It seems like it’s only copyright infringement when poor people take rich people’s stuff.
When it’s the other way round, it’s fair use.
It’s like corporations and the super rich make the rules.
No, AI does not create new
derivativetransformative works. Copyright law is very clear that the thing that is copyrightable is that modicum of creativity, reduced to a tangible medium of expression, that society must encourage and protect.Derivative works need even more creativity to be protectable than original works because it has to be so newly creative as to be a different work, transformative, even though the original may still be very recognizable.
An AI system does not have creativity. At best, it could mimic someone who is creative, but it could never have creativity on its own. It is generative, not creative.
It’s like that monkey that took a nice picture, but the picture was not copyrightable because the person seeking to enforce the copyright didn’t create the work. It’s creativity that the Constitution seeks to encourage by the copyright clause.
You can make new derivative work without being creative. Just look at all the YouTubers copying each other.
Many of those those reaction videos on YouTube are actually infringing on copyright. Just that the videos they’re reacting to aren’t made by people with deep enough pockets to sue them so they get away with it.
The AI doesn’t need creativity because the “A” in “AI” stands for “artificial,” not “autonomous.” It’s a tool. Someone is controlling the output by setting the input parameters.
it has to be so newly creative as to be a different work, even though the original may still be recognizable
Your definition implies Andy Warhol wasn’t creative.
I think they are considered derivative, and are not protected. Not that he wasn’t creative, just that his work wasn’t so creative to be independently copyrightable. I’m a little rusty on my IP law.
I used to be a very popular and successful collage artist (I’m now an illustrator, I like painting more), and my work has been copied by AI. However, I don’t really care. In fact, I was musing once the idea of licensing everything under the CC-BY license. I don’t mind if AI copies my stuff, because if eventually this democratizes art (as it has already), all the better. Yes, these AI belong to corporations, but if they’re easy to access, or free to use, all the better. I want people to extend what I did, and remix it. I don’t want to be remembered as me, as a singular artist, that somehow I emerged from the void. Because I didn’t. EVERY artist is built on top of their predecessors, and all art is a remix. That’s the truth that other artists don’t wanna hear because it’s all about their ego.
The issue isn’t ego from any artists I’ve talked to. The issue is that most enjoy DOING their art for a living, and AI threatening their ability to make a living doing the thing they love, by actively taking their work and emulating it.
Add to that, that no one seems to believe AI does a better job than a trained artist, and it also threatens to lower the quality bar at the top end.
Personally I think that if AI is free to use and any work done by AI cannot be covered by copyright (due to being trained on people’s art against their will), then I don’t have an issue with it.
If society benefits from the democratization of art/books/etc then it’s not a loss, it’s a win for everyone. There were many jobs in the past that were lost because technology made them obsolete. Being a commissioned artist is one of these professions. However, there IS still going to be a SMALL niche for human-made original artworks (not made on ipads). But that’d be a niche. And no one stopping anyone from doing art, be it a profession or not. That’s the beauty of art. If you were to be a plumber, and robots took your job, you’d have trouble to do it as a hobby, since it would require a lot of sinks and pipes to play around, and no one would care. But with art, you can do it on the cheap, and people STILL like your stuff, EVEN if they won’t buy it anymore.
I don’t think it is relatively difficult to make “Ethical” AI.
Simply refer to the sources you used and make everything, from the data used, the models and the weights, of public domain.
It baffles me as to why they don’t, wouldn’t it just be much simpler?
$ $ $
If letting AI train on other people’s works is unjust enrichment then what the record lables did to creatives through the entire 20th century taking ownership of their work through coercive contracting is extra-unjust enrichment.
Not saying it isn’t, but it’s not new, and bothersome that we’re only complaining a lot now.
Good for this guy. Fuck AI and the companies responsible.
Capitalism is the problem. Greed is the reason. I like that shitty idiots are fighting other shitty idiots because I think it’s funny… but neither parties are good guys
Capitalism is precisely the problem, because if the end product were never sold nor used in any commercial capacity, the case for “fair use” would be almost impossible to challenge. They’re betting on judges siding with them in extending a very specific interpretation of fair use that has been successfully applied to digital copying of content for archival and distribution as in e.g. Google Books or the Internet Archive, which is also not air-tight, just precedent.
Even fair uses of media may not respect the dignity of the creators of works used to create “media synthesizers”. In other words, even if a computer science grad student does a bunch of scraping for their machine learning dissertation, unless they ask and get permission from the creators, their research isn’t upholding the principle of data dignity, which current law doesn’t address at all, but is obviously the real issue upsetting people about “Generative AI”.
I’m not sure I follow that first sentence.
Fair use is an affirmative, positive defense to liability under the Copyright Act. It only exists as a concept because there is a marketplace for creative work.
That marketplace, the framers of the Constitution would suggest, only exists because the Constitution allows Congress to grant exclusive licenses to creative Works (i.e., copyright protection). In other words, they viewed creative work as an driven by economics; by securing an exclusive license to the artist, she can make money and create more art.
