[HN Gopher] Judge pares down artists' AI copyright lawsuit again...
___________________________________________________________________
Judge pares down artists' AI copyright lawsuit against Midjourney,
Stability AI
Author : starshadowx2
Score : 166 points
Date : 2023-10-30 22:35 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| artninja1988 wrote:
| Good. Most claims got dismissed (although with leave to amend)
| with only the infringement on the input side really remaining.
| This lawyer is a clown
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| Why is Midjourney completely off the hook while Stability AI is
| not?
|
| I'm trying to pull up the original court document, but the PDF
| isnt loading.
| starshadowx2 wrote:
| For that count specifically, Stability was directly involved
| with creating and funding the LAION dataset, whereas Midjourney
| and DeviantArt were not.
|
| The DeviantArt direct claim is because of how DeviantArt has
| been using Stable Diffusion for their DreamUp system, but the
| direct claim against Midjourney has been less clear from the
| plaintiffs about whether they're going against Midjourney using
| Stable Diffusion in one model (beta/test/testp) or their use of
| training data (like LAION)
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| Basically the judge said the idea AI images generated are
| infringing on copyright is so stupid it's thrown out.
|
| The other part of the case is if the artists copyright was
| violated when training the AI and they have only claimed that
| Stability used their art to train.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| The plaintiffs apparently failed to plead sufficient factual
| allegations to support their infringement claim against MTD,
| which is a rookie mistake.
|
| Factual allegations at this point don't have to be correct
| (that's what discovery is for), but they do have to at least
| satisfy the legal requirements for each prong of a legal claim.
| In many legal pleadings, the plaintiffs will state, "upon
| information and belief, we [assert X factual allegation]" since
| they don't yet have the discovery to support a more specific
| factual allegation.
| williamcotton wrote:
| _Orrick also dismissed McKernan and Ortiz 's copyright
| infringement claims entirely._
|
| Well, duh. The judge is helping out the plaintiffs in this case.
| A jury would have been easily convinced by the defense that no
| images produced by Stability's systems are visually derivative.
|
| The key is indeed what follows:
|
| _The judge allowed Andersen to continue pursuing her key claim
| that Stability 's alleged use of her work to train Stable
| Diffusion infringed her copyrights._
|
| So unless there is some kind of summary judgement I would wager
| that this becomes the focus of both sides as this heads towards
| trial.
|
| But that's it. As predicted by commentary from legal scholars,
| the outputs of Stable Diffusion are distinct from the model and
| are not infringing on copyright... at least for this complaint!
| gamblor956 wrote:
| No, he dismissed McKernan and Ortiz because they didn't
| register their images for U.S. copyright, which is a
| foundational prerequisite for any copyright lawsuit (in the
| U.S.)
|
| This simply means that they need to register their images for
| copyright before they can re-join the case.
| (https://www.gibsondunn.com/supreme-court-holds-that-
| copyrigh...)
|
| EDIT: reading the linked PDF further, and it appears that McK
| and O's legal counsel stated that the two weren't asserting the
| copyright claims at all, which is why they were dismissed with
| prejudice. That means that they can't re-join the case by
| filing for copyrights for their images...Their lawyer fucked up
| pretty badly and if I were either of them I'd be filing a
| malpractice lawsuit.
| starshadowx2 wrote:
| Isn't that linked case because they started to file for
| copyright and then sued rather than waiting for it to be
| completed first?
|
| In this case they never filed in the first place, and it was
| dismissed with prejudice.
| williamcotton wrote:
| I'll check PACER and read the actual ruling when I'm at work
| tomorrow, but yeah I'm interpreting "dismissed entirely" as
| "dismissed with prejudice".
|
| You're entirely correct that if it was dismissed without
| prejudice the complaints on copyright infringement on the
| outputs could be amended and refiled.
| starshadowx2 wrote:
| This is from the PDF:
|
| In opposition, plaintiffs do not address, much less
| contest, McKernan or Ortiz's asserted inability to pursue
| Copyright Act claims. At oral argument, plaintiffs' counsel
| clarified that they are not asserting copyright claims on
| behalf of these two plaintiffs. July 19, 2023 Transcript
| (Tr.), pg. 17:1-5. As such, McKernan and Ortiz's copyright
| act claims are DISMISSED WITH PREJUDICE.
| williamcotton wrote:
| Re: EDIT
|
| Another interpretation is that the plaintiffs were well aware
| of how weak their case was with regards to the outputs and
| basically planned on abandoning it from the start.
|
| There's been more than a bit of showmanship from the
| plaintiff's counsel so I'm not surprised that the actual
| legal tactics differ from the rhetoric of the blog posts.
| It's also common to stack the complaint so that when the
| judge does start focusing on the key issues that maybe a
| little more ends up at trial than otherwise.
|
| There's winning in the court of public opinion and then
| there's winning in a Federal court.
| michaelbrave wrote:
| I'm not convinced the training on copyrighted things argument
| will hold up either.
| minimaxir wrote:
| This lawsuit was always weird because it was a much much weaker
| case than the GitHub Copilot lawsuit by the same firm: atleast
| with text you can point out exact infringement, but the Stable
| Diffusion lawsuit (https://stablediffusionlitigation.com/) seems
| mostly based on inaccurate technical memes like "diffusion is
| just compression" without examples.
|
| The HN discussion back when this lawsuit was first announced was
| correctly pessimistic: the top comment was "Where are the
| copies?". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34377910
| alphanullmeric wrote:
| Intellectual property shouldn't be a thing. If you still have it
| after I've supposedly stolen it from you, then it's not real
| property. The easiest test of consistency is simply to ask about
| both piracy and AI training data. If you support IP in one case
| but not the other then you're a hypocrite. There is no third
| option where your support of something depends not on what it is
| but who it benefits.
| gumballindie wrote:
| You do realise that if people's intellectual work is not
| protected there wont be any intellectual work left, right? Why
| would i create something knowing you can just grab it and use
| it? Communism did the same to physical property, where you
| didnt own much and everything belonged to everyone. That didnt
| end particularly well because people inherently want to own
| things, especially the output of their own creation. Sure you
| can use it, but according to the terms and conditions of the
| owner. Same goes for owning objects. You can use my car if i
| let you use my car.
| alphanullmeric wrote:
| And if there was no slavery we wouldn't have any pyramids. I
| don't care. You don't have the right to an idea, a sound or a
| particular arrangement of pixels. That's not communism
| because nothing is being taken from you. I don't owe you any
| terms and conditions to something you don't own.
| gumballindie wrote:
| Well, by law, i do and you do owe me royalties. Hopefully
| these people hire better lawyers next time. Also people
| tend to get upset when their ownership of things is
| violated, pixels or otherwise.
| alphanullmeric wrote:
| Sure then, by law I could have had slaves too. Glad
| you're honest about the side of history you sit on.
| gumballindie wrote:
| The concept of intellectual property came about at the
| same time that slavery was fading away. Essentially at
| the time when people progressed into something better
| than basic primates that thought enslaving one another is
| a good idea. So technically speaking advocates for the
| abolition of copyright are projecting a reversal of
| progress. I want actual ai that actually learns and that
| doesnt rely on brute forcing simulated intelligence using
| a clever mix of people's ideas. By tolerating this fakery
| you are really just handing over the bastardisation of
| the holy grail of tech - ai - to a handful of grifters
| who's success relies on taking what's mine for free and
| giving it to others for a fee. At scale and with
| government protection.
| alphanullmeric wrote:
| Irrelevant. You said "it's the law". I responded with
| "it's the law". You lack consistency, more at 12.
|
| I already made it clear in my original comment that
| unlike you, my position on IP holds universally and not
| just in situations that benefit me. The fact that you
| continue to try to argue how beneficial it would be to
| have IP makes me believe that you simply do not care
| about being consistent, so I'd like to hear it from you
| personally. You believe in IP when it comes to stopping
| AI but not when it prevents you from pirating, agree or
| disagree? If I don't get a one word answer I'll answer
| for you.
| gumballindie wrote:
| I dont care about what holds universally "true" in some
| peole's minds about _my_ property. That's communism. I am
| an individual therefore i care about _my_ ownership.
| Communism wanted to make everything belong to everyone.
| Philosophical darwinism proved that that concept is
| wrong. What's mine is mine, period.
|
| I never pirate software and no, I dont think piracy is a
| good idea either. I believe in open source and that human
| knowledge should he free in the sense of librem but i
| equally believe that that should be according to terms
| and conditions. So i, as a human, would like to read and
| understand your idea but if you dont wish to grant me the
| right to monetise it - sure.
| alphanullmeric wrote:
| Pixels, sounds and ideas aren't your property. That has
| nothing to do with communism. Force is only justified in
| response to force, and you've still yet to prove that my
| copying of your ideas is forceful enough to warrant
| government intervention.
| eindiran wrote:
| This notion that the creators and artists are raking up
| the wealth generated by people consuming their creations
| is obviously wrong. Intellectual property in general, but
| especially copyright, has been a colossal failure --
| rent-seeking middlemen have emerged to swallow up the
| financial dividends of the creative. The idea that
| someone can sell access to your work without you being
| rewarded is ALREADY how things work. Copyright as it
| stands is just a way to give rent-seeking middlemen a
| moat, not a protection for creatives.
| lsaferite wrote:
| I find this whole exchange silly, but I would point out
| that you said:
|
| > The concept of intellectual property came about at the
| same time that slavery was fading away. Essentially at
| the time when people progressed into something better
| than basic primates that thought enslaving one another is
| a good idea.
|
| Wouldn't that suggest that at the point in time where we
| move past IP we are _also_ progressing to a new stage in
| humanity?
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Do you think the creator of a piece of art has _any_ rights
| whatsoever? You 're basically endorsing the idea that if
| you stumble across some original work that you're able to
| make a copy of, there's nothing wrong with falsely
| declaring yourself the author of it and collecting money
| from anyone you can trick into believing this.
| alphanullmeric wrote:
| You have the right to protect it with means that are not
| government force. Force is only justified in response to
| force, and you don't get to ransom anyone that "steals"
| your thoughts and pixels. Do you believe copying is
| force? That's a yes or no question, and if I don't get a
| yes or no answer then I'll answer for you.
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| > You have the right to protect it with means that are
| not government force. Force is only justified in response
| to force, and you don't get to ransom anyone that
| "steals" your thoughts and pixels.
|
| This just sounds like your opinion, why do you think
| this? I really like that people can profitably write
| books and make movies and I think some force to allow
| that to happen seems reasonable.
| alphanullmeric wrote:
| Of course it's my opinion that force is only justified in
| response to force, disagree?
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I reject your whole premise here, as many thefts can
| occur without force, and many legal remedies are imposed
| without force. You're just ducking the question; it seems
| you're saying that 'no, you don't have any rights that
| you can enforce in court.' You'd probably object to
| extralegal enforcement on the basis that it violates the
| NAP or some other glibertarian trope.
| alphanullmeric wrote:
| I'll answer for you then. Yes, you're claiming that
| copying is force.
|
| I am defining force as literal force. What theft can
| occur without physically touching the thing being stolen?
|
| I didn't duck the question. I answered it. I even
| answered it before it was asked (minus the irrelevant
| comment about identity fraud) - I'm against IP. Copy
| whatever you want.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _I am defining force as literal force. What theft can
| occur without physically touching the thing being
| stolen?_
|
| This is like saying you work 24-7 because breathing
| involves physical motion. Insisting on ur personal
| definitions of well-understood terms while disregarding
| how everyone else uses them is childish. But even if we
| use this, ah, special definition, legal remedies in tort
| cases typically don't involve force. You get a judgement
| of liability from the court, and and are ordered to write
| a check. You can complain about government force, but by
| your criteria your injury is wholly imaginary.
|
| Meanwhile it seems clear that you do not consider that
| authors of creative works to have any rights whatsoever
| in their output. I hear this a lot from people with no
| creative abilities of their own.
| alphanullmeric wrote:
| My definition of force is the definition of force. The
| definition I gave you was literally "literal force", and
| you understood that to mean something different from your
| interpretation of force. You are the only one trying to
| change definitions here. If the court orders me to do
| something, that's force. If you think it's somehow
| voluntary, then I have a few examples I'd like to ask you
| about. I have no idea what injury you're referring to.
|
| Yes, we've already established that you don't get the
| rights to pixels, sounds and ideas, and my creative
| abilities won't change that.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Pathetic display. There is not only one definition of any
| word, as you can readily ascertain by consulting a good
| dictionary, legal or otherwise.
|
| _Yes, we 've already established that you don't get the
| rights to pixels, sounds and ideas_
|
| We've established that that's what _you_ want, and that
| you 're unwilling to even acknowledge the concept of
| authorship. Your efforts at rhetorical browbeating are
| clumsy at best.
| alphanullmeric wrote:
| But it doesn't matter what your definition is. If your
| definition of force includes copying, then we're done.
| That's what I wanted to hear you say. If not, but you
| want to go after people that copy, then you don't believe
| that force is only justified in response to force. If you
| want to tell me about how court orders aren't force, then
| I'll ask you if they're equally voluntary in a couple
| situations where they don't benefit you.
|
| That's right, _I_ do not want people to own pixels,
| sounds and ideas. I don 't acknowledge the concept of
| ownership of something that isn't property. Problem?
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| Tangential question, but if I buy a copy of Hamlet by
| someone claiming to have written it, are they not
| committing fraud?
|
| (Regardless, a "solution" to the problem of copyright
| that destroys people's ability to profitably write books
| or make movies seems silly to me)
| simbolit wrote:
| What does the creator's right have to do with lying?
|
| (1) Lying is bad.
|
| (2) Lying and "collecting money from anyone you can
| trick" is fraud.
|
| (3) Fraud is illegal, and that has nothing to do with
| copyright.
|
| You are massively straw-manning here.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Copyright is literally the mechanism that allows creators
| to obtain a legal remedy for such actions. I have a lot
| of problems with the state of copyright, but am OK with
| the basic concept.
|
| GP is arguing against any sort of IP rights, so these
| questions are reasonable. Lying isn't illegal, if there
| are no IP rights in a created work then anyone can
| legally claim authorship.
| astrange wrote:
| The pyramids weren't built by slaves. The ones in Egypt at
| least.
| zirgs wrote:
| Copyright activists really lost a lot of respect because of
| those silly music industry lawsuits, the mickey mouse
| protection act, software patents of trivial stuff and the
| like.
|
| This lawsuit is even sillier than the previous ones.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Thank god copyright came along and gave us Shakespeare, Bach,
| da Vinci, Chaucer, Beethoven...
|
| And can you imagine life without the wheel? Too bad we didn't
| invent patents earlier so that we could've gotten a head
| start inventing it and the spear.
| simbolit wrote:
| Fire was copyrighted by humans, that's why the other apes
| can't use it.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| This is how moneyheads think the world works: that everything
| is a series of monetary incentives to be linked together to
| make an end result. Most humans don't actually think this
| way, and in specific a LOT of creative work is made without
| calculating exactly what the profit is going to be. This
| doesn't mean that artists don't want to be paid, but that
| artists focus on making their work first and monetizing it
| later.
|
| What copyright actually protects is creative industry. By
| assigning _individualized_ monopolies over copying and
| reproduction, the publishing industry can persistently
| lowball the shit out of artists (who themselves undervalue
| their work, see above) and then reap the profits for
| themselves. Since the vast majority of creative work would
| never see market interest, it 's cheaper to pay billions of
| dollars to the handful of known, recognizable, and
| _marketable_ mega-successes than to pay smaller amounts to a
| far larger pool of mid-list or unknown artists. This is why
| unions exist in basically every creative industry: otherwise,
| nobody below the talent line[0] gets paid.
|
| To put a finer point on it: right now, the unions are doing a
| way better job of protecting human artists against AI art
| than copyright is. The argument for training AI being
| infringing is very weak in the general case where there's no
| obvious regurgitation. I mean, where does your copyrighted
| material even 'live' in the model, if the model can't even
| reproduce it? However, unions can _very easily_ just say
| "you can't force us to cut corners by using this tool" in
| their negotiations and actually get that result. Furthermore,
| those rulings _only_ bind publishers that hire artists. The
| artists themselves can still use AI when it makes sense in
| their workflow, rather than when publishers think they can
| cheap out on shit.
|
| The failures of Soviet communism are complicated, but if you
| had to boil it down to one factor, I would not summarize it
| as "communal ownership bad" or "collectivism bad". Collective
| action has its place. Furthermore, the analogy you're making
| between copyright and physical property is flawed[1]. The
| reason why physical property ownership even exists is because
| of scarcity - the reason why I need permission to use your
| car is because you can't use your car if I'm also using it.
|
| The irony of your communism analogy is that copyright is
| specifically used to erode ownership in private property in a
| way that makes the communism haters cry communism. There's a
| novel form of copyright misuse as a business model in which
| you put software in a thing that used to not require
| software, call it "smart", and then use the software to
| enforce your own idea of what "owning" the product means,
| backed up by the same laws that make it illegal to copy DVDs.
| There are a LOT of people who would like to go back to owning
| their cars and computers again, and that requires rolling
| back copyright, not strengthening it.
|
| [0] Hollywood-ism for "people whose contribution to the work
| is not marketable"
|
| [1] And, I suspect, a by-product of having read a bunch of
| Ayn Rand nonsense
| gumballindie wrote:
| > This is how moneyheads
|
| Yeah people need to pay bills and such. I know in communism
| that may seem unecessary but it is. AI fueled techno
| communism will fail as all other flavours of the same
| ideology. Can't take from the few and give to the many even
| if that's a digital product. What's mine is mine.
| vortegne wrote:
| "people inherently want to own things, especially the output
| of their own creation". That is the founding idea of
| communism indeed. I'm not sure you understand anything about
| it.
| czl wrote:
| Say someone takes your written work (say your online comments,
| any articles, blogs etc) and claims it as their own. You still
| have a copy of your work but now your audience the authorship
| is in doubt. Would you be against this happening to you? What
| are your thoughts about plagiarism? How is this different from
| "copyright"?
| simbolit wrote:
| You are straw-manning.
|
| Imagine you encounter a public domain image (which by
| definition is not protected by copyright), you download it,
| and put it on your website.
|
| Perfectly fine.
|
| But if you write "I made this image" below it, you are a liar
| and a fraud. No copyright needed.
