[HN Gopher] Adobe is buying videos for $3 per minute to build AI...
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       Adobe is buying videos for $3 per minute to build AI model
        
       Author : marban
       Score  : 115 points
       Date   : 2024-04-11 11:05 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
        
       | SilverBirch wrote:
       | I'm kind of surprised by this. I understand there's basically two
       | views: Content creators say "Hey, this is my stuff, you don't
       | have permission to use it, you need to pay me" and there's
       | Silicon Valley: "I'm allowed to look at your images, feeding your
       | images into my machine is the same thing". Legally, the first
       | view seems probably correct, but from a "history of silicon
       | valley" view, breaking the rules in order to gain a competitive
       | advantage in the market has _always_ been the better strategy.
       | 
       | It'd be like if Uber launched by applying for NY taxi medallions.
       | So this seems like a crazy risk:reward ratio here. Adobe is going
       | to end up with a massive bill, a weak model and the _hope_ that
       | the guys who steal everything will face consequences. We 've
       | _never_ seen Silicon Valley face consequences like that in the
       | past so i don 't see why you would bet it's going to happen this
       | time.
        
         | artninja1988 wrote:
         | The whole differentiator between firefly, the adobe image
         | generator, is that it's trained on their licensed stock image
         | library and commercially safe. Besides that, even openai is
         | licensing some proprietary high quality content from
         | proprietary sources. Even if the open Internet is deemed fair
         | use, there's still a lot of content locked away to license
        
         | dehrmann wrote:
         | Adobe is an established player with real customers who don't
         | want to deal with copyright issues. Telling them "this is safe
         | to use _because we paid for it_ " solves that issue.
         | 
         | With Uber, no one's suing individual riders or drivers over an
         | illegal taxi ride.
        
           | HeatrayEnjoyer wrote:
           | This is such a tectonic shift for what the concept of media
           | even means that any assumptions are on uncertain ground.
           | 
           | The courts could find that it isn't possible to sign away
           | these rights. There are many other rights that the law does
           | not permit to be signed away for much more tame reasons than
           | "enables further creations of 'your' work (or in the case of
           | actors, literally 'you') not only without your actual
           | involvement, but even long after your death". I would expect
           | that it at least comes with a time limit. "Artists can sign a
           | license to use these rights but only until their death + 10
           | years, after that the licensee can't use anything trained on
           | their work. Artists also have an unrevokable right to cancel
           | the license at any time with 90 day notice." might be one
           | possible outcome.
        
             | alemanek wrote:
             | That seems like a crazy stretch to me. Not a lawyer but the
             | rights courts typically don't let you sign away are things
             | like your freedom. Signing away your right to profit or
             | control a video you created is super common already.
             | 
             | Content licensing is really well established and already
             | allows for licensing for specific use and different royalty
             | structures based on usage. An example of this is streaming
             | vs theater vs syndication.
             | 
             | So, now there is a new venue to take into account and have
             | the lawyers add a few pages to their contracts moving
             | forward.
        
               | HeatrayEnjoyer wrote:
               | >courts typically don't let you sign away are things like
               | your freedom.
               | 
               | This is exactly my point. An AI that can replace you,
               | personally, is closer to signing away your identity or
               | freedom than the rights to display a specific already
               | completed work.
        
               | spaced-out wrote:
               | The court telling an artist they're not allowed to sell
               | their videos to the highest bidder seems like a greater
               | infringement on their freedom. What if no one wants to
               | pay for this person's videos except for an AI company?
               | You're basically telling them they're not allowed to
               | profit off of their work.
        
               | bongodongobob wrote:
               | You can't just make up new definitions of freedom, that's
               | not what freedom is.
        
           | tylerchilds wrote:
           | i was at adobe summit a couple weeks back, the push was ai
           | heavy-- the strategy is 100% around no copyright issues.
           | 
           | observationally they're in an interesting position, balancing
           | their artistic clients and their executive clients. a clean
           | model is the easiest way to hedge their portfolio and
           | reputation.
        
             | Ekaros wrote:
             | Artist don't want their work taken for free. And executive
             | clients can know that court systems can be extremely
             | fickle... It can go one way or an other depending
             | jurisdiction and even one big enough going wrong can be
             | expensive.
        
               | whywhywhywhy wrote:
               | The Artists it was trained on already signed rights away
               | to Adobe when they put their work for sale on Adobe Stock
               | so they'll get what they're given really.
        
               | Ekaros wrote:
               | That is fair. But I was talking in general, mostly about
               | material that was not sold on Adobe Stock...
        
           | SJC_Hacker wrote:
           | They would have to do the leg work to ensure that the seller
           | is the legitimate rights holder.
        
