There are artists that can study a painting for a few minutes and then recreate it from memory. There are artists who study a particular body of work so long that they can create more works indistinguishable in style. If an artist recreates a copyrighted work or creates a derivative too close to the original, then that new work is potentially copyright infringement.

That is, we focus on the output of the process to determine infringement with living artists and ignore the training. But with ML, everyone focuses on the training.

It seems an ML tool could add a filter to the output and refuse to output a work that too closely resembles one or more work under copyright. Isn't that basically what legitimate professional artists do as well?

Thousands of artists are capable of infringement, but we don't take away their brushes based on capability.

Its legally different because the human brain is not considered a fixed medium under copyright law, so a human experiencing and learning something is not making what is potentially a copy or derivative work under copyright law, and therefore not exercising, potentially without permission, one of the exclusive rights granted to the copyright holder.

> There are artists that can study a painting for a few minutes and then recreate it from memory

Right, and those artists violate copyright at the moment they recreate it in a fixed medium without permission, but encoding it into computer storage media is already a copy, so a machine (or, rather, the person using the machine) hits that threshold before creating an actual visual output.

> That is, we focus on the output of the process to determine infringement

No, we focus on what is set in a fixed medium. If that is done at an intermediate step of the process, rather than being an output, it can still be infringement.

Its just that a human doesn’t always need to make a copy in what is legally a fixed medium until the output, but that is not the same as categorically only treating outout of a process as legally relevant.

Is that what these embeddings are doing? No.

If artists try to argue that all copies are equivalent, but are unable to recreate their works from the embeddings, their argument will fall flat.

This argument also only applies to sharing models, which is doubly dumb because we want open source models, not closed source models. It’s a harmful status quo to try and enforce.

I see no reason the same standard cannot be applied to ML generated content. If the evaluation is being performed on the end result, then that is all that matters. The same judges that decide these things for human generated content can continue to do so for ML generated ones.

Even the people submitting and responding to the copyright claims will still be human (with briefs generated by ML…).

What will be more interesting is when the judges themselves get replaced with an “objective” AI to quantify similarity for copyright purposes. If that ever happens, it’ll trigger an arms race to hit the razors edge without going over.

You just answered it? One is a ML system and one is a human?

I'm really, really baffled why people keep using this argument. Like you guys know machines are not humans, right? ...right?

Humans are special cases in laws. Always have been and always will be (until AGI). A pedestrian is treated differently in laws than a driver is. The fact that a pair of legs and a car both move you from point A to point B doesn't make them same. Selling human livers on your local market is very different from selling cow livers, even biologically they are all organic tissues.

Let me say it again: humans are special cases. AI learning copyrighted materials might be illegal or legal, but it has little to do with "what if a human being does the same".

If I independently come up with a song called "Let it Be" that has the same lyrics as the Beatles song and publish it without the permission of the copyright holders, I will have violated their copyright.

It doesn't matter if I heard the song before or not. It doesn't matter if I did it myself or used a computer to do it. What matters is the final product and my publishing of a song close enough to the one that was copyrighted.

AI image generators are just tools, like Photoshop is a tool. Nobody cares if you used a paint brush or Photoshop to create something that looks like a copyrighted image, why should AI image generators be any different?

If the final image is similar enough to a copyrighted work and I publish that image without permission of the copyright holder, then that's a copyright violation.

If the final image is different enough, then it's not.

That an AI was used and how the AI was trained are completely separate issues.

Probably not even then, at least not initially. While some people conflate AGI with personhood, consciousness, qualia, etc. we've got at least 22 different[0] ideas of what consciousness is and no idea how to even determine whether or not a mind has qualia — and even if we did, I see no specific reason to require any of them, as a P-zombie[1] AGI doesn't seem to me like a contradiction in terms.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41583-022-00587-4

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

Like any useful force amplifier, legal personhood has effectively been co-opted to benefit those entities which stand to gain from it (e.g., corporations, large-money political donors, etc).

Thus, it probably won't surprise anyone when AIs are granted legal personhood, to bypass the detrimenal effects they will inevitably have on natural persons.

That said, it is likely a good thing to keep meatspace in some kind of privileged legal category, lest the rights of legal persons outweight those of natural persons (which seems to be the inevitable conclusion, and goal, of all this).

Arguing a trained model is infringing would then be like arguing the manufacturers of my monitor were infringing as it contained the very same RGB.as the artist.

I mean, that's true in the sense that "fair use by a pencil is a concept which hardly been studied by legislators" is true. Use (fair or not) isn't by the tool, its by the person using the tool.

IE why isn't it that an artist could say, hey I'm letting you see this painting, but you are not allowed to sit down with a canvas and learn how to reproduce it? Because you can do that in galleries - no photos, no reproductions.

So actually building a machine there, under the cover of darkness, that learns from your work so you can produce new work, why is that allowed in the first place? Certainly wouldn't be at a museum.

The key thing here is - if you want artists' data, you should ask for it. They didn't. This would be equivalent of training a Github CoPilot on every available piece of code in existence, ever, instead of what they had available. Why should that be allowed? So if I built some toy code in 1996, and happened to post it on usenet, and it's a great implementation of X, why the heck is CoPilot allowed to read it? It's my property.

But you can't stop people from sitting and studying your painting and then painting stuff similar to it.

One of the core assertions that is being decided in this case is if there is any actual reproduction here. Does a model contain a reproduction of every image it was trained on? Can the model actually create a reproduction of any images it was trained on?

If it turns out that there is no reproduction here, then it comes down to how much legal control we give copyright owners to regulate access.

A gallery can reasonably ban cameras and canvases, but it becomes a lot less reasonable if they try to ban artists.

Let's imagine that this isn't just specifically tuned ML but proper General AI that can learn new skills. Is your argument that this AI would be legally prohibited from viewing any images it doesn't have a specific license for?

I think that drawing hard lines around what kind of processing can be done on publicly available images is going to become problematic. It's better to regulate around what can be done with the results of the processing than that processing itself. That's how our existing laws work. Making a reproduction, even just from memory, of a copyrighted work is restricted. Memorizing a copyrighted work is not.

Like I said to another poster - you've probably seen a Picasso. Can you make me a copy?

Because a Diffusion model can. But you can't. Why not?

Your denial that there is a demonstrable difference between human and machine attention is part of the core obfuscation these companies are using to win this battle, so I reject it entirely. That difference creates the whole issue. If you don't recognise it, then answer me - Why can't you paint me a Picasso? You're saying the Machine is just like a human, yet a simple question of reproduction tells you it's not like a human in any way. It's a machine, and it produces machine reproductions. It learns faster and more accurately than any human, and its purpose is to produce derivative works. If the machine didn't need human data to do this, this discussion would be academic. But it does.

So the whole future of the Arts will be decided by investigating what the machine actually does, not the simplistic idea of it´s just like a human.

You have to evaluate the machine's abilities and impact onto the world. And that's the tough part. But just saying "hihih it's just a person" while it produces superhuman output is not a solution, it's just a lie that was invented by the people profiting from these models.

>Is your argument that this AI would be legally prohibited from viewing any images it doesn't have a specific license for?

Yes. You pay for access.

This isn't a given, it is something that has yet to be decided in this case. (Edit: if you look at studies that look for examples of SD reproductions, the best examples still similar to what a human trying to reproduce the image from memory would create)

> Your denial that there is a demonstrable difference between human and machine attention

There are demonstrable differences between different intelligent systems. I have yet to see any demonstration that shows that you can't reproduce human attention with machine. (Though we can't do it yet)

> If you don't recognise it, then answer me - Why can't you paint me a Picasso?

