[HN Gopher] Artists score major win in copyright case against AI...
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Artists score major win in copyright case against AI art generators
Author : KZerda
Score : 107 points
Date : 2024-08-15 18:43 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.hollywoodreporter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.hollywoodreporter.com)
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| There are no clean image models. Zero. Using today's model
| architectures, the problem of using non-expressly-permitted data
| for training is insurmountable. I welcome anyone more
| knowledgeable on the matter to go ahead and comment about a
| counterexample before downvoting.
|
| So if the artists prevail, image generators are donezo. Open
| source, proprietary, whatever. People saying otherwise just don't
| know enough about how they work.
|
| You have heard of Adobe's Firefly. It is not clean. Adobe uses
| CLIP, T5, or something for text conditioning. None of those
| things were trained on expressly permitted content. Go ahead and
| ask them.
|
| Maybe you have heard of Open Model Initiative. They are going
| going to use CLIP or T5. They have no alternative.
|
| There are not enough license bureau images to train a CLIP model,
| not enough expressly licensed text content to train T5. A CLIP
| model needs 2 billion images to perform well, not the 600m Adobe
| claims they have access to. It's right in the paper.
|
| Good luck training a valuable language model on only expressly
| permissioned content. You'd become a billionaire if you could
| keep such an architecture secret. And then when it does exist,
| such as with some translation models, well they underperform, so
| who uses them?
|
| What do people want? I don't really care about IP, I care about,
| who is allowed to make money? Is only Apple, who controls the
| devices and accounts, and therefore can really enforce anti-
| piracy, permitted to make money? Only parties with good legal
| representation? It's not so black and white, not so cut and
| dried, who the good guys and bad guys are. We already live with a
| huge glut of content and raised interest rates, which have been
| 100x more impactful to the bottom line - financial and creative -
| of working artists. Why aren't these artists demanding that the
| Fed drops rates, or that back catalog media be delisted to boost
| demand for new media? It's not that simple either! Presumably a
| lot of people using these image and video generators are
| narrative creators of a kind too, like video game developers,
| music video makers, etc. Are they also bad guys?
|
| There's no broad solution here, the legal victory here is
| definitely pyrrhic, but one thing's for sure: Apple, NVIDIA, Meta
| and Google will still be printing cash. The artists are
| advocating for a position that boils down to, "The only moral
| creative-economic status quo is my status quo."
| __loam wrote:
| Asking why the artists are mad at the corporations that are
| trying to profit off their labor without permission and not the
| fed or other artists is definitely a take.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| You are making a bad faith comment. There's no mystery why
| artists are mad at Stability and Midjourney. I agree that
| demanding lower interest rates would be ridiculous. That is
| my point. You could delete Midjourney, Stability, DALL-E3,
| etc. tomorrow, and it will still suck harder today to be a
| working artist than it did in 2021, when interest rates were
| lower and there were literally hundreds more TV series being
| produced, 2x more video games being made, than today.
|
| Why limit ourselves to turning back the clock on AI, on
| interest rates and content productivity, if we're going to
| play time machine fantasies? You could also go back in time
| and buy bitcoin, and be rich. I am mocking the _idea_ of
| turning back the clock, and you know it, and while anyone has
| a right to be angry about anything, and to engage in a time
| machine fantasy about anything, it ought to at least be a
| fantasy that makes sense and achieves some goals.
|
| Because the goal right now, "The smallest, most memetic
| sentiment of I'll show those corporations!" is kind of well-
| trodden, kind of old and tired. Brother, there are millions
| of people trying to do that every day. And when they achieve
| their goals of showing the big corporations, I cannot think
| of a single instance where all but the already lucky few -
| like these famous plaintiffs! - gain anything financially.
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| I appreciate the extent to which you've demonstrated
| whataboutism at its extremes, but I think we can take
| things even further. Let's suggest that artists direct
| their ire at the emergence of life itself from the raw
| materials of the universe, as that is, indisputably, the
| origin of all suffering.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| > Let's suggest that artists direct their ire at the
| emergence of life itself from the raw materials of the
| universe, as that is, indisputably, the origin of all
| suffering.
|
| Some artists do.
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| A keen observation. While artists may be made redundant,
| I doubt AI will ever achieve the depth of insight you've
| demonstrated in this thread.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I once trained a model from data from a simulator which I wrote
| myself. I think it's clean.
|
| Just sayin, zero is a strong claim.
| kfarr wrote:
| Yeah and as much as I may not be a big Adobe fan, they legit
| hold the rights to plenty of "clean" IP-compliant training
| material (OPs comment re generative text not withstanding)
| ljlolel wrote:
| Adobe also trained on output of midjourney
|
| https://www.cdpinstitute.org/news/adobe-firefly-partly-
| train....
