16 ms·

Where are you going to get the training data, once copyright law is amended to protect artists from this new kind of intellectual property theft? Without enorm

Where are you going to get the training data, once copyright law is amended to protect artists from this new kind of intellectual property theft? Without enormous training data from human victims, your "Artificial Intelligence" doesn't exist. In the end, your "AI" is just huge interpolator, using matrix multiplications and max() or gelu() to interpolate the work of real intelligence: the human artists. Once it's illegal, only criminals will use it. No first-world company will break the law to save money on artists. You think anyone who matters will secretly use a neural net trained in violation of copyright? Think again. I say this as a person who writes GPU BLAS kernels professionally at a company you've heard of. I directly profit from this theft. But I also know it's wrong.

Jack000 4y ago
shutterstock, like what openai/dalle-2 is doing? The only impact this kind of legislation will have is to ensure that only big companies get to train large models.
capybara_2020 4y ago
Don't large companies already have access to "legal" training data? They can use the images you uploaded. Most ToS have language to allow them to do that.
nikanj 4y ago
Where do the human artists get their copyright-free training data? Can a human copy the style of a famous artist and break copyright? Does the legal situation change if instead of a pencil they use photoshop, or if instead of photoshop they use runway?
- mola 4y ago
  Yes, it changes. Please explain why not.
chairhairair 4y ago
Legislation will be too slow.
dontreact 4y ago
There’s a lot of data without copyright out there
- bediger4000 4y ago
  Yes, but it's pretty hard to definitively say that a particular work is not copyrighted, given the life+X years term, and that works don't have to be marked as copyrighted. I believe that's why books have had fewer illustrations these last 20 years: authors can't afford to indemnify publishers against copyright suits over illustrations, and it's really hard to make sure either you have the correct permission or it's out of copyright.
EMIRELADERO 4y ago
I personally believe that both training and generating images through AI is fair use. It's transformative. You're creating completely new ideas. Consider that plus the fact that styles aren't copyrightable. Also keep in mind that, at least in the US, you can't legislate your way out of fair use since it's a constitutional right. (It's the result of the tension that exists between the copyright clause and the first amendment)
- wwweston 4y ago
  The output is transformative. But in order to use it as an input to a training set, you're effectively making a copy that may or may not be authorized, not to mention at some level the intermediate representation might well present a copyright issue. "Style" isn't the issue. I think on an ethical level we're just going to need the expectation of separate agreements / legal conceptions for having ones work go into a training set. It's novel territory, providing not only work-for-hire but meta-work-for-hire. Might even be that there's no true compensation without equity.
  - parineum 4y ago
    I can only potentially see an issue with that if you're selling the model which is essentially a collection of copyrighted works (organized in a new way). However, the output of that model is the epitome of derivative work. The trained model has to be viewed as an artistic tool used by the artist to create art, imo.
    - didibus 4y ago
      Derivative work isn't permitted under current copyright though, you know that? Like I can't release a sequel to a Star Wars movie without getting a license to do so by Disney, because they own the original work's copyright, I'm not allowed to produce a derivative of it. Similarly this is why there needs to be an explicit open source license that allows you to produce derivative work from it. That's the crux of it, the trained model is a derivative work, literally it's mathematically derived almost deterministically (ignoring SDG being stochastic). The question is, even though it's derivative, is it still fair use to use it without permission?
ramesh31 4y ago
“Good artists borrow, great artists steal.” We’ve argued this for centuries. Fair use is a fine line, but it exists. And it doesn’t matter whether the generative agent is human or machine. If a sufficiently unique work of art is the result, it’s not stealing.
HHC-Hunter 4y ago
> Where are you going to get the training data, once copyright law is amended to protect artists from this intellectual property theft? The same places as before? What's stopping anyone from training these models? The cat is out of the bag and artists need to learn they will have to cede on these copyright issues. Similar to musicians having to cede on digital reproduction of music.
- darkerside 4y ago
  DRM never went away. It just became so seamless we never notice it anymore.
  - pshc 4y ago
    It's pretty common for youtubers and streamers to get their content demonetized, muted or pulled for a bogus copyright violation.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
SkyPuncher 4y ago
Am I facetious for saying that you'd simply buy it? Artists will become style makers.
- kodah 4y ago
  That's the trajectory if we stay on this path. Artists would essentially become AI power users. The question upstream of that is, do you think this is a good path? Personally, I think AI has done about as much as crypto, maybe even less. I can't think of a single use of AI that I couldn't do without.
