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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

#201

Post by rpdillon »

kranke155 wrote: post #97
olalonde wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

AI is just leveraging value in the data that wasn't used before. In the same way we can automate jobs by watching how the human workers do the job, we can automate writing text or producing a picture. As we drive to work, we do so so we can get to work, but cameras on other vehicles watch us drive, and take all the judgement and learning we put into driving to try and create automated drivers. Should all drivers be compensated when their driving style is used to train an autonomous vehicle? It's the same scenario you mention: the work of humans is used to automate away that same work (this is pretty much how we automated everything, AI is just more explicit about it). It seems to me that these lawsuits are really about trying to stop the automation of certain creative jobs. And perhaps this is where we disagree, since stopping automation of jobs doesn't seem like a nobel end to me. Indeed, if we'd had this attitude about automating other jobs (like farming and manufacture of goods), creative jobs wouldn't exist, since everyone would be spending all their time producing food and tools.

I'm not sure what your comment about "Logitech CoPilot" is. GitHub CoPilot exists, was trained on code from the past 20 years, and by and large developers enjoy the additional automation, and are looking for ways to leverage this automation to be more productive. I would think artists and writers would adopt a similar approach. Experience tells me that fighting automation is a waste of time. Best to stay ahead of it.

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

#202

Post by Capricorn2481 »

csallen wrote: post #162
nologic01 wrote: post #134

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 despise the underlying belief here. That belief that the only reason people create art is based on desires for fame and monetary gain. Which is so demonstrably incorrect that it boggles my mind. This is where centuries of copyright law have gotten us, brainwashing people into thinking ideas are property ("intellectual property") and should be treated as rivalrous goods, and that the only reason to be an artist is t…

I appreciate the sentiment but AI is not a panacea to copyright laws, it's a way to hoard ideas whether it's protected or not.

And we still have copyright laws. Corporations are still hoarding IP. So rules for thee, not for me. The harder you make it for artists to get paid, the more people you get promoting Raid Shadow Legends

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

#204

Post by AndrewKemendo »

monkaiju wrote: post #192
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 courts are like the doors to the Ritz, open to everyone!

Oh this is perfectly said thank you

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

#205

Post by constantly »

kranke155 wrote: post #105
constantly wrote: post #104

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. 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…

Where did you get this idea that Disney or someone paid for all these works to be produced? A lot of the works were just ripped off Arstation and similar websites. It's likely a very large number was never "paid for". A lot of that work was never paid for to begin with. It was just spec work by artists who a. might be too young b. might be in between jobs c. just doing passion work. Again a lot of people at HN don't…

I just assumed Disney paid their employees, though maybe they’re volunteers or something. I read Ed Catmull’s Creativity, Inc. a while back and my takeaway (in addition to seeing a glimpse into how the management worked) was that all workers at Pixar were compensated for their work. Not totally orthogonal because Disney did end up acquiring Pixar. But I have a hard time believing a movie like Frozen was created without paying for it to be created.

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

#206

Post by [deleted] »

nologic01 wrote: post #134

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…

[deleted]

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

#207

Post by nirvdrum »

r2_pilot wrote: post #122
nirvdrum wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And yet humans plagiarize all the time. And how do you measure genuine creativity? See the Chinese Room thought experiment. Also we generally don't make our tools able to "set off to their own devices" because that's silly. I agree with the substance of software operating differently from humans and that we should currently maintain a distinction between software and human rights. Of which I do not believe copyright…

And we penalize plagiarism. Sure, people often get away with it but it's not something we generally condone.

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

#208

Post by kranke155 »

shkkmo wrote: post #166
kranke155 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Is this good faith? I already stipulated that the images are publicly accessible. Are you suggesting that somehow artists should be able to block the AI from viewing a properly licensed instance of a copyrighted image? That pretty much results in a ban on general ai. No it, results in a ban on general ai that doesn't compensate rights owners .

So you have a general AI, it sees someone wearing a t-shirt containing a licensed, copyrighted image. This AI now needs to pay the copyright holder of that image? How I think it should work is the sa.e for any other intelligent system. Systems can view publicly available images, memorize them, and even reproduce them for certain fair uses. The systems have to pay for a license to right holders for the non fair uses o…

You're saying it sees someone as if AI is walking around and this all happened by random chance.

No. What happened was AI scientists deliberately built a giant corpus of training data based off unlicensed imagery that was conveniently pre-tagged - Artstation and other sites of the same type. And it was trained to deliberately create images of the exact same type as it was ingesting. It wasn't "randomly learning about the world" and it certainly did not "stumble upon" these images.

The fact that there was a large corpus of artistic imagery already tagged just revealed itself to be too appetizing for AI training, so a few companies did it in secret, without asking anyone for permission, then hoping to make enough money and VC funding that they would defeat any challenge in court.

So yes, those people who made the original images should get paid.

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

#209

Post by Wissenschafter »

renegat0x0 wrote: post #198
csallen wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I despise the underlying belief here. That belief that the only reason people create art is based on desires for fame and monetary gain. Which is so demonstrably incorrect that it boggles my mind. This is where centuries of copyright law have gotten us, brainwashing people into thinking ideas are property ("intellectual property") and should be treated as rivalrous goods, and that the only reason to be an artist is t…

... but you do have a rent to pay for? You know that artists also have to live somewhere? Why do we have stars on github? Maybe not for fame, but it is a good indicator of how somebody is good. Fame is important. We do not make github repositories for "stars", but I think it is a good motivator for people to continue what they're doing. If there is an author who spent years of his life into producing some kind of mus…

You can pay rent by other means than art. Adapt or be homeless.

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

#210

Post by kranke155 »

rpdillon wrote: post #201
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…

AI is just leveraging value in the data that wasn't used before. In the same way we can automate jobs by watching how the human workers do the job, we can automate writing text or producing a picture. As we drive to work, we do so so we can get to work, but cameras on other vehicles watch us drive, and take all the judgement and learning we put into driving to try and create automated drivers. Should all drivers be c…

>Should all drivers be compensated when their driving style is used to train an autonomous vehicle?

Yes.

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