Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google “expert witness”! Courts are also known to hire their own experts who mediated between the experts on either side. Also, those emails seem very likely to be ordered to be produced during discovery. This thing could really go either way at this point but I feel like Stability has the upper hand. Imagine training a model without any of the plaintiffs images, then using that side by side with the model that does.…
Stable Diffusion has been known to make virtually identical copies of the images it was "trained" on, afaik. If the images are REALLY of no importance, they wouldn't have been used anyway.
Judge pares down artists' AI copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, Stability AI
131–140 of 442 posts
Re: Judge pares down artists' AI copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, Stability AI
#132Having done way more corporate court than I want (patents, mergers, liquidation), I’m increasingly convinced that the judicial system is fundamentally flawed. The reality is that the law in 2023 US is so obscure and opaque and how judges come to their ruling seems to be by their total whim with no actual philosophy other than maintenance of the system. Further I’m extremely unimpressed with the vast majority of judge…
The law has never been more transparent. The public has nearly complete access to every docket in the country. Moreover, the level of jurisprudence has never been higher.
Moreover, I’ve lost a case or two in my time, but it was never because of a lack of a warchest.
Re: Judge pares down artists' AI copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, Stability AI
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find the whole comparison "it´s just like a person learning" to be a tiring trope. It's demonstrably not. Like I said to another poster - you've probably seen a Picasso. Can you make me a copy? Because a Diffusion model can. But you can't. Why not? Your denial that there is a demonstrable difference between human and machine attention is part of the core obfuscation these companies are using to win this battle, so…
A diffusion model can't make a copy. That's the whole point. The original Picasso isn't in the model weights. It has learned to make pixels a particular color to mimic that style, but that's it.
This whole argument of "ah but it doesnt really need it" doesn't hold up. If the model didn't need it, it wouldn't have used it in the first place.
Same thing in Artstation. It was of course propitious for AI scientists to find such a lovely database of high quality imagery, and all so helpfully tagged into categories.
All they had to do was take it.
Re: Judge pares down artists' AI copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, Stability AI
#134Why would any human spend their limited lifespan to create a piece of work that will be grabbed without permission, approximated algorithmically (at least on the surface) and reused in infinite possible small variations without any attribution or remuneration whatsoever?
This feels like a reversion to medieval times with minimal trade between regions as thieves would ambush traders and steal any goods.
Re: Judge pares down artists' AI copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, Stability AI
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m so confused about American copyright law. I was always under the impression that copyright is granted automatically and you didn’t need to “register” it, contrarily to a trademark which must be registered and is only valid for its specific industry.
That was my belief too, but: "Copyright exists from the moment the work is created. You will have to register, however, if you wish to bring a lawsuit for infringement of a U.S. work." https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-general.html (Makes me wonder if, back in the day, every song that was downloaded and then pursued by the RIAA was registered...)
This isn't a good sign.
Re: Judge pares down artists' AI copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, Stability AI
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
> why isn't it that an artist could say, hey I'm letting you see this painting, but you are not allowed to sit down with a canvas and learn how to reproduce it? Because you can do that in galleries - no photos, no reproductions. But you can't stop people from sitting and studying your painting and then painting stuff similar to it. One of the core assertions that is being decided in this case is if there is any actua…
I find the whole comparison "it´s just like a person learning" to be a tiring trope. It's demonstrably not. Like I said to another poster - you've probably seen a Picasso. Can you make me a copy? Because a Diffusion model can. But you can't. Why not? Your denial that there is a demonstrable difference between human and machine attention is part of the core obfuscation these companies are using to win this battle, so…
This isn't a given, it is something that has yet to be decided in this case. (Edit: if you look at studies that look for examples of SD reproductions, the best examples still similar to what a human trying to reproduce the image from memory would create)
> Your denial that there is a demonstrable difference between human and machine attention
There are demonstrable differences between different intelligent systems. I have yet to see any demonstration that shows that you can't reproduce human attention with machine. (Though we can't do it yet)
> If you don't recognise it, then answer me - Why can't you paint me a Picasso?
I haven't studied painting or Picasso. There are many people who can paint a Picasso as well as, if not better than, any ML model we have today. There are people who you could take to a gallery show who could go home and reproduce both style and individual works at an equivalent level.
> It learns faster and more accurately than any human,
The word, "faster", here is doing a lot of work. Machine learning can be "faster" in that it can happen in parallel and be scaled to take less time. However humans currently also learn "faster" because they require fewer repetitions or examples to learn. As such, the "learning" derived from a human viewing an image is arguably currently larger.
> Yes. You pay for access.
Is this good faith? I already stipulated that the images are publicly accessible. Are you suggesting that somehow artists should be able to block the AI from viewing a properly licensed instance of a copyrighted image? That pretty much results in a ban on general ai.
