Judge pares down artists' AI copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, Stability AI • Hacker News Board

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

#231

Post by kranke155 » Tue, Oct 31, 2023, 2:39 PM UTC

constantly wrote: post #205

kranke155 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 witho…

You're absolutely correct that Disney pays its employees.

However most of the images that are being used for training data don't come from Disney. Most of the imagery used for Stable Diffusion and Midjourney was from portfolio websites and other sources, afaik. The Artstation website, which is a popular portfolio website, was one of the main targets, alongside many others. Other websites used include DeviantArt and Flickr. You can check using this website https://haveibeentrained.com

A lot of people placed their passion work, personal work, and unpaid work on Artstation, DeviantArt and Flickr. Some of those people are brilliant. Stability AI used their work as training data, without announcing it or asking for permission. The result is that a lot of more profilic and famous artists can see a lot of work that directly seems to be a reference to their own, copying their style.

A lot of the work on these websites is quite simply not commercial work. The only commercial application in fact, so far, is these image engines.

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

#232

Post by ben_w » Tue, Oct 31, 2023, 2:41 PM UTC

raincole wrote: post #142

My perspective is there are two different main issues about AI (especially Stable Diffusion). One is how it works consistently with the current law. Ml model is basically a highly lossy compressed data format. If you collect millions of copyrighted images, merge them into a super big image, then compress it into a .jpg. Are you allowed to redistribute this .jpg file? To me, it's mostly depending on how lossy (low qua…

To the extent that Stable Diffusion models are "lossy compression", the main one is somewhere between 1 and 10 bytes per image depending on whose answer I use for the question "how many images was it trained on?" (I assume the cause is 1.5, 2.0 and SDXL having different answers and the reporters conflating them). The geometric mean of those is ~three bytes, which is only enough for one single RGB pixel per image.

For all the legal issues — and the artistic flaws — I still find it quite remarkable how good it is at such a small size.

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

#233

Post by kranke155 » Tue, Oct 31, 2023, 2:41 PM UTC

myaccountonhn wrote: post #193

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.

AIs and humans are not the same, why do people keep grouping them together and assume the same logic should apply?

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

#234

Post by mithr » Tue, Oct 31, 2023, 2:44 PM UTC

czl wrote: post #31

gamblor956 wrote: post #15

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)…

The issue at hand isn't actually directly about how the output images contained the Getty logo; the lawsuit isn't saying "you're showing our logo on your output, which isn't a Getty image, and we take issue with that". It's whether Getty images can be ingested into the training set without consent or compensation to Getty.

The reason the distorted logos matter is because they make it much more difficult to claim that Getty images were not ingested and used for training — if they weren't, then how come the outputs have those logos? And similarly, they make it much more difficult to claim that these source images were only used as "inspiration" for the generative algorithm and thus fall under fair use — if they're only used for "inspiration", how come they generate/copy easily-recognizable parts of the original images (i.e. the logo) as-is?

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

#235

Post by raincole » Tue, Oct 31, 2023, 2:45 PM UTC

harshreality wrote: post #175

raincole wrote: post #142

My perspective is there are two different main issues about AI (especially Stable Diffusion). One is how it works consistently with the current law. Ml model is basically a highly lossy compressed data format. If you collect millions of copyrighted images, merge them into a super big image, then compress it into a .jpg. Are you allowed to redistribute this .jpg file? To me, it's mostly depending on how lossy (low qua…

That's a difficult question because the boundaries of similarity/derived works for copyright purposes are determined by judges and juries based on their intuitions. There's no mathematical similarity testing, and trying to formulate such a thing would be challenging. What's similar enough to a pop music theme, that has a grand total of a few lines of unique music, to be a copyright violation? How many bars have to be…

> That's a difficult question because the boundaries of similarity/derived works for copyright purposes are determined by judges and juries based on their intuitions.

I believe that's why DALL-E bans some keywords related to alive artists. To show they have "no intention to violate copyrights".

And that's why I'm so worry about that we're heading to a future where open, uncensored models are illegal and closed source AI-as-a-service services are legal. It's not fearmongering: right now, you can't use GPL code in your closed source apps, but you can use GPL code on your server running a service that provides the exact same functions. I believe it has already hugely undermined the original intent of GPL (written in an era before SaaS became popular).