I haven't studied painting or Picasso. There are many people who can paint a Picasso as well as, if not better than, any ML model we have today. There are people who you could take to a gallery show who could go home and reproduce both style and individual works at an equivalent level.

> It learns faster and more accurately than any human,

The word, "faster", here is doing a lot of work. Machine learning can be "faster" in that it can happen in parallel and be scaled to take less time. However humans currently also learn "faster" because they require fewer repetitions or examples to learn. As such, the "learning" derived from a human viewing an image is arguably currently larger.

> Yes. You pay for access.

Is this good faith? I already stipulated that the images are publicly accessible. Are you suggesting that somehow artists should be able to block the AI from viewing a properly licensed instance of a copyrighted image? That pretty much results in a ban on general ai.

No it, results in a ban on general ai that doesn't compensate rights owners.

This AI now needs to pay the copyright holder of that image?

How I think it should work is the sa.e for any other intelligent system. Systems can view publicly available images, memorize them, and even reproduce them for certain fair uses. The systems have to pay for a license to right holders for the non fair uses of reproductions.

No. What happened was AI scientists deliberately built a giant corpus of training data based off unlicensed imagery that was conveniently pre-tagged - Artstation and other sites of the same type. And it was trained to deliberately create images of the exact same type as it was ingesting. It wasn't "randomly learning about the world" and it certainly did not "stumble upon" these images.

The fact that there was a large corpus of artistic imagery already tagged just revealed itself to be too appetizing for AI training, so a few companies did it in secret, without asking anyone for permission, then hoping to make enough money and VC funding that they would defeat any challenge in court.

So yes, those people who made the original images should get paid.

It's called a thought experiment. You are claiming that processing imagery that is publicly available for viewing consitutes an IP violation and I'm taking that to the logical conclusion.

> based off unlicensed imagery

The imagery on Artstation is licensed. Artstation has a license to display those images publicly. If Artstation did not have that license, they would be the infringing party.

> so a few companies did it in secret

I'm not sure what the basis for this assertion is it was not done in secret. Stable Diffusion was trained using https://laion.ai/blog/laion-5b/

This lawsuit isn't against the people who trained the model, but those who distribute it. Yhe Stable Diffusion model was not released by a for-profit company but was released as open source by a university research group which received funding from VC backed companies.

The IP model you are pushing for is a huge expansion of the already problematic copyright system. It will curtain research and training of publicly available models.

It is already easy as can be to copy images with a computer or digital camera. Stable Diffusion doesn't make it easier to reproduce these images and washing an image through a ML model won't protect you from that reproduction being an infringement.

I think it makes far more sense to use our existing restrictions to regulate usage of the output than to make new restrictions on the types of processing that are allowed on publicly available content.

If I am a decent human artist who's looked at many Picasso works and spent time studying how to reproduce his style?

Of course I can.

Artists copy each other's styles all the time, dude. You can literally go to Deviant Art (or wherever), scroll through, and point out examples of style copying, often much more glaring that anything I've seen out of a diffusion model.

It has learned to make pixels a particular color to mimic that style, but that's it.

This whole argument of "ah but it doesnt really need it" doesn't hold up. If the model didn't need it, it wouldn't have used it in the first place.

Same thing in Artstation. It was of course propitious for AI scientists to find such a lovely database of high quality imagery, and all so helpfully tagged into categories.

All they had to do was take it.

> This whole argument of "ah but it doesnt really need it" doesn't hold up. If the model didn't need it, it wouldn't have used it in the first place.

I haven't seen anyone making this argument. There's a pretty clear difference between learning something from an image and memorizing it.

There also isn't any illegal with memorizing an image and painting a reproduction. What you aren't allowed to do is sell or distribute that reproduction without a license.

I think it makes more sense to restrict what people are allowed do with ML tools than to restrict what ML tools can do.

You claimed the model can reproduce an image from that training data. That's false, and what the judge dismissed.

  “none of the Stable Diffusion output images provided in response to a 
  particular Text Prompt is likely to be a close match for any specific image in  
  the training data.”

  “I am not convinced that copyright claims based a derivative theory can 
  survive absent ‘substantial similarity’ type allegations,” the ruling stated. 

If you don't mind it being as bad as the the result of a Stable Diffusion image being passed on to a half-trained robot arm, sure: extra limbs, even more of a David Cronenberg vibe than Picasso at his weirdest, mixing with mis-attributed ideas from other images that I've associated with the same labels…

When you publish it, you lose some property rights. While under copyright, there is a short list of things that others are prohibited from doing (reproduce, distributed, etc.). And you lose all your rights once the copyright expires.

Because (fortunately) human thoughts can't be subject to copyright law yet. So when we talk about copying and making derivative works, if you have this

    artistic works -> neural network weights

    artistic works -> human brain

Three things immediately spring to mind: scale (1), accountability (2), and profit (3).

1. An automated system can train on data at huge volume, in a way that no single human is capable of doing. Setting aside the issue that training an ML model and artists learning by copying techniques of other artists is, I would argue, fundamentally different acts, _even if we take them to be the same_, we have to acknowledge that in a single human lifetime one person can only "train" on so many works. Automated systems have no such limitation.

2. If an artist violates copyright or oversteps norms around artistic professional practice, they can be held accountable. Companies which violate this by using automated systems so far hide behind those systems ("the AI is doing it/did it") so aren't held responsible (it should be: the company has built the system, and therefore is responsible for how it is used, and what it does). By building up this false sense of agency on the part of systems (which the marketing term "AI" is designed to bolster), lack of accountability is laundered into the actions being taken at scale.

3. Automated systems are, due to their scale, very profitable. I can generate hundreds or thousands of copyright-violating work that dilute the market for artists, and it is incredibly cheap to do so. Fighting those copyright violations in court has to be done more or less on an individual basis (especially if actions like that in the original article continue to fail), which is extremely slow and expensive. If the cost of violating copyright is tiny, and the cost of enforcing it is huge, then it ceases to be a useful tool except for the most well-resourced organizations.

> It seems an ML tool could add a filter to the output and refuse to output a work that too closely resembles one or more work under copyright. Isn't that basically what legitimate professional artists do as well?

No, because copyright is more complicated than "these two things look a lot alike", and legitimate professional artists don't run into this issue, because they aren't constantly trying to skirt the line of "as close as possible to copyright violation while still getting away with it".

> Thousands of artists are capable of infringement, but we don't take away their brushes based on capability.

But they do get sued when they infringe! Enforcement happens, because (for now) it is still possible for independent artists to enforce their copyrights. The argument being made by artists with regard to these ML models is that _they are already infringing copyright_, not that they hypothetically may in the future.

The HN discussion back when this lawsuit was first announced was correctly pessimistic: the top comment was "Where are the copies?". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34377910

The reality is that the law in 2023 US is so obscure and opaque and how judges come to their ruling seems to be by their total whim with no actual philosophy other than maintenance of the system.

Further I’m extremely unimpressed with the vast majority of judges competence in display - such that contempt should be the starting position.

The fact that this is how laws are actually made (precedent of applications will always beat the letter) means that nobody who doesn’t have a warchest will be able to actually utilize the system coherently

As with everything now, courts are rules by those with the most money

The law has never been more transparent. The public has nearly complete access to every docket in the country. Moreover, the level of jurisprudence has never been higher.

Moreover, I’ve lost a case or two in my time, but it was never because of a lack of a warchest.

