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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

#301

Post by surgical_fire »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #295
surgical_fire wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ver…

I fail to see how so, outside of some ulterior desire to see "art" as something inherently superior. Manual labor was used to build bulldozers that replaced manual labor, to give an example.

Using existing artwork for training model is only the process that generative AI came to be.

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

#302

Post by glimshe »

nologic01 wrote: post #236
glimshe wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are applying an outdated mental framework to AI, not to mention a falacious view on the relation between copyright protection and the incentive for art.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 si…

They actually didn't have such a great way to sustain creatives. Poor artists is a staple of civilization. You hear about the winners, but most artisans, painters, etc had to fight hard for income.

AI won't make art go away, because you still need to tell the AI what to do. But the new art won't require as much skill with a paintbrush. For instance, I'm terrible at drawing but I believe I have creative ideas. AI alllows me to be an artist too.

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

#303

Post by corethree »

snovv_crash wrote: post #270
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.

It's ok to give humans rights that we don't give to machines.

You're saying humans can break copyright but machines can't?

You realized machines didn't break copyright right? Machines can't do this yet so it's a non issue at this point.

Humans were sued in this lawsuit because humans are the ones who did this action.

The lawsuit is about this: I can copy stuff into my brain but not into my cybernetic assistive brain.

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

#304

Post by kranke155 »

EnergyAmy wrote: post #290
kranke155 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would agree.

My fear is that in between the world we have now and the world where robots do everything, we have a giant valley of madness where robots take all the jobs, all the profits, and a lot of people are left with nothing.

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

#305

Post by kranke155 »

ben_w wrote: post #298
kranke155 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

is that the direction we're going in right now? Or are we moving towards techno feudalism?

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

#306

Post by abakker »

rvz wrote: post #109
abakker wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument kind of elides over how you will make the millions, when the author has not. The hypothetical of lost revenue needs to be validated by the evidence of actual revenue being made in this way. Right now, I see lots of interest in paying for the _tool_, but almost none in paying human wages for the _output_ of generative models. (I am not proposing that my above distinction is a legal test. Just pointing ou…

As long as it is public domain it does not matter how the millions is made; ebook, book or newsletter. There is no recognition of 'lost revenue' for the commercialization of public domain works.

I don't disagree at all. The OP I was responding to mentioned non-public-domain works like a blog.

My point was that we haven't yet seen the products of GenAI stuff really making money yet. People are paying for the tool, and people are paying for work that is being done using the tool, but nobody buys a book, image, movie, or similar from OpenAI or Google directly.

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

#307

Post by ben_w »

kranke155 wrote: post #305
ben_w wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

is that the direction we're going in right now? Or are we moving towards techno feudalism?

More anarchy than the feudalism for the moment.

The main Stable Diffusion models themselves are licensed under Creative ML OpenRAIL-M, and freely available third-party models exist; OpenAI gets stick for not making their models downloadable (at least GPT-x does, though nobody seems to care too much about them keeping the DALL•E 2/3 models private), other players are making and distributing other LLMs of varying quality.

That said, we do also have actual reasons to be concerned about this remaining anarchic (though a lot of people very loudly scoff at them), so who knows what the future will bring on that axis.

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

#308

Post by nologic01 »

surgical_fire wrote: post #279
nologic01 wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is just the real world as it is What? Have you ever paid for a book? a subscription to a publishing medium of any sort, a movie or a piece of music? Have you noticed a copyright sign somewhere? Is that arrangement of recognizing and rewarding those who create something worthwhile part of the real world or not? Not even a hallucinating AI would be so incongruous.

Have you ever paid for food? For clothing? For cars? You might be shocked, but automation replaced humans in all those industries. I'll still pay for books, music, or whatever. I won't really care at which capacity they were AI generated.

> but automation replaced humans in all those industries.

So? To the extend that people are still involved, they are typically paid - unless it is slave labor, that is.

This is not an automation vs manual labor debate. Creators will use any technology that helps them create something worthwhile. It may even involve algorithms in various ways. Generative art was a thing way before the AI bro invasion.

The question is about provenance, attribution and remuneration of whatever human work and creativity is involved in producing unique pieces of work. Work that is used as input for the algorithmic production of infinite variations and replicas.

The AI crowd simply wants to devalue that human input (while pressumably charging for API's or whatever comes on the other side of the meat grinder).

Which I suppose might happen in an increasingly dystopic world, but they seem to also believe that people will keep embarking on literary studies, movie or music making studies etc. as some sort of non-remunerative hobby, just to keep producing useful inputs for the AI models.

Its not going to happen. The golden goose will be dead before you can spell "AI".

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

#309

Post by Kim_Bruning »

kranke155 wrote: post #237
Kim_Bruning wrote: post #225

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]

Eh? I don't feel clever. I feel tired.Some of this is personal experience. It's the same every time. Including "but this time it's different".

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

#310

Post by Kim_Bruning »

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.

At the moment I'm in the situation where having AI tools means I'm willing to try things I've never tried before; including having actually considered hiring artists for the first time ever.

Sadly, I think most artists would bite my head off right this minute? So I guess I'm going to have to wait until the storm blows over.

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