Re: Judge pares down artists' AI copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, Stability AI
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
False. Libraries exist. Borrowing books from neighborhood libraries or friends exists. Watching movies and TV with friends exists. Listening to music on the radio (yes, those free electromagnetic thingies) still exists. There are many, many, many free performances or accessible copies of all kinds of copyrighted content, plenty to train either a neural net or a human brain on. Books3 has separate legal concerns, but…
Libraries exist? Do you think books fly onto library shelves for free? As far as I know, someone bought them. Your neighbour or friend also bought the stuff. I suspect you're not being straight here, I just have to ignore this whole line of reasoning since it seems so absurd. >Until AGI arrives, or some other method of training LLMs from the ground up on sparse examples by incrementally building on structural knowled…
Physical library books are governed by the doctrine of first sale. That's why google has one of the largest (maybe excluding l-bg-n and IA) corpus of books on the internet. They might have the cleanest corpus of OCR'd book content of anyone, since IA uses commercial or open source OCR and that's it, while google for a long time used recaptcha to check OCR results.
For physical books, the cost per read of a library book is an order of magnitude smaller than the cost per read of privately purchased books. How can you tolerate the economic model of libraries when the net effect is a theft of maybe 80%-95% from the author and publisher? Libraries subsidize books that nobody wanted to read, but steal from authors and publishers whose books are read multiple times per physical copy.
Even libraries' onerous ebook licenses are not commercial retail ebook pricing. They're just closer to retail pricing than the publishers could ever manage with physical books, because there's no pesky right of first sale which turns physical book libraries into piracy havens.
I would prefer to get away from OpenAI and Facebook and all the other people using potentially tainted sources like books3. The obvious legal question for them isn't whether training was legal, but whether the acquisition of the training data was legal. That's a straightforward copyright issue, or at least as straightforward as fair use determinations can ever be. Whether we agree with copyright law as it stands, it's certain that copyright applies when books3 is transferred around the internet. How transformative it is, how much the transfer of books3 affects the market, and the other two factors, make those actions fair use, are the only questions to be considered.
The training aspect is where all the difference of opinion lies:
What is your position on Google using its corpus of books (legally acquired and possessed, as the content behind google books) to train a LLM? Do they need to acquire additional rights from copyright holders? Why, and under what legal theory?
How would they get permission ahead of time? How would they agree to a pricing model? Would they spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars training a model, and only then negotiate with rights holders to find out whether the license fees they want will be economically viable? We all know that most major rights holders would never grant a one-time license fee. It would be perpetual rent-seeking from AI output. I don't see how any of these LLM or image generation models would be economical if rights holders had their way. They wouldn't mind. They're notoriously slow to adopt tech, but if they did anything, they'd hire AI experts, build their own models, and license the models back to Google and Microsoft.
Re: Judge pares down artists' AI copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, Stability AI
#138Can somebody explain how this will not kill any incentive to publish anything? Why would any human spend their limited lifespan to create a piece of work that will be grabbed without permission, approximated algorithmically (at least on the surface) and reused in infinite possible small variations without any attribution or remuneration whatsoever? This feels like a reversion to medieval times with minimal trade betw…
Re: Judge pares down artists' AI copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, Stability AI
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find the whole comparison "it´s just like a person learning" to be a tiring trope. It's demonstrably not. Like I said to another poster - you've probably seen a Picasso. Can you make me a copy? Because a Diffusion model can. But you can't. Why not? Your denial that there is a demonstrable difference between human and machine attention is part of the core obfuscation these companies are using to win this battle, so…
> Because a Diffusion model can. This isn't a given, it is something that has yet to be decided in this case. (Edit: if you look at studies that look for examples of SD reproductions, the best examples still similar to what a human trying to reproduce the image from memory would create) > Your denial that there is a demonstrable difference between human and machine attention There are demonstrable differences between…
No it, results in a ban on general ai that doesn't compensate rights owners.
Re: Judge pares down artists' AI copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, Stability AI
#140Having done way more corporate court than I want (patents, mergers, liquidation), I’m increasingly convinced that the judicial system is fundamentally flawed. The reality is that the law in 2023 US is so obscure and opaque and how judges come to their ruling seems to be by their total whim with no actual philosophy other than maintenance of the system. Further I’m extremely unimpressed with the vast majority of judge…
Not to be too rude, but you’re not an attorney and couldn’t be more wrong. The law has never been more transparent. The public has nearly complete access to every docket in the country. Moreover, the level of jurisprudence has never been higher. Moreover, I’ve lost a case or two in my time, but it was never because of a lack of a warchest.
I'm confused as to what this sentence means. The level of {the study/philosophy/science of law} has never been higher?