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Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

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Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#31

Post by gnopgnip »

rickmode wrote: post #14

I believe we first need to answer the question of whether the copyright of the AI model’s source text or images affects the output. My opinion — and note I’m a software engineer, not a lawyer — is that an AI, being a statistical model and not generally intelligent, should not be allowed to disregard the copyright of its source material. This would, I think, require the AI’s creator to secure a license for all of its…

Is there any precedent where copyright was focused on the input rather than the final published work?

Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#32

Post by carom »

There are three copyright issues here; datasets, model weights, and model outputs.

Dataset copyright is pretty well defined and things can often be used under fair use. Fair use decisions are done with a four prong test and really decided by the courts on a case-by-case basis.

Model weights cannot currently be copyrighted. They are the output of a mechanical process over the dataset. However, software faced a similar situation where the source code could be copyrighted but the compiled binary was not. US copyright law was updated to address this. We may see something similar for model weights.

Model outputs are less clear, but these are likely copyrightable by the user of the model. It is not possible for a non-human to hold copyright, so the model cannot. It is very unlikely that the company producing the model could assert copyright over the outputs. A good analogy here is someone using photo manipulation software.

Super interesting area. I think we will eventually see an update to the copyright code to make weights copyrightable. Also it will be interesting to see how court challenges (code generation, image generation) affect datasets in the future.

Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#33

Post by chottocharaii »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #18

We as a society have a relatively healthy setup for people to create art and content. Sure there are problems, but on the whole it mostly works. What AI will do is destroy that by removing the profitability of creating that content. Although generative AI operates on a similar principle to a human being exposed to a large number of artworks, it does so at a speed blindingly faster, enabling it to outcompete humans at…

What you’re describing requires an ability to copyright style on top of expression. That would be an unacceptable constraint on freedom of speech and artistic freedom in my view

The ability of an industry to turn a profit should not constrain the ability of the general public to communicate ideas. Expression is the only thing that should be copyrighted against

Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#34

Post by vouaobrasil »

flangola7 wrote: post #29
vouaobrasil wrote: post #18

We as a society have a relatively healthy setup for people to create art and content. Sure there are problems, but on the whole it mostly works. What AI will do is destroy that by removing the profitability of creating that content. Although generative AI operates on a similar principle to a human being exposed to a large number of artworks, it does so at a speed blindingly faster, enabling it to outcompete humans at…

Even if we keep draconian copyright laws they need to be changed in some ways. Otherwise Disney will dominate by creating their own AIs and we still end up with a small faction controlling what we consume - and we will be paying them for the honor of it on top.

I agree. I was being somewhat facetious there. I don't really enjoy copyright laws the way they are, but I do believe that AI is the FAR greater evil.

Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#36

Post by stale2002 »

optymizer wrote: post #21
Der_Einzige wrote: post #5

I'm going to try to plead my case for images generated using sophisticated prompt engineering to be copyrightable. For example, at the point that I've written a prompt with 20 tags, 10 negative prompt tags, some loras, custom weights, embeddings merges, and prompt editing, I'm now writing what is effectively a "program", which should be copyrightable and so should its outputs. It's total BS to me that a book of midjo…

The training model for Stable Diffusion has a lot of copyrighted images mixed together into an output which makes the plagiarism non-obvious, but let's reduce the set by 1 image. Shouldn't affect the output too much, right? Maybe some prompt will have a slightly different image. Now let's reduce it by another image. Again, less options for what to display, fewer images to take pixels from, but still a lot of options,…

> is that not an obvious copyright infringement?

No, it is absolutely not.

Let's do the same hypothetical that you brought up and using other people's art, but instead are model just takes 1 single pixel from 1 million images.

Taking 1 single pixel from a million images, or the first letter from every book, and putting it into a new work is transformative fair use.

Transformative fair use is legal.

> Just because the output is 50% image A and 50% image B, or 0.1% image A and 0.1% image B and 99.8% image C, doesn't suddenly make it OK.

It quite literally does! Using .1% percent of an image is legal.