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    AI image recognition is widely in use for real products today. I use it pretty regularly to identify plants. Have even used it a few times to identify electrical or mechanical parts.
    - kodah 4y ago
      I use it for that too, I said things I couldn't do without.
      - Gigachad 4y ago
        Considering you can move to the middle of the jungle and survive with sticks and stones, that covers essentially everything.
        kodah 4y ago
        Loads of insight from a dude named Gigachad. Colour me surprised.
- Applejinx 4y ago
  Not at all. I'm no great artist but I did about 440 episodes of a webcomic some years ago. That's hundreds of times what I'd need to train an AI on that style. Now consider if I'd made that, trained the AI, and then DID NOT SHARE IT. Suddenly, I've got an AI thing that other people don't have (not directly, they can eventually have a second-order knockoff of it) made to express an intention that knockoffs won't have. So I'd have both the story to tell (hence the original training set) and the means to automate the creation of it. You've already got artists/technicians making things like Clip Studio brushes, things that transform a stroke into a very different style or dump scatterings of clip art for texture. This is literally the same thing only way more sophisticated. Just because you have a 'foliage brush' doesn't mean you can draw a woodland scene, it just makes the texture rendering trivial. Just because you can type 'woodland scene' doesn't make it a SCENE, it just makes the image rendering trivial. Does it serve a story purpose? What does the imagery do, beyond just existing? The mere existence of 'imagery in X style' is rapidly going to become really boring. Once 'an image can look like anything at all' becomes commonplace, to be impressed by that will be about as sophisticated as being impressed that plastic is shiny. It becomes all about 'what did you do with it?' and that is where artists come in.
prvc 4y ago
Would you permit human students of art to view and learn from copyrighted images under these hypothetical laws?
- rhelsing 4y ago
  The comparison between a ML model and a human is often used but it is not very useful. The problem is in most of these cases is that a powerful entity is profiting off of other people's work without their consent and gives nothing to the exploited members in return. Sure, an individual human learns from copyrighted works and reincorporates to make something slightly new all the time. And then they may also profit from it and not give anything in return to those that came before. The problem here is the scale and the power that enables that scale. This is industrial level mining of non-consenting humans, exploiting their life's work in many cases.
  - cercatrova 4y ago
    A powerful entity such as...an open source company like Stable Diffusion?
    - throwaway290 4y ago
      Such as Microsoft with Copilot
      - cercatrova 4y ago
        The very nature of AI is that anyone can make their own model with enough training. There are already open versions of Copilot available, such as Fauxpilot, or GPT Neo for GPT-3, so I never understand the "only rich and powerful will have AI." I mean, sure, some will, but just like programming, the effort will eventually be distributed to open source versions.
        throwaway290 4y ago
        As an OSS contributor you can nicely ask people building some OSS equivalent of Copilot to not use your work as training data, and they would comply because this is culture. Good luck doing the same with a megacorp
abetusk 4y ago
It will be a hellscape if copyright law is extended to include artistic style. Copyright is already overreaching and broad. To extend it further would be disastrous for the public and for the small to mid tier artist. I could imagine that if copyright law were to be extended in this way, artists would either be small enough to fall under the radar or select for popular enough artists that they could sub-license the 'copyrighted style' in question. Regardless, only large corporations and a select few 'superstar' artists would benefit at the expense of the vast majority of artists and the public. If this were to pass (and I very much doubt there's a good chance of it happening), all is not lost because there is a wealth of public domain imagery that we can still train on. This could then snowball into providing richer datasets to train on. I don't like the framing of a lot of these arguments. I'm paying taxes to provide a state apparatus that provides copyright legal protection for artists. I'm happy to do this, up to a point, as it's essentially a contract that provides incentives to innovation by rewarding artists, with the understanding that, eventually, the artists works get to be used by the public (that is, given to the public domain/commons). Copyright law, at least in the US, specifically forbids ideas and "styles" to focus on specific realizations. I understand we're in a shifting landscape where technology is changing this narrative and that copyright law was created with different technology in mind but copyright law exists, presumably, as a compromise to incentivize artistic creation while serving the public good. Copyright law is not meant to be corporate welfare nor is it meant to protect the artist at the expense of the public, in perpetuity. It would be nice to have a more reasoned argument instead of this knee-jerk reaction of theft.
- pradn 4y ago
