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Copyright infringement in AI art

technollama.co.uk

101–110 of 155 posts

Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#101

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.

Yes, big-name artists working with corps to create style generators for a campaign. Watermarked images which cause proprietary, legal ML scrapers to reject the sample.

Suddenly, copping someone's steez becomes a matter of revolution.

Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#102

>Moreover, the developers of these tools are aware of the potential pitfalls of producing exact replicas of art in their training datasets. OpenAI admitted that this was a problem in some of the earlier iterations of the program, and they now filter out specific instances of this happening. 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 compari…

they addressed duplicates during pre-training (by removing duplicate examples in the dataset), as documented here https://openai.com/blog/dall-e-2-pre-training-mitigations/

Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#103
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It was better than those, but many "professional" companies that would in the past hire out a group of translators to translate their documentation into various languages now just use machine translators with a cursory pass.

If you read mainly English, you won't notice it, but you'll see it if you speak a language that does have translations, but aren't primary.

Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#104

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

Why? The only thing I care about is whether a song is good

Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#105
> It looks like it, but it’s not the exact same thing, it’s almost as if the AI is drawing it from memory, which in some way it is, it’s re-constructing what Starry Night looks like.

The blog post also has a picture of four slightly-different recreations of a Van Gogh painting.

The thing is, under current copyright law in the US, all four of those recreations would be legally considered the same image. The standard for copyright infringement is access plus substantial similarity. It would be easy to construe access to a training image set through ML software that was trained on that set; and thus any regurgitated output would be infringing.

Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#106
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

You can lose your trademark if you do not actively enforce violations. Hence, the full cost of a trademark should include its legal maintenance.

Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#107
post #19

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…

It's honestly pretty fascinating to watch perfect be the enemy of the good in this space. As a result of the birth of cheap-to-free machine translation of human language, the space of things available on the global market has become incredibly vast, because the good-enough stab at translation is often good enough for a dedicated hacker to make the thing work anyway.

Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#108
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…

This is how I feel as well. I'm a software engineer by trade, but I'm really much more interested in writing music and stories. I always imagined myself retiring the day I have saved up enough money so I could focus on art and creativity. My life certainly has felt much less meaningful since I saw what DALL-E 2 can produce.

And my main concern is not that of professional artists' financial situations. I'm mainly worried about how the massive influx of computer-generated content will inflate away the meaning of human-created art. And I'm afraid that when art becomes so good and so customized to each individual consumer, we won't have much common culture left.

I think this Penny Arcade strip well puts into words how I feel: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2022/06/06/dalliance

In a way, I'm so mad at my fellow engineers. There's so much good we could do, is really killing the creative arts the right thing to do?

And I don't believe for one second this talk about AI just being a tool, and prompt-engineering being a new craft for artists to learn. I think this kind of interface will quickly go away, and soon enough AI apps will look much more similar to TikTok or YouTube than they do today.

Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#109
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It's honestly pretty fascinating to watch perfect be the enemy of the good in this space. As a result of the birth of cheap-to-free machine translation of human language, the space of things available on the global market has become incredibly vast, because the good-enough stab at translation is often good enough for a dedicated hacker to make the thing work anyway.

It applies to even English language transcriptions as well. Do I pay pennies a minute or a $1+ a minute? It depends on the use case and my budget. If my time is expensive and I'm publishing externally (e.g. for a professional podcast or an interview for a client), I'll probably go with a human. If I just want to refer to some notes to pull out a quote or go back to check something? An ML transcription with timestamps is probably fine. Ditto if the alternative to ML transcription is nothing.

Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#110
post #33

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…

Machine translation has been a curse for those who enjoy content that's not usually promptly translated and instead sits there for years if not decades. Not uncommon are people asking in broken English how to use certain tools e.g. automated DeepL scripts and releasing their "translations" (or edited machine translations, changing just some of most glaring issues with the text, generally), thus "burning" a release, t…

I can concur; there was a scandal within the fan translation scene for PC-98 games when it came out that at least one high-profile "translator" was just lightly-editing machine translated output to sound correct. Problem is, there are all sorts of mistakes you can make in translation that will not sound incorrect at all unless you speak both languages.

I must ask what you mean by "burning" a release, though. If we're talking about fan translations, stuff gets retranslated all the time. And most of the stuff that gets fan translated is far too niche to justify a commercial release to begin with. If something is popular enough to get an official release, the fan translations either get taken down or disappear on their own.

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