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AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

heathermeeker.com

141–150 of 705 posts

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#141
post #116

There's no part of AI that is being swallowed up by copyright. AI companies can ask for permission if they want to train their models on other people's works. It's not that hard, various image hosting sites have already added an opt-in/opt-out toggle to their services. Sites might even get away with using this stuff as compensation for free hosting. The fact of the matter is that the AI companies don't want to ask fo…

It’s strange to me that there’s a lot of overlap between people who think AI training should require explicit consent for every piece of training data, and people who think copyright and patents are insanely restrictive in the music/movies/literature/software world. It’s also worrying that requiring consent to train an AI model will inevitably lead to requiring consent to make handmade art that’s a little too similar…

It's probably those same people who publish their code under open source licenses instead of giving it to the public domain. I don't understand why people cling so hard onto every worthless little bit of code they write while also sort of half giving it away to almost everyone for almost any purpose.

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#142
I'm hooked on Stable Diffusion. It's the most impressive sudden leaps in technology in my 30 or so years of being old enough to understand it. Much of the power it has, is based on the material it is trained on, and I'm very appreciative of the work and effort that was made in order to make it what it is. And, it's only getting started.

That said...

I get it. Huggingface are working on a diffusion based model for music. And guess what? It's extremely important for them to only use opt-in or commissioned training data. Why? Because the music industry, unlike artists on artstation and the likes, have a lot of lawyers and can protect their copyrighted works.

Why should it really be any different for visual arts? I honestly don't see why. That isn't to say I'm not going to keep on using stable diffusion, nor do I think there is anything that can be done to stop it. But, I do think artists should be compensated, and such models should not be based on the work of anyone, unless they want it to be.

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#143
post #121

There's no part of AI that is being swallowed up by copyright. AI companies can ask for permission if they want to train their models on other people's works. It's not that hard, various image hosting sites have already added an opt-in/opt-out toggle to their services. Sites might even get away with using this stuff as compensation for free hosting. The fact of the matter is that the AI companies don't want to ask fo…

AI companies can ask for permission if they want to train their models on other people's works Do you ask for permission when you train your mind on copyrighted books? Or observe paintings? Or listen to music? Do you ask for permission when you get new ideas from HN that aren't your own? Humans are constantly ingesting gobs of "copyrighted" insights that they eventually remix into their own creations without necessar…

I can't be trivially copy/pasted and replicated at scale.

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#144
post #116

There's no part of AI that is being swallowed up by copyright. AI companies can ask for permission if they want to train their models on other people's works. It's not that hard, various image hosting sites have already added an opt-in/opt-out toggle to their services. Sites might even get away with using this stuff as compensation for free hosting. The fact of the matter is that the AI companies don't want to ask fo…

It’s strange to me that there’s a lot of overlap between people who think AI training should require explicit consent for every piece of training data, and people who think copyright and patents are insanely restrictive in the music/movies/literature/software world. It’s also worrying that requiring consent to train an AI model will inevitably lead to requiring consent to make handmade art that’s a little too similar…

All or nothing, in my opinion. Either abolish or severely reduce copyright, or abide by it.

The simple fact of the matter is that Disney and Getty invest a lot of money into these materials being out there in the first place. Open source programmers and artists spend a lot of time producing works for no cost other than some minor courtesies.

AI companies aren't your friend or the little mom ''n pop shop down the road. Their technology giants backed by billionaires. When it comes to Disney versus Google/Microsoft, I'm against both sides if it means giving up my rights.

Big AI taking your stuff and ignoring copyright law isn't some kind of protests against copyright, it's the very opposite; it shows that copyright doesn't matter if you have the money to defend yourself in court. Violate the the MPAA's copyright and you get extradited, violate some random person's copyright and you should feel honoured that people even want to steal your work.

In my opinion, the idea behind the current copyright system works fine if the terms weren't so ridiculously long. Restrict copyright to five or ten years and I'd be fine with the whole thing. This "70 years after the death of the author" crap is the biggest stifle on copyright adds.

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#145
post #121

There's no part of AI that is being swallowed up by copyright. AI companies can ask for permission if they want to train their models on other people's works. It's not that hard, various image hosting sites have already added an opt-in/opt-out toggle to their services. Sites might even get away with using this stuff as compensation for free hosting. The fact of the matter is that the AI companies don't want to ask fo…

AI companies can ask for permission if they want to train their models on other people's works Do you ask for permission when you train your mind on copyrighted books? Or observe paintings? Or listen to music? Do you ask for permission when you get new ideas from HN that aren't your own? Humans are constantly ingesting gobs of "copyrighted" insights that they eventually remix into their own creations without necessar…

Moral principles apply to living things. The living things in question are people at big companies training models to sell them as services from behind paywalls.

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how about people running AI only feed them information that they legally have the right to use? That's what they did! It was in fair use. So yes, they did have the right to legally train the data on copyrighted images.

> It was in fair use Many artists don't believe this and the law is very much unclear. In many cases the AI generated work literally looks like a clone.

I'm curious the effort spent prompt-crafting and searching for a seed to arrive at a similar image. Have they provided the prompt and seed used?

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#147
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the recent lawsuits that made the rounds on HN I happened to have missed those discussions, do you have some links you can point towards? thanks!

https://stablediffusionlitigation.com/ https://githubcopilotlitigation.com/ Both along with their respective HN threads.

I’m still not seeing those examples, at least in the Stable Diffusion link.

Even in my overfitted dreambooth model of my wife it doesn’t pop out the exact same portraits.

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#148
post #121

There's no part of AI that is being swallowed up by copyright. AI companies can ask for permission if they want to train their models on other people's works. It's not that hard, various image hosting sites have already added an opt-in/opt-out toggle to their services. Sites might even get away with using this stuff as compensation for free hosting. The fact of the matter is that the AI companies don't want to ask fo…

AI companies can ask for permission if they want to train their models on other people's works Do you ask for permission when you train your mind on copyrighted books? Or observe paintings? Or listen to music? Do you ask for permission when you get new ideas from HN that aren't your own? Humans are constantly ingesting gobs of "copyrighted" insights that they eventually remix into their own creations without necessar…

> Humans are constantly ingesting gobs of "copyrighted" insights that they eventually remix into their own creations without necessarily reimbursing the original source(s) of their creativity.

Yes, and humans are being found liable for copyright infringement for doing so. All that's needed to establish liability is access and substantial similarity; the bar for the latter can be very low indeed (see Williams et al. v. Bridgeport Music et al.).

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#149
> One possible best practice would be to allow authors to specifically opt out of use of their output for ML training.

If it’s a copyright matter, I don’t see how that could work. It’d need to be opt-in, or covered by an explicit license grant (and terms and conditions are being ignored to the point that I gather some jurisdictions’ courts are pretty much striking down anything that a reasonable person wouldn’t expect to be there, and so it wouldn’t surprise me if such an approach would strike down any grant asserted in T&Cs).

> for software authors, prohibiting ML training would be antithetical to the Open Source Definition

If it’s a copyright matter, this wouldn’t be the case, because it wouldn’t be discrimination against a particular field of endeavour, but rather simply insisting on the terms of the license.

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#150
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI companies can ask for permission if they want to train their models on other people's works Do you ask for permission when you train your mind on copyrighted books? Or observe paintings? Or listen to music? Do you ask for permission when you get new ideas from HN that aren't your own? Humans are constantly ingesting gobs of "copyrighted" insights that they eventually remix into their own creations without necessar…

I'm not a computer program.

I don’t think one can know that for sure. ;)
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