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Nick Clegg says asking artists for use permission would 'kill' AI industry

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Re: Nick Clegg says asking artists for use permission would 'kill' AI industry

#61

Post by const_cast »

pj_mukh wrote: post #59
const_cast wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> OpenAI is selling the fact that you could potentially generate copyrightable material as a subscription, because the artwork is somewhere in the compressed data? Yeah, that's the express and sole purpose of the tool. You use OpenAI image generation because you want something that looks like a stock image for your website. But you don't want to pay for a stock image because you're cheap. So you'll get a close enough…

"express and sole purpose of the tool" Categorically untrue. 100% of all my usage of image generation is for artistic purposes that have nothing to do with the reproduction of or even the mimicry of existing art. This is a gaping hole in the legal case if the lawyers need this to be true.

> 100% of all my usage of image generation is for artistic purposes that have nothing to do with the reproduction of or even the mimicry of existing art.

How? You're creating artwork that is based off of the training data and is meant to replicate a subset of it.

I think, just because you cannot pinpoint the exact art piece(s) that you are recreating doesn't mean that that isn't what you're doing.

Re: Nick Clegg says asking artists for use permission would 'kill' AI industry

#63

Post by pj_mukh »

const_cast wrote: post #61
pj_mukh wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"express and sole purpose of the tool" Categorically untrue. 100% of all my usage of image generation is for artistic purposes that have nothing to do with the reproduction of or even the mimicry of existing art. This is a gaping hole in the legal case if the lawyers need this to be true.

> 100% of all my usage of image generation is for artistic purposes that have nothing to do with the reproduction of or even the mimicry of existing art. How? You're creating artwork that is based off of the training data and is meant to replicate a subset of it. I think, just because you cannot pinpoint the exact art piece(s) that you are recreating doesn't mean that that isn't what you're doing.

Sorry when you said "Sole purpose", I assumed you meant the ChatGPT USERS sole purpose and OpenAI's expectation of their users' Sole purpose. My sole purpose as a ChatGPT user is not to create/recreate stock photos.

"just because you cannot pinpoint the exact art piece(s)"

Precisely, and neither can the owner of the copyright. Unless of course I rub into classical copyright issues ("these two art pieces look too similar") which goes back to my original question, why isn't just enforcing existing copyright law on bad ChatGPT users enough?

If I "use" your artwork, and generate another artwork that looks nothing like yours (either from my brain or by automating it) why do you care?

Re: Nick Clegg says asking artists for use permission would 'kill' AI industry

#64

Post by Gud »

jimmydoe wrote: post #58
kulahan wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people seem to think AI development happens in a vacuum, but there are a lot of international implications to consider. Even if the US had some incredibly thorough process for ensuring everyone got paid for their AI additions, many nations would just straight-up steal the data anyways. So maybe in ChatGPT, you can’t ask for a studio ghibli-style photo, but in ChinaGPT (or what-have-you), it’ll work just fine…

China might do it, so we did it first. I love this logic, and another place to apply it is about when to use nuclear bombs.

The key difference is that if China uses their nukes, so will we. On them.

Re: Nick Clegg says asking artists for use permission would 'kill' AI industry

#65

Post by birn559 »

pj_mukh wrote: post #60
Earw0rm wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a strict reading, the tool itself is a copyright violation. In that an LLM is the code and its weights, and the weights contain a lossy compressed copy of a copyrighted work. Now you might say that's an overly rigid reading of copyright law, and I might agree, but that is nevertheless the reading of it applied to other domains - music, film and so on - where incorporating even a fractional, lossy and heavily proce…

The legality of Copyright material being present in the latent space of a commercialized foundation model would definitely be an interesting case! Though most of these cases aren't litigating this. They are charging that the ability to recreate copyrightable material is the fault of the tool and not the tool user[1]. [1]: https://www.darrow.ai/resources/ai-copyright-law

If using the work as training data was lawful (which hasn't been always the case as we know today) I tend to agree with you, but it might depend: creating an alteration of the work might be prohibited altogether or you might need to give proper credit to the original authors and that might already be violated when you present certain output to a user. In general, the user is responsible to obey the license of the original work. The problem is that the LLM doed not know on which works its output (mostly) is based on. So in theory, no output for which copyright laws might apply should be used whatsoever.

Re: Nick Clegg says asking artists for use permission would 'kill' AI industry

#68

Post by therealpygon »

birn559 wrote: post #46
karaterobot wrote: post #40

I'm the kind of creative whose job is threatened by AI, but if I'm being honest and cold-blooded, I'm not actually sure that I'd call what AI training does stealing—apart from any illicit acquisition of the data, that is. I'm open to being persuaded. I just have not read a really persuasive argument that when a model is trained, what it's doing is closer to stealing than it is to being influenced and then recapitulat…

AIs are not creative, that's anthropomorphism. They use lossy compression to save training data. Later on, the compressed data is used to generate things that are potentially copyright violations (because they are very close to the original).

People don’t like honesty because they want to be special snowflakes, but sorry, humans aren’t that creative. The entire copyright and patent system is predicated on that fact, that you can only make money by making a thing exclusive and proprietary. That is directly caused by the fact that not only is it NOT original, but that others absolutely will invent/create the same thing eventually even without exposure to the original material, which is why people want to protect their exclusivity.

“I’m original because I add the little curls to the lines, make the lines softer, and make faces pointy rather than round” isn’t originality, nor is any of the art that people claim copyright for.

Additionally, it is a fundamental misunderstanding of AI modes if you think the models are simply lossy compression of data. That is like saying the alphabet is just lossy compression of The Odyssey.

Re: Nick Clegg says asking artists for use permission would 'kill' AI industry

#69

Post by kulahan »

jimmydoe wrote: post #58
kulahan wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people seem to think AI development happens in a vacuum, but there are a lot of international implications to consider. Even if the US had some incredibly thorough process for ensuring everyone got paid for their AI additions, many nations would just straight-up steal the data anyways. So maybe in ChatGPT, you can’t ask for a studio ghibli-style photo, but in ChinaGPT (or what-have-you), it’ll work just fine…

China might do it, so we did it first. I love this logic, and another place to apply it is about when to use nuclear bombs.

I’m not talking about China. I’m talking about every single nation on the planet.

Re: Nick Clegg says asking artists for use permission would 'kill' AI industry

#70

Post by Earw0rm »

pj_mukh wrote: post #60
Earw0rm wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a strict reading, the tool itself is a copyright violation. In that an LLM is the code and its weights, and the weights contain a lossy compressed copy of a copyrighted work. Now you might say that's an overly rigid reading of copyright law, and I might agree, but that is nevertheless the reading of it applied to other domains - music, film and so on - where incorporating even a fractional, lossy and heavily proce…

The legality of Copyright material being present in the latent space of a commercialized foundation model would definitely be an interesting case! Though most of these cases aren't litigating this. They are charging that the ability to recreate copyrightable material is the fault of the tool and not the tool user[1]. [1]: https://www.darrow.ai/resources/ai-copyright-law

Copyright law has never clearly and adequately defined the boundary between copying and measuring.

If I measure the length of a song? Not copyright infringement. If I take even a very short sequence of PCM samples, copyright infringement.

But the practical thresholds appear to be different, there's a bunch of ways you can extract kbs' worth of information from a song, some are considered copying (ripping the melody to midi with a converter, say), some are not.

And in the case of "AI", depending on the model it could be extracting and encoding almost anything, because it's a catch-all term encompassing dozens of architectures and methods.

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