361–370 of 390 posts
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Neither does the AI, so what’s the point? Yes, if you look hard enough you’ll find some. But that’s true on either side.
When humans copy verbatim, even only partially, there are consequences unless it's fair use.
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You won't get the exact image, because the model doesn't perfectly memorize all inputs, but you'll likely get something so close that everyone would consider it a derivative work. This is very similar to getting Copilot to spit out Carnack's fast inverse square root code with the right prompt.
There's some interesting thought experiments around this: 1. You do the same thing but don't use "getty" in the prompt. 2. You do the same thing with "getty" in the prompt on a model NOT trained with Getty images 3. You ask a human photographer to do the same thing and you show him a Getty image 4. You ask a human photographer to do the same thing but without showing him a Getty image (but he's presumably seen many i…
For 2, you can't find what isn't there, so something random would come out.
For 3 or 4, I suppose you could pay paparazzi to stalk the celebrity and try to produce a similar original shot, and this might be impossible depending on the prompt (for example, photo of [person] at [event] on [date]"), but if it's possible it has absolutely no resemblance to 1 or 2. The photographer would produce an original work, unless your #3 contractor tries to remove the watermark and pass off the Getty image as their own, which would be idiotic.
There is no particular "Getty Images" style, other than their quality requirements, they are a huge company that acquires and licenses a ton of pro photography. There's no such thing as "getty-like".
So, no, only option 1 might possibly produce a problematic derivative work.
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A machine operator does not own the copyright on the parts his machine stamps out even though he puts in inputs. GM's engineers can own the copyright on a car they design in CAD. If you put in creative inputs using a tool, it is copyrightable (a car's design). If all you did was say, give my XYZ widget (in this case 'give me a picture of a frog holding an umbrella under a rainbow') you only gave instructions for gene…
>If you put in creative inputs using a tool, it is copyrightable (a car's design). If all you did was say, give my XYZ widget (in this case 'give me a picture of a frog holding an umbrella under a rainbow') you only gave instructions for generating a widget, you did not create art. Does this still hold true if you worked through hundreds of variants of 'give me a picture of a frog holding an umbrella under a rainbow'…
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Maybe. Everything from back when I was a real person and dealt with copyright, patent, and trademark lawyers tells me otherwise, but I know this from the tech industry side/tech industry lawyers and not art specifically. My reading of Title 17 tells me otherwise. But maybe you are right. And maybe museum/gallery owners actually own the copyright of the works they 'find' and display, especially if the gallery gave the…
> And maybe museum/gallery owners actually own the copyright of the works they 'find' and display, especially if the gallery gave the artists 'prompts' for what they wanted the art to contain. In general, not if those prompts were given to a human who does the actual work. Unless that human was contracted under a work-for-hire agreement, in which case absolutely yes. > You can't own colors or dimensions Interesting.…
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But it's not copyrightable. I guess you can lie and say you created it, but you didn't, and computer generated. You created it no more than you created your house because you picked the layout and paint colors. There is no money in non-copyrightable generated computer images.
Of course it is. Following your logic no photograph can be copyrighted taken with a camera. After all, the subject already existed you've seen in your camera, you merely recorded the photons with a sensor, digital or analog, doesn't matter.
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I've seen a lot of confidence on HN and other tech communities that a court would never rule that training an AI on copyrighted images is infringement, but I'm not so sure. To be clear, I hope that training AI on copyrighted images remains legal, because it would cripple the field of AI text and image generation if it wasn't! But think about these similar hypotheticals: 1. I take a copyrighted Getty stock image (that…
It’s not about reconstruction, it’s about the notion of a “derivative work”. Translating a work would absolutely be derivative (consider the case of translating a literary work between languages: this is a classic example of a derivative work). Blurring a work but incorporating it would nonetheless still be derivative, I think. The challenge with these models is that they’ve clearly been trained on (exposed to) copyr…
Every single human has been exposed to copyrighted material, and probably can reproduce fragments of copyrighted material on demand. Nobody ever writes a book or paints a picture without reading a lot of books and looking at a lot of paintings first. For a "subconscious copying" suit to apply, you need to demonstrate "probative similarity" - that is, similarity to copyrighted material that is unlikely to be coincidental.
In other words - it's not clear to me that the situation with AI is any different than with a human, or that it presents new legal challenges. If it looks new, it is new.
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Nonsense. Observations about certain characteristics of a copyrighted work are not covered under that work's copyright. If I take a copyrighted book and produce a table of word frequencies in that book, no serious person would claim that the author's copyright domain extends to my table.
Everyone in HN keeps pretending like ML transformation = human inspiration. This is really funny - we don’t have AGI but we have an AGI-like capability to avoid copyright. Seems to be the only place where human rights and AI rights are matched is where it most benefits AI research. How interesting. A for profit computer program =! A human being.
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There's some interesting thought experiments around this: 1. You do the same thing but don't use "getty" in the prompt. 2. You do the same thing with "getty" in the prompt on a model NOT trained with Getty images 3. You ask a human photographer to do the same thing and you show him a Getty image 4. You ask a human photographer to do the same thing but without showing him a Getty image (but he's presumably seen many i…
For 1, there's probably a case where a picture that exactly matches the prompt is very famous, so maybe the right prompt would manage to effectively select an image licensed by Getty. The GPLed fast inverse square root routine was an example of this kind of thing: one good match and the model finds it. Finding such a case might or might not be possible. For 2, you can't find what isn't there, so something random woul…
It's not a search engine. It can synthesise things that it hasn't seen to some degree (assuming it knows the elements that make up the request.