| Retric wrote:
| Legally you are allowed to lie, also it isn't fraud.
|
| So posting that is perfectly legal for a public domain work
| and the only thing preventing you from doing with someone
| alive right now is copyright.
| alphanullmeric wrote:
| Don't care.
| justanotherjoe wrote:
| The creation of information is a divine thing, information
| lasts until humanity itself goes extinct. The very first
| concept created by our caveman ancestor we still use today.
| Copying is easy. Creating is hard. Even something as simple as
| creating an original name is really hard, let alone making
| entire movies and video games. I actually think intellectual
| property is the single best thing humanity had done, precisely
| because otherwise there is no movies, there is no games, why
| would there be. Although I agree it shouldn't last forever.
| alphanullmeric wrote:
| In case I haven't already made it clear enough in the comment
| you replied to - whether I believe in something or not
| doesn't depend on who would benefit from it.
|
| But to answer the question, you use proprietary software
| protected by means other than government force every single
| day.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/byprrngynpe/...
|
| The dismissal of Deviant was inappropriate given that the case
| hasn't reached discovery yet. The dismissal was granted based on
| a _substantive_ evaluation of the Defendant 's assertions which
| is inappropriate at this early _procedural_ stage of the case.
| (see e.g. page 10 where the judge evaluates the "plausibility"
| of alleged facts, and page 12 where he says "I am not convinced"
| about the plaintiff's theory, even though in a MTD this is not a
| determination he is supposed to make pre-discovery).
|
| Moreover, even if plaintiff's language was "unclear", the
| appropriate procedure is to require them to amend their claim and
| dismiss Deviant if the plaintiff does not amend, not to dismiss a
| defendant and give the plaintiff leave to amend their claims.
|
| With respect to Midjourney, the Plaintiffs failed to plead
| sufficient factual allegations to support their claim, so that
| dismissal was appropriate. (Pre-discovery, it's okay for the
| alleged/pleaded "facts" to be wrong, you just need to allege
| sufficient "facts" that you have a legal basis for a court case.
| Note that "facts" in the MTD context doesn't mean real world
| facts, it is a legal term of art that actually refers to an
| allegation of a fact that will later be determined to be true or
| false at the actual legal proceeding on the merits.)
| artninja1988 wrote:
| Interesting. How do you see the Getty v stability lawsuit
| going? That looks much worse for stability. Do you think they
| will just settle and stability will pay them some licensing
| fee?
| gamblor956 wrote:
| Getty has a much stronger case, given that warped versions of
| the Getty logo have shown up in a number of SD-generated
| images, so it's obvious that there was impermissible copying.
|
| I'm not sure Stability will agree to a licensing fee, since
| part of the rationale for the last version of SD was to
| _remove_ the infringing images from their training sets going
| forward.
| artninja1988 wrote:
| Hmmm. What do you think the outcome will be then?
| zirgs wrote:
| I've never seen a getty logo in any of my generated images
| so I suspect that they used img2img or some weird prompt.
| simbolit wrote:
| In the early stuffs, Stable Diffusion 1 (not XL 1!) and
| such, if you prompted for stock photo style images, you
| regularly (~30%) got something resembling the Getty stock
| photo watermark in the lower right.
|
| Was quite annoying but adding "public domain, Creative
| Commons" to the prompt usually got rid of it (the model
| knows that public domain images have no watermark :-).
| Since SD2.0 I haven't seen this happening at all.
| zirgs wrote:
| I've generated thousands of images using SD 1.5 based
| models and I've never got the getty watermark. That makes
| my think that some dishonest lawyer used img2img.
| czl wrote:
| > warped versions of the Getty logo have shown up in a
| number of SD-generated images.
|
| If you create art that has a Pepsi logo on a depicted
| vending machine etc Pepsi has no copyright claim on your
| art does it? All it shows is the art was made with the
| knowledge of the logo and the logo was included as an
| element inside the art.
|
| When logos are shown in a context that may cause confusion
| (about who made a product etc) there may be trademark
| infringement but trademark infringement is not being
| claimed here so why would warped logos matter?
| chankstein38 wrote:
| So I'm only guessing here but my thought is because a
| Pepsi logo just indicates that the input image was an ad,
| a Getty Images logo means that the input images were
| owned by Getty and likely used without their consent.
| Filligree wrote:
| We know input images were used without consent. That's
| not in question, it just also isn't all that relevant.
| mithr wrote:
| The issue at hand isn't actually directly about how the
| _output_ images contained the Getty logo; the lawsuit isn
| 't saying "you're showing our logo on your output, which
| isn't a Getty image, and we take issue with that". It's
| whether Getty images can be _ingested_ into the training
| set without consent or compensation to Getty.
|
| The reason the distorted logos matter is because they
| make it much more difficult to claim that Getty images
| were _not_ ingested and used for training -- if they
| weren 't, then how come the outputs have those logos? And
| similarly, they make it much more difficult to claim that
| these source images were only used as "inspiration" for
| the generative algorithm and thus fall under fair use --
| if they're only used for "inspiration", how come they
| generate/copy easily-recognizable parts of the original
| images (i.e. the logo) as-is?
| czl wrote:
| > they make it much more difficult to claim that Getty
| images were not ingested and used for training
|
| Was that claim put forth? Why then does making this
| difficult matter?
|
| > they make it much more difficult to claim that these
| source images were only used as "inspiration" for the
| generative algorithm and thus fall under fair use -- if
| they're only used for "inspiration", how come they
| generate/copy easily-recognizable parts of the original
| images
|
| If artists created works of art containing warped logos
| etc as elements in their art would they be infringing
| copyright because of these warped logos? But if an
| artists uses a computer to create the same art instead of
| real paint that becomes infringement? Because copyright
| depends on the method of production not just the produced
| result?
| gpm wrote:
| > so it's obvious that there was impermissible copying.
|
| Impermissible is a legal conclusion that is not the least
| bit obvious.
| hankchinaski wrote:
| This is like Michelangelo suing Caravaggio because he copied or
| better, was inspired by his work
| soulofmischief wrote:
| A thought experiment:
|
| Imagine you have a blob of seemingly random data. Nothing in the
| data contains anything recognizable as illegal or in violation of
| copyright.
|
| Now imagine that the right input suddenly turns the data into
| illegal or infringing material, after a transformation operation.
| And not just a single unique input such as a password which
| clearly represents a mapping function between two sets of data.
|
| But imagine if there were seemingly infinite possible inputs,
| each of which transformed the data into a different infringing
| blob of data. If these inputs exactly represented the novel,
| copyrightable or illegal aspects, but the blob itself was inert.
|
| What should be illegal here? The blob, which by itself is free of
| any questionable bits of data, or the inputs which transform it
| into something tangible? Both? Neither?
|
| Well, it has never been illegal to draw or paint something
| representing CSAM, for example. And it has never been illegal to
| draw or paint Mickey Mouse in your own home.
|
| What's often illegal is _publishing_ said data. Ignoring the free
| speech debate around artificially produced CSAM, publishing it is
| already illegal in many territories. It is also illegal to
| violate copyright in many countries when publishing information.
|
| What's interesting is that it is not illegal to trace a drawing
| and hanging it up on your wall, instead of buying the the real
| drawing from its rights-holder. It's also not illegal to
| reproduce a tracing done by a friend. But the recording and film
| industries have been more successful in convincing us that it
| _should_ be illegal to do the same for a song or film. That you
| should not be able to "trace" the data at home, and that you
| should not be able to share it with me, that I should not be able
| to trace over _your_ tracing and bring home a copy for myself.
|
| I can understand, and support a copyright system which regulates
| the publishing of copyrighted material. Even copyleft paradigms
| lean on regulation for enforcement. But the film and music
| industry actively try to restrict individual freedoms in the name
| of corporate profits, while still screwing over their clients and
| employees with respect to profit-sharing.
|
| Back to the point: That blob should never be illegal. The
| activation functions should never be illegal. That is a basic
| extension of free speech. But publishing, that is a different
| story, and we _already have laws offering such protections_ both
| with respect to illegally-produced or copyrighted content. Any
| attempt to regulate what kind of model I am allowed to run at
| home is a massive infringement on my rights as an individual, and
| is borne either out of gross ignorance of current copyright law
| from the same people crying, "But think of the copyrights!", or
| direct, insidious corporate greed.
|
| You can adjust this thought experiment so that instead of dealing
| with a magic blob, we are dealing with a program that makes it
| _really_ easy to produce illegal or copyrighted works after a bit
| of human interaction. Is there claim here now? Are we basing the
| law on how much human involvement was needed to create the
| output? We 've faced similar arguments around technological leaps
| such as the printing press or mechanical loom. Did we, as a
| society, reject these advances in technology in order to protect
| loom workers and scribes?
|
| Bottom line. You can pry my models out of my cold, dead or
| handcuffed hands. Times like these really shine a light on who is
| complicit in the system, and who suffers from it.
|
| If you are in the creative industry, you need to understand how
| things are going to change. As an engineer with decades of
| investment into my craft, I also have to face the rude awakening
| that is ahead in my own industry as automation creates a gap
| between highly-skilled professionals and newcomers. Being a paid
| software engineer might become as hard of work as becoming a
| famous professional artist. Lots of connections, insane
| specialization and a lifetime devoted to the craft. A lot of
| people in school for engineering _right now_ might struggle to
| find employment in 20 years or less if they cannot cross this gap
| in time. Artists aren 't the only tribe experiencing a huge
| industry shake-up over a technology that will one day be so
| ubiquitous that it's inside of your toaster.
| Aerroon wrote:
| > _Imagine you have a blob of seemingly random data. Nothing in
| the data contains anything recognizable as illegal or in
| violation of copyright._
|
| R
|
| The set of Real numbers contains every positive whole number.
| This is already the magical blob.
|
| Eg the decimal number 65101114114111111110 is "Aerroon" in
| ASCII.
|
| Edit3: real numbers are better than natural numbers or whole
| numbers for this. They have zero and they solve the "0005"
| problem.
| mithr wrote:
| This feels like a bit of a naive interpretation of the
| situation. At its core -- regardless of specific lawsuits, etc
| -- the questions here are (1) should copyright laws be
| _adapted_ to the new reality of generative AI, (2) should
| artists be able to control how their work is used given
| generative AI is a reality, and (3) do we as a society think
| people should be able to make a living as artists, and what are
| the implications of that either way when it comes to AI models
| and their use.
|
| Until this point, an artist who has developed their own
| personal, recognizable style, could be _somewhat_ confident
| that it is difficult for someone else to generate a new piece
| of art exactly mimicking their style. That is to say, it was
| never _impossible_ -- there have certainly always been other
| artists out there who are capable of taking artwork and
| creative something new in that style -- but there were some
| barriers to getting there, including that those artists aren't
| easily and instantaneously accessible to every human being on
| the planet, that they generally don't work for free, and that
| they would need some time to produce their work. The
| combination of these factors resulted in a system wherein, for
| the most part, if you really wanted to create something in the
| style of a specific artist, you would need to commission them,
| thereby supporting their ability to live and continue creating
| art. And /or they sold merchandise with their art, or
| collections, etc.
|
| Now, on the other hand, it is incredibly easy to go to an image
| generator and have it generate art in the style of a specific
| (sufficiently well-established) artist quickly, easily, and
| freely. The barriers have, overnight, gone from being
| reasonably protective to pretty much nonexistent. As a result,
| artists are asking themselves how they can continue to live and
| create art. This is something a sufficiently well-established
| professional artist used to be able to do before generative AI
| came into the picture, because other than the odd copycat
| (which again took time and effort and an actual human with the
| right ability), they were the only ones who could produce
| images in their own styles, and this ability was thus a
| valuable resource that people paid for. If anyone can now
| produce identical images independently and for free, then this
| ability may no longer be a resource other people will pay for.
|
| Part of what these court cases are trying to determine is
| exactly whether any copyright does apply to generated images.
| You wrote that "publishing, that is a different story, and we
| already have laws offering such protections both with respect
| to illegally-produced or copyrighted content", but those laws
| are exactly what's being tested here: artists (and
| organizations like Getty) are seeing what they claim are AI-
| generated copies of their copyrighted works in use out in the
| world (so these have been "published" by some definition --
| they are not only being printed out and hung in people's
| garages for them and their friends to look at in private), and
| are suing to stop that.
|
| But aside from that, I think there is a real philosophical
| discussion here. If you've trained as an artist your entire
| life, have worked hard to develop a unique style, and are one
| of the relatively few artists who have been successful doing so
| -- should a company be able to wait until you became popular,
| then just take all of your work, and use it to train a model
| that can produce works exactly in your style easily and without
| any effort, which it can then provide to people freely or for a
| subscription?
|
| This also isn't _as much_ about the output, as about how the
| output was obtained. If the model did not actually ingest your
| images, but someone wrote a prompt that involved a super-
| detailed description of what _made_ your style unique, going
| into color palettes, line thicknesses, art styles, influences,
| etc etc, and you would have to get all of that right in order
| to generate something that looked like your art, then I think
| most folks would be generally ok with that. But when (1) your
| prompt can just be "give me art that looks like soulofmischief
| made it" and it'll give you just that, and (2) you know that
| your art was used to train the model in order for it to be able
| to do that, then there is a question of whether fair use laws
| should be adjusted to prohibit this behavior and protect your
| ability to live off of your work.
|
| I also think that regardless of the outcome of these lawsuits,
| no one is really coming for your own models and hour ability to
| tinker in your garage. It may not be legal today to duplicate a
| copyrighted image and hang it in your office, but no one will
| ever know (or care enough to do nothing about it) if you do.
| Similarly, even if this use becomes copyrighted, nothing will
| practically stop you from building your own large model that
| includes any copyrighted images you want, for your own personal
| use, in your own garage. But if you then turn around and try to
| profit off of that model, or if you want someone else to
| produce a model (thus stepping more into the publishing realm)
| that's where a line may be drawn. I personally think that'd be
| fair.
|
| Finally, zooming all the way out, I believe that it should be
| possible to make a living as an artist, and I think when we
| have discussions like these, we should keep reminding ourselves
| to think about how our technical or legal arguments affect that
| outcome.
| sinuhe69 wrote:
| Orrick dismissed McKernan and Ortiz's copyright claims because
| they had not registered their images with the U.S. Copyright
| Office, a requirement for bringing a copyright lawsuit.
|
| That is the key.
| Topfi wrote:
| Here is a direct link to the motion for those interested:
| https://scribd.com/document/681174239/Order-on-motion-to-dis...
| aa_is_op wrote:
| Amazing how copyright law amazingly disappears when it's to the
| detriment of major tech companies and protecting smaller
| creators.
|
| Just amazing!
| gmerc wrote:
| I'm not sure if here you are reading that. Have you read the
| article?
|
| The copyright infringement claim (for training) is left intact.
| It's the other claims that had no basis in existing law (e.g.
| no copyright was registered, etc) that have been thrown out.
| flanked-evergl wrote:
| > Amazing how copyright law amazingly disappears
|
| Can you elaborate in what way it disappeared in your opinion?
| aa_is_op wrote:
| We found the AI company employee. Please explain to me why
| are AI companies just allowed to take anything they want with
| a blank statement "we can use it because you specifically
| didn't say I'm not allowed"?
| kranke155 wrote:
| This will be the greatest act of Intellectual Property theft in
| history.
|
| All because judges will be befuddled about what to do after
| hearing terms like "training data" and "compression". We will, of
| course get the emails in 10-20 years showing that it's all lies
| and that the CEOs of these companies knew exactly what they were
| doing.
|
| If this continues, AI will be the great inequality machine in
| history. Take data from 1,000,000 individuals, train your AI to
| replace them, compensate no one.
|
| You can do this in every area: driving, farming, cooking. Music.
| Just dispossess everyone of all their property by training an AI
| to copy all their work! What could be easier (and less morally
| right)...
| treyd wrote:
| Intellectual property never really existed. Copyright is
| something we made up to extend the logic of commodities to the
| full value chain for books, which made sense 200 years ago. But
| it makes no sense to apply the logic of commodities to
| digitally produced and distributed media. The production of
| culture has been slowly becoming more distorted as cultural
| assets that should be and historically were held in common
| accumulates under the umbrella of massive intellectual property
| holders (Disney, Universal, etc) after we took the legal
| concept that was meant to apply to a much more narrow context
| and applied it broadly. They benefit disproportionally from
| intellectual property than individual artists do. The (recent)
| past dominating the present, being ruled by abstractions, and
| all that.
|
| Is it bad that this will be used to displace individual
| artists/creatives in the value chain of media production? Of
| course it is. But we shouldn't be responding to that by
| clinging harder to schemes that have outlived their usefulness,
| we should be developing new models for funding production.
| rvz wrote:
| > Copyright is something we made up to extend the logic of
| commodities to the full value chain for books, which made
| sense 200 years ago. But it makes no sense to apply the logic
| of commodities to digitally produced and distributed media.
|
| Great! So given your articles are in the public domain on
| your website I can make millions out of it without given you
| a cent or direct credit and sources without paying you and
| can claim it all as my own then.
| abakker wrote:
| This argument kind of elides over how you will make the
| millions, when the author has not.
|
| The hypothetical of lost revenue needs to be validated by
| the evidence of actual revenue being made in this way.
| Right now, I see lots of interest in paying for the _tool_,
| but almost none in paying human wages for the _output_ of
| generative models.
|
| (I am not proposing that my above distinction is a legal
| test. Just pointing out that all these arguments would be
| more credible if actual ai generated works were being sold
| by AI companies)
| rvz wrote:
| As long as it is public domain it does not matter how the
| millions is made; ebook, book or newsletter.
|
| There is no recognition of 'lost revenue' for the
| commercialization of public domain works.
| abakker wrote:
| I don't disagree at all. The OP I was responding to
| mentioned non-public-domain works like a blog.
|
| My point was that we haven't yet seen the products of
| GenAI stuff really making money yet. People are paying
| for the tool, and people are paying for work that is
| being done using the tool, but nobody buys a book, image,
| movie, or similar from OpenAI or Google directly.
| roenxi wrote:
| Anyone who programs for a living should be making whatever
| preparations are possible for being replaced by an AI. If
| AIs are good at art they'll be better at coding.
|
| I have sympathy for the artists, but frankly this is
| progress and it can't be stopped. The economics are so lop-
| sided in favour of silicon that the law won't be able to
| hold it back without crippling society at large. Artists
| aren't the only ones affected and they may not even be the
| profession most impacted.
