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Copyright infringement in AI art

technollama.co.uk

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Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#121

Post by jeroenhd »

Imnimo wrote: post #3

I'm not copyright expert, but I would have imagined the answer is relatively straightforward: if an image would be infringing if drawn by a human, it's also infringing if drawn by a model, and similarly for non-infringing. Does the manner in which the image is generated play into whether it infringes a copyright?

> Does the manner in which the image is generated play into whether it infringes a copyright?

Is taking a picture of a painting enough to violate copyright? Is a digital copy of a VHS tape a copyright violation? Is copy/pasting an image a copyright violation?

A computer is not creative because it cannot think. It can only copy what others do; it doesn't understand what it's doing, only how to do something. Equating a human with a computer is unreasonable at the current state of computing and I doubt we'll see a truly conscious AI in the future.

For an automated tool to replicate art into a state such that it would no longer be a mere reproduction of copyrighted material, one would assume that the tool would gain such sophistication that the tool itself should deserve copyright rather than its operators. After all, a commissioner of an art piece may provide the prompt but the art itself is under copyright by the author.

We'll have to see how the courts look at these reconstructions. Personally, I believe tools like DALL-E and Copilot are no more than fancy copy/paste systems and should only be trained on copyright-free materials for their use not to be subject to copyright issues.

Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#122

Post by fleddr »

nitwit005 wrote: post #117
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…

> 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 simil…

I get what you're saying, but that would be the bottom tier of the creative industry, which is just one portion of the whole.

Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#123

Post by kevingadd »

trention wrote: post #55
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. This is incorrect. Translators employed: 2005 - 29240 2021 - 52170 Yearly salary: 2005 - 38300 2021 - 52170 Source - BLS ( https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm ) Employment growth was ~79% on a US population growth of ~13.5%. 38300 2005 $ equal 52854 2021$. So pretty much demand for translators exploded while real…

Translation is not exclusively a salaried job. Most translators in the fields I'm familiar with (games and manga) are freelance contractors, and most are getting paid by the word/page, not a yearly salary.

ML has depressed the rates those people earn. It's been good for the demand for editors though since they need to pay someone to fix the DeepL output up so they can release it.

Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#124

Post by angusturner »

Angostura wrote: post #62
angusturner wrote: post #54

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.

Where I think this analogy breaks down is that these models are not simply copying / memorizing the training data. They are using the data to fit a model, highly compressing the specifics while holding on to general patterns and abstractions.

I really feel like "reading lots of books" is a better analogy. (Of course its not perfect, since these systems can scale way past the number of books a human can read).

Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#125

Post by fleddr »

LampDrewNear wrote: post #108
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…

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 worr…

We seem to have some things in common. I'm also a software engineer with a creative hobby: wildlife photography.

In that space, there's already a kind of abundance problem. It's saturated. So even in the case of a "hit piece", the appreciation lasts about a few hours. A bunch of likes and some shallow comments. That's it.

If I were to base my meaning on that, I'd say it has no meaning. That's why I find meaning in my deep love for my subjects, as well as the process of photography itself. I decouple external validation from my intrinsic motivation. Few photographers do this, they crave the attention, which is why they're restless and miserable. They would surely feel even worse in an AI world where current saturation levels will do a 1000x.

The above you can probably apply to lots of other creative endeavors. For example, creative writing on a blog. You already can't get noticed today, imagine the avalanche of AI writing making this problem exponentially worse.

So we will have little shared meaning, at best personal meaning, but only for the strongly intrinsically motivated, the rest may stop altogether. On top of that, the new "creators" will also experience little meaning. You can generate the most beautiful piece of AI art, but can't seriously claim: I made that.

Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#127

Post by mostlylurks »

LampDrewNear wrote: post #108
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…

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 worr…

Computer-generated content may pose an essentially insurmountable challenge to human practitioners of most art forms, but not all of them. The forms of art that are at risk of being overtaken by ML are those in which individual works of art can be faithfully represented in some storage format (which may be anything from a video file to a piece of paper with things printed onto it), which is used to transmit the work of art to an audience via inanimate means.

Those art forms that feature the physical presence of an actual human being, such as theater, dance, stand-up comedy, musical performances, etc, will presumably remain somewhat safe from the flood of computer-generated content, and people might even flock to such art forms in pursuit of authenticity. Things like improvisational theater also add an element of genuine human reactions to the mix, which will no doubt attract some interest in the age of AI art, which has no direct human will behind it. Of course, AI could produce imitations of recordings of such performances, but not the actual physical performances themselves, and people already seem to very strongly favor actual performances over recordings.

Ironically, mass-produced AI art might conceivably cause a cultural shift from our status quo of having an abundance of inanimate mass-market art with essentially global reach to a culture favoring local performative arts (which, aside from concerts, have no real mass appeal at the moment), which would essentially foster a unique local art scene with some limited number of performers for each city that mostly stay in that city. Such a scenario wouldn't result in hyperindividualized art, quite the opposite.

Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#128

Post by jacobsievers »

antioppressor wrote: post #126

Yeah, but what happens if you explicitly state that your art/images must not be included in AI training?

If I've legitimately obtained a copy of your work, then I'm entitled to use it, read it, even make my own copies for personal use. Any new work I attempt to distribute would be measured against your original to determine infringement.

Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#129

Post by merek »

MonkeyMalarky wrote: post #95
avian wrote: 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…

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

Introducing the Fiibean wepa Taki: https://labs.openai.com/s/95bli4C4CKZ73DMigFNdDKQ4

Re: Copyright infringement in AI art

#130

Post by JohnHaugeland »

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…

> the demand and pay for translators went down.

Prices on ProZ are basically exactly what they were before Google Translate

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