I'm confused as to what this sentence means. The level of {the study/philosophy/science of law} has never been higher?

Additionally, Westlaw is hated by all for its pricing, but it’s almost impossible to comprehend how significantly it’s improved, and equalized, legal research.

Hey quick question, my good friend, lets call him Doug is a high school equivalency graduate, has a few felonies and currently works as a road flagger

How does this complete access to every docket in the country help him?

You have more perfectly explained my point better than I could have. Thanks

Every piece of creation you and I make us the sum total of our experiences and that includes copy written work. Holding an LLM guilty for that is like holding the human brain guilty for memorizing copyrighted work.

Define "genuine creativity".

Genuine creativity, often attributed to humans, is the ability to generate, imagine, or invent something new and original that has value or meaning. It involves thinking beyond existing boundaries, making connections between different pieces of information, and coming up with innovative solutions to problems.

Creativity can manifest in many forms, including:

Artistic creativity: This is often the first thing people think of when they hear the word "creativity". It includes creating visual art, music, literature, and more.

Inventive creativity: This involves coming up with new products, technologies, or methods that solve problems in novel ways.

Conceptual creativity: This involves developing new theories, models, or ways of understanding the world.

Problem-solving creativity: This involves finding unique solutions to challenges or problems.

Genuine creativity is often characterized by originality, expressiveness, and the ability to transform or redefine existing ideas or norms. It's a complex process that involves both conscious and unconscious thinking, and it's influenced by a person's knowledge, experiences, personality, and environment.

I went a step further and asked if it's capable of genuine creativity and received:

As an AI, I don't possess creativity in the human sense. I don't have feelings, thoughts, or experiences, and I don't generate ideas or concepts spontaneously. However, I can generate unique combinations of information based on the vast amount of data I've been trained on. This can sometimes appear as "creativity", but it's important to note that it's a result of complex algorithms and computations, not genuine creative thought.

My terse reply actually indicates an understanding that we completely lack a formal definition of "genuine creativity", and therefore any such claims are vague intuitions at best.

> I don't have feelings, thoughts, or experiences

This implicitly assumes we have a mechanistic understanding of feelings, thoughts or experiences. We don't, therefore we can make no such definitive claims about how machine learning and human cognitive processes. ChatGPT has specifically been trained to give this response despite agreeing with an argument that suggests it could indeed have mental states:

https://twitter.com/naasking/status/1598802001428566016

> As an AI, I don't possess creativity in the human sense. I don't have feelings, thoughts, or experiences, and I don't generate ideas or concepts spontaneously

Define "spontaneously". If you mean that humans act without apparent cause, that does not entail there is no cause. If there is a cause, then that cause can be modeled as an input into a pure function. ChatGPT and other ML systems are pure functions can also mix concepts and generate new and unique outputs from its learned state space given such inputs. Humans are still more complex than such systems, so the mystique can hide in the perceived complexity, but don't mistake this for a different kind of process. Which isn't to say that it is the same process, I'm saying there's no real basis for either claim.

I think there's a lot of sloppy thinking going on when comparing human brains and ML, particularly ascribing some sort of exceptionalism to humans. There's a long, incorrect history of that.

These sorts of clipped sentences without any supporting context are understood to be delivered in bad faith. If you want to discuss in good faith, then elaborate. From here it sure looks like you wanted to score points by derailing the discussion on what you’ve deemed to be poor word choice.

you've been called and it turns out your argument was merely a bluff

I viewed the curt demand I provide a definition as rude and a cheap tactic intended to disrupt a discussion. And the ensuing discussion with that particular person did nothing to convince me otherwise. Fortunately, I don’t owe them a reply and you don’t have to believe me. It’s all good.

The fact that it knows the definition of creativity makes it's answer suspect. It's like saying this: "I am not capable of speaking or understanding English, what you see here is just a statistical prediction of the next most likely words. I do not in actuality understand or speak English."

Basically it's a best fit curve in N-dimensional space. The entire human brain can be modeled this way. In practice what we end up doing is using a bunch of math tricks to try to poke and prod at this curve to get some sort of "fit" on the data.

There are an infinite number of possible curves that can fit within this data. One of these curves is the LLM. The other curve is the human brain.

Here's a better way to put it. Your entire OS can be modeled under this idea. We can use a bunch of training data and basically recreate your operating system under ML. Just feed in current state and train it until it will output correct state.

But understanding the OS from this ML perspective is a far cry from understanding the OS from the perspective of source code.

We do NOT understand fully what's going on. In fact, the fact that the LLM even had chatGPT's capabilities was not predicted or foreseen.

I hate pedantic vocabulary just as much as you and this is not the direction I want to take it. But that test I outlined above literally points out that there is no difference. What the LLMs output fits our definition of genuine creativity because you can't tell the difference.

In fact the word itself is the ludicrous thing here. You just made it up to differentiate AI art and human art, but in reality there is no differentiator it's one category with zero recognizable difference... the only actual difference is "what" created it.

Sure, there's incremental evolution. But, we also have breakthrough artists inventing new techniques and art forms. It doesn't matter that a computer program can clone a power chord structure and create something that sorta sounds like Nirvana. That's not proof of creativity. Yes, it created something so it's "creative" in entirely mechanical stance. Just like solar flares will flip bits in my computer and "create" things as well.

We can argue all day about what art means. It can get really philosophical really quick. I contend people can dream up new ideas and execute on them in a way that resonates with others and that they don't need to copy everyone else to do that. That given the basics (here's some paper an color pencils) people can develop skills and invent wholly unique ways to represent themselves and the world around them. That they're able to do that in isolation and without education. I point to the entirety of human civilization as my supporting evidence. I think it's reductive to claim we're just statistical models consuming media and shuffling things around.

It seems to me this whole argument hinges on saying humans and these image generation tools work the same way. If they do, then teach one of these programs what it means to draw, give them a sensor network to the outside world, and let's see what they generate. That would be hugely compelling and would sidestep this whole discussion about IP whitewashing. But, that's not what's happening. Whether because of convenience or because it's the only practical way to generate art, these systems only work by training on art created by humans. That they're able to generate a final product that looks like something else made by a human shouldn't be shocking -- that's the whole basis of copying.

Take a look at the image on the lower right hand corner. That is indisputably original. The badge doesn't exist anywhere else and the alien form with one entire leg jutting out of the torso has never been done before. We know that this one legged creature is entirely original because it doesn't exist in any of the shows.

This is the key how you know LLMs aren't regurgitating stuff. It's trying to reproduce something from a flawed understanding of reality. A regurgitation would get things truly correct, but a one legged human is a creative error due to a lack of understanding. The LLM doesn't understand reality as completely and as cohesively as we do but it understands an aspect of it enough that it can produce art that mostly works. The LLM is definitely creating stuff from pure thought. These things are not copies and that's what you don't get.

The hype for LLMs is so over the top that it looks like the latest outrage from something that occurred on social media. What you and other people are missing is that we crossed a certain AI threshold here. This isn't mere regurgitation.

I never claimed this. Art isn't a regurgitation. It's a composition of what came before plus a random seed. Humans do this. But so do LLMs.

Think about it. Can you erase all forms of memory in a human until it's brain dead and expect it to produce art? No. It can't.

> Children draw all sorts of fanciful creatures that they've never seen in the wild or in other art.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1136039656660684880/1...

>We have art formed by completely isolated societies in very distinct styles

prompt: Draw art in the style of a society or civilization that has never existed. Make the art very distinct in style such that the style is very divergent from anything that has been seen before.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1136039656660684880/1...