The tricky bit would to teach it "Gettyness" without showing it Getty images but I think that's entirely possible. Getty images aren't astonishing examples of unprecedented originality. So it just needs to know a) the celebrity b) the action and c) what people mean when they ask for something that looks like a Getty image.
EDIT - I answered in a rush and realise you made a similar point to me about "Gettyness" - which makes it even harder for me to understand why you think it would be a violation.
How many different ways can George Clooney eat a burrito in Times Square?
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Everyone in HN keeps pretending like ML transformation = human inspiration. This is really funny - we don’t have AGI but we have an AGI-like capability to avoid copyright. Seems to be the only place where human rights and AI rights are matched is where it most benefits AI research. How interesting. A for profit computer program =! A human being.
Can you articulate a meaningful (and more importantly legally provable) difference? Both human brains and these sorts of AI programs are intractable black boxes. Maybe you think computer programs lack some sort of divine spark, but even if we accept that it seems to me that it's not a given that humans apply their divine spark every time they create something either.
So because they’re both black boxes we suddenly treat them both the same legally?
I don’t have to prove that an ML transform is equivalent to a human being. Divine spark isn’t necessary to protect you from copyright - we have laws that determine what you need to do and those laws have allowed IP to exist as a profitable area for a century.
Here’s a simple question - if I were to take an image from an artist on artstation and announce my for money Warhammer tournament with it, without paying him, I’d be violating his IP rights.
But if I build an ML engine I apparently can take 100 of his images, produce similar images and charge money for it. Magic!
Explain to me - how did the artist suddenly lose his IP rights exactly ?
I submit it is up to ML researchers to prove this isn’t the biggest IP land grab in history. Not for me to prove that somehow humans are different. We know humans are different and we’ve codified in law just how much new IP needs to be different in order to avoid copyright. That’s good enough for humans.
But somehow ML enthusiasts want to say that if I feed an ML all the Disney movies and I get it to make it derivative work, it’s somehow protected? I can’t wait to see all the Mickey Mouse movies made by AÍ. Guess what - that’s never going to happen. If you think Disney or any other IP empire will let that go, I don’t know what to tell you. It’s absolute madness to say that anything that goes into an ML transformation is uncopyrightable. Or somehow I have no rights over my artwork because I don’t have the ability to sue OpenAI to oblivion like Disney does? Because that’s literally what we’re saying - those artists from artstation and Getty whose images were used were used exactly because they believed that they wouldn’t be able to sue - thanks to distinctions like your own!
Disney won’t let that stand, they would sue and push for annihilation, but hey the 100,000 artists on artstation? F** them, they can’t sue us. Let’s use their shit.
That’s basically where we’re at.
Let’s work out an example. So this AI can be feed all of Lucien Freud’s works. Then it can produce Lucien Freud-like artwork. And in this process, where all that is missing is Lucien Freud’s own signature, it could potentially make a virtual replica of one of his most famous paintings! Thus I would have a copy of Lucien Freud! But completely copyright free.
Are you for real? This cannot, absolutely cannot be allowed to happen. It is the biggest data theft in history, larger than Facebook or anything, to basically say that any human data when run through an ML transformation engine is no longer property of the human being who produced it but if the ML engineer. This is absolute madness if you consider the second order and third order effects.
Essentially all human data that can be automated through ML would be automated to the gain of only the ML engineers involved. The intellectual property of millions of human beings producing the data would be nothing but compost. This will lead to an unsustainable situation, where no one but ML engineers will be able to make any profit in the world. Human beings must be compensated for their data, or we’re headed straight into a dystopia.
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> And maybe museum/gallery owners actually own the copyright of the works they 'find' and display, especially if the gallery gave the artists 'prompts' for what they wanted the art to contain. In general, not if those prompts were given to a human who does the actual work. Unless that human was contracted under a work-for-hire agreement, in which case absolutely yes. > You can't own colors or dimensions Interesting.…
The creator would still own the copyright and have to assign it to the person that hired them. It's that same as when us software engineers get our names on patents and then assign them to our employers. I'm surprised more people in HN are not familiar with how intellectual property rights work.
I think that may be a hair-splitting on the process; point is it is possible to write a contract where work done by someone else has its copyright assigned to a contracted employer. But honestly, that entire point is less interesting than the question of how many quanta of work one has to put into a mechanism-facilitated process to be able to claim copyright of the result.
So paint-bucketing one square is insufficient for unrelated reasons of originality (the inability to copyright a shape). But Piet Mondrian's "Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow" (1930) was just a few squares and lines and was copyrightable. So clearly, it doesn't take too many horizontal and vertical black lines and full-block fills to create original art.
If I write a small script and put it in the public domain to generate Mondrian-like output and hand it to you, and you run it twelve times and pick your favorite, is there any reason you couldn't copyright that one? What's the important difference between picking the output of the script you ran on your hardware and drawing a few grids and paint-bucket-filling yourself? Is it not two paths to the same result: a novel Mondrian-style image that you created? How much intention is needed to make it copyrightable vs. how much random-algorithm output?