4 ms·

Does that mean the developers put The Big Lebowski through the model during training? Where did they get all the movies and TV shows from? And does copying so d

by sp332 4y ago

Does that mean the developers put The Big Lebowski through the model during training? Where did they get all the movies and TV shows from? And does copying so directly from the source material open them and users up to copyright infringement liability?

natly 4y ago
They probably did, but even if they didn't it may have come from the terrabytes of data they scraped from the internet. OpenAI doesn't care. They claim that it's derivative enough to go under fair use. And whether it is or isn't, I guess their calculation is that the risk is worth taking to be the first to develop these algorithms, which is a huge head start if the courts decide that it does count as fair use.
- gwern 4y ago
  Hilarious parodies like these are copyright infringement, yes, but also open-and-shut fair use defense. (You're confusing the issue of transformativeness and fair use defense.)
BeefWellington 4y ago
I'm imagining the defense will be: "Your honor, it can't be infringement because I ran it through an ML model first." Especially if the movie(s) that are eventually generated this way are ripping whole scenes or sequences out of other films, a la copilot.
- bogwog 4y ago
  I feel like if they don’t have licenses for all of their source material, then the model should be required to be released into the public domain. It’s like extremely expensive piracy that is bad for artists and bad for the environment. I wonder if the reason OpenAI, Google, etc don’t release these things isn’t so much that they’re worried about racist/offensive output, but instead they’re worried about people using it to create images of, say, Mickey Mouse and drawing the attention of his lawyers? It’d be better for AI companies to keep all of this stuff in a legal gray area for as long as possible.
  - FeepingCreature 4y ago
    Being bad for artists and the environment is not illegal. If you look at a movie poster, your brain does not need to be released in the public domain. Even if you sketch it from memory.
    - bogwog 4y ago
      > Being bad for artists and the environment is not illegal. Yet we have copyright laws and environmental protection laws to protect both. > If you look at a movie poster, your brain does not need to be released in the public domain. Even if you sketch it from memory. Because I’m not a machine. I’m contrained by physics, whereas these models are not. Copyright laws were made to protect artists from IP theft. If I make a sculpture, it’s not trivial to copy that and steal from me, so creating copyright laws to protect sculptors would be a hard sell. But a painting, a book, a song, etc are easy to steal, especially with technology. Copying and selling someone else’s painting is similar to copying and selling someone else’s sculpture, yet the scale of theft is obviously different (mass producing sculptures is much harder than making unlimited copies of an mp3) These AI models are a new type of theft, and likewise need new types of legal protections for artists.
      - ekianjo 4y ago
        > hese AI models are a new type of theft, and likewise need new types of legal protections for artists. Meh. This means that most artists will also struggle to make something as good as these models and will have to find something else to do for a living. Its not the first time in history that an occupation is obsoleted. Projectionnists in cinemas have mostly dissapeared.
        bogwog 4y ago
        If these models are trained on human artists, what’s going to happen if humans stop making original art? It’s obvious from the OP that even a single film is enough to add a new stylistic capability to Dall E, so even though it might have been trained on hundreds of years of human artwork, a single modern piece can still influence significantly. > This means that most artists will also struggle to make something as good as these models This makes me think that you’re lacking a fundamental understanding of what art is. The “demand” for art is never going to disappear, but these models are simply going to disrupt the supply by flooding the market with derivative works at a massive scale. The internet posed a similar threat back when it first came out, but laws were changed to combat that (e.g. the DMCA). I fail to see how this situation is any different? A country that doesn’t get on top of this issue will doom itself to cultural irrelevance in the long term, IMO.
xeromal 4y ago
I would hope that the spirit of the law would be considered in this. This is a clear application of fair use. Are the owners of the IP losing money on letting someone generate new characters in their movie/show?
- simiones 4y ago
  > Are the owners of the IP losing money on letting someone generate new characters in their movie/show? Typically, creators are very protective of this sort of thing, unless it stays in the area of fan art. If anyone tries to seriously monetize this kind of output, I'm sure we'll see a lot of cases. Imagine what Disney would do if you used DALL-E to create an animated feature film in the style of Mickey Mouse, but with cats instead of mice, and they found out you used actual footage from, say, Fantasia to train an AI model. No idea if they would win, but I'm certain they'd sue.
alkonaut 4y ago
I was assuming it was just movie posters and screenshots from online articles/reviews/imdb etc, and not any analysis of the video itself (I might be wrong though - using video would make the number of available input frames grow by orders of magnitude, not that there is a lack of pictures online). E.g. The Shining picture of Jack Nicholson with the door isn't representative of the "look" of the film, but very much an iconic still frame and basically what you see in a Google image search for "The Shining".
jhart99 4y ago
Wouldn't the images be a transformative work? But then again there were those recent music cases where the infringement was only a small number of notes in sequence. This will almost inevitably end up in court because I'm not sure there is a comparable case.

by sp332 4y ago

natly 4y ago

They probably did, but even if they didn't it may have come from the terrabytes of data they scraped from the internet. OpenAI doesn't care. They claim that it's derivative enough to go under fair use. And whether it is or isn't, I guess their calculation is that the risk is worth taking to be the first to develop these algorithms, which is a huge head start if the courts decide that it does count as fair use.

gwern 4y ago
Hilarious parodies like these are copyright infringement, yes, but also open-and-shut fair use defense. (You're confusing the issue of transformativeness and fair use defense.)

