81–90 of 442 posts
The lawsuit is moving forward, but only on copyrighted work. This is (not yet) a story.
This will be the greatest act of Intellectual Property theft in history. All because judges will be befuddled about what to do after hearing terms like “training data” and “compression”. We will, of course get the emails in 10-20 years showing that it’s all lies and that the CEOs of these companies knew exactly what they were doing. If this continues, AI will be the great inequality machine in history. Take data from…
Also, those emails seem very likely to be ordered to be produced during discovery.
This thing could really go either way at this point but I feel like Stability has the upper hand.
Imagine training a model without any of the plaintiffs images, then using that side by side with the model that does. This could then be used to show the jury that those individual works are of no importance to the system if the images are of the same quality.
They will probably argue that the individual expressions of each work are not copied, rather the abstract ideas of two-dimensional representations present across any and all images.
Expect lots of side by side pictures as Exhibits from both side! Grandma and her fellows have to weigh in on this one!
This is a fun one!
> Two of the three artists who filed the lawsuit have dropped their infringement claims because they didn’t register their work with the copyright office before suing. The copyright claims will be limited to artist Sarah Anderson’s works, which she has registered. I’m impressed that their legal team was incompetent enough that they didn’t bring this up as an issue before filing the lawsuit.
Can someone explain again how an ML system scanning and training on a copyrighted work is different from a highly skilled artist doing the same? There are artists that can study a painting for a few minutes and then recreate it from memory. There are artists who study a particular body of work so long that they can create more works indistinguishable in style. If an artist recreates a copyrighted work or creates a de…
I see no reason the same standard cannot be applied to ML generated content. If the evaluation is being performed on the end result, then that is all that matters. The same judges that decide these things for human generated content can continue to do so for ML generated ones.
Even the people submitting and responding to the copyright claims will still be human (with briefs generated by ML…).
What will be more interesting is when the judges themselves get replaced with an “objective” AI to quantify similarity for copyright purposes. If that ever happens, it’ll trigger an arms race to hit the razors edge without going over.
Can someone explain again how an ML system scanning and training on a copyrighted work is different from a highly skilled artist doing the same? There are artists that can study a painting for a few minutes and then recreate it from memory. There are artists who study a particular body of work so long that they can create more works indistinguishable in style. If an artist recreates a copyrighted work or creates a de…
Three things immediately spring to mind: scale (1), accountability (2), and profit (3).
1. An automated system can train on data at huge volume, in a way that no single human is capable of doing. Setting aside the issue that training an ML model and artists learning by copying techniques of other artists is, I would argue, fundamentally different acts, _even if we take them to be the same_, we have to acknowledge that in a single human lifetime one person can only "train" on so many works. Automated systems have no such limitation.
2. If an artist violates copyright or oversteps norms around artistic professional practice, they can be held accountable. Companies which violate this by using automated systems so far hide behind those systems ("the AI is doing it/did it") so aren't held responsible (it should be: the company has built the system, and therefore is responsible for how it is used, and what it does). By building up this false sense of agency on the part of systems (which the marketing term "AI" is designed to bolster), lack of accountability is laundered into the actions being taken at scale.
3. Automated systems are, due to their scale, very profitable. I can generate hundreds or thousands of copyright-violating work that dilute the market for artists, and it is incredibly cheap to do so. Fighting those copyright violations in court has to be done more or less on an individual basis (especially if actions like that in the original article continue to fail), which is extremely slow and expensive. If the cost of violating copyright is tiny, and the cost of enforcing it is huge, then it ceases to be a useful tool except for the most well-resourced organizations.
> It seems an ML tool could add a filter to the output and refuse to output a work that too closely resembles one or more work under copyright. Isn't that basically what legitimate professional artists do as well?
No, because copyright is more complicated than "these two things look a lot alike", and legitimate professional artists don't run into this issue, because they aren't constantly trying to skirt the line of "as close as possible to copyright violation while still getting away with it".
> Thousands of artists are capable of infringement, but we don't take away their brushes based on capability.
But they do get sued when they infringe! Enforcement happens, because (for now) it is still possible for independent artists to enforce their copyrights. The argument being made by artists with regard to these ML models is that _they are already infringing copyright_, not that they hypothetically may in the future.
> Two of the three artists who filed the lawsuit have dropped their infringement claims because they didn’t register their work with the copyright office before suing. The copyright claims will be limited to artist Sarah Anderson’s works, which she has registered. The lawsuit is moving forward, but only on copyrighted work. This is (not yet) a story.
This will be the greatest act of Intellectual Property theft in history. All because judges will be befuddled about what to do after hearing terms like “training data” and “compression”. We will, of course get the emails in 10-20 years showing that it’s all lies and that the CEOs of these companies knew exactly what they were doing. If this continues, AI will be the great inequality machine in history. Take data from…
Google “expert witness”! Courts are also known to hire their own experts who mediated between the experts on either side. Also, those emails seem very likely to be ordered to be produced during discovery. This thing could really go either way at this point but I feel like Stability has the upper hand. Imagine training a model without any of the plaintiffs images, then using that side by side with the model that does.…
If the images are REALLY of no importance, they wouldn't have been used anyway.
Can someone explain again how an ML system scanning and training on a copyrighted work is different from a highly skilled artist doing the same? There are artists that can study a painting for a few minutes and then recreate it from memory. There are artists who study a particular body of work so long that they can create more works indistinguishable in style. If an artist recreates a copyrighted work or creates a de…
This will be the greatest act of Intellectual Property theft in history. All because judges will be befuddled about what to do after hearing terms like “training data” and “compression”. We will, of course get the emails in 10-20 years showing that it’s all lies and that the CEOs of these companies knew exactly what they were doing. If this continues, AI will be the great inequality machine in history. Take data from…
There is no "taking data" going on. Nobody is going into your private locker and training on your painting, music or cooking recipes. If you put your "work" out in the world, anyone who views it, is automatically training their brains on it. Viewing is training.
A perfectly reasonable view for humans, since you shouldn't be able to copyright a brain.
Not at all a reasonable view for a computer, until we also get to freely use all the copyrighted works ourselves. The problem here is that AI training is asymmetric: the people training an AI use works in violation of their licenses, but don't let their own works be used in the same way. For instance, Microsoft uses code on GitHub to train Copilot, but you still don't get to freely the source code of Windows or GitHub.
I am absolutely in favor of eliminating copyright and patent law. I am not in favor of keeping it around while letting AI become a laundering mechanism to get around it. AI training should not get to uniquely ignore copyright; copyright should cease to exist.