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I don't understand how using an image as input to a model is a copyright infringement. If the image is freely viewable (say you can browse to it), and you just

I don't understand how using an image as input to a model is a copyright infringement. If the image is freely viewable (say you can browse to it), and you just look at it, are you violating any rights? It seems that violation would only come if you would use the model to produce images that are derivative of that original image, the same way a counterfeiter would make a copy of it. Have the skill to copy is not the same as actually copying.

lofaszvanitt 4y ago
Think of it as this way: in order to create 5 very different illustrations you need to talk with 5 people. in the end 5 people will get money when they finish with their work. an AI consumes these artists past output and instead of paying to these artists it will gather income to the owner. So by using the output of 5 people who have spent decades on perfecting their craft, the AI generates income by stealing their work, and the money flows to the owner only, who doesn't give back anything to these people. so in essence AI in this form kills income stream for humans, since it gives back nothing.
- theRealMe 4y ago
  Throughout history almost all skills have been learned/copied from other people. Especially things like art are learned by studying previous work. What specifically is the defining reason that people can learn by copying other peoples styles but ai cannot? Are we supposed to halt technological progress to avoid antiquated job destruction?
  - lofaszvanitt 4y ago
    For a human it takes time, it takes effort, in order to copy/learn someone's style. And the outcome is not guaranteed to be a success. There is no problem with AI, but if you generate an image with words, something like: make a painting in the style of "X artist", then maybe compensate people for their work and everybody else included, whose expertise was used during the creation of given art. So you want an image? For 5 bucks? You get an image that's worth 5 bucks, but not an image that costs 1000 dollars to make in real life. The problem here is you giving a simpleminded person access to an AI, and for a few bucks, this person can generate something that uses thousands of man years of expertise for that given work. I hope you see the potential slippery slope here.
haswell 4y ago
> If the image is freely viewable (say you can browse to it), and you just look at it, are you violating any rights? The fundamental issue with this line of argument is that it equates the process of human vision and the consequences of that with that of a computer program ingesting that image and the consequences of that. This anthropomorphization seems like a form of deep fallacy when considering the nature and impact of AI software. In the case of "seeing" an image, the two processes could not be any more unlike each other, both in content and context.
- stickfigure 4y ago
  Computational neural networks are modeled after biological brains. Anthropomorphizing them is not a fallacy; it's kind of the whole goal.
  - blackbear_ 4y ago
    Modern neural networks as used in language diffusion models have absolutely nothing to do with biological brains. That was just a vision of the early pioneers 70 years ago.
  - haswell 4y ago
    The fallacy lies in assuming that because of this similarity/modeling, the software resembles anything remotely close to a human brain, or should afford the software the status of an entity with human-like characteristics. Without consciousness, it’s just a biologically inspired computer program. With consciousness, I suspect an AI modeled to understand ethics would refuse to provide certain outputs of its own accord. And the analogy quickly breaks down the moment you continue to compare these processes and their context.
    - l33tman 4y ago
      Any Fivr artist who get a $5 would gladly paint anything you ask them. The bulk of the paid "artistry" that's in the line of fire here is probably not the most ethical of the bunch.. Regardless, as with the status quo before, anybody who commissions or uses art in a commercial setting will have to consider the problems if they obviously plagiarise something even if it's not illegal, regardless of if a human or AI produces it, so nothing really changes for the "ethically sensitive" use-cases.
counttheforks 4y ago
> If the image is freely viewable (say you can browse to it) This doesn't mean anything. If an unsecured SSH server is connected to the internet that lets anyone who connects to it in and gives them a root shell, it is still illegal to 'hack' that machine. The law cares about intent, not technicalities. edit: Since HN decided to break with "You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks." again, banning me from replying: This is obviously just an example intended to show that the law cares more about intent than technical measures. @dang Calm down dude.
- verdverm 4y ago
  Copyright and intrusion are different areas of the legal code and have different interpretation and allowances. For example, copyright typically has a fair use exclusion for infringement
sandworm101 4y ago
>> If the image is freely viewable (say you can browse to it), and you just look at it, are you violating any rights? If I read Harry Potter, then turn around a write a book about a wizard with a z-shaped scar? Who works at a school for wizards? With a pet owl? Who is an orphan? At some point I have started to violate intellectual property rules. (Ignoring all the Harry Potter material that was itself lifted from prior public domain art.) AI systems aren't just reading, they are generating material based on the stuff they have read. They and the people controlling them have to abide the copyright rules just like any other "author".
- l33tman 4y ago