         | surfingdino wrote:
         | I am struggling with the Silicon Valley's latest business model
         | that seems to be based on stealing all content in order to
         | train AI to replace the very creators who created that content.
         | If we then replace white-collar workers with AI and blue-collar
         | workers with robots... and most of the population are jobless
         | who's going to be able to pay for the content, the services,
         | and the goods produced by AI and robots? Is it why the VC are
         | in favour of universal basic income? But if we all go on UBI
         | then what's the point to selling to us if that money could go
         | to the VCs... but then... what do they do with the money if it
         | ceases to circulate and incentivise people to work and trade?
        
           | AnthonyMouse wrote:
           | > If we then replace white-collar workers with AI and blue-
           | collar workers with robots...
           | 
           | ...we would be living in post-scarcity and everything would
           | be free. But that doesn't happen in the absence of AGI, what
           | actually happens is that technology replaces some jobs and
           | then people do the remaining jobs, which are now in higher
           | demand because the things done by technology become cheaper
           | and the money that had gone to pay for labor there now gets
           | spent on something else, increasing demand for the other
           | thing.
           | 
           | Technology has been replacing jobs for hundreds of years and
           | we still have low unemployment.
        
         | numpad0 wrote:
         | > "Hey, this is my stuff, you don't have permission to use it,
         | you need to pay me"
         | 
         | I see a lot of the first and second parts, but nowhere near as
         | often the third part: The rights holders aren't seeking
         | financial growth, just wants control in perpetuity. I suspect
         | that's the part proving difficult to solve.
        
         | AnthonyMouse wrote:
         | > Legally, the first view seems probably correct
         | 
         | It's not obvious why that would be.
         | 
         | Artists aren't going to like this technology because it
         | competes with them, but it competes with them regardless of
         | whether it was their work or someone else's in the training
         | data.
         | 
         | This leads to a visceral response where they want to call this
         | "stealing" and hope that the creators of the technology can be
         | sued into non-existence so their competition can be eliminated.
         | But as Adobe is demonstrating, that isn't going to happen
         | anyway. So the question isn't whether the technology will
         | exist, it's if it will be locked up behind the walls of major
         | corporations. The latter doesn't do artists any good but harms
         | the public -- including artists who want to leverage the
         | technology in their art. So why should the law protect Adobe's
         | moat from the public?
        
           | SilverBirch wrote:
           | The reason I think the first view seems more correct is that
           | it's like downloading a song from spotify. Yes you would
           | think streaming a song from spotify is technologically
           | identitical as downloading it, but legally there is a
           | distinction. If you found a way of ripping a copy of a song
           | from spotify there would be a record company ready to sue you
           | and a law they could use to do it.
           | 
           | It's theoretically true that the models could be trained with
           | someone else's training data, but there's a flaw in that
           | argument. If you _can_ train with other data without these
           | legal issues, why _don 't_ they? And the answer is actually
           | because they do assign some value to that training data, and
           | there's not an infinite supply and it's actually quite
           | difficult to get large sets of quality data.
           | 
           | I think it's a pretty open question how this will resolve, it
           | could be like stremaing music where companies like spotify
           | are little more than puppets for the major record labels. It
           | could end up like youtube where the model started with "We're
           | going to steal stuff" and ended up "We're going to strongly
           | enforce copyright now we're the encumbent" or some other
           | third way. But I don't expect the "We're going to take
           | everything with no regard to the existing legal framework"
           | will sustain long term.
        
             | AnthonyMouse wrote:
             | > The reason I think the first view seems more correct is
             | that it's like downloading a song from spotify. Yes you
             | would think streaming a song from spotify is
             | technologically identitical as downloading it, but legally
             | there is a distinction. If you found a way of ripping a
             | copy of a song from spotify there would be a record company
             | ready to sue you and a law they could use to do it.
             | 
             | But the law would probably be DMCA 1201 for circumventing
             | the DRM rather than normal copyright for making the copy,
             | which is much more ambiguous. Also, record companies like
             | to sue people, that doesn't mean they're right and provides
             | no indication of what the law _should_ be. You could just
             | as easily pick some other example, like whether you can rip
             | a music CD or vinyl you bought to put it on your iPod,
             | which the record companies might not _like_ to be allowed,
             | but that doesn 't mean that it isn't.
             | 
             | > It's theoretically true that the models could be trained
             | with someone else's training data, but there's a flaw in
             | that argument. If you _can_ train with other data without
             | these legal issues, why _don 't_ they?
             | 
             | To which the answer is that they do. A lot of models are
             | trained on arbitrary content from the internet.
             | 
             | As to why Adobe in particular is doing this, think about
             | it. It's because that interpretation benefits them rather
             | than the artists, by creating a moat where companies who
             | already have licenses to bulk stock images etc. are the
             | only ones who can create a model, rather than having lots
             | of competitors because anyone can create one and many of
             | them are free and can be run locally.
             | 
             | > I don't expect the "We're going to take everything with
             | no regard to the existing legal framework" will sustain
             | long term.
             | 
             | Publishing companies don't like public libraries. So
             | anybody can go there and borrow a copy of any book for
             | free? That doesn't mean that libraries are bad or are or
             | should be illegal.
             | 
             | Also, laws are created through the political process, which
             | is not always great. The outcome "individual artists
             | somehow benefit from this" isn't even in the room there.
             | The two most plausible outcomes are that "tech companies"
             | win and anybody can train a model on anything they can get
             | their hands on, and that "content conglomerates" win and
             | then this technology gets locked up as a service from only
             | megacorps and the artists still don't get anything
             | meaningful, but now the world has another abusive cartel
             | imposing arbitrary censorship and using control over this
             | to cement control over adjacent markets etc. Of these, the
             | second is clearly worse.
        
