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On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney

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Re: On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney

#731

Post by scheeseman486 »

freejazz wrote: post #723
bawolff wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like the issue here, is you are giving AIs agency. AIs are not magic. They are tools. They are not alive, they do not have agency. They do not do things by themselves. Humans do things, some humans use AI to do those things. Agency always rests with a combination of the tool's creator and operator, never the tool itself. Is there really a difference between a human flooding the market using AI and a human floo…

It'd be a good point if it wasn't for the fact that search engines didn't exist until google, because of technology, and that courts didn't need to consider the issue until then. So where does your point get us? We are here now.

Search engines are an index, which have existed for centuries.

Re: On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney

#732

Post by romwell »

c0pium wrote: post #655
chx wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I firmly believe that training models qualifies as fair use There's a hell lot of money to be made from this belief so of course the HN crowd will hold it. Some of us here who have been around the copyright hustle for a little longer laugh at this bitterly and pray that the courts and/or Doctorow's activism saves us. But there's so much money to be made from automatized plagiarism and the forces against are so weak…

Generative models are just a tool. Artists are mad because this tool empowers other people, who they view as less talented, to make art too. The camera and 1-hour film developing didn’t destroy oil paintings, it just enabled more people to have control over what was on their walls.

>Generative models are just a tool.

Sure. It's just a tool. That need other people's art to work.

If it's "just a tool" in and of itself, then there's no problem keeping it away from other people's art.

>The camera and 1-hour film developing didn’t destroy oil paintings

Because the copyright laws were extended to include photographic reproduction of art as something you need to obtain a permission (and a license) for.

The same needs to happen for generative AI.

A photocopy machine is just a tool too. So is the printing press.

Re: On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney

#733

Post by romwell »

kansface wrote: post #455
tedivm wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I firmly believe that training models qualifies as fair use. I think it falls under research, and is used to push the scientific community forward. I also firmly believe that commercializing models built on top of copyrighted works (which all works start off as) does not qualify as fair use (or at least shouldn't) and that commercializing models build on copyrighted material is nothing more than license laundering. C…

> The reason that AI models are generating content similar to other people's work is because those models were explicitly trained to do that. Ah, just like humans who train against the output of other humans. AI models are not fundamentally different in kind in this regard, only scope, and even that isn't perfectly obvious to me a priori.

>Ah, just like humans who train against the output of other humans.

Yeah, and creating derivative work without permission is against the law.

>AI models are not fundamentally different in kind in this regard

[citation needed]

Of course they are fundamentally different. They don't get to decide what to absorb.

Humans that make those decisions, correspondingly, should pay the price.

Re: On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney

#734

Post by maronato »

Jasper_ wrote: post #41
rimeice wrote: post #5

The sooner anyone making profit from models trained on creators proprietary content start paying for the content they’re using the better for creators, society and even the AI companies. It’s pretty tiring hearing people argue about whether copyright law applies to AI companies or not. It applies. Just get on and sort out a proper licensing model.

> "The bottom line is this," the firm, known as a16z, wrote. "Imposing the cost of actual or potential copyright liability on the creators of AI models will either kill or significantly hamper their development." > The firm said payment for all of the copyrighted material already used in LLMs would cost the companies that built them "tens or hundreds of billions of dollars a year in royalty payments." https://www.bus…

“Payment for all workers who develop fields or man factories would cost the companies that operate them hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in salary payments”

- slavers, probably.

Of course slavery != AI, but the argument that we should protect companies from their expenses to enable their bad business model is very entitled and presumptuous.

Thousands of companies have failed because their businesses models didn’t work, and thousands more will.

AI will be fine. It probably won’t be as stupidly lucrative as the current model, but we’ll find a way.

