I doubt the artists really thought this through. If they "win" this AI would be driven into illegality in the west and the global south would not care one bit about those laws and will happily outcompete those very same western artists on very uneven ground.
Artists score major win in copyright case against AI art generators
121–130 of 144 posts
Re: Artists score major win in copyright case against AI art generators
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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Re: Artists score major win in copyright case against AI art generators
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the experts are playing hardball then transformations of any and everything into PDFs is an effective tactic.
No. See the various state rules of civil procedure concerning the presumptive and requested form of production of electronically stored information. An example is Ariz. R. Civ. P. 26.1(c)(3).
I've seen plenty of productions of source code, email tranches, and database dumps in PDF format in both state and federal suits this year alone.
I've never worked with the courts in Arizona so perhaps this kind of gamesmanship is not allowed.
Re: Artists score major win in copyright case against AI art generators
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
The concern is that AI will be better than artists for making art, and artists don't want their art to be part of the tool set for creating that AI.
Totally new situation for humanity that almost no one saw coming. So artists are forced to use the outdated and lone weapon they have; copyright claims.
Re: Artists score major win in copyright case against AI art generators
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, the issue is that it makes outputs that compete with artists, and that is a problem if you go and make a fair use argument for appropriating copyrighted works. If I were to secretly use an image generator, just for my own purposes, trained on public data, the plaintiffs would say it is just as illegal. The rub is, do you know who else makes work that competes with artists? Other artists! It still kind of goes dow…
How the model is used isn’t relevant if creating it was already infringement. Training on works creates something of value and artists want to be able to prevent that training without compensation. There’s a long history of case law around just how much of someone’s work can be copied before it’s a problem. But here it’s literally the entire work being used so ‘how much’ is just everything. The points you bring up ar…
It's only clear that training is a violation of copyright if you have a layman's understanding of how training works. There are no images stored in image models, just vectors that represent pixel relationships. You may call this fancy compression, but the ship runs aground if you try to "compress" a small set of images with a transformer - you just will get random noisy junk on the output.
Artists have a much firmer legal ground to stand on if they go after model output, but the goal is to kill image generators, not simply censor their output.
Think of it like this: If I splatter paint on a canvas, does jackson pollock have a copyright claim? Probably not, despite my creation being a product of training on his work. But it would be fair for my creation to be checked to see if it is too similar to one of his works.
Re: Artists score major win in copyright case against AI art generators
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
How the model is used isn’t relevant if creating it was already infringement. Training on works creates something of value and artists want to be able to prevent that training without compensation. There’s a long history of case law around just how much of someone’s work can be copied before it’s a problem. But here it’s literally the entire work being used so ‘how much’ is just everything. The points you bring up ar…
It's only clear that training is a violation of copyright if you have a layman's understanding of how training works. There are no images stored in image models, just vectors that represent pixel relationships. You may call this fancy compression, but the ship runs aground if you try to "compress" a small set of images with a transformer - you just will get random noisy junk on the output. Artists have a much firmer…
just vectors that represent pixel relationships
Ask DALL-E 2 for Mona Lisa and it will produce something clearly derived from the original work. The ability to recreate items from the training set depends on how these systems are trained, but they are clearly capable of retraining enough to be problematic.
The Harry Potter the movies aren’t the original books, derivative works don’t imply something is the same just that it’s directly derived from something else.
> If I splatter paint on a canvas, does jackson pollock have a copyright claim?
If you’re trying to copy him then actually yes he would. Being inspired by a technique is fine, but the difference is less subtle than you might think.
Copyright cares how something was created, if you end up with ‘random’ patterns that happen to look suspiciously similar to another work it’s extremely unlikely that you came to that point randomly. What’s the odds you would pick the same 12 colors as someone else and apply them in the same order? 12 factorial isn’t a small number and that’s before considering the color selection.
Re: Artists score major win in copyright case against AI art generators
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
CLIP is just for an embedding for images and text, right? I might be getting mixed up… The diffusion part is just trained with the images, and the guidance part… is trained to produce the image when given the additional information of the embedding of the text? I find it difficult to imagine how the information from the CLIP embedding of the text could result in much information about the images that CLIP was trained…
> CLIP is just for an embedding for images and text, right? Yes, which is what makes text-to-image generation possible. You can go ahead and try using Stable Diffusion models, or even the incredibly high quality Flux, with no text "embedding" (or whatever you want to call it), and judge for yourself if those outputs are useful.
I get that, but my question is, “how can using the guidance from CLIP possibly make the resulting image infringe on copyright?”. I’m not saying that the CLIP part isn’t necessary for it to be useful.
Re: Artists score major win in copyright case against AI art generators
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's only clear that training is a violation of copyright if you have a layman's understanding of how training works. There are no images stored in image models, just vectors that represent pixel relationships. You may call this fancy compression, but the ship runs aground if you try to "compress" a small set of images with a transformer - you just will get random noisy junk on the output. Artists have a much firmer…
just vectors that represent pixel relationships Ask DALL-E 2 for Mona Lisa and it will produce something clearly derived from the original work. The ability to recreate items from the training set depends on how these systems are trained, but they are clearly capable of retraining enough to be problematic. The Harry Potter the movies aren’t the original books, derivative works don’t imply something is the same just t…
All what you said is why I believe artists have much firmer ground to stand on by going after output. We can have dumb AI that scans outputs for copyright violation the same way youtube scans for it.
Just because I can draw spider man from memory doesn't mean I owe Disney money or that I am 'problematic'. It means I just have to censor my outputs when doing drawings for people.
But again, artists don't want this outcome, so there is a purposeful muddying of the waters going on.
Re: Artists score major win in copyright case against AI art generators
#129You can have a kid, that kid can grow up to be a musician inspired by Taylor Swift, likely with some of their musical output having depended on Taylor's input. That's perfectly legal. But in a possible future, you could produce an AGI that isn't allowed to listen to Taylor Swift, never allowed to be inspired by anything from Taylor's songs?
We're not at the AGI stage yet. Whether the AI is "inspired" is a poor direction to argue in.
A better question is whether a person who can legally do X without using a tool is legally allowed to do X using a tool. Can a musician who learns Taylor Swift songs make music similar to Taylor Swift songs? If so, then a non-musician should be able to use a tool trained on a body of songs including but not limited to Taylor Swift songs to generate "music" similar to Taylor Swift songs.
Re: Artists score major win in copyright case against AI art generators
#130Earlier 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…
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 mess…
> All of them prohibit you from using their model to train other AI models.
Have they ever successfully enforced this clause in court? An equally valid resolution would be a conclusion that they don't actually have that power.