       | troq13 wrote:
       | Weird spot. $3 per minute seems like a lot more than most AI
       | companies are willing to pay, and a lot less than most creators
       | who are not making slop would be willing to take.
        
         | devoutsalsa wrote:
         | If I'd posted 10 minute videos weekly for 5 years and someone
         | offered me $7500-ish to use them as training data, I'd think
         | that was a pretty good deal. YMMV.
        
           | endisneigh wrote:
           | Depending on the content that's a terrible deal. Low ball is
           | it takes an hour to produce a single minute of video. You're
           | being paid 3 bucks an hour. If it's animation it could take a
           | day to animate a single minute, in which case you're being
           | screwed even harder.
           | 
           | Suckers who don't properly value their time is why BigCo
           | generally wins.
        
             | altdataseller wrote:
             | Did they say they're buying only high quality videos? What
             | if it's just a video of me talking through my coding
             | sessions? It would be rather low effort and sounds like
             | "free money" to me
        
               | doublerabbit wrote:
               | Would it though? If they train your video, produced
               | future videos based off that video, charged for the next.
               | 
               | That then takes away your next video. So you got paid a
               | low ball amount only to be ripped off.
        
               | replygirl wrote:
               | would it though? nothing would be stopping them. the idea
               | something would relies on an assumption that we'll soon
               | be able to generate long, coherent, and useful
               | instructional videos with fully resolved text on demand,
               | with such high quality and low cost that no one will be
               | able to compete. but we already have people out there who
               | can do this instruction/review live and off the cuff, and
               | who would certainly be able to make use of this stuff in
               | their own work
        
               | doublerabbit wrote:
               | Yes it would.
               | 
               | Because it restricts you from creating such style videos.
               | Your being paid a pittance for a bot to learn your style.
               | 
               | Why wouldn't you want more money?
        
               | AnthonyMouse wrote:
               | > Why wouldn't you want more money?
               | 
               | Because that style isn't that unique, so the difference
               | is between getting paid nothing and now there is a bot
               | that can do the same thing, or getting paid something and
               | now there is a bot that can do the same thing.
               | 
               | It hasn't even been established that they're required to
               | pay you at all.
        
               | doublerabbit wrote:
               | My style is unique. If I'm teaching folks something I'm
               | skilled in I wouldn't want to be learned from $3
               | especially for a $$$ company that abuses trust.
               | 
               | Style is how teachers make learning happen. If teachers
               | follow the general generic book mundaneness, you learn
               | far less than of you apply your own style.
               | 
               | Besides, if they were using the content without my
               | permission I should be allowed to seek costs for such.
        
               | AnthonyMouse wrote:
               | > My style is unique.
               | 
               | "You're unique, just like everybody else."
               | 
               | It doesn't matter if the thing is using your exact style
               | or one which is enough of a substitute for it that the
               | difference isn't going to make up the difference between
               | your $50 fee and the $0.01 in electricity it takes to
               | have the AI do it.
               | 
               | > Besides, if they were using the content without my
               | permission I should be allowed to seek costs for such.
               | 
               | On what basis? How is it different than someone teaching
               | their students your style, so the students can make their
               | own original works in the same style? It's directly
               | analogous to classroom use, which is an explicit example
               | of fair use from the copyright statute.
        
               | doublerabbit wrote:
               | This is moot. For sake of sanity, and that I said what I
               | wanted to say and I'll agree to disagree.
               | 
               | This just shows that anyone is willing to cloned for less
               | than their actual worth which is calculated on their own
               | basis.
               | 
               | If you'd rather be ripped off, having a class taught for
               | $5 from some AI bot from your own teaching style earning
               | a single $3 than yourself teaching and earning $5 from
               | each class, be my guest.
               | 
               | Edit: I'm now post capped, so can't comment/reply on HN
               | for another four hours anyway. Old news.
        
               | replygirl wrote:
               | keeping in mind $0.01 for something like an hour lesson,
               | or a full class, is entirely theoretical
        
               | AnthonyMouse wrote:
               | The AI is the thing being taught, not the thing teaching
               | a class. Once you have a model, $0.01 is the correct
               | order of magnitude for the cost of generating an image
               | from a prompt. If anything it's an overestimate.
        