The amount of work that you take from someone else is one of the 4 factors of fair use.

Yes, the specific example you gave falls under what the courts literally use right now as one of the factors!

Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#37

Post by LegitShady »

stale2002 wrote: post #22
LegitShady wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No your human input product is the inputs you authored but you're applying for copyright for something else.

So then yes, it is about the human input into the process. Thats what I just said. Having large amounts of human input is the thing that matters for this stuff, which is the case for many forms of AI art. In the same way how photoshop uses a computer, and the computer creates the art, the resulting computer generate art can still have copyright protections. (because of the large amount of human input, even though yes…

The product of your human work is the input, not the ai generated image. You are merely commissioning some system to do the work on which you have very little actual future authorship except the commission. For art we don't grant the copyright to someone commissioning work, they have to negotiate with the artist for that.

But your artist is not human, so cannot create copyrightable works, so you can't even bargain for the right. Your copyrightable prompt just created a public domain result.

As for your comparison with photoshop, you have it backwards. The lesson you should learn is that if you fill portions of a work using something that starts authoring parts of the image, you should lose the ability to copyright those parts of the image, because you didn't author them.

Just like other works that are a mix of public domain and copyrighted elements, you can only copyright the human authored work. It's like making a comic with AI pictures - the images themselves are public domain (assuming you haven't forgotten to license the use of those works in your computer system that generates the image for you), you assembling the work into a comic is what you own the copyright to.

the characters and images designed by a machine remain public domain, no matter if you prompted all of them.

Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#38

Post by marcinzm »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #30
marcinzm wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And I sincerely hope they are used against AI to make AI unprofitable. No, they'll make AI unprofitable for small time creators but not massive corporations. The latter either already have rights to vast quantitates of training data or will hire a thousands in Africa to create training data that is just legally different enough to count.

That is why we should halt AI completely and do a more thorough analysis of its societal-level implications before blindingly putting it out there. Because when new technology is introduced, it makes it almost impossible to stop using it due to the way our current society is setup (as a sensitive machine that is very quick to reward any gains in efficieny and economic output as opposed to sustainability).

Define AI.

Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#39

Post by hakfoo »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #18

We as a society have a relatively healthy setup for people to create art and content. Sure there are problems, but on the whole it mostly works. What AI will do is destroy that by removing the profitability of creating that content. Although generative AI operates on a similar principle to a human being exposed to a large number of artworks, it does so at a speed blindingly faster, enabling it to outcompete humans at…

I don't want to see AI copyright, but that's more an extension of not wanting to see any copyright.

A lot of it comes down to creativity as a process, or as a product.

It feels like many people tend to view creativity-- especially capital-A Art-- as a process-- it should be arduous and require skill and be an exclusive club. I've seen people be very hostile to pre-AI digital technology because it lowers the bar-- with software, you have a canvas that you can keep erasing until you're happy, a straight-edge that's perfect every time, etc.

I tend to think the important part is the end product: was someone able to express their vision to the highest possible level of fidelity? In that regard, every new technology gets us closer-- the person who couldn't draw a circle can take a photo and doctor it in the GIMP until he's happy. The next frontier for this is to say "I can use AI to generate 200 permutations, and then take the ones I like best and further hack on them to get what I want."

This also makes me hostile to copyright, since anyone trying to claim work as their own, establish restrictive conditions, or "stop plagiarism" is denying others tools and resources that could be used to deliver their vision. Maybe the most effective way to realize someone's vision is to start with an existing piece of work and modify to fit. (programmers seem to understand this more innately than, say, photographers)

Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#40

Post by jj999 »

gnopgnip wrote: post #31
rickmode wrote: post #14

I believe we first need to answer the question of whether the copyright of the AI model’s source text or images affects the output. My opinion — and note I’m a software engineer, not a lawyer — is that an AI, being a statistical model and not generally intelligent, should not be allowed to disregard the copyright of its source material. This would, I think, require the AI’s creator to secure a license for all of its…

Is there any precedent where copyright was focused on the input rather than the final published work?

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