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| > (OPs comment re generative text not withstanding)
|
| That's like saying, "Not withstanding the part of this that
| is true, but would be inconvenient to the idea that Adobe
| has something invaluable."
|
| You can't train a useful text-to-image model without some
| kind of text conditioning approach. All the existing text
| conditioning approaches cannot be developed using only the
| data they have. How else can I put this?
|
| The whole insight here is that the idea of "clean" is
| already kind of magical, that people want "clean" image
| models but they don't really understand the meaning of
| "clean" - or rather, nobody wants to take leadership in
| educating how these models work. People want good vibes,
| aesthetically pleasing "clean" image generators, not
| actually technologically clean image generators.
|
| But this court case would outlaw the good vibes "clean"
| generators, and since there are no technologically clean
| image generators, that's it for image generators.
| jononor wrote:
| That CLIP is not data / sample efficient is well know, and
| research to improve this is ongoing. Here is a 2021 paper which
| outperforms a CLIP baseline, with 7x less data.
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.05208 I am sure there are more
| recent papers also, possibly with larger gains. I do not see
| why Adobe would not be able to make a good CLIP like model with
| 0.6 billion images.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| > I do not see why Adobe would not be able to make a good
| CLIP like model with 0.6 billion images.
|
| Unity and Epic have tried and failed to do so. There are lots
| of talented people out there at companies with lots of money.
| Adobe, Unity and Epic aren't the only ones with licensing
| bureau images either. And anyway, did you consider that the
| vast majority of content in licensing bureaus is garbage? Or
| that the captions are garbage? Or that maybe they have wildly
| overstated the number of images they have?
|
| Adobe hasn't published anything about their architecture or
| approach for the simple reason that it is not clean in the
| way they advertise their models to be.
| drdeca wrote:
| CLIP is just for an embedding for images and text, right?
|
| I might be getting mixed up... The diffusion part is just
| trained with the images, and the guidance part... is trained to
| produce the image when given the additional information of the
| embedding of the text? I find it difficult to imagine how the
| information from the CLIP embedding of the text could result in
| much information about the images that CLIP was trained with,
| ending up in the generated images?
| minimaxir wrote:
| The diffusion process is conditioned on CLIP text, which
| works better (in theory) since the encoded text is aligned
| with images.
| itishappy wrote:
| An understanding of language is important for conveying and
| achieving intent.
|
| Imagine working with an artist in a multi-step refinement
| process to produce some desired artwork. Regardless of the
| artists skill, you'll probably get better results if you're
| able to communicate well.
|
| That's kinda how the diffusion process works. It starts with
| noise, generates a rough output, then iteratively refines it.
| The classifier is part of the refinement process so it knows
| what to change.
|
| "Hey, you've added a tree-looking-thing on your beach-
| looking-thing, you should add some palm fronds so it better
| fits the setting."
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| > CLIP is just for an embedding for images and text, right?
|
| Yes, which is what makes text-to-image generation possible.
| You can go ahead and try using Stable Diffusion models, or
| even the incredibly high quality Flux, with no text
| "embedding" (or whatever you want to call it), and judge for
| yourself if those outputs are useful.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| The level of cleanliness you talk about matters for FOSS people
| like us. The kinds of risks Adobe's Firefly customers might
| care about might be lower. They probably don't care that the
| model knows what the text string "C3-PO" means, but absolutely
| don't want it drawing random bits and pieces of other
| copyrighted images without being prompted for them.
|
| My understanding was that CLIP handled prompt comprehension -
| like, there's a set of vectors in CLIP space for "gold humanoid
| robot" that "C3-PO" would map to from the small language model,
| and pictures of C3-PO would map to from the image model in
| CLIP. But the U-net doing the actual image diffusion wouldn't
| know how to fill that part of CLIP space with the specific
| copyrightable representation of the Star Wars character unless
| it'd been trained on the same set of images. It might
| generalize how to draw a gold robot, which is not a
| copyrightable image feature, but not C3-PO specifically.
|
| It's entirely plausible that a court might say training CLIP on
| copyrighted material is OK, but training the VAE or U-net
| layers is not, based on the technical capability of each layer
| to reproduce trained-on material.
|
| The moral arguments being bandied about by artists are broader
| than copyright. Firefly - or even a fully public-domain-trained
| model - cannot satisfy them. Being trained on is a moral
| insult, but they would still be insulted by AI bros and
| corporate stooges boasting about how AI can eliminate entire
| classes of artistic work. To be clear, the AI models we
| currently have - as well as those we will have in the future -
| are not useful tools for artists. The problem is not a lack of
| training data or the provenance of said data, it's the fact
| that text is not a good interface for visual artists.
|
| It is, however, a very good interface for people who want
| artists to go away. What AI art is doing in 2024 is
| _satisficing_ - i.e. providing viewers and users of art with a
| good-enough market substitute.
|
| The bigger questions you raise about ownership are orthogonal
| to the questions of who gets to own the model. The artists
| opposing AI rightfully want to see tech companies bleed,
| because tech companies are the same companies who sold their
| bosses on the tools that steal their wages - e.g. streaming
| services that pay fractions of a cent if you're lucky. If AI
| were to prevail the alternative would then be to engage in
| copyright laundry in protest. e.g. "If you won't protect us
| against AI, then we'll weaponize it against the media
| conglomerates who want to use it to fire us with."