               | replygirl wrote:
               | it's barley short of what a 1920x1080 image costs from
               | openai, but we're in a thread about instructional video,
               | which is neither economical nor available yet
        
               | AnthonyMouse wrote:
               | Video would cost more than still images for the obvious
               | reasons, but still likely much less than the cost of
               | however many frames per second times that number of
               | images, because nearly all of the frames will be minor
               | variations on the previous frame. Meanwhile it's going to
               | be a couple years before that technology exists because
               | you'd have to develop something that can sync video with
               | audio etc., by which point the hardware would be more
               | power efficient.
               | 
               | So now we're speculating on the cost of something that
               | doesn't exist yet, but it's highly likely that hardware
               | is going to get more power efficient over time, so the
               | question then isn't whether "AI can do this for a lower
               | price than humans" will happen, it's just a question of
               | how long before it does.
        
               | replygirl wrote:
               | it restricts one from making more videos? how? i
               | understand your comment as reiterating the assumption i
               | was responding to then reframing that assumption with a
               | generalization. of course fair pay is good, and my point
               | is we don't have a solid foundation to assume ai will
               | impact that more any other creative technology we've seen
               | on computers in the last few decades
        
             | devoutsalsa wrote:
             | You can sell it more than once.
        
             | replygirl wrote:
             | i reckon nearly zero of these creators are making videos
             | for a single viewer. and as a film student, or even as a
             | professor, you wouldn't spend $300 per movie just to
             | reference in study. demanding even more than that can only
             | be hedging against the idea that one will be out of a job
        
             | sebzim4500 wrote:
             | Yeah but if you have already made the content then you're
             | getting $7500 for free.
        
               | endisneigh wrote:
               | Per the article you're paid to make new content.
               | 
               | Even if that were not true, releasing the rights for so
               | little is dumb.
        
               | 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
               | As opposed to the Pile where the authors got nothing for
               | the privilege of their content being used to train the
               | LLMs.
        
             | lightedman wrote:
             | "Low ball is it takes an hour to produce a single minute of
             | video."
             | 
             | As some of us like to say, "Fuck it, we'll do it live." As
             | in, that's the only take you get and it goes right to
             | production zero editing and processing. Everything gets set
             | once, fired once, and it gets uploaded immediately.
        
             | asah wrote:
             | Price is determined by the value to the purchaser, not the
             | cost of production. Particularly for digital products with
             | no per-use COGS.
        
             | rakoo wrote:
             | If I learn through the press that Adobe is willing to pay
             | amount A and this information is very peblic, I can at the
             | very least assume they are making 10x more so I'm willing
             | to sell it 20x more and see where this goes
        
           | baobabKoodaa wrote:
           | These AI video systems will need huge amounts of random
           | videos showing things like leafs rustling in the wind, car
           | driving, etc. so you don't even need to put in 10 hours of
           | effort to create a 10 minute video, you can just grab your
           | camera and go for a walk and publish that as it is, and it
           | will be valuable training material.
           | 
           | $3 per minute would be a pretty high price to pay for "man
           | walks outside" video.
        
           | doublerabbit wrote:
           | Why wouldn't you want more?
        
           | ysavir wrote:
           | If I was in that situation, the last thing I'd want is to
           | provide an AI video generator the means of creating videos
           | like mine and that would compete with me.
        
         | paxys wrote:
         | If it's a non exclusive deal then of course they'll take it.
        
           | troq13 wrote:
           | "you already used these socks, why wouldn't you sell them to
           | a stranger for $3"
        
         | voxic11 wrote:
         | Its a non-exclusive deal so you can film something for your
         | youtube channel and make money there while also getting some
         | extra bucks from adobe.
        
         | Legend2440 wrote:
         | Videos that are good for training data are very different from
         | videos that are good content.
         | 
         | They do not want theatrical productions, they want raw footage
         | of the real world.
        
       | htrp wrote:
       | have they fixed the image generation in their firefly models yet?
        
       | retskrad wrote:
       | So are we just going to let OpenAI, Google, Facebook, Microsoft
       | and others to just steal the whole internet, including videos on
       | YouTube, and train their models for free without compensating
       | creators? Or will they get away with it because there were no
       | laws that prohibited their behaviour?
        
         | jsheard wrote:
         | Adobe is pretty much banking on the "scrape everything"
         | approach getting too bogged down in legal problems to be
         | commercially viable in the long term. They're going out of
         | their way to only train on licensed material so they (and Getty
         | Images) will be the last ones standing if the worst case
         | scenario happens for the companies who thought they could just
         | take everything, and in the meantime they get the business of
         | risk-adverse customers who don't want to chance it until it's
         | settled one way or the other.
         | 
         | It's a decent lobbying tactic too - companies like OpenAI claim
         | their technology can only exist with unrestricted scraping, and
         | requiring them to license training data would kill the whole
         | industry in the crib, but Adobe and Getty can point to their
         | own products as existence proofs that it can be done but OpenAI
         | just doesn't want to.
        