Re: On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney

#735

Post by [deleted] »

caconym_ wrote: post #687
ben_w wrote: post #676

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO that's a terrible thought experiment given the situation. LLMs do not store enough content or with enough accuracy to even close to a virtual library. Unlike, say, Google and the Wayback Machine, the former of which stores enough to show snippets from the pages it's presenting to you as search results (and they got sued for that in certain categories of result), and the latter is straight up an archive of all the…

> LLMs do not store enough content or with enough accuracy to even close to a virtual library. Unlike, say, Google and the Wayback Machine, the former of which stores enough to show snippets from the pages it's presenting to you as search results (and they got sued for that in certain categories of result), and the latter is straight up an archive of all the sites it crawls. I already addressed this: "the only differ…

[deleted]

Re: On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney

#736

Post by bawolff »

scheeseman486 wrote: post #731
freejazz wrote: post #723

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'd be a good point if it wasn't for the fact that search engines didn't exist until google, because of technology, and that courts didn't need to consider the issue until then. So where does your point get us? We are here now.

Search engines are an index, which have existed for centuries.

When i was in university, i remember there was this humanities professor who had a concordance for the iliad on his shelf. As a CS person it was so cool to see the ancient version of a search engine.

Re: On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney

#738

Post by scheeseman486 »

cmiles74 wrote: post #351
sandworm101 wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> In the artist's opinion, OpenAI violated that license... So? Why does the author's opinion even enter into the equation? Authors cannot claim ownership beyond the bounds of copyright. If what AI is doing qualifies as fair use, the artist cannot do anything about it. I'm sure that lots of artists would not want anyone to lampoon or criticize their work. They cannot stop such things. I'm sure lots of artists would n…

It is not clear that training an LLM falls under "fair use". We are then left with the license of the work, in this case that license forbids re-selling the work for a profit. It is the artist's license for their work at issue, not their opinion.

If the legality is ambiguous then we're left with an impending court decision. Fair use is an affirmative defense, considered case by case.

Re: On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney

#739

Post by mlyle »

freejazz wrote: post #719
mlyle wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, we already have doctrine that starts to encompass some of these concepts with fair use. The four pronged test in US case law: - the purpose and character of use (is a machine doing this different in purpose and character? many would say yes. is "ripping-off-this-artist-as-a-service" different than an isolated work that builds upon another artist's art?) - the nature of the copyrighted work - the amount…

The problem with this conversation is that its being had by people that make the top level comment here stating that clothing is not copyrightable. It is. Clothing design is copyrightable. This was a huge recent case, Star Athletica. They know nothing about copyright law and they just build intuitions from the world around them, but the intuitions are completely nonsense because they are made in ignorance of the actu…

You're dismissing my comment because of what someone else said upthread?

I hate the desire to meta-comment about the site rather than argue on the merits.

We obviously don't know so much about how courts will interpret copyright with LLMs. There's a lot of arguments on all sides, and we're only going to know in several years after a whole lot of case law solidifies. There are so many questions, (fair use, originality, can weights be copyrighted? when can model output be copyrighted? etc etc etc). Not to mention that the legislative branch may weigh in.

This discourse by citizens who are informed about technology is essential for technology to be regulated well, even if not all participants in the conversation are as legally informed as you'd wish. Today's well-meaning intuition about what deserves copyright and why inform tomorrow's case law and legislation.

Re: On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney

#740

Post by csallen »

tga_d wrote: post #705
csallen wrote: post #699

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A company hires an artist. That artist has observed a ton of other artists' work over the years. The company instructs that artist to draw, "X but in the style of Y", where Y is some copyrighted artwork. The company then prints the result and puts it on their packaging. A company builds an AI tool. That AI tool is trained on a ton of artists' work over the years. The company opens up the AI tool and asks it to draw,…

Okay, but then that's an an argument subject to the critiques made upthread that you were initially trying to dismiss? You can't claim that AI doesn't need to worry about citing influences because it's just doing a thing humans wouldn't cite influences for, then proceed to cite an example where you would very much be expected to cite your influences, and AI wouldn't, as evidence.

I never argued that AI doesn't need to worry about citing influences. If I am a person using a tool to create a work, and the final product clearly resembles some copyrighted work that I need to reference and give credit to, what does it matter if my tool is a pencil, a graphics editing program, a GPT, or my own mind? I can cite the work.
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