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > There are no clean image models. Zero. Using today's model
| architectures, the problem of using non-expressly-permitted
| data for training is insurmountable.
|
| "This would be hard to do while respecting licenses on creative
| works" is not an argument for being permitted to ignore those
| licenses.
|
| I don't like copyright, but I strongly believe in everyone
| following the same rules. If AI companies are finding that
| copyright is inconvenient: welcome to the club, Open Source
| developers have been saying that for decades, and others have
| been saying it for centuries. There shouldn't be a special
| asymmetric exception for AI training that lets AI ignore
| licenses while everyone else cannot. By all means remove
| copyright restrictions for _everyone_ , for _all_ uses.
|
| > So if the artists prevail, image generators are donezo.
|
| And for exactly that reason I hope they prevail. Model training
| can start over and do it right this time.
| Dwedit wrote:
| I'm sure the artists don't give any care about the parts of the
| training that aren't directly related to generating images,
| such as models which generate captions for images.
| minimaxir wrote:
| It was very surprising OpenAI wasn't named as a defendant in
| this suit due to CLIP.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| The plaintiffs barely understand how any of this stuff works.
| The judge barely understands how this stuff works.
| tivert wrote:
| > There are not enough license bureau images to train a CLIP
| model, not enough expressly licensed text content to train T5.
| A CLIP model needs 2 billion images to perform well, not the
| 600m Adobe claims they have access to. It's right in the paper.
|
| Not an expert on this, but I wonder:
|
| 1) how many images you could create/buy/tag with a billion
| dollar investment, and
|
| 2) if you could lower the training requirements with targeted
| training data creation (e.g. get low-priced/amateur models to
| come in singly and in groups for an hour each and work through
| a catalog of poses/costumes designed to result very good
| generative model for "people").
| lancesells wrote:
| Imagine OpenAI put all their code and all their work in a
| public repo so someone can modify it and sell it without
| permission. Oh wait... they wouldn't do that.
|
| > Presumably a lot of people using these image and video
| generators are narrative creators of a kind too, like video
| game developers, music video makers, etc. Are they also bad
| guys?
|
| Was their a dearth of video games or music videos before
| generative AI became mainstream? Yeah, creating takes resources
| and time and effort and dedication, usually for very little
| reward.
|
| If these companies can't exist without stealing everyone else's
| work than maybe they should hire creators with their billions
| or license the material.
| ijk wrote:
| Where are you getting 2 billion from? The original CLIP paper
| says:
|
| > We demonstrate that the simple pre-training task of
| predicting which caption goes with which image is an efficient
| and scalable way to learn SOTA image representations from
| scratch on a dataset of 400 million (image, text) pairs
| collected from the internet. [1]
|
| OpenCLIP was trained on more images, but the datasets like
| LAION-2B are kind of low-quality in terms of labeling; I find
| it plausible that a better dataset could outperform it. I'm
| pretty sure that the stock images Adobe is drawing from have
| better labeling already.
|
| I agree that this is likely to backfire on artists, but part of
| that is that I expect the outcome to be that large corporations
| will license private datasets and open research will starve.
|
| [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.00020
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| The 400m images in the paper yield the ~40% zero shot
| ImageNet accuracy in the chart they publish.
|
| That level of performance is generally not good enough for
| text conditioning of DDIMs.
|
| The published CLIP checkpoints, and later in the paper, they
| talk about performance that is almost twice as good at 76.2%.
| That data point, notably, does not appear in the chart. So
| the published checkpoints, and the performance they talk
| about later in the paper, are clearly trained on way more
| data.
|
| How much data? Let's take a guess. I got the data points from
| the chart they have, and I went and fit y=a log_[?]b (c+dx) +
| K to the points in the paper: a[?]12.31
| b[?]0.18 c[?]24.16 d[?]0.81
| K[?]-10.47
|
| Then I got 7.55b images to get a performance of 76%. The fit
| is R^2 = 0.993, I don't have any good intuitions for why this
| is so high, it could very well be real, and there's no reason
| to anchor on "7.55b is a lot higher than LAION-4b", although
| they could just concatenate a social media image dataset of
| 3b images with LAION-4b, and boom, there's 7b.