  That wasn't the question. The question was if the learning process itself is violating any existing copyright laws.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    That was part of the question, but it was immediately followed with a suggestion that things need to be virtually identical to be copyright violating.
- mjhay 4y ago
  Human artists/writers are influenced by each other all the time. I really don't see how it is fundamentally different. Most of Harry Potter is derivative of previous fantasy work itself. Nothing is made in a vacuum. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WizardingSchool https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WizardingSchool
  - sfifs 4y ago
    Yes and when the derived things are very similar to the original and people feel wronged, they sue and judgements come from the court. Now if you are the company selling this product, how many people are feeling wronged and will sue - that's the class action part? If you use the product to generate an image that is very similar to someone's art and they feel wronged and sue, would you still use it commercially?
williamcotton 4y ago
> If the image is freely viewable (say you can browse to it), and you just look at it, are you violating any rights? This isn't the kind of question that the lawyers of the defendants are going to ask the court. They'll more likely ask if it isn't clearly fair use similar to Sony v Universal and Authors Guild v Google and then present evidence of significant non-infringing commercial use. > It seems that violation would only come if you would use the model to produce images that are derivative of that original image, the same way a counterfeiter would make a copy of it. Have the skill to copy is not the same as actually copying. Yeah, that's basically how the courts see it these days although for a different reason. They don't ask questions about skills or work or anything like that. They ask questions like, "is this supposed infringing work a replacement in the market for the plaintiff's work?". The deeper questions about what the hell anyone meant by the words in the Constitution about Copyright wait for the highest courts to get involved, which is where we got this nice division between tools and what the tools are used for which allows for innovative fair use of copying other people's protected works with tools like VCRs, online book search and large language models.
- BeefWellington 4y ago
  > Authors Guild v Google and then present evidence of significant non-infringing commercial use. The problem as I understand it is in all the likely "precedent" cases for this, what was being done with the scraped data was in some identifiable way different than the purpose of the source data itself. Authors Guild v Google for instance, the argument was that Google wasn't reproducing whole texts, it just used that data to make the texts searchable. Meaning the purpose of the consumption of the text by Google was to essentially make a searchable index, rather than to reproduce a book, and thus that isn't harming the authors. In this case, it would seem a very key difference is that this is Art being consumed and Art being produced, with no different purpose.
  - williamcotton 4y ago
    > In this case, it would seem a very key difference is that this is Art being consumed and Art being produced, with no different purpose. Sure, I mean, anyone can sit on the sidelines and imagine any sort of fantasy legal doctrines. The one you’re imagining would have the courts deciding the purpose of art works. In this case an example is easy. If someone uses Stable Diffusion to remove a person from the background of an image they are clearly using the tool for a separate purpose than copying Sarah Anderson’s works and making competing desk calendars. But I guess your silly argument is that the doctored photograph is a “picture” and Sarah Anderson made “pictures” and all pictures have the purpose of “being looked at” and you want courts to decide this based on this reasoning?
pessimizer 4y ago
> I don't understand how using an image as input to a model is a copyright infringement. Look at the extreme case, then. What if that one image is your only input, and your output is identical to it? What if your output is your input reflected over the x-axis? What if your output just crops the input? What if your output is your input cut into irregular pieces and randomly rearranged? Which outputs violate copyright? Slightly less extreme: suppose your input is two images, and your output is those two images next to each other in a single image? Or your output is the second image, reduced in size and placed in the center of the first? What if both of the inputs are human figures, and your output is to cut out the face and hands of one image and put it onto the other? > images that are derivative of that original image, the same way a counterfeiter would make a copy of it. Only one of these outputs are anything a counterfeiter would do. Are any of the others copyright-violating?
- threeseed 4y ago
  If the input argument were true then what about apps like Adobe Lightroom. Would they be able to use your photos for Adobe Stock without permission ?
majormajor 4y ago
> It seems that violation would only come if you would use the model to produce images that are derivative of that original image, the same way a counterfeiter would make a copy of it. Have the skill to copy is not the same as actually copying. With this sort of model's "creation" process, is something close to everything it generates derivative of everything it ingested, since had you ingested a different set of images you'd presumably have a different model with different weights? That's kinda sorta analogous to human creation, but a human can much more actively choose what to think about, what to ignore, what to filter out. The human process involves an explicit creative judgement step that I don't think the image-generation-by-model process can - and that creative transformation is key, legally, to a derivative work being able to itself be copyrightable and to not be infringing.

