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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

#321

Post by Filligree »

cmiles74 wrote: post #116
constantly wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This is kind of petulant then, respectfully. They got paid to produce that work, and they sold their services for that paycheck and the knowledge that they were putting their work into the world. The fruits of their la…

People who do the work should be compensated when their work is used to generate income for someone else. This is the way it's worked for as long as I can remember: I get paid to do some work, the company then gets my output. What we have here is someone hoovering up copyrighted and protected content, from all over the internet, and using it to generate income. They then are turning around and claiming that they do n…

Is Stability actually making any profit? They trained the AI, and released it for free, and-

I'm still confused as to their business model.

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

#322

Post by rvz »

EnergyAmy wrote: post #275
rvz wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Copyright is something we made up to extend the logic of commodities to the full value chain for books, which made sense 200 years ago. But it makes no sense to apply the logic of commodities to digitally produced and distributed media. Great! So given your articles are in the public domain on your website I can make millions out of it without given you a cent or direct credit and sources without paying you and can…

I don't think you've really thought this through. How would someone make millions off of that? If someone tried, the original author is still offering it for free. Why would someone pay for it? A lot of people are very myopic about generative AI, thinking that large Hollywood studios are going to steal people's work and put everyone out of a job. Hollywood studios won't exist soon enough because anyone will be able t…

> I don't think you've really thought this through. How would someone make millions off of that? If someone tried, the original author is still offering it for free. Why would someone pay for it?

Tens of millions of fans of a living celebrity would pay for it and the fans do not care about the original author as long as it is the celebrity's name that is selling it and can claim it as their own.

They don't need to give credit or sources to whatever their selling to generate millions.

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

#323

Post by gedy »

raincole wrote: post #227
Kim_Bruning wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So just to be sure: the list of URLs + metadata that gets used for stable diffusion is several terabytes. Not the images. Just the list of URLs alone (and a bit of other metadata). Stable diffusion itself is just 6+ GB, and fits comfortably on my USB stick. That's one heck of a lossy compression algorithm, sir! (this thread has more discussion on this line of thinking https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37879938 )

> So just to be sure: the list of URLs + metadata that gets used for stable diffusion is several terabytes. Not the images. Just the list of URLs alone (and a bit of other metadata). > Stable diffusion itself is just 6+ GB, and fits comfortably on my USB stick. Thanks for sharing this info which I'm aware of. However, this fact is not as significant as it might sound in terms of whether it's a lossy compression algor…

It's not just "lossy compression" though if you can generate images that were never in the source material. I get your point but it's somewhat misleading analogy.

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

#324

Post by ronsor »

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…

If you had a conversation with a STEM person, they'd probably say everything is 100% fine, society and all. If you had a conversation with an artist, they'd probably say AI is pure evil theft and society is collapsing.

If you solely listen to either side, you'll be blinded by madness. On that note, how many people respect or value the effort behind software? Most don't, not most artists either. That is the nature of life.

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

#325

Post by smrtinsert »

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…

> Ml model is basically a highly lossy compressed data format This is a pretty incendiary statement for those opposed to generative models, but more important its not a good interpretation because the intent is not to store a compressed format for restoring the same image, nor can it.

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

#326

Post by smrtinsert »

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…

Is this supposed to be sarcastic, because this is impossible and you're arguing a strawman. You could also say electricity enabled this great inequality, we have got to stop electricity.

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

#327

Post by AwaAwa »

rvz wrote: post #322
EnergyAmy wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you've really thought this through. How would someone make millions off of that? If someone tried, the original author is still offering it for free. Why would someone pay for it? A lot of people are very myopic about generative AI, thinking that large Hollywood studios are going to steal people's work and put everyone out of a job. Hollywood studios won't exist soon enough because anyone will be able t…

> I don't think you've really thought this through. How would someone make millions off of that? If someone tried, the original author is still offering it for free. Why would someone pay for it? Tens of millions of fans of a living celebrity would pay for it and the fans do not care about the original author as long as it is the celebrity's name that is selling it and can claim it as their own. They don't need to gi…

Given a generation or so, a celebrity mostly won't have tens of millions of fans, because there will be tens of millions of celebrities. It's happening already but they are just called 'influencers, podcasters, youtubers' at the moment, with the line getting more blurred everyday.

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

#328

Post by Illotus »

surgical_fire wrote: post #251
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.

Not really good if AI can run around it but to normal people it exists as before.

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

#329

Post by hunter2_ »

gpderetta wrote: post #171
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…

Machines do not have rights. The question is whether an human with a specific machine has a certain right, as opposed to a human with a different machine.

> human with a specific machine

I assume the entire client+server system constitutes the "machine" in this case, correct? So does "human with" refer to the end user (client side) or the sysadmin (server side)? Maybe one is an accomplice? The machine isn't going to infringe without certain prompting by the end user, just as an inkjet printer isn't going to do so.

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

#330

Post by rpdillon »

kranke155 wrote: post #210
rpdillon wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is just leveraging value in the data that wasn't used before. In the same way we can automate jobs by watching how the human workers do the job, we can automate writing text or producing a picture. As we drive to work, we do so so we can get to work, but cameras on other vehicles watch us drive, and take all the judgement and learning we put into driving to try and create automated drivers. Should all drivers be c…

>Should all drivers be compensated when their driving style is used to train an autonomous vehicle? Yes.

It sounds like you want to expand intellectual property rights to include the details of any action people take that could be observed by a machine so it can learn how to do the same thing. That's an untenable strategy: the ROI of the existing IP regime is already doubtful, and expanding it won't improve it, it'll simply expand all those problems to new areas.
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