Live data from Hacker News

Judge pares down artists' AI copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, Stability AI

reuters.com

51–60 of 442 posts

Re: Judge pares down artists' AI copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, Stability AI

#51

A thought experiment: Imagine you have a blob of seemingly random data. Nothing in the data contains anything recognizable as illegal or in violation of copyright. Now imagine that the right input suddenly turns the data into illegal or infringing material, after a transformation operation. And not just a single unique input such as a password which clearly represents a mapping function between two sets of data. But…

>Imagine you have a blob of seemingly random data. Nothing in the data contains anything recognizable as illegal or in violation of copyright.

R

The set of Real numbers contains every positive whole number. This is already the magical blob.

Eg the decimal number 65101114114111111110 is "Aerroon" in ASCII.

Edit3: real numbers are better than natural numbers or whole numbers for this. They have zero and they solve the "0005" problem.

Re: Judge pares down artists' AI copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, Stability AI

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have the right to protect it with means that are not government force. Force is only justified in response to force, and you don’t get to ransom anyone that “steals” your thoughts and pixels. Do you believe copying is force? That’s a yes or no question, and if I don’t get a yes or no answer then I’ll answer for you.

> You have the right to protect it with means that are not government force. Force is only justified in response to force, and you don’t get to ransom anyone that “steals” your thoughts and pixels. This just sounds like your opinion, why do you think this? I really like that people can profitably write books and make movies and I think some force to allow that to happen seems reasonable.

Of course it’s my opinion that force is only justified in response to force, disagree?

Re: Judge pares down artists' AI copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, Stability AI

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I reject your whole premise here, as many thefts can occur without force, and many legal remedies are imposed without force. You're just ducking the question; it seems you're saying that 'no, you don't have any rights that you can enforce in court.' You'd probably object to extralegal enforcement on the basis that it violates the NAP or some other glibertarian trope.

I’ll answer for you then. Yes, you’re claiming that copying is force. I am defining force as literal force. What theft can occur without physically touching the thing being stolen? I didn’t duck the question. I answered it. I even answered it before it was asked (minus the irrelevant comment about identity fraud) - I’m against IP. Copy whatever you want.

I am defining force as literal force. What theft can occur without physically touching the thing being stolen?

This is like saying you work 24-7 because breathing involves physical motion. Insisting on ur personal definitions of well-understood terms while disregarding how everyone else uses them is childish. But even if we use this, ah, special definition, legal remedies in tort cases typically don't involve force. You get a judgement of liability from the court, and and are ordered to write a check. You can complain about government force, but by your criteria your injury is wholly imaginary.

Meanwhile it seems clear that you do not consider that authors of creative works to have any rights whatsoever in their output. I hear this a lot from people with no creative abilities of their own.

Re: Judge pares down artists' AI copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, Stability AI

#55

Intellectual property shouldn’t be a thing. If you still have it after I’ve supposedly stolen it from you, then it’s not real property. The easiest test of consistency is simply to ask about both piracy and AI training data. If you support IP in one case but not the other then you’re a hypocrite. There is no third option where your support of something depends not on what it is but who it benefits.

You do realise that if people’s intellectual work is not protected there wont be any intellectual work left, right? Why would i create something knowing you can just grab it and use it? Communism did the same to physical property, where you didnt own much and everything belonged to everyone. That didnt end particularly well because people inherently want to own things, especially the output of their own creation. Sur…

This is how moneyheads think the world works: that everything is a series of monetary incentives to be linked together to make an end result. Most humans don't actually think this way, and in specific a LOT of creative work is made without calculating exactly what the profit is going to be. This doesn't mean that artists don't want to be paid, but that artists focus on making their work first and monetizing it later.

What copyright actually protects is creative industry. By assigning individualized monopolies over copying and reproduction, the publishing industry can persistently lowball the shit out of artists (who themselves undervalue their work, see above) and then reap the profits for themselves. Since the vast majority of creative work would never see market interest, it's cheaper to pay billions of dollars to the handful of known, recognizable, and marketable mega-successes than to pay smaller amounts to a far larger pool of mid-list or unknown artists. This is why unions exist in basically every creative industry: otherwise, nobody below the talent line[0] gets paid.

To put a finer point on it: right now, the unions are doing a way better job of protecting human artists against AI art than copyright is. The argument for training AI being infringing is very weak in the general case where there's no obvious regurgitation. I mean, where does your copyrighted material even 'live' in the model, if the model can't even reproduce it? However, unions can very easily just say "you can't force us to cut corners by using this tool" in their negotiations and actually get that result. Furthermore, those rulings only bind publishers that hire artists. The artists themselves can still use AI when it makes sense in their workflow, rather than when publishers think they can cheap out on shit.

The failures of Soviet communism are complicated, but if you had to boil it down to one factor, I would not summarize it as "communal ownership bad" or "collectivism bad". Collective action has its place. Furthermore, the analogy you're making between copyright and physical property is flawed[1]. The reason why physical property ownership even exists is because of scarcity - the reason why I need permission to use your car is because you can't use your car if I'm also using it.

