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

#241

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

ben_w wrote: post #232

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…

> 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

Here is a catch tho. It's just "by average" several bytes. We can't tell if some images practically contribute 0 bit to the final results while some others contribute more.

(I know this "contribute" word is a little non-sense in the context of ML. But existing lossy compression algorithms are not that different in this sense: if you compress a 1M frames produced by a 3D renderer to a .mpeg video, each frame doesn't contribute the same amount of bytes to the final result.)

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

#242

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Oct 31, 2023, 2:59 PM UTC

naasking wrote: post #176

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 these systems are incapable of genuine creativity. Define "genuine creativity".

[deleted]

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

#243

Post by marcinzm » Tue, Oct 31, 2023, 3:09 PM UTC

nologic01 wrote: post #172

marcinzm wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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? Because they enjoy it? Or do you see artists as some type of corporate drone who hates the very act of making art? That's like asking why anyone wo…

Excuse me? What moral and economic planet are you living on? Enjoyment is an important drive behind any creative person, so much is true. But at least part of the enjoyment comes from other people appreciating, acknowledging and, yes, remunerating that creative work. The idea that authors, artists and other creatives will keep pumping original work as part-time love affairs so that AI bros can grab it and mint a dime…

You seem to have a very limited view of artists. The vast vast majority of artists are not professionals and make no money from their art. The vast majority of them also get very little publicity for their arts. Yet they still create.

There'd be less art and probably lower quality art however to think people would outright stop making art due to any reason is strange (to use your words).

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

#244

Post by ben_w » Tue, Oct 31, 2023, 3:19 PM UTC

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.

I had a free school education (including Shakespeare and Ethan Frome, both of which are out of copyright now though only the former when I studied it); several free libraries; and with the exception of my final year even my university tuition was free[0]; after graduation the museums I went to were also free; I watched free educational videos from Apple Developer and YouTube, and listened to free podcasts; I have learned things from reading Wikipedia; and I have done free online courses in both natural languages and programming languages.

This doesn't cover everything: I did, indeed, also buy books on HTML and JS, and my first C compiler, and a licence to REALbasic[1]. But that doesn't refute the fact that I did learn a lot for free.

> If AI models require human training data, then they should pay for it. Easy.

You can do that if you like, but that won't stop any of the economic issues that arise. The cost of running Stable Diffusion is so low that even if you had literal slaves, and you were spending only the UN extreme poverty threshold on keeping them alive and housed, the pro-rata cost of keeping them alive for long enough to type in the prompt dominates the total cost of making images.

Right now these models are still, despite their impressiveness, flawed: while an artist can use them to great effect, most of us will have our generations easily spotted by some flaw we have never trained ourselves to notice. If the models become good enough to fully replace all artists, the only way the profession called "artist" isn't going to go the same way as the profession called "computer" is if the arts are to humans as fancy tails are to peacocks: the effort being the point, extravagantly wasting effort to show you're fit enough to manage fine despite the penalty.

[0] UK rules at the time, thanks to my dad's early retirement and therefore "low income" status

[1] as it was so named at the time, Xojo now

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

#245

Post by nologic01 » Tue, Oct 31, 2023, 3:22 PM UTC

ativzzz wrote: post #183

nologic01 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excuse me? What moral and economic planet are you living on? Enjoyment is an important drive behind any creative person, so much is true. But at least part of the enjoyment comes from other people appreciating, acknowledging and, yes, remunerating that creative work. The idea that authors, artists and other creatives will keep pumping original work as part-time love affairs so that AI bros can grab it and mint a dime…

> The idea that authors, artists and other creatives will keep pumping original work as part-time love affairs so that AI bros can grab it and mint a dime is... strange. The entire software industry is built on open source software written for free by other software devs

the sustainability of open source projects that are not corporate-backed is, famously, a major issue.

In analogy, if creative production was to be paid by a benevolent patron that doesn't care if the work is then released in the public domain the economic equation changes. But this mode is not how things work at present.

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

#246

Post by EnergyAmy » Tue, Oct 31, 2023, 3:26 PM UTC

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…

Don't be silly. This was a level-headed ruling that avoids retarding the progress of science and the useful arts.

I'd really like to see people drop the inequality argument. If you actually cared about that instead of virtue signaling, you'd push for a mandatory GPL-style license that forces models to be available to anybody that uses them. That would avoid trying to unsuccessfully put the genie back in the bottle, while also preventing a few companies from benefiting at the expense of everyone else. Just like OpenAI's original mission of making AI available for everyone, before they got dollar signs in their eyes.

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

#247

Post by ben_w » Tue, Oct 31, 2023, 3:28 PM UTC

kranke155 wrote: post #118

harshreality wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 knowled…

> 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.

First, there's this thing called a deposit library: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_deposit

Second: I, as a user of the service, who learns things, still pay nothing.

Should I be required to directly pay for the things I learned from, or is it sufficient that someone is? Because if the latter, then picking up a book from a normal (non-deposit) library, showing it to an OCR system, and having an AI learn from that, would involve just as much payment as I ever made to read a library book (with the possible exception of late return fines, I can't remember if I ever had any of those).

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

#248

Post by surgical_fire » Tue, Oct 31, 2023, 3:28 PM UTC

huimang wrote: post #151

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…

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 of…

This is how technology works. Bulldozers effectively replaced people with shovels. Excel effectively replaced accounting clerks. Generative AI effectively replace artists (to some capacity).

Most people care only about the output of a system, not about who the system replaces.

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

#249

Post by surgical_fire » Tue, Oct 31, 2023, 3:29 PM UTC

nologic01 wrote: post #238

Wissenschafter wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The kind of world he is advocating is just the real world as it is. You have to be extremely naive or privileged to think otherwise

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

#250

Post by MichaelZuo » Tue, Oct 31, 2023, 3:32 PM UTC

YurgenJurgensen wrote: post #184

marcinzm wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"Experiences" and "content" are not equivalent. To take a very simple example: Go outside. Look at some geraniums. There are probably other examples, but red geraniums are pretty common and cheap in temperate climates. If you've been looking at screens for a long time, geranium petals look impossibly red. Red roses also work. Why is that? Because they're a real physical object whose colour properties cannot be accura…

> Because they're a real physical object whose colour properties cannot be accurately reproduced in an image using standard RGB colour.

'Real physical objects' don't have 'colour properties', as grouping together certain wavelength ranges of EM radiation and then assigning them a 'colour' label is a human invention.

For example, even if every human disappeared from Earth tomorrow, objects will still emit EM radiation, but won't emit human invented labels.