In the EU, training a model on copyrighted data does not infringe copyright. This is explicit, codified law as of the latest EU Copyright Directive[0]. In the U

In the EU, training a model on copyrighted data does not infringe copyright. This is explicit, codified law as of the latest EU Copyright Directive[0]. In the US, AI researchers are more or less hoping that Authors Guild v. Google forms controlling precedent against lawsuits against the AI companies. While this is not done-and-dusted case law, I can see the logic. The model is capable of, and is intended to be capable of, creating novel art. In neither case is it legal to use outputs of an AI that infringe an already-existing copyrighted work. This means anyone using it to generate production-ready artwork is exposing themselves to potential legal liability if their AI winds up regurgitating training set data. This is what I worry about way more than just "are the model weights infringing copyright". As for morality: - Absolutely none of the current generative art systems are trained from scratch on ethically-sourced datasets. The AI companies just assume that because they need ungodly amounts of training set data, that they are morally entitled to get it, because they spend more time staring into the eyes of a basilisk[1] than worrying about the world they already live in. - Multiple companies getting into generative art have gone above and beyond in giving human artists the middle finger. DeviantArt decided to blow all their good-will from defending against NFT nonsense by making their AI training program opt-out, which is NOT HOW CONSENT WORKS. Mimic[2] and Dreambooth are basically artistic impersonation tools that have specific moral implications beyond the general practice of AI art. Whether or not this becomes actual law is... well, I'll put it to you this way. Stability AI's Dance Diffusion is actually trained on an ethically-sourced, public-domain dataset. Why? Because they're afraid of being sued by the RIAA. Despite the name, copyright maximalists are less about maximizing the rights of artists and more about building moats around large publishers. And generative art does not threaten[3] those publishers, so it will not be banned. [0] Yes, the same one that mandated upload filters on video sites. [1] Roko's Basilisk posits the idea of a superintelligent AI - one that can eat everyone's brains and emulate them perfectly - constructing a perfect hell for people who didn't build it as a way to threaten those people in the past to build it. Longtermists can burn in computer-generated hell. Time discounts exist for a reason. [2] https://illustmimic.com/en/ https://illustmimic.com/en/ [3] Specifically: even in a world where AI completely outperforms humans on all artistic endeavors, publishers will just buy the AI companies.