|
| OpenCLIP reproduced this work after all with 2b images and
| got 79.5%. But e.g. Flux and SD3 do not use OpenCLIP's
| checkpoints. So that one performance figure isn't
| representative of how bad OpenCLIP's checkpoints are versus
| how good OpenAI's checkpoints are. It's not straightforward
| to fit, it's way more than 400m.
|
| Another observation is that there are plenty of Hugging Face
| spaces with crappy ResNet and crappy small-dataset trained-
| from-scratch CLIP conditioning to try. Sometimes it actually
| looks as crappy as Adobe's outputs do, there's a little bit
| of a chance that Adobe tried and failed to create its own
| CLIP checkpoint on the crappy amount of data they had.
| dhosek wrote:
| Frankly, I'm not convinced that a world in which generative AIs
| based on unlicensed data have to shut down is a bad thing. You
| want to create art, you learn to draw or hire someone who can.
| You want to create a story, you learn to write or hire someone
| who can.
| davexunit wrote:
| > So if the artists prevail, image generators are donezo
|
| Good. If it's impossible to make this particular type of
| image/whatever (it's not art) generator without exploiting all
| artists then that it shouldn't be allowed to be made.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| > Using today's model architectures, the problem of using non-
| expressly-permitted data for training is insurmountable... So
| if the artists prevail, image generators are donezo.
|
| This doesn't follow. Using 2014's model architectures, image
| generators were also impossible, but that didn't prevent
| progress. The field is moving absurdly rapidly. Suggesting that
| because we can't do it one way today, therefore we can't to it
| that way tomorrow is like saying that because we couldn't do it
| one way yesterday, therefore we can't do it that way today.
|
| It's wild to trample people's livelihoods because researchers
| haven't figured out how not to yet, especially when that kind
| of research is making such quick progress. I'd rather wait a
| few years and have the best of both worlds.
| throwup238 wrote:
| _> The court declined to dismiss copyright infringement claims
| against the AI companies._
|
| That "major win" being allowed to proceed with the case at all.
| All they've done is clear the first hurdle meant to kill
| frivolous lawsuits before they get to discovery. Their other
| claims were dismissed:
|
| _> Claims against the companies for breach of contract and
| unjust enrichment, plus violations of the Digital Millennium
| Copyright Act for removal of information identifying intellectual
| property, were dismissed. The case will move forward to
| discovery, where the artists could uncover information related to
| the way in which the AI firms harvested copyrighted materials
| that were then used to train large language models._
| __loam wrote:
| I'm very excited for discovery.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Didn't the Enron dataset that's now part of the Pile become
| public during discovery too? Some great image datasets might
| drop.
| throwup238 wrote:
| IANAL but documents don't become public during discovery,
| they only become public if they're filed with the court
| (unless they're sealed). The vast majority of information
| dredged up during discovery remains confidential.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| But things like datasets are massive and structure is
| important. Do they retain them digitally with the same
| original structure or do they transform them into some
| kind of massive PDF?
| williamcotton wrote:
| If the experts are playing hardball then transformations
| of any and everything into PDFs is an effective tactic.
| singleshot_ wrote:
| No. See the various state rules of civil procedure
| concerning the presumptive and requested form of
| production of electronically stored information. An
| example is Ariz. R. Civ. P. 26.1(c)(3).
| nomel wrote:
| Related, I worked at a company that had a standards body
| forced information sharing agreement with a competitor.
| One of the requirements was that documentation had to be
| shared.
|
| Unfortunately, our documentation was a very well
| formatted with links and was searchable, making it easy
| to navigate. So in an act of malicious compliance, the
| few thousand page document was printed then scanned to
| low res, jpg artifact filled, crooked, but still legible,
| set of images that were shared as a fairly useless pdf.
| ronsor wrote:
| The dataset is already public. That's the only reason they
| were able to file this time-wasting lawsuit anyway.
| polotics wrote:
| Why do you think it is time wasting? Is it because of the
| wasted time of all the artists having gone to the bother
| of producing art that can now be approximated at the
| press of a button?
| ronsor wrote:
| It's a waste of time because the majority of their claims
| were poorly constructed, disingenuous, and subsequently
| thrown out.
|
| All this has done is incentivize AI research companies to
| be even more closed and opaque.
| mc32 wrote:
| Will the plaintiffs get similar relief to the one IP holders
| got from Megaupload, I wonder?