  We don't have to even get to the point of extending copyright to artistic style. If using copyrighted art to train a model is found to not be fair use, the technology will no longer be above board. Companies in countries with these rules won't be able to ignore them. What could happen if this interpretation of fair use comes to pass? Model trainers may have to license images from companies like Getty. In a sense, it should be cheaper than using an image individually. In some countries, music organizations deal with licensing large sets of songs, no need to negotiate with each label or artist individually. That sort of arrangement could come to pass. Perhaps there'll be a simple option on image upload sites to select the license for the image - allow or disallow model training. Or perhaps everyone will simply use below-the-board models surreptitiously.
yrgulation 4y ago
You underestimate people’s willingness to sacrifice other people’s work for the benefit of a few corporations and their cult like leadership. Already some argue passionately that ai stealing data is just like humans learning from other humans. Let alone that once a new trend starts ai will have to catchup - meaning that for a while it will lag so sufficient data is available for it to steal again. Also if we completely push artists out due to ever lower costs there will be little progress in original content.
- merely-unlikely 4y ago
  There will still be a market for human artists. Humans like the works created by other humans.
  - yrgulation 4y ago
    Yes but smaller. There is a lot of content outside acclaimed paintings that we will not benefit from, and most important, people wont get to practice. And art is all about practice. For every 10k mediocre artists we replace with ai we will miss that one great artist that was taken out of the pool because they couldnt practice because the job no longer exists. I see the benefits of the technology, but the price we will pay will be too large. Same could be said about photoshop but photoshop is a tool. Ai is a mind.
    - est31 4y ago
      There is one star trek episode (think it was TNG but not sure) where the local civilization is totally dependent on some benevolent AI that their anchestors built. It broke but due to their reliance on it, they lost all expertise to repair it.
      - yrgulation 4y ago
        Great, now i have to watch the whole series again just to find that episode. On a serious note i am now confused. Because at the same time i see ai generated art as a tool for creating new art, a facilitator. Still i dont agree people’s ip should be used without their consent. Oh boy progress is confusing sometimes.
nobodyandproud 4y ago
> Once it's illegal, only the criminals will use it. No first-world company will break the law to save money on artists. You think anyone who matters will secretly use a neural net trained in violation of copyright? Think again. Disney is a first world company and it does exactly that: https://www.yahoo.com/now/column-disney-allegedly-cheated-hundreds-130008971.html https://www.yahoo.com/now/column-disney-allegedly-cheated-hu... Getty images is another: https://petapixel.com/2016/08/04/getty-images-sued-accused-misusing-47000-photos/ https://petapixel.com/2016/08/04/getty-images-sued-accused-m... In the US, the approach is to see what you can get away with, and you can get away with a lot with a pile of money and an army of lawyers.
- aiappreciator 4y ago
  This can also be trivially circumvented: Step 1. Hire some outsourced artist in the rest of the world, where people don't care about AI art regulation. Step 2. Watch as those outsourced artists outproduce the domestic artists, since they have the twin advantage of lower costs AND better quality due to being able to use insanely powerful AIs. Step 3. Watch as the domestic art industry gets wiped out, just like manufacturing did. Politicians can understand this 1.2.3, therefore they'll never ban art AI.
nootropicat 4y ago
The only outcome of this would be that all commercial image/video AI creation tools are Chinese, but illegal to directly use in the West, so everyone wanting to do this legally has to pay contractors in China instead that semi-unofficially use these tools, but pretend not to. There's no putting the genie back into the bottle.
worthless-trash 4y ago
As only a shitty C developer, I do have a question regarding the possible uses of this kind of technology. Could you use the same theory to model 3d drawings (parts ?) in STL for manufacturing. Ie, is the ai limited that way ?
- nineteen999 4y ago
  Probably, with some more training and more work. https://dreamfusion3d.github.io/ https://dreamfusion3d.github.io/ Regards, another shitty C programmer
  - worthless-trash 4y ago
    I had googled this, but i didn't get much on my first few terms. Thanks mate.
jackblemming 4y ago
You know piracy (actual theft, not just pure unsubstantiated hypotheticals) exists and yet the game, music, and entertainment industries seem to be doing just fine. I think artists will be OK. I would love to change my position if there's any evidence. Perhaps it could start with a single example of any non-trivial job position being removed due to these image generation models.
- didibus 4y ago
  I've already seen it happen a little. There's a few games, albeit often indie, where they used generative music makers for their soundtrack, saving them having to hire a music producer. I mean, if you've used or tried any of those models, you know that very soon it will allow an artist to be way more productive, what needed 50 artists might only need 30 now. I'd really be surprised if this didn't cost jobs. The only possibility it doesn't is that the projects get even bigger in scope, so increase productivity would go into more am ambitious projects instead of job cuts.
