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Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

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Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#51

Post by idle_zealot »

LegitShady wrote: post #13
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 thing you're authoring is just your prompt. Apply for a copyright for it. The image or text generated in reply is generated by a computer with no more input from you than someone commissioning work using very precise words, and lacks human authorship.

This falls apart when you start getting into things like control net and posing, or iterative erasing, reprompting, and in/outfilling. It starts feeling more like some weird combination of 3d modeling, photoshop, and a really advanced autofill.

Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#52

Post by vouaobrasil »

hakfoo wrote: post #39
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-- wit…

> 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."

I don't think effort should be arbitrarily constrained to make the bar high, but I do not agree with you that the end product is important.

What is important is that the product comes from people because art helps society be healthier by existing as a means of communication from people to other people. Once AI begins to take over part of the process, it becomes like athletes who dope...it removes the essence of their achievement.

Art is more than just a single, isolated product for consumption. It exists to inspire, to change minds based on its ORIGINS, not just on its end results.

The problem with your argument is that you are ignoring the sociological effects of artistic creation, and focusing on the act of maximizing along a SINGLE variable: aesthetic value. That does art a disservice, and it means that the argument for or against AI must also be more subtle.

Besides, isn't the strategy of releasing AI just to see what happens a bit haphazard?

Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#53

Post by jtr1 »

stale2002 wrote: post #27
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 that an AI, being a statistical model and not generally intelligent, should not be allowed to disregard the copyright of its source material None of what you are saying has anything to do with copyright. The tool Photoshop isn't generally intelligent either. And yet, yes it can be used to create art using other people's stuff. And it could be done legally if the results are transformative.

Photoshop doesn’t install with a massive directory of other people’s copyrighted works to draw snippets from.

Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#54

Post by Nevermark »

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…

I don’t think it makes sense for both model builders and the model’s users to separately obtain licenses for the same works used in the training set.

A model trained on several copyrighted data sources cannot somehow be used in a way depending on a subset of those sources.

So all parameters of usage and compensation should be settled by contract between the model builder and copyrighted data supplier, before the copyrighted material is used.

Or to put it simply: using copyrighted material to create a model would NOT be considered fair use.

That’s it. That’s the standard. No complicated new laws required.

Model builders obtain permission to use copyrighted material from copyright holders based on any terms both agree to.

Terms might involve model usage limits, term limits, one time compensation, per use compensation, data source credits, or anything else either party wants.

The likely result will be some standard sets of terms becoming popular and well known. But nobody has to agree to anything they don’t want to.

Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#55

Post by LegitShady »

stale2002 wrote: post #44
LegitShady wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

> 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. In your opinion then, using this same line of logic, Photoshop is not protected. The courts disagree with you though. Using your line of logic, you could say that the computer is authoring the w…

I used words very carefully. It depends on the level of human authorship.

If you use a tool to correct some pixels thats directed by a human closely, no thats not a problem.

If you remove large parts of the image with the ai erase fill, then you've given up authorship of those parts of the image. You could then go in and author changes to the work that you could further add to your copyright. But you would never change the copyright status of the stuff authored by a machine.

You're using 'Photoshop' on a naive level without looking at the most important element - how much authorship is the human having. You can basically 'hand paint' a picture in photoshop, or you can use the ai tools and have almost no authorship.

Photoshop is a program not a method.

Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#56

Post by meowkit »

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…

My opinion as a SWE who is dating a lawyer (joke, not a serious qualification but it does provide some insight):

Generative models traverse and interpolate high dimensional state spaces. These state spaces are created from input data.

I would argue people do the exact same thing - the first main difference is we can use novel inputs (e.g. we can use images or words to develop our music/temporal state spaces and vice versa). People also are recursive and self referential in a way that doesn't collapse.

Until we solve the interpretability problem (e.g. can you decode the feature space of a neural network into something we can comprehend) there is no good solution. Either traditional copyright wins and we get even more draconian policies (think Disney and their desire to never put anything in the public domain), or we have a free for all (which I don't think is bad for creative works, but certainly for more practical things like stock photos or nonfiction).

Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#57

Post by ZoomerCretin »

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…

Why would copyrightability of AI generated work affect its profitability? Owning a copyright gives you the exclusive right to copy and sell a work. If no one owns the copyright for a work, no one has the _exclusive_ right to copy and sell that work.

Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#58

Post by usr8new »

carom wrote: post #32

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…

Biggest issue is the first one. Dataset copyrights are where most of the fight b/w regulators, AI companies & artists is happening.

Should you be able to train your model on an image or text someone uploaded on the internet without buying the copyright? If no, then most of current LLMs & stable diffusion models will have to go & I don't see big tech allowing it.

Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#59

Post by spookie »

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,…

Thank you, it basically boils down to this.

I'm baffled at how someone in their right mind still argues as if using any other tool is free of copyright infringement of some kind.

It also boggles my mind how, in our line of work (which is often artistic in its own right), a lot of people make preconceptions on how art is made. Often reducing it to nothing but transformative generation. Such takes are deeply narcissistic, and downright wrong. At this point I'm led to believe they're AI generated.

Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#60

Post by jj999 »

carom wrote: post #32

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…

Who do you think should hold the copyright on the model weights, the copyright holders of the individual works comprising the dataset or the ones who assembled the dataset?
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