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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

#291

Post by corethree »

AlexandrB wrote: post #152
marcinzm wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Even if this is true, the sum of a human's total experiences is far more vast than what LLMs are trained on and is mostly non-copyrighted material. Your eyes are open ~16 hours a day, constantly exposing your brain to various non-copyrighted stuff like trees, rocks, animals, the insides of your house, the crap on your desk, other people's faces, traffic, etc.

Right. LLMs have content that isn't copyrighted too.

But humans like LLMs do have copyrighted content. That means humans are breaking the law that LLMs are also breaking.

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

#292

Post by corethree »

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…

Sure but the minute you look at copywrited work you made a copy of it in your brain and have broken the law.

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

#293

Post by corethree »

nirvdrum wrote: post #117
corethree wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The final decision made by this article is one I agree with with or without money and I have no incentive the game. Every piece of creation you and I make us the sum total of our experiences and that includes copy written work. Holding an LLM guilty for that is like holding the human brain guilty for memorizing copyrighted work.

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.

If the content generated by an LLM does not exist anywhere else... it is by definition "creative."

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

#294

Post by EnergyAmy »

kranke155 wrote: post #285
EnergyAmy wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What you're wishing for won't achieve what you want. You'd then be complaining because OpenAI bought one copy of every book, and authors can't survive on one sale alone.

It doesn't really matter though. The models that exist today aren't going away, and future work will just be built on top of their output, tainting every model forevermore from your perspective. I suggest you adapt to the new way of things and enjoy the ride.

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

#295

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

surgical_fire wrote: post #248
huimang wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We are able to create bulldozers without using any shovels. We can create Excel without accounting clerks. But we cannot create generative models without using existing artwork. Because existing artwork is so critical to the inventions replacing artists, it’s more exploitative.

If we required workers consent to directly use their works, we would be able to build bulldozers and excel but not stable diffusion. It’s very different that way.

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

#296

Post by ben_w »

kranke155 wrote: post #281
ben_w wrote: 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. 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.

Is it fascinating? Seems pretty obvious to me, you've got things that are good and things that are bad and you want to find the dividing line between them, why pick something central to either group that doesn't illuminate the boundary between them?

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

#297

Post by naasking »

nirvdrum wrote: post #278
naasking wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And yet these systems are incapable of genuine creativity. Define "genuine creativity".

Given the terse reply, I'm guessing you disagree that it's even a concept. So, to round out the inevitable circular discussion I've gone ahead and asked ChatGPT for you: Genuine creativity, often attributed to humans, is the ability to generate, imagine, or invent something new and original that has value or meaning. It involves thinking beyond existing boundaries, making connections between different pieces of infor…

> Given the terse reply, I'm guessing you disagree that it's even a concept.

My terse reply actually indicates an understanding that we completely lack a formal definition of "genuine creativity", and therefore any such claims are vague intuitions at best.

> I don't have feelings, thoughts, or experiences

This implicitly assumes we have a mechanistic understanding of feelings, thoughts or experiences. We don't, therefore we can make no such definitive claims about how machine learning and human cognitive processes. ChatGPT has specifically been trained to give this response despite agreeing with an argument that suggests it could indeed have mental states:

https://twitter.com/naasking/status/1598802001428566016

> As an AI, I don't possess creativity in the human sense. I don't have feelings, thoughts, or experiences, and I don't generate ideas or concepts spontaneously

Define "spontaneously". If you mean that humans act without apparent cause, that does not entail there is no cause. If there is a cause, then that cause can be modeled as an input into a pure function. ChatGPT and other ML systems are pure functions can also mix concepts and generate new and unique outputs from its learned state space given such inputs. Humans are still more complex than such systems, so the mystique can hide in the perceived complexity, but don't mistake this for a different kind of process. Which isn't to say that it is the same process, I'm saying there's no real basis for either claim.

I think there's a lot of sloppy thinking going on when comparing human brains and ML, particularly ascribing some sort of exceptionalism to humans. There's a long, incorrect history of that.

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

#298

Post by ben_w »

kranke155 wrote: post #282
ben_w wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 alter…

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

And still will even if they (for any value of "they") do pay.

Unless… do you want them to pay the entire future economic value that, say, all programmers including myself might have added if we weren't about to be made redundant by the next coding LLM?

Because the historical analogy there is getting Raspberry Pi to pay out the entire global GDP for each Pi Zero, on the grounds of that model being able to do arithmetic as fast as the entire world, even if the entire world had been paid to work in the obsolete job role of "computer", after having been trained to operate reliably at the speed of the current world record holder.

> Is this what you think is desirable?

Post-scarcity economics, AKA "fully automated luxury communism" (not the book of the same name): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity

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

#299

Post by corethree »

nirvdrum wrote: post #278
naasking wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And yet these systems are incapable of genuine creativity. Define "genuine creativity".

Given the terse reply, I'm guessing you disagree that it's even a concept. So, to round out the inevitable circular discussion I've gone ahead and asked ChatGPT for you: Genuine creativity, often attributed to humans, is the ability to generate, imagine, or invent something new and original that has value or meaning. It involves thinking beyond existing boundaries, making connections between different pieces of infor…

How do you know the answer isn't an hallucination? Maybe it made the answer up creatively and is lying to you about its own capabilities.

The fact that it knows the definition of creativity makes it's answer suspect. It's like saying this: "I am not capable of speaking or understanding English, what you see here is just a statistical prediction of the next most likely words. I do not in actuality understand or speak English."

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

#300

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

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.

That argument applies equally well to midjourney and co. It has no inherent survival benefit either.
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