smohare 4y ago
throwaway290 4y ago
Powerful interests of media giants got copyright law where it is now, they mostly decide where it goes. If training models on illegally scraped indie artist imagery allows the likes of Disney to save money then there is no one to lobby for copyright law to be strictly applied in this case.
sdenton4 4y ago
The 2030's will be dominated by a resurgence of 17th century styles, in the public domain and therefore available for genetics modeling...
stuntkite 4y ago
I think you underestimate the exponential scale of what's happening and how the training data can make and dictate digital worlds to then use to train itself again to then be directed and prompted by humans again and then rinse repeat except we also train an AI to be the human who directs and prompts but throw in a random seed but also still take in some human interaction and use that to build whole visual worlds. Flat or in Unreal Nanite 3D. Characters and places. Normal light and light we haven't seen... Train again. Use the previous human AI but now the human prompts create a set of human AIs to feed back into that and then that is put out into a space to make a set of paintings as controls that are painted by robots and those are scanned in intense detail by cameras that also pick up near IR and UV and those are used as a training set to seed the new environments which is then told to make me an episode of Duckman from a half remembered drunk memory voice memo and the output is better than the original show probably ever was. Then turn that AI loose and let the internet use it to make Duckman episodes but people figure out how to tweak the prompts to make Toy Story at scale but also use it to train their own AIs. We have reliable secure GPU multi tenancy now. Next year we'll start seeing AI designed silicon photonics creeping in. All this GPU training is now pretty accessible to be passed all over the internet and back securely and streaming. No one has any clue what's coming in a very short few months. Well, we have a few ideas... but it's going to be surprising. These systems build systems to build more systems there and back again. The only constraint being energy availability and attention. The powers that be captured all of human experience for a couple decades to seed this project. So off we go I guess! This moves so much faster than copyright law. This is our new world. The compression of information contained inside of models is something that existing bureaucratic systems cannot hope to regulate. I'm pretty sure no one that can is even slightly interested in regulating it anyway. Our new way of life is gonna be pretty weird. I think some fun new media will come out of it though. Which is pretty cool. Also you know... Utopia or Oblivion.
hoseja 4y ago
Wait till you find out how brains work. Will you be mandating copyright enforcement chips in the frontal lobe? Your position is untenable and will be destroyed thoroughly, if not in places where Disney and co. are entrenched then everywhere else first and eventually in Disneylands too.
- trention 4y ago
  There is no reason to legally treat humans and algorithms the same way. Only insane, moronic singularitarians claim otherwise.
esjeon 4y ago
An exception should be recognized: open models - free of charge, with no strings attached. I think this is the best approach because: (1) Models are public, so everyone can benefit from them. (2) Such models can be trained on public data for improvements. (No complexity involved over paying for data, no copyright risks regarding data, etc) (3) Companies can sell services. (model-as-a-service, customization, apps/tools, education, etc) (4) Companies may lose competitive edges, but they can enjoy the bigger market. (I'm looking at Matlab and Mathematica. They are really good, but Python took the market eventually.) It feels like many of FOSS pros/cons can be plugged in here as-is.
visarga 4y ago
> Without enormous training data from human victims, your "Artificial Intelligence" doesn't exist. Copyright only concerns with expression, not ideas. You can still learn the concepts from copyrighted content without violating copyright. There is a limit to what can be protected from AI with copyrights. When they trained Stable Diffusion they used 5B image-text pairs, but the final model fits in 5GB. So they didn't actually take too much, about 1 byte per input example, which is in line with the idea of learning general concepts rather than copying. An interesting parallel - the human DNA is about the same size, 3.2B nucleotides. The SD model is like a cultural DNA, and like DNA is compact, easy to replicate and powerful. At this level copyright is an anti-pattern, genes and memes like to travel and evolve.
BeFlatXIII 4y ago
> Where are you going to get the training data, once copyright law is amended to protect artists from this new kind of intellectual property theft? For me, countries that don't enforce that or old models from before the ban. Then again, I'm a nerd who wouldn't release my creations commercially—they'd be AI-generated shitposts or images done for the joy of exploring what my new tools can do.
wdutch 4y ago
> No first-world company will break the law to save money on artists If the future of copyright law in the west moves to outlaw use in training data then the west will lose out to companies from China, Vietnam and anywhere else that doesn't care at all about western copyright. I think it will give them a competitive edge.

