| points out! It's also blocking many new forms of art if you
| enforce the fractional sampling idea in law.
|
| On the other hand, small startups selling to customers who need
| to produce proprietary content could incur a risk with AI
| generated products. Aka the customer won't want to risk their
| product by including potentially infringing items (like with Co-
| Pilot's potential use of unpaid labour or open source code and
| other licences).
| jheriko wrote:
| i never expect anyone in silly valley to do due diligence... it
| was a pretty obvious problem from the outset.
|
| if you are making a product, then using copyrighted material is
| far from fair use, at least outside of the US.
| fleddr wrote:
| I have to admit that I did not see it coming. Ignorant of AI's
| capabilities, I always imagined it to automate away our boring,
| mechanical, repetitive stuff. Which in some hopeful utopian
| scenario would mean that we could focus on the humanities:
| family, health/sports, culture and anything creative.
|
| For AI to come for art, at the very core of our humanity (the
| oldest cave painting is 64K y/o) is quite the confrontation
| indeed. One that will rapidly escalate more broadly
| (poetry/writing, photography, cinema, music) and more deeply. The
| amount of AI art will explode, in turn serving as input for even
| more AI art.
|
| The speed at which this will happen suggests to me we need to be
| far more alarmist in coming up with answers to many questions.
| Philosophical, legal, socio-economical, etc.
|
| I really think the attitude "I'm not an artist so this will only
| benefit me" is shortsighted, and I'm saying that as a non-artist
| myself. It's like we're at the beginning of a very short and
| steep exponential curve of total disruption.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| > I always imagined it to automate away our boring, mechanical,
| repetitive stuff
|
| Which includes most art produced.
|
| Do a google image search for something stock-photo-y like "man
| in business suit kicking". You'll find a staggering number of
| photographs and cartoons designed to be used in power point
| slides.
|
| If you play around, you'll find any variation of "man in
| business suit" paired with an action will produce similar
| results. People were paid to make all of those, but it's so
| repetitive that it's not hard to see how an AI could find the
| pattern.
| LampDrewNear wrote:
| This is how I feel as well. I'm a software engineer by trade,
| but I'm really much more interested in writing music and
| stories. I always imagined myself retiring the day I have saved
| up enough money so I could focus on art and creativity. My life
| certainly has felt much less meaningful since I saw what DALL-E
| 2 can produce.
|
| And my main concern is not that of professional artists'
| financial situations. I'm mainly worried about how the massive
| influx of computer-generated content will inflate away the
| meaning of human-created art. And I'm afraid that when art
| becomes so good and so customized to each individual consumer,
| we won't have much common culture left.
|
| I think this Penny Arcade strip well puts into words how I
| feel: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2022/06/06/dalliance
|
| In a way, I'm so mad at my fellow engineers. There's so much
| good we could do, is really killing the creative arts the right
| thing to do?
|
| And I don't believe for one second this talk about AI just
| being a tool, and prompt-engineering being a new craft for
| artists to learn. I think this kind of interface will quickly
| go away, and soon enough AI apps will look much more similar to
| TikTok or YouTube than they do today.
| ramoz wrote:
| > The amount of AI art will explode, in turn serving as input
| for even more AI art ... The speed at which this will happen
| suggests to me we need to be far more alarmist in coming up
| with answers to many questions ...
|
| I agree. I don't want to live in a AI-hamster-wheel future.
|
| Human creativity is driven by emotion, curiosity, intuition...
| etc. AI creativity is basically an advanced form of copy-
| paste/blend using context -- all of which is learned from human
| content.
|
| We should be working harder to empower human-creativity...
| which is an argument AI artists often make in favor of
| generative creativity... however this narrative falters when
| money gets cheap and automation disrupts whatever economies
| exist for creatives (esp writers and artists).
| trention wrote:
| Brynjolfsson and McAfee made a simular argument a decade ago
| - we will use automation to replace rather than augment human
| labor, the result being a local optimum far from the global
| one (that's in terms of results, the dystopian disempowerment
| of humanity is another story.
| donkarma wrote:
| only thing that should worry people is the fact that it is cheap
| and bad much like machine translation which would make people
| rely on it, downgrading the baseline of art for companies forever
| gedy wrote:
| Independent of whether one thinks AI generated images are really
| art, I feel like they are getting very good at simulating
| "inspiration" and other indirect ways of copying other artists
| and their styles. I think the last thing we need to do is start
| incorporating copyright and other filters into these models to
| filter out content.
|
| This just empowers others to control and monopolize content,
| worse than today.
| revicon wrote:
| Agreed, per the article " style and a 'look and feel' are not
| copyrightable"
| Hemospectrum wrote:
| I wonder if they can be trademarked. If not now, maybe later.
| surfacedetail wrote:
| It's more difficult to trademark stuff like style, there
| are certain rules of what can be trademarked; long story
| short, non-graphical representations need to be clear,
| precise, self-contained, easily accessible, intelligible,
| durable and objective.
|
| Trademark also gives a more limited protection in some
| ways.
| nl wrote:
| Yes they probably can be trademarked.
|
| But a big question is why? Trademarks are very expensive.
|
| It makes sense for a company logo that was AI generated,
| but spending 100K+ for very limited protection of a piece
| of art seems questionable.
| verdverm wrote:
| Trademarks are actually much cheaper than that, I paid a
| few thousand dollars for mine. The price range your
| quoting is more typical of patents
| clcaev wrote:
| You can lose your trademark if you do not actively
| enforce violations. Hence, the full cost of a trademark
| should include its legal maintenance.
| verdverm wrote:
| that is an unknown quantity which one cannot estimate
| nl wrote:
| Was it international? And in how many categories?
|
| It adds up very quickly.
| Imnimo wrote:
| I'm not copyright expert, but I would have imagined the answer is
| relatively straightforward: if an image would be infringing if
| drawn by a human, it's also infringing if drawn by a model, and
| similarly for non-infringing. Does the manner in which the image
| is generated play into whether it infringes a copyright?
| jeroenhd wrote:
| > Does the manner in which the image is generated play into
| whether it infringes a copyright?
