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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 disast

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.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Should we request that all human artists verify that the weighting between the neuron connections in their brain wasn’t influenced by any copyrighted media? Or similarly, if a company trains a model and then bins the training data. How would you verify any artists work was in there?
  - Filligree 4y ago
    That would make sense to me. It shouldn't be legal for anyone who's seen popular culture to become an artist.
  - tumult 4y ago
    Computers aren't people. Software isn't humans.
    - _aavaa_ 4y ago
      That’s irrelevant, the argument is that copyrighted work shouldn’t be used to influence new work.
      - auggierose 4y ago
        No, the argument is that humans are treated differently than hardware/software before the law.
        _aavaa_ 4y ago
        I think we're reading different threads. As others have already mentioned here before: - a "style" isn't copyright-able - Looking at how others have done art, imitating them to learn, and then combining what we learned with everything else we've seen in our life is how humans produce art. And it's the same way that stablediffusion produces art: train on data, reproduce based on what it's learned, combine everything its seen with a prompt to create something new.
    - Gigachad 4y ago

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.

Gigachad 4y ago
Should we request that all human artists verify that the weighting between the neuron connections in their brain wasn’t influenced by any copyrighted media? Or similarly, if a company trains a model and then bins the training data. How would you verify any artists work was in there?
- Filligree 4y ago
  That would make sense to me. It shouldn't be legal for anyone who's seen popular culture to become an artist.
- tumult 4y ago
  Computers aren't people. Software isn't humans.
  - _aavaa_ 4y ago
    That’s irrelevant, the argument is that copyrighted work shouldn’t be used to influence new work.
    - auggierose 4y ago
      No, the argument is that humans are treated differently than hardware/software before the law.
      - _aavaa_ 4y ago
        I think we're reading different threads. As others have already mentioned here before: - a "style" isn't copyright-able - Looking at how others have done art, imitating them to learn, and then combining what we learned with everything else we've seen in our life is how humans produce art. And it's the same way that stablediffusion produces art: train on data, reproduce based on what it's learned, combine everything its seen with a prompt to create something new.
  - Gigachad 4y ago