>It seems to me this whole argument hinges on saying humans and these image generation tools work the same way. If they do, then teach one of these programs what it means to draw, give them a sensor network to the outside world, and let's see what they generate.

No. The argument hinges on something far more insidious. If I showed you two pieces of art side by side.... One was AI generated in seconds and the other one was created through pure passion and hours and hours of hard work and toil. If you can't tell one was AI generated then all that toil and passion is useless.

Why? Just observe how art and content is perceived before and after you tell people it was made by AI. I think it's an unfounded bias.

You probably remember the AI art piece that won an art contest? It was perceived as better than the rest, obviously, or it wouldn't have won - until it was revealed it was made by AI.

Now, IMHO, that was not fair and if it was disqualified, that was absolutely the right move, but that's not the point.

The same can be observed when people talk about (AI) art. I've seen people comment "Awesome! There is just something about [this artwork] that AI can't reproduce, human art has soul!" even though the artwork they commented on* was made by AI

After it is revealed to be AI made, it is suddenly "soulless" and not genuine anymore.

I remember there was an online mental health care platform that (without revealing this) introduced AI therapists. According to their analytics, the AI therapists, on average, got higher scores than the human therapists. Then, word got out they're using AI and suddenly, people rated the service a lot worse than before. It was obviously wrong to not disclose this.

There's nothing wrong with valuing craftsmanship and human work higher than machine work. We as humans do and I do, too - but generally, nowadays, digital watercolor art made in Photoshop (and co) is not inherently considered "not creative" or "soulless" because it wasn't painted with real watercolor... but I'm pretty sure that was not always the case. I'm sure artists discussed about how digital art is not genuine, creative or soulless back then, too.

Can anyone that was there at the time tell me if there were similarities in sentiment when digital art and Photoshop (and co) became popular?

What I'm trying to say is that there is definitely a bias at work and people generally can't tell the difference if they are not told about the (possibility of) involvement of AI.

I also fear that currently, we're just the lame adults that don't like the new thing and eventually in 10 to 20 years after AI art is normal and accepted by the generation that grew up with it, something new will come out that that generation will think is lame and not genuine, and so on.

That is how I remember it. I'm relatively sure, but take it with a grain of salt - memories are, as we know, not reliable.

We see things, we recognize patterns, and we reproduce those patterns to the best of our abilities - that is the human creative process in a nutshell. It’s the process that lead to the creation of LLMs in the first place - why should our creation not follow the same methodology in order to create the same way we do? Why should a computer looking at a hundred pieces of art and producing something objectively similar to what it’s seen be any different than a human being doing the same thing?

But humans like LLMs do have copyrighted content. That means humans are breaking the law that LLMs are also breaking.

LLMs and diffusion models don’t “consume content” and the content they produce doesn’t come from inspiration, greed, boredom or any number of human traits. They don’t remember the Target logo to go shop there or a college class they took to apply for a job so they can be a tax paying member of society.

No LLMs use a cold and calculating algorithm to produce content that it equivalent and at times Better than anything a human can produce. When a human consumes content produced by an LLM it is indistinguishable from content that came from inspiration, greed, boredom or any number of human traits. You can't tell. That is the future. We can identify flaws now but we all know those flaws will be rapidly disappearing.

What the LLM tells us, what it teaches us, is that the human condition is trivial. We are a biological machines made out of wetware and the LLM is a solid state machine made out of silicon. Two machines that make content. We like to pretend that the stuff that comes from inspiration, greed or boredom as if those are things that have deep intrinsic meaning in the universe. No. It's a lie we tell ourselves. We make up the meaning, and so does the LLM.

Society is fucking changing. Creativity, art, works of inspiration... all that stuff will become as common as water and plastic cups. That's just the way things are accept it or don't.

But here's the thing. Don't pull justice into the mix. Don't say that a crime was committed because an LLM produced something better and faster than a human could. Don't call obviously original writing and original art a COPY when it is obviously NOT. These are the same tactics used by patent trolls.

This is a twisting of justice because people are afraid. No different from how a patent troll twists justice because people want profit.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1136039656660684880/1...

here are four pieces of original art that I produced in 10 seconds using an LLM with the prompt: "the most original piece of art ever". Sue me!!

The law is arbitrary, written by humans, not by some platonic ideal inherent in the universe. It doesn’t need to be applied equally to people and tools.

The people producing these models just want profit as much as any patent troll and like them will interpret the law in such a way that benefits them or fight to change it so they can realize that profit.

It’s easier to go after the models and prevent copyright for AI generated works than to take issue with all of their users which is what we’re seeing in the courts.

“Society is fucking changing”

I agree with you there.

I’m not fundamentally opposed to AI generated anything actually but the training is problematic and I don’t see society as ready for it.

It would be an easier pill to swallow if we had a shortage of writers/artists/etc and this was the solution to that.

Here's a common experience most people will have had: Think about what it feels like to slip and fall on a wet road and skin your palms on some gritty tarmac. Think about how many senses that involves, and how it's a basic experience most people have had. And now consider how we aren't even remotely close to the process of beginning to digitise such a basic experience.

'Real physical objects' don't have 'colour properties', as grouping together certain wavelength ranges of EM radiation and then assigning them a 'colour' label is a human invention.

For example, even if every human disappeared from Earth tomorrow, objects will still emit EM radiation, but won't emit human invented labels.

The LLM is just deriving unique works in between the data points along that best fit curve.

You realized machines didn't break copyright right? Machines can't do this yet so it's a non issue at this point.

Humans were sued in this lawsuit because humans are the ones who did this action.

The lawsuit is about this: I can copy stuff into my brain but not into my cybernetic assistive brain.

Just because I make an algorithm that linearly interpolates between two (copyrighted) values doesn't mean that it is creative or holds the wisdom between them.

No, this has always been the case. The judge ruled nothing new.

You cannot sue someone for copyright unless you first register the copyright.

https://www.nycbar.org/get-legal-help/article/intellectual-p....

https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-general.html https://copyrightalliance.org/faqs/why-register-copyright/

The judge didn't say that (for one thing, copyrights aren't handled by the Patent and Trademark Office.)

What he did say is a bit bizarre. because copyrightable works are cooyrighted automatically when set in fixed (including digital) form. So, if it existed to be trained on and was cooyrightable, it was cooyrighted.

The judge may have been using sloppy language to refer to registration, which legally must be done before pursuing most copyright claims in court. (This isn't about being cooyrighted, and registration can happen after alleged infringement without invalidating the claim, but it doesn have to happen before filing a lawsuit; it is a procedural reauirement that is black and white in the law.)

> Except for an action brought for a violation of the rights of the author under section 106A(a), and subject to the provisions of subsection (b),[1] no civil action for infringement of the copyright in any United States work shall be instituted until preregistration or registration of the copyright claim has been made in accordance with this title.

[NB: 106A(a) is right of attribution].

It's the law, as enacted by Congress (even though it is probably a violation of the TRIPS Agreement, an international treaty signed by the US).

But note there is nothing preventing you from registering your copyright well after you first published the material, although the work has to be registered before infringement if you want statutory damages (the big $$$$) instead of just actual damages.

(Also, fwiw, your copyright registration being denied is sufficient to bring action. You just now have to plead why you have copyright despite the US Copyright Office disagreeing.)

> Your work is under copyright protection the moment it is created and fixed in a tangible form that it is perceptible either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.

> Do I have to register with your office to be protected?