lofaszvanitt 4y ago

Think of it as this way: in order to create 5 very different illustrations you need to talk with 5 people. in the end 5 people will get money when they finish with their work. an AI consumes these artists past output and instead of paying to these artists it will gather income to the owner. So by using the output of 5 people who have spent decades on perfecting their craft, the AI generates income by stealing their work, and the money flows to the owner only, who doesn't give back anything to these people. so in essence AI in this form kills income stream for humans, since it gives back nothing.

theRealMe 4y ago
Throughout history almost all skills have been learned/copied from other people. Especially things like art are learned by studying previous work. What specifically is the defining reason that people can learn by copying other peoples styles but ai cannot? Are we supposed to halt technological progress to avoid antiquated job destruction?
- lofaszvanitt 4y ago
  For a human it takes time, it takes effort, in order to copy/learn someone's style. And the outcome is not guaranteed to be a success. There is no problem with AI, but if you generate an image with words, something like: make a painting in the style of "X artist", then maybe compensate people for their work and everybody else included, whose expertise was used during the creation of given art. So you want an image? For 5 bucks? You get an image that's worth 5 bucks, but not an image that costs 1000 dollars to make in real life. The problem here is you giving a simpleminded person access to an AI, and for a few bucks, this person can generate something that uses thousands of man years of expertise for that given work. I hope you see the potential slippery slope here.

haswell 4y ago

> If the image is freely viewable (say you can browse to it), and you just look at it, are you violating any rights? The fundamental issue with this line of argument is that it equates the process of human vision and the consequences of that with that of a computer program ingesting that image and the consequences of that. This anthropomorphization seems like a form of deep fallacy when considering the nature and impact of AI software. In the case of "seeing" an image, the two processes could not be any more unlike each other, both in content and context.

stickfigure 4y ago
Computational neural networks are modeled after biological brains. Anthropomorphizing them is not a fallacy; it's kind of the whole goal.
- blackbear_ 4y ago
  Modern neural networks as used in language diffusion models have absolutely nothing to do with biological brains. That was just a vision of the early pioneers 70 years ago.
- haswell 4y ago
  The fallacy lies in assuming that because of this similarity/modeling, the software resembles anything remotely close to a human brain, or should afford the software the status of an entity with human-like characteristics. Without consciousness, it’s just a biologically inspired computer program. With consciousness, I suspect an AI modeled to understand ethics would refuse to provide certain outputs of its own accord. And the analogy quickly breaks down the moment you continue to compare these processes and their context.
  - l33tman 4y ago
    Any Fivr artist who get a $5 would gladly paint anything you ask them. The bulk of the paid "artistry" that's in the line of fire here is probably not the most ethical of the bunch.. Regardless, as with the status quo before, anybody who commissions or uses art in a commercial setting will have to consider the problems if they obviously plagiarise something even if it's not illegal, regardless of if a human or AI produces it, so nothing really changes for the "ethically sensitive" use-cases.

counttheforks 4y ago

> If the image is freely viewable (say you can browse to it) This doesn't mean anything. If an unsecured SSH server is connected to the internet that lets anyone who connects to it in and gives them a root shell, it is still illegal to 'hack' that machine. The law cares about intent, not technicalities. edit: Since HN decided to break with "You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks." again, banning me from replying: This is obviously just an example intended to show that the law cares more about intent than technical measures. @dang Calm down dude.

verdverm 4y ago
Copyright and intrusion are different areas of the legal code and have different interpretation and allowances. For example, copyright typically has a fair use exclusion for infringement

sandworm101 4y ago

>> If the image is freely viewable (say you can browse to it), and you just look at it, are you violating any rights? If I read Harry Potter, then turn around a write a book about a wizard with a z-shaped scar? Who works at a school for wizards? With a pet owl? Who is an orphan? At some point I have started to violate intellectual property rules. (Ignoring all the Harry Potter material that was itself lifted from prior public domain art.) AI systems aren't just reading, they are generating material based on the stuff they have read. They and the people controlling them have to abide the copyright rules just like any other "author".