           | Dalewyn wrote:
           | I applaud their approach, since it's obviously in line with
           | traditional concepts such as _fucking paying someone for
           | their time and work_.
        
             | pavlov wrote:
             | Still, it's possible to end up in a situation where people
             | are getting paid and in theory it's an improvement over a
             | previous lawless IP situation, but in practice it still
             | leaves creators in the cold.
             | 
             | That's basically what happened with Spotify. Artists are
             | getting paid something for streaming, but it's fractions of
             | pennies on the dollars they used to make from music sales.
        
               | Dalewyn wrote:
               | It's better to be good than not be perfect in the face of
               | being bad.
        
             | cma wrote:
             | Didn't they quickly change terms before people knew what
             | was going on with the Stock AI stugg, and only do any press
             | for it after it was available but too late to opt out?
        
           | paxys wrote:
           | And by being the first mover they get to dictate prices as
           | well. Content creators will sell for whatever because the
           | alternative is $0. Once more companies get involved and start
           | bidding the value of these catalogs will undoubtedly go up.
        
           | andy_ppp wrote:
           | It's amazing how quickly laws get changed when there's
           | potentially billions of dollars that can be extracted.
        
           | Hoasi wrote:
           | Sound strategy by Adobe.
        
           | doctorpangloss wrote:
           | Adobe's stuff isn't only trained on licensed material. They
           | are as fucked as everyone else.
           | 
           | There doesn't exist a LLM trained only on expressly licensed
           | data that works well enough for the image diffusion
           | conditioning task. So unless they made some kind of huge
           | scientific discovery, which they didn't, they are using a
           | text model like T5 or CLIP to achieve the "text" part of
           | "text to image", which of course is trained on not expressly
           | licensed data.
        
           | chriskanan wrote:
           | I'm guessing they will then lobby to ban open source AI
           | models, especially their usage in commercial applications.
           | One would need a huge bank account to create models in the
           | future. I think this would have a chilling effect on the AI
           | ecosystem. In essence it's a form of regulatory capture.
        
             | jsheard wrote:
             | You already need a huge bank account to create models, the
             | (quality) open source ones are all hand-me-downs from
             | companies burning through huge stacks of investor cash and
             | giving away the spoils. It should go without saying that
             | that won't last.
        
               | artninja1988 wrote:
               | I mean it's in the crown sourcing range for diffusion
               | models and going to get cheaper. It currently costs 50k
               | to retrain stable diffusion 2
               | (https://www.databricks.com/blog/stable-diffusion-2). So
               | yeah, mandatory licensing of data on the open web would
               | absolutely kill university projects and small startups.
               | The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as they
               | say
        
               | jsheard wrote:
               | That's 50k if you already know the exact architecture
               | you're going to use, and the exact training data you're
               | going to use, and nail it all on the first try. Multiply
               | that by however many failed attempts it takes while
               | experimenting with new ideas, especially when the
               | corporate players stop being so eager to publish the
               | finer details of their research, and that 50k could very
               | quickly turn into millions.
        
               | artninja1988 wrote:
               | Yeah, it's not going to be SOTA but existing models are
               | already good enough for a reasonable portion of use
               | cases. Even if they lag behind it's important to have
               | free models.
        
         | kozikow wrote:
         | Nono, let stealing the internet first, generate synthetic
         | training data, and then outlaw it to ensure no one else catches
         | up.
        
           | mewpmewp2 wrote:
           | Is there going to be a new term called "Data Laundering"?
           | 
           | You create the synthetic data, move it through 10s of
           | entities and then buy it back cheaply from an entity.
        
             | datadrivenangel wrote:
             | It's the fireside monopoly approach.
             | 
             | Break the law so you can undercut the real producers, and
             | then buy the rights when they're broke and everything works
             | out for you!
        
             | winstonprivacy wrote:
             | Data Laundering is an old term... I was using in more than
             | a decade ago in talks about how unethically gathered
             | private data was being sold to Israeli companies, who then
             | licensed it back to US corporations. It was (probably still
             | is) a way to side step privacy laws.
        
         | whywhywhywhy wrote:
         | This is why open models trained with disregard for IP are
         | important.
         | 
         | It's going to happen anyway, the tech can either be free to
         | everyone so we all benefit or behind a paywall. Those are your
         | two options there isn't a 3rd if we're talking reality not
         | fantasy.
        
         | kristopolous wrote:
         | It's called enclosing the commons and the answer is a
         | resounding "yes!"
        
         | deadbabe wrote:
         | Most of a creator's content is consumed for free as is by their
         | audience. Their compensation arrives in the form of payments
         | from a few large subscribers or from an ad distribution
         | platform or other such sponsorship deals.
         | 
         | I'm not sure why you and others think that using someone's work
         | as inspiration for creating some new work requires payment. Are
         | we required to pay someone when sharing a meme, or using a
         | sound for a reel or a TikTok? A lot of these creators are just
         | creating shit they saw someone else create.
        
           | ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
           | _> Are we required to pay someone when sharing a meme_
           | 
           | I suspect that, if the image in the meme is copyrighted, the
           | answer is "yes."
           | 
           | I haven't come across too many memes with Mickey Mouse, but I
           | do see the occasional Marvel one (I have forwarded these,
           | myself).
        
             | deadbabe wrote:
             | Under the OP's logic, you and everyone who shared those
             | memes owes money. Everyone.
        
               | ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
               | Yup. Welcome to the RIAA's worldview.
               | 
               | It can get nasty.
        
             | qeternity wrote:
             | There is a little something called "fair use".
        
               | ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
               | Yeah...that gets fuzzy.
               | 
               | Satire of the work is allowed, but I don't think using
               | the work, itself, in satire of something else, is
               | allowed.
               | 
               | I think that the example a lot of folks use is the
               | "Pissing Calvin" decal.
               | 
               | Watterson never allowed any commercialization of his
               | characters. Every "Pissing Calvin" decal is actually a
               | copyright violation, but I think that they never enforced
               | it, so it may be considered "OK" to use, as the copyright
               | has been allowed to wither.
               | 
               | But IANAL. Things get sticky, here.
        
               | deadbabe wrote:
               | The original work isn't used. It's satirized in the form
               | of training data that a model will understand.
        
               | rightbyte wrote:
               | Family Guy made a scene for scene recreation of Star
               | Wars.
        
           | AmericanChopper wrote:
           | I don't think there's any legal issue with using data for
           | training. I think the problem is how do you subsequently
           | prevent your model from creating copyright violations. If you
           | watch a Spider-Man movie and take some inspiration from it,
           | you know that you go and make a movie with similar themes or
           | whatever, but you can't just go out and create your own
           | Spider-Man movie. An AI model doesn't know this, and I don't
           | know how you'd teach it this concept. Especially when
           | properly educated humans frequently have disputes about what
           | is/isn't allowed.
        
             | deadbabe wrote:
             | The copyright isn't violated unless shared. So it's the end
             | user's responsibility. Not the AI model.
        
               | AmericanChopper wrote:
               | It was shared when OpenAI (or whoever else) created it
               | and then shared it with you (or likely sold it to you if
               | you're a subscriber).
               | 
               | But even if you think that's fine it makes using AI
               | models for your own commercial applications more risky.
        
               | SJC_Hacker wrote:
               | Most likely these models are going be hidden behind the
               | network. Aside from the issues of size, which will
               | probably run into the terabytes, I can't see companies
               | willing to risk including them in downloadable code them
               | given how expensive they are to generate, for fear of
               | being copied.
               | 
               | A single network transfer alone is enough to qualify
               | "sharing".
               | 
               | Heck some of the content creators are even arguing that
               | the models are essentially a form of lossy compression,
               | because no one quite knows exactly how they work.
               | 
               | Also the users probably won't be the ones with deep
               | pockets, unless it was a studio. And the lawyers are
               | generally going to after the ones with deep pockets.
        
             | SJC_Hacker wrote:
             | Spiderman was released 1962. Copyright runs out in 2057.
             | 
             | What you could do is what some of of the original comic
             | book creators did when they ripped off each others work
             | (Doom Patrol/Xmen, Quicksilver/Flash, etc.) - create an
             | alternative version that was close the original but was
             | different enough that it wasn't a straight up copy. So it
             | wouldn't be Spiderman, but Venom or something, and the suit
             | wouldn't be red/blue but like maybe purple/green or
             | something.
        
         | bobcostas55 wrote:
         | You know what, I _would_ download a car.
        
         | djeastm wrote:
         | I think the strategy is to succeed at all costs now then pay
         | out a fine or settlement as a cost of doing business later when
         | it's a fraction of their profits. Seems to be how things go.
        
         | aqme28 wrote:
         | > train their models for free without compensating creators
         | 
         | Isn't $3/minute exactly the compensation for creators you're
         | looking for?
        
           | chinathrow wrote:
           | Why would that be a fair price?
        
             | aqme28 wrote:
             | They're offering that price to creators. Beyond that,
             | you're getting into the philosophical argument of what
             | defines a fair price.
        
             | SJC_Hacker wrote:
             | Because its the highest bid?
        
         | slyall wrote:
         | Google owns youtube. I'd be surprised if their user agreement
         | doesn't allow them to train on the uploads. Same with Apple and
         | Facebook.
         | 
         | I'm not sure a dozen companies (before consultation and
         | licensing) having control of 90-something percent of their
         | world's content is a good idea either
        
         | glimshe wrote:
         | The article is paywalled, but isn't _paying for videos_ the
         | very opposite of  "stealing" and "without compensating"?
        
