5 ms·

> The weights are like distilled intellectual property. You're distributing an enormous body of other people's work, to enable derivative work without attributi

by judge2020 4y ago

> The weights are like distilled intellectual property. You're distributing an enormous body of other people's work, to enable derivative work without attribution? Huge harm to society, make it illegal. The thing is that you're distributing only the instructions for making other peoples' work. There are art books and articles explain the styles of certain artists and what techniques they use to achieve it; you could probably recreate "the Mona Lisa but in the style of Marc Chagall with cool glasses on" with real paint if you had previously stared at both the Mona Lisa and Marc's art for hours at a time. Are you infringing upon either of their copyrights by combining them? Probably not. But if you just recreated the Mona Lisa after having stared at it for hours, and it turned out nearly identical, then it would be. So where is the line?

galaxyLogic 4y ago
Well think if you took the left side of Mona Lisa and combined it with Van Gog's Starry night? Would that be ok? Of course not. But if you took 100 paintings from 100 artists and clipped all into small jigsaw pieces then recombined them randomly to create a new picture, that would probably not be considered "derived art". What matters is how much creativity you put into the process. Does the creative esthetics of the work derive from your efforts, or from those of the existing author's existing art. But if I took 100 paintings from a single artist and combined them all into new works of art, that would probably be copyright infringement in my view, and is what seems to be happening here. Consider the history of trademark lawsuits. You can be sued if you create something that somehow resembles an existing trademark, say use the exact same color as Coca-Cola for something similar. So I think the guiding principle is or should be whether what you create can be confused with the work of some other highly original artist. It doesn't matter if you painted it all, if it looks similar enough that people could confuse it with the original artist's work, you are infringing.
- deadbeeves 4y ago
  >But if I took 100 paintings from a single artist and combined them all into new works of art, that would probably be copyright infringement in my view What makes you say that? A work is considered derivative with regards to another work, not to an author. If we take your jigsaw example and accept that the final result would not be derivative of any of the works that contributed each individual piece, and then pretend as if in actuality all the sources were from the same artist, what would change that would suddenly make the result derivative from some or all of the original works?
  - galaxyLogic 4y ago
    You are probably right there, I was just assuming that courts would consider it a factor if all pieces came from the same author. As I understand it copyright infringement is not just a pure "crime" in itself. It is about the financial harm caused. I think the word they use is "tort". It is always about violating somebody else's right(s). Oracle sues Google for Java copyright infringement. It is not just about "Hey here's a copyright infringement ... put Google in jail". It is about "We lost a billion dollars, because of your infringement". So Oracle claims not just a single copyright infringement of a single work, but billion dollars worth of infringement. It is not black and white, it is quantitative. How much there is of it determines the seriousness of the violation. I'm not a lawyer of course, don't take my advise.
- galangalalgol 4y ago
  You can trademark a style, you can't copyright it. IANAL but that is what my corporate IP compliance training tells me. As long as am regurgitating non legal advice, I suspect half mona lisa half starry night might be considered a transformtive work. If a single human artist painted both perfectly onto the same canvas it could be construed as a statement about changes in the culture between the two contexts, so if you do it with Photoshop, it might very well get ruled the same way. As for the morality of it? I don't like the idea of copilot replacing me, but I don't think it was wrong to make it. I'll eventually have to retrain myself to retrain copilot models I suppose. Or we'll have to decide to care for each other as we all go unemployed.
  - galaxyLogic 4y ago
    If you gave the co-pilot the license to copy your code, part of that license is they have to include your license and copyright notice in every derived work they make. And Copilot, it doesn't just copy "style", it copies code.
