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Ah I am glad to see someone else talking about using public domain images! Honestly it baffles me that in all this discussion, I rarely see people discussing h

Ah I am glad to see someone else talking about using public domain images! Honestly it baffles me that in all this discussion, I rarely see people discussing how to do this with appropriately licensed images. There are some pretty large datasets out there of public images, and doing so might even help encourage more people to contribute to open datasets. Also if the big ML companies HAD to use open images, they would be forced to figure out sample efficiency for these models. Which is good for the ML community! They would also be motivated to encourage the creation of larger openly licensed datasets, which would be great. I still think if we got twitter and other social media sites to add image license options, then people who want to contribute to open datasets could do so in an easy and socially contagious way. Maybe this would be a good project for mastodon contributors, since that is something we actually have control over. I'd be happy to license my photography with an open license! It is really a wonderful idea to try to do this with open data. Maybe it won't work very well with current techniques, but that just becomes an engineering problem worth looking at (sample efficiency).

bowsamic 4y ago
No one is ever going to stop using all the available images until there is a law against it. Why would they?
- LunaSea 4y ago
  There are already laws against it but enforcement is laking, as always.
  - bonoboTP 4y ago
    If you can't process/digest copyrighted content with algorithms/machine learning then Google Search (the whole thing, not just Image Search) is dead. So no, it's not at all clear where the legal lines are drawn. There have been no court cases yet, regarding the training of ML models. People are trying to draw analogies from other types of cases, but this has not been tried in court yet. And then the answer will likely differ based on country.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - Xelynega 4y ago
      > If you can't process/digest copyrighted content with algorithms/machine learning then Google Search (the whole thing, not just Image Search) is dead. Not if Google honors the robots.txt like they say they do. Hosting content with a robots.txt saying "index me please" is essentially an implicit contract with Google for full access to your content in return for showing up in their search results. Hosting an image/code repository with a very specific license attached and then having that licensed ignored by someone who repackages that content and redistributes it is not the same as sites explicitly telling Google to index their content. A much closer comparison IMO would be someone compressing a massive library of copyrighted content and then redistributing it and arguing it's legal because "the content has been processed and can't be recovered without a specific setup". I don't think we'd need prior court cases to argue that would most likely be illegal, so I don't see how machine learning models differ.
      - bonoboTP 4y ago
        Google also indexes sites without robots.txt. Also, it's not mere classic indexing but ML processing too.
      - astrange 4y ago
        LAION/StableDiffusion is already legal under the same exemptions as Google Image Search and does respect robots.txt. It was also created in Germany so US court cases wouldn’t apply to it.
  - bowsamic 4y ago
    No, it has not yet been demonstrated that the current copyright laws forbid the use of copyrighted images to train neural networks.
    - LunaSea 4y ago
      The moment you make money from it the law is pretty clear.
      - bowsamic 4y ago
        No, it isn’t. Why are you lying?
  - smeagull 4y ago
    Can't wait for law enforcement to start arresting people for looking at images.
    - Xelynega 4y ago
      As long as they aren't repackaging and redistributing them, why would looking at them be illegal?
      - smeagull 4y ago
        You're training your model. Maybe it's producing art that becomes illegal.
- 4RealFreedom 4y ago
  I've seen many arguments about getting laws on the books around ML learning. I would suggest people create a project that creates movies using ML and train it using existing Hollywood movies. I realize this isn't easy but the issue needs to be pushed to people that have the means to force change.
acadapter 4y ago
Human artists derive their inspiration and styles from a large set of copyrighted works, but they are free to produce new art despite of that. Art would have developed much slower and be much poorer if, for example, Impressionism or Cubism had been entangled in long ownership confrontations in courts. Then there's the fact that humanity has been able to develop and share art and literary works for thousands of years without the modern copyright system. It would be interesting to see if this technology can erode the copyright concept a bit. Maybe not remove it completely, but perhaps influence people to create wider definitions for "fair use", and undo the extensions that Disney lobbyists have created.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ajuc 4y ago
  > It would be interesting to see if this technology can erode the copyright concept a bit Copyright law (especially in US) only ever changes in the direction that suits corporations. So - no. What I expect instead is artists being sued by a big tech company for copyright violations because that big tech company used the artist Public Domain image for training their copyrighted AI and as a result it created a copyrighted copy of the original artist's image.
  - nceqs3 4y ago
    >Copyright law (especially in US) only ever changes in the direction that suits corporations. So - no. Just objectively false.
    - ajuc 4y ago
      Counterexample?
  - phtrivier 4y ago
    In this situation, it would seem like the suit would end up at "comparing the timestamp at which the public domain and copyrighted versions were published", wouldn't it ? There is nothing that the generative AI can do in this process that's legally different from copy pasting the image, editing it a bit by hand, and somehow claiming intellectual property of the _initial_ image, no ?
thot_experiment 4y ago
The problem is not that people aren't owning ideas hard enough, ideas shouldn't be ownable in this way, the problem is that we've created a system that's obsessed with scarcity and collecting rents. Being able to own and trade ideas a la copyright/patents helps people who can buy copyrights and patents stifle creativity more than it helps artists gather reward for their creation (though it does both). Human endeavor is inherently collaborative. The idea that my art is my virgin creation is an illusion perpetuated by capitalists. My art is the work of thousands who came before me with my slight additions and tweaks. Your (and in general, our) suggestion that we should be concerned with respecting or even expanding these protections is incorrect if you want human creativity to flourish.
- hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
  When I was younger, I also thought that way. I also felt that being artist has nothing to with money: a true artist will always create out of their internal need, not for money. Then came the brutal reality: creating high-quality artwork needs time. Some can be created after work, but not that much. Some forms of art require expensive instruments. Some, like filmmaking, require collaboration and coordination of many people. So yes, I could do some forms of art part-time using the money from my day job, but I knew it was a far cry from what I could do when working on it full time. It's not capitalism, it's just reality.
  - arbol 4y ago
    The restrictions on creating art are the product of the society you live in, which means they are the product of capitalism if you live in a capitalist society. The way society is organised determines the cost of people's time, the cost of the tools, and the cost of the materials.
    - Xelynega 4y ago
      Yea I find when people say "ideas shouldn't be ownable" it's really the more general "deriving profit from private ownership was a mistake". Like you kinda point out, most of the reason I can think of that a person would want control of their intellectual property is to derive profit from it. That reason has nothing to do with intellectual property or how it's created, it's a consequence of living in a capitalist society.
smeagull 4y ago
Yup, it really is a good thing they haven't been forced to use open images.

