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Copyright infringement in AI art

technollama.co.uk

71–80 of 155 posts

Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#71
Okay I dislike the US copyright system immensely - virulent yearning for reasonable terms and ending sampling payments forever more…

But let’s get practical here for a minute - if an ape can’t own the copyright to a selfie, then nothing generated by a machine - no matter how sentient - will legally be protected.

Just keep that in mind, because the ML results will not abide by human creation protections.

Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#74
If this all worked in a fair way it would be treated similarly to sampling in music where the original artists get a royalty each time a track is used. If that source is clear like where it's "x in the style of y" using these elements of x explicitly. However, the complexity is often too great and how can you prove fractional sampling of your work? Very tricky as the article points out! It's also blocking many new forms of art if you enforce the fractional sampling idea in law.

On the other hand, small startups selling to customers who need to produce proprietary content could incur a risk with AI generated products. Aka the customer won't want to risk their product by including potentially infringing items (like with Co-Pilot's potential use of unpaid labour or open source code and other licences).

Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#75
i never expect anyone in silly valley to do due diligence... it was a pretty obvious problem from the outset.

if you are making a product, then using copyrighted material is far from fair use, at least outside of the US.

Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#76
I have to admit that I did not see it coming. Ignorant of AI's capabilities, I always imagined it to automate away our boring, mechanical, repetitive stuff. Which in some hopeful utopian scenario would mean that we could focus on the humanities: family, health/sports, culture and anything creative.

For AI to come for art, at the very core of our humanity (the oldest cave painting is 64K y/o) is quite the confrontation indeed. One that will rapidly escalate more broadly (poetry/writing, photography, cinema, music) and more deeply. The amount of AI art will explode, in turn serving as input for even more AI art.

The speed at which this will happen suggests to me we need to be far more alarmist in coming up with answers to many questions. Philosophical, legal, socio-economical, etc.

I really think the attitude "I'm not an artist so this will only benefit me" is shortsighted, and I'm saying that as a non-artist myself. It's like we're at the beginning of a very short and steep exponential curve of total disruption.

Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#77
post #50

The question that fascinates me about this whole debate is on what basis (if any) one draws the line between a machine learning from copyrighted data vs a human learning from copyrighted data. And I do think “learning” is the correct metaphor here. There are good reasons to believe that the brain is doing something conceptually similar to generative statistical models. i.e compressing inputs (/percepts) into some kin…

I think it makes sense to have a distinction between human and machine learning. • Human memory has natural limits in capacity, accuracy, speed, etc. Even if you wanted to, you just can't launder copyright all of humanity's works in a blink of an eye. Things done by humans are limited to human scale, but automation can elevate things to an industrial scale (it's legal to fart, it's not legal to have an industrial-sca…

> it's just a business model based on using other people's work.

So... all of civilization?

Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#78
post #68
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it makes sense to have a distinction between human and machine learning. • Human memory has natural limits in capacity, accuracy, speed, etc. Even if you wanted to, you just can't launder copyright all of humanity's works in a blink of an eye. Things done by humans are limited to human scale, but automation can elevate things to an industrial scale (it's legal to fart, it's not legal to have an industrial-sca…

Humans get away with much more, such as just photographing other people's work and then selling those photographs[0]. I don't see how generating a bunch of images, selecting one, and perhaps tweaking it more is any less fair use. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Prince

That's a camera, a machine. Same problem as with AI. The machine can rapidly at scale reproduce visuals, including other people's artistic works.

Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think your idea is prescient. I can imagine a market of proprietary "styles", I suppose in the form of pre-trained networks/datasets, that can generate any number of concrete instances of images, texts, and other media.

Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#80
It seems the more interesting legal question is not regarding input, but whom owns the copyrights of the output, if any. Interesting article:

https://www.technollama.co.uk/dall%C2%B7e-goes-commercial-bu...

If I interpret that article correctly, at least Dall-e does not claim copyright on the generation nor does it grant it to the person writing the prompt. The copyright question seems entirely unanswered.

Perhaps that should be codified in law explicitly: AI generated art cannot be copyrighted.

If it was created from the collective input of humanity (unasked), its output may as well benefit all of humanity as well. It's hard to make the case that somebody writing a prompt deserves full copyright protection. Even if so, just add one word and one can claim it's once again an "original".

Not respecting AI copyrights would also help protect the vast area of commercial art, as it lowers its value if it cannot be legally protected. This could get hairy though, because what happens if you take AI output as input and then start manually tweaking/editing it. It would then be a mixed AI/human works.

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