- nuc1e0n 4y ago
  Andy Warhol did something very similar to this with Avril Harrison's computer illustration of Venus. He just used the clone tool to add a third eye then called the result his own work. It even still had her signature on it.
- fennecfoxy 4y ago
  That's kind of hilarious because ALL artists copy/imitate other artist' styles during their learning process before settling into a style all of their own. The number of people who learned to draw by redrawing/imitating Disney stuff is countless. The thing people aren't seeing with AI art is that it's the same as mass manufacturing, compare: buying a mass produced knife vs buying a handmade artisanal knife. I think exactly the same thing applies; generating machine made art in a given style vs buying/commissioning an artist. I think taking someone's work to train an AI is fine, as long as you obtained legal access to the material in the first place. There is no copyright for art styles, if there was we would have no artists because even this artist in question would've started out by imitating other artist' styles. As an update after taking a closer look at the article rather than the discussion: her art style is 100% inspired by Disney (and a few others) and there is nothing wrong with that.
  - galaxyLogic 4y ago
    > Taking someone's work to train an AI is fine, as long as you obtained legal access to the material That is the big question here, what kind of legal access does Copilot etc. have to the training materials. When they use the training material they must copy it to their computer. According to most open source licenses they then also have to retain the copyright notice to wherever they copy it. But now it seems that Copilot skips that part. It copies everything else but not the copyright notice.
  - thrwy_918 4y ago
    It seems very strange to use the existing rules of copyright as a defense of the use of this new technology. The concept of copyright was created in response to the development of the printing press. It was a reaction to a disruptive technology. It was possible to laboriously copy written works before the printing press existed, but the new technology made it incomparably cheaper and faster to do so, and societies reacted by creating new protections for content creators. We are now at the threshold of a new disruptive technology that is likely to bring about profound economic changes in the arts. It makes no sense to me to take the old rules and try to use them to justify this disruptive technology, when the old rules were initially created in response to a different disruptive technology. It seems uncontroversial that this new generative technology is built on the backs of human artists. It only functions by drawing from their works. Is it so unconceivable that we might need a totally new set of protections for those human artists?
- thedorkknight 4y ago
  >But if I took 100 paintings from a single artist and combined them all into new works of art, that would probably be copyright infringement in my view, and is what seems to be happening here. If I look at 100 paintings by Pablo Picasso and then paint a new one in his style, did I commit copyright infringement?
  - galaxyLogic 4y ago
    That's a good question. My immediate answer would tend to be no. But consider you produced a comic-book about Mickey Mouse where the character Mickey Mouse looked exactly like the one in the several Disney books and movies. You would probably get sued. Right?
vlovich123 4y ago
Trying to take a strong form of OPs position, one obvious line would be the automation and mass reproduction aspects, in addition to how much unique creativity you specifically added to the process. It gets of course harrier because what happens to experts in the field who are able to do that and then just use this as a boosting tool. Still, I don’t think copyright law has clear bright lines so much, but more guidance that the courts just try to muddle through as best they can. Certainly one can make an argument that just stealing an artists style like this could be considered a copyright violation, just like sampling even a few seconds of someone else’s track can be in music. Again, not saying these are net good for society, but clearly existing copyright laws do try to take this tack. I think the one thing working against her favor is that a) early days so laws haven’t caught up b) us laws generally favor corporate interests over individuals so she might never get any relief even if deeper pockets start to protect themselves as this becomes a bigger problem for them.