|
| Is taking a picture of a painting enough to violate copyright?
| Is a digital copy of a VHS tape a copyright violation? Is
| copy/pasting an image a copyright violation?
|
| A computer is not creative because it cannot think. It can only
| copy what others do; it doesn't understand what it's doing,
| only how to do something. Equating a human with a computer is
| unreasonable at the current state of computing and I doubt
| we'll see a truly conscious AI in the future.
|
| For an automated tool to replicate art into a state such that
| it would no longer be a mere reproduction of copyrighted
| material, one would assume that the tool would gain such
| sophistication that the tool itself should deserve copyright
| rather than its operators. After all, a commissioner of an art
| piece may provide the prompt but the art itself is under
| copyright by the author.
|
| We'll have to see how the courts look at these reconstructions.
| Personally, I believe tools like DALL-E and Copilot are no more
| than fancy copy/paste systems and should only be trained on
| copyright-free materials for their use not to be subject to
| copyright issues.
| revicon wrote:
| I'm also not a copyright expert, so I wonder about things like
| if I draw a (crappy) picture of Spider-Man and slap it on a
| tshirt, can I sell it without violating copyright? I'm sure
| there's established law about this kind of thing.
| egypturnash wrote:
| If your shitty Spidey is a drawing you did yourself, you are
| not violating copyright. You are however blatantly violating
| Disney's collection of trademarks on "Spider-Man", the
| distinctive appearance of the character, and a host of
| associated marks.
| eru wrote:
| My guess is that your badly drawn Spider-Man T-shirt would
| violate trademark, but not copyright.
| kube-system wrote:
| The general consensus in the IP space (in the US at least) is
| to treat AI no differently than any other tool.
| eru wrote:
| > Does the manner in which the image is generated play into
| whether it infringes a copyright?
|
| Yes, it does. Let's leave AI out for a moment.
|
| If you lock yourself into your room with no Internet access,
| and you draw (or write etc) something independently that just
| happens to look exactly like some already existing copyright-ed
| work, you are still not infringing any copyrights.
|
| If you produced the same work by making a copy, you would
| infringe copyright.
|
| See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design for how
| that's relevant in real life.
|
| However you can infringe on patents and trademarks with
| independent work, ie even if you don't just make a copy.
| rvnx wrote:
| Wait, if you draw Pikachu or Homer Simpson from your memory,
| even without access to internet, you are still infringing the
| rights of the holders of the characters. How is it different
| than OpenAI or Midjourney drawing pictures of Homer Simpson
| from their database/"memory" ?
| surfacedetail wrote:
| Characters are different, as recognisable characters have
| copyright on their own (not all characters do). But let's
| say you're drawing a painting from memory, you may or may
| not be infringing copyright. The question is about
| substantial copying.
| [deleted]
| eru wrote:
| Drawing Pikachu or Homer Simpson from memory is more likely
| to violate trademarks than copyrights, I would guess?
| gibolt wrote:
| AI isn't locked in a room. No end user can verify the sourced
| training images, so anything coming close to an existing work
| should be assumed to have been part of the source material
| for the derivative.
| eru wrote:
| > AI isn't locked in a room.
|
| Humans aren't in a locked room either. Unless you put them
| there. Same for AI.
|
| To say the same thing with less snark: in the future there
| might be a market for AIs trained on 'clean room' data.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| Oh but you can. I've scanned the LAION training data set
| (which was used for mini DALLE, Imagen, and Disco
| Diffusion) and I recognized several images that long to
| business partners of mine.
|
| How does an AI know what Obama looks like? It memorized
| thousands of images of him, most of which were by
| professional photographers and, hence, copyrighted.
| RobertoG wrote:
| I think the problem is with the definition of copyright.
| It doesn't apply to the current environment. It could
| even be the case, that it never made sense in the first
| place, and only now, we are realizing.
|
| I have never seen Obama in real life. If I can draw him
| because I know him from copyrighted works, is my draw
| copyright infringement?
| greysphere wrote:
| Are you copying one or more of those works? If so, yes.
| If you aren't, then no. How do you know? Well as an
| artist, after thousands of hours of copying, and
| thousands of hours of drawing from imagination, you know
| which activity you are doing. As an untrained person, you
| might not know, but the quality/value is so low no one
| cares.
| RobertoG wrote:
| But drawing from imagination is just copying from an
| abstraction existing in your brain. And that abstraction
| comes from inputs from the outside that you saw in the
| past, where would it come from if not that?
|
| In the Obama example it comes from copyrighted inputs.
| Without the photos in the magazines and newspapers I
| would not have idea how Obama looks. Any draw I do, it's
| going to be derivative of those copyrighted photos and,
| maybe, other inputs more generics that I saw in the past
| (that could be copyrighted too).
|
| How is that different from what that software is doing?
| It's not, it's just that it's done in an industrial
| scale.
|
| This is just the same problem an artisan had when
| factories started to appear.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| How does a human know what Obama looks like? They
| memorized thousands of images[1] of him, most of which
| were by professional photographers and, hence,
| copyrighted.
|
| At what point is a neural network sophisticated enough
| that it can be compared to human learning for copyright
| purposes?
|
| [1]: For most people at least. Some will have actually
| seen him in person, and for those this statement would of
| course not be true.
| vintermann wrote:
| Well, it probably didn't memorize any single of them. One
| thing that has changed dramatically from back when I
| studied AI (a whole 5ish years ago, sigh...), to my
| shock, is that the number of training epochs has dropped
| dramatically. Sometimes down to just one. If it's only
| ever looked at your image and updated its weights _once_
| , could that really be enough to copy it? Only if
| virtually everything in your image is also present in
| thousands of other images, which would suggest there was
| very little originality in your photo to plagiarize.
| (This is certainly the case with Obama's press
| photographers - political press photographers aren't
| hired for originality!)
| owow123 wrote:
| > political press photographers aren't hired for
| originality!
|
| Yes they almost definitely are, what else would they be
| hired for? You wouldn't watch the same news everyday
| (even if it feels that way)
|
| > the number of training epochs has dropped dramatically
|
| So? Lets imagine a documented nurodiverse person (lets
| use a photographic memory) "snapsohts" a famous "works"
| and then sits in a room, after 5 years training, to
| produce "some work" are they free of copyright claims?
