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

If you’re talking about the labor needed to build a bulldozer, it is paid consenting labor. That’s the point. It isn’t that art is superior, it’s that the required labor to create these things is going uncompensated and without consent.

That's not how it works, never has been how it works, and should not be how it works.

For thousands of years, human workers and artists have trained themselves by looking at copies of other people's work, and used the ideas and inspiration the gain from that material to produce new works. Artists will literally sit down and copy another artist's work as part of training. This happens as a matter of course. Sometimes the new works produced after training are fresh and original. And just as often, they are derivative copycats (see: fan fiction, most clothing, most music, half the stuff on DeviantArt, etc.).

The law is only concerned with a creator's output, not the input.

If you produce and distribute something that's an obvious copy of someone else's work, that could be a copyright violation. However, if what you produce is sufficiently original, it's fair game, regardless of who you were inspired or trained by. The law does not require compensating or crediting those who inspired you or helped with training. Again, the law is only concerned with output, not with training, not with inspiration, not with input.

What you are advocating for is a huge change. Would this change apply to humans who are learning/training by looking at and copying others' work? If so, that would be a nightmare. If not, why not? Why only apply it to AI? Because the AI is more efficient at it than humans?

If that's your reason, could you justify it? New technology is always more efficient than the status quo. That's the entire point of new technology. Making laws to stop it accomplishes nothing except limiting technology in order to protect old jobs and business models. Why should we do that?

> Granted, a lot of this boils down to whether AI learns or copys/remixes; [...]

I mean, it certainly isn't learning in the same way humans learn. Human learning involves some degree of understanding, which is wholly absent in AIs. There is, to my mind, no good reason to treat them the same because of this difference.

No it doesn't. The model we use to create these things is general enough that it can be applied to ALL forms of intelligence.

Basically it's a best fit curve in N-dimensional space. The entire human brain can be modeled this way. In practice what we end up doing is using a bunch of math tricks to try to poke and prod at this curve to get some sort of "fit" on the data.

There are an infinite number of possible curves that can fit within this data. One of these curves is the LLM. The other curve is the human brain.

Here's a better way to put it. Your entire OS can be modeled under this idea. We can use a bunch of training data and basically recreate your operating system under ML. Just feed in current state and train it until it will output correct state.

But understanding the OS from this ML perspective is a far cry from understanding the OS from the perspective of source code.

We do NOT understand fully what's going on. In fact, the fact that the LLM even had chatGPT's capabilities was not predicted or foreseen.

The systems in question require learning from art generated by humans. If they didn't, they could avoid all of this IP mess by learning how to draw. The supposition I'm pushing back on is that humans only generate art by regurgitating what came before them and I don't see any basis for that claim. We have art formed by completely isolated societies in very distinct styles. Children draw all sorts of fanciful creatures that they've never seen in the wild or in other art. Artists have developed different techniques for capturing their work and it can resonate with people. We have prodigies capable of creating symphonies before they can do much else in the world.

Sure, there's incremental evolution. But, we also have breakthrough artists inventing new techniques and art forms. It doesn't matter that a computer program can clone a power chord structure and create something that sorta sounds like Nirvana. That's not proof of creativity. Yes, it created something so it's "creative" in entirely mechanical stance. Just like solar flares will flip bits in my computer and "create" things as well.

We can argue all day about what art means. It can get really philosophical really quick. I contend people can dream up new ideas and execute on them in a way that resonates with others and that they don't need to copy everyone else to do that. That given the basics (here's some paper an color pencils) people can develop skills and invent wholly unique ways to represent themselves and the world around them. That they're able to do that in isolation and without education. I point to the entirety of human civilization as my supporting evidence. I think it's reductive to claim we're just statistical models consuming media and shuffling things around.

It seems to me this whole argument hinges on saying humans and these image generation tools work the same way. If they do, then teach one of these programs what it means to draw, give them a sensor network to the outside world, and let's see what they generate. That would be hugely compelling and would sidestep this whole discussion about IP whitewashing. But, that's not what's happening. Whether because of convenience or because it's the only practical way to generate art, these systems only work by training on art created by humans. That they're able to generate a final product that looks like something else made by a human shouldn't be shocking -- that's the whole basis of copying.