4 ms·

I'm still not seeing the "transformative" argument: the point of transformation isn't "it is in a different format" but (to quote Wikipedia, which is, of course

by saurik 4y ago

I'm still not seeing the "transformative" argument: the point of transformation isn't "it is in a different format" but (to quote Wikipedia, which is, of course, dumb... I'm sorry ;P) where one "builds on a copyrighted work in a different manner or for a different purpose from the original". The reason a search engine thumbnail is transformative isn't because it has been transformed to make it smaller... it is because the purpose of the resulting use of the image is somewhat unrelated to the use the original author was going for when they made the original image. At issue here is then that, rather than using an original image from Getty Images, someone decided to take all of the images from Getty Images and churn them through some algorithm that generated an image that directly competed with the original images from Getty Images. So like, sure: if you really only narrowly want to talk about OpenAI, what they are themselves doing (training and distributing a model) might potentially be legal, but the people using the result would seem to be in serious hot water... oh, and actually, I think they run it all a service, don't they? So no: I don't even think that defense works, as OpenAI is in some sense not even selling a model, they are merely directly competing with Getty Images to provide sell photos to people.

gojomo 4y ago
Autogenerated, often fantastical, never-seen-before AI images strike me as a paradigmatically 'transformative' use. It's novel. It's shocking to many practicioners how flexible & high-quality the images can be. It will unlock all sorts of new downstream creation. The representation that feeds the generation is statistical, even to the point of being plausibly factual: these things/people/places/concepts can be abstractly represented as the balanced weights inside the model. And under US law, facts aren't copyrightable. I could see a case being factored as: (1) the scraping/training/ephemeralization itself involves the usual copying of downloading/locally-processing images, like indexing, but all those 'copying' steps are fair-use protected, as science/transformative/de-minimus/whatever; (2) any subsequent new-image generation no longer involves any 'copying', only new creation from distilled patterns of the entire training corpus, in which Getty retains no 'trace tincture' of copyright-control. So there's no specific acts of illegal copying to penalize. Also, a human artist would be allowed to review related Getty/etc preview images, free on the web, to familiarize themself with a person or setting, before drawing it themself, with their own flair – as long as they don't copy it substantially. Why wouldn't an AI artist?
- omnimus 4y ago
  "AI artist" doesn't add any of its "own flair". It builds exclusively on past experience and work of humans. And it also directly completes with them without any thought of credit or compensation. People are really underplaying how damaging this is going to be for the industry. It's going to completely decimate it. You can already see people using names of artists in the DALL-E prompt to get "their" work for few dollars avoiding any copyright or social issues. Artists will suddenly be competing with AI on price and time - why we should pay you living wage when we instantly generate something close enough. Why would anyone try to create some new aesthetic or push anything further if their effort will be replicated next week when the model gets updated with new source data. Everything is gonna get stuck to aesthetic of 2025 and before. It's completely inhuman.
  - gojomo 4y ago
    The synergistic effect of all the AI's inputs absolutely results in a unique new 'flair', with extensions, reversals, and mash-ups of styles just as in human-made artistic styles. And AI "builds exclusively on past experience and work of humans" just like any young new human artist equally does. In many cases, you can even tell the different models' outputs apart, not by raw quality or glitches, but by hard-to-describe aesthetic tendencies. I share your concern on the effect on human artists – both the market for their work, and even their morale, when learning, knowing that decades of practice will still be outproduced by seconds of computation. But I don't think the genie will be put back in the bottle, by either expansive interpretation of existing copyright law, or even new laws.
    - omnimus 4y ago
      Indeed the genie is out. And while we will get some interesting AI uses ultimately this is degenerative tech. In the end we end up with less authentic, less unpredictible and less delightfull art. Instead we get the perfectly suited to us, predictible, mediocre stuff. I said it in comment above - yes people build on work of others but they also bring lots of their originality and intelect. Part of what people do is truly uniquely theirs and piece by piece we progress as a whole. The crutial detail is that AI learns only from visual patterns from past and cant think at all. And humans learn from everything around them and think about it deeply.

by saurik 4y ago

gojomo 4y ago

Autogenerated, often fantastical, never-seen-before AI images strike me as a paradigmatically 'transformative' use. It's novel. It's shocking to many practicioners how flexible & high-quality the images can be. It will unlock all sorts of new downstream creation. The representation that feeds the generation is statistical, even to the point of being plausibly factual: these things/people/places/concepts can be abstractly represented as the balanced weights inside the model. And under US law, facts aren't copyrightable. I could see a case being factored as: (1) the scraping/training/ephemeralization itself involves the usual copying of downloading/locally-processing images, like indexing, but all those 'copying' steps are fair-use protected, as science/transformative/de-minimus/whatever; (2) any subsequent new-image generation no longer involves any 'copying', only new creation from distilled patterns of the entire training corpus, in which Getty retains no 'trace tincture' of copyright-control. So there's no specific acts of illegal copying to penalize. Also, a human artist would be allowed to review related Getty/etc preview images, free on the web, to familiarize themself with a person or setting, before drawing it themself, with their own flair – as long as they don't copy it substantially. Why wouldn't an AI artist?

omnimus 4y ago
"AI artist" doesn't add any of its "own flair". It builds exclusively on past experience and work of humans. And it also directly completes with them without any thought of credit or compensation. People are really underplaying how damaging this is going to be for the industry. It's going to completely decimate it. You can already see people using names of artists in the DALL-E prompt to get "their" work for few dollars avoiding any copyright or social issues. Artists will suddenly be competing with AI on price and time - why we should pay you living wage when we instantly generate something close enough. Why would anyone try to create some new aesthetic or push anything further if their effort will be replicated next week when the model gets updated with new source data. Everything is gonna get stuck to aesthetic of 2025 and before. It's completely inhuman.
- gojomo 4y ago
  The synergistic effect of all the AI's inputs absolutely results in a unique new 'flair', with extensions, reversals, and mash-ups of styles just as in human-made artistic styles. And AI "builds exclusively on past experience and work of humans" just like any young new human artist equally does. In many cases, you can even tell the different models' outputs apart, not by raw quality or glitches, but by hard-to-describe aesthetic tendencies. I share your concern on the effect on human artists – both the market for their work, and even their morale, when learning, knowing that decades of practice will still be outproduced by seconds of computation. But I don't think the genie will be put back in the bottle, by either expansive interpretation of existing copyright law, or even new laws.
  - omnimus 4y ago
    Indeed the genie is out. And while we will get some interesting AI uses ultimately this is degenerative tech. In the end we end up with less authentic, less unpredictible and less delightfull art. Instead we get the perfectly suited to us, predictible, mediocre stuff. I said it in comment above - yes people build on work of others but they also bring lots of their originality and intelect. Part of what people do is truly uniquely theirs and piece by piece we progress as a whole. The crutial detail is that AI learns only from visual patterns from past and cant think at all. And humans learn from everything around them and think about it deeply.