| Have you not seen the nurodiverse person who draws the
| entire New York sky line from 1 helicopter ride?
|
| Your approach seems non-sensical, 1 epoch - 10,000
| epochs, it doesn't matter - its still a copy / derivative
| work (which may exempt it, fair enough).
|
| Personally I think all current AI work is just copyright
| on steroids, DALL-E outputs Shutterstock logos given the
| right input and Githubs co-poilt is just a lawsuit
| waiting to happen (implying anyone has the funds to
| actually sue Microsoft these days, the T&C's of Github
| must be incredibly broad).
| practice9 wrote:
| This is a very interesting thought. If the image is very
| generic, IMO it should not be copyrightable, it should be
| public domain.
| olalonde wrote:
| > If you lock yourself into your room with no Internet
| access, and you draw (or write etc) something independently
| that just happens to look exactly like some already existing
| copyright-ed work, you are still not infringing any
| copyrights.
|
| That's not true.
| eru wrote:
| Please see this as a long-winded and approximate
| description of clean room development
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design) which is
| definitely a thing.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| >Moreover, the developers of these tools are aware of the
| potential pitfalls of producing exact replicas of art in their
| training datasets. OpenAI admitted that this was a problem in
| some of the earlier iterations of the program, and they now
| filter out specific instances of this happening.
|
| This is the most telling thing. They have a system, which might
| not even be part of the "AI" it might simply be they are
| comparing outputs for close matches to the OG dataset and then
| hiding them from the end user.
|
| I mean we've seen OpenAI's solution to their un-diverse data set
| so we know what standards they work to.
| kxq wrote:
| they addressed duplicates during pre-training (by removing
| duplicate examples in the dataset), as documented here
| https://openai.com/blog/dall-e-2-pre-training-mitigations/
| fleddr wrote:
| It seems the more interesting legal question is not regarding
| input, but whom owns the copyrights of the output, if any.
| Interesting article:
|
| https://www.technollama.co.uk/dall%C2%B7e-goes-commercial-bu...
|
| If I interpret that article correctly, at least Dall-e does not
| claim copyright on the generation nor does it grant it to the
| person writing the prompt. The copyright question seems entirely
| unanswered.
|
| Perhaps that should be codified in law explicitly: AI generated
| art cannot be copyrighted.
|
| If it was created from the collective input of humanity
| (unasked), its output may as well benefit all of humanity as
| well. It's hard to make the case that somebody writing a prompt
| deserves full copyright protection. Even if so, just add one word
| and one can claim it's once again an "original".
|
| Not respecting AI copyrights would also help protect the vast
| area of commercial art, as it lowers its value if it cannot be
| legally protected. This could get hairy though, because what
| happens if you take AI output as input and then start manually
| tweaking/editing it. It would then be a mixed AI/human works.
| archontes wrote:
| It's not entirely unanswered.
|
| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/us-copyright-offic...
| anonymousab wrote:
| I wonder if that applies to AI generated code as well.
| fleddr wrote:
| Thanks, did not know that. I consider it to be good news.
| Pulcinella wrote:
| This just says that the AI can't own the copyright, just like
| how Photoshop, the software program, can't be granted a
| copyright but a person using Photoshop can.
| wesleywt wrote:
| If you learn painting by copying other painters then paint a new
| painting, copyright infringement?
|
| Unfortunately many small artists making a living by designing
| logos will dissappear with this technology.
| patengineer wrote:
| It depends on what the painter does with the 'new painting'. If
| it is solely that the painter(considered a student) is learning
| how to paint, then copyright infringement would not apply as it
| would be covered under 'fair dealings'.
|
| This would apply in the UK, perhaps Europe. I'm not familiar
| with US law.
|
| Quoting the Act - "Fair dealing with a artistic work for the
| purposes of private study does not infringe any copyright in
| the work."
|
| If the painter then goes on to sell this painting, well, that's
| copyright infringement because they are making a copy of a
| painting available to the public.(assuming no licencing or
| authorisation from the legal copyright owner was previously
| obtained)
| sgift wrote:
| Either you or I misread the question. I think it wasn't about
| selling a copy. It was about using copying to learn how to
| paint (which is fine, as you've stated) and then produce your
| own painting which you then sell. The sold painting isn't a
| copy. So .. no copyright infringement?
| patengineer wrote:
| Ah, I think it depends how you interpreted the question. I
| took 'new painting' to mean a copy of other painter's work.
|
| Looking at it from your perspective(which on reflection is
| the right interpretation), I would say no copyright
| infringement assuming the 'new painting' is an original
| creation i.e. not a duplicate of an existing piece of art
| by another artist.
|
| Plenty of people, myself included, learn creative arts by
| mimicking others and then developing our own style which
| might be similar to the artists we got our inspiration
| from. I think as long as it's clear that there is no
| duplication of the original works(for sale), then all is
| okay.
|
| So if I learnt my art by mimicking Van Gogh and my new
| paintings are of a similar Van Gogh style, as long as they
| are original creations, no copyright infringement imo.
| jefftk wrote:
| The article gives several examples of AI-regenerated Starry
| Night, and says:
|
| _It looks like it, but it's not the exact same thing, it's
| almost as if the AI is drawing it from memory, which in some way
| it is, it's re-constructing what Starry Night looks like._
|
| This seems to ignore that those are pretty clearly derivative
| works of Starry Night?
|
| Famous UK example which really stretched the definition of a
| derivative work ("London bus crossing a bridge, black and white")
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_Island_Collections_Ltd_...
|
| (Not a lawyer)
| _trampeltier wrote:
| I searched just quick, and for ex. Getty does not allow to use
| pictures for ML.
|
| Anyway, I think is pretty clear, usually it is not allowed,
| exept. user upload a picture to a platform and give all rights
| away because the platform say it in the EULA.
| dahart wrote:
| > Assuming that the input phase is fine and the datasets used are
| legitimate, then most infringement lawsuits may end up taking
| place in the output phase. And it is here that I do not think
| that there will be substantive reproduction to warrant copyright
| infringement.
