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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

#371

Post by __loam »

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…

Professional artists have to eat. Holy shit.

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

#372

Post by __loam »

Wissenschafter wrote: post #209
renegat0x0 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... but you do have a rent to pay for? You know that artists also have to live somewhere? Why do we have stars on github? Maybe not for fame, but it is a good indicator of how somebody is good. Fame is important. We do not make github repositories for "stars", but I think it is a good motivator for people to continue what they're doing. If there is an author who spent years of his life into producing some kind of mus…

You can pay rent by other means than art. Adapt or be homeless.

What a shit opinion. As most of us are professional programmers here, surely we can understand the benefits of professionalization? We as a society lose something if the economy can't support the mastery of these skills, including the ability to create the training data these models depend on.

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

#373

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#374

Post by mistrial9 »

treyd wrote: post #346
mistrial9 wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you would throw out hundreds of years of copyright law on a whim. This is economic suicide for independent creatives. The most tragic part of this is that creatives themselves, immersed in creativity, see no rhyme or reason to stop the flow. Over time, those that grow old or weak are discarded with no rights to their own work. Yes, it is that bad.

Have you listened to artists and creatives talk about copyright recently? Especially ones that publish on newer, digital distribution platforms like YouTube? There's numerous more thorough critiques of copyright law and calls to abolish it from across the political spectrum. You're mischaracterizing me by suggesting that it's "economic suicide", as I said in my original comment in this thread: > But we shouldn't be r…

YouTube where the user account can be terminated without notice, and with no recourse?

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

#375

Post by mock-possum »

YurgenJurgensen wrote: post #130
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.

This argument gets repeated often enough that it implies that there are a significant number of people who actually believe it. This is pretty depressing, as the only way you could think that a human is not fundamentally more capable of creativity than an LLM is if you are incapable of imagining anything other than a life of ‘consuming content’.

Or maybe it’s depressing to you because of your vested belief in some kind of exceptionalism for humanity. We’re just big biological machines - we run on electricity and chemicals. Just because the materials might be a bit different between a human brain and an LLM, doesn’t mean that fundamentally the process of gathering, digesting, and regurgitating data works any different.

We see things, we recognize patterns, and we reproduce those patterns to the best of our abilities - that is the human creative process in a nutshell. It’s the process that lead to the creation of LLMs in the first place - why should our creation not follow the same methodology in order to create the same way we do? Why should a computer looking at a hundred pieces of art and producing something objectively similar to what it’s seen be any different than a human being doing the same thing?

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

#376

Post by simbolit »

anigbrowl wrote: post #40
simbolit wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does the creator's right have to do with lying? (1) Lying is bad. (2) Lying and "collecting money from anyone you can trick" is fraud. (3) Fraud is illegal, and that has nothing to do with copyright. You are massively straw-manning here.

Copyright is literally the mechanism that allows creators to obtain a legal remedy for such actions. I have a lot of problems with the state of copyright, but am OK with the basic concept. GP is arguing against any sort of IP rights, so these questions are reasonable. Lying isn't illegal, if there are no IP rights in a created work then anyone can legally claim authorship.

Lying isn't illegal, but "collecting money from anyone you can trick" is.

It is fraud.

What is so hard about this?

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

#377

Post by mock-possum »

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…

Oh I can explain it: what you’re describing is already happening, it’s been happening since far far before medieval times, it’s literally how human creativity works: novel recombinations of existing works.

If anything, it will lower the barrier for creation, to allow a greater variety of art by a greater variety of artists. Adding a new tool to an artist’s kit is an incredible step forward for art.

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

#378

Post by mock-possum »

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…

Sing it with me now: Copying Is Not Theft

https://youtu.be/IeTybKL1pM4

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

#379

Post by simbolit »

zirgs wrote: post #56
simbolit wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the early stuffs, Stable Diffusion 1 (not XL 1!) and such, if you prompted for stock photo style images, you regularly (~30%) got something resembling the Getty stock photo watermark in the lower right. Was quite annoying but adding "public domain, Creative Commons" to the prompt usually got rid of it (the model knows that public domain images have no watermark :-). Since SD2.0 I haven't seen this happening at all…

I've generated thousands of images using SD 1.5 based models and I've never got the getty watermark. That makes my think that some dishonest lawyer used img2img.

I can't find a publicly accessible SD1 model, but CompVis LatentDiffusion also uses the LAION dataset.

(1) go to https://huggingface.co/spaces/multimodalart/latentdiffusion

(2) enter "businesspeople arguing in the boardroom" as the prompt

(3) generate a couple images

(4) find things which look a lot lot lot like watermarks of stock photo companies

This is what I get (first try!): https://ibb.co/1620jT8

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

#380

Post by simbolit »

Retric wrote: post #43
simbolit wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are straw-manning. Imagine you encounter a public domain image (which by definition is not protected by copyright), you download it, and put it on your website. Perfectly fine. But if you write "I made this image" below it, you are a liar and a fraud. No copyright needed.

Legally you are allowed to lie, also it isn’t fraud. So posting that is perfectly legal for a public domain work and the only thing preventing you from doing with someone alive right now is copyright.

"the only thing preventing you..."

Wtf? No!

I am allowed to lie. But I don't.

What is preventing me? What is preventing you from lying.

The law is n the only force guiding human actions....

You can be a liar and a fraud even without doing illegal things. This isn't controversial, is it?

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