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Artists score major win in copyright case against AI art generators

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Re: Artists score major win in copyright case against AI art generators

#111

Post by dmonitor »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #72
davexunit wrote: post #59

It's so obvious to me that machine learning models are derivative works of their training set. If they weren't, then why would these companies fight so hard to say otherwise? They need that training data to make their product, so they should pay the licensing fees for it! 10 years ago, when I worked on a machine learning model for my employer, it was unthinkable to train on data we did not have the rights to use. But…

> It's so obvious to me that machine learning models are derivative works of their training set. Okay, but narrative creators watch movies and listen to music and read books too. Many do indeed "file the serial numbers off" other people's work and publish something else, that makes them money and not the original creators. Does one instance of "filing the serial numbers off" by one author mean that no authors anywher…

> it's not so obvious if "AI" is a distinct class from human

It is. It obviously is. It's the same reason that a person watching a movie and remembering it later is different than recording the movie with a camcorder.

> Ah but I made a robot that walks into theaters, buys a ticket, records the movie, leaves, and then recreates the movie at my home an infinite number of times. I didn't break the law, since a human could surely do the same thing with enough practice and effort.

Do you realize how ridiculous that sounds?

Re: Artists score major win in copyright case against AI art generators

#112

Post by j0hnyl »

slavik81 wrote: post #55
coffeecloud wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me it sounds like this argument is claiming that "training models" is legally equivalent to "training humans". So are there other examples of a human being allowed to do something where a machine made by a human is not allowed to do that thing? I am allowed to go to a movie and remember every detail and tell it to my friends, but my camcorder is not allowed to do that.

If you redrew The Lion King frame by frame from memory, it would still be copyright infringement if you redistributed it to your friends. The difference is how similar your recreation is to the original, not whether it was done by a human or by a machine.

Punish for the re-drawing, not the memorizing.

Re: Artists score major win in copyright case against AI art generators

#113

Post by Workaccount2 »

polotics wrote: post #98
Workaccount2 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>and that someone feeding petabytes of copyrighted material into an AI model to fully automate generation of art is obviously copyright infringement. It becomes a little less obvious when you learn that the models which had petabytes of images "go into it" are You have 5 million artists on one hand saying "My art is in there being used" and you have a 10GB file full of matrix vectors saying "There are no image files…

No the <10GB size of the model does not imply any less copyright infrigement is occuring IMHO. The fact that there is a very efficient compression involved does not change the fact that a copy of the copyrighted material, that copy being not compressed in any way, was input into the process that generated the model, in breach of the copyrighted material's copyright.

The training process doesn't involve any copies being made. At least anymore than viewing an image on the internet copies it into your RAM.

Transformers's analyze images, they don't copy them. You might call this semantics, but you probably also wouldn't call out an algorithm that counts black pixels on website images as "copyright violation".

There is a lot of nuance here and a lot to consider. Transformers are not archives of images, they are archives of relationships. This is key because you don't have to copy an image to measure the relationships between it's pixels.

Train a transformer on one image, and it will just output noisy garbage.

Re: Artists score major win in copyright case against AI art generators

#114

Post by nineteen999 »

gpm wrote: post #87
archontes wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am also not a lawyer; I have some background and training in IP law as it pertains to engineering. As far as I can tell, the image you describe and your example sentence are closer than you might think to each other. Mickey Mouse is a copyrighted character, and Disney could certainly claim infringement for both. Whether you have a fair use claim is down to the tenets of fair use, and whether they sue you is down to…

Aren't some versions of Mickey Mouse out of copyright now...

Steamboat Willie.

Re: Artists score major win in copyright case against AI art generators

#115

Post by alwa »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #113
polotics wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No the <10GB size of the model does not imply any less copyright infrigement is occuring IMHO. The fact that there is a very efficient compression involved does not change the fact that a copy of the copyrighted material, that copy being not compressed in any way, was input into the process that generated the model, in breach of the copyrighted material's copyright.

The training process doesn't involve any copies being made. At least anymore than viewing an image on the internet copies it into your RAM. Transformers's analyze images, they don't copy them. You might call this semantics, but you probably also wouldn't call out an algorithm that counts black pixels on website images as "copyright violation". There is a lot of nuance here and a lot to consider. Transformers are not…

Is the concern that the output weights infringe on copyright, or that the the training material itself was obtained and used in a manner inconsistent with copyright law?

