Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Copyright infringement in AI art

technollama.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 155 posts

Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#21

Post by tgv »

olladecarne wrote: post #11

ML revolutionized translation a long time ago and the demand and pay for translators went down. It also used the works of thousands of humans who translated text and they never saw a dime. Copyright applies to translations so we've already gone through something similar. The same will happen with art and every other medium that ML touches. I have a love/hate relationship with ML because of this. It seems that there w…

That the translators "never saw a dime" isn't accurate. A large corpus of parallel texts is supplied by the EU, which pays its translators and then publishes the documents for free. Other parallel corpora include manuals. While there's definitely copyright on that, it doesn't lie with the translators.

Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#22

Post by rvnx »

eru wrote: post #9
Imnimo wrote: post #3

I'm not copyright expert, but I would have imagined the answer is relatively straightforward: if an image would be infringing if drawn by a human, it's also infringing if drawn by a model, and similarly for non-infringing. Does the manner in which the image is generated play into whether it infringes a copyright?

> Does the manner in which the image is generated play into whether it infringes a copyright? Yes, it does. Let's leave AI out for a moment. If you lock yourself into your room with no Internet access, and you draw (or write etc) something independently that just happens to look exactly like some already existing copyright-ed work, you are still not infringing any copyrights. If you produced the same work by making a…

Wait, if you draw Pikachu or Homer Simpson from your memory, even without access to internet, you are still infringing the rights of the holders of the characters. How is it different than OpenAI or Midjourney drawing pictures of Homer Simpson from their database/"memory" ?

Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#23

Post by stemlord »

thriftwy wrote: post #13

What I'm dreaming of is an AI which can make any song covered by any performer or band in history of music. Totally doable but would likely put you on the most wanted list above all the drug lords.

I'm dreaming of an AI that can determine whether a song was AI-generated or is truly one degree from human hands

Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#25

Post by nl »

verdverm wrote: post #18
nl wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes they probably can be trademarked. But a big question is why? Trademarks are very expensive. It makes sense for a company logo that was AI generated, but spending 100K+ for very limited protection of a piece of art seems questionable.

Trademarks are actually much cheaper than that, I paid a few thousand dollars for mine. The price range your quoting is more typical of patents

Was it international? And in how many categories?

It adds up very quickly.

Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#26

Post by martopix »

avian wrote: post #19
olladecarne wrote: post #11

ML revolutionized translation a long time ago and the demand and pay for translators went down. It also used the works of thousands of humans who translated text and they never saw a dime. Copyright applies to translations so we've already gone through something similar. The same will happen with art and every other medium that ML touches. I have a love/hate relationship with ML because of this. It seems that there w…

> ML revolutionized translation a long time ago and the demand and pay for translators went down. ML translation also caused a noticeable drop in the average quality of translated text in my experience. Companies now ship machine-translated manuals for minor languages that are often little more than gibberish. Human translators weren't perfect - for example, often you could see that the translator didn't know the ter…

I disagree with the first part, I remember home appliances made in Asia in the 90s that came with completely ridiculous manuals, possibly translated with a dictionary and little else. Machine translation can really be good if used properly. Of course I wouldn't use it to translate literature.

Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#27

Post by soulofmischief »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #17
olladecarne wrote: post #11

ML revolutionized translation a long time ago and the demand and pay for translators went down. It also used the works of thousands of humans who translated text and they never saw a dime. Copyright applies to translations so we've already gone through something similar. The same will happen with art and every other medium that ML touches. I have a love/hate relationship with ML because of this. It seems that there w…

> I hope someone can engineer a new economic system that works for what's coming. What's coming is post-scarcity for all kinds of intellectual work. There will be nothing to economize: supply of both labor and product will be infinite. I don't want corporations engineering a made up economy where there is none.

I predict a new system arises in which styles themselves are copyrightable and eligible for royalties.

Human-sourced styles will become trend, as people seek originality to establish identity in an otherwise indistinguishable world of machine-driven experiences.

Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#28

Post by greysphere »

RobertoG wrote: post #15
fxtentacle wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh but you can. I've scanned the LAION training data set (which was used for mini DALLE, Imagen, and Disco Diffusion) and I recognized several images that long to business partners of mine. How does an AI know what Obama looks like? It memorized thousands of images of him, most of which were by professional photographers and, hence, copyrighted.

I think the problem is with the definition of copyright. It doesn't apply to the current environment. It could even be the case, that it never made sense in the first place, and only now, we are realizing. I have never seen Obama in real life. If I can draw him because I know him from copyrighted works, is my draw copyright infringement?

Are you copying one or more of those works? If so, yes. If you aren't, then no. How do you know? Well as an artist, after thousands of hours of copying, and thousands of hours of drawing from imagination, you know which activity you are doing. As an untrained person, you might not know, but the quality/value is so low no one cares.

Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#29

Post by vintermann »

avian wrote: post #19
olladecarne wrote: post #11

ML revolutionized translation a long time ago and the demand and pay for translators went down. It also used the works of thousands of humans who translated text and they never saw a dime. Copyright applies to translations so we've already gone through something similar. The same will happen with art and every other medium that ML touches. I have a love/hate relationship with ML because of this. It seems that there w…

> ML revolutionized translation a long time ago and the demand and pay for translators went down. ML translation also caused a noticeable drop in the average quality of translated text in my experience. Companies now ship machine-translated manuals for minor languages that are often little more than gibberish. Human translators weren't perfect - for example, often you could see that the translator didn't know the ter…

That sort of translation always had a lemon problem. How do you know if the translation to Portuguese is any good, if you don't speak Portuguese and don't know anyone who does? You can pay the expensive translator company, or the dodgy cheaper translator company that claims to be equally good.

Did you choose the responsible expensive option? Sucks, because they have been competing with the bad/automated translators so long that they squeeze their human translators so hard, they produce bad translations anyway.

Also, it didn't help that you didn't give them any context, but just sent them one sentence at a time, extracted from the strings in your program. Because we've all done that, haven't we?

Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#30

Post by vintermann »

fxtentacle wrote: post #14
gibolt wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI isn't locked in a room. No end user can verify the sourced training images, so anything coming close to an existing work should be assumed to have been part of the source material for the derivative.

Oh but you can. I've scanned the LAION training data set (which was used for mini DALLE, Imagen, and Disco Diffusion) and I recognized several images that long to business partners of mine. How does an AI know what Obama looks like? It memorized thousands of images of him, most of which were by professional photographers and, hence, copyrighted.

Well, it probably didn't memorize any single of them. One thing that has changed dramatically from back when I studied AI (a whole 5ish years ago, sigh...), to my shock, is that the number of training epochs has dropped dramatically. Sometimes down to just one. If it's only ever looked at your image and updated its weights once, could that really be enough to copy it? Only if virtually everything in your image is also present in thousands of other images, which would suggest there was very little originality in your photo to plagiarize. (This is certainly the case with Obama's press photographers - political press photographers aren't hired for originality!)
Post reply on HN