Live data from Hacker News

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

reuters.com

281–290 of 442 posts

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

#281
post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lear…

Everybody finds an edge case they can justify their entire worldview on. It's fascinating.

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

#282
post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lea…

If we let this idea that "AI training data usage has no compensation for rights owners" to be become ensconced in the legal system, then all human endeavour will become fair game to be acquired by someone to make a Machine Intelligence out of, and remove you completely out of the profit loop of your own work.

This will happen in every industry and occupation, one by one.

Is this what you think is desirable?

The alternative is perversely simple: PAY for the right to use training data.

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

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We can try some kind of libertarian socialism system, either with decentralized planing or with anti-capitalist markets to deal with it.

Consider existence of services like patreon where people support creators they respect before are able to get to know the work of the author - no intellectual property rights are needed here.

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

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am defining force as literal force. What theft can occur without physically touching the thing being stolen? This is like saying you work 24-7 because breathing involves physical motion. Insisting on ur personal definitions of well-understood terms while disregarding how everyone else uses them is childish. But even if we use this, ah, special definition, legal remedies in tort cases typically don't involve force.…

My definition of force is the definition of force. The definition I gave you was literally "literal force", and you understood that to mean something different from your interpretation of force. You are the only one trying to change definitions here. If the court orders me to do something, that's force. If you think it's somehow voluntary, then I have a few examples I'd like to ask you about. I have no idea what inju…

Pathetic display. There is not only one definition of any word, as you can readily ascertain by consulting a good dictionary, legal or otherwise.

Yes, we've already established that you don't get the rights to pixels, sounds and ideas

We've established that that's what you want, and that you're unwilling to even acknowledge the concept of authorship. Your efforts at rhetorical browbeating are clumsy at best.

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

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I guess enjoy rejecting modern life. We're going to see an explosion of new works from people using these new tools in creative ways. I'm sure you'll say that you don't want anything to do with AI-generated art, but that will soon mean avoiding just about every new work.

I have nothing against AI-generated art.

It's the usage of unlicensed images and text in their training data that I have an issue with. If you wrote a book or made a painting, GPT-4 should pay for the rights to read or look at it.

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

#286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My point is this is still a machine. Running analogies on top of metaphors, you can justify everything. This thing is a machine intelligence. My point is that a machine intelligence to be equivalent to humans in every law is curiously never mentioned, except when it is advantageous to the owners of said machine. Or are we saying that we can't turn off GPT-4 at this point, because following your metaphor, we would be…

It's pretty obvious that we should be considering whether or not it's ethical to turn off AI. Even if most people think it's OK right now, that will likely change as these models get more capable, exactly similar to the differing opinions on abortion.

> except when it is advantageous to the owners of said machine.

That's just not true. You're ignoring vast amounts of discussion on the topic, particularly the discussions had when Blake Lemoine claimed that LaMDA was sentient. There's no reason to dismiss all that just because you're dead set on assuming everyone involved in AI is up to no good.

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

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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", "…

[flagged]

[deleted]

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

#288
post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you use DALLE3 the results are astonishing. No more issues with hands and legs. Give it a go.

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

#289

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.

Are we going to hold all human artists to that standard as well? I suspect many would fail it.

I don't follow. Which standard is that? Many (most?) artists do in fact fail, particularly if they're unable to find a creative way to differentiate themselves. Society generally shuns plagiarism. We call out things that are deemed as "knock-offs", whether they're bands, video games, movies, books, or clothing.

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

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, whic…

This is a completely misled interpretation of events, since automating my work to the scale of generative AI, there won't be any work left for humans. This "but progress" argument is tiring. The Industrial Revolution was a complete failure if you measure quality of life in its first decades. It got turned around by people who you know, fought back, created unions, and demanded fair pay.

> there won't be any work left for humans

Good. That's the goal, and we can stop inventing stupid make-work for people when that happens. Jobs aren't the goal, making robots do all of the work is the goal. You're falling into the myopic trap of assuming that the current way of things won't change along with generative AI becoming commonplace.

Post reply on HN