galaxyLogic 4y ago

Well think if you took the left side of Mona Lisa and combined it with Van Gog's Starry night? Would that be ok? Of course not. But if you took 100 paintings from 100 artists and clipped all into small jigsaw pieces then recombined them randomly to create a new picture, that would probably not be considered "derived art". What matters is how much creativity you put into the process. Does the creative esthetics of the work derive from your efforts, or from those of the existing author's existing art. But if I took 100 paintings from a single artist and combined them all into new works of art, that would probably be copyright infringement in my view, and is what seems to be happening here. Consider the history of trademark lawsuits. You can be sued if you create something that somehow resembles an existing trademark, say use the exact same color as Coca-Cola for something similar. So I think the guiding principle is or should be whether what you create can be confused with the work of some other highly original artist. It doesn't matter if you painted it all, if it looks similar enough that people could confuse it with the original artist's work, you are infringing.

deadbeeves 4y ago
>But if I took 100 paintings from a single artist and combined them all into new works of art, that would probably be copyright infringement in my view What makes you say that? A work is considered derivative with regards to another work, not to an author. If we take your jigsaw example and accept that the final result would not be derivative of any of the works that contributed each individual piece, and then pretend as if in actuality all the sources were from the same artist, what would change that would suddenly make the result derivative from some or all of the original works?
- galaxyLogic 4y ago
  You are probably right there, I was just assuming that courts would consider it a factor if all pieces came from the same author. As I understand it copyright infringement is not just a pure "crime" in itself. It is about the financial harm caused. I think the word they use is "tort". It is always about violating somebody else's right(s). Oracle sues Google for Java copyright infringement. It is not just about "Hey here's a copyright infringement ... put Google in jail". It is about "We lost a billion dollars, because of your infringement". So Oracle claims not just a single copyright infringement of a single work, but billion dollars worth of infringement. It is not black and white, it is quantitative. How much there is of it determines the seriousness of the violation. I'm not a lawyer of course, don't take my advise.
galangalalgol 4y ago
You can trademark a style, you can't copyright it. IANAL but that is what my corporate IP compliance training tells me. As long as am regurgitating non legal advice, I suspect half mona lisa half starry night might be considered a transformtive work. If a single human artist painted both perfectly onto the same canvas it could be construed as a statement about changes in the culture between the two contexts, so if you do it with Photoshop, it might very well get ruled the same way. As for the morality of it? I don't like the idea of copilot replacing me, but I don't think it was wrong to make it. I'll eventually have to retrain myself to retrain copilot models I suppose. Or we'll have to decide to care for each other as we all go unemployed.
- galaxyLogic 4y ago
  If you gave the co-pilot the license to copy your code, part of that license is they have to include your license and copyright notice in every derived work they make. And Copilot, it doesn't just copy "style", it copies code.
nuc1e0n 4y ago
Andy Warhol did something very similar to this with Avril Harrison's computer illustration of Venus. He just used the clone tool to add a third eye then called the result his own work. It even still had her signature on it.
fennecfoxy 4y ago
That's kind of hilarious because ALL artists copy/imitate other artist' styles during their learning process before settling into a style all of their own. The number of people who learned to draw by redrawing/imitating Disney stuff is countless. The thing people aren't seeing with AI art is that it's the same as mass manufacturing, compare: buying a mass produced knife vs buying a handmade artisanal knife. I think exactly the same thing applies; generating machine made art in a given style vs buying/commissioning an artist. I think taking someone's work to train an AI is fine, as long as you obtained legal access to the material in the first place. There is no copyright for art styles, if there was we would have no artists because even this artist in question would've started out by imitating other artist' styles. As an update after taking a closer look at the article rather than the discussion: her art style is 100% inspired by Disney (and a few others) and there is nothing wrong with that.
- galaxyLogic 4y ago
  > Taking someone's work to train an AI is fine, as long as you obtained legal access to the material That is the big question here, what kind of legal access does Copilot etc. have to the training materials. When they use the training material they must copy it to their computer. According to most open source licenses they then also have to retain the copyright notice to wherever they copy it. But now it seems that Copilot skips that part. It copies everything else but not the copyright notice.
- thrwy_918 4y ago
  It seems very strange to use the existing rules of copyright as a defense of the use of this new technology. The concept of copyright was created in response to the development of the printing press. It was a reaction to a disruptive technology. It was possible to laboriously copy written works before the printing press existed, but the new technology made it incomparably cheaper and faster to do so, and societies reacted by creating new protections for content creators. We are now at the threshold of a new disruptive technology that is likely to bring about profound economic changes in the arts. It makes no sense to me to take the old rules and try to use them to justify this disruptive technology, when the old rules were initially created in response to a different disruptive technology. It seems uncontroversial that this new generative technology is built on the backs of human artists. It only functions by drawing from their works. Is it so unconceivable that we might need a totally new set of protections for those human artists?
thedorkknight 4y ago
>But if I took 100 paintings from a single artist and combined them all into new works of art, that would probably be copyright infringement in my view, and is what seems to be happening here. If I look at 100 paintings by Pablo Picasso and then paint a new one in his style, did I commit copyright infringement?
- galaxyLogic 4y ago
  That's a good question. My immediate answer would tend to be no. But consider you produced a comic-book about Mickey Mouse where the character Mickey Mouse looked exactly like the one in the several Disney books and movies. You would probably get sued. Right?

vlovich123 4y ago

Trying to take a strong form of OPs position, one obvious line would be the automation and mass reproduction aspects, in addition to how much unique creativity you specifically added to the process. It gets of course harrier because what happens to experts in the field who are able to do that and then just use this as a boosting tool. Still, I don’t think copyright law has clear bright lines so much, but more guidance that the courts just try to muddle through as best they can. Certainly one can make an argument that just stealing an artists style like this could be considered a copyright violation, just like sampling even a few seconds of someone else’s track can be in music. Again, not saying these are net good for society, but clearly existing copyright laws do try to take this tack. I think the one thing working against her favor is that a) early days so laws haven’t caught up b) us laws generally favor corporate interests over individuals so she might never get any relief even if deeper pockets start to protect themselves as this becomes a bigger problem for them.