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Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

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Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#291

Post by freejazz »

gremlinsinc wrote: post #143
rcme wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether or not “humans do it” isn’t relevant. You can walk around with a copyrighted song in your head. That is not copyright infringement. But if you take that song, create a digital copy, and distribute it for money, then you are violating someone’s copyright. Additionally, our legal system requires a balance of probabilities. It’s hard to prove that someone was influenced by another work unless the similarities ar…

I challenge you to listen to 4 chords of awesome and tell me again about how every song is completely original. How does eragon exist when it's definitely ripped parts from star wars, etc...ai usually doesn't spit out a full plagiarism, but a loosely inspired work which is what most media we consume is. Edit: 4 chords of awesome link is https://youtube.com/watch?v=oOlDewpCfZQ&si=8vL6PbDnHiaffJh3

A copyright in just Eragon would be incredibly thin, for the exact reasons you state. This criticism of copyright by people that have no understanding of actual copyright law, how it works, how its used, etc, is so exhausting and ignorant.

Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#292

Post by idle_zealot »

optymizer wrote: post #265
idle_zealot wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This viewpoint is about as coherent as "every image file is copyright infringing because every pixel in it exists somewhere in some other image somewhere". Derivative works, when substantially changed, are not infringing. If I take an image of the Mona Lisa and rearrange all its pixels so it looks like a picture of a cat, that's not infringement. If I sample lines and curves and colors and styles from several images…

> If I take > If I sample You're not a computer program and your viewpoint is about as valid as "cars don't need speed limits because most humans can't run faster than 10mph and that speed is safe". Copyright laws where made with humans in mind.

If 1 in 100 humans could run up to 100mph you bet your ass there'd be laws against doing so around other people; it's a safety concern. Hell, even now running in most indoor or crowded areas is, if not illegal, at least considered bad behavior and may get you reprimanded or thrown out.

Some people claim to have a photographic memory. Supposing this is true, is it illegal for these people to look at copyrighted material because they may reproduce it later from the copy in their head? Of course not, it's the actual act of producing that copy that isn't allowed.

Of course, we're not talking about a computer program that stores a copy of an image and reproduces it later (that's called an "image encoder"), we're talking about is a statistical software that identifies common patterns in images and associations between those patterns and human language descriptions of the images containing them. It doesn't store or make a copy of the images it learns from, and it should only be able to reproduce images or elements of images that are overrepresented in its training data. Like any other software tool, if someone manages to use it to make an unauthorized copy of someone else's work, whether it was present in the training data or otherwise, then the user has infringed the other person's copyright. The only real argument you could make is that distribution of a trained model constitutes distribution of a tool aimed at assisting users in unlawful copying, but IMO that would apply more easily to wget than StableDiffusion.

Copyright laws were made to encourage and promote the creation and practice of useful arts. Applying them to stop the creation and adoption of a tool that would make humans far more efficient in the creation of art is backwards.

Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#293

Post by klabb3 »

Paradigma11 wrote: post #221
klabb3 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think parent anthropomorphizing anything. The ones who anthropomorphize are saying that machines should be covered by fair use, because they have similarities with humans. This is not about the rights of a machine but about how one human product is consumed by another human product. This is just a commercial supply chain: if you make a model, you need human data. You generally need to compensate your supplier…

Its not the tool that is covered by fair use. It is the creation of the tool that is covered by fair use. Is the tool itself supposed to be a copyright violation or is it a tool facilitating copyright violation by producing violating output? The later is something that can be tested because we have processes to compare works of art for it. If it is shown that LLMs produce mostly infringing art then we can and should…

> It is the creation of the tool that is covered by fair use.

Copyright doesn’t restrict creation of something, it restricts (mainly) commercial distribution. Research, education and journalism etc are largely unaffected, and would still be.

That said, I believe that selling access to the tool to the public already violates the copyright of the rights holders, even if it doesn’t produce similar works of art. The copyrighted works increased the value of the product (otherwise why would they use it?).

> The later is something that can be tested because we have processes to compare works of art for it.

This is the most expensive, least practical and most arbitrary part of existing copyright. It would be a huge mistake, imo, to expand this dramatically. This problem mostly goes away if the supply chain is sanely regulated.

All you’d need is give access to the training set upon audit, and bureaucrats could check for copyrighted works. There are already automated tools for this.

Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#294

Post by klabb3 »

gaganyaan wrote: post #242
klabb3 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Copyright, as defined in the U.S. Constitution, exists "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts"[1]. I can think of no better modern example of "the Progress of Science and useful Arts" than AI models themselves. This makes no sense. Before AI, it’s clear that copyright itself restricts what can be done, in order to promote overall health of innovation. You can’t just say this is cool so therefore allowe…

AI is the innovation. Trying to misapply copyright here would retard the progress of science and useful arts, not promote them, because it would wrongly restrict that innovation. The answer to big tech corporations centralizing this is to fund it publically and make it available for free to everyone as a shared summation of our culture, not lobotomize ourselves just to profit a few old dinosaurs that are relying on a…

> AI is the innovation.

Yes, but it does not live in a vacuum. It’s power is derived from human creations and their labor, for now.

When Spotify transformed the music industry, they could not simply claim innovation and be exempt. They had to negotiate with the dinosaurs and eventually it came through.