> No. In general, registration is voluntary. Copyright exists from the moment the work is created. You will have to register, however, if you wish to bring a lawsuit for infringement of a U.S. work. See Circular 1, Copyright Basics, section “Copyright Registration.”

from https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-general.html#:~:text=....

I’m surprised to see this reasoning (well all billion images can’t have been registered, so they can’t sue). I wonder how much it would cost in copyright fees to register all of LAION.

Well, here's the actual text from the decision:

> Each defendant argues that McKernan and Ortiz’s copyright claims must be dismissed because neither of them has registered their images with the Copyright Office. They also move to “limit” Anderson’s copyright claim to infringement based only on the 16 collections of works that she has registered. See, e.g., Declaration of Paul M. Schoenhard (Dkt. No. 51-1), ¶¶ 5-6; see also Compl. ¶ 28 & Exs. 1-16.3

> In opposition, plaintiffs do not address, much less contest, McKernan or Ortiz’s asserted inability to pursue Copyright Act claims. At oral argument, plaintiffs’ counsel clarified that they are not asserting copyright claims on behalf of these two plaintiffs. July 19, 2023 Transcript (Tr.), pg. 17:1-5. As such, McKernan and Ortiz’s copyright act claims are DISMISSED WITH PREJUDICE.

> Likewise, plaintiffs do not address or dispute that Anderson’s copyright claims should be limited to the collections Anderson has registered. The scope of Anderson’s Copyright Act claims are limited to the collections which she has registered.

TL;DR: plaintiffs didn't attempt to argue that the copyright claims should be construed broadly, defendants argued they should, so defendants win at motion-to-dismiss stage. The defendants actually lost their argument that they should win because Anderson didn't identify the specific registered works, the entire case should be thrown out--the judge said there's enough specificity to let the case go to discovery to figure out which registered works may have been infringed.

Moreover, at least in the case of music, people have been successfully sued when their song strongly resembles another copyrighted work. Thus "holding the human brain guilty for memorizing copyrighted work" is actually the status quo.

The question is that vague resemblance is subject to copyright.

Why would any human spend their limited lifespan to create a piece of work that will be grabbed without permission, approximated algorithmically (at least on the surface) and reused in infinite possible small variations without any attribution or remuneration whatsoever?

This feels like a reversion to medieval times with minimal trade between regions as thieves would ambush traders and steal any goods.

This is where centuries of copyright law have gotten us, brainwashing people into thinking ideas are property ("intellectual property") and should be treated as rivalrous goods, and that the only reason to be an artist is to profit. Brainwashing people into thinking the only way we'll have art in the world is if we maximize the profits of commercial artists.

Take one brief look at the internet, music, video, podcasts, a museum, the walls and refrigerators in people's homes, a kindergarten class room, an art class, or hell, this very forum. And you'll see that it's universally true that people like creating stuff because people like creating stuff. For free. Because it's fun and stimulating. That's inherent in us. We do not need laws to prop up an artificial business model for humans to maintain our drive to create.

Why do we have stars on github? Maybe not for fame, but it is a good indicator of how somebody is good. Fame is important. We do not make github repositories for "stars", but I think it is a good motivator for people to continue what they're doing.

If there is an author who spent years of his life into producing some kind of music piece, should not there be some kind of laws protecting his work from theft?

Abide the law, or meet consequences?

btw, regarding copyright use, i don't see how AIs are not in the "fair use" category, they take human-generated content and apply a transformation to it, generating new images. The only problem is that generating images is a million-times quicker and cheaper

See how ridiculous that sounds?

I find that evil.

- Lots of art still does pay the rent in ways that aren't threatened by AI. I haven't seen any convincing arguments that AI will be the death of commercial art, but moreso a new tool used by many commercial artists.

- Business models change. There have been countless industries and skillsets that have been made obsolete by various technological innovations that have automated what previously required skilled workers to do. Society adapts. Why should we make this particular technological progress illegal, just so we can freeze a particular business model in time? We don't do that with other professions. Why can't artists adapt and find new ways to make money?

- Similarly, why do methods of getting famous for art, or being motivated for art, need to stay consistent and unchanged over time? Why can't artists figure out new ways to get famous or get motivated? Why should we freeze or outlaw technology just so artists don't have to change from what's always worked?

- Copyright violation is not theft. Theft is when you take a rivalrous good from someone else who owns it. If you grow an apple, and I take it, that is theft, and it's wrong because you no longer have that apple. Copyright violation is not theft. If you draw a picture, and I copy it, that picture has not been stolen, and you have not been deprived of it. This is a crime very different than theft, and the laws behind it are very different than the laws behind theft, as is the reasoning behind those laws. So it would behoove you to stop equating it to theft.

But people also have to eat, need shelter, want kids, have to take care of health issues, and so on. For that they need money. If they can't get money from their creations they'll spend less time creating and more time engaging in activity that generates returns.

On the other hand, artists who adapt AI into their workflows will have vastly improved productivity, so the amount of time they need to create new works can also be much smaller for the same amount of output.

There will still be some artists who can avoid using AI and make a living, but like all skilled industries that have already been disrupted by automation, the market for that kind of work will become smaller and more exclusive, and that’s probably OK. Live musicians were the only way to get music on the radio, or in the cinema, or at a party, until audio recordings decimated the industry[0]. You can still buy hand-made furniture, or clothing, or cars, but most people today get them from a factory.

I do think there are serious issues with large players attempting to corner the market and extract all the wealth for themselves, but this is an old problem[1], and I think on balance these lawsuits perpetuate, rather than attempt to solve, the root problem: a missing social safety net and no guarantee that people will not have to scramble to survive every time a disruptive technology emerges.

[0] https://timeline.com/live-musicians-were-so-terrified-of-rec...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

This will benefit people who spam garbage 100x more than it will benefit the natural human desire to create art.

The parent argument was that AI will force artists to spend more time engaging in non-artistic pursuits because the amount of money the market will pay for artwork will go down. The counterpoint is that the amount of time the artist needs to spend on creating artwork is also reduced. In other words, if the market value for creating one artwork goes down by 50%, but the amount of time it takes also goes down by 50%, then there is no change except that the artist gets to double the amount of work they produce for the same amount of time.

Regarding the natural human desire to create art, unless you’re famous, making money as a creative involves mostly shitwork. Most commercial projects are just not very fun or interesting. Tools like generative AI can help to automate away a lot of the shitwork, so when the really interesting projects come along, they can be given more energy. This, to me, also seems like a win.

When automobiles were popularized, entire generations of families and people devoted to horsecraft suddenly found their business model obsolete. Did we as a society need to come together to ask how talented people in the horse industry might be able to continue to profitably dedicate their lives to that task? No, we just let the market figure it out, and allowed change to occur.

Our take an alternate thought experiment. Imagine a world where recipes were patentable. The first person to make mac-and-cheese could patent that, claim ownership of mac-and-cheese, and ban every other person and restaurant from making and selling mac-and-cheese. There would, of course, be an entire industry devoted to this. There would be restaurant chains that own the idea of pizza, burgers, etc., and stop any and everyone else from making that. There would be small and boutique recipe crafters creating and profiting from their unique recipes, too. And of course, people in this industry would ferociously sue anyone who "stole" the recipes that they "owned." And they would ask the same questions you're asking: "What ever would we do in a world where recipe owners don't get to uniquely monopolize their creations because they're allowed to be appropriated by others?" And the answer is: that business model wouldn't simply exist, and the world would be just fine without it.

It's not clear to me why any particular profession or business model needs to be protected into existence. The world will be just fine if some business model that always worked gradually ceases to become viable. I have sympathy for the people in those professions, but it happens all the time, and is a necessary consequence of technological innovation and progress.