         | CameronFromCA wrote:
         | We can only hope so.
        
         | rchaud wrote:
         | Open borders for me, paywalls and perpetual surveillance for
         | thee.
        
         | rchaud wrote:
         | Open borders for me, DMCA enforcement for thee.
        
       | 2Gkashmiri wrote:
       | I demand adobe buy ALL copyrighted material at $3/minute.
       | 
       | Disney, WB,etc etc
       | 
       | That'll show them
        
       | LightBug1 wrote:
       | Times like this, I'm glad a lot of my shit is still on hard
       | drives!
        
       | spaceman_2020 wrote:
       | Personally, Photoshop's AI tools are the weakest among all that
       | I've tried. Even free tools like Remove.bg and Canva are running
       | circles around Adobe's background removal
       | 
       | Lenoardo's AI tools are even better and the native background
       | removal is just 10x better than Adobe
        
         | ackbar03 wrote:
         | yea those guys completely missed the bus. I worked on some AI
         | image editing tool a few years back with a partner and we were
         | constantly worried Photoshop was going to suddenly make us
         | obsolete, which is now kind of funny looking at where they're
         | at
        
       | HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
       | $3/min = $180/hr. Pretty good pay!
       | 
       | Do they care what the content is?!
        
         | sentfromrevolut wrote:
         | They're not buying slop. they're buying high quality content
         | like animations. It can take hours to create one minute so it's
         | really the other direction , division from 3/min down to
         | something like 0.50c/hour of work, not multiplication from
         | 3/min to 180/hr .......
        
       | HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
       | Biggest source of video on the net is maybe porn. Is that the
       | path to AGI?
        
         | ackbar03 wrote:
         | That is beyond dystopian
        
           | CyberDildonics wrote:
           | It's also not true so the whole idea is nonsense. Youtube
           | alone in 2022 was taking _in_ 30,000 hours of video per hour.
           | Every day youtube receives more video than anyone could watch
           | in their entire lifetime.
        
             | ackbar03 wrote:
             | Says cyberdildonics
        
       | marcodiego wrote:
       | Would they be interested in buying a video of paint drying[1]?
       | 
       | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paint_Drying?useskin=vector
        
       | callamdelaney wrote:
       | Tbh AI is a derivative thing, a human can read something and be
       | inspired in exactly the same way, I don't see how copyright is
       | enforceable.
        
         | lionkor wrote:
         | The difference is that it's not a human, it's a machine
         | designed to do that. There was a choice, that's the difference.
        
           | everforward wrote:
           | I don't think this is a great line of argument. It hinges on
           | choice, which rapidly degrades into an argument about free
           | will and the nature of whether anyone truly makes a choice or
           | if our apparent "choices" are just a rationalization of
           | deterministic response to external stimuli.
           | 
           | I don't think there's a subjectively true answer to that
           | question, so we just end up bickering over free will instead
           | of AI.
           | 
           | If you just want to declare humans to be special, I would
           | just go straight to that. Humans are already legally special
           | in all kinds of ways.
        
             | graypegg wrote:
             | I think making humans legally special is a good argument
             | though.
             | 
             | The whole point of copyright, is to allow artists to be
             | able to generate a little income with exclusive rights to
             | the works they produce. It's not just there because it's
             | some inherent property of artwork: us humans decided that
             | courts should punish people that threaten the livelihood of
             | artists (in a very narrow scope of ways) via the judicial
             | system.
             | 
             | Of course the "spirit" of the law is meaningless, but I at
             | least don't think understanding copyright law as a purely
             | legal tool, divorced from the human element, is
             | participating in the same conversation artists are having.
             | 
             | Should people that just make art, eat? Early human history
             | the answer was no. Then we advanced to a point where people
             | can specialize in skills, and art made life worth living,
             | so the answer was yes. Now where are we?
        
               | visarga wrote:
               | Now that generative AI is here, there will be artists who
               | will try to differentiate themselves from AI, and artists
               | that will embrace it to explore new possibilities. It's
               | not a matter of protecting artists, but of choosing what
               | artists to protect, the first or second group? Should we
               | ban photography as well, how about synthesizers, should
               | home owners band new construction in their neighborhood
               | to protect their investments?
               | 
               | In my opinion any attempt at restricting AI training is
               | also restricting people who would use it to create new
               | things. And it will backfire spectacularly, by scanning
               | for derivative works in AI we automatically need to do
               | the same for every work claimed to be created by a human,
               | because we don't know who's using AI secretly.
               | 
               | And it will create a chilling effect, incidental
               | similarity would be too high a risk to take. Even old
               | works will be revealed, their secret influences laid bare
               | for everyone to see. Excessive scrutiny could deter
               | artists from experimenting with new forms of expression,
               | possibly leading to a homogenized art world where
               | innovation is curtailed.
        
