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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

#111

Post by cmiles74 »

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…

It's convenient to refer to the training of the machine as learning but let's not lose sight of the fact that "machine learning" is not at all the same thing as people "learning". Pretending they mean the same thing in this context, in my opinion, is dishonest.

I also take issue with the assumption that AI will "benefit everyone enormously, even if it won't be equally distributed"; I don't see any factual basis for this assumption. On the contrary, it seems much more likely that AI will be used to concentrate wealth even further. Given the high cost, I find it hard to believe it will ever by "equally distributed".

For as long as I can remember big corporations have been merciless in their preservation of "intellectual property". I didn't love it then and I don't love it now. OTOH, the idea that Microsoft can train their LLM on code I've written and then sell access to that LLM for money (sharing no dollars with me) strikes me as outright theft.

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

#112

Post by AnimalMuppet »

constantly wrote: post #104
kranke155 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> 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. This is kind of petulant then, respectfully. They got paid to produce that work, and they sold their services for that paycheck and the knowledge that they were putting their work into the world. The fruits of their la…

Let's say I have a band. We make a record, and we sell some records. We get paid for that.

Now someone wants to use one of the songs in an ad. We "got paid" to produce the work, but the people making the ad still have to pay us for that use of the song, because it's a different use than the one we got paid for.

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

#113

Post by harshreality »

kranke155 wrote: post #103
harshreality wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, and you know how humans acquire works to learn from? They pay for it. They buy the books. They buy tickets to theatre. They buy entrance to the gallery. The trick that's being done now is hey, we don't have to pay since it's not a person. (to the creator) But hey, it is just like a person when it learns! (legal system) If AI models require human training data, then they should pay for it. Easy.

False. Libraries exist. Borrowing books from neighborhood libraries or friends exists. Watching movies and TV with friends exists. Listening to music on the radio (yes, those free electromagnetic thingies) still exists. There are many, many, many free performances or accessible copies of all kinds of copyrighted content, plenty to train either a neural net or a human brain on.

Books3 has separate legal concerns, but Google has a legally acquired corpus of tons of books, which they've mostly cleaned up from scans (probably far better than IA has), and have probably used to train Bard on. Their lawyers must be biting their nails waiting to see how these lawsuits turn out, though.

Until AGI arrives, or some other method of training LLMs from the ground up on sparse examples by incrementally building on structural knowledge of language.... training on ridiculous amounts of copyrighted content is required. Not because anyone wants to copy those works, but because training that way fills in for a lack of real-world experience that every child gets, which includes consuming and interacting with a bunch of copyrighted content that isn't tracked because it's not practical to do so.

You could train a LLM only on project gutenberg, and the LLM would churn out stilted English and the occasional iambic pentameter. That's great if you want works that seem like they were written over a century ago, but nearly useless otherwise.

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

#114

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

rvz wrote: post #91
treyd wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

This describes how ideas work - and ideas are rarely (if ever) IP-locked by a first originator - because there usually isn't one.

Everything by everyone, everywhere is built on the output of predecessors. Progress is a shared effort made up of minuscule increments or slight reorderings - which are typically done several times before they catch on.

IP exists to hinder this process by preventing 99.99999% of potential people from advancing ideas.

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

#115

Post by raincole »

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…

> how an ML system scanning and training on a copyrighted work is different from a highly skilled artist doing the same?

You just answered it? One is a ML system and one is a human?

I'm really, really baffled why people keep using this argument. Like you guys know machines are not humans, right? ...right?

Humans are special cases in laws. Always have been and always will be (until AGI). A pedestrian is treated differently in laws than a driver is. The fact that a pair of legs and a car both move you from point A to point B doesn't make them same. Selling human livers on your local market is very different from selling cow livers, even biologically they are all organic tissues.

Let me say it again: humans are special cases. AI learning copyrighted materials might be illegal or legal, but it has little to do with "what if a human being does the same".

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

#116

Post by cmiles74 »

constantly wrote: post #104
kranke155 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> 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. This is kind of petulant then, respectfully. They got paid to produce that work, and they sold their services for that paycheck and the knowledge that they were putting their work into the world. The fruits of their la…

People who do the work should be compensated when their work is used to generate income for someone else. This is the way it's worked for as long as I can remember: I get paid to do some work, the company then gets my output.

What we have here is someone hoovering up copyrighted and protected content, from all over the internet, and using it to generate income. They then are turning around and claiming that they do not need to pay for these protected works because... Well, it's always something hand-wavy like "machine learn like people" but it boils down to "I want to keep the money."

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

#117

Post by nirvdrum »

corethree wrote: post #98
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.

And yet these systems are incapable of genuine creativity. If they were, they would be taught rules & techniques and set off to their own devices to draw, like humans. But, they can't and they're not. LLMs and humans don't learn or create in the same way. Moreover, there's no reason we should grant LLMs the full rights and privileges of humans.

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

#118

Post by kranke155 »

harshreality wrote: post #113
kranke155 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and you know how humans acquire works to learn from? They pay for it. They buy the books. They buy tickets to theatre. They buy entrance to the gallery. The trick that's being done now is hey, we don't have to pay since it's not a person. (to the creator) But hey, it is just like a person when it learns! (legal system) If AI models require human training data, then they should pay for it. Easy.

False. Libraries exist. Borrowing books from neighborhood libraries or friends exists. Watching movies and TV with friends exists. Listening to music on the radio (yes, those free electromagnetic thingies) still exists. There are many, many, many free performances or accessible copies of all kinds of copyrighted content, plenty to train either a neural net or a human brain on. Books3 has separate legal concerns, but…

Libraries exist? Do you think books fly onto library shelves for free? As far as I know, someone bought them. Your neighbour or friend also bought the stuff. I suspect you're not being straight here, I just have to ignore this whole line of reasoning since it seems so absurd.

>Until AGI arrives, or some other method of training LLMs from the ground up on sparse examples by incrementally building on structural knowledge of language.... training on ridiculous amounts of copyrighted content is required.

that's not my problem. Those AI model folk should just compensate the people they're using training data from, and they should ask for permission.

>You could train a LLM only on project gutenberg, and the LLM would churn out stilted English and the occasional iambic pentameter. That's great if you want works that seem like they were written over a century ago, but nearly useless otherwise.

Not my problem. Why are the problems of the wonderful AI developers suddenly human, global problems that we all have to find a way to fix?

If they want access to training data - they should pay for the privielige.

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

#119

Post by marcinzm »

nirvdrum wrote: post #117
corethree wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And yet these systems are incapable of genuine creativity. If they were, they would be taught rules & techniques and set off to their own devices to draw, like humans. But, they can't and they're not. LLMs and humans don't learn or create in the same way. Moreover, there's no reason we should grant LLMs the full rights and privileges of humans.

Are we going to hold all human artists to that standard as well? I suspect many would fail it.

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

#120

Post by cmiles74 »

harshreality wrote: post #95
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…

Where is this idea that copyrighted material should be excluded from training data coming from?

My understanding is that people want to be compensated when their intellectual property is used as training data for a machine. That strikes me as an entirely reasonable expectation.

One person memorizing Harry Potter for their own amusement, even if they make money doing public appearances where they recite sections of the work verbatim for the amusement of the audience is not in any way similar to the process of training an LLM or of that LLM's output. The scale alone is so vastly different that it renders the comparison useless and misleading.

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