I am of the belief that even if there was no marketplace for creative work (no exclusive licensing / no copyright laws), people are still inherently creative and will still make creative things. I think the economic model of creativity enshrined in the Constitution is what gives us stuff like one decent movie followed by four shitty sequels. We have tens of thousands of years of original artworks, creative stories, songs, sculptures, etc. The only thing the copyright clause does, in my view, is concentrate the profit from creativity into the hands of a few successful artists or, more likely, a few large employers, such as George Lucas or Walt Disney, Viacom, Comcast, etc.
I think this unjust enrichment claim comes as close to anything as data dignity that I’ve heard of. It’s not a lawsuit to enforce a positive legal right, but rather an plea to the court’s equity to correct a manifest injustice and restore the parties to a more just position.
That the AI companies have been enriched at the detriment of the artists seems obvious. What makes it unjust is that the defendants had no permission and did not pay the artist.
“the only people that should be getting unjustly rich off of other peoples created content are us” ~ alphabet/google/youtube
The intense hatred for “stealing” content might be blunted if all the subsequent work product goes to the public domain.
But what do you do when you start getting copywrite struck on your own works, because someone else decided to steal it and claim ownership?
People talk about open source models, but there’s no such thing. They are all black boxes where you have no idea what went into them.
People talk about open source models, but there’s no such thing.
:-/
Source code isn’t real? Schematics and blue prints don’t exist?
My guy that already happens. Didn’t you see the hbomberguy video?
I didn’t hear or see. Do you have a link, or care to elaborate?
Well i didn’t really want to but just for you, Skaffi, I looked it up on YouTube and copied the link
This video is so fucking funny I didn’t care that it’s almost four hours long lmao
I have not, but I’ve heard rumors of it happening.
Ok, dumb question time. I’m assuming no one has any significant issues, legal or otherwise, with a person studying all Van Gogh paintings, learning how to reproduce them, and using that knowledge to create new, derivative works and even selling them.
But when this is done with software, it seems wrong. I can’t quite articulate why though. Is it because it takes much less effort? Anyone can press a button and do something that would presumably take the person from the example above years or decades to do? What if the person was somehow super talented and could do it in a week or a day?
I actually had some thoughts about this and posted this in a similar thread:
First, that artist will only learn from a few handful of artists instead of every artist’s entire field of work all at the same time. They will also eventually develop their own unique style and voice–the art they make will reflect their own views in some fashion, instead of being a poor facsimile of someone else’s work.
Second, mimicking the style of other artists is a generally poor way of learning how to draw. Just leaping straight into mimicry doesn’t really teach you any of the fundamentals like perspective, color theory, shading, anatomy, etc. Mimicking an artist that draws lots of side profiles of animals in neutral lighting might teach you how to draw a side profile of a rabbit, but you’ll be fucked the instant you try to draw that same rabbit from the front, or if you want to draw a rabbit at sunset. There’s a reason why artists do so many drawings of random shit like cones casting a shadow, or a mannequin doll doing a ballet pose, and it ain’t because they find the subject interesting.
Third, an artist spends anywhere from dozens to hundreds of hours practicing. Even if someone sets out expressly to mimic someone else’s style, teaches themselves the fundamentals, it’s still months and years of hard work and practice, and a constant cycle of self-improvement, critique, and study. This applies to every artist, regardless of how naturally talented or gifted they are.
Fourth, there’s a sort of natural bottleneck in how much art that artist can produce. The quality of a given piece of art scales roughly linearly with the time the artist spends on it, and even artists that specialize in speed painting can only produce maybe a dozen pieces of art a day, and that kind of pace is simply not sustainable for any length of time. So even in the least charitable scenario, where a hypothetical person explicitly sets out to mimic a popular artist’s style in order to leech off their success, it’s extremely difficult for the mimic to produce enough output to truly threaten their victim’s livelihood. In comparison, an AI can churn out dozens or hundreds of images in a day, easily drowning out the artist’s output.
And one last, very important point: artists who trace other people’s artwork and upload the traced art as their own are almost universally reviled in the art community. Getting caught tracing art is an almost guaranteed way to get yourself blacklisted from every art community and banned from every major art website I know of, especially if you’re claiming it’s your own original work. The only way it’s even mildly acceptable is if the tracer explicitly says “this is traced artwork for practice, here’s a link to the original piece, the artist gave full permission for me to post this.” Every other creative community writing and music takes a similarly dim views of plagiarism, though it’s much harder to prove outright than with art. Given this, why should the art community treat someone differently just because they laundered their plagiarism with some vector multiplication?
So try doing Disney style animation and similar character and similar style story line. And start profiting from it. Lets see if the “Disney” the “corporation” will remain silent or sue you to oblivion.
Damn you musta hated Don Bluth
I don’t hate him. Its just that when corporation steals individual idea or data its for research and stuff. If its other way around, us as individual will have to face lawsuit.
So i hope they sue nvidia and other big corporations who are harvesting our data for AI.
Thats the thing, nothings being stolen. Beauty and the Beast didnt up and disappear because Bluth and Fox Studios made Anastasia. Theres style similarities but it is undeniably its own work. Dont even think about the style sharing going on in the thousands of Anime out there.
Copying is not theft. Letting only massive and notoriously untransparent corporations control an emerging technology is.
Theft of what?
Anything
They stole my car?
You wouldn’t download a car
My car is part of “anything”
Another rent eeeker trying to hold back human progress for personal greed, they’re super common.
AI aint going away, it’s already commonly running and on local machines, and being used covertly.