| myaccountonhn wrote:
| > I have sympathy for the artists, but frankly this is
| progress and it can't be stopped.
|
| Kinda sad that artists having their income even more
| crippled is seen as progress.
| ben_w wrote:
| Some places have government grants funding the arts.
|
| On the other hand, I grew up in one of those places, the
| UK, and there were a lot of people moaning that the TV
| License (which funds the BBC) was an abominable stealth
| tax or words to that effect.
|
| I'm now in Germany, where everyone has to pay the
| equivalent even if they don't own a TV or watch live over
| the internet (unlike the UK where not doing that means
| you don't need to pay); I've not heard anyone complain so
| far... but I don't know if that's because they genuinely
| don't, or if I'm peacefully oblivious by never having
| been suckered into reading a German-language comments
| section.
| EnergyAmy wrote:
| That's only true if artists cling to the old ways and
| reject new tools. Their income can increase if they
| embrace the new empowering tools becoming available.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| At the moment I'm in the situation where having AI tools
| means I'm willing to try things I've never tried before;
| including having actually considered hiring artists for
| the first time ever.
|
| Sadly, I think most artists would bite my head off right
| this minute? So I guess I'm going to have to wait until
| the storm blows over.
| beej71 wrote:
| > If AIs are good at art they'll be better at coding.
|
| Not sure about that. It's like saying if AIs are good at
| art, they'll be better at math.
| ben_w wrote:
| While the conclusion doesn't follow from the premise
| through the mere application of logic, I would note that
| when I was a kid all the high performance stuff was done
| in assembly "because compilers can't optimise properly",
| and yet since sometime around when I went to university
| (+- a few years) we've all had compilers that are _in
| almost all cases_ better at this than their operators.
|
| Also, GPT-3.5 is already a better coder than a few humans
| whose mistakes I've had to fix. 3.5 is nowhere near the
| best, yet it's already eating at the bottom rungs despite
| being free.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > I can make millions out of it without given you a cent or
| direct credit and sources without paying you and can claim
| it all as my own then.
|
| This describes how ideas work - and ideas are rarely (if
| ever) IP-locked by a first originator - because there
| usually isn't one.
|
| Everything by everyone, everywhere is built on the output
| of predecessors. Progress is a shared effort made up of
| minuscule increments or slight reorderings - which are
| typically done several times before they catch on.
|
| IP exists to hinder this process by preventing 99.99999% of
| potential people from advancing ideas.
| treyd wrote:
| If someone ran a print shop and printed out my articles
| into a book called "Collected works by Trey on HN" or
| something and didn't give me a cent then yeah I'd be
| thrilled, because it's a validation of my work. I already
| published the articles, they're doing all the work to put
| them into print, what right do I really have to claim part
| of the sales?
|
| But if they claimed that _they_ wrote the content then they
| would be defrauding their customers, since saying they
| wrote them would just be lying. You don 't need
| intellectual property for fraud (as in "lying for material
| gain") to exist and be bad. At the very least it would be
| dishonest academically speaking and they should be
| criticized for it.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| you would throw out hundreds of years of copyright law on
| a whim. This is economic suicide for independent
| creatives. The most tragic part of this is that creatives
| themselves, immersed in creativity, see no rhyme or
| reason to stop the flow. Over time, those that grow old
| or weak are discarded with no rights to their own work.
| Yes, it is that bad.
| treyd wrote:
| Have you listened to artists and creatives talk about
| copyright recently? Especially ones that publish on
| newer, digital distribution platforms like YouTube?
| There's numerous more thorough critiques of copyright law
| and calls to abolish it from across the political
| spectrum.
|
| You're mischaracterizing me by suggesting that it's
| "economic suicide", as I said in my original comment in
| this thread:
|
| > But we shouldn't be responding to that by clinging
| harder to schemes that have outlived their usefulness, we
| should be developing new models for funding production.
|
| Sure it would be disruptive if we snapped our fingers and
| said "no more IP starting tomorrow", there should be a
| gradual phasing out of these unfair protections and
| effort put into sustainable pro-creative models.
| EnergyAmy wrote:
| I don't think you've really thought this through. How would
| someone make millions off of that? If someone tried, the
| original author is still offering it for free. Why would
| someone pay for it?
|
| A lot of people are very myopic about generative AI,
| thinking that large Hollywood studios are going to steal
| people's work and put everyone out of a job. Hollywood
| studios _won 't exist_ soon enough because anyone will be
| able to put together a movie that rivals existing expensive
| productions. In fact, generative AI is democratizing, as
| long as it's not gatekept by a few large corporations,
| which is exactly what trying to misapply copyright here
| would do.
| rvz wrote:
| > I don't think you've really thought this through. How
| would someone make millions off of that? If someone
| tried, the original author is still offering it for free.
| Why would someone pay for it?
|
| Tens of millions of fans of a living celebrity would pay
| for it and the fans do not care about the original author
| as long as it is the celebrity's name that is selling it
| and can claim it as their own.
|
| They don't need to give credit or sources to whatever
| their selling to generate millions.
| AwaAwa wrote:
| Given a generation or so, a celebrity mostly won't have
| tens of millions of fans, because there will be tens of
| millions of celebrities. It's happening already but they
| are just called 'influencers, podcasters, youtubers' at
| the moment, with the line getting more blurred everyday.
| CrimsonRain wrote:
| There is no "taking data" going on. Nobody is going into your
| private locker and training on your painting, music or cooking
| recipes.
|
| If you put your "work" out in the world, anyone who views it,
| is automatically training their brains on it. Viewing is
| training.
| kranke155 wrote:
| Ok, so reproduce me a Picasso. You've seen one right?
| test6554 wrote:
| Obligatory _My first grader can do that._
| WithinReason wrote:
| AI can't reproduce a Picasso exactly either. That's the
| main reason the lawsuit was dismissed according to TFA.
| kranke155 wrote:
| It's funny to me that we haven't reached AGI or anywhere near
| it, but when we talk about training Diffusion models,
| suddenly they're "just like a person" for legal reasons.
|
| Same thing that happened on the construction of the
| "corporation as a person", built on top of rulings made to
| protect African Americans.
| EnergyAmy wrote:
| That's like saying "it's funny to me that this baby can't
| drive a car, but we still call it a 'person'".
|
| We've achieved AGI, it's just yet a baby. Only a few years
| ago, if you wanted a model that could complete a task,
| you'd have to train a model specific to that task. GPT-4
| can do a large variety of tasks without being specifically
| trained on them, i.e. it's suitable for a wide range of
| general tasks. Yeah, it sucks at some of them, but focusing
| on that is short-sighted. Look at the progress made from
| just a few years ago and where it's going, especially with
| multimodality and increased compute power.
| kranke155 wrote:
| My point is this is still a machine. Running analogies on
| top of metaphors, you can justify everything.
|
| This thing is a machine intelligence. My point is that a
| machine intelligence to be equivalent to humans in every
| law is curiously never mentioned, except when it is
| advantageous to the owners of said machine.
|
| Or are we saying that we can't turn off GPT-4 at this
| point, because following your metaphor, we would be
| committing murder or abortion?
|
| Again, you can't reason using metaphors and inferences
| and analogies. It's not helpful.
| EnergyAmy wrote:
| It's pretty obvious that we should be considering whether
| or not it's ethical to turn off AI. Even if most people
| think it's OK right now, that will likely change as these
| models get more capable, exactly similar to the differing
| opinions on abortion.
|
| > except when it is advantageous to the owners of said
| machine.
|
| That's just not true. You're ignoring vast amounts of
| discussion on the topic, particularly the discussions had
| when Blake Lemoine claimed that LaMDA was sentient.
| There's no reason to dismiss all that just because you're
| dead set on assuming everyone involved in AI is up to no
| good.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > If you put your "work" out in the world, anyone who views
| it, is automatically training their brains on it. Viewing is
| training.
|
| A perfectly reasonable view for humans, since you shouldn't
| be able to copyright a brain.
|
| Not at all a reasonable view for a computer, until we also
| get to freely use all the copyrighted works ourselves. The
| problem here is that AI training is _asymmetric_ : the people
| training an AI use works in violation of their licenses, but
| don't let their own works be used in the same way. For
| instance, Microsoft uses code on GitHub to train Copilot, but
| you still don't get to freely the source code of Windows or
| GitHub.
|
| I am _absolutely_ in favor of eliminating copyright and
| patent law. I am _not_ in favor of keeping it around while
| letting AI become a laundering mechanism to get around it. AI
| training should not get to uniquely ignore copyright;
| copyright should cease to exist.
| myaccountonhn wrote:
| AIs and humans are not the same, why do people keep grouping
| them together and assume the same logic should apply?
| ben_w wrote:
| 1. Nobody really knows what box to put AI in, because
| nobody's had decent ones until very recently.
|
| 2. Despite the differences, the _similarities_ are
| rhetorically convincing for many.
|
| I recon there will be a lot of bad analogies for the next
| decade at least.
| EnergyAmy wrote:
| No two people are exactly the same, but we group them
| together in various ways. The question to ask is "for a
| particular purpose, should they be treated with the same
| reasoning?".
|
| For the purpose of creating new art from experiencing
| previously created art, why should we treat them
| differently?
| williamcotton wrote:
| Google "expert witness"! Courts are also known to hire their
| own experts who mediated between the experts on either side.
|
| Also, those emails seem very likely to be ordered to be
| produced during discovery.
|
| This thing could really go either way at this point but I feel
| like Stability has the upper hand.
|
| Imagine training a model without any of the plaintiffs images,
| then using that side by side with the model that does. This
| could then be used to show the jury that those individual works
| are of no importance to the system if the images are of the
| same quality.
|
| They will probably argue that the individual expressions of
| each work are not copied, rather the abstract ideas of two-
| dimensional representations present across any and all images.
|
| Expect lots of side by side pictures as Exhibits from both
| side! Grandma and her fellows have to weigh in on this one!
|
| This is a fun one!
| kranke155 wrote:
| Stable Diffusion has been known to make virtually identical
| copies of the images it was "trained" on, afaik.
|
| If the images are REALLY of no importance, they wouldn't have
| been used anyway.
| williamcotton wrote:
| And then the defense reminds the court that copyright is
| about _specific_ works. Clearing the specific intent to
| copy a specific work is pretty key if you want to argue
| idea /expression or fair use or whatever their strategy may
| be.
|
| And yes, the nearly identical copies will definitely be
| presented to the jury.
| michaelbrave wrote:
| that's a gross oversimplification and an argument that was
| made in bad faith that has now spread like a meme.
|
| The gist was if you overtrain a model, and try to recreate
| an exact image by prompting very similar things, and run it
| several thousand times, then you can recreate an image. If
| you seriously crank up the overtraining it's even easier.
| But normal use of the models do not just pump out
| recreations of training data.
| WithinReason wrote:
| That never happened afaik
| olalonde wrote:
| Learning is not theft and never has been. I don't care whether
| it's a human or machine doing it. AI will benefit everyone
| enormously, even if it won't be equally distributed. The real
| issue here is that some skills are increasingly becoming
| obsolete and people have a hard time coping with that. Instead
| of demanding compensation, which would really be impractical to
| implement anyways, why not focus on developing new skills?
| kranke155 wrote:
| No that is not what people are upset about. They are upset
| that their life's work is being used without even asking
| permission, for someone else to get insanely rich.
|
| _That 's what they're upset about._
|
| If there were no use for 2D artists, then Stability Ai
| wouldn't be making an AI to replace them.
|
| Key word here is: replace. 2D artists are not becoming
| _obsolete_ - they 're being replaced by a machine that was
| trained on their works without permission.
|
| If you want to make an AI that does amazing paintings, and
| doesn't use human training data, more power to you. I can't
| compete with that. But if you use MY WORK to make a machine
| that's going to replace me, you do it under the cover of
| darkness and without permission - yeah i'll get pretty mad.
|
| What happened to visual artists was more like Logitech
| announcing Logitech CoPilot and revealing they've extracted
| code from keylogging for the past 20 years.
| constantly wrote:
| > No that is not what people are upset about. They are
| upset that their life's work is being used without even
| asking permission, for someone else to get insanely rich.
| That's what they're upset about.
|
| This is kind of petulant then, respectfully. They got paid
| to produce that work, and they sold their services for that
| paycheck and the knowledge that they were putting their
| work into the world. The fruits of their labor were already
| being used to make Disney, etc. massively wealthy.
|
| But this is even another step of indirection from that
| totally fine and reasonable situation: people (or machines)
| are learning from the work and producing their own. They
| might as well be angry at interns who learned their style
| to get junior jobs at Disney and who are now up and coming,
| replacing them.
| kranke155 wrote:
| Where did you get this idea that Disney or someone paid
| for all these works to be produced?
|
| A lot of the works were just ripped off Arstation and
| similar websites. It's likely a very large number was
| never "paid for".
|
| A lot of that work was never paid for to begin with. It
| was just spec work by artists who a. might be too young
| b. might be in between jobs c. just doing passion work.
|
| Again a lot of people at HN don't really seem to know the
| story very well, or how artists are compensated.
| constantly wrote:
| I just assumed Disney paid their employees, though maybe
| they're volunteers or something. I read Ed Catmull's
| Creativity, Inc. a while back and my takeaway (in
| addition to seeing a glimpse into how the management
| worked) was that all workers at Pixar were compensated
| for their work. Not totally orthogonal because Disney did
| end up acquiring Pixar. But I have a hard time believing
| a movie like Frozen was created without paying for it to
| be created.
| kranke155 wrote:
| You're absolutely correct that Disney pays its employees.
|
| However most of the images that are being used for
| training data don't come from Disney. Most of the imagery
| used for Stable Diffusion and Midjourney was from
| portfolio websites and other sources, afaik. The
| Artstation website, which is a popular portfolio website,
| was one of the main targets, alongside many others. Other
| websites used include DeviantArt and Flickr. You can
| check using this website https://haveibeentrained.com
|
| A lot of people placed their passion work, personal work,
| and unpaid work on Artstation, DeviantArt and Flickr.
| Some of those people are brilliant. Stability AI used
| their work as training data, without announcing it or
| asking for permission. The result is that a lot of more
| profilic and famous artists can see a lot of work that
| directly seems to be a reference to their own, copying
| their style.
|
| A lot of the work on these websites is quite simply not
| commercial work. The only commercial application in fact,
| so far, is these image engines.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Let's say I have a band. We make a record, and we sell
| some records. We get paid for that.
|
| Now someone wants to use one of the songs in an ad. We
| "got paid" to produce the work, but the people making the
| ad still have to pay us for _that_ use of the song,
| because it 's a _different_ use than the one we got paid
| for.
| cmiles74 wrote:
| People who do the work should be compensated when their
| work is used to generate income for someone else. This is
| the way it's worked for as long as I can remember: I get
| paid to do some work, the company then gets my output.
|
| What we have here is someone hoovering up copyrighted and
| protected content, from all over the internet, and using
| it to generate income. They then are turning around and
| claiming that they do not need to pay for these protected
| works because... Well, it's always something hand-wavy
| like "machine learn like people" but it boils down to "I
| want to keep the money."
| Filligree wrote:
| Is Stability actually making any profit? They trained the
| AI, and released it for free, and-
|
| I'm still confused as to their business model.
| MacsHeadroom wrote:
| They build private enterprise AI solutions for big bucks
| and use their free models as advertisement of their
| ability. StableDiffusion is marketing.
| rpdillon wrote:
| AI is just leveraging value in the data that wasn't used
| before. In the same way we can automate jobs by watching
| how the human workers do the job, we can automate writing
| text or producing a picture. As we drive to work, we do so
| so we can get to work, but cameras on other vehicles watch
| us drive, and take all the judgement and learning we put
| into driving to try and create automated drivers. Should
| all drivers be compensated when their driving style is used
| to train an autonomous vehicle? It's the same scenario you
| mention: the work of humans is used to automate away that
| same work (this is pretty much how we automated everything,
| AI is just more explicit about it). It seems to me that
| these lawsuits are really about trying to stop the
| automation of certain creative jobs. And perhaps this is
| where we disagree, since stopping automation of jobs
| doesn't seem like a nobel end to me. Indeed, if we'd had
| this attitude about automating other jobs (like farming and
| manufacture of goods), creative jobs wouldn't exist, since
| everyone would be spending all their time producing food
| and tools.
|
| I'm not sure what your comment about "Logitech CoPilot" is.
| GitHub CoPilot exists, was trained on code from the past 20
| years, and by and large developers enjoy the additional
| automation, and are looking for ways to leverage this
| automation to be more productive. I would think artists and
| writers would adopt a similar approach. Experience tells me
| that fighting automation is a waste of time. Best to stay
| ahead of it.
| kranke155 wrote:
| >Should all drivers be compensated when their driving
| style is used to train an autonomous vehicle?
|
| Yes.
| rpdillon wrote:
| It sounds like you want to expand intellectual property
| rights to include the details of any action people take
| that could be observed by a machine so it can learn how
| to do the same thing. That's an untenable strategy: the
| ROI of the existing IP regime is already doubtful, and
| expanding it won't improve it, it'll simply expand all
| those problems to new areas.
| MacsHeadroom wrote:
| That's plainly ridiculous.
| EnergyAmy wrote:
| Your job will only be replaced if you're unwilling to
| adapt. It's like saying that C made assembly programmers
| obsolete. There's a lot fewer people programming in
| assembly, but the correct view is that there's a lot more
| programmers now than there were in the days that you had to
| know assembly.
|
| "Under the cover of darkness and without permission"
| implies quite a bit, but you're coming at it from the wrong
| angle, which this court ruling affirms. Try thinking of it
| as a new tool that will act as a force multiplier for your
| work.
| kranke155 wrote:
| This is a completely misled interpretation of events,
| since automating my work to the scale of generative AI,
| there won't be any work left for humans.
|
| This "but progress" argument is tiring. The Industrial
| Revolution was a complete failure if you measure quality
| of life in its first decades. It got turned around by
| people who you know, fought back, created unions, and
| demanded fair pay.
| EnergyAmy wrote:
| > there won't be any work left for humans
|
| Good. That's the goal, and we can stop inventing stupid
| make-work for people when that happens. Jobs aren't the
| goal, making robots do all of the work is the goal.