|
| This might be true, but feels like maybe the most practical
| answer to this whole question is to focus on the inputs and to
| establish ways for artists to control whether their art is used
| as input. Don't let legally questionable content into training,
| and you automatically prevent getting legally questionable
| output. Why would we do anything else, really? It's potentially a
| large assumption to make that the datasets are currently
| legitimate under the lens of copyright. Pulling images off the
| internet just because they're accessible is not valid, and humans
| aren't currently allowed to do that under the law. But it might
| be comforting to artists and practical for both artists and AI
| researchers if artists could specify a form of copyright or a
| license that allows ML training provided that their work is not
| recognizably reproduced. Certainly datasets like Flickr with
| Creative Commons search tools allows a wide variety of public use
| that is entirely legal. What reasons do we have to not establish
| something similar for machine learning?
| olladecarne wrote:
| ML revolutionized translation a long time ago and the demand and
| pay for translators went down. It also used the works of
| thousands of humans who translated text and they never saw a
| dime. Copyright applies to translations so we've already gone
| through something similar. The same will happen with art and
| every other medium that ML touches. I have a love/hate
| relationship with ML because of this. It seems that there will be
| a painful transition period as many humans are displaced,
| probably even average coders like me. In a way, it's no different
| than what a human does but humans can't scale like computers. I
| hope someone can engineer a new economic system that works for
| what's coming.
| avian wrote:
| > ML revolutionized translation a long time ago and the demand
| and pay for translators went down.
|
| ML translation also caused a noticeable drop in the average
| quality of translated text in my experience. Companies now ship
| machine-translated manuals for minor languages that are often
| little more than gibberish. Human translators weren't perfect -
| for example, often you could see that the translator didn't
| know the terminology of the field. But at least the rest of the
| text was usually intelligible.
|
| If this is where we're heading to with visual art as well I'm
| not looking forward to the future. Imagine an instruction
| manual where illustrations are machine-created. Everything
| looks kind of weird and inconsistent. If you quickly flip
| through the book it looks like all the important points are
| shown on the pictures, but looking closely shapes don't match
| with reality and the details are all wrong. The number of bolts
| changes from picture to picture. It's all there just to check a
| mark on someone's list, but doesn't really help you in
| servicing the thing.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| It's honestly pretty fascinating to watch perfect be the
| enemy of the good in this space. As a result of the birth of
| cheap-to-free machine translation of human language, the
| space of things available on the global market has become
| _incredibly_ vast, because the good-enough stab at
| translation is often good enough for a dedicated hacker to
| make the thing work anyway.
| ghaff wrote:
| It applies to even English language transcriptions as well.
| Do I pay pennies a minute or a $1+ a minute? It depends on
| the use case and my budget. If my time is expensive and I'm
| publishing externally (e.g. for a professional podcast or
| an interview for a client), I'll probably go with a human.
| If I just want to refer to some notes to pull out a quote
| or go back to check something? An ML transcription with
| timestamps is probably fine. Ditto if the alternative to ML
| transcription is nothing.
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| A DALL-E generated IKEA style manual for a nonexistent piece
| of furniture would be absolutely hilarious.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Hah. Yes. And as an amusing result, emails and chats are
| filled with errors resulting from automated translation. The
| service was supposed to be a crutch, but it became widely
| adopted and lowered the standards everywhere.
|
| Anecdotally, I now check my email, because Outlook likes to
| change what I wrote.
| vintermann wrote:
| That sort of translation always had a lemon problem. How do
| you know if the translation to Portuguese is any good, if you
| don't speak Portuguese and don't know anyone who does? You
| can pay the expensive translator company, or the dodgy
| cheaper translator company that claims to be equally good.
|
| Did you choose the responsible expensive option? Sucks,
| because they have been competing with the bad/automated
| translators so long that they squeeze their human translators
| so hard, they produce bad translations anyway.
|
| Also, it didn't help that you didn't give them any context,
| but just sent them one sentence at a time, extracted from the
| strings in your program. Because we've all done that, haven't
| we?
| martopix wrote:
| I disagree with the first part, I remember home appliances
| made in Asia in the 90s that came with completely ridiculous
| manuals, possibly translated with a dictionary and little
| else. Machine translation can really be good if used
| properly. Of course I wouldn't use it to translate
| literature.
| bombcar wrote:
| It was better than those, but many "professional" companies
| that would in the past hire out a group of translators to
| translate their documentation into various languages now
| just use machine translators with a cursory pass.
|
| If you read mainly English, you won't notice it, but you'll
| see it if you speak a language that does have translations,
| but aren't primary.
| 0x_rs wrote:
| Machine translation has been a curse for those who enjoy
| content that's not usually promptly translated and instead sits
| there for years if not decades. Not uncommon are people asking
| in broken English how to use certain tools e.g. automated DeepL
| scripts and releasing their "translations" (or edited machine
| translations, changing just some of most glaring issues with
| the text, generally), thus "burning" a release, that is not
| going to be taken by real translators that require weeks,
| months of draining work to complete so that context, subtlety
| and most meaning from the original source is not lost.
|
| It's a race to the bottom. It doesn't sound nice to say, but as
| things become more accessible it's harder and harder to filter
| out genuine content from look-alikes, asset flips and low-
| effort automations, this may be unfamiliar to anybody looking
| at Steam releases for example. I wonder how it'll turn out for
| artwork. I want to be optimistic and think of it as an
| additional tool to artists or people that want to create new
| things rather than a displacement wave with its significantly
| smaller costs.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| I can concur; there was a scandal within the fan translation
| scene for PC-98 games when it came out that at least one
| high-profile "translator" was just lightly-editing machine
| translated output to sound correct. Problem is, there are all
| sorts of mistakes you can make in translation that will not
| sound incorrect at all unless you speak _both languages_.
|
| I must ask what you mean by "burning" a release, though. If
| we're talking about fan translations, stuff gets retranslated
| all the time. And most of the stuff that gets fan translated
| is far too niche to justify a commercial release to begin
| with. If something is popular enough to get an official
| release, the fan translations either get taken down or
| disappear on their own.
