31–40 of 155 posts
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
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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" ?
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…
It's a race to the bottom. It doesn't sound nice to say, but as things become more accessible it's harder and harder to filter out genuine content from look-alikes, asset flips and low-effort automations, this may be unfamiliar to anybody looking at Steam releases for example. I wonder how it'll turn out for artwork. I want to be optimistic and think of it as an additional tool to artists or people that want to create new things rather than a displacement wave with its significantly smaller costs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed, per the article “ style and a ‘look and feel’ are not copyrightable”
I wonder if they can be trademarked. If not now, maybe later.
Trademark also gives a more limited protection in some ways.
Unfortunately many small artists making a living by designing logos will dissappear with this technology.
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…
On the one hand, as you and others point out, rates for human translation have been hurt, and the quality of a lot of MT-enabled translation visible to the public is mediocre to poor.
On the other hand, MT is enabling communication among people that was not possible or practical before. A small start-up is able to find customers and suppliers in countries with different languages. People with common interests but diverse languages are able to chat and share ideas on social media. A person receives an e-mail from a long-lost relative in a language the recipient doesn’t know; MT enables them to correspond and eventually meet up. Little of that communication would be taking place if a human translator had to be found and paid for each interaction.
If you learn painting by copying other painters then paint a new painting, copyright infringement? Unfortunately many small artists making a living by designing logos will dissappear with this technology.
This would apply in the UK, perhaps Europe. I'm not familiar with US law.
Quoting the Act - "Fair dealing with a artistic work for the purposes of private study does not infringe any copyright in the work."
If the painter then goes on to sell this painting, well, that's copyright infringement because they are making a copy of a painting available to the public.(assuming no licencing or authorisation from the legal copyright owner was previously obtained)
This is the most telling thing. They have a system, which might not even be part of the "AI" it might simply be they are comparing outputs for close matches to the OG dataset and then hiding them from the end user.
I mean we've seen OpenAI's solution to their un-diverse data set so we know what standards they work to.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
In the Obama example it comes from copyrighted inputs. Without the photos in the magazines and newspapers I would not have idea how Obama looks. Any draw I do, it's going to be derivative of those copyrighted photos and, maybe, other inputs more generics that I saw in the past (that could be copyrighted too).
How is that different from what that software is doing? It's not, it's just that it's done in an industrial scale.
This is just the same problem an artisan had when factories started to appear.
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…
Former professional translator here (Japanese-to-English, 1986 to 2005). I have very mixed feelings about MT. On the one hand, as you and others point out, rates for human translation have been hurt, and the quality of a lot of MT-enabled translation visible to the public is mediocre to poor. On the other hand, MT is enabling communication among people that was not possible or practical before. A small start-up is ab…
As an example, as a hobby, I am interested in things like anime video compression and such. Two of the most essential sites for me in terms of resources and information have been almost entirely Chinese. And while they appreciate and respect the international users, at the end of the day, they can’t translate each and every single forum post into English or any other language that someone may need.
And also unfortunately, I don’t have the time yet to invest in learning the language enough to use those sites without assistance. Instead, I rely heavily on things like Google Translate, Yandex, and DeepL. They’ve been totally essential to the point to where a major pain point for me with my preferred browser (FireFox) has been a lack of native MT support (until very recently, which has been nice for Russian and stuff, but I’m still waiting for Chinese support in Bergamot).
Similarly, while I studied in Russia for a while, I’m not a native speaker, and my skills aren’t what they used to be now that I’ve been out of the country for a while. There is a lot of interesting stuff on the Russian internet (Habr, RuTracker, various articles, etc.) that I only really have the level of convenient access to that I do because of MT.
I don’t think it’s all sunshine and rainbows, certainly, as with stuff like DALL-E 2, but it definitely provides a lot of people real value and happiness. Hopefully, humanity will figure out how best to balance the positives and negatives of AI services like these.
I see that both sides (lol, sorry) of this often take pretty hardline stances on “art is art; there is no difference” vs. “these are just copy-pasting people’s hardwork and can’t actually create anything themselves”. I think the value is sort of indisputable, but I worry about how it’ll affect people’s livelihoods — e.g., after playing with DALL-E 2, I think it is totally capable of replacing things like stock photos a large percentage of the time (not always, of course, but it definitely can sometimes).