| You're falling into the myopic trap of assuming that the
| current way of things won't change along with generative
| AI becoming commonplace.
| kranke155 wrote:
| I would agree.
|
| My fear is that in between the world we have now and the
| world where robots do everything, we have a giant valley
| of madness where robots take all the jobs, all the
| profits, and a lot of people are left with nothing.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| That's whose goal? It certainly isn't the goal of
| billionaires and people that run the country. By in
| large, _their_ goal is to be rich and powerful: to have
| power over other people. You don 't get that by
| eliminating the need to work.
|
| It would take an incredible amount of altruism to share
| your goal, and you don't become a billionaire by being
| altruistic.
| joquarky wrote:
| > This "but progress" argument is tiring
|
| But progress is part of the foundational purpose of
| copyright:
|
| > To promote the _Progress_ of Science and useful Arts,
| by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors
| the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and
| Discoveries.
| cmiles74 wrote:
| It's convenient to refer to the training of the machine as
| learning but let's not lose sight of the fact that "machine
| learning" is not at all the same thing as people "learning".
| Pretending they mean the same thing in this context, in my
| opinion, is dishonest.
|
| I also take issue with the assumption that AI will "benefit
| everyone enormously, even if it won't be equally
| distributed"; I don't see any factual basis for this
| assumption. On the contrary, it seems much more likely that
| AI will be used to concentrate wealth even further. Given the
| high cost, I find it hard to believe it will ever by "equally
| distributed".
|
| For as long as I can remember big corporations have been
| merciless in their preservation of "intellectual property". I
| didn't love it then and I don't love it now. OTOH, the idea
| that Microsoft can train their LLM on code I've written and
| then sell access to that LLM for money (sharing no dollars
| with me) strikes me as outright theft.
| harshreality wrote:
| If you memorize all of harry potter word for word, or some
| famous solo vocal track from memory, are you committing a
| copyright violation? Or only if you then recreate it and try to
| redistribute your copy?
|
| The scenario where AI training is locked down doesn't result in
| 1,000,000 individuals getting paid. (What would they get paid,
| and by whom?) It results in Disney, Adobe, etc.--massive
| companies with existing licenses to use content just about
| however they want--training their own models and locking
| everyone else out of the large AI model training game, until AI
| gets good enough to start generating human-quality creative
| work on its own (the same kind of progression as alphago/lee to
| alphago/zero), perhaps with the addition of a small set of
| purely copyright-free material.
|
| Excluding all copyrighted material would be tying an AI model's
| metaphorical hands behind its back, since humans, although
| capable of producing great works through much iterative effort
| in isolation, all rely on having learned from some copyrighted
| work. Find an author who hasn't read plenty of recent books as
| well as older classics, or a musician (other than classical)
| who hasn't listened to plenty of modern music, or a director or
| editor who hasn't watched tons of movies and films. Recall
| Newton, "[I]f I have seen further, it is by standing on the
| shoulders of giants." Many of those "shoulders" are
| copyrighted.
| kranke155 wrote:
| Yes, and you know how humans acquire works to learn from?
|
| _They pay for it._
|
| They buy the books. They buy tickets to theatre. They buy
| entrance to the gallery.
|
| The trick that's being done now is hey, we don't have to pay
| since it's not a person. (to the creator) But hey, it is
| _just like a person_ when it learns! (legal system)
|
| If AI models require human training data, then they should
| pay for it. Easy.
| harshreality wrote:
| False. Libraries exist. Borrowing books from neighborhood
| libraries or friends exists. Watching movies and TV with
| friends exists. Listening to music on the radio (yes, those
| free electromagnetic thingies) still exists. There are
| many, many, many free performances or accessible copies of
| all kinds of copyrighted content, plenty to train either a
| neural net or a human brain on.
|
| Books3 has separate legal concerns, but Google has a
| _legally acquired_ corpus of tons of books, which they 've
| mostly cleaned up from scans (probably far better than IA
| has), and have probably used to train Bard on. Their
| lawyers must be biting their nails waiting to see how these
| lawsuits turn out, though.
|
| Until AGI arrives, or some other method of training LLMs
| from the ground up on sparse examples by incrementally
| building on structural knowledge of language.... training
| on ridiculous amounts of copyrighted content is required.
| Not because anyone wants to copy those works, but because
| training that way fills in for a lack of real-world
| experience that every child gets, which includes consuming
| and interacting with a bunch of copyrighted content that
| isn't tracked because it's not practical to do so.
|
| You could train a LLM only on project gutenberg, and the
| LLM would churn out stilted English and the occasional
| iambic pentameter. That's great if you want works that seem
| like they were written over a century ago, but nearly
| useless otherwise.
| kranke155 wrote:
| Libraries exist? Do you think books fly onto library
| shelves for free? As far as I know, someone bought them.
| Your neighbour or friend also bought the stuff. I suspect
| you're not being straight here, I just have to ignore
| this whole line of reasoning since it seems so absurd.
|
| >Until AGI arrives, or some other method of training LLMs
| from the ground up on sparse examples by incrementally
| building on structural knowledge of language.... training
| on ridiculous amounts of copyrighted content is required.
|
| that's not my problem. Those AI model folk should just
| compensate the people they're using training data from,
| and they should ask for permission.
|
| >You could train a LLM only on project gutenberg, and the
| LLM would churn out stilted English and the occasional
| iambic pentameter. That's great if you want works that
| seem like they were written over a century ago, but
| nearly useless otherwise.
|
| Not my problem. Why are the problems of the wonderful AI
| developers suddenly human, global problems that we all
| have to find a way to fix?
|
| If they want access to training data - they should pay
| for the privielige.
| harshreality wrote:
| I think humans should pay for permission to learn. Heaven
| forbid copyright holders don't get paid for all the
| material they've put out that humans are using (often
| stealing) to learn from in order to become useful members
| of society!
|
| Physical library books are governed by the doctrine of
| first sale. That's why google has one of the largest
| (maybe excluding l-bg-n and IA) corpus of books on the
| internet. They might have the _cleanest_ corpus of OCR 'd
| book content of anyone, since IA uses commercial or open
| source OCR and that's it, while google for a long time
| used recaptcha to check OCR results.
|
| For physical books, the cost per read of a library book
| is an order of magnitude smaller than the cost per read
| of privately purchased books. How can you tolerate the
| economic model of libraries when the net effect is a
| theft of maybe 80%-95% from the author and publisher?
| Libraries subsidize books that nobody wanted to read, but
| steal from authors and publishers whose books are read
| multiple times per physical copy.
|
| Even libraries' onerous ebook licenses are not commercial
| retail ebook pricing. They're just closer to retail
| pricing than the publishers could ever manage with
| physical books, because there's no pesky right of first
| sale which turns physical book libraries into piracy
| havens.
|
| I would prefer to get away from OpenAI and Facebook and
| all the other people using potentially tainted sources
| like books3. The obvious legal question for them isn't
| whether training was legal, but whether the acquisition
| of the training data was legal. That's a straightforward
| copyright issue, or at least as straightforward as fair
| use determinations can ever be. Whether we agree with
| copyright law as it stands, it's certain that copyright
| applies when books3 is transferred around the internet.
| How transformative it is, how much _the transfer of
| books3_ affects the market, and the other two factors,
| make those actions fair use, are the only questions to be
| considered.
|
| The training aspect is where all the difference of
| opinion lies:
|
| What is your position on Google using its corpus of books
| (legally acquired and possessed, as the content behind
| google books) to train a LLM? Do they need to acquire
| additional rights from copyright holders? Why, and under
| what legal theory?
|
| How would they get permission ahead of time? How would
| they agree to a pricing model? Would they spend tens or
| hundreds of millions of dollars training a model, and
| only then negotiate with rights holders to find out
| whether the license fees they want will be economically
| viable? We all know that most major rights holders would
| never grant a one-time license fee. It would be perpetual
| rent-seeking from AI output. I don't see how any of these
| LLM or image generation models would be economical if
| rights holders had their way. They wouldn't mind. They're
| notoriously slow to adopt tech, but if they did anything,
| they'd hire AI experts, build their own models, and
| license the models back to Google and Microsoft.
| ben_w wrote:
| > Libraries exist? Do you think books fly onto library
| shelves for free? As far as I know, someone bought them.
| Your neighbour or friend also bought the stuff. I suspect
| you're not being straight here, I just have to ignore
| this whole line of reasoning since it seems so absurd.
|
| First, there's this thing called a deposit library:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_deposit
|
| Second: I, as a user of the service, who learns things,
| still pay nothing.
|
| Should I be required to directly pay for the things I
| learned from, or is it sufficient that _someone_ is?
| Because if the latter, then picking up a book from a
| normal (non-deposit) library, showing it to an OCR
| system, and having an AI learn from that, would involve
| just as much payment as I ever made to read a library
| book (with the _possible_ exception of late return fines,
| I can 't remember if I ever had any of those).
| kranke155 wrote:
| Everybody finds an edge case they can justify their
| entire worldview on. It's fascinating.
| ben_w wrote:
| Is it fascinating? Seems pretty obvious to me, you've got
| things that are good and things that are bad and you want
| to find the dividing line between them, why pick
| something central to either group that doesn't illuminate
| the boundary between them?
| biot wrote:
| [delayed]
| beej71 wrote:
| I don't think this is the argument that's being made,
| though. They're not saying, "This is a clear cut case of
| piracy--pay me for that book."
|
| They're saying, "You can't consume my book in that way."
| ben_w wrote:
| I had a free school education (including Shakespeare and
| Ethan Frome, both of which are out of copyright now though
| only the former when I studied it); several free libraries;
| and with the exception of my final year even my university
| tuition was free[0]; after graduation the museums I went to
| were also free; I watched free educational videos from
| Apple Developer and YouTube, and listened to free podcasts;
| I have learned things from reading Wikipedia; and I have
| done free online courses in both natural languages and
| programming languages.
|
| This doesn't cover everything: I did, indeed, also buy
| books on HTML and JS, and my first C compiler, and a
| licence to REALbasic[1]. But that doesn't refute the fact
| that I did learn a lot for free.
|
| > If AI models require human training data, then they
| should pay for it. Easy.
|
| You can do that if you like, but that won't stop any of the
| economic issues that arise. The cost of running Stable
| Diffusion is so low that even if you had _literal_ slaves,
| and you were spending only the UN extreme poverty threshold
| on keeping them alive and housed, the pro-rata cost of
| _keeping them alive for long enough to type in the prompt_
| dominates the total cost of making images.
|
| Right now these models are still, despite their
| impressiveness, flawed: while an artist can use them to
| great effect, most of us will have our generations easily
| spotted by some flaw we have never trained ourselves to
| notice. If the models become good enough to fully replace
| all artists, the only way the profession called "artist"
| isn't going to go the same way as the profession called
| "computer" is if the arts are to humans as fancy tails are
| to peacocks: the effort being the point, extravagantly
| wasting effort to show you're fit enough to manage fine
| despite the penalty.
|
| [0] UK rules at the time, thanks to my dad's early
| retirement and therefore "low income" status
|
| [1] as it was so named at the time, Xojo now
| kranke155 wrote:
| If we let this idea that "AI training data usage has no
| compensation for rights owners" to be become ensconced in
| the legal system, then all human endeavour will become
| fair game to be acquired by someone to make a Machine
| Intelligence out of, and remove you completely out of the
| profit loop of your own work.
|
| This will happen in every industry and occupation, one by
| one.
|
| Is this what you think is desirable?
|
| The alternative is perversely simple: PAY for the right
| to use training data.
| ben_w wrote:
| > This will happen in every industry and occupation, one
| by one.
|
| And still will even if they (for any value of "they") do
| pay.
|
| Unless... do you want them to pay the entire future
| economic value that, say, all programmers including
| myself might have added if we weren't about to be made
| redundant by the next coding LLM?
|
| Because the historical analogy there is getting Raspberry
| Pi to pay out the entire global GDP for _each_ Pi Zero,
| on the grounds of that model being able to do arithmetic
| as fast as the entire world, even if the entire world had
| been paid to work in the obsolete job role of
| "computer", after having been trained to operate reliably
| at the speed of the current world record holder.
|
| > Is this what you think is desirable?
|
| Post-scarcity economics, AKA "fully automated luxury
| communism" (not the book of the same name):
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity
| kranke155 wrote:
| is that the direction we're going in right now? Or are we
| moving towards techno feudalism?
| ben_w wrote:
| More anarchy than the feudalism for the moment.
|
| The main Stable Diffusion models themselves are licensed
| under Creative ML OpenRAIL-M, and freely available third-
| party models exist; OpenAI gets stick for not making
| their models downloadable (at least GPT-x does, though
| nobody seems to care too much about them keeping the
| DALL*E 2/3 models private), other players are making and
| distributing other LLMs of varying quality.
|
| That said, we do also have actual reasons to be concerned
| about this remaining anarchic (though a lot of people
| very loudly scoff at them), so who knows what the future
| will bring on that axis.
| cmiles74 wrote:
| Where is this idea that copyrighted material should be
| excluded from training data coming from?
|
| My understanding is that people want to be compensated when
| their intellectual property is used as training data for a
| machine. That strikes me as an entirely reasonable
| expectation.
|
| One person memorizing Harry Potter for their own amusement,
| even if they make money doing public appearances where they
| recite sections of the work verbatim for the amusement of the
| audience is not in any way similar to the process of training
| an LLM or of that LLM's output. The scale alone is so vastly
| different that it renders the comparison useless and
| misleading.
| creer wrote:
| > people want to be compensated when their intellectual
| property is used as training data for a machine.
|
| That's fine that they want to. The question is whether
| copyright law gives them that and that's very unlikely.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| Just because it's on twitter doesn't mean it's true. I think a
| court setting where things are contemplated in a rigorous and
| reasoned way has a somewhat better chance of arriving at
| something resembling the truth.
|
| We've been here before several times: Silhouette painting,
| Photography, Airbrushing, Pianos, Synthesizers, Sampling,
| Photoshop, Ray Tracing, and many more. "It's not real art",
| "they're stealing from us", "we'll go hungry!" .
|
| Some of these are already quite old. For others, I've actually
| been asked the question back when I was in school: "Are you
| really making music if your instrument has a microprocessor in
| it?". Um, yes, yes I claim I _am_ making music thank you very
| much.
|
| First people complain, then they adapt, and then they end up
| making awesome art with the new tools and/or instruments. Which
| isn't to say historically it was all rainbows and roses, but it
| was never the end of the world either. Seeing the newer
| generation of AI tools and how the tools end up getting
| integrated into regular workflows, it seems to be going the
| same direction.
|
| To quote the song, I think it's "all just little bits of
| history repeating".
| EnergyAmy wrote:
| Don't be silly. This was a level-headed ruling that avoids
| retarding the progress of science and the useful arts.
|
| I'd really like to see people drop the inequality argument. If
| you actually cared about that instead of virtue signaling,
| you'd push for a mandatory GPL-style license that forces models
| to be available to anybody that uses them. That would avoid
| trying to unsuccessfully put the genie back in the bottle,
| while also preventing a few companies from benefiting at the
| expense of everyone else. Just like OpenAI's original mission
| of making AI available for everyone, before they got dollar
| signs in their eyes.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| > This will be the greatest act of Intellectual Property theft
| in history.
|
| Good.
|
| Intellectual Property is a mistake. If AI brings about its end,
| I welcome it.
| Illotus wrote:
| Not really good if AI can run around it but to normal people
| it exists as before.
| smrtinsert wrote:
| Is this supposed to be sarcastic, because this is impossible
| and you're arguing a strawman. You could also say electricity
| enabled this great inequality, we have got to stop electricity.
| ballenf wrote:
| Can someone explain again how an ML system scanning and training
| on a copyrighted work is different from a highly skilled artist
| doing the same?
|
| There are artists that can study a painting for a few minutes and
| then recreate it from memory. There are artists who study a
| particular body of work so long that they can create more works
| indistinguishable in style. If an artist recreates a copyrighted
| work or creates a derivative too close to the original, then that
| new work is potentially copyright infringement.
|
| That is, we focus on the output of the process to determine
| infringement with living artists and ignore the training. But
| with ML, everyone focuses on the training.
|
| It seems an ML tool could add a filter to the output and refuse
| to output a work that too closely resembles one or more work
| under copyright. Isn't that basically what legitimate
| professional artists do as well?
|
| Thousands of artists are capable of infringement, but we don't
| take away their brushes based on capability.
| picadores wrote:
| The AI will not throw a molotowcocktail at you or hang you from
| a lamppost when it starves?
| kranke155 wrote:
| Let me change the argument around: Why is it assumed that
| because an artwork is freely available on the internet, you are
| allowed to train a machine to reproduce it, being in its
| totality or just details that are used in the creation of new
| works?
|
| IE why isn't it that an artist could say, hey I'm letting you
| see this painting, but you are not allowed to sit down with a
| canvas and learn how to reproduce it? Because you can do that
| in galleries - no photos, no reproductions.
|
| So actually building a machine there, under the cover of
| darkness, that learns from your work so you can produce new
| work, why is that allowed in the first place? Certainly
| wouldn't be at a museum.
|
| The key thing here is - if you want artists' data, you should
| ask for it. They didn't. This would be equivalent of training a
| Github CoPilot on every available piece of code in existence,
| ever, instead of what they had available. Why should that be
| allowed? So if I built some toy code in 1996, and happened to
| post it on usenet, and it's a great implementation of X, why
| the heck is CoPilot allowed to read it? It's my property.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > why isn't it that an artist could say, hey I'm letting you
| see this painting, but you are not allowed to sit down with a
| canvas and learn how to reproduce it? Because you can do that
| in galleries - no photos, no reproductions.
|
| But you can't stop people from sitting and studying your
| painting and then painting stuff similar to it.
|
| One of the core assertions that is being decided in this case
| is if there is any actual reproduction here. Does a model
| contain a reproduction of every image it was trained on? Can
| the model actually create a reproduction of any images it was
| trained on?
|
| If it turns out that there is no reproduction here, then it
| comes down to how much legal control we give copyright owners
| to regulate access.
|
| A gallery can reasonably ban cameras and canvases, but it
| becomes a lot less reasonable if they try to ban artists.
|
| Let's imagine that this isn't just specifically tuned ML but
| proper General AI that can learn new skills. Is your argument
| that this AI would be legally prohibited from viewing any
| images it doesn't have a specific license for?
