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

reuters.com

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

#91

Post by rvz »

treyd wrote: post #72
kranke155 wrote: post #65

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…

Intellectual property never really existed. Copyright is something we made up to extend the logic of commodities to the full value chain for books, which made sense 200 years ago. But it makes no sense to apply the logic of commodities to digitally produced and distributed media. The production of culture has been slowly becoming more distorted as cultural assets that should be and historically were held in common ac…

> Copyright is something we made up to extend the logic of commodities to the full value chain for books, which made sense 200 years ago. But it makes no sense to apply the logic of commodities to digitally produced and distributed media.

Great! So given your articles are in the public domain on your website I can make millions out of it without given you a cent or direct credit and sources without paying you and can claim it all as my own then.

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

#92

Post by williamcotton »

kranke155 wrote: post #88
williamcotton wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Stable Diffusion has been known to make virtually identical copies of the images it was "trained" on, afaik. If the images are REALLY of no importance, they wouldn't have been used anyway.

And then the defense reminds the court that copyright is about specific works. Clearing the specific intent to copy a specific work is pretty key if you want to argue idea/expression or fair use or whatever their strategy may be.

And yes, the nearly identical copies will definitely be presented to the jury.

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

#93

Post by test6554 »

kranke155 wrote: post #76
CrimsonRain wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ok, so reproduce me a Picasso. You've seen one right?

Obligatory My first grader can do that.

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

#94

Post by olalonde »

kranke155 wrote: post #65

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…

Learning is not theft and never has been. I don't care whether it's a human or machine doing it. AI will benefit everyone enormously, even if it won't be equally distributed. The real issue here is that some skills are increasingly becoming obsolete and people have a hard time coping with that. Instead of demanding compensation, which would really be impractical to implement anyways, why not focus on developing new skills?

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

#95

Post by harshreality »

kranke155 wrote: post #65

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…

If you memorize all of harry potter word for word, or some famous solo vocal track from memory, are you committing a copyright violation? Or only if you then recreate it and try to redistribute your copy?

The scenario where AI training is locked down doesn't result in 1,000,000 individuals getting paid. (What would they get paid, and by whom?) It results in Disney, Adobe, etc.—massive companies with existing licenses to use content just about however they want—training their own models and locking everyone else out of the large AI model training game, until AI gets good enough to start generating human-quality creative work on its own (the same kind of progression as alphago/lee to alphago/zero), perhaps with the addition of a small set of purely copyright-free material.

Excluding all copyrighted material would be tying an AI model's metaphorical hands behind its back, since humans, although capable of producing great works through much iterative effort in isolation, all rely on having learned from some copyrighted work. Find an author who hasn't read plenty of recent books as well as older classics, or a musician (other than classical) who hasn't listened to plenty of modern music, or a director or editor who hasn't watched tons of movies and films. Recall Newton, "[I]f I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Many of those "shoulders" are copyrighted.

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

#96

Post by michaelbrave »

kranke155 wrote: post #88
williamcotton wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Stable Diffusion has been known to make virtually identical copies of the images it was "trained" on, afaik. If the images are REALLY of no importance, they wouldn't have been used anyway.

that's a gross oversimplification and an argument that was made in bad faith that has now spread like a meme.

The gist was if you overtrain a model, and try to recreate an exact image by prompting very similar things, and run it several thousand times, then you can recreate an image. If you seriously crank up the overtraining it's even easier. But normal use of the models do not just pump out recreations of training data.

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

#97

Post by kranke155 »

olalonde wrote: post #94
kranke155 wrote: post #65

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…

Learning is not theft and never has been. I don't care whether it's a human or machine doing it. AI will benefit everyone enormously, even if it won't be equally distributed. The real issue here is that some skills are increasingly becoming obsolete and people have a hard time coping with that. Instead of demanding compensation, which would really be impractical to implement anyways, why not focus on developing new s…

No that is not what people are upset about. They are upset that their life's work is being used without even asking permission, for someone else to get insanely rich.

That's what they're upset about.

If there were no use for 2D artists, then Stability Ai wouldn't be making an AI to replace them.

Key word here is: replace. 2D artists are not becoming obsolete - they're being replaced by a machine that was trained on their works without permission.

If you want to make an AI that does amazing paintings, and doesn't use human training data, more power to you. I can't compete with that. But if you use MY WORK to make a machine that's going to replace me, you do it under the cover of darkness and without permission - yeah i'll get pretty mad.

What happened to visual artists was more like Logitech announcing Logitech CoPilot and revealing they've extracted code from keylogging for the past 20 years.

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

#98

Post by corethree »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #71

Having done way more corporate court than I want (patents, mergers, liquidation), I’m increasingly convinced that the judicial system is fundamentally flawed. The reality is that the law in 2023 US is so obscure and opaque and how judges come to their ruling seems to be by their total whim with no actual philosophy other than maintenance of the system. Further I’m extremely unimpressed with the vast majority of judge…

The final decision made by this article is one I agree with with or without money and I have no incentive the game.

Every piece of creation you and I make us the sum total of our experiences and that includes copy written work. Holding an LLM guilty for that is like holding the human brain guilty for memorizing copyrighted work.

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

#99

Post by bergen »

ballenf wrote: post #66

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…

An artist can not professionally scan and incorporate millions of pieces of art into his cortex in a minute for commercial purpose.

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

#100

Post by nness »

TotalCrackpot wrote: post #74

This is consistent with historically intellectual property being a construct that benefits owners of capital and not actual innovators. That's why I think it should be abolished, this is yet another mechanism to monopolize a space to profit through some kind of rent-seeking procedure.

What should it be replaced with — a system where no one retains intellectual rights over the works that they create?
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