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Copyright infringement in AI art

technollama.co.uk

111–120 of 155 posts

Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#111

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…

I'm wating for the algorithms to automate all my decision making too.

so me in the future will be an algorithm suggesting what should I buy/eat/etc.. and another which will accept/reject what the former suggests.

this way, I don't have to bother with any of this annoying "life" stuff.

/joking

Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#112
I don't know if "copyright infringement" is really a useful legal construct here. The issue is not so much that a person's work is being duplicated, but that a person's work is being used to reduce the value of their labour without consent or compensation. It's probably more under unfair competition. Ultimately, though, this issue probably requires new constructs and laws, which is unlikely to happen. The law is the ultimate expression of the power of the dominant class, and these sorts of AI/ML systems benefit the socially dominant class of business owners and investors.

Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#113
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

that is an unknown quantity which one cannot estimate

Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh but you can. I've scanned the LAION training data set (which was used for mini DALLE, Imagen, and Disco Diffusion) and I recognized several images that long to business partners of mine. How does an AI know what Obama looks like? It memorized thousands of images of him, most of which were by professional photographers and, hence, copyrighted.

Well, it probably didn't memorize any single of them. One thing that has changed dramatically from back when I studied AI (a whole 5ish years ago, sigh...), to my shock, is that the number of training epochs has dropped dramatically. Sometimes down to just one. If it's only ever looked at your image and updated its weights once , could that really be enough to copy it? Only if virtually everything in your image is al…

> political press photographers aren't hired for originality!

Yes they almost definitely are, what else would they be hired for? You wouldn't watch the same news everyday (even if it feels that way)

> the number of training epochs has dropped dramatically

So? Lets imagine a documented nurodiverse person (lets use a photographic memory) "snapsohts" a famous "works" and then sits in a room, after 5 years training, to produce "some work" are they free of copyright claims? Have you not seen the nurodiverse person who draws the entire New York sky line from 1 helicopter ride?

Your approach seems non-sensical, 1 epoch - 10,000 epochs, it doesn't matter - its still a copy / derivative work (which may exempt it, fair enough).

Personally I think all current AI work is just copyright on steroids, DALL-E outputs Shutterstock logos given the right input and Githubs co-poilt is just a lawsuit waiting to happen (implying anyone has the funds to actually sue Microsoft these days, the T&C's of Github must be incredibly broad).

Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it makes sense to talk about these systems as though they have any agency (and I think I was careful not to). Of course there is nothing that necessitates letting these systems do what humans do. What I am saying is that I am allowed as a human to ingest copyrighted material, learn from it, form mental abstractions and use those learnings to generate new art. Why then, would I be forbidden from external…

> What I am saying is that I am allowed as a human to ingest copyrighted material, learn from it, form mental abstractions and use those learnings to generate new art. Why then, would I be forbidden from externalising some of that process into an artificial system that operates on similar principles. For the same reason you aren't allowed to make unlimited photocopies of a library book.

This analogy doesn't hold. The human equivalent of a photocopier is scribing a copy of a book. Scribing 100 copies and distributing those is just as illegal as creating and distributing photocopies.

Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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. Would you stop doing it if the artists said “this is making me unhappy”?

Weird Al does.

He doesn't have to, parody is inherently transformative under copyright, but he's a decent guy, and he's kept a song or two in the crate because the original artist didn't want a parody released.

I support that, and I also support not caring, as a matter of principle. It's supererogatory; it shows that Weird Al is a good person, but not that someone who releases a parody without asking first is a bad person.

Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#117
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…

> I always imagined it to automate away our boring, mechanical, repetitive stuff

Which includes most art produced.

Do a google image search for something stock-photo-y like "man in business suit kicking". You'll find a staggering number of photographs and cartoons designed to be used in power point slides.

If you play around, you'll find any variation of "man in business suit" paired with an action will produce similar results. People were paid to make all of those, but it's so repetitive that it's not hard to see how an AI could find the pattern.

Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#118
post #111

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…

I'm wating for the algorithms to automate all my decision making too. so me in the future will be an algorithm suggesting what should I buy/eat/etc.. and another which will accept/reject what the former suggests. this way, I don't have to bother with any of this annoying "life" stuff. /joking

Yes, if you were ruler of the world, you're going to have an awfully huge amount of people doing f.a. There are only so many hairdressers, masseurs and plumbers required.

What you need is a kill switch, something to slow down population growth.

Anyway, are you up to date with your mandatory medical treatments?

Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#120

I think it’s clear that what’s happening is (mostly) legal, but the better question is whether it should continue to be. It will be a bad outcome if a few people profit off of a huge group of people’s labor without their consent and without compensating them, in order to put that large group out of work. Technological advances change the labor market all the time, but it’s absolutely different to exploit your own lab…

Cat’s out of the bag. Stable-diffusion runs on an m1 mac, is competitive with dall-e, and will soon be open source. Midjourney was made independently from dall-e and is arguably better. This is the most revolutionary artistic tool to ever exist and anyone with a few thousand bucks can download a script from github and train it themselves. My advice to creatives is to figure out how to thrive in this new environment b…

I mean CoPilot is already similar, no?
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