| tgv wrote:
| That the translators "never saw a dime" isn't accurate. A large
| corpus of parallel texts is supplied by the EU, which pays its
| translators and then publishes the documents for free. Other
| parallel corpora include manuals. While there's definitely
| copyright on that, it doesn't lie with the translators.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Community ownership. We need everyone to be part owner in the
| economy that they rely on. Then productivity gains are good for
| people even if there is less work to do.
| bsedlm wrote:
| I'm wating for the algorithms to automate all my decision
| making too.
|
| so me in the future will be an algorithm suggesting what should
| I buy/eat/etc.. and another which will accept/reject what the
| former suggests.
|
| this way, I don't have to bother with any of this annoying
| "life" stuff.
|
| /joking
| verisimi wrote:
| Yes, if you were ruler of the world, you're going to have an
| awfully huge amount of people doing f.a. There are only so
| many hairdressers, masseurs and plumbers required.
|
| What you need is a kill switch, something to slow down
| population growth.
|
| Anyway, are you up to date with your mandatory medical
| treatments?
| tkgally wrote:
| Former professional translator here (Japanese-to-English, 1986
| to 2005). I have very mixed feelings about MT.
|
| On the one hand, as you and others point out, rates for human
| translation have been hurt, and the quality of a lot of MT-
| enabled translation visible to the public is mediocre to poor.
|
| On the other hand, MT is enabling communication among people
| that was not possible or practical before. A small start-up is
| able to find customers and suppliers in countries with
| different languages. People with common interests but diverse
| languages are able to chat and share ideas on social media. A
| person receives an e-mail from a long-lost relative in a
| language the recipient doesn't know; MT enables them to
| correspond and eventually meet up. Little of that communication
| would be taking place if a human translator had to be found and
| paid for each interaction.
| OmarAssadi wrote:
| Good points!
|
| As an example, as a hobby, I am interested in things like
| anime video compression and such. Two of the most essential
| sites for me in terms of resources and information have been
| almost entirely Chinese. And while they appreciate and
| respect the international users, at the end of the day, they
| can't translate each and every single forum post into English
| or any other language that someone may need.
|
| And also unfortunately, I don't have the time yet to invest
| in learning the language enough to use those sites without
| assistance. Instead, I rely heavily on things like Google
| Translate, Yandex, and DeepL. They've been totally essential
| to the point to where a major pain point for me with my
| preferred browser (FireFox) has been a lack of native MT
| support (until very recently, which has been nice for Russian
| and stuff, but I'm still waiting for Chinese support in
| Bergamot).
|
| Similarly, while I studied in Russia for a while, I'm not a
| native speaker, and my skills aren't what they used to be now
| that I've been out of the country for a while. There is a lot
| of interesting stuff on the Russian internet (Habr,
| RuTracker, various articles, etc.) that I only really have
| the level of convenient access to that I do because of MT.
|
| I don't think it's all sunshine and rainbows, certainly, as
| with stuff like DALL-E 2, but it definitely provides a lot of
| people real value and happiness. Hopefully, humanity will
| figure out how best to balance the positives and negatives of
| AI services like these.
|
| I see that both sides (lol, sorry) of this often take pretty
| hardline stances on "art is art; there is no difference" vs.
| "these are just copy-pasting people's hardwork and can't
| actually create anything themselves". I think the value is
| sort of indisputable, but I worry about how it'll affect
| people's livelihoods -- e.g., after playing with DALL-E 2, I
| think it is totally capable of replacing things like stock
| photos a large percentage of the time (not always, of course,
| but it definitely can sometimes).
|
| I'm of the mindset that you should be able to remix, adapt,
| copy, etc, virtually everything in an ideal world. Maybe I am
| just entitled, I don't see why I should have to waste the
| man-hours recreating or reverse engineering something simply
| because of a license incompatibility, for example.
|
| Similarly, I don't see why I shouldn't be able to transform
| or straight-up copy and distribute someone else's art if it
| provides people with happiness. As an example, talking about
| anime earlier, I think things like fansubs can provide lots
| of additional value to people by either providing more
| natural translations or through extensive typesetting that
| companies tend not to do because it is not "necessary". For
| example, those familiar with the show _Bakemonogatari_ are
| probably aware of the extreme amount of dialogue displayed
| exclusively visually, with rapid flashing cards and such.
| While I think the official subtitles don't get enough credit
| 99% of the time, that is a prime example where fansubs which
| go in and actively mask over the text on the screen and
| replace it with the viewer's native language is very helpful.
| However, despite the value these things provide, it is
| copyright infringement.
|
| Rationally, I understand that the emotional and protective
| side of people exists, but at the same time, I don't
| "understand" it; I want people to use my stuff -- I want
| people to be happy with their limited time on this planet. In
| that sense, I think the emotional argument for copyright does
| not appeal to me.
|
| That being said, pragmatically, people need jobs. We live in
| a society where you must work. A society where you have bills
| to pay, groceries to buy, and fees for schools and hospitals.
| Stripping away copyright protections entirely for things like
| this would hurt a lot of people right now. And I am really
| curious how this'll all turn out in court when the majority
| of these datasets are trained on things that they have no
| right to be using.
|
| Will we be in a world where you can essentially bypass all
| copyright protections by throwing everything into TensorFlow
| before feeding the computer a little prompt? Or will we be in
| a world where many of these tools are crippled to the point
| of uselessness? Or will we be in a world where companies just
| accept that sometimes someone will take them to court and
| settlements will just be another business expense?
|
| Aside from the economic issues, if I'm going to be writing
| some Adderall-infused essay right now, I figure I may as well
| rant about the other two.
|
| The first of those is biases; while I have always been aware
| of this problem, it was very evident after playing with
| DALL-E 2 this past week. The datasets seem to be very
| European-centric (US, Canada, NZ, AU, etc included in that).
| There were a number of things that I could not get it to
| generate correctly or would produce wildly different results
| based on the prompts I fed it.
