Judge pares down artists' AI copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, Stability AI

No LLMs use a cold and calculating algorithm to produce content that it equivalent and at times Better than anything a human can produce. When a human consumes content produced by an LLM it is indistinguishable from content that came from inspiration, greed, boredom or any number of human traits. You can't tell. That is the future. We can identify flaws now but we all know those flaws will be rapidly disappearing.

What the LLM tells us, what it teaches us, is that the human condition is trivial. We are a biological machines made out of wetware and the LLM is a solid state machine made out of silicon. Two machines that make content. We like to pretend that the stuff that comes from inspiration, greed or boredom as if those are things that have deep intrinsic meaning in the universe. No. It's a lie we tell ourselves. We make up the meaning, and so does the LLM.

Society is fucking changing. Creativity, art, works of inspiration... all that stuff will become as common as water and plastic cups. That's just the way things are accept it or don't.

But here's the thing. Don't pull justice into the mix. Don't say that a crime was committed because an LLM produced something better and faster than a human could. Don't call obviously original writing and original art a COPY when it is obviously NOT. These are the same tactics used by patent trolls.

This is a twisting of justice because people are afraid. No different from how a patent troll twists justice because people want profit.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1136039656660684880/1...

here are four pieces of original art that I produced in 10 seconds using an LLM with the prompt: "the most original piece of art ever". Sue me!!

Its legally different because the human brain is not considered a fixed medium under copyright law, so a human experiencing and learning something is not making what is potentially a copy or derivative work under copyright law, and therefore not exercising, potentially without permission, one of the exclusive rights granted to the copyright holder.

> There are artists that can study a painting for a few minutes and then recreate it from memory

Right, and those artists violate copyright at the moment they recreate it in a fixed medium without permission, but encoding it into computer storage media is already a copy, so a machine (or, rather, the person using the machine) hits that threshold before creating an actual visual output.

> That is, we focus on the output of the process to determine infringement

No, we focus on what is set in a fixed medium. If that is done at an intermediate step of the process, rather than being an output, it can still be infringement.

Its just that a human doesn’t always need to make a copy in what is legally a fixed medium until the output, but that is not the same as categorically only treating outout of a process as legally relevant.

The judge didn't say that (for one thing, copyrights aren't handled by the Patent and Trademark Office.)

What he did say is a bit bizarre. because copyrightable works are cooyrighted automatically when set in fixed (including digital) form. So, if it existed to be trained on and was cooyrightable, it was cooyrighted.

The judge may have been using sloppy language to refer to registration, which legally must be done before pursuing most copyright claims in court. (This isn't about being cooyrighted, and registration can happen after alleged infringement without invalidating the claim, but it doesn have to happen before filing a lawsuit; it is a procedural reauirement that is black and white in the law.)

It's called a thought experiment. You are claiming that processing imagery that is publicly available for viewing consitutes an IP violation and I'm taking that to the logical conclusion.

> based off unlicensed imagery

The imagery on Artstation is licensed. Artstation has a license to display those images publicly. If Artstation did not have that license, they would be the infringing party.

> so a few companies did it in secret

I'm not sure what the basis for this assertion is it was not done in secret. Stable Diffusion was trained using https://laion.ai/blog/laion-5b/

This lawsuit isn't against the people who trained the model, but those who distribute it. Yhe Stable Diffusion model was not released by a for-profit company but was released as open source by a university research group which received funding from VC backed companies.

The IP model you are pushing for is a huge expansion of the already problematic copyright system. It will curtain research and training of publicly available models.

It is already easy as can be to copy images with a computer or digital camera. Stable Diffusion doesn't make it easier to reproduce these images and washing an image through a ML model won't protect you from that reproduction being an infringement.

I think it makes far more sense to use our existing restrictions to regulate usage of the output than to make new restrictions on the types of processing that are allowed on publicly available content.