The inertia is a feature, not a bug. We’re still dealing with the fallout of the social media and ad-tech transformations. Unintended side effects takes a lot of time to understand.

> Trying to misapply copyright here would retard the progress of science and useful arts[…]

How so? All of academia would be entirely exempt, and so would the hackers and tinkerers, etc. You’d only violate copyright if you sell the models or the works they produced.

> The answer to big tech corporations centralizing this is to fund it publically and make it available for free

Yeah but that won’t happen. Even if it does, we need something that works in the meantime.

Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#295

Post by [deleted] »

LegitShady wrote: post #280
stale2002 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I used words very carefully. Then I am happy to use your word if that clarifies things. Just replace everything that I said about "human input" with "human authorship". And my point is that there are many things that a human can do using AI art that have large amounts of "human authorship" beyond just the boring case of prompting midjourney with a dumb prompt. > It depends on the level of human authorship. Oh hey!…

Its clear from this post that you aren't at all here in good faith, just to be glib and purposely misconstrue other people's words. good luck with life.

[deleted]

Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#296

Post by lewhoo »

hanselot wrote: post #234

Every day of my life I wake up feeling more and more detached from the world. That people are even debating this is so incredibly stupid to me. The only people that will benefit from more onerous copyright are the major corporations that already have lawyers lined up and ready to fight their battles ad infinitum. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37347528 The everyday person will not benefit from any decisions…

> Copyright by itself is such a clever trick to prevent the world from advancing.

And yet, the world is advancing.

Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#297

Post by lewhoo »

A lot of talk here on how copyrights and intellectual property are stupid, backwards, ancient (this is particularly strange, because the right for humans to exist and not be harmed is arguably much older and no one is complaining) and harmful without exploring a world without them. If I recall copyrights were introduced along with the development of mass print for the purpose of protecting authors of books. How will the world of today solve this issue ?

Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#298

Post by nearbuy »

optymizer wrote: post #268
nearbuy wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Once there are millions of images, you end up with just tiny blobs of pixels being copied from many different images. This is not how these neural nets work. They don't copy pixels from anywhere. They learn features. The features represented internally are generally not easy to interpret to humans, but for sake of illustration, there could be an artificial neuron that fires when a subject should have blue eyes. Hav…

Thank you for the explanation. Let me explain my position in similar terms. I'm not replicating an image, I'm "using my brain to build a network of neurons that map electrical impulses from the optical nerve excited by wavelengths projected onto my retina in order to send other electrical signals to actuator tissues". The complexity of the process is irrelevant imo. We can treat it as a black box and look at the inpu…

You're right that if you're replicating an existing copyright image, the process doesn't matter. Legally, if you lived in a cave your whole life and never saw any art and by amazing coincidence you just happened to paint and sell the exact same painting as some other artist, you'd be violating their copyright. Independent creation doesn't protect you.

On the other hand, under current copyright law, if Stable Diffusion generates an original image that doesn't look like a copy of any existing image, it's clear the new image doesn't violate any artist's copyright.

The debate is whether you can use copyright images/text to train an AI.

Stable Diffusion is of course trained on millions of photos of the real world, in addition to images made by artists. Of course, humans artists also see and digest both the real world and images by other artists and both influence their output. That's why you get trends like impressionism.

Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#299

Post by gaganyaan »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #284
gaganyaan wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Number 3 doesn't really make sense. I wouldn't get copyright if I told a human artist "draw a dog". Why would that change just because I'm telling an AI to do it?

I oversimplified that point a bit for brevity's sake, but I'd say I agree that some level of creative input from the human operator should be required in order for the work to be copyrightable. If I draw a black 100px*100px square in MS paint that's not copyrightable, nor should typing "dog" with a seed of "1" into Stable Diffusion be. But as soon as even the smallest level of creative input is involved, yeah it shou…

You can get very creative in your instructions to a human, but that creativity still won't get you any copyright.

And afaik, in a work for hire scenario, the artist just agrees to transfer their copyright automatically. If there's no copyright in the first place, there's nothing to transfer

Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#300

Post by gaganyaan »

klabb3 wrote: post #294
gaganyaan wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is the innovation. Trying to misapply copyright here would retard the progress of science and useful arts, not promote them, because it would wrongly restrict that innovation. The answer to big tech corporations centralizing this is to fund it publically and make it available for free to everyone as a shared summation of our culture, not lobotomize ourselves just to profit a few old dinosaurs that are relying on a…

> AI is the innovation. Yes, but it does not live in a vacuum. It’s power is derived from human creations and their labor, for now. When Spotify transformed the music industry, they could not simply claim innovation and be exempt. They had to negotiate with the dinosaurs and eventually it came through. The inertia is a feature, not a bug. We’re still dealing with the fallout of the social media and ad-tech transforma…

> You’d only violate copyright if you sell the models or the works they produced

That's not how copyright works. Academia would be able to claim fair use in expensive lawsuits. Hackers and tinkerers would be sued into submission exactly because it's a hobby that they won't risk jail for. People would be scared to work on anything related because of lawsuits threatening them with obscene amounts of money, and hence the retardation of science and the useful arts.

Other countries would leapfrog the US, and it would be left behind, all so that a few people can continue extracting rent with their government-granted monopolies.

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