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| Here's the PDF of the court order:
| https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.40...
|
| (The "major win" in this case is that the court partially denied
| the defendants' motions to dismiss, so the case can now proceed
| to discovery.)
| warkdarrior wrote:
| If these AI companies get punished, this will be a great win for
| open-source model training. Looking forward to train models at
| home, maybe over a distributed, P2P network of open-source
| enthusiasts, using images off the Internet. Harder to sue and
| punish a decentralized ML-training coop!
| maxwell wrote:
| But isn't this about LAION, an open source model? Looks like
| they're going after Stability, not OpenAI or Anthropic.
|
| Maybe this is more about stifling open source models.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Apparently also anything training from it so DeviantArt
| (which reuploaded the model) and Midjourney (which sounds
| like it did a transference training) are involved.
|
| The reason the lawsuit feels weird is that transformative use
| is pretty clearly fair use:
|
| > In computer- and Internet-related works, the transformative
| characteristic of the later work is often that it provides
| the public with a benefit not previously available to it,
|
| I mean if genAI isn't this I'm not sure what would be. The
| public gets a benefit of having a computer generate art from
| spoken speech and that requires quite a substantial
| transformation of a data corpus of labelled images.
|
| Indeed, there's lots of art at Art Basel that depicts Disney
| characters in various ways to critique Disney & that's a much
| more direct copying of a different artists style (& even more
| direct trademark infringement). It really feels like artists
| are trying to have it both ways because this threatens their
| livelihood.
| segasaturn wrote:
| The plaintiffs are claiming that their art-style is copyrighted
| intellectual property and that they can sue image generators for
| damages if it creates an output that resembles theirs. Regardless
| of what you think about AI art, the precedent of this case will
| be a huge expansion of the power of IP and copyright law in the
| US mainly to the benefit of corporations - imagine Disney
| copyrighting the look of their 3D animated Pixar movies and suing
| anybody who tries to make a cartoony 3D animated movie for IP
| theft.
| seanhunter wrote:
| That's not what they're claiming.
|
| They're claiming that the models were trained on copyright
| material[1] and that training models doesn't constitute fair
| use[2]. Their claims are in the first couple of pages of the
| court ruling.
|
| The claim is not that the style is copyrightable but that
| producing work in the same style could affect the market for
| the original product which is one of the parts of the four
| factor test for fair use. [3]
|
| [1] Which ldo they were
|
| [2] This is the big one and will have enormous ramifications if
| it ends up with the court ruling substantially in their favour
|
| [3] https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-
| factors/
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| > and that training models doesn't constitute fair use
|
| How can it not constitute fair use? They both made no copies
| of that data (copyright infringement) nor did they commit
| actual theft by stealing the data from some vault. Everything
| else is permitted. For that matter, this is equivalent to
| some human artist studying a piece of art and then starting
| to create art in that same style too... is that no longer
| fair use?
|
| There are some court rulings so bad that the judge should
| just be removed from the bench.
|
| > could affect the market for the original product
|
| Oh, that makes more sense. The "negative movie reviews for
| newly released films is copyright infringement" argument.
| Nice.
| akersten wrote:
| Even the fair use argument is putting the cart before the
| horse. I would think these plaintiffs need to convince a
| court that the works are derivative first, and iff they are
| derivative, then the fair use argument can be made (that
| the reproduction is not a copyright infringement, {because
| e.g., the result is substantially different from the
| input}).
|
| Asking "is it fair use for a [human/computer] to [study/be
| trained on] copyrighted works" simply does not make sense
| as a fair use question because the answer has always been
| "looking at a painting and internalizing it has nothing to
| do with fair use, of course studying the old masters is
| permitted." I'm far from convinced the answer should be any
| different here.
|
| So to me they're barking up a non productive tree by trying
| to essentially say "the entire model is copyright
| infringement." Hopefully a judge/jury is not convinced. IMO
| it should be case by case for any given artifact, whether
| human or machine produced, does it infringe. Obviously a
| harder hill to climb for the plaintiffs.
| ghaff wrote:
| A lot of people also conflate plagiarism with copyright
| infringement. There are a lot of ways I can plagiarize--
| or at least create works that obviously draw very heavily
| from other work without attribution--that may be very
| frowned on, especially in an academic setting, but are
| not actually infringing.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I think im with the artists on this one. They had to copy
| the data for model training, which I think constitutes a
| commercial use.
|
| If I release software under a non-commercial use license,
| it is still IP infringement if a company uses it in their
| business process.
| pavon wrote:
| They are claiming both those things - copyright infringement
| and a trade dress infringement under the Lanham Act.
|
| That said, their trade dress claim doesn't go so far to claim
| ownership of an entire style, it is the use of that style in
| association with their names that is the problem. For example
| "draw a stick figure cartoon dog" is fine but "draw a dog in
| the style of xkcd" is not, by their reasoning. And you
| certainly can't advertise that the model can make images in
| the style of these artists in ways that might be interpreted
| as the artists being involved with the company.
