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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

#251

Post by surgical_fire »

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…

> This will be the greatest act of Intellectual Property theft in history.

Good.

Intellectual Property is a mistake. If AI brings about its end, I welcome it.

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

#252

Post by ben_w »

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?

1. Nobody really knows what box to put AI in, because nobody's had decent ones until very recently.

2. Despite the differences, the similarities are rhetorically convincing for many.

I recon there will be a lot of bad analogies for the next decade at least.

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

#253

Post by moose4400 »

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…

Well said.

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

#254

Post by EnergyAmy »

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…

Your job will only be replaced if you're unwilling to adapt. It's like saying that C made assembly programmers obsolete. There's a lot fewer people programming in assembly, but the correct view is that there's a lot more programmers now than there were in the days that you had to know assembly.

"Under the cover of darkness and without permission" implies quite a bit, but you're coming at it from the wrong angle, which this court ruling affirms. Try thinking of it as a new tool that will act as a force multiplier for your work.

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

#255

Post by delecti »

TotalCrackpot wrote: post #224
delecti wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I believe that I should never be able to get financially hurt or go to prison because I used other person's thoughts "Use another person's thoughts" is obfuscating the reality of the situation so far as to be disingenuous. The way society ensures new works are created is to guarantee a temporary monopoly over certain narrow types of ideas to their creators. Why would anybody be an author if everyone could download…

Do you suggest that you need intellectual property for new ideas to be created and propagated? THAT'S silly! For most of the history of this species there were no intellectual property rights and people still were sharing their thoughts and ideas for various reasons.

For most of the history of this species there also weren't books, people making a living writing books, computers, or importantly, the ability to endlessly copy books using computers. If we want people to write books, those people need to be able to feed themselves, and that's harder if nobody has any reason to pay for those books.

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

#256

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#257

Post by ben_w »

raincole wrote: post #115
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 differ…

> Always have been and always will be (until AGI)

Probably not even then, at least not initially. While some people conflate AGI with personhood, consciousness, qualia, etc. we've got at least 22 different[0] ideas of what consciousness is and no idea how to even determine whether or not a mind has qualia — and even if we did, I see no specific reason to require any of them, as a P-zombie[1] AGI doesn't seem to me like a contradiction in terms.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41583-022-00587-4

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

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

#258

Post by aa_is_op »

flanked-evergl wrote: post #64
aa_is_op wrote: post #62

Amazing how copyright law amazingly disappears when it's to the detriment of major tech companies and protecting smaller creators. Just amazing!

> Amazing how copyright law amazingly disappears Can you elaborate in what way it disappeared in your opinion?

[flagged]

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

#259

Post by ben_w »

kranke155 wrote: post #110
shkkmo wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why isn't it that an artist could say, hey I'm letting you see this painting, but you are not allowed to sit down with a canvas and learn how to reproduce it? Because you can do that in galleries - no photos, no reproductions. But you can't stop people from sitting and studying your painting and then painting stuff similar to it. One of the core assertions that is being decided in this case is if there is any actua…

I find the whole comparison "it´s just like a person learning" to be a tiring trope. It's demonstrably not. Like I said to another poster - you've probably seen a Picasso. Can you make me a copy? Because a Diffusion model can. But you can't. Why not? Your denial that there is a demonstrable difference between human and machine attention is part of the core obfuscation these companies are using to win this battle, so…

> Can you make me a copy?

If you don't mind it being as bad as the the result of a Stable Diffusion image being passed on to a half-trained robot arm, sure: extra limbs, even more of a David Cronenberg vibe than Picasso at his weirdest, mixing with mis-attributed ideas from other images that I've associated with the same labels…

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

#260

Post by EnergyAmy »

kranke155 wrote: post #80
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.

It's funny to me that we haven't reached AGI or anywhere near it, but when we talk about training Diffusion models, suddenly they're "just like a person" for legal reasons. Same thing that happened on the construction of the "corporation as a person", built on top of rulings made to protect African Americans.

That's like saying "it's funny to me that this baby can't drive a car, but we still call it a 'person'".

We've achieved AGI, it's just yet a baby. Only a few years ago, if you wanted a model that could complete a task, you'd have to train a model specific to that task. GPT-4 can do a large variety of tasks without being specifically trained on them, i.e. it's suitable for a wide range of general tasks. Yeah, it sucks at some of them, but focusing on that is short-sighted. Look at the progress made from just a few years ago and where it's going, especially with multimodality and increased compute power.

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