The Three Artists Behind a Landmark Lawsuit Against AI Art Generators

Great points. The one thing I would respectfully disagree with is the idea that this stuff can be shut down by buyout, legal action or whatever. The fact that the technology and process is now 'out of the bottle' so to speak, means that it won't go away. Progress is progress, and whether it's open source or foreign countries as actors, means that love it or hate it, we're going to have to live with the consequences of our actions.

It's going to be fascinating to see how we deal with androids which integrate advanced AI and therefore perfectly mimic human beings. The mind boggles.

I think the current state of things is the most sane approach. Copyright on the inputs doesn’t matter but copyright on the output does. If you use the tool to create a work that a court would consider copying, congrats it’s infringement. If not you’re good. Not sure? You’re now in in the same boat at other artists who can’t remember if their idea is original or not.

> > " In an interview with Forbes, Midjourney CEO David Holz said that the dataset that the company trained its AI model on was “just a big scrape of the internet” and the company hadn’t sought consent from artists who owned the copyright to their work. “There isn’t really a way to get a hundred million images and know where they’re coming from,” Holz said."

> So you just go ahead and steal copyrighted images without ask and attribution?

It's not ever "stealing". It's a copyright infringement and only if it isn't in fair use.

> This attitude is far beyond the pale and I, for one, hope that the artists succeed with their lawsuit.

The fact that the model is based on scanning a hundred million images in order to function and that less images means it would not function as well and the fact that it is actually impossible to ask for a hundred million permissive uses is all highly relevant to judgements related to fair use.

And of course that there are many non-infringing uses factors in heavily.

In the case of Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc. (1984), also known as the "Betamax case," the Supreme Court found that the sale of home video recording equipment (such as VCRs) was not copyright infringement, because the equipment had "commercially significant noninfringing uses." This principle, known as the "Betamax defense," was relied on by Google in the later case of Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc. (2015).

In the Google Books case, the court found that Google's scanning of millions of books to create a searchable database was a fair use of the copyrighted works under copyright law. The court cited the Betamax case in finding that Google's use of the books had a transformative purpose, and that the creation of a searchable database had significant public benefits, including the ability to find and identify books, and the ability to create new forms of research and scholarship. The court also found that Google's use did not harm the market for the original books, as it did not serve as a substitute for the original books and that the use of the copyrighted material was minimal.

Similarly, in the case of Stable Diffusion, it could be argued that the tool is being used for a transformative purpose, such as creating new and unique images (for inpainting new background imagery in place of removed people from vacation photos, or generating spectrographs of "70s disco rock", or converting a photo of a dog into a painting of a dog in the style of Dali) , and that it is not harming the market for the original works. Additionally, the fact that Stable Diffusion is free for the public to use may further support the argument that it is fair use, as it does not compete with the original images and does not generate commercial gain for the defendants.

You don't ask permission to look at an image that is publicly on display. AFAIK there is no law saying that machine learning bots are forbidden to look at an image that is publicly on display.

These are thought experiments. So other sensible viewpoints are only a contribution. I am myself also trying to work out where AI leaves us. Not just in this case, but because we will be hit by AI in the computer science field - hardware, software, everywhere - and potentially many places in general society.

I do not immediately see why strong market actors would not be able to close an attacker down in this way. I buy the argument that tech can be 'out of the bottle'. But this does not necessarily mean that it is feasible to use for market competition. It is often more likely that the tech is absorbed by existing strong market players. But as happens right now, you can influence markets, professions and peoples behaviour by making free (no pay) market tests on a large enough scale. Which is interesting in itself.

I did business studies at university and we had a lot of work on market forces. And the text books were full of examples of market situations where competitors attacked and was succesfully fended off using legal action - both warranted and unwarranted. And by other means. And wipe out by buy out is completely normal. I do not have much data on this, but I would think that a lot of acquihires, are actually done as market defence. With the basic intention to close down competitive tech. Maybe the acquired tech, knowledge and brains is used sometimes, and then probably incorporated into existing tech, but I think this is not always the main purpose of the acquihire. It is probably counter intuitive to think like this for tech people (I am one myself). But business people think in market dynamics (and money) first. The tech can often be a surprisingly long way down in the list of priorities - where we think it should be much higher up.

I have myself worked in companies that did a merger, where the merging entity was spun off by a parent company - in all cases a tech department that was no longer wanted by the parent company - and in the aftermath of the merger, the business entity was in reality obliterated by the new company, much more than it was merged or absorbed. Made a lot of people in the merged entity unhappy and rightfully so.