| reactor wrote:
| Humans acquire a significant amount of knowledge (or get trained
| on) by learning from the work of others. If companies can face
| legal repercussions for training models on materials from
| elsewhere, a similar argument could be made for individuals.
| coffeecloud wrote:
| To me it sounds like this argument is claiming that "training
| models" is legally equivalent to "training humans".
|
| So are there other examples of a human being allowed to do
| something where a machine made by a human is not allowed to do
| that thing?
|
| I am allowed to go to a movie and remember every detail and
| tell it to my friends, but my camcorder is not allowed to do
| that.
| slavik81 wrote:
| If you redrew The Lion King frame by frame from memory, it
| would still be copyright infringement if you redistributed it
| to your friends. The difference is how similar your
| recreation is to the original, not whether it was done by a
| human or by a machine.
| epoxia wrote:
| Funnily enough, The Lion King is a property that has its
| own controversy of plagiarism of a different animation,
| Kimba The White Lion. But, I guess if Disney does it it's
| okay...
| jncfhnb wrote:
| If you drew it shittily from memory it would still be
| copyright infringement. As would retelling it.
| Discoverability of the infringement and the irrelevance of
| the violation is the reason you don't get sued
| p1necone wrote:
| This argument seems ridiculous to me but it's hard to explain
| exactly why.
|
| People are people, LLMs are... not people - it seems pretty
| obvious to me that humans learning from seeing things is a
| basic fact of nature, and that someone feeding petabytes of
| copyrighted material into an AI model to fully automate
| generation of art is _obviously_ copyright infringement.
|
| I can see the argument making more sense if we actually manage
| to synthesize consciousness, but we don't have anything
| anywhere near that at the moment.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| That's not obvious to me. I suppose it depends on your
| familiarity with copyright law, as opposed to the noun
| copyright. I typically don't find oft repeated concepts to
| have any bearing on the legal reality.
| gedy wrote:
| > LLMs are... not people
|
| Of course, but LLMs are tools used by people - they don't
| just spit out Taylor Swift songs or whatever automatically
| and wipe out human jobs. The laws we have already apply to
| people (whom use any tool they want) and what they do with
| creations, and whether copyright applies or whatever.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| >and that someone feeding petabytes of copyrighted material
| into an AI model to fully automate generation of art is
| obviously copyright infringement.
|
| It becomes a little less obvious when you learn that the
| models which had petabytes of images "go into it" are <10GB
| in size.
|
| You have 5 million artists on one hand saying "My art is in
| there being used" and you have a 10GB file full of matrix
| vectors saying "There are no image files in here" on the
| other. Both are kind of right. ish. sort of.
| 627467 wrote:
| is distributing a zip file of copyrighted material
| infringement? if it is I guess the argument is distributing
| this <10GB model that can _unzip_ into copyrighted material
| is infringement.
|
| disclaimer: I'm just devil advocating. I don't believe this
| discussion is productive. the time for IP protection to be
| necessary for social good has gone and now it's just a time
| wasting idea
| polotics wrote:
| No the <10GB size of the model does not imply any less
| copyright infrigement is occuring IMHO. The fact that there
| is a very efficient compression involved does not change
| the fact that a copy of the copyrighted material, that copy
| being not compressed in any way, was input into the process
| that generated the model, in breach of the copyrighted
| material's copyright.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| It's not copyright infringement to copy somebody's style.
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| I didn't realize you could train yourself on a lifetime's worth
| of YT videos every single day. (If salty sally had a problem
| with this statement, it's in the other articles on the HN front
| page right now, gf) The storage, recall, and scale required
| have always made this interpretation laughable - or rather, the
| kind of argument that seeks to privilege tools (and
| corporations) over people.
| silver_silver wrote:
| That human would become another artist whereas the model could
| potentially replace the entire industry. There's a comparison
| to the Industrial Revolution to be made but it's not one which
| convinces me. Making artistic dream jobs even more impossible
| to land is so cynical and shallow. It's like building a
| supermarket in Yosemite.
| artninja1988 wrote:
| Definitely concerning and I hope model trainers win. If push
| comes to shove developers can always go to jurisdictions with
| more forward looking copyright exemptions regarding text and data
| mining like Israel and Japan though.
| CaptainFever wrote:
| Don't forget the EU and SG! :)
| throwaway4837 wrote:
| You can have a kid, that kid can grow up to be a musician
| inspired by Taylor Swift, likely with some of their musical
| output having depended on Taylor's input. That's perfectly legal.
| But in a possible future, you could produce an AGI that isn't
| allowed to listen to Taylor Swift, never allowed to be inspired
| by anything from Taylor's songs?
| RangerScience wrote:
| AGI, I would hope, would be governed by different laws -
| including worker's rights - so that the economic relationships
| between all parties is more similar to human relationships than
| LLMs.