               | graypegg wrote:
               | I can get that. There's never a path forward that doesn't
               | leave something on the table. I of course want artistic
               | freedom + technology to advance alongside each other.
               | 
               | But we're also talking about MAKING generative AI models.
               | Not USING generative AI models. Making a model is so far
               | outside of the scope of a single artist it's almost
               | comical. We're talking about a task that, given no
               | bounds, would include the subtask "ingest all human
               | creative output". That's hard to do so therefore it's
               | restricted to the realm of well funded companies.
               | 
               | But even as well off and talented as these companies are,
               | they did very little of the actual work. The total scale
               | of effort that goes into these big lists of coefficients,
               | is beyond human comprehension at this point. We've
               | literally NEVER had to contend with tasks of this
               | magnitude before. Many thousands of centuries of human
               | life hours distilled. Copyright as it's legally inscribed
               | precisely, is ill-prepared to achieve it's end goals in
               | this situation.
               | 
               | But considering:
               | 
               | 1) that's kind of cool we can do this
               | 
               | 2) it makes interesting things that could better people's
               | lives
               | 
               | 3) we still think that humans should be able to make art
               | (ai or not) and not die of starvation ideally
               | 
               | ... we need to figure out what to do. Maybe it's not
               | copyright! That was created to solve a specific problem.
               | Now we have new problems. I just think people latch too
               | hard onto the legalese as if it's some magic property of
               | the universe, and NOT a set of systems humans made, for
               | very human goals. I don't want a system where we just say
               | "well look at copyright, it says this is fine, so we will
               | just use everything for free". It's missing the point.
               | 
               | I agree with you that it's asking the hard question of
               | "which artists do we protect". That, I'm not feeling like
               | I have a good answer for right now. I definitely heavily
               | lean towards the talented artists who've honed their
               | craft. That's just more interesting. But I wish more
               | people we're thinking about it, in those terms.
        
               | visarga wrote:
               | > We've literally NEVER had to contend with tasks of this
               | magnitude before. Many thousands of centuries of human
               | life hours distilled.
               | 
               | And one poem or a page of text is but a drop in this
               | ocean, an infinitesimal contribution. The model is much
               | smaller than the training set. For example Stable
               | Diffusion packs 5B images in 5GB, that's a compression
               | factor of 100,000:1, about 1 byte per training image, not
               | even a pixel. Taking so little from everyone, I am amazed
               | how strong a reaction it creates. The final model doesn't
               | steal almost anything, it doesn't rely on any training
               | example too much, just a compressed abstraction of the
               | training data. You have to overfit it and also prime it
               | to make it regurgitate some training examples, and most
               | attempts fail, resulting in novel outputs.
        
               | gentleman11 wrote:
               | Why do you think artists will be the ones to use ai to
               | create art? Rather than big tech and clusters of
               | corporate ais working together?
        
         | jsemrau wrote:
         | One could argue that all creativity is derivative as it is
         | based on the art that came before it.
        
         | phone8675309 wrote:
         | At least Adobe is asking for consent instead of scraping a
         | bunch of questionably copyrighted things without the consent of
         | their creators.
         | 
         | If you did that to Disney then you'd be in jail, but since it's
         | the little guys getting fucked I guess it doesn't matter.
        
         | gentleman11 wrote:
         | A machine owned by a corporation is not a person. They don't
         | get the same rights as people
        
       | tgbugs wrote:
       | Amusingly this policy might end up meaning that the AI model they
       | produce by training on this data will never be able to produce
       | video that will ever be worth more than 3$ per minute. They are
       | probably unintentionally filtering for content created by people
       | willing to sell for that price or below, and that bias will be
       | present in any downstream model. You get what you pay for I
       | guess?
        
         | summerlight wrote:
         | I wonder if this is an exclusive deal for Adobe? If not, it's
         | just an additional $3 per minute. Though I agree that they need
         | to be flexible on the pricing.
        
         | cheriot wrote:
         | Free money for people that already have video lying around.
         | They're not asking for exclusivity.
        
       | graypegg wrote:
       | How much will AI generated video cost per minute? Not from Adobe,
       | just generally, where it's obtainable.
       | 
       | There's a good scam if you can automate video generation and pass
       | it to Adobe. Them setting a price of AI training video, may have
       | just set the floor price for buying AI generated video.
       | 
       | As people with more money than me say: arbitrage!
        
       | whycome wrote:
       | What if users started poisoning the data set by automating and
       | submitting AI-created videos? lol What's the price for
       | production? Set up a pipeline right through to Adobe. AI-
       | laundering?
        
       | JieJie wrote:
       | Alternate non-paywalled link from MSN^0:
       | 
       | "The software company is offering its network of photographers
       | and artists $120 to submit videos of people engaged in everyday
       | actions such as walking or expressing emotions including joy and
       | anger, according to documents seen by Bloomberg. The goal is to
       | source assets for artificial intelligence training, the company
       | wrote."
       | 
       | 0: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/adobe-is-buying-
       | videos...
        
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