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Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

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Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#111

Post by dragonwriter »

bee_rider wrote: post #110
brookst wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you wished to include such images in training, you would also need an explainable AI that could tell you exactly what training inputs are influencing its output. This is a huge leap that would change copyright law dramatically, even for humans. Youre asserting that copyright doesn’t just protect from reproduction, but from use as an example to learn from. I think this would break copyright altogether. What music…

You only have to make that leap if you suppose that machine learning algorithms actually learn and then become capable of creating their own original works, rather than producing mechanical transformations of their inputs. Which, I don’t think that’s an inherently absurd statement. I mean, at some point humans physically exist, so a sufficiently complex artificial being could exactly replicate our physically processe…

> You only have to make that leap if you suppose that machine learning algorithms actually learn and then become capable of creating their own original works, rather than producing mechanical transformations of their inputs.

Why do you think humans can do that, and that what we call “original works” of humans are not just mechanical transformations of the human’s inputs.

How, in a universe of deterministic physical laws, is it possible for a human to do anything else?

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#112

Post by spywaregorilla »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #98
alexwebb2 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I take a copy of your art to hang on my wall, I've violated your copyright. But if I "copy" the experiential knowledge of your art into my brain by viewing it, I'm not violating your copyright. My brain doesn't contain a copy of the art, it's just been influenced by viewing it, and I might be more capable of producing art that mimics your style. What these models are doing feels, to me, vastly more like the second…

But you are not capable of reproducing from your mind something that is in that artists' style, after that viewing. If you show someone a painting and ask them to recreate it, even setting aside the skill gap, you do not get the same painting back. You get a different painting, with some overlap, with the "focus" of it being what the person paid the most attention to during their viewing. In this way, ML training is…

> But you are not capable of reproducing from your mind something that is in that artists' style, after that viewing.

I am capable of doing this.

> If you show someone a painting and ask them to recreate it, even setting aside the skill gap, you do not get the same painting back. You get a different painting, with some overlap, with the "focus" of it being what the person paid the most attention to during their viewing.

same for ai models. in fact, more true for ai models. You'll have a much harder time recreating an image from popular models than from human memory.

> It makes all generated art have this very sterile, soulless feeling to it because these tiny choices that would otherwise be made by a person trying to illicit an effect are instead just the machine sort of shrugging and being like "well in most things I've seen where a woman is sitting this way, her hand is tilted this way" but it doesn't know why the hand is tilted or what that means for the subject, which means the hand-tilt might be applied to subjects for whom it makes absolutely no sense at all to tilt the hand.

this will surely age well

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#113

Post by Kim_Bruning »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #54
spywaregorilla wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does not contain compressed "copies" of the image. It contains a synthesis of the image.

And the synthesis was created with material that the AI company did not license and did not have permission to use for this purpose. I have ZERO issue with image generators on their own. They're quite cool technology. The only thing I and tons and tons of other people have requested is they not use images without permission to train them, that's literally it. That's my sole, single, solitary objection and yet every A…

Some forms of copying/uses for a work are permitted by law (eu) or permitted by fair use (us) and thus exempt from permission. Eg. it is generally accepted that you are allowed to download works if you're viewing them in a browser, storing them in a search engine database, or are taking statistical data for a research project.

AI companies argue (long story short) that their usage is closest to taking statistical data, and thus doesn't trigger the need for a license.

I do realize that some people find this to be a somewhat unfair outcome as is, but

A) It is the current law as is. (caveat: we still have to see if the courts actually confirm this particular interpretation)

B) I'm not actually sure we should let those people have their way in the first place.

Of course, ignorance of the law is no excuse.

I feel like some creative folks never actually bothered to learn the laws they were working under, or (more charitably) this turned out to be a corner case, and they were caught by surprise.

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#114

Post by Kim_Bruning »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #112
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you are not capable of reproducing from your mind something that is in that artists' style, after that viewing. If you show someone a painting and ask them to recreate it, even setting aside the skill gap, you do not get the same painting back. You get a different painting, with some overlap, with the "focus" of it being what the person paid the most attention to during their viewing. In this way, ML training is…

> But you are not capable of reproducing from your mind something that is in that artists' style, after that viewing. I am capable of doing this. > If you show someone a painting and ask them to recreate it, even setting aside the skill gap, you do not get the same painting back. You get a different painting, with some overlap, with the "focus" of it being what the person paid the most attention to during their viewi…

> this will surely age well

People are already experimenting and/or deploying systems that run an LLM before doing text2image [1]. This helps a lot with 'understanding'.

The next low-hanging fruit would then be to go back and improve the labeling used for training the image-generation models in the first place (using new multi-modal LLMs).