Jack000 4y ago

shutterstock, like what openai/dalle-2 is doing? The only impact this kind of legislation will have is to ensure that only big companies get to train large models.

capybara_2020 4y ago

Don't large companies already have access to "legal" training data? They can use the images you uploaded. Most ToS have language to allow them to do that.

nikanj 4y ago

Where do the human artists get their copyright-free training data? Can a human copy the style of a famous artist and break copyright? Does the legal situation change if instead of a pencil they use photoshop, or if instead of photoshop they use runway?

mola 4y ago
Yes, it changes. Please explain why not.

chairhairair 4y ago

Legislation will be too slow.

dontreact 4y ago

There’s a lot of data without copyright out there

bediger4000 4y ago
Yes, but it's pretty hard to definitively say that a particular work is not copyrighted, given the life+X years term, and that works don't have to be marked as copyrighted. I believe that's why books have had fewer illustrations these last 20 years: authors can't afford to indemnify publishers against copyright suits over illustrations, and it's really hard to make sure either you have the correct permission or it's out of copyright.

EMIRELADERO 4y ago

I personally believe that both training and generating images through AI is fair use. It's transformative. You're creating completely new ideas. Consider that plus the fact that styles aren't copyrightable. Also keep in mind that, at least in the US, you can't legislate your way out of fair use since it's a constitutional right. (It's the result of the tension that exists between the copyright clause and the first amendment)

wwweston 4y ago
The output is transformative. But in order to use it as an input to a training set, you're effectively making a copy that may or may not be authorized, not to mention at some level the intermediate representation might well present a copyright issue. "Style" isn't the issue. I think on an ethical level we're just going to need the expectation of separate agreements / legal conceptions for having ones work go into a training set. It's novel territory, providing not only work-for-hire but meta-work-for-hire. Might even be that there's no true compensation without equity.
- parineum 4y ago
  I can only potentially see an issue with that if you're selling the model which is essentially a collection of copyrighted works (organized in a new way). However, the output of that model is the epitome of derivative work. The trained model has to be viewed as an artistic tool used by the artist to create art, imo.
  - didibus 4y ago
    Derivative work isn't permitted under current copyright though, you know that? Like I can't release a sequel to a Star Wars movie without getting a license to do so by Disney, because they own the original work's copyright, I'm not allowed to produce a derivative of it. Similarly this is why there needs to be an explicit open source license that allows you to produce derivative work from it. That's the crux of it, the trained model is a derivative work, literally it's mathematically derived almost deterministically (ignoring SDG being stochastic). The question is, even though it's derivative, is it still fair use to use it without permission?

ramesh31 4y ago

“Good artists borrow, great artists steal.” We’ve argued this for centuries. Fair use is a fine line, but it exists. And it doesn’t matter whether the generative agent is human or machine. If a sufficiently unique work of art is the result, it’s not stealing.

HHC-Hunter 4y ago

> Where are you going to get the training data, once copyright law is amended to protect artists from this intellectual property theft? The same places as before? What's stopping anyone from training these models? The cat is out of the bag and artists need to learn they will have to cede on these copyright issues. Similar to musicians having to cede on digital reproduction of music.

darkerside 4y ago
DRM never went away. It just became so seamless we never notice it anymore.
- pshc 4y ago
  It's pretty common for youtubers and streamers to get their content demonetized, muted or pulled for a bogus copyright violation.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

SkyPuncher 4y ago

Am I facetious for saying that you'd simply buy it? Artists will become style makers.

