An artist fights Midjourney

In the Visual Arts (drawing, printmaking, painting, even sculpture) copying the masters has been practised, and even recommended for centuries (if not longer). I believe it's the same with music. It's what you will want to do to some extent in order to get better at doing your own thing - some do it a lot, some do it less. None does not do it.

The tool may be a brush, it may be a pencil, it may even be a contraption or machine of some kind. It could even be a camera, or software. This does not matter. The result is typically labelled "a studio", "a reproduction", or if has significant deviations from the original "a paraphrase".

Some artists include elements of the work of other artists in their own work regularly, even copyrighted "characters". The thing known as "sampling" did not originate with rap music. Here there's a line somewhere (just like in rap) that, how much is too much? The answer is always that some cases are "fair use" and others are not.

My concern in all this is that people scared of this new tool (AI) will react in a way that leads them to demand restrictions in the way that traditional artists have worked like, forever.

In my view the AI model is no different from a camera, or that combined with some software suite like blender, photoshop, or even gimp. It's just a tool. And, well it can create reproductions. Reproductions are just that, and no more.

> If you were to search any Harry Potter book using google search I'm sure you will find the unlicensed content, served up to you by google, very quickly, with less prompt than midjourney needs. You can hand wave about how it's so different but I see the search example returning a hashed copy vs. midjourney making something you could argue in court is infringement. The thing is, both are already illegal. You don't need additional government meddling in code to make illegal something that is already illegal.

That's not how the Internet works. Google is not serving you the Harry Potter books contents, they (might) point you to a different server that (might) be serving you the books, but what theat website would be doing is in fact illegal in most jurisdictions. In contrast midjourney are the ones serving you the content, that is a huge difference and not "handwaving". If you don't see a difference there than I really don't know what to say.

> In all cases, the person committing the crime is the person to prosecute.

Yes and it is midjourney who is committing the crime. Their models contain the unlicenced copyrighted material and they sell a service using that material.

> What would happen if I used Photoshop to carefully recreate the image by hand? Or even a paint brush and canvas? It would still be illegal! What are you arguing to make illegal? The paint brush?

Why are you continuing to ignore the central point that midjourney contains the copyrighted work? That's completely different to being a brush?

> For _some people_ making clones of copyrighted work is very easy, this tool makes is easy for more people. But for you, _it's the tool?_

Yes because "the tool" is already making the clone, inside it's model.

> And in any of these cases you're trying to protect the same IP holders that cut off access to content you purchased, so any idea of fairness in copyright is a joke at this point anyway. I work in that industry so I knew it was possible, but I never thought they would do it with a huge swath of content like what happened to play station owners. IP holders deserve no sympathy or protection under the law after that move.

So instead we are happy for even larger corporations to just take all creative outputs (and that includes lots of open source software) simply feed their models and resell this work of others through their models essentially disowning the previous creators without paying anything? Now if these models would actually be freely available and all parameters published I might be OK with it as the end of copyright as we know it, but that's not what is happening here. We are essentially witnessing the dispossession and monopolization of knowledge by a few large corporations and startups.

> You might say "but these are not the people we're trying to protect". Too bad, that's what any IP law restricting generative AI would protect. And consider the draconian means required to do so.

>So your argument is that the tool running remotely as a service somehow makes it different from one running on your local computer?

no, my argument is that the tool being run by midjourney makes them liable for how it is operation. because it's their model, their program, their computer. They are responsible at every level.

>So if someone copies the contents of a novel into Google Docs, Google is liable for their copyright infringement, but if they paste it into Word running on their computer, all of the liability is on them?

not sure why you think that's relevant, but yes google is liable for copyright infringement facilitated by their platform. that's why if you upload a full-length video to youtube and the rights-holder posts a DMCA, google will delist or delete your video.

> At what point does the liability shift? What if all of the functionality is implemented in JavaScript in the browser, rather than running on someone else's server?

why the fuck would javascript change anything?

>I don't think the situation is nearly as cut and dry as you make it out to be.

it really is, there are well-established precedents for how this works and it's only not "cut and dry" if you arbitrarily consider AI startups to be exempt from the same rules that apply to everybody else.