4 ms·

Hey, we want to use machines to steal people's creative work, take away their jobs in the future, and create more algorithm generated garbage since it worked so

Hey, we want to use machines to steal people's creative work, take away their jobs in the future, and create more algorithm generated garbage since it worked so well for news sites and promoting videos/posts/social media. We also want to pretend that computer generated graphics are created by an 'artist' for the sole purpose of being able to assign copyright to our machine works, but be able to ignore artists and copyright in every other way. Why do people seem to have a strong opinion against this? It's just stealing the most intimate thing humans create (art) so that we can create soulless algorithmic versions of it for our own uses because evil artists won't let us just do what we want with their works and won't let us profit on their work. Artists are jerks.

yieldcrv 4y ago
> We also want to pretend that computer generated graphics are created by an 'artist' for the sole purpose of being able to assign copyright to our machine works The current IP rights system allows for work for hire, assignments. Reframing it to "I commissioned an AI" obliterates any debate about who owns what. When you commission the rights of what is created is assigned to you, for this machine model, just add that clarity in the TOS and its a done deal.
leereeves 4y ago
Creating art similar to another artist's work isn't stealing when humans do it, why would it be stealing when machines do it? (Unless the result is too similar, like the Wonder Woman image generated by Stable Diffusion shown in the article, in which case it's "stealing" whether created by human or machine.)
- manholio 4y ago
  Because machines are not humans, and shouldn't enjoy the benefits of fair use. Copyright law exists to balance the interests of the people that make up the society, not some abstract caricatural embodiment in algorithmic form.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    Should humans using machines enjoy the benefit of fair use?
    - manholio 4y ago
      Sure, if you build your own model, train it on copyrighted works, then use it to create art; or if you use someone else's model which properly license its copyrighted sources, and use that to create art. In both cases your output is a new creative work sufficiently different from its parents to not constitute infringement and enjoy its own copyright protection. However, the model creator/distributor will never be able to claim fair use on the model itself, which is choke full of unlicensed material and can only exist if trained on such material. It's not really a subtle or particularly difficult legal distinction, in traditional terms it's like an artistic collage (model output) vs a database of copyrighted works (trained model). The trained model is not a sufficiently different work that stands on its own, in fact it is just a compressed algorithmic representation of the works used to train it, legally speaking it is those works.
      - shadowgovt 4y ago
        In what way is the model chock full of unlicensed material? It was trained on unlicensed material, but I don't think you're ever going to be able to find a forensic auditor who can tease individual works out of the weights in a model. You can't reasonably assert that a model encodes individual works of copyrighted material in any way meaningful for copyright. Not without a change to the law.
        manholio 4y ago
        Obfuscation is not a valid defense against copyright infringement. If my database contains full encrypted copies of unlicensed works and I distribute keys to my customers for parts of those works, no forensic auditor will ever prove the full extent of my infringement without learning the full keyset. But I would argue that reproduction of even a single instance of an unlicensed non trivial fragment of a copyrighted work would taint that entire database. In the same way in AI a crafted prompt that creates striking similarities to a well known work, like this example here, is suficient proof that the model embeds unlicensed works; using a copyrighted work for training models is just another form of commercial exploitation that the original author should be compensated for.
shadowgovt 4y ago
I can't quite follow what you're saying due to your choice of subjects. "It's just stealing the most important thing humans create so we can create soulless algorithmic versions of it for our own uses..." Who is the 'we' there if not 'humans?' I can tell you the machines do not care one way or the other about art. What we're looking at is the ability for humans who have not trained to be artists being able to create something similar to trained output. That's what technology does: augment human capacity to do something. It's what it always does.

yieldcrv 4y ago

> We also want to pretend that computer generated graphics are created by an 'artist' for the sole purpose of being able to assign copyright to our machine works The current IP rights system allows for work for hire, assignments. Reframing it to "I commissioned an AI" obliterates any debate about who owns what. When you commission the rights of what is created is assigned to you, for this machine model, just add that clarity in the TOS and its a done deal.

leereeves 4y ago

Creating art similar to another artist's work isn't stealing when humans do it, why would it be stealing when machines do it? (Unless the result is too similar, like the Wonder Woman image generated by Stable Diffusion shown in the article, in which case it's "stealing" whether created by human or machine.)

manholio 4y ago
Because machines are not humans, and shouldn't enjoy the benefits of fair use. Copyright law exists to balance the interests of the people that make up the society, not some abstract caricatural embodiment in algorithmic form.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  Should humans using machines enjoy the benefit of fair use?
  - manholio 4y ago
    Sure, if you build your own model, train it on copyrighted works, then use it to create art; or if you use someone else's model which properly license its copyrighted sources, and use that to create art. In both cases your output is a new creative work sufficiently different from its parents to not constitute infringement and enjoy its own copyright protection. However, the model creator/distributor will never be able to claim fair use on the model itself, which is choke full of unlicensed material and can only exist if trained on such material. It's not really a subtle or particularly difficult legal distinction, in traditional terms it's like an artistic collage (model output) vs a database of copyrighted works (trained model). The trained model is not a sufficiently different work that stands on its own, in fact it is just a compressed algorithmic representation of the works used to train it, legally speaking it is those works.
    - shadowgovt 4y ago
      In what way is the model chock full of unlicensed material? It was trained on unlicensed material, but I don't think you're ever going to be able to find a forensic auditor who can tease individual works out of the weights in a model. You can't reasonably assert that a model encodes individual works of copyrighted material in any way meaningful for copyright. Not without a change to the law.
      - manholio 4y ago
        Obfuscation is not a valid defense against copyright infringement. If my database contains full encrypted copies of unlicensed works and I distribute keys to my customers for parts of those works, no forensic auditor will ever prove the full extent of my infringement without learning the full keyset. But I would argue that reproduction of even a single instance of an unlicensed non trivial fragment of a copyrighted work would taint that entire database. In the same way in AI a crafted prompt that creates striking similarities to a well known work, like this example here, is suficient proof that the model embeds unlicensed works; using a copyrighted work for training models is just another form of commercial exploitation that the original author should be compensated for.

shadowgovt 4y ago

I can't quite follow what you're saying due to your choice of subjects. "It's just stealing the most important thing humans create so we can create soulless algorithmic versions of it for our own uses..." Who is the 'we' there if not 'humans?' I can tell you the machines do not care one way or the other about art. What we're looking at is the ability for humans who have not trained to be artists being able to create something similar to trained output. That's what technology does: augment human capacity to do something. It's what it always does.