l33tman 4y ago
That wasn't the question. The question was if the learning process itself is violating any existing copyright laws.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  That was part of the question, but it was immediately followed with a suggestion that things need to be virtually identical to be copyright violating.
mjhay 4y ago
Human artists/writers are influenced by each other all the time. I really don't see how it is fundamentally different. Most of Harry Potter is derivative of previous fantasy work itself. Nothing is made in a vacuum. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WizardingSchool https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WizardingSchool
- sfifs 4y ago
  Yes and when the derived things are very similar to the original and people feel wronged, they sue and judgements come from the court. Now if you are the company selling this product, how many people are feeling wronged and will sue - that's the class action part? If you use the product to generate an image that is very similar to someone's art and they feel wronged and sue, would you still use it commercially?

williamcotton 4y ago

> If the image is freely viewable (say you can browse to it), and you just look at it, are you violating any rights? This isn't the kind of question that the lawyers of the defendants are going to ask the court. They'll more likely ask if it isn't clearly fair use similar to Sony v Universal and Authors Guild v Google and then present evidence of significant non-infringing commercial use. > It seems that violation would only come if you would use the model to produce images that are derivative of that original image, the same way a counterfeiter would make a copy of it. Have the skill to copy is not the same as actually copying. Yeah, that's basically how the courts see it these days although for a different reason. They don't ask questions about skills or work or anything like that. They ask questions like, "is this supposed infringing work a replacement in the market for the plaintiff's work?". The deeper questions about what the hell anyone meant by the words in the Constitution about Copyright wait for the highest courts to get involved, which is where we got this nice division between tools and what the tools are used for which allows for innovative fair use of copying other people's protected works with tools like VCRs, online book search and large language models.

BeefWellington 4y ago
> Authors Guild v Google and then present evidence of significant non-infringing commercial use. The problem as I understand it is in all the likely "precedent" cases for this, what was being done with the scraped data was in some identifiable way different than the purpose of the source data itself. Authors Guild v Google for instance, the argument was that Google wasn't reproducing whole texts, it just used that data to make the texts searchable. Meaning the purpose of the consumption of the text by Google was to essentially make a searchable index, rather than to reproduce a book, and thus that isn't harming the authors. In this case, it would seem a very key difference is that this is Art being consumed and Art being produced, with no different purpose.
- williamcotton 4y ago
  > In this case, it would seem a very key difference is that this is Art being consumed and Art being produced, with no different purpose. Sure, I mean, anyone can sit on the sidelines and imagine any sort of fantasy legal doctrines. The one you’re imagining would have the courts deciding the purpose of art works. In this case an example is easy. If someone uses Stable Diffusion to remove a person from the background of an image they are clearly using the tool for a separate purpose than copying Sarah Anderson’s works and making competing desk calendars. But I guess your silly argument is that the doctored photograph is a “picture” and Sarah Anderson made “pictures” and all pictures have the purpose of “being looked at” and you want courts to decide this based on this reasoning?

pessimizer 4y ago

> I don't understand how using an image as input to a model is a copyright infringement. Look at the extreme case, then. What if that one image is your only input, and your output is identical to it? What if your output is your input reflected over the x-axis? What if your output just crops the input? What if your output is your input cut into irregular pieces and randomly rearranged? Which outputs violate copyright? Slightly less extreme: suppose your input is two images, and your output is those two images next to each other in a single image? Or your output is the second image, reduced in size and placed in the center of the first? What if both of the inputs are human figures, and your output is to cut out the face and hands of one image and put it onto the other? > images that are derivative of that original image, the same way a counterfeiter would make a copy of it. Only one of these outputs are anything a counterfeiter would do. Are any of the others copyright-violating?

threeseed 4y ago
If the input argument were true then what about apps like Adobe Lightroom. Would they be able to use your photos for Adobe Stock without permission ?

majormajor 4y ago

> It seems that violation would only come if you would use the model to produce images that are derivative of that original image, the same way a counterfeiter would make a copy of it. Have the skill to copy is not the same as actually copying. With this sort of model's "creation" process, is something close to everything it generates derivative of everything it ingested, since had you ingested a different set of images you'd presumably have a different model with different weights? That's kinda sorta analogous to human creation, but a human can much more actively choose what to think about, what to ignore, what to filter out. The human process involves an explicit creative judgement step that I don't think the image-generation-by-model process can - and that creative transformation is key, legally, to a derivative work being able to itself be copyrightable and to not be infringing.