bowsamic 4y ago

No one is ever going to stop using all the available images until there is a law against it. Why would they?

LunaSea 4y ago
There are already laws against it but enforcement is laking, as always.
- bonoboTP 4y ago
  If you can't process/digest copyrighted content with algorithms/machine learning then Google Search (the whole thing, not just Image Search) is dead. So no, it's not at all clear where the legal lines are drawn. There have been no court cases yet, regarding the training of ML models. People are trying to draw analogies from other types of cases, but this has not been tried in court yet. And then the answer will likely differ based on country.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - Xelynega 4y ago
    > If you can't process/digest copyrighted content with algorithms/machine learning then Google Search (the whole thing, not just Image Search) is dead. Not if Google honors the robots.txt like they say they do. Hosting content with a robots.txt saying "index me please" is essentially an implicit contract with Google for full access to your content in return for showing up in their search results. Hosting an image/code repository with a very specific license attached and then having that licensed ignored by someone who repackages that content and redistributes it is not the same as sites explicitly telling Google to index their content. A much closer comparison IMO would be someone compressing a massive library of copyrighted content and then redistributing it and arguing it's legal because "the content has been processed and can't be recovered without a specific setup". I don't think we'd need prior court cases to argue that would most likely be illegal, so I don't see how machine learning models differ.
    - bonoboTP 4y ago
      Google also indexes sites without robots.txt. Also, it's not mere classic indexing but ML processing too.
    - astrange 4y ago
      LAION/StableDiffusion is already legal under the same exemptions as Google Image Search and does respect robots.txt. It was also created in Germany so US court cases wouldn’t apply to it.
- bowsamic 4y ago
  No, it has not yet been demonstrated that the current copyright laws forbid the use of copyrighted images to train neural networks.
  - LunaSea 4y ago
    The moment you make money from it the law is pretty clear.
    - bowsamic 4y ago
      No, it isn’t. Why are you lying?
- smeagull 4y ago
  Can't wait for law enforcement to start arresting people for looking at images.
  - Xelynega 4y ago
    As long as they aren't repackaging and redistributing them, why would looking at them be illegal?
    - smeagull 4y ago
      You're training your model. Maybe it's producing art that becomes illegal.
4RealFreedom 4y ago
I've seen many arguments about getting laws on the books around ML learning. I would suggest people create a project that creates movies using ML and train it using existing Hollywood movies. I realize this isn't easy but the issue needs to be pushed to people that have the means to force change.