|
| As relatively minor, silly example, while I had no trouble
| getting it to produce white-washed movie posters for by
| asking it for "Netflix live-action adaptation of _Dragon Ball
| Z_ ", I couldn't get it to do the same for India and
| Bollywood. I am sure someone who has spent more time doing
| "prompt engineering" than I have could possibly get better
| results, but the point still stands in the sense that it
| seems to like to produce what Americans & Europeans are more
| exposed to.
|
| Another example is, just ignorantly guessing, the way things
| are weighted -- e.g., I wanted to have it produce art in the
| style of shows like _Tatami Galaxy_ , _The Night Is Short,
| Walk On Girl_ , and things like the album covers for Asian
| Kung-fu Generation. All of those listed are done by Yusuke
| Nakamura. However, perhaps rubbing salt in the wound for
| artists, I was unable to get the results I wanted by asking
| for things in Yusuke Nakamura's style. Instead, I had much
| better results by using "Yuasa Masaaki", the director of
| Tatami Galaxy and The Night Is Short, Walk On Girl. My only
| guess here is just that Yuasa is a more common occurrence in
| text, at least in terms of the English internet.
|
| In that sense, I worry that these tools will not only replace
| people, but they'll reinforce existing cultural and societal
| biases even more so than we already do on our own now.
|
| Further compounding issues like that is the censorship and
| filtering on OpenAI; virtually anything political, violent or
| sexual is not currently allowed (and may never be? I figure
| no company wants to be associated with the potential PR
| disasters that come with it, like Microsoft's Tay). This is
| extra problematic given how important all of those things are
| in art. I worry that we will lose artists and have fewer
| people pushing the boundaries of art.
|
| And ironically, for a society that criticizes countries like
| China so fervently for censorship, we rely so heavily on
| giant capitalist companies which self-enforce much of the
| same censorship, helping further enforce the status quo and
| restricting marginalized minorities. I am not a fan to say
| the least, despite understanding the potential for violent
| speech, propaganda, etc.
|
| Anyway, that's the end of my long-winded 6 AM phone rant.
| Apologies for any weird formatting or incoherent thoughts!
| Trung0246 wrote:
| I wonder what the chinese site in question? It has been
| long since I dabble into video compression scene beside
| just use ffmpeg when I needed
| egypturnash wrote:
| _Similarly, I don't see why I shouldn't be able to
| transform or straight-up copy and distribute someone else's
| art if it provides people with happiness._
|
| Would you stop doing it if the artists said "this is making
| me unhappy"?
| samatman wrote:
| Weird Al does.
|
| He doesn't have to, parody is inherently transformative
| under copyright, but he's a decent guy, and he's kept a
| song or two in the crate because the original artist
| didn't want a parody released.
|
| I support that, and I also support not caring, as a
| matter of principle. It's supererogatory; it shows that
| Weird Al is a good person, but not that someone who
| releases a parody without asking first is a bad person.
| tkgally wrote:
| Thanks for the rant! A bit longer than is normal for HN,
| but I enjoyed it and learned things from it.
| zyx321 wrote:
| Speaking of MTL, I have never found a satisfactory
| replacement for ChiiTrans. An app that shows multiple
| translations side-by-side, including literal dictionary
| translation and phonetic translation. It would even show
| you alternative meanings on mouse-over. Is there any more
| modern app like that? The western fans of Japanese visual
| novels were decades ahead of their time.
|
| And I agree on the censorship angle too. Imagine if
| politicians had to stoop to Youtube Video Essay levels of
| self-censorship, talking about the parallels between badguy
| Germany and present day badguyism. Or about the
| psychological effects of naughty trafficking and childhood
| naughty abuse. I do not want my political discourse limited
| to PEGI-6 language.
| trention wrote:
| >ML revolutionized translation a long time ago and the demand
| and pay for translators went down.
|
| This is incorrect.
|
| Translators employed:
|
| 2005 - 29240
|
| 2021 - 52170
|
| Yearly salary:
|
| 2005 - 38300
|
| 2021 - 52170
|
| Source - BLS (https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm)
|
| Employment growth was ~79% on a US population growth of ~13.5%.
|
| 38300 2005 $ equal 52854 2021$.
|
| So pretty much demand for translators exploded while real wages
| stayed flat.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > I hope someone can engineer a new economic system that works
| for what's coming.
|
| What's coming is post-scarcity for all kinds of intellectual
| work. There will be nothing to economize: supply of both labor
| and product will be infinite. I don't want corporations
| engineering a made up economy where there is none.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| I predict a new system arises in which styles themselves are
| copyrightable and eligible for royalties.
|
| Human-sourced styles will become trend, as people seek
| originality to establish identity in an otherwise
| indistinguishable world of machine-driven experiences.
| lioeters wrote:
| I think your idea is prescient. I can imagine a market of
| proprietary "styles", I suppose in the form of pre-trained
| networks/datasets, that can generate any number of concrete
| instances of images, texts, and other media.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Yes, big-name artists working with corps to create style
| generators for a campaign. Watermarked images which cause
| proprietary, legal ML scrapers to reject the sample.
|
| Suddenly, copping someone's steez becomes a matter of
| revolution.
| gedy wrote:
| This is kind of ironic, as many artists who have a unique
| visual style insist their art is about the deeper meaning
| and not just the look. (I don't really agree that is that
| important to most observers)
| tailspin2019 wrote:
| This is an interesting line of thinking!
| zaphar wrote:
| Good luck figuring out a style that isn't "cribbing" off of
| another artists style. In which case if that becomes legal
| then the ML will just be used to generate unique styles
| which are similarly cribbing.
|
| There is no definition of "style" here you can rely on
| without causing just as much harm to human artists as you
| would be restricting AI art. Everything is derivative of
| something/someone else after all.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| I'd say the patent system, and the current implementation
| of the copyright system, are far from perfect and
| commonly abused, yet they remain intact. I'm not sure if
| your criticisms will prohibit governing bodies from
| introducing lobbyist-friendly legislation. Fair-use
| policies will help keep Average Joe out of prison, while
| also diverting revenue.
|
| Just like copyright today, even though the individual
| supposedly benefits from this scheme, it's companies who
| have greater stake in the outcome.
