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This blindly steam rolls over some important distinctions. Humans aren’t allowed to sell direct copies of other people’s art (not in the US and many other count

by dahart 4y ago

This blindly steam rolls over some important distinctions. Humans aren’t allowed to sell direct copies of other people’s art (not in the US and many other countries anyway). This isn’t a hang-up, and it’s not status quo bias, it’s well covered law and economic philosophy that is already blending new digital rights ideas into hard fought legal precedents. We have explicitly decided to have the social goal to protect the rights of artistic creative people & businesses without having their work instantly ripped off. Humans also are good at taking inspiration from ideas, where today’s AI is borrowing pixels. The AI is copying in a way that humans don’t, it’s not mimicking and taking inspiration - that is anthropomorphising the software that is trained and programmed to make automated mashups of images. So in part it depends on what we do with AI images. There may be nothing wrong with training on copyrighted material if the resulting inferences are never distributed publicly nor used for commercial purposes. Of course that seems extremely unlikely, which is why it needs to be discussed carefully and debated in good faith, right? Maybe in part it also depends on whether the AI software is guaranteed to produce something very different from any individual training image. If the outputs are guaranteed to be always a mashup, and never indistinguishable from any single input, that seems like it would be an easier pill to swallow. (There appears to be legal precedent along these lines for music sampling.)

IanCal 4y ago
> Humans also are good at taking inspiration from ideas, where today’s AI is borrowing pixels. I disagree with this, we don't just hear about ideas we actually see the art. Both are shown pictures.
karmasimida 4y ago
> Humans aren’t allowed to sell direct copies of other people’s art Direct copying yes, but stealing ideas? No. Actually it is a well-known practice in the art industry to use several existing works as references, and creating new artwork that is bit of mixture of all of them. That is exactly what DALL-E/StableDiffusion are trying to do. AI isn't borrowing pixels, either. If you read the idea of diffusion models, quite the opposite, what it directly learns is how to destroy an image from what it is into gaussian noise. The trick here is we can reverse this process 'creating' arts from noises. There is no copying pixels, not even in the most simplistic version of how this model works.
remram 4y ago
More importantly, humans are inspectable. You can ask a human why they did something one way. You can put them on a stand and ask them whether they had knowledge of X, why they didn't do alternative Y, how they arrived at formulation Z. All this goes out the window with AI, we have to judge the entire model as a whole, and even though we see DALL-E etc spit out watermarks we can't call it a liar or a thief. "This part overfits but the whole model is transformative, we think" say the authors.

by dahart 4y ago

IanCal 4y ago

> Humans also are good at taking inspiration from ideas, where today’s AI is borrowing pixels. I disagree with this, we don't just hear about ideas we actually see the art. Both are shown pictures.

karmasimida 4y ago

> Humans aren’t allowed to sell direct copies of other people’s art Direct copying yes, but stealing ideas? No. Actually it is a well-known practice in the art industry to use several existing works as references, and creating new artwork that is bit of mixture of all of them. That is exactly what DALL-E/StableDiffusion are trying to do. AI isn't borrowing pixels, either. If you read the idea of diffusion models, quite the opposite, what it directly learns is how to destroy an image from what it is into gaussian noise. The trick here is we can reverse this process 'creating' arts from noises. There is no copying pixels, not even in the most simplistic version of how this model works.

remram 4y ago

More importantly, humans are inspectable. You can ask a human why they did something one way. You can put them on a stand and ask them whether they had knowledge of X, why they didn't do alternative Y, how they arrived at formulation Z. All this goes out the window with AI, we have to judge the entire model as a whole, and even though we see DALL-E etc spit out watermarks we can't call it a liar or a thief. "This part overfits but the whole model is transformative, we think" say the authors.