In the 1800s, the Luddites smashed up factory equipment and tried to make it illegal, because they wanted to protect labor jobs. Thankfully they lost, and now we have a world with better jobs, which they could not have imagined.

Your car/horse example makes no sense in this context because the existence of cars is not predicated on the existence of horses. On the other hand, GenAI is not possible without the art that forms the training data.

For thousands of years, human workers and artists have trained themselves by looking at copies of other people's work, and used the ideas and inspiration the gain from that material to produce new works. Artists will literally sit down and copy another artist's work as part of training. This happens as a matter of course. Sometimes the new works produced after training are fresh and original. And just as often, they are derivative copycats (see: fan fiction, most clothing, most music, half the stuff on DeviantArt, etc.).

The law is only concerned with a creator's output, not the input.

If you produce and distribute something that's an obvious copy of someone else's work, that could be a copyright violation. However, if what you produce is sufficiently original, it's fair game, regardless of who you were inspired or trained by. The law does not require compensating or crediting those who inspired you or helped with training. Again, the law is only concerned with output, not with training, not with inspiration, not with input.

What you are advocating for is a huge change. Would this change apply to humans who are learning/training by looking at and copying others' work? If so, that would be a nightmare. If not, why not? Why only apply it to AI? Because the AI is more efficient at it than humans?

If that's your reason, could you justify it? New technology is always more efficient than the status quo. That's the entire point of new technology. Making laws to stop it accomplishes nothing except limiting technology in order to protect old jobs and business models. Why should we do that?

Despite everything you said about humans copying the work of other humans, the fact is that humans are capable of producing new art without reference to prior art. You can prove this by considering the emergence of the very first cave paintings.

On the other hand, GenAI like Stable Diffusion is capable of outputting art only if the following two conditions are met:

1. there is a prompt (and perhaps special configuration) made by the artist using the GenAI

2. there is training data (i.e. art made by prior artists) that makes the AI capable of translating the prompt into an image.

Of course it is possible to create programs that output something that may be considered art without reference to the work of other people. However, without (2) GenAI specifically cannot exist, and so the people that make (2) possible are right to demand credit if their work is used in this context.

Note that this says nothing about technological progress. If you train GenAI on material you have a right to use (e.g. art that is in the public domain, or copyrighted art that you have a license to use), then it's all good. The problem arises when you use a copy of someone's work in a process without their permission, when the law clearly says that the creator of that work has the legal right to decide how copies of that work are used (with the exception of "fair use").

None of the targeted artists are being compensated or credited. Nor are you demanding they be.

Why not?

If I train myself by copying your work, by your logic, shouldn't you be compensated or credited? The fact that my neurons could've theoretically created some other type of art from scratch even if I hadn't trained on your work, doesn't change the situation that I did in fact train on your work.

If you intend to train a GenAI on a copy of an image I own the rights to (perhaps because I created it), then you have to negotiate with me. If you don't, then you are violating my copyright.

What you're describing is some totally new law that doesn't exist anywhere on earth, because it would make no sense. Imagine if an aspiring artist who's training by studying a copy of another artist's drawing, or by listening to a copy of another artist's music, gets charged with violating that artist's copyright because they trained on a copy without permission.

Again, think of the implications if the laws you're dreaming up actually applied to people today.

When you are downloading someone's copyrighted music to train your GenAI with, the act of downloading it creates a copy of the work that now exists on your computer.

The essence of copyright law is to give the owner the right to decide how copies of their work are used, which you have violated if you did the above without their consent. Incidentally, this is why pirating music is a copyright violation.

Your argument is based on falsely equating the process of a human getting inspired by prior art to training GenAI on the same. If a human goes to an art gallery and gets inspired by some copyrighted work, he did not have to create a copy of that work for the inspiration to take place.

On the other hand, with GenAI training, the act of creating a copy is unavoidable (e.g by taking a picture of a painting, which is uploaded to your computer, which is piped into a training algorithm).

The human's mental representation of the painting does not count as a copy, but painting_photo.png does and the owner's rights fully extend to it.

I'm not sure if you're a web programmer or not, but all images, audio, and video on the web work by copying. When you navigate to a website that displays images/audio/video, this works because your browser is automatically downloading those files from the server to your computer, i.e. creating copies.

Importantly, this process is identical, whether it's a human browsing the web or GenAI browsing the web. It is 100% unavoidable for both humans and AI to download copies of media that their browsers come across on the internet. 100% of us end up with painting_photo.png on our computers. That's just how browsers work. And that download counts as legal under Fair Use in every single country.

Furthermore, once that download has occurred, we all have the legal right to observe these files, to learn from them, to peek into them however we want. There is no law that makes this illegal for humans, nor for GenAI. It is theoretically possible to make a GenAI that illegal makes additional copies of files that the browser has downloaded, but that's entirely unnecessary, as they could simply train on the already-downloaded copy.

You have two options:

1. Re-interpret current copyright law in a way that would make it illegal to look at files automatically downloaded when browsing the web. This would make GenAI training methods illegal, but would also make humans browsing the web illegal, since they are identical.

2. Add a new law to the books that would specifically target GenAI and make it illegal for it to do something that is not currently illegal or in violation of any laws. In this case, I would ask you: why on earth would you want to go out of your way to create this unnecessary law that the world is just fine without?

I can't think of any reason, except wanting to protect the business model of current artists. Which is lame, imo. We should not be outlawing useful new technologies to protect the profits of people in any industry, including artists.

That does not mean that you automatically have a right to do whatever you please with this copy. If you want to redistribute the content, or use it as part of some commercial process, then you absolutely have to discuss this with the copyright holder, and they have every right to deny you if you cannot agree on the terms. That is the meaning of "all rights reserved".

Not all copies are equal. Feel free to enjoy a copy of "Oops!... I Did It Again" that you paid for on iTunes. But download the same file using P2P, and the record company might just have the book thrown at you. The two files are identical copies, but the difference is that the copyright holder gave you the right to listen to the first (in exchange for money) but not the second. Furthermore, downloading the song from iTunes gives you the right to listen to it, but not to play it on loudspeakers at the next conference that you are organizing. To obtain the right to use it for that purpose, you have to negotiate with the record label.

Note once again that these restrictions do not apply for works that are e.g. in the public domain, which you are free to use in any way you want. I am in no way arguing for "outlawing useful new technologies", anymore than I am for outlawing cameras because they can be used to create bootleg copies of the latest blockbuster movie. Feel free to train GenAI on copies of works that you have a right to use for that purpose: either because they are in the public domain, or because the copyright owner explicitly gave everyone the right to use a copy of the work to train a GenAI, or because you negotiated a licensing agreement with the copyright owner.

When it comes to their works, copyright owners have the right to block reproduction (e.g. making a copy), adaptation (e.g. turning a book into a movie version), distribution (e.g. selling copies), public performance, and public display. That's it. And there are even some important exceptions for Fair Use, too.

They can't block other things. There is no law granting them the power to do so.

For example. they can't stop me from talking about a copy of their work. They can't stop me from analyzing the copy. They can't stop me from learning from it. From describing it. From memorizing it. From looking at it whenever I want. From extracting lessons from it, or extracting patterns from it. Or from hiring a friend or a company to do these things for me. Or from writing a computer program that does these things. Etc.

It's perfectly legal for me to browse the web, look at copyrighted images that my browser has downloaded, study them, consider the patterns and techniques within them, and then re-use these same or similar techniques to create new art, so long as it's not so close to the original that it counts as a reproduction or adaptation. There is no power granted to copyright holders to limit my ability to do this, nor should their be.

