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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

#421

Post by treyd »

mistrial9 wrote: post #374
treyd wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That's bad but also mostly unrelated to the main point I'm making about copyright. If anything it's supportive since part of the risk of account deletion/restriction is running afowl of their content ID system, which only exists because of strongarm corporate copyright holders.

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

#422

Post by renegat0x0 »

Wissenschafter wrote: post #271
renegat0x0 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If any work is used for AI training, then the author should be paid. I hope that artists will be protected. Abide the law, or meet consequences?

If any work is used for human training, then the author should be paid. See how ridiculous that sounds?

If a 'work' was created for view only, and a "big tech company" sends employees to spy and capture anything 'work' related during human training, with mischievous intent to copy everything without permission, without compensation, so that author cannot use it anymore then NO, I do not find that ridiculous.

I find that evil.

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

#423

Post by renegat0x0 »

__loam wrote: post #372
Wissenschafter wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What a great way to start conversation. "What a shit opinion". You must have many friends.

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

#424

Post by csallen »

xeckr wrote: post #419
csallen wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, of course I can justify applying a different standard to AI than to humans when it comes to the generation of art. Despite everything you said about humans copying the work of other humans, the fact is that humans are capable of producing new art without reference to prior art. You can prove this by considering the emergence of the very first cave paintings. On the other hand, GenAI like Stable Diffusion is capa…

Your point still doesn't make sense to me. Real humans today are creating art based on other artists' work. Their art would have absolutely zero chance of being created if not for the training, copying, and inspiration they're drawing from other works. Cavemen were not creating the art that we see people creating today, because people today rely on learning from and copying others' examples.

None of the targeted artists are being compensated or credited. Nor are you demanding they be.

Why not?

If I train myself by copying your work, by your logic, shouldn't you be compensated or credited? The fact that my neurons could've theoretically created some other type of art from scratch even if I hadn't trained on your work, doesn't change the situation that I did in fact train on your work.

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

#425

Post by dragonwriter »

panta wrote: post #343
theonlybutlet wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you propose is just a different small set of monopolistic players. Copyright has always been a trade off between the creator and society. It should be enforced the exact same way as it currently is. Fair use is fair use. By your same logic, what is the difference between an AI or a very productive human? Where do you draw the line?

Fair use by a machine is a concept which has hardly been studied by legislators. Personally I'd draw the line at the human/machine boundary.

> Fair use by a machine is a concept which has hardly been studied by legislators.

I mean, that's true in the sense that "fair use by a pencil is a concept which hardly been studied by legislators" is true. Use (fair or not) isn't by the tool, its by the person using the tool.

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

#426

Post by xeckr »

csallen wrote: post #424
xeckr wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, of course I can justify applying a different standard to AI than to humans when it comes to the generation of art. Despite everything you said about humans copying the work of other humans, the fact is that humans are capable of producing new art without reference to prior art. You can prove this by considering the emergence of the very first cave paintings. On the other hand, GenAI like Stable Diffusion is capa…

Your point still doesn't make sense to me. Real humans today are creating art based on other artists' work. Their art would have absolutely zero chance of being created if not for the training, copying, and inspiration they're drawing from other works. Cavemen were not creating the art that we see people creating today, because people today rely on learning from and copying others' examples. None of the targeted arti…

When you train a GenAI on an image, legally speaking you're training it on a COPY of that image.

If you intend to train a GenAI on a copy of an image I own the rights to (perhaps because I created it), then you have to negotiate with me. If you don't, then you are violating my copyright.

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

#427

Post by corethree »

nirvdrum wrote: post #420
corethree wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok yeah let's avoid that bullshit then. The problem is there's enough leeway between the words that I could honestly say everything LLMs generate are representative of what most humans define as "genuine creativity" and I bet you that I can show you human art and computer art side by side and you'd be incapable of knowing which one is genuinely creative. I hate pedantic vocabulary just as much as you and this is not…

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 creature…

>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.

