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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

#81

Post by pavon »

seanhunter wrote: post #21
segasaturn wrote: post #20

The plaintiffs are claiming that their art-style is copyrighted intellectual property and that they can sue image generators for damages if it creates an output that resembles theirs. Regardless of what you think about AI art, the precedent of this case will be a huge expansion of the power of IP and copyright law in the US mainly to the benefit of corporations - imagine Disney copyrighting the look of their 3D anima…

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…

They are claiming both those things - copyright infringement and a trade dress infringement under the Lanham Act.

That said, their trade dress claim doesn't go so far to claim ownership of an entire style, it is the use of that style in association with their names that is the problem. For example "draw a stick figure cartoon dog" is fine but "draw a dog in the style of xkcd" is not, by their reasoning. And you certainly can't advertise that the model can make images in the style of these artists in ways that might be interpreted as the artists being involved with the company.

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

#82

Post by doctorpangloss »

Retric wrote: post #78
doctorpangloss wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's so obvious to me that machine learning models are derivative works of their training set. Okay, but narrative creators watch movies and listen to music and read books too. Many do indeed "file the serial numbers off" other people's work and publish something else, that makes them money and not the original creators. Does one instance of "filing the serial numbers off" by one author mean that no authors anywher…

The issue here is that the AI model itself is a derivative work. Further, they will very much recreate things the’ve seen many examples of. Recreating “Mona Lisa” isn’t a problem, but recreating “Iron Man” is. Individual artists may not know how to prompt the system to recreate their work, but looking at the training sets is going to help quite a bit.

No, the issue is that it makes outputs that compete with artists, and that is a problem if you go and make a fair use argument for appropriating copyrighted works.

If I were to secretly use an image generator, just for my own purposes, trained on public data, the plaintiffs would say it is just as illegal.

The rub is, do you know who else makes work that competes with artists? Other artists! It still kind of goes down on some vibesy stuff that I don't know if the law has a straight answer to. And for what it's worth, the Andy Warhol v. Goldsmith decision was about artists competing with other artists - this is the decision that has created an opening to challenge fair use. I just wonder why limit ourselves to the peculiarities of that case, why not open all forms of competition between artists to litigation over their influences and processes?

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

#83

Post by jncfhnb »

davexunit wrote: post #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…

> If they weren't, then why would these companies fight so hard to say otherwise?

What kind of looney logic is this?

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

#84

Post by doctorpangloss »

bugglebeetle wrote: post #14
doctorpangloss wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are making a bad faith comment. There's no mystery why artists are mad at Stability and Midjourney. I agree that demanding lower interest rates would be ridiculous. That is my point. You could delete Midjourney, Stability, DALL-E3, etc. tomorrow, and it will still suck harder today to be a working artist than it did in 2021, when interest rates were lower and there were literally hundreds more TV series being pro…

I appreciate the extent to which you’ve demonstrated whataboutism at its extremes, but I think we can take things even further. Let’s suggest that artists direct their ire at the emergence of life itself from the raw materials of the universe, as that is, indisputably, the origin of all suffering.

> Let’s suggest that artists direct their ire at the emergence of life itself from the raw materials of the universe, as that is, indisputably, the origin of all suffering.

Some artists do.

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

#85

Post by 627467 »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #71
p1necone wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>and that someone feeding petabytes of copyrighted material into an AI model to fully automate generation of art is obviously copyright infringement. It becomes a little less obvious when you learn that the models which had petabytes of images "go into it" are You have 5 million artists on one hand saying "My art is in there being used" and you have a 10GB file full of matrix vectors saying "There are no image files…

is distributing a zip file of copyrighted material infringement? if it is I guess the argument is distributing this disclaimer: I'm just devil advocating. I don't believe this discussion is productive. the time for IP protection to be necessary for social good has gone and now it's just a time wasting idea

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

#86

Post by jncfhnb »

slavik81 wrote: post #55
coffeecloud wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you drew it shittily from memory it would still be copyright infringement. As would retelling it. Discoverability of the infringement and the irrelevance of the violation is the reason you don’t get sued

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

#87

Post by gpm »

archontes wrote: post #73
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?

I am also not a lawyer; I have some background and training in IP law as it pertains to engineering. As far as I can tell, the image you describe and your example sentence are closer than you might think to each other. Mickey Mouse is a copyrighted character, and Disney could certainly claim infringement for both. Whether you have a fair use claim is down to the tenets of fair use, and whether they sue you is down to…

Aren't some versions of Mickey Mouse out of copyright now...

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

#88

Post by Retric »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #82
Retric wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue here is that the AI model itself is a derivative work. Further, they will very much recreate things the’ve seen many examples of. Recreating “Mona Lisa” isn’t a problem, but recreating “Iron Man” is. Individual artists may not know how to prompt the system to recreate their work, but looking at the training sets is going to help quite a bit.

No, the issue is that it makes outputs that compete with artists, and that is a problem if you go and make a fair use argument for appropriating copyrighted works. If I were to secretly use an image generator, just for my own purposes, trained on public data, the plaintiffs would say it is just as illegal. The rub is, do you know who else makes work that competes with artists? Other artists! It still kind of goes dow…

How the model is used isn’t relevant if creating it was already infringement. Training on works creates something of value and artists want to be able to prevent that training without compensation. There’s a long history of case law around just how much of someone’s work can be copied before it’s a problem. But here it’s literally the entire work being used so ‘how much’ is just everything.

The points you bring up are also relevant but artists don’t want to look through a billion individual images to see if that specific image happens to infringe on their work.

Edit: Wrote the response to a comment that got deleted before I posted presumably because I edited this one: IMO many commentators are getting this wrong.

“the less likely it is that the appropriation will serve as a substitute for the original work or its plausible derivatives, shrinking the market opportunities for the copyrighted work” https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/21-869_87ad.pdf

The form of these models is very different, but the purpose is to create directly competing works. Each individual output may not directly infringe with a specific work, but the goal of the model very much is.

The comment brought up commentary about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Warhol_Foundation_for_the...

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

#89

Post by doctorpangloss »

paulddraper wrote: post #76
davexunit wrote: post #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…

Of course they are derivative. The question is whether they are transformative . Right or wrong, the bar for transformative use is probably lower than you think. Artists are the beneficiaries of this, as they can riff on popular works for inspiration, recognizability, social commentary. Given the existing case law, I don't see a ruling against AI companies as likely.

> Given the existing case law, I don't see a ruling against AI companies as likely.

Huh? Every corporate IP lawyer seems to think Andy Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith has foreclosed the fair use defense, and that there isn't much to argue by AI companies to use work without express permission for training.

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

#90

Post by [deleted] »

Retric wrote: post #88
doctorpangloss wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the issue is that it makes outputs that compete with artists, and that is a problem if you go and make a fair use argument for appropriating copyrighted works. If I were to secretly use an image generator, just for my own purposes, trained on public data, the plaintiffs would say it is just as illegal. The rub is, do you know who else makes work that competes with artists? Other artists! It still kind of goes dow…

How the model is used isn’t relevant if creating it was already infringement. Training on works creates something of value and artists want to be able to prevent that training without compensation. There’s a long history of case law around just how much of someone’s work can be copied before it’s a problem. But here it’s literally the entire work being used so ‘how much’ is just everything. The points you bring up ar…

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