kodah 4y ago
That's the trajectory if we stay on this path. Artists would essentially become AI power users. The question upstream of that is, do you think this is a good path? Personally, I think AI has done about as much as crypto, maybe even less. I can't think of a single use of AI that I couldn't do without.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  AI image recognition is widely in use for real products today. I use it pretty regularly to identify plants. Have even used it a few times to identify electrical or mechanical parts.
  - kodah 4y ago
    I use it for that too, I said things I couldn't do without.
    - Gigachad 4y ago
      Considering you can move to the middle of the jungle and survive with sticks and stones, that covers essentially everything.
      - kodah 4y ago
        Loads of insight from a dude named Gigachad. Colour me surprised.
Applejinx 4y ago
Not at all. I'm no great artist but I did about 440 episodes of a webcomic some years ago. That's hundreds of times what I'd need to train an AI on that style. Now consider if I'd made that, trained the AI, and then DID NOT SHARE IT. Suddenly, I've got an AI thing that other people don't have (not directly, they can eventually have a second-order knockoff of it) made to express an intention that knockoffs won't have. So I'd have both the story to tell (hence the original training set) and the means to automate the creation of it. You've already got artists/technicians making things like Clip Studio brushes, things that transform a stroke into a very different style or dump scatterings of clip art for texture. This is literally the same thing only way more sophisticated. Just because you have a 'foliage brush' doesn't mean you can draw a woodland scene, it just makes the texture rendering trivial. Just because you can type 'woodland scene' doesn't make it a SCENE, it just makes the image rendering trivial. Does it serve a story purpose? What does the imagery do, beyond just existing? The mere existence of 'imagery in X style' is rapidly going to become really boring. Once 'an image can look like anything at all' becomes commonplace, to be impressed by that will be about as sophisticated as being impressed that plastic is shiny. It becomes all about 'what did you do with it?' and that is where artists come in.

prvc 4y ago

Would you permit human students of art to view and learn from copyrighted images under these hypothetical laws?

rhelsing 4y ago
The comparison between a ML model and a human is often used but it is not very useful. The problem is in most of these cases is that a powerful entity is profiting off of other people's work without their consent and gives nothing to the exploited members in return. Sure, an individual human learns from copyrighted works and reincorporates to make something slightly new all the time. And then they may also profit from it and not give anything in return to those that came before. The problem here is the scale and the power that enables that scale. This is industrial level mining of non-consenting humans, exploiting their life's work in many cases.
- cercatrova 4y ago
  A powerful entity such as...an open source company like Stable Diffusion?
  - throwaway290 4y ago
    Such as Microsoft with Copilot
    - cercatrova 4y ago
      The very nature of AI is that anyone can make their own model with enough training. There are already open versions of Copilot available, such as Fauxpilot, or GPT Neo for GPT-3, so I never understand the "only rich and powerful will have AI." I mean, sure, some will, but just like programming, the effort will eventually be distributed to open source versions.
      - throwaway290 4y ago
        As an OSS contributor you can nicely ask people building some OSS equivalent of Copilot to not use your work as training data, and they would comply because this is culture. Good luck doing the same with a megacorp

abetusk 4y ago

It will be a hellscape if copyright law is extended to include artistic style. Copyright is already overreaching and broad. To extend it further would be disastrous for the public and for the small to mid tier artist. I could imagine that if copyright law were to be extended in this way, artists would either be small enough to fall under the radar or select for popular enough artists that they could sub-license the 'copyrighted style' in question. Regardless, only large corporations and a select few 'superstar' artists would benefit at the expense of the vast majority of artists and the public. If this were to pass (and I very much doubt there's a good chance of it happening), all is not lost because there is a wealth of public domain imagery that we can still train on. This could then snowball into providing richer datasets to train on. I don't like the framing of a lot of these arguments. I'm paying taxes to provide a state apparatus that provides copyright legal protection for artists. I'm happy to do this, up to a point, as it's essentially a contract that provides incentives to innovation by rewarding artists, with the understanding that, eventually, the artists works get to be used by the public (that is, given to the public domain/commons). Copyright law, at least in the US, specifically forbids ideas and "styles" to focus on specific realizations. I understand we're in a shifting landscape where technology is changing this narrative and that copyright law was created with different technology in mind but copyright law exists, presumably, as a compromise to incentivize artistic creation while serving the public good. Copyright law is not meant to be corporate welfare nor is it meant to protect the artist at the expense of the public, in perpetuity. It would be nice to have a more reasoned argument instead of this knee-jerk reaction of theft.

pradn 4y ago
We don't have to even get to the point of extending copyright to artistic style. If using copyrighted art to train a model is found to not be fair use, the technology will no longer be above board. Companies in countries with these rules won't be able to ignore them. What could happen if this interpretation of fair use comes to pass? Model trainers may have to license images from companies like Getty. In a sense, it should be cheaper than using an image individually. In some countries, music organizations deal with licensing large sets of songs, no need to negotiate with each label or artist individually. That sort of arrangement could come to pass. Perhaps there'll be a simple option on image upload sites to select the license for the image - allow or disallow model training. Or perhaps everyone will simply use below-the-board models surreptitiously.

