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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

#31

Post by minimaxir »

drdeca wrote: post #17
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…

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…

The diffusion process is conditioned on CLIP text, which works better (in theory) since the encoded text is aligned with images.

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

#32

Post by itishappy »

drdeca wrote: post #17
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…

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…

An understanding of language is important for conveying and achieving intent.

Imagine working with an artist in a multi-step refinement process to produce some desired artwork. Regardless of the artists skill, you'll probably get better results if you're able to communicate well.

That's kinda how the diffusion process works. It starts with noise, generates a rough output, then iteratively refines it. The classifier is part of the refinement process so it knows what to change.

"Hey, you've added a tree-looking-thing on your beach-looking-thing, you should add some palm fronds so it better fits the setting."

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

#33

Post by lancesells »

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…

Imagine OpenAI put all their code and all their work in a public repo so someone can modify it and sell it without permission. Oh wait... they wouldn't do that.

> Presumably a lot of people using these image and video generators are narrative creators of a kind too, like video game developers, music video makers, etc. Are they also bad guys?

Was their a dearth of video games or music videos before generative AI became mainstream? Yeah, creating takes resources and time and effort and dedication, usually for very little reward.

If these companies can't exist without stealing everyone else's work than maybe they should hire creators with their billions or license the material.

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

#34

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

seanhunter wrote: post #21
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 f…

> and that training models doesn't constitute fair use

How can it not constitute fair use? They both made no copies of that data (copyright infringement) nor did they commit actual theft by stealing the data from some vault. Everything else is permitted. For that matter, this is equivalent to some human artist studying a piece of art and then starting to create art in that same style too... is that no longer fair use?

There are some court rulings so bad that the judge should just be removed from the bench.

> could affect the market for the original product

Oh, that makes more sense. The "negative movie reviews for newly released films is copyright infringement" argument. Nice.

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

#35

Post by akersten »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #34
seanhunter wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

> and that training models doesn't constitute fair use How can it not constitute fair use? They both made no copies of that data (copyright infringement) nor did they commit actual theft by stealing the data from some vault. Everything else is permitted. For that matter, this is equivalent to some human artist studying a piece of art and then starting to create art in that same style too... is that no longer fair use…

Even the fair use argument is putting the cart before the horse. I would think these plaintiffs need to convince a court that the works are derivative first, and iff they are derivative, then the fair use argument can be made (that the reproduction is not a copyright infringement, {because e.g., the result is substantially different from the input}).

Asking "is it fair use for a [human/computer] to [study/be trained on] copyrighted works" simply does not make sense as a fair use question because the answer has always been "looking at a painting and internalizing it has nothing to do with fair use, of course studying the old masters is permitted." I'm far from convinced the answer should be any different here.

So to me they're barking up a non productive tree by trying to essentially say "the entire model is copyright infringement." Hopefully a judge/jury is not convinced. IMO it should be case by case for any given artifact, whether human or machine produced, does it infringe. Obviously a harder hill to climb for the plaintiffs.

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

#37

Post by ijk »

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…

Where are you getting 2 billion from? The original CLIP paper says:

> We demonstrate that the simple pre-training task of predicting which caption goes with which image is an efficient and scalable way to learn SOTA image representations from scratch on a dataset of 400 million (image, text) pairs collected from the internet. [1]

OpenCLIP was trained on more images, but the datasets like LAION-2B are kind of low-quality in terms of labeling; I find it plausible that a better dataset could outperform it. I'm pretty sure that the stock images Adobe is drawing from have better labeling already.

I agree that this is likely to backfire on artists, but part of that is that I expect the outcome to be that large corporations will license private datasets and open research will starve.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.00020

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

#40

Post by coffeecloud »

reactor wrote: post #38

Humans acquire a significant amount of knowledge (or get trained on) by learning from the work of others. If companies can face legal repercussions for training models on materials from elsewhere, a similar argument could be made for individuals.

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.

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