Re: Artists score major win in copyright case against AI art generators

#116

Post by [deleted] »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #72
davexunit wrote: post #59

It's so obvious to me that machine learning models are derivative works of their training set. If they weren't, then why would these companies fight so hard to say otherwise? They need that training data to make their product, so they should pay the licensing fees for it! 10 years ago, when I worked on a machine learning model for my employer, it was unthinkable to train on data we did not have the rights to use. But…

> It's so obvious to me that machine learning models are derivative works of their training set. Okay, but narrative creators watch movies and listen to music and read books too. Many do indeed "file the serial numbers off" other people's work and publish something else, that makes them money and not the original creators. Does one instance of "filing the serial numbers off" by one author mean that no authors anywher…

[deleted]

Re: Artists score major win in copyright case against AI art generators

#117

Post by gamblor956 »

nomel wrote: post #57
williamcotton wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the experts are playing hardball then transformations of any and everything into PDFs is an effective tactic.

Related, I worked at a company that had a standards body forced information sharing agreement with a competitor. One of the requirements was that documentation had to be shared. Unfortunately, our documentation was a very well formatted with links and was searchable, making it easy to navigate. So in an act of malicious compliance, the few thousand page document was printed then scanned to low res, jpg artifact fille…

There was a time that would have worked because most judges didn't even know how to turn on their computers, much less the difference in file types.

Now, do the same thing and the judge would fine the company, and its lawyers, for failing to comply with discovery. And if the judge is super pissed off, they may issue a warrant for the CEO to spend a few nights in jail thinking about his decision-making process.

Re: Artists score major win in copyright case against AI art generators

#118

Post by doctorpangloss »

dmonitor wrote: post #111
doctorpangloss wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's so obvious to me that machine learning models are derivative works of their training set. Okay, but narrative creators watch movies and listen to music and read books too. Many do indeed "file the serial numbers off" other people's work and publish something else, that makes them money and not the original creators. Does one instance of "filing the serial numbers off" by one author mean that no authors anywher…

> it's not so obvious if "AI" is a distinct class from human It is. It obviously is. It's the same reason that a person watching a movie and remembering it later is different than recording the movie with a camcorder. > Ah but I made a robot that walks into theaters, buys a ticket, records the movie, leaves, and then recreates the movie at my home an infinite number of times. I didn't break the law, since a human cou…

The policy isn’t written that way though. The policy doesn’t say anything about camcorders. So you’re right about camcorders. But the law says “copying” which is pretty abstract, the case law is really detailed, so it’s not so black and white. Nobody cares about your imaginary situations with robots - I basically agree with you that there needs to be a distinct law governing AI training, and that leads to a far more interesting and totally normative conversation about who, if anyone, is the good or the bad guys.

If the policy (via case law) becomes, expressly permissioned content only, there are no image generators. Some people may want that. But is that better than we were, in the current status quo, where we have them? I don’t think so.

Re: Artists score major win in copyright case against AI art generators

#120

Post by Covenant0028 »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #72
davexunit wrote: post #59

It's so obvious to me that machine learning models are derivative works of their training set. If they weren't, then why would these companies fight so hard to say otherwise? They need that training data to make their product, so they should pay the licensing fees for it! 10 years ago, when I worked on a machine learning model for my employer, it was unthinkable to train on data we did not have the rights to use. But…

> It's so obvious to me that machine learning models are derivative works of their training set. Okay, but narrative creators watch movies and listen to music and read books too. Many do indeed "file the serial numbers off" other people's work and publish something else, that makes them money and not the original creators. Does one instance of "filing the serial numbers off" by one author mean that no authors anywher…

There is a difference, and AI companies understand it very well. All of them prohibit you from using their model to train other AI models. Microsoft takes it a step further and even prohibits you from trying to discover how the models work.

No human, however powerful, can prevent you from looking at their actions and learning from them. You can look at Obama's speeches for instance and learn how to craft certain messages for your own speeches. Nothing he can do to stop you from doing that.

And that is the key difference: AI models have been designed to privatize the process of learning, wherein they have unlimited freedom to learn from any human's work without compensating them from it, but humans or even other AI models cannot learn from an AI model.

This distinction IMO removes any right that the AI companies have to pretend that their models are people. They're not, the actions of the AI companies themselves show that.

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