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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

#21

Post by seanhunter »

segasaturn wrote: post #20

The plaintiffs are claiming that their art-style is copyrighted intellectual property and that they can sue image generators for damages if it creates an output that resembles theirs. Regardless of what you think about AI art, the precedent of this case will be a huge expansion of the power of IP and copyright law in the US mainly to the benefit of corporations - imagine Disney copyrighting the look of their 3D anima…

That's not what they're claiming.

They're claiming that the models were trained on copyright material[1] and that training models doesn't constitute fair use[2]. Their claims are in the first couple of pages of the court ruling.

The claim is not that the style is copyrightable but that producing work in the same style could affect the market for the original product which is one of the parts of the four factor test for fair use. [3]

[1] Which ldo they were

[2] This is the big one and will have enormous ramifications if it ends up with the court ruling substantially in their favour

[3] https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/

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

#22

Post by JoshTriplett »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #2

There are no clean image models. Zero. Using today's model architectures, the problem of using non-expressly-permitted data for training is insurmountable. I welcome anyone more knowledgeable on the matter to go ahead and comment about a counterexample before downvoting. So if the artists prevail, image generators are donezo. Open source, proprietary, whatever. People saying otherwise just don't know enough about how…

> There are no clean image models. Zero. Using today's model architectures, the problem of using non-expressly-permitted data for training is insurmountable.

"This would be hard to do while respecting licenses on creative works" is not an argument for being permitted to ignore those licenses.

I don't like copyright, but I strongly believe in everyone following the same rules. If AI companies are finding that copyright is inconvenient: welcome to the club, Open Source developers have been saying that for decades, and others have been saying it for centuries. There shouldn't be a special asymmetric exception for AI training that lets AI ignore licenses while everyone else cannot. By all means remove copyright restrictions for everyone, for all uses.

> So if the artists prevail, image generators are donezo.

And for exactly that reason I hope they prevail. Model training can start over and do it right this time.

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

#23

Post by maxwell »

warkdarrior wrote: post #15

If these AI companies get punished, this will be a great win for open-source model training. Looking forward to train models at home, maybe over a distributed, P2P network of open-source enthusiasts, using images off the Internet. Harder to sue and punish a decentralized ML-training coop!

But isn't this about LAION, an open source model? Looks like they're going after Stability, not OpenAI or Anthropic.

Maybe this is more about stifling open source models.

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

#24

Post by Dwedit »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #2

There are no clean image models. Zero. Using today's model architectures, the problem of using non-expressly-permitted data for training is insurmountable. I welcome anyone more knowledgeable on the matter to go ahead and comment about a counterexample before downvoting. So if the artists prevail, image generators are donezo. Open source, proprietary, whatever. People saying otherwise just don't know enough about how…

I'm sure the artists don't give any care about the parts of the training that aren't directly related to generating images, such as models which generate captions for images.

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

#25

Post by vlovich123 »

throwup238 wrote: post #16
moffkalast wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't the Enron dataset that's now part of the Pile become public during discovery too? Some great image datasets might drop.

IANAL but documents don't become public during discovery, they only become public if they're filed with the court (unless they're sealed). The vast majority of information dredged up during discovery remains confidential.

But things like datasets are massive and structure is important. Do they retain them digitally with the same original structure or do they transform them into some kind of massive PDF?

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

#26

Post by williamcotton »

vlovich123 wrote: post #25
throwup238 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IANAL but documents don't become public during discovery, they only become public if they're filed with the court (unless they're sealed). The vast majority of information dredged up during discovery remains confidential.

But things like datasets are massive and structure is important. Do they retain them digitally with the same original structure or do they transform them into some kind of massive PDF?

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

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

#27

Post by vlovich123 »

maxwell wrote: post #23
warkdarrior wrote: post #15

If these AI companies get punished, this will be a great win for open-source model training. Looking forward to train models at home, maybe over a distributed, P2P network of open-source enthusiasts, using images off the Internet. Harder to sue and punish a decentralized ML-training coop!

But isn't this about LAION, an open source model? Looks like they're going after Stability, not OpenAI or Anthropic. Maybe this is more about stifling open source models.

Apparently also anything training from it so DeviantArt (which reuploaded the model) and Midjourney (which sounds like it did a transference training) are involved.

The reason the lawsuit feels weird is that transformative use is pretty clearly fair use:

> In computer- and Internet-related works, the transformative characteristic of the later work is often that it provides the public with a benefit not previously available to it,

I mean if genAI isn't this I'm not sure what would be. The public gets a benefit of having a computer generate art from spoken speech and that requires quite a substantial transformation of a data corpus of labelled images.

Indeed, there's lots of art at Art Basel that depicts Disney characters in various ways to critique Disney & that's a much more direct copying of a different artists style (& even more direct trademark infringement). It really feels like artists are trying to have it both ways because this threatens their livelihood.

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

#28

Post by minimaxir »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #2

There are no clean image models. Zero. Using today's model architectures, the problem of using non-expressly-permitted data for training is insurmountable. I welcome anyone more knowledgeable on the matter to go ahead and comment about a counterexample before downvoting. So if the artists prevail, image generators are donezo. Open source, proprietary, whatever. People saying otherwise just don't know enough about how…

It was very surprising OpenAI wasn't named as a defendant in this suit due to CLIP.

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

#29

Post by ronsor »

moffkalast wrote: post #10
__loam wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm very excited for discovery.

Didn't the Enron dataset that's now part of the Pile become public during discovery too? Some great image datasets might drop.

The dataset is already public. That's the only reason they were able to file this time-wasting lawsuit anyway.

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

#30

Post by tivert »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #2

There are no clean image models. Zero. Using today's model architectures, the problem of using non-expressly-permitted data for training is insurmountable. I welcome anyone more knowledgeable on the matter to go ahead and comment about a counterexample before downvoting. So if the artists prevail, image generators are donezo. Open source, proprietary, whatever. People saying otherwise just don't know enough about how…

> There are not enough license bureau images to train a CLIP model, not enough expressly licensed text content to train T5. A CLIP model needs 2 billion images to perform well, not the 600m Adobe claims they have access to. It's right in the paper.

Not an expert on this, but I wonder:

1) how many images you could create/buy/tag with a billion dollar investment, and

2) if you could lower the training requirements with targeted training data creation (e.g. get low-priced/amateur models to come in singly and in groups for an hour each and work through a catalog of poses/costumes designed to result very good generative model for "people").

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