3 ms·

For generative art, trademarking your name might help prevent people from using it in prompts, but for general copyright, where does the line stand between some

by dzink 4y ago

For generative art, trademarking your name might help prevent people from using it in prompts, but for general copyright, where does the line stand between someone casually publishing every color in the rainbow, every note combination, every letter in the alphabet, and claiming anyone else is infringing on their copyright? If someone copies your thesis, abstract, poem word for word, that is clear violation of your IP, but we are all remixing words that everyone uses, colors, brush strokes, API terms, programming language keywords, and notes. Copyright law has the fair use doctrine and transformative use is explicitly allowed to allow iteration. There is some level of granularity that is essential to creativity - otherwise one entity can copyright all possible combinations and prevent any creativity from happening legally. If AI goes below that threshold, all of humanity has a chance to iterate far faster and find new spaces and fill new needs for everyone. Humans have been able to draw in the style of Picasso or Monet for centuries. A program doing it is not infringement, just much faster iteration.

burkaman 4y ago
> A program doing it is not infringement, just much faster iteration. "Much faster" is absolutely relevant, morally and legally. Visiting a website a bunch of times is not illegal, programmatically DDoSing it is. Having a private conversation with someone and writing down what they said afterwards is not illegal, but recording the conversation and perfectly reproducing it without their permission often is. Shouting at someone in public is generally ok, having a drone follow them around anytime they're in public playing a recording of whatever you shouted is probably not ok. Computers are not people. Just because it's ok for a person to do something, doesn't mean it's ok to have a computer do the same thing a billion times per second.
- dzink 4y ago
  DDoSing is bad not because of the speed but because it overwhelms the infrastructure a product is designed for. Doing it to your own computer by making it crunch AI models until it runs out of memory is perfectly legal and iterative. Printing pages of a book in seconds vs dedicating lives of people to hand draw each letter in the monastery is iteration. Computers are not people. Computers are iteration tools people use to free up precious lifetime they have and bring more value to the world. If you are a human who trains 10000 hrs to invest like Paul Graham, or draw like Thomas Kincade, or play the piano, or operate as a top brain surgeon, you have spent a fraction of your life to do this fast and reap the rewards. But that fraction of your life has tremendous cost on society. Many people paid with their time and money to feed you, teach you, house you, during that time and during your upbringing which allowed you to have those 10k hrs to dedicate to this task. Now all of that work can be used by you to do exponentially more with your precious life. Instead of spending days or years making a portrait, you’d spend seconds. Now you can find higher purpose and solve much bigger problems - instead of asking for 100 to hand draw a portrait for a few hundred people in your lifetime, you could create one for every teen who needs a boost in their self esteem and raise their confidence and ability to cope with challenges in their life at massive scale. More importantly, since there is a huge scarcity of people trained to fulfill each niche need that forms a bottleneck on society’s capacity to use that. Imagine if instead of airplane we counted on a few trained supermen to fly people who needed to cross places fast by hand. How many people would die before they see the world or are taken to a doctor, etc. The world can’t survive on superheroes or super trained people. The world can do more with the time and lives of people in it.
  - burkaman 4y ago
    I disagree but this is a reasonable perspective. One specific point: > instead of asking for 100 to hand draw a portrait for a few hundred people in your lifetime, you could create one for every teen who needs a boost in their self esteem and raise their confidence and ability to cope with challenges in their life at massive scale. This is a misunderstanding that reminds of those startups that were like "we realized people love getting hand-written cards, so we built a product to learn your handwriting and generate them for you!" No, the effort is the point. For people who like those cards it's not about the aesthetics of handwritten text, it's about knowing somebody dedicated some of their limited time to you personally. A depressed person is not going to be cheered up by an auto-generated portrait, even if it's indistinguishable from one a human artist spent 12 hours on. You can't "scale" human connection like this, unless you hide the fact that robots are involved. I'm not saying all technology is bad. I think robo-surgeons would be great if they can save more lives, even if they put human surgeons out of work. In this particular domain, right now it seems like these tools have the potential to discourage future generations of artists, which would be self-defeating because the models are not AI and will stagnate without additional training data. I don't think they should be banned, but I think we should take human artists' concerns seriously, not co-opt someone's artistic identity if they ask us not to, and try to make sure we think about the unintended consequences of a powerful new tool.
