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

reuters.com

151–160 of 442 posts

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

#151

Can somebody explain how this will not kill any incentive to publish anything? Why would any human spend their limited lifespan to create a piece of work that will be grabbed without permission, approximated algorithmically (at least on the surface) and reused in infinite possible small variations without any attribution or remuneration whatsoever? This feels like a reversion to medieval times with minimal trade betw…

The problem is these discussions are being had by STEM/tech people who don't respect or value art or the effort behind it, not by artists. They simply do not get the concerns that artists have.

It truly boggles the mind that people equate machines that can output thousands and thousands of images in short time spans in any ingested style... with humans who have to hone styles and can only produce a result every so often.

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

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument gets repeated often enough that it implies that there are a significant number of people who actually believe it. This is pretty depressing, as the only way you could think that a human is not fundamentally more capable of creativity than an LLM is if you are incapable of imagining anything other than a life of ‘consuming content’.

So specifically what is there except the sum total of our experiences and our genetics?

Even if this is true, the sum of a human's total experiences is far more vast than what LLMs are trained on and is mostly non-copyrighted material. Your eyes are open ~16 hours a day, constantly exposing your brain to various non-copyrighted stuff like trees, rocks, animals, the insides of your house, the crap on your desk, other people's faces, traffic, etc.

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

#153

It seems like they focused too much on the details of how the model works and how data is encoded by the model. "In his dismissal of infringement claims, Orrick wrote that plaintiffs’ theory is “unclear” as to whether there are copies of training images stored in Stable Diffusion that are utilized by DeviantArt and Midjourney. He pointed to the defense’s arguments that it’s impossible for billions of images “to be co…

Maybe even the data for training should be opt-in, then at least this case would have been easier solved. The outputs are then another story - I can agree to training but I'm not eager to see knock-offs of my work being outputted and spread.

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

#154
post #77
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…

It's a matter of scale. No human being can ingest ALL existing images. If it was the case that the average human artist was able to replicate any other work, without effort, probably we would have had two effects: first, we'd have much less works of art (because the gains would have been eliminated, so why bother), and second, copyright law would have been much more restrictive. This is exactly what we should do: avo…

The law does not say it is a matter of scale.

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

#155

Can somebody explain how this will not kill any incentive to publish anything? Why would any human spend their limited lifespan to create a piece of work that will be grabbed without permission, approximated algorithmically (at least on the surface) and reused in infinite possible small variations without any attribution or remuneration whatsoever? This feels like a reversion to medieval times with minimal trade betw…

Other humans have always been doing exactly that with anything you published.

Really? can you point to some example?

People have been putting up with some theft because they could still eke a living.

This attitude has all the coherency of "some people are thieves, we cannot catch them all, so lets make theft legal".

Unless I hear some sensible argument why this slippery road won't destroy a good fraction of the economy I am assuming that regression to kleptocracy is the shape of things to come.

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

#156
post #143
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just not that different from people seeing works and learning or being inspired, so how do you "ban AI" without adding more crazy DRM/DMCA stuff for legitimate use?

[flagged]

I agree that the scale is different, but even the way you’ve phrased it sounds pretty comparable to how humans learn and produce art. Besides scale, how is it different?

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

#157
post #91
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…

If someone ran a print shop and printed out my articles into a book called "Collected works by Trey on HN" or something and didn't give me a cent then yeah I'd be thrilled, because it's a validation of my work. I already published the articles, they're doing all the work to put them into print, what right do I really have to claim part of the sales?

But if they claimed that they wrote the content then they would be defrauding their customers, since saying they wrote them would just be lying. You don't need intellectual property for fraud (as in "lying for material gain") to exist and be bad. At the very least it would be dishonest academically speaking and they should be criticized for it.

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

#158
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getty has a much stronger case, given that warped versions of the Getty logo have shown up in a number of SD-generated images, so it's obvious that there was impermissible copying. I'm not sure Stability will agree to a licensing fee, since part of the rationale for the last version of SD was to remove the infringing images from their training sets going forward.

> warped versions of the Getty logo have shown up in a number of SD-generated images. If you create art that has a Pepsi logo on a depicted vending machine etc Pepsi has no copyright claim on your art does it? All it shows is the art was made with the knowledge of the logo and the logo was included as an element inside the art. When logos are shown in a context that may cause confusion (about who made a product etc)…

So I'm only guessing here but my thought is because a Pepsi logo just indicates that the input image was an ad, a Getty Images logo means that the input images were owned by Getty and likely used without their consent.

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

#159

Can somebody explain how this will not kill any incentive to publish anything? Why would any human spend their limited lifespan to create a piece of work that will be grabbed without permission, approximated algorithmically (at least on the surface) and reused in infinite possible small variations without any attribution or remuneration whatsoever? This feels like a reversion to medieval times with minimal trade betw…

I don't see how this could be any different than say a person reads a book. Then uses what they learned from that book to write another book? Sure, if they're literally copying material from one book and then adding that as their own work into their book, that could be against copyright.

Because a machine can do it millions of times faster

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

#160

Can somebody explain how this will not kill any incentive to publish anything? Why would any human spend their limited lifespan to create a piece of work that will be grabbed without permission, approximated algorithmically (at least on the surface) and reused in infinite possible small variations without any attribution or remuneration whatsoever? This feels like a reversion to medieval times with minimal trade betw…

People like to create things regardless of profit motive, like art, who woulda thunk it?

I don't understand how people think this will suddenly make human art vanish, that is just ridiculous and naive. People will spend their limited lifespan to make art, because that's what humans just do. Cavemen weren't being paid to paint on the walls.

Your viewpoint is honestly insane. The people against AI art are bonkers.

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