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Nightshade: An offensive tool for artists against AI art generators

nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu

411–420 of 710 posts

Re: Nightshade: An offensive tool for artists against AI art generators

#411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true of almost all DRM, isn't it? Even for the most annoying form that is always-online DRM, everyone is provided the same access to the bytes that form a game. You and I have the same bytes of game. It's the purpose of some of those bytes that turns it into DRM.

No, it's not the same. The game is non-functional without the proper keys/authorization whereas images run through this algorithm are still images that anyone and any computer can view in the same manner without any authentication.

An analogy that springs to mind is the difference between an access control mechanism such as a door with lock and key versus whatever magical contrivance that prevents entry to a dwelling by vampires uninvited.

Re: Nightshade: An offensive tool for artists against AI art generators

#412
post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't copyright ideas, you copyright works. And these artists' productions are works, not abstract ideas, with copyrights, and they are being violated. This is simple law. Why do people have such a hard time with this? Are you the one training the models and you need to find a cognitive escape out of the illegality and wrong-doing of your activities?

>This is simple law. Why do people have such a hard time with this? Because this isn’t simple law. It feels like simple infringement, but there’s no actual copying going on. You can’t open up the database and find a given duplicate of a work. Instead you have some abstraction of what it takes to get to a given work. Also it’s important to point out that nothing in the law is sure. A good lawyer, a sympathetic judge,…

Have you seen the examples of midjourney reproducing exact frames of Dune, Star Wars etc? With vague prompting not asking for the media property specifically. It's pretty close to querying a database, except if you're asking for something that's not there it's able to render an interpolated result on the fly. Ask it for something that is there however and the model will dutifully pull it up.

Re: Nightshade: An offensive tool for artists against AI art generators

#413
post #240
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google scrapes copyrighted material every day and then presents that material to users in the form of excerpts, images, and entire book pages. This has been ruled OK by the courts. Scraping copyrighted information is not illegal or we couldn't have search engines.

Scraping is only legal if it's temporary and transformational. If Google started selling the scrapped images it would be a different story.

What is not transformational for generative AI ?

Re: Nightshade: An offensive tool for artists against AI art generators

#414
post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't copyright ideas, you copyright works. And these artists' productions are works, not abstract ideas, with copyrights, and they are being violated. This is simple law. Why do people have such a hard time with this? Are you the one training the models and you need to find a cognitive escape out of the illegality and wrong-doing of your activities?

> This is simple law. “One may well ask: ‘How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?’ The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that ‘an unjust…

Well, fine, but you'll have to claim that copyright is unjust and that you are breaking the law as an act of civil disobedience. The AI corps do not want to take this stance as they also have intellectual property to protect. Classic "have their cake and eat it too" scenario.

Re: Nightshade: An offensive tool for artists against AI art generators

#415
post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then let's use a more precise term that is also present in law: monopoly. You can't monopolize an idea. Copyright law is a prescription, not a description. Copyright law demands that everyone play along with the lie that is intellectual monopoly. The effectiveness of that demand depends on how well it can be enforced. Playing pretend during the age of the printing press may have been easy enough to coordinate, but it…

Trying to make sense of the above comment is difficult. > Copyright law demands that everyone play along with the lie that is intellectual monopoly. Saying "lie" suggests willful deception. Perhaps you mean "socially constructed"? Combined with "playing pretend" makes it read a bit like a rant. > Then let's use a more precise term that is also present in law: monopoly. Ok, in law and economics, the core idea of monop…

> Saying "lie" suggests willful deception.

Consider instead the term "legal fiction", it's not so derogatory.

Re: Nightshade: An offensive tool for artists against AI art generators

#416
post #172

This is the DRM problem again. However much we might wish that it was not true, ideas are not rivalrous. If you share an idea with another person, they now have that idea too. If you share words on paper, then someone with eyes and a brain might memorize them (or much more likely, just grasp and retain the ideas conveyed in the words). If you let someone hear your music, then the ideas (phrasing, style, melody, etc)…

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Re: Nightshade: An offensive tool for artists against AI art generators

#417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not the same. The game is non-functional without the proper keys/authorization whereas images run through this algorithm are still images that anyone and any computer can view in the same manner without any authentication.

An analogy that springs to mind is the difference between an access control mechanism such as a door with lock and key versus whatever magical contrivance that prevents entry to a dwelling by vampires uninvited.

That may be an ok analogy, but magic isn’t real. Maybe a better analogy would be to speak or write in a language that you know certain people don’t natively understand, and using lots of slang and idioms that don’t translate easily. Someone could still run it through Google Translate or whatever, but they won’t get a great understanding of what you actually said. They’d have to actually learn the language and the sorts of slang and idioms used.

Re: Nightshade: An offensive tool for artists against AI art generators

#418
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that's true, then it should be fine for that human to paint with the brush of his AI tool. Why should that human artist be restricted in the types of tools he uses to create his artwork?

Should I be restricted in using copy paste as my tool for creating art?

No you should not. You should be able to use any tool you want.

If you produce a work that is too much of a copy from the original, you might be liable to a copyright claim.. but the act of copy and paste should not be prohibited in the generation of something new.

This is done all the time by artists.. who perhaps create an artwork by copy and pasting advertisements out of a womans magazine to create an image of a womans face made only of those clipping. Making a statement about identity creation from corporate media... we should not put restrictions on such art work.

Here's just one example of an artist using copy-n-paste of content they don't own to create something new:

https://torontolife.com/culture/this-artist-creates-one-of-a...

Re: Nightshade: An offensive tool for artists against AI art generators

#419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Whether it's irrelevant is a matter of opinion. It's just as much of an opinion, or as 'objective', as your prior statements. Your going to have to face up to the fact that just saying something is 'objective' doesn't necessarily mean all 8 billion people will agree that it is so.

Yes, someone can disagree on whether a fact is true. That's obviously true, but it has no effect on the truth of that fact. I'm saying something very simple: If a machine can copy your style, that's a fundamentally different situation than if a human can copy your style, and it has utterly different consequences. You can disagree with my statement, or say that whether it's fundamentally different is subjective, or yo…

> For a current example, there's already billions of man-hours worth of AI spam writing, indexed by Google, that is likely not actually read by even a single person on Earth.

Continuing to ignore this point won't make the prior comments seem any more persuasive, in fact probably less.

So here's another chance to engage productively instead of just declaring things to be true or false, 'objective', etc., with only the strength of a pseudonymous HN account's opinion behind it.

Try to actually convince readers with solid arguments instead.

Re: Nightshade: An offensive tool for artists against AI art generators

#420
post #103

I’m completely flabbergasted by the number of comments implying copyright concepts such as “fair use” or “derivative work” apply to trained ML models. Copyright is for _people_, as are the entailing rights, responsibilities and exemptions. This has gone far beyond anthropomorphising and we need to like get it together, man!

No one is saying a model is the legal entity. The legal entities are still people and corporations.

Oh come on, you’re being insincere. Wether or not the model is learning from the work just like people is hotly debated as if it would make a difference. Fair use is even brought up. Fair use! Even if it applied, these training sets collate all of everything

I feel like I’m taking crazy pills TBQH

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