[1] eg. the current GPT+ standard model will do Prompt -> GPT-4 -> DALL-E

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#115

Post by anon291 »

wredue wrote: post #96
anon291 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI does not copy Diffusion models are exposed to a blank canvas and then instructed to produce something. At no point are they looking into a database. They simply produce an image that will score highly in their aesthetic estimations.

Prove it. Train an AI just on a few techniques. Then a couple fundamental stock photos with nothing but the subject. Then have it generate things outside of the realm of the stock photos recombined in a general style. Let us see your completely unique and unpredictable results.

Can you explain in more detail what you want? If you undertrain a diffusion model it will produce meaningless gibberish. Which is still 'creative', just not what you expected. Training for a diffusion model is not 'inserting' images into a dataset. Rather you should view it as a 'taste' alignment.

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#116

Post by Kim_Bruning »

dragonwriter wrote: post #105
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what way is training "copying"? This is just an attempt at a landgrab by idiot copyright maximalists.

> In what way is training "copying"? In the way in which you literally must make a copy of the dataset to use it in training, and that literal copy if not excused by fair use analysis including consideration of the downstream purpose, is a violation of copyright.

A lot of 'technical copying' actually is permitted by EU laws or US Fair use arguments. Think of browsing, caching, scraping, indexing, etc.

AI companies argue that insofar as they are copying, they are only making ephemeral technical copies.

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#117

Post by dragonwriter »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #116
dragonwriter wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In what way is training "copying"? In the way in which you literally must make a copy of the dataset to use it in training, and that literal copy if not excused by fair use analysis including consideration of the downstream purpose, is a violation of copyright.

A lot of 'technical copying' actually is permitted by EU laws or US Fair use arguments. Think of browsing, caching, scraping, indexing, etc. AI companies argue that insofar as they are copying, they are only making ephemeral technical copies.

> A lot of 'technical copying' actually is permitted by EU laws or US Fair use arguments.

US fair use analysis includes purpose, so copying which would be fair use for one purpose can cease to be when the purpose changes.

Since this is a case under US law, and the US is not currently a member of the EU, EU law is somewhat tangential.

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#118

Post by gumballindie »

dragonwriter wrote: post #109
gumballindie wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s try something radical: not putting it any way. A machine has no rights, and it doesnt learn as humans do. I know the cult leader, altman, wants you to think otherwise, but no, stealing people’s work to make ai viable is not OK.

Nah, Altman doesn't really want you think machines are like humans and have rights either, because if the law thought that, it would also think Altman was aspiring to be the greatest slaver in all of history.

> the greatest slaver

Once he manages to replace y'all with ai, what do you think you will become?

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#119

Post by MichaelZuo »

dragonwriter wrote: post #104
MichaelZuo wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> interesting wrinkle Far more then that, it's an absolute show-stopper for any potential lawsuits, as it's really unlikely any potential litigant will be able to prove that even a large majority of the images have been registered, and thus eligible for a lawsuit.

All they have to do is register their works that they are claiming were specifically infringed, and they are fine. Well, with the registration issue. They still have to prove us of an exclusive right and overcome any argument that the other side puts up that the use involved fell under fair use, but they'll have dealt with the threshold issue of “are we allowed to sue over the works we are alleging were used".

> All they have to do is register their works that they are claiming were specifically infringed, and they are fine.

Based on what legal reasoning?

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#120

Post by sandworm101 »

SLSMan wrote: post #63
sandworm101 wrote: post #13

>> He wrote that the sheer size of the LAION database may protect the company because it is “simply not plausible that every training image used to train Stable Diffusion was copyrighted (as opposed to copyrightable) or that all DeviantArt users’ output images rely upon (theoretically) copyright training images.” This is where I think the judge misspoke. "Copyrighted" does not mean registered . Copyrights attach at c…

The terminology can be confusing, but "copyrighted" is often used interchangeably with "registered". Copyright in a work exists from the moment it's the work is created, but it's not "copyrighted" in the sense the judge is using until the work is registered with the Copyright Office. Registration is a requirement to sue for infringement. So a work is protected by copyright as soon as it's created, but it needs to be…

That is another hair to split, between "registered" at time of infringement and "registered" at time of lawsuit.

You need to register prior to bringing a claim. That isn't a big deal and can be done easily after any alleged infringement. But to get the attorney fees you need to have registered before the infringement occurred, something you cannot fix after you decision to sue.

Then to split hairs yet again, was the work registered at the time it was copied by the AI, or are you suing over infringement that occurred after a late registration? Are you claiming it was registered when the AI was trained on it, or are you claiming registration during the work's subsequent use by the AI after the training process? Maybe you can get attorney fees despite late registration if you can prove ongoing infringement after the pre-registration training process.

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