The irony of your communism analogy is that copyright is specifically used to erode ownership in private property in a way that makes the communism haters cry communism. There's a novel form of copyright misuse as a business model in which you put software in a thing that used to not require software, call it "smart", and then use the software to enforce your own idea of what "owning" the product means, backed up by the same laws that make it illegal to copy DVDs. There are a LOT of people who would like to go back to owning their cars and computers again, and that requires rolling back copyright, not strengthening it.

[0] Hollywood-ism for "people whose contribution to the work is not marketable"

[1] And, I suspect, a by-product of having read a bunch of Ayn Rand nonsense

Re: Judge pares down artists' AI copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, Stability AI

#56
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never seen a getty logo in any of my generated images so I suspect that they used img2img or some weird prompt.

In the early stuffs, Stable Diffusion 1 (not XL 1!) and such, if you prompted for stock photo style images, you regularly (~30%) got something resembling the Getty stock photo watermark in the lower right. Was quite annoying but adding "public domain, Creative Commons" to the prompt usually got rid of it (the model knows that public domain images have no watermark :-). Since SD2.0 I haven't seen this happening at all…

I've generated thousands of images using SD 1.5 based models and I've never got the getty watermark. That makes my think that some dishonest lawyer used img2img.

Re: Judge pares down artists' AI copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, Stability AI

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll answer for you then. Yes, you’re claiming that copying is force. I am defining force as literal force. What theft can occur without physically touching the thing being stolen? I didn’t duck the question. I answered it. I even answered it before it was asked (minus the irrelevant comment about identity fraud) - I’m against IP. Copy whatever you want.

I am defining force as literal force. What theft can occur without physically touching the thing being stolen? This is like saying you work 24-7 because breathing involves physical motion. Insisting on ur personal definitions of well-understood terms while disregarding how everyone else uses them is childish. But even if we use this, ah, special definition, legal remedies in tort cases typically don't involve force.…

My definition of force is the definition of force. The definition I gave you was literally "literal force", and you understood that to mean something different from your interpretation of force. You are the only one trying to change definitions here. If the court orders me to do something, that's force. If you think it's somehow voluntary, then I have a few examples I'd like to ask you about. I have no idea what injury you're referring to.

Yes, we've already established that you don't get the rights to pixels, sounds and ideas, and my creative abilities won't change that.

Re: Judge pares down artists' AI copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, Stability AI

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realise that if people’s intellectual work is not protected there wont be any intellectual work left, right? Why would i create something knowing you can just grab it and use it? Communism did the same to physical property, where you didnt own much and everything belonged to everyone. That didnt end particularly well because people inherently want to own things, especially the output of their own creation. Sur…

And if there was no slavery we wouldn’t have any pyramids. I don’t care. You don’t have the right to an idea, a sound or a particular arrangement of pixels. That’s not communism because nothing is being taken from you. I don’t owe you any terms and conditions to something you don’t own.

The pyramids weren't built by slaves. The ones in Egypt at least.

Re: Judge pares down artists' AI copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, Stability AI

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The concept of intellectual property came about at the same time that slavery was fading away. Essentially at the time when people progressed into something better than basic primates that thought enslaving one another is a good idea. So technically speaking advocates for the abolition of copyright are projecting a reversal of progress. I want actual ai that actually learns and that doesnt rely on brute forcing simul…

Irrelevant. You said “it’s the law”. I responded with “it’s the law”. You lack consistency, more at 12. I already made it clear in my original comment that unlike you, my position on IP holds universally and not just in situations that benefit me. The fact that you continue to try to argue how beneficial it would be to have IP makes me believe that you simply do not care about being consistent, so I’d like to hear it…

I dont care about what holds universally “true” in some peole’s minds about _my_ property. That’s communism. I am an individual therefore i care about _my_ ownership. Communism wanted to make everything belong to everyone. Philosophical darwinism proved that that concept is wrong. What’s mine is mine, period.

I never pirate software and no, I dont think piracy is a good idea either. I believe in open source and that human knowledge should he free in the sense of librem but i equally believe that that should be according to terms and conditions. So i, as a human, would like to read and understand your idea but if you dont wish to grant me the right to monetise it - sure.

Re: Judge pares down artists' AI copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, Stability AI

#60

Intellectual property shouldn’t be a thing. If you still have it after I’ve supposedly stolen it from you, then it’s not real property. The easiest test of consistency is simply to ask about both piracy and AI training data. If you support IP in one case but not the other then you’re a hypocrite. There is no third option where your support of something depends not on what it is but who it benefits.

You do realise that if people’s intellectual work is not protected there wont be any intellectual work left, right? Why would i create something knowing you can just grab it and use it? Communism did the same to physical property, where you didnt own much and everything belonged to everyone. That didnt end particularly well because people inherently want to own things, especially the output of their own creation. Sur…

"people inherently want to own things, especially the output of their own creation". That is the founding idea of communism indeed. I'm not sure you understand anything about it.
Post reply on HN