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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

#61

Post by Workaccount2 »

radley wrote: post #54
aabajian wrote: post #48

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…

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

Not really, because that would still be a loss for artists. Where they are trying to steer the ship is to "training on IP is copyright violation".

Artists are looking to stop AI from taking their jobs. An AI generator with an IP filter on it's output will still very much be a threat to their work.

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

#62

Post by doctorpangloss »

jononor wrote: post #13
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…

That CLIP is not data / sample efficient is well know, and research to improve this is ongoing. Here is a 2021 paper which outperforms a CLIP baseline, with 7x less data. https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.05208 I am sure there are more recent papers also, possibly with larger gains. I do not see why Adobe would not be able to make a good CLIP like model with 0.6 billion images.

> I do not see why Adobe would not be able to make a good CLIP like model with 0.6 billion images.

Unity and Epic have tried and failed to do so. There are lots of talented people out there at companies with lots of money. Adobe, Unity and Epic aren't the only ones with licensing bureau images either. And anyway, did you consider that the vast majority of content in licensing bureaus is garbage? Or that the captions are garbage? Or that maybe they have wildly overstated the number of images they have?

Adobe hasn't published anything about their architecture or approach for the simple reason that it is not clean in the way they advertise their models to be.

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

#63

Post by davexunit »

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…

> So if the artists prevail, image generators are donezo

Good. If it's impossible to make this particular type of image/whatever (it's not art) generator without exploiting all artists then that it shouldn't be allowed to be made.

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

#64

Post by rurp »

throwaway4837 wrote: post #41

You can have a kid, that kid can grow up to be a musician inspired by Taylor Swift, likely with some of their musical output having depended on Taylor's input. That's perfectly legal. But in a possible future, you could produce an AGI that isn't allowed to listen to Taylor Swift, never allowed to be inspired by anything from Taylor's songs?

The notion that a large scale generative AI system should be viewed and treated the same as a human child legitimately makes no sense to me.

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

#65

Post by wiredfool »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #47
throwaway4837 wrote: post #41

You can have a kid, that kid can grow up to be a musician inspired by Taylor Swift, likely with some of their musical output having depended on Taylor's input. That's perfectly legal. But in a possible future, you could produce an AGI that isn't allowed to listen to Taylor Swift, never allowed to be inspired by anything from Taylor's songs?

I think it is more nuanced than that. Imagine you write a book and release it with a non-commercial use license, but a company copies it and uses it for employee training. Imagine you wrote software and released it with a non-commercial use license, but the company includes it in their for-profit workflow.

Imagine you wrote a book, released it using a publisher who put it on dead trees, and sold it in e-book format. And imagine that a whole industry does this, and doesn't release the books for free to copy use in any format. Which is not hard to do, because that's basically the current situation for the publishing industry.

Now imagine that all of that was used to train an LLM without compensation to the authors and publishers who paid the authors. This is apparently current situation with some of the training dataset.

While at the same time, libraries have to pay per e-loan. Archive.org can't do a 1:1 dead tree format shift loan to ebook.

I get that the tech industry wants everyone else's information to be free to use and their products to generate money enough for big exits and big salaries, but at some point the optics look pretty bad.

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

#66

Post by doctorpangloss »

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…

> CLIP is just for an embedding for images and text, right?

Yes, which is what makes text-to-image generation possible. You can go ahead and try using Stable Diffusion models, or even the incredibly high quality Flux, with no text "embedding" (or whatever you want to call it), and judge for yourself if those outputs are useful.

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

#67

Post by CatWChainsaw »

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.

I didn't realize you could train yourself on a lifetime's worth of YT videos every single day. (If salty sally had a problem with this statement, it's in the other articles on the HN front page right now, gf) The storage, recall, and scale required have always made this interpretation laughable - or rather, the kind of argument that seeks to privilege tools (and corporations) over people.

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

#68

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

throwaway4837 wrote: post #41

You can have a kid, that kid can grow up to be a musician inspired by Taylor Swift, likely with some of their musical output having depended on Taylor's input. That's perfectly legal. But in a possible future, you could produce an AGI that isn't allowed to listen to Taylor Swift, never allowed to be inspired by anything from Taylor's songs?

As always, it’s not what the thing is but what you do with it. If you click a spotify link and dance around your kitchen that’s okay. If you click a spotify link and put it into a commercial it’s not okay. Same thing for your scenarios. The legality question is about what your kid does with the music they heard.

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

#69

Post by mc32 »

throwup238 wrote: post #3

> The court declined to dismiss copyright infringement claims against the AI companies. That "major win" being allowed to proceed with the case at all. All they've done is clear the first hurdle meant to kill frivolous lawsuits before they get to discovery. Their other claims were dismissed: > Claims against the companies for breach of contract and unjust enrichment, plus violations of the Digital Millennium Copyrigh…

Will the plaintiffs get similar relief to the one IP holders got from Megaupload, I wonder?

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

#70

Post by doctorpangloss »

minimaxir wrote: post #28
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…

It was very surprising OpenAI wasn't named as a defendant in this suit due to CLIP.

The plaintiffs barely understand how any of this stuff works. The judge barely understands how this stuff works.
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