yrgulation 4y ago

You underestimate people’s willingness to sacrifice other people’s work for the benefit of a few corporations and their cult like leadership. Already some argue passionately that ai stealing data is just like humans learning from other humans. Let alone that once a new trend starts ai will have to catchup - meaning that for a while it will lag so sufficient data is available for it to steal again. Also if we completely push artists out due to ever lower costs there will be little progress in original content.

merely-unlikely 4y ago
There will still be a market for human artists. Humans like the works created by other humans.
- yrgulation 4y ago
  Yes but smaller. There is a lot of content outside acclaimed paintings that we will not benefit from, and most important, people wont get to practice. And art is all about practice. For every 10k mediocre artists we replace with ai we will miss that one great artist that was taken out of the pool because they couldnt practice because the job no longer exists. I see the benefits of the technology, but the price we will pay will be too large. Same could be said about photoshop but photoshop is a tool. Ai is a mind.
  - est31 4y ago
    There is one star trek episode (think it was TNG but not sure) where the local civilization is totally dependent on some benevolent AI that their anchestors built. It broke but due to their reliance on it, they lost all expertise to repair it.
    - yrgulation 4y ago
      Great, now i have to watch the whole series again just to find that episode. On a serious note i am now confused. Because at the same time i see ai generated art as a tool for creating new art, a facilitator. Still i dont agree people’s ip should be used without their consent. Oh boy progress is confusing sometimes.

nobodyandproud 4y ago

> Once it's illegal, only the criminals will use it. No first-world company will break the law to save money on artists. You think anyone who matters will secretly use a neural net trained in violation of copyright? Think again. Disney is a first world company and it does exactly that: https://www.yahoo.com/now/column-disney-allegedly-cheated-hundreds-130008971.html https://www.yahoo.com/now/column-disney-allegedly-cheated-hu... Getty images is another: https://petapixel.com/2016/08/04/getty-images-sued-accused-misusing-47000-photos/ https://petapixel.com/2016/08/04/getty-images-sued-accused-m... In the US, the approach is to see what you can get away with, and you can get away with a lot with a pile of money and an army of lawyers.

aiappreciator 4y ago
This can also be trivially circumvented: Step 1. Hire some outsourced artist in the rest of the world, where people don't care about AI art regulation. Step 2. Watch as those outsourced artists outproduce the domestic artists, since they have the twin advantage of lower costs AND better quality due to being able to use insanely powerful AIs. Step 3. Watch as the domestic art industry gets wiped out, just like manufacturing did. Politicians can understand this 1.2.3, therefore they'll never ban art AI.

nootropicat 4y ago

The only outcome of this would be that all commercial image/video AI creation tools are Chinese, but illegal to directly use in the West, so everyone wanting to do this legally has to pay contractors in China instead that semi-unofficially use these tools, but pretend not to. There's no putting the genie back into the bottle.

worthless-trash 4y ago

As only a shitty C developer, I do have a question regarding the possible uses of this kind of technology. Could you use the same theory to model 3d drawings (parts ?) in STL for manufacturing. Ie, is the ai limited that way ?

nineteen999 4y ago
Probably, with some more training and more work. https://dreamfusion3d.github.io/ https://dreamfusion3d.github.io/ Regards, another shitty C programmer
- worthless-trash 4y ago
  I had googled this, but i didn't get much on my first few terms. Thanks mate.

jackblemming 4y ago

You know piracy (actual theft, not just pure unsubstantiated hypotheticals) exists and yet the game, music, and entertainment industries seem to be doing just fine. I think artists will be OK. I would love to change my position if there's any evidence. Perhaps it could start with a single example of any non-trivial job position being removed due to these image generation models.

didibus 4y ago
I've already seen it happen a little. There's a few games, albeit often indie, where they used generative music makers for their soundtrack, saving them having to hire a music producer. I mean, if you've used or tried any of those models, you know that very soon it will allow an artist to be way more productive, what needed 50 artists might only need 30 now. I'd really be surprised if this didn't cost jobs. The only possibility it doesn't is that the projects get even bigger in scope, so increase productivity would go into more am ambitious projects instead of job cuts.

