Copyright infringement in AI art

One of the first links provided on the subreddit for Disco Diffusion is a page describing the effects of adding an artist's name to an image prompt. There are hundreds of artists listed on that page. How long will it take until one of those artists notices that ML art associated with their name is getting significant attention and says it makes them unhappy? How many deceased artists on said list that are unable give their opinion would have objected if they were still alive?

I suspect that even if all the arguments about copyright and learning fail to make any difference in the legal system, the original artists will eventually catch on and provide their individual opinions on what they think of the entire concept. Then the issue becomes not one of copyright infringement, but disrespect of someone else's time and labor. It would become a social problem with no technological solution. You can't tell creators what they ought to feel about people generating new art by reducing their name to a weighted keyword to be fed into a corporation's million dollar ML model.

As precedent, some authors don't want people making derivative works from their content, for reasons that might not necessarily have to do with copyright. An example is not wanting NSFW content derived from the same fictional universe. In the case of copyright, sites like fanfiction.net ultimately sided with the authors who didn't want fanworks and banned users from posting them. AO3 was subsequently created in response to fanwork bans.

I'm wondering if a "no AI" clause will become part of many services' terms of service in the future, splitting them along ideological lines instead of legal ones and causing a general air of distrust to arise from the ensuing need to detect which art was not created by humans. It feels like ethical reservations about including artist keywords in prompt engineering would be stronger over on the artists' side (depending on the artist's opinions), and could cause pushback at some point. Whether or not it will make a difference remains to be seen. My guess is it won't really, because it's impossible to ban GPUs or technological progress.

This might be true, but feels like maybe the most practical answer to this whole question is to focus on the inputs and to establish ways for artists to control whether their art is used as input. Don’t let legally questionable content into training, and you automatically prevent getting legally questionable output. Why would we do anything else, really? It’s potentially a large assumption to make that the datasets are currently legitimate under the lens of copyright. Pulling images off the internet just because they’re accessible is not valid, and humans aren’t currently allowed to do that under the law. But it might be comforting to artists and practical for both artists and AI researchers if artists could specify a form of copyright or a license that allows ML training provided that their work is not recognizably reproduced. Certainly datasets like Flickr with Creative Commons search tools allows a wide variety of public use that is entirely legal. What reasons do we have to not establish something similar for machine learning?