I’m of the mindset that you should be able to remix, adapt, copy, etc, virtually everything in an ideal world. Maybe I am just entitled, I don’t see why I should have to waste the man-hours recreating or reverse engineering something simply because of a license incompatibility, for example.
Similarly, I don’t see why I shouldn’t be able to transform or straight-up copy and distribute someone else’s art if it provides people with happiness. As an example, talking about anime earlier, I think things like fansubs can provide lots of additional value to people by either providing more natural translations or through extensive typesetting that companies tend not to do because it is not “necessary”. For example, those familiar with the show Bakemonogatari are probably aware of the extreme amount of dialogue displayed exclusively visually, with rapid flashing cards and such. While I think the official subtitles don’t get enough credit 99% of the time, that is a prime example where fansubs which go in and actively mask over the text on the screen and replace it with the viewer’s native language is very helpful. However, despite the value these things provide, it is copyright infringement.
Rationally, I understand that the emotional and protective side of people exists, but at the same time, I don’t “understand” it; I want people to use my stuff — I want people to be happy with their limited time on this planet. In that sense, I think the emotional argument for copyright does not appeal to me.
That being said, pragmatically, people need jobs. We live in a society where you must work. A society where you have bills to pay, groceries to buy, and fees for schools and hospitals. Stripping away copyright protections entirely for things like this would hurt a lot of people right now. And I am really curious how this’ll all turn out in court when the majority of these datasets are trained on things that they have no right to be using.
Will we be in a world where you can essentially bypass all copyright protections by throwing everything into TensorFlow before feeding the computer a little prompt? Or will we be in a world where many of these tools are crippled to the point of uselessness? Or will we be in a world where companies just accept that sometimes someone will take them to court and settlements will just be another business expense?
Aside from the economic issues, if I’m going to be writing some Adderall-infused essay right now, I figure I may as well rant about the other two.
The first of those is biases; while I have always been aware of this problem, it was very evident after playing with DALL-E 2 this past week. The datasets seem to be very European-centric (US, Canada, NZ, AU, etc included in that). There were a number of things that I could not get it to generate correctly or would produce wildly different results based on the prompts I fed it.
As relatively minor, silly example, while I had no trouble getting it to produce white-washed movie posters for by asking it for “Netflix live-action adaptation of Dragon Ball Z”, I couldn’t get it to do the same for India and Bollywood. I am sure someone who has spent more time doing “prompt engineering” than I have could possibly get better results, but the point still stands in the sense that it seems to like to produce what Americans & Europeans are more exposed to.
Another example is, just ignorantly guessing, the way things are weighted — e.g., I wanted to have it produce art in the style of shows like Tatami Galaxy, The Night Is Short, Walk On Girl, and things like the album covers for Asian Kung-fu Generation. All of those listed are done by Yusuke Nakamura. However, perhaps rubbing salt in the wound for artists, I was unable to get the results I wanted by asking for things in Yusuke Nakamura’s style. Instead, I had much better results by using “Yuasa Masaaki”, the director of Tatami Galaxy and The Night Is Short, Walk On Girl. My only guess here is just that Yuasa is a more common occurrence in text, at least in terms of the English internet.
In that sense, I worry that these tools will not only replace people, but they’ll reinforce existing cultural and societal biases even more so than we already do on our own now.
Further compounding issues like that is the censorship and filtering on OpenAI; virtually anything political, violent or sexual is not currently allowed (and may never be? I figure no company wants to be associated with the potential PR disasters that come with it, like Microsoft’s Tay). This is extra problematic given how important all of those things are in art. I worry that we will lose artists and have fewer people pushing the boundaries of art.
And ironically, for a society that criticizes countries like China so fervently for censorship, we rely so heavily on giant capitalist companies which self-enforce much of the same censorship, helping further enforce the status quo and restricting marginalized minorities. I am not a fan to say the least, despite understanding the potential for violent speech, propaganda, etc.
Anyway, that’s the end of my long-winded 6 AM phone rant. Apologies for any weird formatting or incoherent thoughts!