    - dzink 4y ago
      People who love to walk will continue to walk even when there are bikes, cars, airplanes, self driving tech, and teleportation etc, available to them. AI art does not discourage artists any more than restaurants discourage home cooks who enjoy cooking. In all of those scenarios the tech caters to people who are in need of a task done and not in desire to spend their life on the craft. There will always be unintended consequences and some will be severe. But what is happening now is pent up demand that finally found an outlet - like a bunch of high pressure mountain water that found a hole through a cave wall and into the ocean - it is gushing. Instead of blind fear of change, I try to see the value previously unseen and it is tremendous. As the creator in the article said she does not see her true art in the stable diffusion creations: the eyes that speak to character in each character, the poses that show confidence or query, or passion. Instead she sees images that mimic her style of drawing. I do see how someone may choose to not become an artist for a living because AI art becomes so ubiquitous that they could never make a living with a paintbrush. BUT, with so much 80-90% of desired art generated by AI, there will now be huge demand for skilled artists who can take a generated image the rest of the way to desired results. I trust that human ambition and taste always expands past superhuman capabilities. The artists if tomorrow will have much different brushes than those of yesterday and be far better and more productive than those of yesterday. There will likely be 3D art in the real world and universes to explore in the virtual one. I’m more concerned we will and are running out of space to store our contraptions. Data storage manufacturers will be thriving.
ROTMetro 4y ago
That is a fake argument. It has been proven wrong on every one of these articles, yet pro-stealing people like yourself keep posting it. You can't copyright such works, only an 'installation' of those works. If you want to talk about copyright, maybe educate yourself on copyright. It's Title 17. https://www.copyright.gov/title17/ https://www.copyright.gov/title17/
- dzink 4y ago
  Which argument, which articles - be specific. AI content is not copyrightable at this stage. Drawing styles are not copyrightable. Name calling and labeling are ad-hominem attacks however and that has no place on HN.
  - ROTMetro 4y ago
    Edit: First and foremost, I'm sorry you felt attacked. That is never OK. I need to step back from posting anything until I can be a decent human being. I regret not doing that before I posted. ----- People claiming you can copyright a canvas that is just a color (when you can't, you can only copyright the art installation/display). People claiming that you can copyright the alphabet (when you can't). It's just frustrating that HN wants to keep having this discussion but with ZERO basis in actual copyright law, and people making factually inaccurate claims as if they understand it. I had the same issue on a criminal law post. Someone posted completely factually inaccurate information regarding title 18 statutes, and HN blocking me from responding in a timely manner while people were reading the post. This just isn't a forum for informed discussion I guess, but peoples gut feelings and what they THINK copyright law is. Opinions are great, and needed, but established law is a real thing and should be part of a discussion that at it's core is about copyright.
    - dzink 4y ago
      Look at the inputs and outputs of generative AI art - specifically the ones shown in the post and others. The disconnect here is not our insights on copyright law (At least not for generative art. Maybe for copilot, code, and GPT3, but not for the art.) Hollie is a Character Artist. A Character has a combination of appearance, emotional radiance, mood, behavior, that have to fit in to create a unique persona and trigger an emotional response to that character from viewers. Stable Diffusion does not take or copy her characters - it mimics her drawing style in colors, hues (it reads what pixels are proximate to what other pixels and tries to apply that proximity to similar colors, line patterns in the future). When you create a stable diffusion image, you set a parameter of how much randomness to apply and how much variety, and what else to mix in. So any content it's trained on becomes a soup of colors and lines and hues and saturation. So if Hollie draws with de-saturated colors, and favors pinks and greens, an image produced with her name will probably have that, but not more than a soup mixed with objects searched by the words of the generator human. Code generation is different as a code has to appear in some form to work properly and that happens with a lot less variance, so generators there would likely remix a LOT more of the original, but images have a much much wider variance unless you ask specifically for as many keywords as possible (aka Mona Lisa by Leonardo Da Vinci) in which case you'd fall under trademark law as well probably (Which is also why Microsoft added trademarked images on their CDs so they could prosecute infringers easier).