This kind of inspired learning is the engine of societal creativity. Copyright was not created to kill this. Copyright was created to help artists profit from their exact work and its likeness, not to capture, own, and profit from inspiration that springs forth from the rest of society.

Yes, I get why it sucks for artists that the technology now exists for computers to also engage in the above process. But I still don't think we should be modifying or creating laws to stop that. Artists can adapt their business models, just like people in every other field when tech starts to compete. The world will be fine.

That argument is absurd, you don't HAVE to be an artist. You can be a talented person and dedicate your life to something else.

Or you can be like everyone else and do it as a hobby in your time off because people don't find what you do creatively to be valuable. I demand I get paid for my playing video games, I think it's valuable and I dedicate my time to it, I deserve to be paid.

Fucking ridiculous.

And we still have copyright laws. Corporations are still hoarding IP. So rules for thee, not for me. The harder you make it for artists to get paid, the more people you get promoting Raid Shadow Legends

Simples as.

Because they enjoy it? Or do you see artists as some type of corporate drone who hates the very act of making art?

That's like asking why anyone would contribute to MIT or Apache licensed open source.

The idea that authors, artists and other creatives will keep pumping original work as part-time love affairs so that AI bros can grab it and mint a dime is... strange.

There'd be less art and probably lower quality art however to think people would outright stop making art due to any reason is strange (to use your words).

I make a painting. I display it. My neighbor sees the painting, studies it for a while, goes home, and makes a painting based on what he learned from mine. People still enjoy my painting, still credit me with making it, and if they like it might still pay for a copy. My neighbor, having devised a way to make paintings really quickly, sells paintings for cheap. Can I send him a bill because he's making money based on something he learned from me?

Granted, a lot of this boils down to whether AI learns or copys/remixes; if it only creates what copyright law would consider derivative works, then that's another matter.

I mean, it certainly isn't learning in the same way humans learn. Human learning involves some degree of understanding, which is wholly absent in AIs. There is, to my mind, no good reason to treat them the same because of this difference.

The entire software industry is built on open source software written for free by other software devs

In analogy, if creative production was to be paid by a benevolent patron that doesn't care if the work is then released in the public domain the economic equation changes. But this mode is not how things work at present.

I don't understand how people think this will suddenly make human art vanish, that is just ridiculous and naive. People will spend their limited lifespan to make art, because that's what humans just do. Cavemen weren't being paid to paint on the walls.

Your viewpoint is honestly insane. The people against AI art are bonkers.

Why is society obligated to pay artists? It isn't.

I mean, I would love to live in a world where UBI was a thing, and people were free to pursue their interests without fear of homelessness or starvation. Capitalism is a system that requires an underbelly of people exploited through the coercion inherent to the inequality of the world.

That is an utopia, however. The reality is that most people - including yours truly - sell their labor to make ends meet. It certainly was not my lifelong dream to do backend development for a financial institution.

Your friend (and many others in this thread) operate under a naive and entitled assumption that their creative output should be enshrined as something special, whereas throughout history technology always replaced human capacity, and we are better for it.

What? Have you ever paid for a book? a subscription to a publishing medium of any sort, a movie or a piece of music? Have you noticed a copyright sign somewhere? Is that arrangement of recognizing and rewarding those who create something worthwhile part of the real world or not? Not even a hallucinating AI would be so incongruous.

You might be shocked, but automation replaced humans in all those industries.

I'll still pay for books, music, or whatever. I won't really care at which capacity they were AI generated.

So? To the extend that people are still involved, they are typically paid - unless it is slave labor, that is.

This is not an automation vs manual labor debate. Creators will use any technology that helps them create something worthwhile. It may even involve algorithms in various ways. Generative art was a thing way before the AI bro invasion.

The question is about provenance, attribution and remuneration of whatever human work and creativity is involved in producing unique pieces of work. Work that is used as input for the algorithmic production of infinite variations and replicas.

The AI crowd simply wants to devalue that human input (while pressumably charging for API's or whatever comes on the other side of the meat grinder).

Which I suppose might happen in an increasingly dystopic world, but they seem to also believe that people will keep embarking on literary studies, movie or music making studies etc. as some sort of non-remunerative hobby, just to keep producing useful inputs for the AI models.

Its not going to happen. The golden goose will be dead before you can spell "AI".

The remuneration will always go to who owns the means of production. That is true in essentially any industry.

> Its not going to happen. The golden goose will be dead before you can spell "AI".

Then what are you worried about?

Repeating slogans one does not understand is something to be left to "AI", not functional humans.

The means of production in the creative process is the brain of the person creating.

Unless what you really wanted to say is "The remuneration will always go to who can steal the means of production".

Additionally, the beauty of contemporary AI is that it's much more similar to the mechanism of inspiration and learning that humans employ than, let's say, the literal copy of a photo. I think it's reasonable for an artist to limit the visibility of their work and prohibit their images from being shared online and used by AI training - but this must apply across the board. If their image is public in a way that anyone could see it, and be inspired by it, then they need to accept that the AI could be equally "inspired" by it.

If you want an easy, concrete example of the process of inspiration and copying taking place for humans, just look at Animes. Styles are imitated by humans left and right, with no concern of original artists losing their livelihood. Human Anime artists copy their idols when learning to draw, oftentimes producing literal imitations for years before starting to produce their own original work, which to be honest usually greatly resembles the source of inspiration (PS: I like Animes, but most of it is very similar in terms of artistic style).

Do humans ever really "invent" any art? Or are the artistic innovators simply a mix of influence of existing art, the natural images of nature/life plus a spice of randomness? Because that's pretty much how AI art functions.

Older societies did not have copyright but they, manifestly, had ways to sustain creatives.

People wax philosophical about paradigm changes and other vacuities yet refuse to answer a simple question: how will society reward human creativity that takes a lifetime of cultivation to flourish.

AI won't make art go away, because you still need to tell the AI what to do. But the new art won't require as much skill with a paintbrush. For instance, I'm terrible at drawing but I believe I have creative ideas. AI alllows me to be an artist too.

It truly boggles the mind that people equate machines that can output thousands and thousands of images in short time spans in any ingested style... with humans who have to hone styles and can only produce a result every so often.

Most people care only about the output of a system, not about who the system replaces.

If we required workers consent to directly use their works, we would be able to build bulldozers and excel but not stable diffusion. It’s very different that way.

Using existing artwork for training model is only the process that generative AI came to be.

If you solely listen to either side, you'll be blinded by madness. On that note, how many people respect or value the effort behind software? Most don't, not most artists either. That is the nature of life.

Because many people make art for art's sake.

Besides popular art works always essentially had this yet people still made them. The difference is in scale not kind.

Or to put it in another context - why would anyone work on an open source project when their work can be reused without (explicit) permission, cloned and reused in infinite small varations without any renumeration and essentially no credit (when was the last time you actually looked at the CREDITS file in an open source project? Have you ever?)

Why does it matter if some artist uses ChatGPT to knock-off your style indirectly rather than directly?

I mean, sure, ChatGPT is better at it than most artists. Is that the problem? The quality of knock-offs is too good now?

Take any new song - and any music head can list several songs it is just like. Take any new movie - and most screenwriters could go on for hours how it's almost exactly 10 different movies. Etc.

There is nothing new under the Sun.

Creative people will create regardless of financial incentives. Fan fiction and free art is already everywhere, for instance.

Its amazing how callous tech people have become as they salivate for their unicorns or whatever they are pursuing.