|
| I think that drawing hard lines around what kind of
| processing can be done on publicly available images is going
| to become problematic. It's better to regulate around what
| can be done with the results of the processing than that
| processing itself. That's how our existing laws work. Making
| a reproduction, even just from memory, of a copyrighted work
| is restricted. Memorizing a copyrighted work is not.
| kranke155 wrote:
| I find the whole comparison "it's just like a person
| learning" to be a tiring trope. It's demonstrably not.
|
| Like I said to another poster - you've probably seen a
| Picasso. Can you make me a copy?
|
| Because a Diffusion model can. But you can't. Why not?
|
| Your denial that there is a demonstrable difference between
| human and machine attention is part of the core obfuscation
| these companies are using to win this battle, so I reject
| it entirely. That difference creates the whole issue. If
| you don't recognise it, then answer me - Why can't you
| paint me a Picasso? You're saying the Machine is just like
| a human, yet a simple question of reproduction tells you
| it's not like a human in any way. It's a machine, and it
| produces machine reproductions. It learns faster and more
| accurately than any human, and its purpose is to produce
| derivative works. If the machine didn't need human data to
| do this, this discussion would be academic. But it does.
|
| So the whole future of the Arts will be decided by
| investigating what the machine _actually does_ , not the
| simplistic idea of _it's just like a human_.
|
| You have to evaluate the machine's abilities and impact
| onto the world. And that's the tough part. But just saying
| "hihih it's just a person" while it produces superhuman
| output is not a solution, it's just a lie that was invented
| by the people profiting from these models.
|
| >Is your argument that this AI would be legally prohibited
| from viewing any images it doesn't have a specific license
| for?
|
| Yes. You pay for access.
| lt wrote:
| A diffusion model can't make a copy. That's the whole
| point. The original Picasso isn't in the model weights.
|
| It has learned to make pixels a particular color to mimic
| that style, but that's it.
| kranke155 wrote:
| If the model didn't learn anything important from
| Picasso, it wouldn't be in the training data.
|
| This whole argument of "ah but it doesnt really need it"
| doesn't hold up. If the model didn't need it, it wouldn't
| have used it in the first place.
|
| Same thing in Artstation. It was of course propitious for
| AI scientists to find such a lovely database of high
| quality imagery, and all so helpfully tagged into
| categories.
|
| All they had to do was take it.
| lt wrote:
| Of course it learned, that's the point of training.
|
| You claimed the model can reproduce an image from that
| training data. That's false, and what the judge
| dismissed. "none of the Stable Diffusion
| output images provided in response to a particular
| Text Prompt is likely to be a close match for any
| specific image in the training data."
| "I am not convinced that copyright claims based a
| derivative theory can survive absent 'substantial
| similarity' type allegations," the ruling stated.
|
| Whether using copyrighted data to train a model is fair
| use or not is a different discussion.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > If the model didn't learn anything important from
| Picasso, it wouldn't be in the training data.
|
| > This whole argument of "ah but it doesnt really need
| it" doesn't hold up. If the model didn't need it, it
| wouldn't have used it in the first place.
|
| I haven't seen anyone making this argument. There's a
| pretty clear difference between learning something from
| an image and memorizing it.
|
| There also isn't any illegal with memorizing an image and
| painting a reproduction. What you aren't allowed to do is
| sell or distribute that reproduction without a license.
|
| I think it makes more sense to restrict what people are
| allowed do with ML tools than to restrict what ML tools
| can do.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > Because a Diffusion model can.
|
| This isn't a given, it is something that has yet to be
| decided in this case. (Edit: if you look at studies that
| look for examples of SD reproductions, the best examples
| still similar to what a human trying to reproduce the
| image from memory would create)
|
| > Your denial that there is a demonstrable difference
| between human and machine attention
|
| There are demonstrable differences between different
| intelligent systems. I have yet to see any demonstration
| that shows that you can't reproduce human attention with
| machine. (Though we can't do it yet)
|
| > If you don't recognise it, then answer me - Why can't
| you paint me a Picasso?
|
| I haven't studied painting or Picasso. There are many
| people who can paint a Picasso as well as, if not better
| than, any ML model we have today. There are people who
| you could take to a gallery show who could go home and
| reproduce both style and individual works at an
| equivalent level.
|
| > It learns faster and more accurately than any human,
|
| The word, "faster", here is doing a lot of work. Machine
| learning can be "faster" in that it can happen in
| parallel and be scaled to take less time. However humans
| currently also learn "faster" because they require fewer
| repetitions or examples to learn. As such, the "learning"
| derived from a human viewing an image is arguably
| currently larger.
|
| > Yes. You pay for access.
|
| Is this good faith? I already stipulated that the images
| are publicly accessible. Are you suggesting that somehow
| artists should be able to block the AI from viewing a
| properly licensed instance of a copyrighted image? That
| pretty much results in a ban on general ai.
| kranke155 wrote:
| >Is this good faith? I already stipulated that the images
| are publicly accessible. Are you suggesting that somehow
| artists should be able to block the AI from viewing a
| properly licensed instance of a copyrighted image? That
| pretty much results in a ban on general ai.
|
| No it, results in a ban on general ai _that doesn 't
| compensate rights owners_.
| shkkmo wrote:
| So you have a general AI, it sees someone wearing a
| t-shirt containing a licensed, copyrighted image.
|
| This AI now needs to pay the copyright holder of that
| image?
|
| How I think it should work is the sa.e for any other
| intelligent system. Systems can view publicly available
| images, memorize them, and even reproduce them for
| certain fair uses. The systems have to pay for a license
| to right holders for the non fair uses of reproductions.
| kranke155 wrote:
| You're saying it sees someone as if AI is walking around
| and this all happened by random chance.
|
| No. What happened was AI scientists _deliberately_ built
| a giant corpus of training data based off unlicensed
| imagery that was conveniently pre-tagged - Artstation and
| other sites of the same type. And it was trained to
| deliberately create images of the exact same type as it
| was ingesting. It wasn 't "randomly learning about the
| world" and it certainly did not "stumble upon" these
| images.
|
| The fact that there was a large corpus of artistic
| imagery already tagged just revealed itself to be too
| appetizing for AI training, so a few companies did it in
| secret, without asking anyone for permission, then hoping
| to make enough money and VC funding that they would
| defeat any challenge in court.
|
| So yes, those people who made the original images should
| get paid.
| theonlybutlet wrote:
| By that same logic, would the manufacturer of my monitor
| be liable for displaying the unlicensed image at my
| request? It's a tool. The end user, inputting variables
| into the model is generating that image.
| ben_w wrote:
| > Can you make me a copy?
|
| If you don't mind it being as bad as the the result of a
| Stable Diffusion image being passed on to a half-trained
| robot arm, sure: extra limbs, even more of a David
| Cronenberg vibe than Picasso at his weirdest, mixing with
| mis-attributed ideas from other images that I've
| associated with the same labels...
| kranke155 wrote:
| If you use DALLE3 the results are astonishing. No more
| issues with hands and legs. Give it a go.
| theonlybutlet wrote:
| So do you put a sign outside your gallery, "No Savants"?
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| > Can you make me a copy?
|
| If I am a decent human artist who's looked at many
| Picasso works and spent time studying how to reproduce
| his style?
|
| Of course I can.
|
| Artists copy each other's styles _all the time_ , dude.
| You can literally go to Deviant Art (or wherever), scroll
| through, and point out examples of style copying, often
| much more glaring that anything I've seen out of a
| diffusion model.
| Vvector wrote:
| "It's my property."
|
| When you publish it, you lose some property rights. While
| under copyright, there is a short list of things that others
| are prohibited from doing (reproduce, distributed, etc.). And
| you lose all your rights once the copyright expires.
| creer wrote:
| The question is about copyright law. You can raise other
| legal theories or ask congress to create an entirely new
| class of intellectual property law. Sure. The lawsuit is
| about whether copyright applies, it seems to me.
| panta wrote:
| It's a matter of scale. No human being can ingest ALL existing
| images. If it was the case that the average human artist was
| able to replicate any other work, without effort, probably we
| would have had two effects: first, we'd have much less works of
| art (because the gains would have been eliminated, so why
| bother), and second, copyright law would have been much more
| restrictive. This is exactly what we should do: avoid applying
| a law thought for human beings, and create a new more specific
| law, much more restrictive. Otherwise future art created by
| actual human beings will suffer greatly (without mentioning the
| loss of work and human abilities), to the economic benefit of a
| very small set of monopolistic players.
| thrill wrote:
| The law does not say it is a matter of scale.
| xeckr wrote:
| Scalable GenAI hardly existed as a sci-fi concept when the
| law was passed.
| frumper wrote:
| Then we should write a law to make it a matter of scale.
| theonlybutlet wrote:
| What you propose is just a different small set of
| monopolistic players. Copyright has always been a trade off
| between the creator and society. It should be enforced the
| exact same way as it currently is. Fair use is fair use. By
| your same logic, what is the difference between an AI or a
| very productive human? Where do you draw the line?
| panta wrote:
| Fair use by a machine is a concept which has hardly been
| studied by legislators. Personally I'd draw the line at the
| human/machine boundary.
| theonlybutlet wrote:
| Fair enough, if that's is so, there's even less of a case
| to be made. The person inputting variables (i.e a prompt)
| into the model that prints out non-fair use outputs would
| be at fault. The end work would be the actual object
| subject to litigation. It's just a tool then. The current
| system still stands then.
|
| Arguing a trained model is infringing would then be like
| arguing the manufacturers of my monitor were infringing
| as it contained the very same RGB.as the artist.
| CrimsonRain wrote:
| No difference. Some people are just luddites or have vested
| interest against automation of their own field (but fine with
| other fields).
| __loam wrote:
| I don't know. It seems pretty shitty that these systems are
| literally leveraging their work against them. It also seems
| shitty that we're trying to automate cultural expression.
| Even if it's not explicitly illegal, the ai art guys are
| still ass holes.
| koolba wrote:
| > If an artist recreates a copyrighted work or creates a
| derivative too close to the original, then that new work is
| potentially copyright infringement.
|
| I see no reason the same standard cannot be applied to ML
| generated content. If the evaluation is being performed on the
| end result, then that is all that matters. The same judges that
| decide these things for human generated content can continue to
| do so for ML generated ones.
|
| Even the people submitting and responding to the copyright
| claims will still be human (with briefs generated by ML...).
|
| What will be more interesting is when the judges themselves get
| replaced with an "objective" AI to quantify similarity for
| copyright purposes. If that ever happens, it'll trigger an arms
| race to hit the razors edge without going over.
| _petronius wrote:
| > Can someone explain again how an ML system scanning and
| training on a copyrighted work is different from a highly
| skilled artist doing the same?
|
| Three things immediately spring to mind: scale (1),
| accountability (2), and profit (3).
|
| 1. An automated system can train on data at huge volume, in a
| way that no single human is capable of doing. Setting aside the
| issue that training an ML model and artists learning by copying
| techniques of other artists is, I would argue, fundamentally
| different acts, _even if we take them to be the same_, we have
| to acknowledge that in a single human lifetime one person can
| only "train" on so many works. Automated systems have no such
| limitation.
|
| 2. If an artist violates copyright or oversteps norms around
| artistic professional practice, they can be held accountable.
| Companies which violate this by using automated systems so far
| hide behind those systems ("the AI is doing it/did it") so
| aren't held responsible (it should be: the company has built
| the system, and therefore is responsible for how it is used,
| and what it does). By building up this false sense of agency on
| the part of systems (which the marketing term "AI" is designed
| to bolster), lack of accountability is laundered into the
| actions being taken at scale.
|
| 3. Automated systems are, due to their scale, very profitable.
| I can generate hundreds or thousands of copyright-violating
| work that dilute the market for artists, and it is incredibly
| cheap to do so. Fighting those copyright violations in court
| has to be done more or less on an individual basis (especially
| if actions like that in the original article continue to fail),
| which is extremely slow and expensive. If the cost of violating
| copyright is tiny, and the cost of enforcing it is huge, then
| it ceases to be a useful tool except for the most well-
| resourced organizations.
|
| > It seems an ML tool could add a filter to the output and
| refuse to output a work that too closely resembles one or more
| work under copyright. Isn't that basically what legitimate
| professional artists do as well?
|
| No, because copyright is more complicated than "these two
| things look a lot alike", and legitimate professional artists
| don't run into this issue, because they aren't constantly
| trying to skirt the line of "as close as possible to copyright
| violation while still getting away with it".
|
| > Thousands of artists are capable of infringement, but we
| don't take away their brushes based on capability.
|
| But they do get sued when they infringe! Enforcement happens,
| because (for now) it is still possible for independent artists
| to enforce their copyrights. The argument being made by artists
| with regard to these ML models is that _they are already
| infringing copyright_, not that they hypothetically may in the
| future.
| mattigames wrote:
| This is the typical intentionally misleading argument in favor
| of AI, comparing a software to a human artist conveniently
| forgetting that a real artist cannot a create millions of
| pieces every hour, just that difference makes any direct
| comparison laughtable because such threshold was an absolute
| immutable constant for all human history until very recently,
| and that includes among many other things the incentives
| artists had to persue that career instead of any other. And of
| course the societal problems that displacing so many jobs
| entails.
| bergen wrote:
| An artist can not professionally scan and incorporate millions
| of pieces of art into his cortex in a minute for commercial
| purpose.
| raincole wrote:
| > how an ML system scanning and training on a copyrighted work
| is different from a highly skilled artist doing the same?
|
| You just answered it? One is a ML system and one is a human?
|
| I'm really, really baffled why people keep using this argument.
| Like you guys know machines are not humans, right? ...right?
|
| Humans are special cases in laws. Always have been and always
| will be (until AGI). A pedestrian is treated differently in
| laws than a driver is. The fact that a pair of legs and a car
| both move you from point A to point B doesn't make them same.
| Selling human livers on your local market is _very_ different
| from selling cow livers, even biologically they are all organic
| tissues.
|
| Let me say it again: humans are special cases. AI learning
| copyrighted materials might be illegal or legal, but it has
| little to do with "what if a human being does the same".
| ben_w wrote:
| > Always have been and always will be (until AGI)
|
| Probably not even then, at least not initially. While some
| people conflate AGI with personhood, consciousness, qualia,
| etc. we've got at least 22 different[0] ideas of what
| consciousness is and no idea how to even determine whether or
| not a mind has qualia -- and even if we did, I see no
| specific reason to require any of them, as a P-zombie[1] AGI
| doesn't seem to me like a contradiction in terms.
|
| [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41583-022-00587-4
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
| theonlybutlet wrote:
| In law there is such a thing as legal person as opposed to
| natural person. When it comes to commercial law, its
| provisions tends to relate to legal persons.
| unsui wrote:
| legal personhood (such as corporate personhood) are
| tools/frameworks which facilitate certain economic actions,
| such as the creation of charters for specific initiatives.
|
| Like any useful force amplifier, legal personhood has
| effectively been co-opted to benefit those entities which
| stand to gain from it (e.g., corporations, large-money
| political donors, etc).
|
| Thus, it probably won't surprise anyone when AIs are
| granted legal personhood, to bypass the detrimenal effects
| they will inevitably have on natural persons.
|
| That said, it is likely a good thing to keep meatspace in
| some kind of privileged legal category, lest the rights of
| legal persons outweight those of natural persons (which
| seems to be the inevitable conclusion, and goal, of all
| this).
| theonlybutlet wrote:
| I agree with you somewhat, in that human rights should be
| protected and law is just a tool, that I feel should be
| used to better humanity. There is a philosophical thought
| behind the whole idea of copyright, I suspect it'd be
| best to use that as a starting point rather as I'm sure
| it would weigh the pros and cons of your point against
| other factors. It fundamentally is designed to strike a
| balance between a creator and wider society.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| Isn't copyright about the final product, not how it was
| arrived at?
|
| If I independently come up with a song called "Let it Be"
| that has the same lyrics as the Beatles song and publish it
| without the permission of the copyright holders, I will have
| violated their copyright.
|
| It doesn't matter if I heard the song before or not. It
| doesn't matter if I did it myself or used a computer to do
| it. What matters is the final product and my publishing of a
| song close enough to the one that was copyrighted.
|
| AI image generators are just tools, like Photoshop is a tool.
| Nobody cares if you used a paint brush or Photoshop to create
| something that looks like a copyrighted image, why should AI
| image generators be any different?
|
| If the final image is similar enough to a copyrighted work
| and I publish that image without permission of the copyright
| holder, then that's a copyright violation.
|
| If the final image is different enough, then it's not.
|
| That an AI was used and how the AI was trained are completely
| separate issues.
| __loam wrote:
| The issue is that ml companies are using exact copies of the
| work in question, and using it to make massive for-profit
| systems without permission or compensation. Individual artists
| don't threaten the market in the same way.
| frumper wrote:
| How do they get the works in question to train on?
| __loam wrote:
| They download them from the public internet. The issue is
| that digital artists are basically required to maintain a
| public portfolio to get work. Them doing that is not
| implicit permission to use that work for whatever the fuck
| you want, as at says at the bottom of every image on Google
| images.
| ndiddy wrote:
| > Two of the three artists who filed the lawsuit have dropped
| their infringement claims because they didn't register their work
| with the copyright office before suing. The copyright claims will
| be limited to artist Sarah Anderson's works, which she has
| registered.
|
| I'm impressed that their legal team was incompetent enough that
| they didn't bring this up as an issue before filing the lawsuit.
| OsrsNeedsf2P wrote:
| What makes you think the legal team didn't know? The plaintiffs
| wanted to sue, so they did
| 0dayz wrote:
| Hasn't this always been a precarious road? With say fair use for
| instance.
|
| Not only that but I really wish we could just redo copyright to
| be more flexible but ultimately empowering the creator with
| conclusive licenses for others to use (like in AI, other creative
| work, streaming, etc.) and the creator is paid either monthly or
| per generated image/song.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Having done way more corporate court than I want (patents,
| mergers, liquidation), I'm increasingly convinced that the
| judicial system is fundamentally flawed.
|
| The reality is that the law in 2023 US is so obscure and opaque
| and how judges come to their ruling seems to be by their total
| whim with no actual philosophy other than maintenance of the
| system.
