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> (1) The model is a copyright violation as it contains untransformed copyrighted material. You can show this by simply asking for a picture of Mickey Mouse. T

> (1) The model is a copyright violation as it contains untransformed copyrighted material. You can show this by simply asking for a picture of Mickey Mouse. This is a strong argument and gave me pause. I think if Disney sued they could probably win. However - examples such as this are probably quite rare. Mickey Mouse is so uniquitous that is massively overrepresented in the training and data and that has resulted in overfitting. For the vast majority of artists and almost certainly for the plaintiffs in this case, the demonstration wouldn't work. You most likely cannot produce an infringing image from a concise text prompt. Arguably one of the outcomes of legal action might be the need for a lot of effort to remove examples similar to the Mickey Mouse example. This would be a good thing but wouldn't prevent AI image generation from broadly doing the things that the plaintiffs want to stop it doing. > (2) but I'd need to see how you show that "it does so to exactly the same degree". Not sure I follow? If I produce an infringing image and a court agrees it's infringing then I'm liable. It doesn't matter how the image was produced. I don't see what there is to dispute here?

karpierz 4y ago
I think we're agreed on (2) For (1), I think it's handy to think of an encrypted zip file that contains a bunch of images. If you give it a valid password, it'll give you a corresponding image. If it produces an image that violates copyright, it clearly violates copyright, even if most of the images contained in it don't. It's possible that if the model required sufficient instruction to reproduce Mickey Mouse ("create a line from (0,20) to (20,30) of thickness 2, then a line from ..."), and could not do so without that, then the argument wouldn't apply. And there's definitely a grey area once we're outside of the territory of reproducing images. But we definitely aren't anywhere close to that with these models, and looking at the "AI Safety" work, it doesn't seem possible to get these models to "behave". > This would be a good thing but wouldn't prevent AI image generation from broadly doing the things that the plaintiffs want to stop it doing. Yeah, I agree that the plaintiffs aren't suing solely because the model can easily regenerate their images. But I think we'll find its insanely hard to get these models to avoid producing copyrighted images. They may be forced to license the training images.

karpierz 4y ago

I think we're agreed on (2) For (1), I think it's handy to think of an encrypted zip file that contains a bunch of images. If you give it a valid password, it'll give you a corresponding image. If it produces an image that violates copyright, it clearly violates copyright, even if most of the images contained in it don't. It's possible that if the model required sufficient instruction to reproduce Mickey Mouse ("create a line from (0,20) to (20,30) of thickness 2, then a line from ..."), and could not do so without that, then the argument wouldn't apply. And there's definitely a grey area once we're outside of the territory of reproducing images. But we definitely aren't anywhere close to that with these models, and looking at the "AI Safety" work, it doesn't seem possible to get these models to "behave". > This would be a good thing but wouldn't prevent AI image generation from broadly doing the things that the plaintiffs want to stop it doing. Yeah, I agree that the plaintiffs aren't suing solely because the model can easily regenerate their images. But I think we'll find its insanely hard to get these models to avoid producing copyrighted images. They may be forced to license the training images.