| trention wrote:
| >post-scarcity for all kinds of intellectual work
|
| Unfortunately, all intellectuals also need to eat, bathe and
| clothe - areas where no "post-scarcity" is on the horizon
| (with climate change, both food and water may become less
| abundant). So an economic system will need to be invented.
| mysterydip wrote:
| Isn't this the other half of the equation for "I host all my
| pictures/art on site xyz because it's free" and somewhere buried
| in the accepted terms of use was "you give us permission to use
| it for anything we want"?
| 6stringmerc wrote:
| Okay I dislike the US copyright system immensely - virulent
| yearning for reasonable terms and ending sampling payments
| forever more...
|
| But let's get practical here for a minute - if an ape can't own
| the copyright to a selfie, then nothing generated by a machine -
| no matter how sentient - will legally be protected.
|
| Just keep that in mind, because the ML results will not abide by
| human creation protections.
| amelius wrote:
| Copyright wars will start when somebody enters the prompt "... in
| the style of Disney" into Dall-E.
| taylorius wrote:
| Copyright will need to be rethought in this new world, where
| artistic interpretations of copyrighted works can be mechanically
| produced. Personally I don't see how it can be made coherent.
| angusturner wrote:
| The question that fascinates me about this whole debate is on
| what basis (if any) one draws the line between a machine learning
| from copyrighted data vs a human learning from copyrighted data.
|
| And I do think "learning" is the correct metaphor here. There are
| good reasons to believe that the brain is doing something
| conceptually similar to generative statistical models. i.e
| compressing inputs (/percepts) into some kind of abstract
| representation space. Even if we don't understand the specific
| details yet.
|
| As far as I'm concerned, it makes no sense to prevent training on
| copyright data. If I use a trained model to substantially
| reproduce parts of a copyrighted work, feels like the issue is
| largely with me and what I do with the content.
|
| These models are just tools after all.
| anankaie wrote:
| I suspect that the difference is in knowing versus unknowing
| use, and the deliberate choice of including learned elements or
| not on the part of the user.
|
| In the case of the ML model, it can reproduce a part of a
| training example perfectly, without the user knowing this
| happened (see the early Copilot analysis wherein it was
| possibly to get it to quote well known blocks of code
| verbatim). This is much less likely to happen when a user is
| consulting her own memories, though obviously never say
| "never".
| trention wrote:
| On the basis that the "machine" is not a human and there is
| nothing that necessitates allowing neural networks to do all
| the things humans are permitted to do.
| angusturner wrote:
| I don't think it makes sense to talk about these systems as
| though they have any agency (and I think I was careful not
| to).
|
| Of course there is nothing that necessitates letting these
| systems do what humans do.
|
| What I am saying is that I am allowed as a human to ingest
| copyrighted material, learn from it, form mental abstractions
| and use those learnings to generate new art. Why then, would
| I be forbidden from externalising some of that process into
| an artificial system that operates on similar principles.
|
| The trained model obviously does not have agency. It is a
| creative and computational tool, much like any other digital
| tool or product.
| Angostura wrote:
| > What I am saying is that I am allowed as a human to
| ingest copyrighted material, learn from it, form mental
| abstractions and use those learnings to generate new art.
| Why then, would I be forbidden from externalising some of
| that process into an artificial system that operates on
| similar principles.
|
| For the same reason you aren't allowed to make unlimited
| photocopies of a library book.
| idle_zealot wrote:
| This analogy doesn't hold. The human equivalent of a
| photocopier is scribing a copy of a book. Scribing 100
| copies and distributing those is just as illegal as
| creating and distributing photocopies.
| trention wrote:
| Not having agency is not the issue here.
|
| Usage of the model can (and will) be automated. Also,
| unlike you, the model scales. This is a qualitative
| difference in the output produced. You are left only with
| the superficial similarity of the input process.
| pornel wrote:
| I think it makes sense to have a distinction between human and
| machine learning.
|
| * Human memory has natural limits in capacity, accuracy, speed,
| etc. Even if you wanted to, you just can't launder copyright
| all of humanity's works in a blink of an eye. Things done by
| humans are limited to human scale, but automation can elevate
| things to an industrial scale (it's legal to fart, it's not
| legal to have an industrial-scale sewage spill).
|
| * Humans have rights, machines don't. Being able to learn and
| use knowledge is fundamental for humans, and (pre-Disney)
| copyright is supposed to be a balance between individual's
| freedom of creativity and control over their works. Machines
| don't have needs or rights to learn and express themselves or
| need to control "their" creative work. Without creator's needs
| in the picture there's nothing to balance, it's just a business
| model based on using _other_ people 's work.
| angusturner wrote:
| These are fair points. I suppose I am more optimistic about
| all the potential ways this tech could augment or enhance
| human creativity.
|
| Like, isn't it kind of wild to think that the average person
| could have access to models that have learned from all art
| ever made...
|
| I'm also encouraged by the fact that some of the best
| versions of these systems are open source and run on a
| commercial GPU.
| pornel wrote:
| Personally I'm conflicted about this.
|
| It does give broader access to illustrations and artworks,
| and this is likely just a stepping stone to even better
| tools. "Prompt engineering" is becoming a creative skill
| itself.
|
| OTOH a corporation scraping artworks and making money from
| producing knock-offs (you can even directly name an author
| to copy) doesn't feel fair to me.
| nonbirithm wrote:
| I'm wondering how the best possible model at some given
| time in the future would _not_ be reliant on the
| resources of a huge tech corporation like OpenAI and
| cloud organizations that have the computing power to
| process massive datasets like CLIP 's.
|
| One of the first links provided on the subreddit for
| Disco Diffusion is a page describing the effects of
| adding an artist's name to an image prompt. There are
| hundreds of artists listed on that page. How long will it
| take until one of those artists notices that ML art
| associated with their name is getting significant
| attention and says it makes them unhappy? How many
| deceased artists on said list that are unable give their
| opinion would have objected if they were still alive?
|
| I suspect that even if all the arguments about copyright
| and learning fail to make any difference in the legal
| system, the original artists will eventually catch on and
| provide their individual opinions on what they think of
| the entire concept. Then the issue becomes not one of
| copyright infringement, but disrespect of someone else's
| time and labor. It would become a social problem with no
| technological solution. You can't tell creators what they
| ought to feel about people generating new art by reducing
| their name to a weighted keyword to be fed into a
| corporation's million dollar ML model.