|
| Further I'm extremely unimpressed with the vast majority of
| judges competence in display - such that contempt should be the
| starting position.
|
| The fact that this is how laws are actually made (precedent of
| applications will always beat the letter) means that nobody who
| doesn't have a warchest will be able to actually utilize the
| system coherently
|
| As with everything now, courts are rules by those with the most
| money
| corethree wrote:
| The final decision made by this article is one I agree with
| with or without money and I have no incentive the game.
|
| Every piece of creation you and I make us the sum total of our
| experiences and that includes copy written work. Holding an LLM
| guilty for that is like holding the human brain guilty for
| memorizing copyrighted work.
| nirvdrum wrote:
| And yet these systems are incapable of genuine creativity. If
| they were, they would be taught rules & techniques and set
| off to their own devices to draw, like humans. But, they
| can't and they're not. LLMs and humans don't learn or create
| in the same way. Moreover, there's no reason we should grant
| LLMs the full rights and privileges of humans.
| marcinzm wrote:
| Are we going to hold all human artists to that standard as
| well? I suspect many would fail it.
| nirvdrum wrote:
| I don't follow. Which standard is that? Many (most?)
| artists do in fact fail, particularly if they're unable
| to find a creative way to differentiate themselves.
| Society generally shuns plagiarism. We call out things
| that are deemed as "knock-offs", whether they're bands,
| video games, movies, books, or clothing.
| r2_pilot wrote:
| And yet humans plagiarize all the time. And how do you
| measure genuine creativity? See the Chinese Room thought
| experiment. Also we generally don't make our tools able to
| "set off to their own devices" because that's silly. I
| agree with the substance of software operating differently
| from humans and that we should currently maintain a
| distinction between software and human rights. Of which I
| do not believe copyright is a fundamental one, merely a
| legislative one(and one I might add has been stolen from
| current living humans- I'm in midlife and I can't
| creatively revamp works that are twice as old as I am, how
| is that fair that I can't use nostalgia from my childhood
| commercially as an adult?).
| nirvdrum wrote:
| And we penalize plagiarism. Sure, people often get away
| with it but it's not something we generally condone.
| naasking wrote:
| > And yet these systems are incapable of genuine
| creativity.
|
| Define "genuine creativity".
| nirvdrum wrote:
| Given the terse reply, I'm guessing you disagree that
| it's even a concept. So, to round out the inevitable
| circular discussion I've gone ahead and asked ChatGPT for
| you:
|
| _Genuine creativity, often attributed to humans, is the
| ability to generate, imagine, or invent something new and
| original that has value or meaning. It involves thinking
| beyond existing boundaries, making connections between
| different pieces of information, and coming up with
| innovative solutions to problems._
|
| _Creativity can manifest in many forms, including:_
|
| _Artistic creativity: This is often the first thing
| people think of when they hear the word "creativity". It
| includes creating visual art, music, literature, and
| more._
|
| _Inventive creativity: This involves coming up with new
| products, technologies, or methods that solve problems in
| novel ways._
|
| _Conceptual creativity: This involves developing new
| theories, models, or ways of understanding the world._
|
| _Problem-solving creativity: This involves finding
| unique solutions to challenges or problems._
|
| _Genuine creativity is often characterized by
| originality, expressiveness, and the ability to transform
| or redefine existing ideas or norms. It 's a complex
| process that involves both conscious and unconscious
| thinking, and it's influenced by a person's knowledge,
| experiences, personality, and environment._
|
| I went a step further and asked if it's capable of
| genuine creativity and received:
|
| _As an AI, I don 't possess creativity in the human
| sense. I don't have feelings, thoughts, or experiences,
| and I don't generate ideas or concepts spontaneously.
| However, I can generate unique combinations of
| information based on the vast amount of data I've been
| trained on. This can sometimes appear as "creativity",
| but it's important to note that it's a result of complex
| algorithms and computations, not genuine creative
| thought._
| naasking wrote:
| > Given the terse reply, I'm guessing you disagree that
| it's even a concept.
|
| My terse reply actually indicates an understanding that
| we completely lack a formal definition of "genuine
| creativity", and therefore any such claims are vague
| intuitions at best.
|
| > I don't have feelings, thoughts, or experiences
|
| This implicitly assumes we have a mechanistic
| understanding of feelings, thoughts or experiences. We
| don't, therefore we can make no such definitive claims
| about how machine learning and human cognitive processes.
| ChatGPT has specifically been trained to give this
| response despite agreeing with an argument that suggests
| it could indeed have mental states:
|
| https://twitter.com/naasking/status/1598802001428566016
|
| > As an AI, I don't possess creativity in the human
| sense. I don't have feelings, thoughts, or experiences,
| and I don't generate ideas or concepts spontaneously
|
| Define "spontaneously". If you mean that humans act
| without _apparent_ cause, that does not entail there is
| no cause. If there is a cause, then that cause can be
| modeled as an input into a pure function. ChatGPT and
| other ML systems are pure functions can also mix concepts
| and generate new and unique outputs from its learned
| state space given such inputs. Humans are still more
| complex than such systems, so the mystique can hide in
| the perceived complexity, but don 't mistake this for a
| different _kind_ of process. Which isn 't to say that it
| is the same process, I'm saying there's no real basis for
| either claim.
|
| I think there's a lot of sloppy thinking going on when
| comparing human brains and ML, particularly ascribing
| some sort of exceptionalism to humans. There's a long,
| incorrect history of that.
| nirvdrum wrote:
| Define "understanding". Please provide a formal
| definition for "vague intuition".
|
| These sorts of clipped sentences without any supporting
| context are understood to be delivered in bad faith. If
| you want to discuss in good faith, then elaborate. From
| here it sure looks like you wanted to score points by
| derailing the discussion on what you've deemed to be poor
| word choice.
| naasking wrote:
| I've elaborated plenty in the post you literally just
| responded to. Nothing further needs to be said. Suffice
| it to say that your original claim was unjustifiable
| given what we currently know.
| corethree wrote:
| How do you know the answer isn't an hallucination? Maybe
| it made the answer up creatively and is lying to you
| about its own capabilities.
|
| The fact that it knows the definition of creativity makes
| it's answer suspect. It's like saying this: "I am not
| capable of speaking or understanding English, what you
| see here is just a statistical prediction of the next
| most likely words. I do not in actuality understand or
| speak English."
| corethree wrote:
| If the content generated by an LLM does not exist anywhere
| else... it is by definition "creative."
| nirvdrum wrote:
| Which is precisely why I said "genuine creativity" in
| hopes of avoiding pedantry around word etymology. It's
| hard to have these discussions when people are
| deliberately being obtuse. By this definition, nearly
| everything is creative making any discussion about it
| meaningless. So, let's use the connotative meaning.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| You seemed to miss the part where the judge said that the
| only things that can be claimed as copyrighted are those
| things that were submitted to the USPTO for specific narrow
| coptright
|
| "The other problem for plaintiffs is that it is simply not
| plausible that every Training Image used to train Stable
| Diffusion was copyrighted (as opposed to copyrightable), or
| that all DeviantArt users' Output Images rely upon
| (theoretically) copyrighted Training Images, and therefore
| all Output images are derivative images"
|
| This displays either ignorance as to how artists work and the
| extent to which they are involved or can be involved in the
| legal copyright system, or reflects incoherence around the
| copyright system.
|
| In this case the Judge chose to say, in effect: unless you
| have explicitly copyrighted it, it's fair use
|
| That is now a new precedent that negatively impacts
| individual artists who have no power in the market, and
| protects giant corporate interests which have tons of power
| in the market
| marcinzm wrote:
| > In this case the Judge chose to say, in effect: unless
| you have explicitly copyrighted it, it's fair use
|
| No, this has always been the case. The judge ruled nothing
| new.
|
| You cannot sue someone for copyright unless you first
| register the copyright.
|
| https://www.nycbar.org/get-legal-
| help/article/intellectual-p....
| Zanni wrote:
| You're arguing something slightly different. The artist
| has copyright as soon as the work is published, whether
| they register it or not. You can't _sue_ unless you 've
| registered.
|
| https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-general.html
| https://copyrightalliance.org/faqs/why-register-
| copyright/
| jcranmer wrote:
| 17 USC SS411
| (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/411):
|
| > Except for an action brought for a violation of the
| rights of the author under section 106A(a), and subject to
| the provisions of subsection (b),[1] no civil action for
| infringement of the copyright in any United States work
| shall be instituted until preregistration or registration
| of the copyright claim has been made in accordance with
| this title.
|
| [NB: 106A(a) is right of attribution].
|
| It's the law, as enacted by Congress (even though it is
| probably a violation of the TRIPS Agreement, an
| international treaty signed by the US).
|
| But note there is nothing preventing you from registering
| your copyright well after you first published the material,
| although the work has to be registered _before_
| infringement if you want statutory damages (the big $$$$)
| instead of just actual damages.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Exactly what I was baiting for and you took it:
|
| "there is nothing preventing you from registering your
| copyright well after you first published the material"
|
| Your point is exactly what people in power want. IT IS
| CODIFIED IN LAW that unless you go through a kafkaesque
| process, your work can be reused and you get no
| compensation for it.
|
| That is precisely the OPPOSITE of "just" and the law was
| written by capitalists for capitalists.
|
| Just look at the original precedent case:
| https://casetext.com/case/vacheron-constantin-le-coultre-
| wat... "two successive applications for a certificate of
| registration were refused by the Register of Copyrights
| upon the ground that the subject matter was not a work of
| art within the requirements of the Act"
|
| Perfect - so we set up a kafkaesque process that is
| opaque and up to a handful of unelected elite to make
| rulings on art (oh please) and if you don't do this then
| it's Legal and therefore right.
|
| Diogenes remains dissapointed
| jcranmer wrote:
| So why are you angry at the judge and not Congress?
|
| (Also, fwiw, your copyright registration being denied is
| sufficient to bring action. You just now have to plead
| why you have copyright despite the US Copyright Office
| disagreeing.)
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| > When is my work protected?
|
| > Your work is under copyright protection the moment it is
| created and fixed in a tangible form that it is perceptible
| either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.
|
| > Do I have to register with your office to be protected?
|
| > No. In general, registration is voluntary. Copyright
| exists from the moment the work is created. You will have
| to register, however, if you wish to bring a lawsuit for
| infringement of a U.S. work. See Circular 1, Copyright
| Basics, section "Copyright Registration."
|
| from https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-
| general.html#:~:text=....
|
| I'm surprised to see this reasoning (well all billion
| images can't have been registered, so they can't sue). I
| wonder how much it would cost in copyright fees to register
| all of LAION.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > I'm surprised to see this reasoning (well all billion
| images can't have been registered, so they can't sue).
|
| Well, here's the actual text from the decision:
|
| > Each defendant argues that McKernan and Ortiz's
| copyright claims must be dismissed because neither of
| them has registered their images with the Copyright
| Office. They also move to "limit" Anderson's copyright
| claim to infringement based only on the 16 collections of
| works that she has registered. See, e.g., Declaration of
| Paul M. Schoenhard (Dkt. No. 51-1), PP 5-6; see also
| Compl. P 28 & Exs. 1-16.3
|
| > In opposition, plaintiffs do not address, much less
| contest, McKernan or Ortiz's asserted inability to pursue
| Copyright Act claims. At oral argument, plaintiffs'
| counsel clarified that they are not asserting copyright
| claims on behalf of these two plaintiffs. July 19, 2023
| Transcript (Tr.), pg. 17:1-5. As such, McKernan and
| Ortiz's copyright act claims are DISMISSED WITH
| PREJUDICE.
|
| > Likewise, plaintiffs do not address or dispute that
| Anderson's copyright claims should be limited to the
| collections Anderson has registered. The scope of
| Anderson's Copyright Act claims are limited to the
| collections which she has registered.
|
| TL;DR: plaintiffs didn't attempt to argue that the
| copyright claims should be construed broadly, defendants
| argued they should, so defendants win at motion-to-
| dismiss stage. The defendants actually _lost_ their
| argument that they should win because Anderson didn 't
| identify the specific registered works, the entire case
| should be thrown out--the judge said there's enough
| specificity to let the case go to discovery to figure out
| which registered works may have been infringed.
| woodrowbarlow wrote:
| it's interesting that you start from the assumption that a
| piece of software should be judged by the same measure as a
| human.
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| This argument gets repeated often enough that it implies that
| there are a significant number of people who actually believe
| it. This is pretty depressing, as the only way you could
| think that a human is not fundamentally more capable of
| creativity than an LLM is if you are incapable of imagining
| anything other than a life of 'consuming content'.
| marcinzm wrote:
| So specifically what is there except the sum total of our
| experiences and our genetics?
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Even if this is true, the sum of a human's total
| experiences is far more vast than what LLMs are trained
| on and is mostly non-copyrighted material. Your eyes are
| open ~16 hours a day, constantly exposing your brain to
| various non-copyrighted _stuff_ like trees, rocks,
| animals, the insides of your house, the crap on your
| desk, other people 's faces, traffic, etc.
| corethree wrote:
| Right. LLMs have content that isn't copyrighted too.
|
| But humans like LLMs do have copyrighted content. That
| means humans are breaking the law that LLMs are also
| breaking.
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| "Experiences" and "content" are not equivalent. To take a
| very simple example: Go outside. Look at some geraniums.
| There are probably other examples, but red geraniums are
| pretty common and cheap in temperate climates. If you've
| been looking at screens for a long time, geranium petals
| look impossibly red. Red roses also work. Why is that?
| Because they're a real physical object whose colour
| properties cannot be accurately reproduced in an image
| using standard RGB colour. Even after billions of dollars
| of R&D and decades of research, the best sensors and
| screens in the world cannot still accurately reproduce
| the simple act of looking at a flower. And yet here you
| are claiming that these models that've been fed nothing
| but digitised facsimiles that we know can't even
| accurately represent common situations are equivalent to
| the experiences of living beings?
|
| Here's a common experience most people will have had:
| Think about what it feels like to slip and fall on a wet
| road and skin your palms on some gritty tarmac. Think
| about how many senses that involves, and how it's a basic
| experience most people have had. And now consider how we
| aren't even remotely close to the process of beginning to
| digitise such a basic experience.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| > Because they're a real physical object whose colour
| properties cannot be accurately reproduced in an image
| using standard RGB colour.
|
| 'Real physical objects' don't have 'colour properties',
| as grouping together certain wavelength ranges of EM
| radiation and then assigning them a 'colour' label is a
| human invention.
|
| For example, even if every human disappeared from Earth
| tomorrow, objects will still emit EM radiation, but won't
| emit human invented labels.
| corethree wrote:
| Sure but the minute you look at copywrited work you made
| a copy of it in your brain and have broken the law.
| hunter2_ wrote:
| Isn't the more severe offense, and the one relevant here,
| more about distributing a recording than making a
| recording? Nobody will care if your brain has a
| copyrighted melody saved in it, but they'll care if you
| start putting it (or something substantially equivalent)
| all over the place where others can obtain it.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| For me this argument will hold water when we can put LLMs in
| jail if they commit a criminal act. Until then, an LLM is not
| a human and not entitled to be treated like one.
|
| Moreover, at least in the case of music, people have been
| successfully sued when their song strongly resembles another
| copyrighted work. Thus "holding the human brain guilty for
| memorizing copyrighted work" is actually the status quo.
| gpderetta wrote:
| You'll still be able to successfully sue people "when their
| [AI generated] song strongly resembles another copyrighted
| work".
|
| The question is that vague resemblance is subject to
| copyright.
| snovv_crash wrote:
| It's ok to give humans rights that we don't give to machines.
| corethree wrote:
| You're saying humans can break copyright but machines
| can't?
|
| You realized machines didn't break copyright right?
| Machines can't do this yet so it's a non issue at this
| point.
|
| Humans were sued in this lawsuit because humans are the
| ones who did this action.
|
| The lawsuit is about this: I can copy stuff into my brain
| but not into my cybernetic assistive brain.
| snovv_crash wrote:
| Copyright holders aren't complaining about the training
| per se, they are complaining about the distribution and
| outputs of the models which in many cases directly
| regurgitate the training data.
| tiahura wrote:
| Not to be too rude, but you're not an attorney and couldn't be
| more wrong.
|
| The law has never been more transparent. The public has nearly
| complete access to every docket in the country. Moreover, the
| level of jurisprudence has never been higher.
|
| Moreover, I've lost a case or two in my time, but it was never
| because of a lack of a warchest.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| > Moreover, the level of jurisprudence has never been higher.
|
| I'm confused as to what this sentence means. The level of
| {the study/philosophy/science of law} has never been higher?
| tiahura wrote:
| That there has been a steady march forward in the quality
| of judicial output. There are still dumb judges and crooked
| judges, but overall, my experience is that younger judges
| are more willing to listen and be educated than judges of
| yesteryear.
|
| Additionally, Westlaw is hated by all for its pricing, but
| it's almost impossible to comprehend how significantly it's
| improved, and equalized, legal research.
| RavingGoat wrote:
| I can only assume that you aren't in the US because that
| couldn't be further from the truth here.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Upon what basis are you saying this? Because just saying
| "that couldn't be further from the truth here" doesn't
| mean anything concretely.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| In which a person who professionally practices law, has been
| to law school, has a higher than average IQ, and has a decade
| of experience describes how easy it is to interpret the legal
| system
|
| Hey quick question, my good friend, lets call him Doug is a
| high school equivalency graduate, has a few felonies and
| currently works as a road flagger
|
| How does this complete access to every docket in the country
| help him?
|
| You have more perfectly explained my point better than I
| could have. Thanks
| monkaiju wrote:
| The courts are like the doors to the Ritz, open to everyone!