by dzink 4y ago

burkaman 4y ago

> A program doing it is not infringement, just much faster iteration. "Much faster" is absolutely relevant, morally and legally. Visiting a website a bunch of times is not illegal, programmatically DDoSing it is. Having a private conversation with someone and writing down what they said afterwards is not illegal, but recording the conversation and perfectly reproducing it without their permission often is. Shouting at someone in public is generally ok, having a drone follow them around anytime they're in public playing a recording of whatever you shouted is probably not ok. Computers are not people. Just because it's ok for a person to do something, doesn't mean it's ok to have a computer do the same thing a billion times per second.

dzink 4y ago
DDoSing is bad not because of the speed but because it overwhelms the infrastructure a product is designed for. Doing it to your own computer by making it crunch AI models until it runs out of memory is perfectly legal and iterative. Printing pages of a book in seconds vs dedicating lives of people to hand draw each letter in the monastery is iteration. Computers are not people. Computers are iteration tools people use to free up precious lifetime they have and bring more value to the world. If you are a human who trains 10000 hrs to invest like Paul Graham, or draw like Thomas Kincade, or play the piano, or operate as a top brain surgeon, you have spent a fraction of your life to do this fast and reap the rewards. But that fraction of your life has tremendous cost on society. Many people paid with their time and money to feed you, teach you, house you, during that time and during your upbringing which allowed you to have those 10k hrs to dedicate to this task. Now all of that work can be used by you to do exponentially more with your precious life. Instead of spending days or years making a portrait, you’d spend seconds. Now you can find higher purpose and solve much bigger problems - instead of asking for 100 to hand draw a portrait for a few hundred people in your lifetime, you could create one for every teen who needs a boost in their self esteem and raise their confidence and ability to cope with challenges in their life at massive scale. More importantly, since there is a huge scarcity of people trained to fulfill each niche need that forms a bottleneck on society’s capacity to use that. Imagine if instead of airplane we counted on a few trained supermen to fly people who needed to cross places fast by hand. How many people would die before they see the world or are taken to a doctor, etc. The world can’t survive on superheroes or super trained people. The world can do more with the time and lives of people in it.
- burkaman 4y ago
  I disagree but this is a reasonable perspective. One specific point: > instead of asking for 100 to hand draw a portrait for a few hundred people in your lifetime, you could create one for every teen who needs a boost in their self esteem and raise their confidence and ability to cope with challenges in their life at massive scale. This is a misunderstanding that reminds of those startups that were like "we realized people love getting hand-written cards, so we built a product to learn your handwriting and generate them for you!" No, the effort is the point. For people who like those cards it's not about the aesthetics of handwritten text, it's about knowing somebody dedicated some of their limited time to you personally. A depressed person is not going to be cheered up by an auto-generated portrait, even if it's indistinguishable from one a human artist spent 12 hours on. You can't "scale" human connection like this, unless you hide the fact that robots are involved. I'm not saying all technology is bad. I think robo-surgeons would be great if they can save more lives, even if they put human surgeons out of work. In this particular domain, right now it seems like these tools have the potential to discourage future generations of artists, which would be self-defeating because the models are not AI and will stagnate without additional training data. I don't think they should be banned, but I think we should take human artists' concerns seriously, not co-opt someone's artistic identity if they ask us not to, and try to make sure we think about the unintended consequences of a powerful new tool.
  - dzink 4y ago
    People who love to walk will continue to walk even when there are bikes, cars, airplanes, self driving tech, and teleportation etc, available to them. AI art does not discourage artists any more than restaurants discourage home cooks who enjoy cooking. In all of those scenarios the tech caters to people who are in need of a task done and not in desire to spend their life on the craft. There will always be unintended consequences and some will be severe. But what is happening now is pent up demand that finally found an outlet - like a bunch of high pressure mountain water that found a hole through a cave wall and into the ocean - it is gushing. Instead of blind fear of change, I try to see the value previously unseen and it is tremendous. As the creator in the article said she does not see her true art in the stable diffusion creations: the eyes that speak to character in each character, the poses that show confidence or query, or passion. Instead she sees images that mimic her style of drawing. I do see how someone may choose to not become an artist for a living because AI art becomes so ubiquitous that they could never make a living with a paintbrush. BUT, with so much 80-90% of desired art generated by AI, there will now be huge demand for skilled artists who can take a generated image the rest of the way to desired results. I trust that human ambition and taste always expands past superhuman capabilities. The artists if tomorrow will have much different brushes than those of yesterday and be far better and more productive than those of yesterday. There will likely be 3D art in the real world and universes to explore in the virtual one. I’m more concerned we will and are running out of space to store our contraptions. Data storage manufacturers will be thriving.