acadapter 4y ago

Human artists derive their inspiration and styles from a large set of copyrighted works, but they are free to produce new art despite of that. Art would have developed much slower and be much poorer if, for example, Impressionism or Cubism had been entangled in long ownership confrontations in courts. Then there's the fact that humanity has been able to develop and share art and literary works for thousands of years without the modern copyright system. It would be interesting to see if this technology can erode the copyright concept a bit. Maybe not remove it completely, but perhaps influence people to create wider definitions for "fair use", and undo the extensions that Disney lobbyists have created.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ajuc 4y ago
> It would be interesting to see if this technology can erode the copyright concept a bit Copyright law (especially in US) only ever changes in the direction that suits corporations. So - no. What I expect instead is artists being sued by a big tech company for copyright violations because that big tech company used the artist Public Domain image for training their copyrighted AI and as a result it created a copyrighted copy of the original artist's image.
- nceqs3 4y ago
  >Copyright law (especially in US) only ever changes in the direction that suits corporations. So - no. Just objectively false.
  - ajuc 4y ago
    Counterexample?
- phtrivier 4y ago
  In this situation, it would seem like the suit would end up at "comparing the timestamp at which the public domain and copyrighted versions were published", wouldn't it ? There is nothing that the generative AI can do in this process that's legally different from copy pasting the image, editing it a bit by hand, and somehow claiming intellectual property of the _initial_ image, no ?

thot_experiment 4y ago

The problem is not that people aren't owning ideas hard enough, ideas shouldn't be ownable in this way, the problem is that we've created a system that's obsessed with scarcity and collecting rents. Being able to own and trade ideas a la copyright/patents helps people who can buy copyrights and patents stifle creativity more than it helps artists gather reward for their creation (though it does both). Human endeavor is inherently collaborative. The idea that my art is my virgin creation is an illusion perpetuated by capitalists. My art is the work of thousands who came before me with my slight additions and tweaks. Your (and in general, our) suggestion that we should be concerned with respecting or even expanding these protections is incorrect if you want human creativity to flourish.

hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
When I was younger, I also thought that way. I also felt that being artist has nothing to with money: a true artist will always create out of their internal need, not for money. Then came the brutal reality: creating high-quality artwork needs time. Some can be created after work, but not that much. Some forms of art require expensive instruments. Some, like filmmaking, require collaboration and coordination of many people. So yes, I could do some forms of art part-time using the money from my day job, but I knew it was a far cry from what I could do when working on it full time. It's not capitalism, it's just reality.
- arbol 4y ago
  The restrictions on creating art are the product of the society you live in, which means they are the product of capitalism if you live in a capitalist society. The way society is organised determines the cost of people's time, the cost of the tools, and the cost of the materials.
  - Xelynega 4y ago
    Yea I find when people say "ideas shouldn't be ownable" it's really the more general "deriving profit from private ownership was a mistake". Like you kinda point out, most of the reason I can think of that a person would want control of their intellectual property is to derive profit from it. That reason has nothing to do with intellectual property or how it's created, it's a consequence of living in a capitalist society.

smeagull 4y ago

Yup, it really is a good thing they haven't been forced to use open images.