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Oh this is perfectly said thank you
| creer wrote:
| The court IS about maintaining the system. That's the plan. If
| you want to change it, then you need to change the law and
| that's the job of Congress.
| TotalCrackpot wrote:
| This is consistent with historically intellectual property being
| a construct that benefits owners of capital and not actual
| innovators. That's why I think it should be abolished, this is
| yet another mechanism to monopolize a space to profit through
| some kind of rent-seeking procedure.
| nness wrote:
| What should it be replaced with -- a system where no one
| retains intellectual rights over the works that they create?
| TotalCrackpot wrote:
| What is intellectual right? I respect authorship, with
| obvious consideration that no intellectual activity happens
| in a vacuum, as Isaac Newton said: "if I have seen further,
| it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.". I believe
| that I should never be able to get financially hurt or go to
| prison because I used other person's thoughts.
| delecti wrote:
| > I believe that I should never be able to get financially
| hurt or go to prison because I used other person's thoughts
|
| "Use another person's thoughts" is obfuscating the reality
| of the situation so far as to be disingenuous. The way
| society ensures new works are created is to guarantee a
| temporary monopoly over certain narrow types of ideas to
| their creators. Why would anybody be an author if everyone
| could download free copies of any new book that came out?
|
| I think patents are granted too liberally, and that
| copyright lasts at least twice as long as it should, but to
| argue that intellectual property can't even _in theory_ be
| beneficial to protect is silly.
| TotalCrackpot wrote:
| Do you suggest that you need intellectual property for
| new ideas to be created and propagated? THAT'S silly! For
| most of the history of this species there were no
| intellectual property rights and people still were
| sharing their thoughts and ideas for various reasons.
| delecti wrote:
| For most of the history of this species there also
| weren't books, people making a living writing books,
| computers, or importantly, the ability to endlessly copy
| books using computers. If we want people to write books,
| those people need to be able to feed themselves, and
| that's harder if nobody has any reason to pay for those
| books.
| TotalCrackpot wrote:
| We can try some kind of libertarian socialism system,
| either with decentralized planing or with anti-capitalist
| markets to deal with it.
|
| Consider existence of services like patreon where people
| support creators they respect before are able to get to
| know the work of the author - no intellectual property
| rights are needed here.
| delecti wrote:
| Realistically, you're talking about a fantasy world.
|
| Less harshly, if we want to have that kind of world,
| we're not going to get there by abandoning creatives by
| removing intellectual property protections as the first
| step. Within the current society, intellectual property
| law does more good than harm.
|
| But besides that, I don't think a universal patreon-like
| support system is even ideal. I don't want to provide
| ongoing support for any creation/creator I appreciate. I
| like being able to just buy a book.
| OsrsNeedsf2P wrote:
| > Two of the three artists who filed the lawsuit have dropped
| their infringement claims because they didn't register their work
| with the copyright office before suing. The copyright claims will
| be limited to artist Sarah Anderson's works, which she has
| registered.
|
| The lawsuit is moving forward, but only on copyrighted work. This
| is (not yet) a story.
| thowaway91234 wrote:
| I'm so confused about American copyright law. I was always
| under the impression that copyright is granted automatically
| and you didn't need to "register" it, contrarily to a trademark
| which must be registered and is only valid for its specific
| industry.
| nness wrote:
| That was my belief too, but: "Copyright exists from the
| moment the work is created. You will have to register,
| however, if you wish to bring a lawsuit for infringement of a
| U.S. work."
|
| https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-general.html
|
| (Makes me wonder if, back in the day, every song that was
| downloaded and then pursued by the RIAA was registered...)
| dannyw wrote:
| Which law firm took the plaintiffs and filed the case
| without registering copyright?
|
| This isn't a good sign.
| pavon wrote:
| It can take several months to register a copyright, so
| they may have started the process and took a gamble on
| how slow the court would move, knowing they could
| fallback on the works that were registered if it didn't
| work out.
| sofixa wrote:
| I'm really looking forward to the EU framework around "AI". It's
| definitely a better approach than having individual artists sue
| and get dismissed on technicalities (that don't even apply in
| most of the EU - e.g. in France, if you release something by
| default you get copyright on it, so the judge's reasoning
| couldn't apply here) and judges deciding based on their
| interpretation of vague laws crafted in an age when "AI" was
| little more than niche science fiction if that.
| flanked-evergl wrote:
| > I'm really looking forward to the EU framework around "AI"
|
| After GDPR and the cookie pop-ups my expectations for things
| coming out of the EU is quite low. Every company I have worked
| it has a different and often conflicting interpretation of
| GDPR, and some places uses it to play politics, and governments
| of individual EU countries are not doing their part to clarify
| how things should be interpreted. It's a dumpster fire IMO.
| laylower wrote:
| This is the first paragraph...
|
| "The contentious issue of whether AI art generators violent
| copyright -- since they are by and large trained on human
| artists' work, in many cases without their direct affirmative
| consent, compensation, or even knowledge -- has taken a step
| forward to being settled in the U.S. today."
|
| Is it human-generated? Violent copyright?
| cmiles74 wrote:
| It seems like they focused too much on the details of how the
| model works and how data is encoded by the model.
|
| "In his dismissal of infringement claims, Orrick wrote that
| plaintiffs' theory is "unclear" as to whether there are copies of
| training images stored in Stable Diffusion that are utilized by
| DeviantArt and Midjourney. He pointed to the defense's arguments
| that it's impossible for billions of images "to be compressed
| into an active program," like Stable Diffusion."
|
| Perhaps future litigation will be more successful if they treat
| the model as a black box. Could an argument be made that a
| person's intellectual property was used to train the model
| without compensation and _that_ is the illegal act? From there
| one would only have to demonstrate that the output form the model
| is similar to a person's body of work.
| soco wrote:
| Maybe even the data for training should be opt-in, then at
| least this case would have been easier solved. The outputs are
| then another story - I can agree to training but I'm not eager
| to see knock-offs of my work being outputted and spread.
| nologic01 wrote:
| Can somebody explain how this will not kill any incentive to
| publish anything?
|
| Why would any human spend their limited lifespan to create a
| piece of work that will be grabbed without permission,
| approximated algorithmically (at least on the surface) and reused
| in infinite possible small variations without any attribution or
| remuneration whatsoever?
|
| This feels like a reversion to medieval times with minimal trade
| between regions as thieves would ambush traders and steal any
| goods.
| gedy wrote:
| It's just not that different from people seeing works and
| learning or being inspired, so how do you "ban AI" without
| adding more crazy DRM/DMCA stuff for legitimate use?
| golergka wrote:
| Other humans have always been doing exactly that with anything
| you published.
| nologic01 wrote:
| Really? can you point to some example?
|
| People have been putting up with some theft because they
| could still eke a living.
|
| This attitude has all the coherency of "some people are
| thieves, we cannot catch them all, so lets make theft legal".
|
| Unless I hear some sensible argument why this slippery road
| won't destroy a good fraction of the economy I am assuming
| that regression to kleptocracy is the shape of things to
| come.
| golergka wrote:
| Consuming information and learning from it is not theft and
| never was.
| latexr wrote:
| Not at this rate, speed, and reliability. Even setting aside
| the morality and legality of the matter, let's please stop
| with the fiction that what these computerised systems do is
| the same as other humans. _Scale matters_. If someone said
| "I'm worried about the consequences of machine guns being
| sold at convenience stores", it is not a sensible response to
| say "human have always been able to kill other humans with
| knives and handguns".
| nirav72 wrote:
| I don't see how this could be any different than say a person
| reads a book. Then uses what they learned from that book to
| write another book? Sure, if they're literally copying material
| from one book and then adding that as their own work into their
| book, that could be against copyright.
| spencerflem wrote:
| Because a machine can do it millions of times faster
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| Alternatively: "People can pick up and throw small lead
| spheres whenever they want, so all gun control is
| pointless."
| huimang wrote:
| The problem is these discussions are being had by STEM/tech
| people who don't respect or value art or the effort behind it,
| not by artists. They simply do not get the concerns that
| artists have.
|
| It truly boggles the mind that people equate machines that can
| output thousands and thousands of images in short time spans in
| any ingested style... with humans who have to hone styles and
| can only produce a result every so often.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| This is how technology works. Bulldozers effectively replaced
| people with shovels. Excel effectively replaced accounting
| clerks. Generative AI effectively replace artists (to some
| capacity).
|
| Most people care only about the output of a system, not about
| who the system replaces.
| emanuele232 wrote:
| yeah, we did not ask for farmers permission before
| producing Farming machines
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| We are able to create bulldozers without using any shovels.
| We can create Excel without accounting clerks. But we
| cannot create generative models without using existing
| artwork. Because existing artwork is so critical to the
| inventions replacing artists, it's more exploitative.
|
| If we required workers consent to directly use their works,
| we would be able to build bulldozers and excel but not
| stable diffusion. It's very different that way.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| I fail to see how so, outside of some ulterior desire to
| see "art" as something inherently superior. Manual labor
| was used to build bulldozers that replaced manual labor,
| to give an example.
|
| Using existing artwork for training model is only the
| process that generative AI came to be.
| ronsor wrote:
| If you had a conversation with a STEM person, they'd probably
| say everything is 100% fine, society and all. If you had a
| conversation with an artist, they'd probably say AI is pure
| evil theft and society is collapsing.
|
| If you solely listen to either side, you'll be blinded by
| madness. On that note, how many people respect or value the
| effort behind software? Most don't, not most artists either.
| That is the nature of life.
| Wissenschafter wrote:
| People like to create things regardless of profit motive, like
| art, who woulda thunk it?
|
| I don't understand how people think this will suddenly make
| human art vanish, that is just ridiculous and naive. People
| will spend their limited lifespan to make art, because that's
| what humans just do. Cavemen weren't being paid to paint on the
| walls.
|
| Your viewpoint is honestly insane. The people against AI art
| are bonkers.
| nologic01 wrote:
| In your infinite sanity you have not answered my question of
| how a creative person will dedicate their life (starting from
| long studies) producing something that society will not
| reward in any way.
| Wissenschafter wrote:
| In their freetime? Do you not have any? Should society
| reward people who want to dedicate to something that has no
| inherent survival benefit? Should that not be something
| done in ones own time?
|
| Why is society obligated to pay artists? It isn't.
| nologic01 wrote:
| I hope people get to read your comment to understand
| indeed what kind of world you are advocating.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| The kind of world he is advocating is just the real world
| as it is. You have to be extremely naive or privileged to
| think otherwise
| emanuele232 wrote:
| I actually had a discussion regarding this topic with a
| peer of mine that at the time was doing art-studies . She
| was extremely angry and devastated that in her field
| weren't enough jobs available for every one that mayored
| in it. That was a real complaint, for her the state
| should step in and guarantee a well-paid job for
| everybody in the exact field that everyone chooses, Like
| "I want to be a painter" and the day after they give you
| a place to work on your paintings
| surgical_fire wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| I mean, I would love to live in a world where UBI was a
| thing, and people were free to pursue their interests
| without fear of homelessness or starvation. Capitalism is
| a system that requires an underbelly of people exploited
| through the coercion inherent to the inequality of the
| world.
|
| That is an utopia, however. The reality is that most
| people - including yours truly - sell their labor to make
| ends meet. It certainly was not my lifelong dream to do
| backend development for a financial institution.
|
| Your friend (and many others in this thread) operate
| under a naive and entitled assumption that their creative
| output should be enshrined as something special, whereas
| throughout history technology always replaced human
| capacity, and we are better for it.
| nologic01 wrote:
| > is just the real world as it is
|
| What? Have you ever paid for a book? a subscription to a
| publishing medium of any sort, a movie or a piece of
| music? Have you noticed a copyright sign somewhere? Is
| that arrangement of recognizing and rewarding those who
| create something worthwhile part of the real world or
| not? Not even a hallucinating AI would be so incongruous.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| Have you ever paid for food? For clothing? For cars?
|
| You might be shocked, but automation replaced humans in
| all those industries.
|
| I'll still pay for books, music, or whatever. I won't
| really care at which capacity they were AI generated.
| nologic01 wrote:
| > but automation replaced humans in all those industries.
|
| So? To the extend that people are still involved, they
| are typically paid - unless it is slave labor, that is.
|
| This is not an automation vs manual labor debate.
| Creators will use any technology that helps them create
| something worthwhile. It may even involve algorithms in
| various ways. Generative art was a thing way before the
| AI bro invasion.
|
| The question is about provenance, attribution and
| remuneration of whatever human work and creativity is
| involved in producing unique pieces of work. Work that is
| used as input for the algorithmic production of infinite
| variations and replicas.
|
| The AI crowd simply wants to devalue that human input
| (while pressumably charging for API's or whatever comes
| on the other side of the meat grinder).
|
| Which I suppose might happen in an increasingly dystopic
| world, but they seem to also believe that people will
| keep embarking on literary studies, movie or music making
| studies etc. as some sort of non-remunerative hobby, just
| to keep producing useful inputs for the AI models.
|
| Its not going to happen. The golden goose will be dead
| before you can spell "AI".
| surgical_fire wrote:
| > The question is about provenance, attribution and
| remuneration of whatever human work and creativity is
| involved in producing unique pieces of work.
|
| The remuneration will always go to who owns the means of
| production. That is true in essentially any industry.
|
| > Its not going to happen. The golden goose will be dead
| before you can spell "AI".
|
| Then what are you worried about?
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| That argument applies equally well to midjourney and co.
| It has no inherent survival benefit either.
| csallen wrote:
| I despise the underlying belief here. That belief that the only
| reason people create art is based on desires for fame and
| monetary gain. Which is so demonstrably incorrect that it
| boggles my mind.
|
| This is where centuries of copyright law have gotten us,
| brainwashing people into thinking ideas are property
| ("intellectual property") and should be treated as rivalrous
| goods, and that the only reason to be an artist is to profit.
| Brainwashing people into thinking the only way we'll have art
| in the world is if we maximize the profits of commercial
| artists.
|
| Take one brief look at the internet, music, video, podcasts, a
| museum, the walls and refrigerators in people's homes, a
| kindergarten class room, an art class, or hell, this very
| forum. And you'll see that it's universally true that people
| like creating stuff _because people like creating stuff._ For
| free. Because it 's fun and stimulating. That's inherent in us.
| We do not need laws to prop up an artificial business model for
| humans to maintain our drive to create.
| throwaway5959 wrote:
| Do you want to work for free?
| MacsHeadroom wrote:
| No, that's why I do work and/or monetize my work in ways
| which aren't easily automated by a machine.
|
| Simples as.
| renegat0x0 wrote:
| ... but you do have a rent to pay for? You know that artists
| also have to live somewhere?
|
| Why do we have stars on github? Maybe not for fame, but it is
| a good indicator of how somebody is good. Fame is important.
| We do not make github repositories for "stars", but I think
| it is a good motivator for people to continue what they're
| doing.
|
| If there is an author who spent years of his life into
| producing some kind of music piece, should not there be some
| kind of laws protecting his work from theft?
| Wissenschafter wrote:
| You can pay rent by other means than art. Adapt or be
| homeless.
| renegat0x0 wrote:
| If any work is used for AI training, then the author
| should be paid. I hope that artists will be protected.
|
| Abide the law, or meet consequences?
| emanuele232 wrote:
| i agree in part with the parent comment, art can be done
| for hobby or for work, if the work part is being replaced
| by generators then art will be confined as an hobby and
| maybe that will be better for everyone. Stop at all the
| laundry-multimillionary "art" racket.
|
| btw, regarding copyright use, i don't see how AIs are not
| in the "fair use" category, they take human-generated
| content and apply a transformation to it, generating new
| images. The only problem is that generating images is a
| million-times quicker and cheaper
| Wissenschafter wrote:
| If any work is used for human training, then the author
| should be paid.
|
| See how ridiculous that sounds?
| __loam wrote:
| What a shit opinion. As most of us are professional
| programmers here, surely we can understand the benefits
| of professionalization? We as a society lose something if
| the economy can't support the mastery of these skills,
| including the ability to create the training data these
| models depend on.
| csallen wrote:
| - The vast majority of art created is done by people who
| don't have a full-time job creating art. So why does art
| have to pay the rent?
|
| - Lots of art still _does_ pay the rent in ways that aren
| 't threatened by AI. I haven't seen any convincing
| arguments that AI will be the death of commercial art, but
| moreso a new tool used by many commercial artists.
|
| - Business models change. There have been countless
| industries and skillsets that have been made obsolete by
| various technological innovations that have automated what
| previously required skilled workers to do. Society adapts.
| Why should we make this particular technological progress
| illegal, just so we can freeze a particular business model
| in time? We don't do that with other professions. Why can't
| artists adapt and find new ways to make money?
|
| - Similarly, why do methods of getting famous for art, or
| being motivated for art, need to stay consistent and
| unchanged over time? Why can't artists figure out new ways
| to get famous or get motivated? Why should we freeze or
| outlaw technology just so artists don't have to change from
| what's always worked?
|
| - Copyright violation is not theft. Theft is when you take
| a rivalrous good from someone else who owns it. If you grow
| an apple, and I take it, that is theft, and it's wrong
| because you no longer have that apple. Copyright violation
| is not theft. If you draw a picture, and I copy it, that
| picture has not been stolen, and you have not been deprived
| of it. This is a crime very different than theft, and the
| laws behind it are very different than the laws behind
| theft, as is the reasoning behind those laws. So it would
| behoove you to stop equating it to theft.
| Capricorn2481 wrote:
| I appreciate the sentiment but AI is not a panacea to
| copyright laws, it's a way to hoard ideas whether it's
| protected or not.
|
| And we still have copyright laws. Corporations are still
| hoarding IP. So rules for thee, not for me. The harder you
| make it for artists to get paid, the more people you get
| promoting Raid Shadow Legends
| nologic01 wrote:
| You are going on an irrelevant tangent (whether people
| enjoying being creative - which is obviously true at least
| for some) instead of answering a very clear and simple
| question: how, in your evolved and less broken universe, will
| talented people dedicate their life to produce something that
| society does not acknowledge or reward but simply
| appropriates.
| Wissenschafter wrote:
| Should I be able to dedicate my life to some obscure thing
| that nobody cares to buy as a commodity?
|
| That argument is absurd, you don't HAVE to be an artist.
| You can be a talented person and dedicate your life to
| something else.
|
| Or you can be like everyone else and do it as a hobby in
| your time off because people don't find what you do
| creatively to be valuable. I demand I get paid for my
| playing video games, I think it's valuable and I dedicate
| my time to it, I deserve to be paid.
|
| Fucking ridiculous.
| csallen wrote:
| Why do we as a society need to answer that question?
|
| When automobiles were popularized, entire generations of
| families and people devoted to horsecraft suddenly found
| their business model obsolete. Did we as a society need to
| come together to ask how talented people in the horse
| industry might be able to continue to profitably dedicate
| their lives to that task? No, we just let the market figure
| it out, and allowed change to occur.
