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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

#51

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…

I think im with the artists on this one. They had to copy the data for model training, which I think constitutes a commercial use.

If I release software under a non-commercial use license, it is still IP infringement if a company uses it in their business process.

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

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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

#53

So…which is the best art generator I can download and run locally today? Or are there a few top ones specific to art style(photorealistic, scenery, pixel art, vectors, etc)?

Flux by Black Forest Labs, by far.

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

#54

IANAL. Is it legal to create derivatives of copyright work and then post them on public online forums? For example, I can certainly write , "Mickey Mouse got food poisoning from his Big Mac." But, if I ask an AI generator to "Make a picture of Mickey Mouse getting food poison at McDonald's", could I post the resulting picture?

The context is generating images based explicitly on intellectual property. The problem is that most AI image generators allow IP as terms and/or they consumed IP to build their model, so they will return IP-based artworks.

If you're a business using the image and used IP terms in your prompt, then you'd need permissions from both parties (Disney, McDonald's) before you post it. If you're writing about AI rights, or making a comment on social media, then less likely you'll need it.

If your prompt was a cartoon mouse gets food poison at a fast food joint, you're off the hook. But if it returns Mickey Mouse at McDonalds, then the AI generator is still on the hook for using IP as a source.

At least, that's where this is all going.

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

#55
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.

If you redrew The Lion King frame by frame from memory, it would still be copyright infringement if you redistributed it to your friends. The difference is how similar your recreation is to the original, not whether it was done by a human or by a machine.

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

#56

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…

Frankly, I’m not convinced that a world in which generative AIs based on unlicensed data have to shut down is a bad thing. You want to create art, you learn to draw or hire someone who can. You want to create a story, you learn to write or hire someone who can.

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

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Related, I worked at a company that had a standards body forced information sharing agreement with a competitor. One of the requirements was that documentation had to be shared.

Unfortunately, our documentation was a very well formatted with links and was searchable, making it easy to navigate. So in an act of malicious compliance, the few thousand page document was printed then scanned to low res, jpg artifact filled, crooked, but still legible, set of images that were shared as a fairly useless pdf.

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

#58
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.

This argument seems ridiculous to me but it's hard to explain exactly why. People are people, LLMs are... not people - it seems pretty obvious to me that humans learning from seeing things is a basic fact of nature, and that someone feeding petabytes of copyrighted material into an AI model to fully automate generation of art is obviously copyright infringement. I can see the argument making more sense if we actually…

> LLMs are... not people

Of course, but LLMs are tools used by people - they don't just spit out Taylor Swift songs or whatever automatically and wipe out human jobs. The laws we have already apply to people (whom use any tool they want) and what they do with creations, and whether copyright applies or whatever.

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

#59
It's so obvious to me that machine learning models are derivative works of their training set. If they weren't, then why would these companies fight so hard to say otherwise? They need that training data to make their product, so they should pay the licensing fees for it! 10 years ago, when I worked on a machine learning model for my employer, it was unthinkable to train on data we did not have the rights to use. But now it's all fair game because OpenAI executives would make a little less money otherwise? They certainly aren't giving up any of their own copyright in return. It's a very transparent transfer of power and money from regular people to the bosses.

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

#60

Definitely concerning and I hope model trainers win. If push comes to shove developers can always go to jurisdictions with more forward looking copyright exemptions regarding text and data mining like Israel and Japan though.

Don't forget the EU and SG! :)
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