> Orrick spends the rest of his ruling explaining why he found the artists’ complaint defective, which includes various issues, but the big one being that two of the artists — McKernan and Ortiz, did not actually file copyrights on their art with the U.S. Copyright Office.

In other words, the story here is mostly that the lawyers screwed up badly in pursuing a copyright lawsuit before ensuring copyright had been filed.

You put work into posting this comment: thought about the situation and crafted sentences you wanted to publish. I've absorbed them, learned from them, they'll inform my own output in the future. And respectfully, I won't remember your name or give credit.

So why did you publish your comment? People can't avoid creating data. We do it passively. And you'll continue doing it, for your entire limited lifespan, even if you get neither laid nor paid for it.

To profit from creation you have to publish - what alternative do you propose?

So that I don't understand this idea that anything will "kill publishing". Copyright changes the economic math around publishing, sure - and most of the time currently not for the better. That will keep evolving but there is no risk of killing creation or publishing.

If anything, it will lower the barrier for creation, to allow a greater variety of art by a greater variety of artists. Adding a new tool to an artist’s kit is an incredible step forward for art.

Well, duh. The judge is helping out the plaintiffs in this case. A jury would have been easily convinced by the defense that no images produced by Stability's systems are visually derivative.

The key is indeed what follows:

The judge allowed Andersen to continue pursuing her key claim that Stability's alleged use of her work to train Stable Diffusion infringed her copyrights.

So unless there is some kind of summary judgement I would wager that this becomes the focus of both sides as this heads towards trial.

But that's it. As predicted by commentary from legal scholars, the outputs of Stable Diffusion are distinct from the model and are not infringing on copyright... at least for this complaint!

This simply means that they need to register their images for copyright before they can re-join the case. (https://www.gibsondunn.com/supreme-court-holds-that-copyrigh...)

EDIT: reading the linked PDF further, and it appears that McK and O's legal counsel stated that the two weren't asserting the copyright claims at all, which is why they were dismissed with prejudice. That means that they can't re-join the case by filing for copyrights for their images...Their lawyer fucked up pretty badly and if I were either of them I'd be filing a malpractice lawsuit.

You're entirely correct that if it was dismissed without prejudice the complaints on copyright infringement on the outputs could be amended and refiled.

In opposition, plaintiffs do not address, much less contest, McKernan or Ortiz’s asserted inability to pursue Copyright Act claims. At oral argument, plaintiffs’ counsel clarified that they are not asserting copyright claims on behalf of these two plaintiffs. July 19, 2023 Transcript (Tr.), pg. 17:1-5. As such, McKernan and Ortiz’s copyright act claims are DISMISSED WITH PREJUDICE.

Another interpretation is that the plaintiffs were well aware of how weak their case was with regards to the outputs and basically planned on abandoning it from the start.

There's been more than a bit of showmanship from the plaintiff's counsel so I'm not surprised that the actual legal tactics differ from the rhetoric of the blog posts. It's also common to stack the complaint so that when the judge does start focusing on the key issues that maybe a little more ends up at trial than otherwise.

There's winning in the court of public opinion and then there's winning in a Federal court.

In this case they never filed in the first place, and it was dismissed with prejudice.

"Use another person's thoughts" is obfuscating the reality of the situation so far as to be disingenuous. The way society ensures new works are created is to guarantee a temporary monopoly over certain narrow types of ideas to their creators. Why would anybody be an author if everyone could download free copies of any new book that came out?

I think patents are granted too liberally, and that copyright lasts at least twice as long as it should, but to argue that intellectual property can't even in theory be beneficial to protect is silly.

Consider existence of services like patreon where people support creators they respect before are able to get to know the work of the author - no intellectual property rights are needed here.

Less harshly, if we want to have that kind of world, we're not going to get there by abandoning creatives by removing intellectual property protections as the first step. Within the current society, intellectual property law does more good than harm.

But besides that, I don't think a universal patreon-like support system is even ideal. I don't want to provide ongoing support for any creation/creator I appreciate. I like being able to just buy a book.

All because judges will be befuddled about what to do after hearing terms like “training data” and “compression”. We will, of course get the emails in 10-20 years showing that it’s all lies and that the CEOs of these companies knew exactly what they were doing.

If this continues, AI will be the great inequality machine in history. Take data from 1,000,000 individuals, train your AI to replace them, compensate no one.

You can do this in every area: driving, farming, cooking. Music. Just dispossess everyone of all their property by training an AI to copy all their work! What could be easier (and less morally right)…

Is it bad that this will be used to displace individual artists/creatives in the value chain of media production? Of course it is. But we shouldn't be responding to that by clinging harder to schemes that have outlived their usefulness, we should be developing new models for funding production.

Great! So given your articles are in the public domain on your website I can make millions out of it without given you a cent or direct credit and sources without paying you and can claim it all as my own then.

But if they claimed that they wrote the content then they would be defrauding their customers, since saying they wrote them would just be lying. You don't need intellectual property for fraud (as in "lying for material gain") to exist and be bad. At the very least it would be dishonest academically speaking and they should be criticized for it.

You're mischaracterizing me by suggesting that it's "economic suicide", as I said in my original comment in this thread:

> But we shouldn't be responding to that by clinging harder to schemes that have outlived their usefulness, we should be developing new models for funding production.

Sure it would be disruptive if we snapped our fingers and said "no more IP starting tomorrow", there should be a gradual phasing out of these unfair protections and effort put into sustainable pro-creative models.

The hypothetical of lost revenue needs to be validated by the evidence of actual revenue being made in this way. Right now, I see lots of interest in paying for the _tool_, but almost none in paying human wages for the _output_ of generative models.

(I am not proposing that my above distinction is a legal test. Just pointing out that all these arguments would be more credible if actual ai generated works were being sold by AI companies)

There is no recognition of 'lost revenue' for the commercialization of public domain works.

My point was that we haven't yet seen the products of GenAI stuff really making money yet. People are paying for the tool, and people are paying for work that is being done using the tool, but nobody buys a book, image, movie, or similar from OpenAI or Google directly.

A lot of people are very myopic about generative AI, thinking that large Hollywood studios are going to steal people's work and put everyone out of a job. Hollywood studios won't exist soon enough because anyone will be able to put together a movie that rivals existing expensive productions. In fact, generative AI is democratizing, as long as it's not gatekept by a few large corporations, which is exactly what trying to misapply copyright here would do.

Tens of millions of fans of a living celebrity would pay for it and the fans do not care about the original author as long as it is the celebrity's name that is selling it and can claim it as their own.

They don't need to give credit or sources to whatever their selling to generate millions.

Either way, they can make millions out of it, even if you are the original author and don't need to give you credit.

This describes how ideas work - and ideas are rarely (if ever) IP-locked by a first originator - because there usually isn't one.

Everything by everyone, everywhere is built on the output of predecessors. Progress is a shared effort made up of minuscule increments or slight reorderings - which are typically done several times before they catch on.

IP exists to hinder this process by preventing 99.99999% of potential people from advancing ideas.

I have sympathy for the artists, but frankly this is progress and it can't be stopped. The economics are so lop-sided in favour of silicon that the law won't be able to hold it back without crippling society at large. Artists aren't the only ones affected and they may not even be the profession most impacted.

Not sure about that. It's like saying if AIs are good at art, they'll be better at math.

Also, GPT-3.5 is already a better coder than a few humans whose mistakes I've had to fix. 3.5 is nowhere near the best, yet it's already eating at the bottom rungs despite being free.