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Artists look at images (copyright or not) while working on their own images all the time. Many of Shakespeare's works are re-writes of stories that were common

Artists look at images (copyright or not) while working on their own images all the time. Many of Shakespeare's works are re-writes of stories that were common in his era? How is this any different?

brodouevencode 4y ago
Did copyright exist in the Shakespearean era?
- lupire 4y ago
  Does that affect the morality of it?
- spywaregorilla 4y ago
  Copyright has no bearing on ethics.
  - Stupulous 4y ago
    I don't know if that's true for everyone. If someone doesn't believe that an idea should be the property of the first person who thought of it for an innate moral reason, they might still believe that it's unethical to take that property away after it is guaranteed by the state. A utilitarian who is pro-copyright because it encourages creation and innovation might not be concerned with works that were published without that encouragement.
  - breck 4y ago
    There's a slight relationship. If you believe in copyright then you don't believe in ethics^1 ;). [1] Assuming you've actually thought about copyright from first principles—I think many people are too busy to have given it enough thought.
kixiQu 4y ago
I recommend reading more about copyright law. The questions you are raising have been considered carefully for centuries. While the modern US settled compromises may be repugnant to you as to me, the expertise behind how these things are considered is valuable and constitutes many-years-of-study's worth. Learning about the complicated contours of what is considered legal and what is considered ethical in "artists [looking] at images" – among which there is a lot of distinction – may explain why others here would expect there to be legal and ethical distinctions among how deep learning systems may process and regurgitate their input.
- visarga 4y ago
  Regurgitation, in a technical sense (yes, it appears in papers) is under 1% and can be filtered out in post processing. It happens when an images is repeated many times in the training set, say, Mona Lisa in 1000 variants. If the outputs were sufficiently different from the most similar training examples would it be exempt from copyright liabilities? On the other extreme, a single copyrighted image in the training set could spoil the whole model, it would be impossible to make sure the training set is 100% clean.
  - kixiQu 4y ago
    > If the outputs were sufficiently different from the most similar training examples would it be exempt from copyright liabilities? This is a great kind of question to ask, and can point us to the right areas of non-deep-learning copyright to think about – but not in a way that lends itself to a quick settled answer in a comment section, I suspect. https://law.marquette.edu/facultyblog/tag/fairey-v-ap/ https://law.marquette.edu/facultyblog/tag/fairey-v-ap/ > On the other extreme, a single copyrighted image in the training set could spoil the whole model, it would be impossible to make sure the training set is 100% clean. Where possessing stolen goods is illegal, it takes quite a lot of effort to determine that an e.g. antiquities dealer has met the reasonable standard of inquiry for 100% of their inventory – but that doesn't mean that isn't the legal requirement. That's an area where we know the legal standard, and this is much newer ground, so it very well may be that tech that depends on datasets too big to take responsibility for may not end up being a great foundation for anything with legal liability attached.
    - visarga 4y ago
      It will be a Napster moment all over again, people want to generate images they don't care about copyrights, and the technology is here. There's already a good enough model (Stable Diffusion) released into the open, it can be executed on any desktop computer. This tech is still very new, it will mature in a few years and we'll get used to it.
Attrecomet 4y ago
We check up on people all the time, it's healthy behavior and actually required for society to function on any level. But when we use technology to empower corporations, governments or even single people to mass surveil entire populations all the time, it's widely seen as massively unethical. Digital technology enables such massive economies of scale, doing away with almost any kind of friction you'd encounter when doing something in the real world, that they are qualitatively different from their analog, offline counterparts. Quantity has a quality of its own, as the saying goes. I'm undecided on the morals of this, so don't understand it as an argument against doing it per se, but "I'm doing it perhaps a couple of hundred times daily if I really try hard, so it's clearly okay to do it billions of times a second" isn't a good argument for it.

Artists look at images (copyright or not) while working on their own images all the time. Many of Shakespeare's works are re-writes of stories that were common in his era? How is this any different?

brodouevencode 4y ago

Did copyright exist in the Shakespearean era?

lupire 4y ago
Does that affect the morality of it?
spywaregorilla 4y ago
Copyright has no bearing on ethics.
- Stupulous 4y ago
  I don't know if that's true for everyone. If someone doesn't believe that an idea should be the property of the first person who thought of it for an innate moral reason, they might still believe that it's unethical to take that property away after it is guaranteed by the state. A utilitarian who is pro-copyright because it encourages creation and innovation might not be concerned with works that were published without that encouragement.
- breck 4y ago
  There's a slight relationship. If you believe in copyright then you don't believe in ethics^1 ;). [1] Assuming you've actually thought about copyright from first principles—I think many people are too busy to have given it enough thought.

kixiQu 4y ago

I recommend reading more about copyright law. The questions you are raising have been considered carefully for centuries. While the modern US settled compromises may be repugnant to you as to me, the expertise behind how these things are considered is valuable and constitutes many-years-of-study's worth. Learning about the complicated contours of what is considered legal and what is considered ethical in "artists [looking] at images" – among which there is a lot of distinction – may explain why others here would expect there to be legal and ethical distinctions among how deep learning systems may process and regurgitate their input.

visarga 4y ago
Regurgitation, in a technical sense (yes, it appears in papers) is under 1% and can be filtered out in post processing. It happens when an images is repeated many times in the training set, say, Mona Lisa in 1000 variants. If the outputs were sufficiently different from the most similar training examples would it be exempt from copyright liabilities? On the other extreme, a single copyrighted image in the training set could spoil the whole model, it would be impossible to make sure the training set is 100% clean.
- kixiQu 4y ago
  > If the outputs were sufficiently different from the most similar training examples would it be exempt from copyright liabilities? This is a great kind of question to ask, and can point us to the right areas of non-deep-learning copyright to think about – but not in a way that lends itself to a quick settled answer in a comment section, I suspect. https://law.marquette.edu/facultyblog/tag/fairey-v-ap/ https://law.marquette.edu/facultyblog/tag/fairey-v-ap/ > On the other extreme, a single copyrighted image in the training set could spoil the whole model, it would be impossible to make sure the training set is 100% clean. Where possessing stolen goods is illegal, it takes quite a lot of effort to determine that an e.g. antiquities dealer has met the reasonable standard of inquiry for 100% of their inventory – but that doesn't mean that isn't the legal requirement. That's an area where we know the legal standard, and this is much newer ground, so it very well may be that tech that depends on datasets too big to take responsibility for may not end up being a great foundation for anything with legal liability attached.
  - visarga 4y ago
    It will be a Napster moment all over again, people want to generate images they don't care about copyrights, and the technology is here. There's already a good enough model (Stable Diffusion) released into the open, it can be executed on any desktop computer. This tech is still very new, it will mature in a few years and we'll get used to it.

Attrecomet 4y ago

We check up on people all the time, it's healthy behavior and actually required for society to function on any level. But when we use technology to empower corporations, governments or even single people to mass surveil entire populations all the time, it's widely seen as massively unethical. Digital technology enables such massive economies of scale, doing away with almost any kind of friction you'd encounter when doing something in the real world, that they are qualitatively different from their analog, offline counterparts. Quantity has a quality of its own, as the saying goes. I'm undecided on the morals of this, so don't understand it as an argument against doing it per se, but "I'm doing it perhaps a couple of hundred times daily if I really try hard, so it's clearly okay to do it billions of times a second" isn't a good argument for it.