smohare 4y ago

throwaway290 4y ago

Powerful interests of media giants got copyright law where it is now, they mostly decide where it goes. If training models on illegally scraped indie artist imagery allows the likes of Disney to save money then there is no one to lobby for copyright law to be strictly applied in this case.

sdenton4 4y ago

The 2030's will be dominated by a resurgence of 17th century styles, in the public domain and therefore available for genetics modeling...

stuntkite 4y ago

I think you underestimate the exponential scale of what's happening and how the training data can make and dictate digital worlds to then use to train itself again to then be directed and prompted by humans again and then rinse repeat except we also train an AI to be the human who directs and prompts but throw in a random seed but also still take in some human interaction and use that to build whole visual worlds. Flat or in Unreal Nanite 3D. Characters and places. Normal light and light we haven't seen... Train again. Use the previous human AI but now the human prompts create a set of human AIs to feed back into that and then that is put out into a space to make a set of paintings as controls that are painted by robots and those are scanned in intense detail by cameras that also pick up near IR and UV and those are used as a training set to seed the new environments which is then told to make me an episode of Duckman from a half remembered drunk memory voice memo and the output is better than the original show probably ever was. Then turn that AI loose and let the internet use it to make Duckman episodes but people figure out how to tweak the prompts to make Toy Story at scale but also use it to train their own AIs. We have reliable secure GPU multi tenancy now. Next year we'll start seeing AI designed silicon photonics creeping in. All this GPU training is now pretty accessible to be passed all over the internet and back securely and streaming. No one has any clue what's coming in a very short few months. Well, we have a few ideas... but it's going to be surprising. These systems build systems to build more systems there and back again. The only constraint being energy availability and attention. The powers that be captured all of human experience for a couple decades to seed this project. So off we go I guess! This moves so much faster than copyright law. This is our new world. The compression of information contained inside of models is something that existing bureaucratic systems cannot hope to regulate. I'm pretty sure no one that can is even slightly interested in regulating it anyway. Our new way of life is gonna be pretty weird. I think some fun new media will come out of it though. Which is pretty cool. Also you know... Utopia or Oblivion.

hoseja 4y ago

Wait till you find out how brains work. Will you be mandating copyright enforcement chips in the frontal lobe? Your position is untenable and will be destroyed thoroughly, if not in places where Disney and co. are entrenched then everywhere else first and eventually in Disneylands too.

trention 4y ago
There is no reason to legally treat humans and algorithms the same way. Only insane, moronic singularitarians claim otherwise.

esjeon 4y ago

An exception should be recognized: open models - free of charge, with no strings attached. I think this is the best approach because: (1) Models are public, so everyone can benefit from them. (2) Such models can be trained on public data for improvements. (No complexity involved over paying for data, no copyright risks regarding data, etc) (3) Companies can sell services. (model-as-a-service, customization, apps/tools, education, etc) (4) Companies may lose competitive edges, but they can enjoy the bigger market. (I'm looking at Matlab and Mathematica. They are really good, but Python took the market eventually.) It feels like many of FOSS pros/cons can be plugged in here as-is.

visarga 4y ago

> Without enormous training data from human victims, your "Artificial Intelligence" doesn't exist. Copyright only concerns with expression, not ideas. You can still learn the concepts from copyrighted content without violating copyright. There is a limit to what can be protected from AI with copyrights. When they trained Stable Diffusion they used 5B image-text pairs, but the final model fits in 5GB. So they didn't actually take too much, about 1 byte per input example, which is in line with the idea of learning general concepts rather than copying. An interesting parallel - the human DNA is about the same size, 3.2B nucleotides. The SD model is like a cultural DNA, and like DNA is compact, easy to replicate and powerful. At this level copyright is an anti-pattern, genes and memes like to travel and evolve.

BeFlatXIII 4y ago

> Where are you going to get the training data, once copyright law is amended to protect artists from this new kind of intellectual property theft? For me, countries that don't enforce that or old models from before the ban. Then again, I'm a nerd who wouldn't release my creations commercially—they'd be AI-generated shitposts or images done for the joy of exploring what my new tools can do.

wdutch 4y ago

> No first-world company will break the law to save money on artists If the future of copyright law in the west moves to outlaw use in training data then the west will lose out to companies from China, Vietnam and anywhere else that doesn't care at all about western copyright. I think it will give them a competitive edge.