AI-assisted art – A mixed decision from the copyright office • Hacker News Board

Re: AI-assisted art – A mixed decision from the copyright office

#61

Post by autoexec » Thu, Feb 23, 2023, 6:21 AM UTC

ROTMetro wrote: post #58

autoexec wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is kind of a problem if companies are fine with lying, or hiring an artist willing to lie and claim they created something, just to get copyright protection. I can't say for sure that we'll have (or always have) some means of telling if something was created by AI or not. Removing AI generated works from copyright entirely means that if you can demonstrate your work was created by AI you wouldn't have to worry t…

You have to list the specific artist(s) on the copyright. Is someone really interested in lying in Federal paperwork for minimal return? Risk/reward ratio on the specific individual(s) who claim to be the artist seems to not be worth it. This isn't a case of limited liability protection hiding behind the 'personhood' of a company but an individual that has to personally claim to be the artist. A company can't claim t…

If a company can make money by doing something, legal or not, we should assume that they will always do that thing. If the penalty for lying about how a work was produced is less than the money a company will make or can protect by illegally enforcing a copyright we should expect them to lie. I'm sure plenty of people would take a steady paycheck for the risk of a lawsuit if the company assures them they'll do everything to protect them.

Companies have repeatedly been caught suing people for violations of copyrights they didn't actually own while paying zero consequences for it once they were caught. For examples see https://www.techdirt.com/2020/03/26/riaa-realizes-it-sued-ch... and https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2010/03/viacom_v_youtu...)

I'm not saying this is an unsolvable problem, but it will take actually imposing severe and meaningful consequences for companies who lie.

Re: AI-assisted art – A mixed decision from the copyright office

#62

Post by wokwokwok » Thu, Feb 23, 2023, 6:25 AM UTC

fwlr wrote: post #30

wokwokwok wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but I mean it's also wrong... That's not how the diffusion process works. You can pick any number of interesting ways to describe it but if they're technically wrong, it doesn't really matter how poetic they are right? Diffusion models do use random noise. As I understand it, every 'step' is composed of three parts: a) the previous output, b) the latent generated from the prompt and c) random noise. As you move…

The sentence you quote is the beginning of a paragraph that ends with “There is random noise, but the visual layer evolves the final image from the noise based upon the latent ’meaning’ in the prompt”… which is in complete agreement with what you’re saying? It certainly isn’t saying diffusion models don’t use random noise. It has the phrase “there is random noise”, that is just wholly incompatible with that claim. Pe…

> the court has a misunderstanding about the “randomly generated noise” when it believes there is randomly generated noise in both the pixel and the latent - this is not the case, there is no randomness in the latent

No.

This is factually incorrect.

The random noise is applied in the latent.

The VAE doesn’t add random shit when you convert to pixel space.

Having randomness in pixel space would make no sense at all.

You don’t ever pick a deterministic point in the latent space (unless you fix the seed to the random number generator, and then you're still picking a random point in the latent space, unless you're prepared to argue you somehow know what a specific seed is going to do before you use it... you're just saving the point for later).

Ultimately, it comes down to this:

- You have a function that generates a bunch of random images.

- You pick one.

Did you create the image? No. You didn't.

Did you apply creativity? Should it be copyrightable? Maybe? You picked the one you liked most out of a set. You certainly applied your sense of aesthetics.

The practical question is:

What stops someone generating every possible image and copyrighting it?

Sorry! I know you typed that prompt out and got a random seed, but it turns out I've actually copyrighted every image for that prompt for seeds 200000000 - 300000000. It's only a 100 million images. Easy.

Right? Who cares if it's random or not? (I do, pedantically, it is), but practically, the copyright office doesn't care. They care about the practicality of preventing the system being abused.

We can argue about the semantics of where the noise is applied, but it doesn't actually matter.

How do you support people by letting them copyright their 'human scale' generated content, but avoid abuse from trolls who apply 'industrial scale copyrighting' with the same process?

Re: AI-assisted art – A mixed decision from the copyright office

#63

Post by wisemanwillhear » Thu, Feb 23, 2023, 5:58 PM UTC

yegortk wrote: post #20

I think this is most significantly a policy issue. Under the existing US law, minor human input could be enough to make AI copyrightable through the "modicum of creativity" argument. However, if this allows for massive amounts of content to be generated (semi-)automatically in much shorter amount of time and with much less effort than what was possible before, it seems strict and generous copyright protections grante…

If I spend little more than a second framing a picture with my camera, which is less than the time and effort that it would take me to type in a prompt for an AI, does that mean I haven't put in enough effort to have a copyright for my photo?

It feels like we need some distinction that's a little more qualitative than quantitative.

Re: AI-assisted art – A mixed decision from the copyright office

#64

Post by gwern » Mon, Feb 27, 2023, 10:55 PM UTC

wokwokwok wrote: post #22

gwern wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think this is shortsighted; this opens up a space for "AI copyright trolls" who generate images for popular prompts in an automated fashion to get copyright, then go after people using AI art who happened to hit the same seed and prompt. That seems extremely unlikely to make any sense given that the random seeds in question would be, what, FP32 or FP64 by default? So that's 4 billion random seeds per prompt. Bett…

Yes, but that’s the point isn’t it? Why not copyright them all? Sure, it’s irritating, and troll behaviour; but that’s literally what patent trolls do right?

No, the point is to make money.