|
| In other words: turning Taylor Swift into a software product
| should be a different legal situation than raising a digital
| consciousness.
| XMPPwocky wrote:
| The existence of sentient AGIs would certainly have wide-
| ranging impacts on the law!
|
| This case is not about sentient AGIs.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I think it is more nuanced than that.
|
| Imagine you write a book and release it with a non-commercial
| use license, but a company copies it and uses it for employee
| training.
|
| Imagine you wrote software and released it with a non-
| commercial use license, but the company includes it in their
| for-profit workflow.
| wiredfool wrote:
| Imagine you wrote a book, released it using a publisher who
| put it on dead trees, and sold it in e-book format. And
| imagine that a whole industry does this, and doesn't release
| the books for free to copy use in any format. Which is not
| hard to do, because that's basically the current situation
| for the publishing industry.
|
| Now imagine that all of that was used to train an LLM without
| compensation to the authors and publishers who paid the
| authors. This is apparently current situation with some of
| the training dataset.
|
| While at the same time, libraries have to pay per e-loan.
| Archive.org can't do a 1:1 dead tree format shift loan to
| ebook.
|
| I get that the tech industry wants everyone else's
| information to be free to use and their products to generate
| money enough for big exits and big salaries, but at some
| point the optics look pretty bad.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| Sounds like information would finally be free, just like it
| always wanted
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| sounds like you are projecting _your_ desires on an
| abstract concept.
| polotics wrote:
| Do you produce information as part of your work? Do you
| expect to get paid for this work?
| rurp wrote:
| The notion that a large scale generative AI system should be
| viewed and treated the same as a human child legitimately makes
| no sense to me.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| As always, it's not what the thing is but what you do with it.
| If you click a spotify link and dance around your kitchen
| that's okay. If you click a spotify link and put it into a
| commercial it's not okay. Same thing for your scenarios. The
| legality question is about what your kid _does_ with the music
| they heard.
| aabajian wrote:
| IANAL. Is it legal to create derivatives of copyright work and
| then post them on public online forums? For example, I can
| certainly _write_ , "Mickey Mouse got food poisoning from his Big
| Mac." But, if I ask an AI generator to "Make a picture of Mickey
| Mouse getting food poison at McDonald's", could I post the
| resulting picture?
| radley wrote:
| The context is generating images based explicitly on
| intellectual property. The problem is that most AI image
| generators allow IP as terms and/or they consumed IP to build
| their model, so they will return IP-based artworks.
|
| If you're a business using the image and used IP terms in your
| prompt, then you'd need permissions from both parties (Disney,
| McDonald's) before you post it. If you're writing about AI
| rights, or making a comment on social media, then less likely
| you'll need it.
|
| If your prompt was a cartoon mouse gets food poison at a fast
| food joint, you're off the hook. But if it returns Mickey Mouse
| at McDonalds, then the AI generator is still on the hook for
| using IP as a source.
|
| At least, that's where this is all going.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| >At least, that's where this is all going.
|
| Not really, because that would still be a loss for artists.
| Where they are trying to steer the ship is to "training on IP
| is copyright violation".
|
| Artists are looking to stop AI from taking their jobs. An AI
| generator with an IP filter on it's output will still very
| much be a threat to their work.
| archontes wrote:
| I agree that interested parties are trying to steer the
| ship there. I just don't see the legal arguments that will
| get them there.
|
| Given the fact that images are transmitted to a person in a
| manner that doesn't violate copyright (and even if they
| are, the transmitter, not receiver is guilty of
| infringement), training an AI is not something that
| copyright law limits.
|
| The AI weights that result are about the farthest thing
| from a derivative work, as the weights as a separate
| object, don't seem to contain the slightest remnant of the
| original work.
| archontes wrote:
| I am also not a lawyer; I have some background and training in
| IP law as it pertains to engineering.
|
| As far as I can tell, the image you describe and your example
| sentence are closer than you might think to each other. Mickey
| Mouse is a copyrighted character, and Disney could certainly
| claim infringement for both. Whether you have a fair use claim
| is down to the tenets of fair use, and whether they sue you is
| down to their estimation of how likely it is it'd be profitable
| for them to do so.
|
| So what is fair use?
| https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107
|
| Put simply, you have to argue about it in court and decide on a
| case by case basis, but the factors are:
|
| The nature of use, such as for profit vs. non-profit.
|
| The nature of the copyrighted work. Your art might be considere
| literary criticism. How central to that message is Mickey
| Mouse?
|
| The amount and substantiality of the copyrighted work appearing
| in your work. Mickey Mouse is the sole feature, so large.
|
| How likely is it that your Mickey Mouse creation will serve as
| a substitute for people consuming normal Mickey Mouse content?
| gpm wrote:
| Aren't some versions of Mickey Mouse out of copyright now...