|
| Our take an alternate thought experiment. Imagine a world
| where recipes were patentable. The first person to make
| mac-and-cheese could patent that, claim ownership of mac-
| and-cheese, and ban every other person and restaurant from
| making and selling mac-and-cheese. There would, of course,
| be an entire industry devoted to this. There would be
| restaurant chains that own the idea of pizza, burgers,
| etc., and stop any and everyone else from making that.
| There would be small and boutique recipe crafters creating
| and profiting from their unique recipes, too. And of
| course, people in this industry would ferociously sue
| anyone who "stole" the recipes that they "owned." And they
| would ask the same questions you're asking: "What ever
| would we do in a world where recipe owners don't get to
| uniquely monopolize their creations because they're allowed
| to be appropriated by others?" And the answer is: that
| business model wouldn't simply exist, and the world would
| be just fine without it.
|
| It's not clear to me why any particular profession or
| business model needs to be protected into existence. The
| world will be just fine if some business model that always
| worked gradually ceases to become viable. I have sympathy
| for the people in those professions, but it happens all the
| time, and is a necessary consequence of technological
| innovation and progress.
|
| In the 1800s, the Luddites smashed up factory equipment and
| tried to make it illegal, because they wanted to protect
| labor jobs. Thankfully they lost, and now we have a world
| with better jobs, which they could not have imagined.
| raynr wrote:
| I didn't get that from the poster you're replying to. I agree
| with you that people will create because people are people
| and want to create.
|
| But people also have to eat, need shelter, want kids, have to
| take care of health issues, and so on. For that they need
| money. If they can't get money from their creations they'll
| spend less time creating and more time engaging in activity
| that generates returns.
| csnover wrote:
| > If they can't get money from their creations they'll
| spend less time creating and more time engaging in activity
| that generates returns.
|
| On the other hand, artists who adapt AI into their
| workflows will have vastly improved productivity, so the
| amount of time they need to create new works can also be
| much smaller for the same amount of output.
|
| There will still be some artists who can avoid using AI and
| make a living, but like all skilled industries that have
| already been disrupted by automation, the market for that
| kind of work will become smaller and more exclusive, and
| that's probably OK. Live musicians were the only way to get
| music on the radio, or in the cinema, or at a party, until
| audio recordings decimated the industry[0]. You can still
| buy hand-made furniture, or clothing, or cars, but most
| people today get them from a factory.
|
| I do think there are serious issues with large players
| attempting to corner the market and extract all the wealth
| for themselves, but this is an old problem[1], and I think
| on balance these lawsuits perpetuate, rather than attempt
| to solve, the root problem: a missing social safety net and
| no guarantee that people will not have to scramble to
| survive every time a disruptive technology emerges.
|
| [0] https://timeline.com/live-musicians-were-so-terrified-
| of-rec...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
| __loam wrote:
| Professional artists have to eat. Holy shit.
| marcinzm wrote:
| >Why would any human spend their limited lifespan to create a
| piece of work that will be grabbed without permission,
| approximated algorithmically (at least on the surface) and
| reused in infinite possible small variations without any
| attribution or remuneration whatsoever?
|
| Because they enjoy it? Or do you see artists as some type of
| corporate drone who hates the very act of making art?
|
| That's like asking why anyone would contribute to MIT or Apache
| licensed open source.
| nologic01 wrote:
| Excuse me? What moral and economic planet are you living on?
| Enjoyment is an important drive behind any creative person,
| so much is true. But at least part of the enjoyment comes
| from other people appreciating, acknowledging and, yes,
| remunerating that creative work.
|
| The idea that authors, artists and other creatives will keep
| pumping original work as part-time love affairs so that AI
| bros can grab it and mint a dime is... _strange_.
| ativzzz wrote:
| > The idea that authors, artists and other creatives will
| keep pumping original work as part-time love affairs so
| that AI bros can grab it and mint a dime is... strange.
|
| The entire software industry is built on open source
| software written for free by other software devs
| nologic01 wrote:
| the sustainability of open source projects that are not
| corporate-backed is, famously, a major issue.
|
| In analogy, if creative production _was_ to be paid by a
| benevolent patron that doesn 't care if the work is then
| released in the public domain the economic equation
| changes. But this mode is not how things work at present.
| bawolff wrote:
| But yet there are a great number of amatur artists where
| none of this is true and yet they still keep creating.
| marcinzm wrote:
| You seem to have a very limited view of artists. The vast
| vast majority of artists are not professionals and make no
| money from their art. The vast majority of them also get
| very little publicity for their arts. Yet they still
| create.
|
| There'd be less art and probably lower quality art however
| to think people would outright stop making art due to any
| reason is strange (to use your words).
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > The idea that authors, artists and other creatives will
| keep pumping original work as part-time love affairs so
| that AI bros can grab it and mint a dime is... strange.
|
| I make a painting. I display it. My neighbor sees the
| painting, studies it for a while, goes home, and makes a
| painting based on what he learned from mine. People still
| enjoy my painting, still credit me with making it, and if
| they like it might still pay for a copy. My neighbor,
| having devised a way to make paintings really quickly,
| sells paintings for cheap. Can I send him a bill because
| he's making money based on something he learned from me?
|
| Granted, a lot of this boils down to whether AI _learns_ or
| copys /remixes; if it only creates what copyright law would
| consider derivative works, then that's another matter.
| naasking wrote:
| > Why would any human spend their limited lifespan to create a
| piece of work that will be grabbed without permission
|
| Creative people will create regardless of financial incentives.
| Fan fiction and free art is already everywhere, for instance.
| nologic01 wrote:
| In your universe apparently "creative people" don't need to
| spend a lifetime of study to hone their art, don't need food
| and shelter every single day etc.
|
| Its amazing how callous tech people have become as they
| salivate for their unicorns or whatever they are pursuing.
| naasking wrote:
| It's a delightful irony that the comment directly above
| yours is from an artist that has used generative art for
| those commercial purposes you think are so essential, and
| felt liberated and inspired in their personal time to be
| even more creative in ways that are not commercially
| viable.
| pkdpic wrote:
| Agreed, working with generative AI tools at work and
| independently over the past year has only made me want to
| make weirder more personal paintings / drawings with less
| interest in mass appeal or artistic professional viability.
| It's felt unexpectedly liberating and inspiring.
| bawolff wrote:
| > Why would any human spend their limited lifespan to create a
| piece of work that will be grabbed without permission,
| approximated algorithmically (at least on the surface) and
| reused in infinite possible small variations without any
| attribution or remuneration whatsoever?
|
| Because many people make art for art's sake.
|
| Besides popular art works always essentially had this yet
| people still made them. The difference is in scale not kind.
|
| Or to put it in another context - why would anyone work on an
| open source project when their work can be reused without
| (explicit) permission, cloned and reused in infinite small
| varations without any renumeration and essentially no credit
| (when was the last time you actually looked at the CREDITS file
| in an open source project? Have you ever?)
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| ~99% of art is _extremely_ derivative.
|
| Why does it matter if some artist uses ChatGPT to knock-off
| your style indirectly rather than directly?
|
| I mean, sure, ChatGPT is better at it than most artists. Is
| that the problem? The quality of knock-offs is too good now?
|
| Take any new song - and any music head can list several songs
| it is _just_ like. Take any new movie - and most screenwriters
| could go on for hours how it 's almost _exactly_ 10 different
| movies. Etc.
|
| There is nothing new under the Sun.
| glimshe wrote:
| You are applying an outdated mental framework to AI, not to
| mention a falacious view on the relation between copyright
| protection and the incentive for art. Have in mind that
| millions of humans have historically produced enormous amounts
| of art with no copyright protection of any kind. The
| protections you are trying to defend are a relatively recent
| phenomenon (~200 years); arguably, some of our best art was
| created well before these protections existed!
|
| Additionally, the beauty of contemporary AI is that it's much
| more similar to the mechanism of inspiration and learning that
| humans employ than, let's say, the literal copy of a photo. I
| think it's reasonable for an artist to limit the visibility of
| their work and prohibit their images from being shared online
| and used by AI training - but this must apply across the board.
| If their image is public in a way that anyone could see it, and
| be inspired by it, then they need to accept that the AI could
| be equally "inspired" by it.
|
| If you want an easy, concrete example of the process of
| inspiration and copying taking place for humans, just look at
| Animes. Styles are imitated by humans left and right, with no
| concern of original artists losing their livelihood. Human
| Anime artists copy their idols when learning to draw,
| oftentimes producing literal imitations for years before
| starting to produce their own original work, which to be honest
| usually greatly resembles the source of inspiration (PS: I like
| Animes, but most of it is very similar in terms of artistic
| style).
|
| Do humans ever really "invent" any art? Or are the artistic
| innovators simply a mix of influence of existing art, the
| natural images of nature/life plus a spice of randomness?
| Because that's pretty much how AI art functions.
| nologic01 wrote:
| I am not trying to defend copyright. I am trying to defend
| the incentives and ability of humans to dedicate their lives
| to something that might be innate to all to some degree but
| only comes to fruition after long years of dedication.
|
| Older societies did not have copyright but they, manifestly,
| had ways to sustain creatives.
|
| People wax philosophical about paradigm changes and other
| vacuities yet refuse to answer a simple question: how will
| society reward human creativity that takes a lifetime of
| cultivation to flourish.
| glimshe wrote:
| They actually didn't have such a great way to sustain
| creatives. Poor artists is a staple of civilization. You
| hear about the winners, but most artisans, painters, etc
| had to fight hard for income.
|
| AI won't make art go away, because you still need to tell
| the AI what to do. But the new art won't require as much
| skill with a paintbrush. For instance, I'm terrible at
| drawing but I believe I have creative ideas. AI alllows
| _me_ to be an artist too.
| lolinder wrote:
| This decision isn't "a reversion to medieval times", whatever
| your opinion on the legal status of these images-- this is an
| entirely procedural decision in which the judge ruled that the
| specific claims of copyright infringement are invalid because
| the plaintiff never filed for copyright:
|
| > Orrick spends the rest of his ruling explaining why he found
| the artists' complaint defective, which includes various
| issues, but the big one being that two of the artists --
| McKernan and Ortiz, did not actually file copyrights on their
| art with the U.S. Copyright Office.
|
| In other words, the story here is mostly that the lawyers
| screwed up badly in pursuing a copyright lawsuit before
| ensuring copyright had been filed.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| It may very well kill the incentives. But if new laws are
| needed, that is a matter for congress, not the courts.
| johngher wrote:
| It's a parlor trick, but I'm going to use it anyway: your own
| comment refutes your point.
|
| You put work into posting this comment: thought about the
| situation and crafted sentences you wanted to publish. I've
| absorbed them, learned from them, they'll inform my own output
| in the future. And respectfully, I won't remember your name or
| give credit.
|
| So why did you publish your comment? People can't avoid
| creating data. We do it passively. And you'll continue doing
| it, for your entire limited lifespan, even if you get neither
| laid nor paid for it.
| creer wrote:
| Plenty of people create with minimal profit effort. Outstanding
| creation happens with minimal profit all the time.
|
| To profit from creation you have to publish - what alternative
| do you propose?
|
| So that I don't understand this idea that anything will "kill
| publishing". Copyright changes the economic math around
| publishing, sure - and most of the time currently not for the
| better. That will keep evolving but there is no risk of killing
| creation or publishing.
| raincole wrote:
| My perspective is there are two different main issues about AI
| (especially Stable Diffusion).
|
| One is how it works consistently with the current law. Ml model
| is basically a highly lossy compressed data format. If you
| collect millions of copyrighted images, merge them into a super
| big image, then compress it into a .jpg. Are you allowed to
| redistribute this .jpg file?
|
| To me, it's mostly depending on how lossy (low quality) your .jpg
| is.
|
| (Note the fact that human brains are also lossy compressed data
| is completely irrelevant here: you can only compare machine to
| machine, algorithm to algorithm. You can't say if a human has
| right to do X, _therefore_ a machine has the same right to do X.)
|
| But this line of thinking, while consistent to me, is dangerous.
| Because it means open models like Stability Diffusion are more
| likely to be illegal than a closed one like MidJourney, since
| it's closer to the source materials. If closed models end up
| being legal but open models don't, it would be a big loss for our
| society as a whole.
| gpderetta wrote:
| Machines do not have rights. The question is whether an human
| with a specific machine has a certain right, as opposed to a
| human with a different machine.
| hunter2_ wrote:
| > human with a specific machine
|
| I assume the entire client+server system constitutes the
| "machine" in this case, correct? So does "human with" refer
| to the end user (client side) or the sysadmin (server side)?
| Maybe one is an accomplice? The machine isn't going to
| infringe without certain prompting by the end user, just as
| an inkjet printer isn't going to do so.
| harshreality wrote:
| That's a difficult question because the boundaries of
| similarity/derived works for copyright purposes are determined
| by judges and juries based on their intuitions. There's no
| mathematical similarity testing, and trying to formulate such a
| thing would be challenging.
|
| What's similar enough to a pop music theme, that has a grand
| total of a few lines of unique music, to be a copyright
| violation? How many bars have to be copied, and what kinds of
| minor variances do or don't avoid a violation? If you're
| inspired by a haiku, and change 5 of 17 syllables, is that
| still a copyright violation? Who knows.
| raincole wrote:
| > That's a difficult question because the boundaries of
| similarity/derived works for copyright purposes are
| determined by judges and juries based on their intuitions.
|
| I believe that's why DALL-E bans some keywords related to
| alive artists. To show they have "no intention to violate
| copyrights".
|
| And that's why I'm so worry about that we're heading to a
| future where open, uncensored models are illegal and closed
| source AI-as-a-service services are legal. It's not
| fearmongering: right now, you can't use GPL code in your
| closed source apps, but you can use GPL code on your server
| running a service that provides the exact same functions. I
| believe it has already hugely undermined the original intent
| of GPL (written in an era before SaaS became popular).
|
| Some AI proponents say ML is the biggest invention since
| steam machines. I don't know if it's true, but if we end up
| stuck in a situation where open models are illegal while AI-
| as-a-service is legal, then it's the biggest step toward a
| dystopia since steam machines.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| So just to be sure: the list of URLs + metadata that gets used
| for stable diffusion is several terabytes. Not the images. Just
| the list of URLs alone (and a bit of other metadata).
|
| Stable diffusion itself is just 6+ GB, and fits comfortably on
| my USB stick.
|
| That's one heck of a lossy compression algorithm, sir!
|
| (this thread has more discussion on this line of thinking
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37879938 )
| raincole wrote:
| > So just to be sure: the list of URLs + metadata that gets
| used for stable diffusion is several terabytes. Not the
| images. Just the list of URLs alone (and a bit of other
| metadata). > Stable diffusion itself is just 6+ GB, and fits
| comfortably on my USB stick.
|
| Thanks for sharing this info which I'm aware of. However,
| this fact is not as significant as it might sound in terms of
| whether it's a lossy compression algorithm.
|
| In most lossy compression algorithms, the compression rate is
| arbitrary. For example, for an algorithm that based on
| fourier transform, you can choose only take the first sin
| wave, or the first 1000 ones (a bit oversimplification here).
|
| So yes, SD is small. Quite miracally small, and its size
| _alone_ implies some important insights on how human see and
| read artworks. But this fact doesn 't change whether I see it
| as a lossy compression. (In my previous comment I stated
| human brain stores lossy compressed data too, so you can see
| I'm using a broad definition of "lossy compression".)
| gedy wrote:
| It's not just "lossy compression" though if you can
| generate images that were never in the source material. I
| get your point but it's somewhat misleading analogy.
| ben_w wrote:
| To the extent that Stable Diffusion models are "lossy
| compression", the main one is somewhere between 1 and 10 bytes
| per image depending on whose answer I use for the question "how
| many images was it trained on?" (I assume the cause is 1.5, 2.0
| and SDXL having different answers and the reporters conflating
| them). The geometric mean of those is ~three bytes, which is
| only enough for one single RGB pixel per image.
|
| For all the legal issues -- and the artistic flaws -- I still
| find it quite remarkable how good it is at such a small size.
| raincole wrote:
| > the main one is somewhere between 1 and 10 bytes per image
| depending on whose answer I use for the question "how many
| images was it trained
|
| Here is a catch tho. It's just "by average" several bytes. We
| can't tell if some images practically contribute 0 bit to the
| final results while some others contribute more.
|
| (I know this "contribute" word is a little non-sense in the
| context of ML. But existing lossy compression algorithms are
| not _that_ different in this sense: if you compress a 1M
| frames produced by a 3D renderer to a .mpeg video, each frame
| doesn 't contribute the same amount of bytes to the final
| result.)
| smrtinsert wrote:
| > Ml model is basically a highly lossy compressed data format
| This is a pretty incendiary statement for those opposed to
| generative models, but more important its not a good
| interpretation because the intent is not to store a compressed
| format for restoring the same image, nor can it.
| notnullorvoid wrote:
| It's not compression.
|
| Compression implies the input can be reconstructed from the
| output (lossy or not), in the case of these ml models the input
| is the training data and the output is the model. You can't
| reconstruct even a fraction of that training data using the
| model alone therefore it is not compression even in the most
| lossy sense.
|
| The model produced though can be an efficient
| compressor/decompressor, which produces a lossy output image
| when given a input of prompt and/or image.
|
| All that aside, the whole human/machine thing is a dumb
| argument. It's humans that are using the tool. The question
| shouldn't be does a machine have rights to do X, but rather do
| humans the have right to use and build such tools?
| ptx wrote:
| > _Orrick spends the rest of his ruling explaining why he found
| the artists' complaint defective, which includes various issues,
| but the big one being that two of the artists -- McKernan and
| Ortiz, did not actually file copyrights on their art with the
| U.S. Copyright Office. [...] The other problem for plaintiffs is
| that it is simply not plausible that every Training Image used to
| train Stable Diffusion was copyrighted (as opposed to
| copyrightable)_
|
| What? I thought everything was copyrighted by default under the
| Berne Convention?
|
| That's the reason for the existence of CC0 [0], after all. Their
| FAQ says: "Copyright and other laws throughout the world
| automatically extend copyright protection to works of authorship
| and databases, whether the author or creator wants those rights
| or not."
|
| [0] https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC0_FAQ#What_is_CC0.3F
| silverlight wrote:
| In the U.S. you have to actually file for a copyright with the
| U.S. Copyright Office if you actually want to bring a copyright
| suit against someone.
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