781–790 of 957 posts
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It's called paying copyright owners -- artists. The economic model can be worked out, but it's not the status quo, where software companies take all the profit and artists are left with nothing.
Amazing how everyone is an intellectual property zealot now.
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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…
If I read a lot of stories in a certain genre that I like, and I later write my own story, it’s almost by definition going to be a mish-mash of everything I like. Should I pay the authors of the books I read when I sell mine?
But it's also going to be affected by the teachers you had in pre-school, the people you hang around with, your relatives, films you've seen, adverts you watched, good memories and bad memories of events. You bring your lived experience to your story, and not just a mish-mash of stories in a particular genre, but everything.
Whereas when you train a model, you know the exact input, and that exact input may be 100% copyright material.
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>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) f…
> Sure. It's just a tool. That need other people's art to work. So does a human brain. Which brings us to the other side of the reasoning is that tools like Midjourney and OpenAI enable idiots (when it comes to drawing/animating ... that includes me) to create engaging artwork. Recently generating artwork like that went from almost impossible to "great, but easily recognizeable as AI artwork". Frankly, I expect the d…
A major difference between a human training himself by looking at art, and a computer doing it, is that the human ends up working for himself, the computer is owned by some billionaire.
One enhances the creative potential of humanity as a whole, the other consolidates it in the hands of the already-powerful.
Another major difference is that a human can't use that knowledge to mass-produce that art at a scale that will put other artists in the poorhouse. The computer can.
Copyright exists to benefit humanity as a whole... And frankly, I see no reason for why a neural network's output should be protected by copyright. Only humans can produce copyrightable works, and a prompt is not a sufficient creative input.
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But today there are thousands of (human) artists who create original works "in the style of" other famous artists, and my understanding is that this is completely legal. Artists own a copyright to their actual works. Not to a "style". Besides, all artists learned from other artists and borrowed lots of ideas from predecessors. Why should we hold AI to a higher standard than we hold human artists to?
Because it makes some people feel bad, and we care about their feelings?
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>> If you think OpenAI is less valuable because it can't use copyrighted content, then it should give some of that value back to the content. But we are allowed to use copyrighted content. We are not allowed to copy copyrighted content. We are allowed to view and consume it, to be influenced by it, and under many circumstances even outright copy it. If one doesn't want anyone to see/consume or be influenced by one's…
I'm not as interested in making a technical/legal argument, as I'm just sharing my feelings on the topic (and eventually, what I think the law should be), but during training copies are made of copyrighted material, even if the model doesn't contain exact copies of work. Crawling, downloading, storing (temporarily) for training all involve making copies, and thus are subject to copyright law. Maybe those copies are f…
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I think the ethics are pretty clear. 1. Don't do things to people that they don't want to be done to them. 2. Do as you would be done by. It really is that simple.
(1) means that taxes, the legal and justice systems, much of the public education system, criticism, begging on the street, and protest are all unethical, among I'm sure many others. Not to suggest you believe they are- I'm sure that you can present very strong arguments for some or all of these- but that makes it much less simple and leaves room for debate about whether this situation is also an exception.
This situation is not an exception. There is no compelling reason to force people to have their work ingested by an AI. Unless you believe that large companies have the inherent right to disregard the rights of individuals?
Whether this is bad or good or should be banned or not is functionally irrelevant. There is nothing that can be done short of terminating the global internet. Sure you could ban it in the US and Europe, but you can't in China, et al. You can't ban it everywhere. You can't ban open source. Art has been democratized. It's not going back in the bottle. A kid with a laptop anywhere on the planet will be able to compete w…
And yet, Comcast and AT&T will gladly terminate any customer on their network pirating copyrighted works from large corporate owners. It seems to me like we very much can do something about AI infringement.
Silicon Valley does not understand the concept of consent.
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Giving something for free doesn’t mean giving it for others to make a profit. We have copyright and other legal rules for a reason. Likewise, many open source licenses don’t allow for people to profit off what you donated to the world. It’s not a forgone conclusion that everything must be exploited for money by someone.
In theory, sure. In practice, if you don't have the money to file the lawsuits to enforce it, no you don't. And if you think making money is unethical or exploitative, then it's unlikely you are going to be able to have the money to enforce whatever rules you think anyone who uses the stuff you put out there for free should follow.
Fortunately you actually can lodge lawsuits in such cases even if you can’t afford it so long as you find either a lawyer who works on contingency in expectation of a settlement or one who believes in something. In this case, almost any lawyer in the field of copyright would be eager to simply make their name with a case that sets precedent in such an important domain.
Fwiw, I make a considerable amount of money, yet also write and contribute to free software. I think it’s unethical and exploitive to take my labor given for free to the community and claim it as your own for your personal enrichment. I think I’m not alone in this specific community on hacker news. So, in theory you’re right. In practice, the libertarian ideal of mad max exploitation of anything you can find not bolted down appeals to a few small number of people, and the rest of us are happy to defend artists and creators from that small population.
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Let's say I'm an artist. I have, thus far, distributed my art for consumption without cost, because I want people to engage with and enjoy it. But, for whatever reason, I have a deep, irrational philosophical objection to corporate profit. I want to preclude any corporation from ever using my art to turn a profit, when at all possible. I have accepted that in some sense, electrical and internet corporations will be t…
When you put it that way, I think you just laid out the case for creating a Copyleft for art.