BeefWellington 4y ago

I'm imagining the defense will be: "Your honor, it can't be infringement because I ran it through an ML model first." Especially if the movie(s) that are eventually generated this way are ripping whole scenes or sequences out of other films, a la copilot.

bogwog 4y ago
I feel like if they don’t have licenses for all of their source material, then the model should be required to be released into the public domain. It’s like extremely expensive piracy that is bad for artists and bad for the environment. I wonder if the reason OpenAI, Google, etc don’t release these things isn’t so much that they’re worried about racist/offensive output, but instead they’re worried about people using it to create images of, say, Mickey Mouse and drawing the attention of his lawyers? It’d be better for AI companies to keep all of this stuff in a legal gray area for as long as possible.
- FeepingCreature 4y ago
  Being bad for artists and the environment is not illegal. If you look at a movie poster, your brain does not need to be released in the public domain. Even if you sketch it from memory.
  - bogwog 4y ago
    > Being bad for artists and the environment is not illegal. Yet we have copyright laws and environmental protection laws to protect both. > If you look at a movie poster, your brain does not need to be released in the public domain. Even if you sketch it from memory. Because I’m not a machine. I’m contrained by physics, whereas these models are not. Copyright laws were made to protect artists from IP theft. If I make a sculpture, it’s not trivial to copy that and steal from me, so creating copyright laws to protect sculptors would be a hard sell. But a painting, a book, a song, etc are easy to steal, especially with technology. Copying and selling someone else’s painting is similar to copying and selling someone else’s sculpture, yet the scale of theft is obviously different (mass producing sculptures is much harder than making unlimited copies of an mp3) These AI models are a new type of theft, and likewise need new types of legal protections for artists.
    - ekianjo 4y ago
      > hese AI models are a new type of theft, and likewise need new types of legal protections for artists. Meh. This means that most artists will also struggle to make something as good as these models and will have to find something else to do for a living. Its not the first time in history that an occupation is obsoleted. Projectionnists in cinemas have mostly dissapeared.
      - bogwog 4y ago
        If these models are trained on human artists, what’s going to happen if humans stop making original art? It’s obvious from the OP that even a single film is enough to add a new stylistic capability to Dall E, so even though it might have been trained on hundreds of years of human artwork, a single modern piece can still influence significantly. > This means that most artists will also struggle to make something as good as these models This makes me think that you’re lacking a fundamental understanding of what art is. The “demand” for art is never going to disappear, but these models are simply going to disrupt the supply by flooding the market with derivative works at a massive scale. The internet posed a similar threat back when it first came out, but laws were changed to combat that (e.g. the DMCA). I fail to see how this situation is any different? A country that doesn’t get on top of this issue will doom itself to cultural irrelevance in the long term, IMO.

xeromal 4y ago

I would hope that the spirit of the law would be considered in this. This is a clear application of fair use. Are the owners of the IP losing money on letting someone generate new characters in their movie/show?

simiones 4y ago
> Are the owners of the IP losing money on letting someone generate new characters in their movie/show? Typically, creators are very protective of this sort of thing, unless it stays in the area of fan art. If anyone tries to seriously monetize this kind of output, I'm sure we'll see a lot of cases. Imagine what Disney would do if you used DALL-E to create an animated feature film in the style of Mickey Mouse, but with cats instead of mice, and they found out you used actual footage from, say, Fantasia to train an AI model. No idea if they would win, but I'm certain they'd sue.

alkonaut 4y ago

I was assuming it was just movie posters and screenshots from online articles/reviews/imdb etc, and not any analysis of the video itself (I might be wrong though - using video would make the number of available input frames grow by orders of magnitude, not that there is a lack of pictures online). E.g. The Shining picture of Jack Nicholson with the door isn't representative of the "look" of the film, but very much an iconic still frame and basically what you see in a Google image search for "The Shining".

jhart99 4y ago

Wouldn't the images be a transformative work? But then again there were those recent music cases where the infringement was only a small number of notes in sequence. This will almost inevitably end up in court because I'm not sure there is a comparable case.