|
| As precedent, some authors don't want people making
| derivative works from their content, for reasons that
| might not necessarily have to do with copyright. An
| example is not wanting NSFW content derived from the same
| fictional universe. In the case of copyright, sites like
| fanfiction.net ultimately sided with the authors who
| didn't want fanworks and banned users from posting them.
| AO3 was subsequently created in response to fanwork bans.
|
| I'm wondering if a "no AI" clause will become part of
| many services' terms of service in the future, splitting
| them along ideological lines instead of legal ones and
| causing a general air of distrust to arise from the
| ensuing need to detect which art was not created by
| humans. It feels like ethical reservations about
| including artist keywords in prompt engineering would be
| stronger over on the artists' side (depending on the
| artist's opinions), and could cause pushback at some
| point. Whether or not it will make a difference remains
| to be seen. My guess is it won't really, because it's
| impossible to ban GPUs or technological progress.
| egypturnash wrote:
| _How many deceased artists on said list that are unable
| give their opinion would have objected if they were still
| alive?_
|
| If a deceased artist has an estate that's profiting off
| their work, said estate will be especially vicious in
| trying to establish precedent that anyone running an
| artist's name through an image generator needs to work
| out some kind of licensing agreement with the artist, or
| get sued.
|
| As a working artist, I am looking forwards to this
| happening.
| sva_ wrote:
| Humans get away with much more, such as just photographing
| other people's work and then selling those photographs[0]. I
| don't see how generating a bunch of images, selecting one,
| and perhaps tweaking it more is any less fair use.
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Prince
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Humans get away with much more, such as just
| photographing other people's work and then selling those
| photographs[0]. I don't see how generating a bunch of
| images, selecting one, and perhaps tweaking it more is any
| less fair use.
|
| Humans have also gotten away with murder. I don't think
| that kind of reasoning is very solid.
|
| My understanding is in industries where it really matters,
| like music, "tweaking" like that would require royalty
| payments at least.
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| That's a camera, a machine. Same problem as with AI. The
| machine can rapidly at scale reproduce visuals, including
| other people's artistic works.
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| > it's just a business model based on using other people's
| work.
|
| So... all of civilization?
| chucklenorris wrote:
| I have a different but related question. Let's say i use a dall-e
| like ai to generate character models for my next game. Are they
| copyrightable? What would stop someone to outright rip off the
| models from my game and use them in other works?
| JohnHaugeland wrote:
| What's fascinating to me is how many of the people decrying
| what's happening as unfair to artists also brag about being
| software pirates, where actual human labor is going unpaid for
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| > unfair to artists
|
| > actual human labor
|
| say what?
| thriftwy wrote:
| What I'm dreaming of is an AI which can make any song covered by
| any performer or band in history of music.
|
| Totally doable but would likely put you on the most wanted list
| above all the drug lords.
| stemlord wrote:
| I'm dreaming of an AI that can determine whether a song was AI-
| generated or is truly one degree from human hands
| thriftwy wrote:
| Why? The only thing I care about is whether a song is good
| cgrealy wrote:
| I highly doubt that's even theoretically possible, given the
| vast range of variety and quality of music created by humans.
| angusturner wrote:
| Feel like people would have said the same with images 6
| months ago tbh. (I mean sure, you could get a fake
| photograph of a person, but the text control that clip has
| unlocked is just wild...)
| janef0421 wrote:
| I don't know if "copyright infringement" is really a useful legal
| construct here. The issue is not so much that a person's work is
| being duplicated, but that a person's work is being used to
| reduce the value of their labour without consent or compensation.
| It's probably more under unfair competition. Ultimately, though,
| this issue probably requires new constructs and laws, which is
| unlikely to happen. The law is the ultimate expression of the
| power of the dominant class, and these sorts of AI/ML systems
| benefit the socially dominant class of business owners and
| investors.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| I think it's clear that what's happening is (mostly) legal, but
| the better question is whether it should continue to be. It will
| be a bad outcome if a few people profit off of a huge group of
| people's labor without their consent and without compensating
| them, in order to put that large group out of work.
|
| Technological advances change the labor market all the time, but
| it's absolutely different to exploit your own labor in this kind
| of way to put you out of a job.
|
| I think if someone wants to build a research ML model, it should
| be fine to use whatever data you can get your hands on. But if
| you want to make a commercial model, you should have to have the
| content creators' permission to use their data to train your
| product.
| visarga wrote:
| It's not just the model publishers that profit from generative
| models, the users gain something as well. And the access
| barrier being lowered, now many more people can benefit. Even
| the artists can benefit.
|
| Let's not forget the contribution of the prompt to the final
| result. The users have a finger in there too. That means they
| are directly involved in the creative process, they deserve a
| claim to the copyright.
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| Cat's out of the bag. Stable-diffusion runs on an m1 mac, is
| competitive with dall-e, and will soon be open source.
| Midjourney was made independently from dall-e and is arguably
| better. This is the most revolutionary artistic tool to ever
| exist and anyone with a few thousand bucks can download a
| script from github and train it themselves. My advice to
| creatives is to figure out how to thrive in this new
| environment because you aren't going to be able to hold back
| progress or stop time.
|
| (Don't worry, us programmers will be next. Language models can
| already generate training data in the form of tests for code-
| authoring neural nets.)
| fariszr wrote:
| I mean CoPilot is already similar, no?
| kmeisthax wrote:
| > It looks like it, but it's not the exact same thing, it's
| almost as if the AI is drawing it from memory, which in some way
| it is, it's re-constructing what Starry Night looks like.
|
| The blog post also has a picture of four slightly-different
| recreations of a Van Gogh painting.
|
| The thing is, under current copyright law in the US, all four of
| those recreations would be legally considered the same image. The
| standard for copyright infringement is access plus substantial
| similarity. It would be easy to construe access to a training
| image set through ML software that was trained on that set; and
| thus any regurgitated output would be infringing.
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