I never claimed this. Art isn't a regurgitation. It's a composition of what came before plus a random seed. Humans do this. But so do LLMs.

Think about it. Can you erase all forms of memory in a human until it's brain dead and expect it to produce art? No. It can't.

> Children draw all sorts of fanciful creatures that they've never seen in the wild or in other art.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1136039656660684880/1...

>We have art formed by completely isolated societies in very distinct styles

prompt: Draw art in the style of a society or civilization that has never existed. Make the art very distinct in style such that the style is very divergent from anything that has been seen before.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1136039656660684880/1...

>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.

No. The argument hinges on something far more insidious. If I showed you two pieces of art side by side.... One was AI generated in seconds and the other one was created through pure passion and hours and hours of hard work and toil. If you can't tell one was AI generated then all that toil and passion is useless.

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

#428

Post by corethree »

nirvdrum wrote: post #420
corethree wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok yeah let's avoid that bullshit then. The problem is there's enough leeway between the words that I could honestly say everything LLMs generate are representative of what most humans define as "genuine creativity" and I bet you that I can show you human art and computer art side by side and you'd be incapable of knowing which one is genuinely creative. I hate pedantic vocabulary just as much as you and this is not…

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 creature…

>https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1136039656660684880/1...

Take a look at the image on the lower right hand corner. That is indisputably original. The badge doesn't exist anywhere else and the alien form with one entire leg jutting out of the torso has never been done before. We know that this one legged creature is entirely original because it doesn't exist in any of the shows.

This is the key how you know LLMs aren't regurgitating stuff. It's trying to reproduce something from a flawed understanding of reality. A regurgitation would get things truly correct, but a one legged human is a creative error due to a lack of understanding. The LLM doesn't understand reality as completely and as cohesively as we do but it understands an aspect of it enough that it can produce art that mostly works. The LLM is definitely creating stuff from pure thought. These things are not copies and that's what you don't get.

The hype for LLMs is so over the top that it looks like the latest outrage from something that occurred on social media. What you and other people are missing is that we crossed a certain AI threshold here. This isn't mere regurgitation.

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

#429

Post by csallen »

xeckr wrote: post #426
csallen wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your point still doesn't make sense to me. Real humans today are creating art based on other artists' work. Their art would have absolutely zero chance of being created if not for the training, copying, and inspiration they're drawing from other works. Cavemen were not creating the art that we see people creating today, because people today rely on learning from and copying others' examples. None of the targeted arti…

When you train a GenAI on an image, legally speaking you're training it on a COPY of that image. If you intend to train a GenAI on a copy of an image I own the rights to (perhaps because I created it), then you have to negotiate with me. If you don't, then you are violating my copyright.

That's not how copyright works. Copyright law limits creating copies of a work, not interacting with copies of a work lol. Which means it doesn't apply to training.

What you're describing is some totally new law that doesn't exist anywhere on earth, because it would make no sense. Imagine if an aspiring artist who's training by studying a copy of another artist's drawing, or by listening to a copy of another artist's music, gets charged with violating that artist's copyright because they trained on a copy without permission.

Again, think of the implications if the laws you're dreaming up actually applied to people today.

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

#430

Post by myaccountonhn »

EnergyAmy wrote: post #264
myaccountonhn wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AIs and humans are not the same, why do people keep grouping them together and assume the same logic should apply?

No two people are exactly the same, but we group them together in various ways. The question to ask is "for a particular purpose, should they be treated with the same reasoning?". For the purpose of creating new art from experiencing previously created art, why should we treat them differently?

The purpose of the copyright law is to reward authors through property rights for their work to protect them against theft and incentivizes them to be able to earn a living from their work too. That does not happen if someone can take the work, feed it as extra data to a statistics machine and earn money from their work without their permission.

If AI training should be fair use has nothing to do about how it works (search engines fall under fair use regardless of if they think or not) but the effects it have on the original author.

So when people talk about humans and AIs "doing the same thing", AIs are not legal entities like humans are to begin with, the entire premise is moot.

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