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| So...which is the best art generator I can download and run
| locally today?
|
| Or are there a few top ones specific to art style(photorealistic,
| scenery, pixel art, vectors, etc)?
| CaptainFever wrote:
| Flux by Black Forest Labs, by far.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| Flux is the best base model and you grab small fine tune Loras
| for specific styles
| davexunit wrote:
| It's so obvious to me that machine learning models are derivative
| works of their training set. If they weren't, then why would
| these companies fight so hard to say otherwise? They _need_ that
| training data to make their product, so they should pay the
| licensing fees for it! 10 years ago, when I worked on a machine
| learning model for my employer, it was unthinkable to train on
| data we did not have the rights to use. But now it 's all fair
| game because OpenAI executives would make a little less money
| otherwise? They certainly aren't giving up any of their own
| copyright in return. It's a very transparent transfer of power
| and money from regular people to the bosses.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| > It's so obvious to me that machine learning models are
| derivative works of their training set.
|
| Okay, but narrative creators watch movies and listen to music
| and read books too. Many do indeed "file the serial numbers
| off" other people's work and publish something else, that makes
| them money and not the original creators. Does one instance of
| "filing the serial numbers off" by one author mean that no
| authors anywhere are allowed to write any books as soon as
| they've read "a bunch" of other books? I get what you are
| saying, but it's not so obvious what the right policy is. It is
| very hard to make it consistent when "AI" is substituted with
| "human," and it's not so obvious if "AI" is a distinct class
| from human, because it is after all, something that only exists
| because a programmer somewhere wrote and operated it.
| Retric wrote:
| The issue here is that the AI model _itself_ is a derivative
| work.
|
| Further, they will very much recreate things the've seen many
| examples of. Recreating "Mona Lisa" isn't a problem, but
| recreating "Iron Man" is. Individual artists may not know how
| to prompt the system to recreate their work, but looking at
| the training sets is going to help quite a bit.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| No, the issue is that it makes outputs that compete with
| artists, and that is a problem if you go and make a fair
| use argument for appropriating copyrighted works.
|
| If I were to secretly use an image generator, just for my
| own purposes, trained on public data, the plaintiffs would
| say it is just as illegal.
|
| The rub is, do you know who else makes work that competes
| with artists? Other artists! It still kind of goes down on
| some vibesy stuff that I don't know if the law has a
| straight answer to. And for what it's worth, the Andy
| Warhol v. Goldsmith decision was about artists competing
| with other artists - this is the decision that has created
| an opening to challenge fair use. I just wonder why limit
| ourselves to the peculiarities of that case, why not open
| all forms of competition between artists to litigation over
| their influences and processes?
| Retric wrote:
| How the model is used isn't relevant if creating it was
| already infringement. Training on works creates something
| of value and artists want to be able to prevent that
| training without compensation. There's a long history of
| case law around just how much of someone's work can be
| copied before it's a problem. But here it's literally the
| entire work being used so 'how much' is just everything.
|
| The points you bring up are also relevant but artists
| don't want to look through a billion individual images to
| see if that specific image happens to infringe on their
| work.
|
| Edit: Wrote the response to a comment that got deleted
| before I posted presumably because I edited this one:
| _IMO many commentators are getting this wrong.
|
| "the less likely it is that the appropriation will serve
| as a substitute for the original work or its plausible
| derivatives, shrinking the market opportunities for the
| copyrighted work" https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/2
| 2pdf/21-869_87ad.pdf
|
| The form of these models is very different, but the
| purpose is to create directly competing works. Each
| individual output may not directly infringe with a
| specific work, but the goal of the model very much is._
| paulddraper wrote:
| Of course they are derivative.
|
| The question is whether they are _transformative_.
|
| Right or wrong, the bar for transformative use is probably
| lower than you think.
|
| Artists are the beneficiaries of this, as they can riff on
| popular works for inspiration, recognizability, social
| commentary.
|
| Given the existing case law, I don't see a ruling against AI
| companies as likely.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| > Given the existing case law, I don't see a ruling against
| AI companies as likely.
|
| Huh? Every corporate IP lawyer seems to think Andy Warhol
| Foundation v. Goldsmith has foreclosed the fair use defense,
| and that there isn't much to argue by AI companies to use
| work without express permission for training.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| > If they weren't, then why would these companies fight so hard
| to say otherwise?
|
| What kind of looney logic is this?
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| needing the training data has zero bearing on if they are
| derivative works. "derivative works" it a term of art with a
| specific meaning.
|
| I think the derivative work argument is a dead end. However, AI
| companies did violate use licenses when they first used the
| data for commercial purpose of training the models.
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