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Copyright infringement in AI art

technollama.co.uk

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Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#91

Post by ramoz »

fleddr wrote: post #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 confrontatio…

> 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 ...

I agree. I don't want to live in a AI-hamster-wheel future.

Human creativity is driven by emotion, curiosity, intuition... etc. AI creativity is basically an advanced form of copy-paste/blend using context -- all of which is learned from human content.

We should be working harder to empower human-creativity... which is an argument AI artists often make in favor of generative creativity... however this narrative falters when money gets cheap and automation disrupts whatever economies exist for creatives (esp writers and artists).

Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#92

Post by gedy »

lioeters wrote: post #79
soulofmischief wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is kind of ironic, as many artists who have a unique visual style insist their art is about the deeper meaning and not just the look. (I don't really agree that is that important to most observers)

Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#93

Post by Trung0246 »

OmarAssadi wrote: post #40
tkgally wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Good points! 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 a…

I wonder what the chinese site in question? It has been long since I dabble into video compression scene beside just use ffmpeg when I needed

Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#94

Post by [deleted] »

surfacedetail wrote: post #32
rvnx wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" ?

Characters are different, as recognisable characters have copyright on their own (not all characters do). But let's say you're drawing a painting from memory, you may or may not be infringing copyright. The question is about substantial copying.

[deleted]

Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#95

Post by MonkeyMalarky »

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…

A DALL-E generated IKEA style manual for a nonexistent piece of furniture would be absolutely hilarious.

Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#96

Post by zaphar »

soulofmischief wrote: post #27
matheusmoreira wrote: post #17

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.

Good luck figuring out a style that isn't "cribbing" off of another artists style. In which case if that becomes legal then the ML will just be used to generate unique styles which are similarly cribbing.

There is no definition of "style" here you can rely on without causing just as much harm to human artists as you would be restricting AI art. Everything is derivative of something/someone else after all.

Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#97

Post by trention »

ramoz wrote: post #91
fleddr wrote: post #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 confrontatio…

> 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 ... I agree. I don't want to live in a AI-hamster-wheel future. Human creativity is driven by emotion, curiosity, intuition... etc. AI creativity is basically an advanced form of copy-paste/blend using cont…

Brynjolfsson and McAfee made a simular argument a decade ago - we will use automation to replace rather than augment human labor, the result being a local optimum far from the global one (that's in terms of results, the dystopian disempowerment of humanity is another story.

Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#98

Post by soulofmischief »

zaphar wrote: post #96
soulofmischief wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Good luck figuring out a style that isn't "cribbing" off of another artists style. In which case if that becomes legal then the ML will just be used to generate unique styles which are similarly cribbing. There is no definition of "style" here you can rely on without causing just as much harm to human artists as you would be restricting AI art. Everything is derivative of something/someone else after all.

I'd say the patent system, and the current implementation of the copyright system, are far from perfect and commonly abused, yet they remain intact. I'm not sure if your criticisms will prohibit governing bodies from introducing lobbyist-friendly legislation. Fair-use policies will help keep Average Joe out of prison, while also diverting revenue.

Just like copyright today, even though the individual supposedly benefits from this scheme, it's companies who have greater stake in the outcome.

Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#99

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

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…

Hah. Yes. And as an amusing result, emails and chats are filled with errors resulting from automated translation. The service was supposed to be a crutch, but it became widely adopted and lowered the standards everywhere.

Anecdotally, I now check my email, because Outlook likes to change what I wrote.

Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#100

Post by egypturnash »

nonbirithm wrote: post #86
pornel wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I’m conflicted about this. It does give broader access to illustrations and artworks, and this is likely just a stepping stone to even better tools. ”Prompt engineering” is becoming a creative skill itself. OTOH a corporation scraping artworks and making money from producing knock-offs (you can even directly name an author to copy) doesn’t feel fair to me.

I'm wondering how the best possible model at some given time in the future would not be reliant on the resources of a huge tech corporation like OpenAI and cloud organizations that have the computing power to process massive datasets like CLIP's. 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 ar…

How many deceased artists on said list that are unable give their opinion would have objected if they were still alive?

If a deceased artist has an estate that's profiting off their work, said estate will be especially vicious in trying to establish precedent that anyone running an artist's name through an image generator needs to work out some kind of licensing agreement with the artist, or get sued.

As a working artist, I am looking forwards to this happening.

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