ROTMetro 4y ago

That is a fake argument. It has been proven wrong on every one of these articles, yet pro-stealing people like yourself keep posting it. You can't copyright such works, only an 'installation' of those works. If you want to talk about copyright, maybe educate yourself on copyright. It's Title 17. https://www.copyright.gov/title17/ https://www.copyright.gov/title17/

dzink 4y ago
Which argument, which articles - be specific. AI content is not copyrightable at this stage. Drawing styles are not copyrightable. Name calling and labeling are ad-hominem attacks however and that has no place on HN.
- ROTMetro 4y ago
  Edit: First and foremost, I'm sorry you felt attacked. That is never OK. I need to step back from posting anything until I can be a decent human being. I regret not doing that before I posted. ----- People claiming you can copyright a canvas that is just a color (when you can't, you can only copyright the art installation/display). People claiming that you can copyright the alphabet (when you can't). It's just frustrating that HN wants to keep having this discussion but with ZERO basis in actual copyright law, and people making factually inaccurate claims as if they understand it. I had the same issue on a criminal law post. Someone posted completely factually inaccurate information regarding title 18 statutes, and HN blocking me from responding in a timely manner while people were reading the post. This just isn't a forum for informed discussion I guess, but peoples gut feelings and what they THINK copyright law is. Opinions are great, and needed, but established law is a real thing and should be part of a discussion that at it's core is about copyright.
  - dzink 4y ago
    Look at the inputs and outputs of generative AI art - specifically the ones shown in the post and others. The disconnect here is not our insights on copyright law (At least not for generative art. Maybe for copilot, code, and GPT3, but not for the art.) Hollie is a Character Artist. A Character has a combination of appearance, emotional radiance, mood, behavior, that have to fit in to create a unique persona and trigger an emotional response to that character from viewers. Stable Diffusion does not take or copy her characters - it mimics her drawing style in colors, hues (it reads what pixels are proximate to what other pixels and tries to apply that proximity to similar colors, line patterns in the future). When you create a stable diffusion image, you set a parameter of how much randomness to apply and how much variety, and what else to mix in. So any content it's trained on becomes a soup of colors and lines and hues and saturation. So if Hollie draws with de-saturated colors, and favors pinks and greens, an image produced with her name will probably have that, but not more than a soup mixed with objects searched by the words of the generator human. Code generation is different as a code has to appear in some form to work properly and that happens with a lot less variance, so generators there would likely remix a LOT more of the original, but images have a much much wider variance unless you ask specifically for as many keywords as possible (aka Mona Lisa by Leonardo Da Vinci) in which case you'd fall under trademark law as well probably (Which is also why Microsoft added trademarked images on their CDs so they could prosecute infringers easier).