Some AI proponents say ML is the biggest invention since steam machines. I don't know if it's true, but if we end up stuck in a situation where open models are illegal while AI-as-a-service is legal, then it's the biggest step toward a dystopia since steam machines.

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

#236

Post by nologic01 » Tue, Oct 31, 2023, 2:45 PM UTC

glimshe wrote: post #214

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…

You are applying an outdated mental framework to AI, not to mention a falacious view on the relation between copyright protection and the incentive for art. Have in mind that millions of humans have historically produced enormous amounts of art with no copyright protection of any kind. The protections you are trying to defend are a relatively recent phenomenon (~200 years); arguably, some of our best art was created…

I am not trying to defend copyright. I am trying to defend the incentives and ability of humans to dedicate their lives to something that might be innate to all to some degree but only comes to fruition after long years of dedication.

Older societies did not have copyright but they, manifestly, had ways to sustain creatives.

People wax philosophical about paradigm changes and other vacuities yet refuse to answer a simple question: how will society reward human creativity that takes a lifetime of cultivation to flourish.

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

#237

Post by kranke155 » Tue, Oct 31, 2023, 2:47 PM UTC

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #225

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…

Just because it's on twitter doesn't mean it's true. I think a court setting where things are contemplated in a rigorous and reasoned way has a somewhat better chance of arriving at something resembling the truth. We've been here before several times: Silhouette painting, Photography, Airbrushing, Pianos, Synthesizers, Sampling, Photoshop, Ray Tracing, and many more. "It's not real art", "they're stealing from us", "…

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

#238

Post by nologic01 » Tue, Oct 31, 2023, 2:50 PM UTC

Wissenschafter wrote: post #215

nologic01 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your infinite sanity you have not answered my question of how a creative person will dedicate their life (starting from long studies) producing something that society will not reward in any way.

In their freetime? Do you not have any? Should society reward people who want to dedicate to something that has no inherent survival benefit? Should that not be something done in ones own time? Why is society obligated to pay artists? It isn't.

I hope people get to read your comment to understand indeed what kind of world you are advocating.

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

#239

Post by ben_w » Tue, Oct 31, 2023, 2:51 PM UTC

beej71 wrote: post #223

roenxi wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone who programs for a living should be making whatever preparations are possible for being replaced by an AI. If AIs are good at art they'll be better at coding. I have sympathy for the artists, but frankly this is progress and it can't be stopped. The economics are so lop-sided in favour of silicon that the law won't be able to hold it back without crippling society at large. Artists aren't the only ones affecte…

> If AIs are good at art they'll be better at coding. Not sure about that. It's like saying if AIs are good at art, they'll be better at math.

While the conclusion doesn't follow from the premise through the mere application of logic, I would note that when I was a kid all the high performance stuff was done in assembly "because compilers can't optimise properly", and yet since sometime around when I went to university (± a few years) we've all had compilers that are in almost all cases better at this than their operators.

Also, GPT-3.5 is already a better coder than a few humans whose mistakes I've had to fix. 3.5 is nowhere near the best, yet it's already eating at the bottom rungs despite being free.

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

#240

Post by ben_w » Tue, Oct 31, 2023, 2:56 PM UTC

myaccountonhn wrote: post #185

roenxi wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone who programs for a living should be making whatever preparations are possible for being replaced by an AI. If AIs are good at art they'll be better at coding. I have sympathy for the artists, but frankly this is progress and it can't be stopped. The economics are so lop-sided in favour of silicon that the law won't be able to hold it back without crippling society at large. Artists aren't the only ones affecte…

> I have sympathy for the artists, but frankly this is progress and it can't be stopped. Kinda sad that artists having their income even more crippled is seen as progress.

Some places have government grants funding the arts.

On the other hand, I grew up in one of those places, the UK, and there were a lot of people moaning that the TV License (which funds the BBC) was an abominable stealth tax or words to that effect.

I'm now in Germany, where everyone has to pay the equivalent even if they don't own a TV or watch live over the internet (unlike the UK where not doing that means you don't need to pay); I've not heard anyone complain so far… but I don't know if that's because they genuinely don't, or if I'm peacefully oblivious by never having been suckered into reading a German-language comments section.