6 ms·

Not related to this lawsuit, but related to AI art and copyright in general. What do any HN lawyers make of this? https://twitter.com/heyBarsee/status/162141103

Not related to this lawsuit, but related to AI art and copyright in general. What do any HN lawyers make of this? https://twitter.com/heyBarsee/status/1621411036426280961 https://twitter.com/heyBarsee/status/1621411036426280961 Basically it's an AI tool that takes a copyrighted photo, and produces an AI-produced photo that is "conceptually identical" but not actually identical. That is, given a photo of "an asian man lying in a grass field surrounded by a semicircle of driftwood and crows", it would produce a photo that had all of the same concepts, but just slightly different execution on each of them. The man's face is still asian but clearly a different person. The driftwood is still in a semicircle, but the individual pieces are all different. The crows are still there, but arranged slightly differently. The grass is still grass, but no blades are the same. So it's essentially cloning the idea/concept/vibes of the target image, but none of the actual "implementation details". Does anyone have any intuition of the legal outlook on this? On one hand, nothing is stopping me from seeing the copyrighted photo and then recruiting a similar looking model, setting up a photoshoot in a field with some stuffed crows, etc. I could replicate what the AI is doing. It would be work, but I could do it. The AI is just automating this. On the other hand, the actual stated intention of this tool is to get around copyright. Seems sketchy.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
prpl 4y ago
IANAL but you can’t copyright a concept.
- ROTMetro 4y ago
  But you do have copyright claims to derivative works.
  - prpl 4y ago
    I think that really depends. You can describe the photo conceptually and build a new photo from that, which would be equivalent to clean room engineering.
    - rhizome 4y ago
      But "you" (or I) don't describe the photo, their process does, and I'm not confident that Separation of Concerns would be enough to establish a clean room.
      - jjeaff 4y ago
        But a derivative work requires that major copyrightable elements remain. So it seems like there is a fuzzy line on whether something is really derivative or not. I don't think it is necessarily enough to have simply started with a copyrighted work.
        williamcotton 4y ago
        Yes, it has to be visually derivative in order to be a copyright infringement, not mathematically derivative! Imagine if Stable Diffusion was made illegal. Someone accuses me of using this illegal tool for an image that doesn’t look like anyone else’s image as far as the court is concerned for copyright. I put the image on my website. If the image itself is not at all infringing, then what is the evidence that Stable Diffusion was used? Should the police be issued a warrant to search my private property for proof that I used Stable Diffusion without a shred of evidence?
      - prpl 4y ago
        I think that depends on how it’s done. If there’s actual visual representation ( bitmaps or FFT coefficients) copied around (and most importantly - more than what might be described as fair use), that would probably be true. If a highly accurate conceptual description is generated then an image generated on that, I would see no issue. I don’t know how it is implemented for the software in question.
        rhizome 4y ago
        IANAL, but from my understanding of the points at issue, I think a court might be likely to find that a) sucking the image into RAM is a copy in the first place; b) the FFT/etc. would be a (first) derivative work; c) using a form of the original image sufficient to communicate to the alteration processes what it should be altering would constitute a copy; and/or d) identifying something as a de-copyrighted work will undercut any defenses. Here's an interesting answer apropos to all this: https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/7250/could-i-remove-gplv2-from-this-algorithm-implementation https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/7250/could-i-...
charcircuit 4y ago
It's clearly a derivative work of the original. >On one hand, nothing is stopping me from seeing the copyrighted photo and then recruiting a similar looking model, setting up a photoshoot in a field with some stuffed crows, etc. I could replicate what the AI is doing. It would be work, but I could do it. The AI is just automating this. If you trace art by hand that is still copyright infringement. If you paraphrase a passage from a book by hand that is still copyright infringement.
- gamegoblin 4y ago
  > If you trace art by hand that is still copyright infringement. If you paraphrase a passage from a book by hand that is still copyright infringement. What if I see some fine art, I, a non-artist, make a super-low quality recreation of it with crayons, give that + a verbal description to a different professional artist who has not seen the original, and have them "upscale" my bad drawing into new fine art. Their art would be conceptually very similar to the original. Same layout, same concept, same vibes, same style (if my verbal description was sufficiently good) but all the details would be different. Is this still infringement?
  - jcranmer 4y ago
    It's a derivative work of a derivative work, so yes, it's still infringement.
  - visarga 4y ago
    If this worked all artists would be passible for lawsuits, how many ways can you draw flowers in a vase? "They stole my idea, your honour! They used the same number of flowers in a vase, I came up with the concept of 3 flowers first." I think artists and copyright intermediaries would like to have "wildcard" copyright, "draw a flower once, all flowers belong to you now", and it would be very bad for creativity if they got their way.
    - XorNot 4y ago
      The vast majority of profit most artists are making is also copyright infringement. Custom porn is where the money is, and Rule 34 is likely a huge part of that.
ronsor 4y ago
Using img2img to "royalty free"-ize an image is clearly copyright infringement, and the output is a clear derivative work of the original. If you described the original image (or made CLIP do it) and fed the description to txt2img generation, then you'd probably be fine.
- gamegoblin 4y ago
  Seems like it's a matter of time (or maybe it's already done and I haven't seen it yet) before you get optimizers that takes an image and produces a seed+prompt that yields a super super conceptually similar image. I think being able to selectively optimize for "magic" random seeds in the diffusion algorithm will be kind of critically important here. Different seeds can produce very different images given the same prompt. What if an optimizer can find a seed+prompt combos that are just as good as cloning as img2img?
  - GaggiX 4y ago
    If you want to clone an image (for some reason) just encode it in latent space and retrieve it using a deterministic sampler such as DDIM. Or you can simply right-click and copy. If you instead don't want to clone an image, you can just extract the CLIP image embeddings from it and use them to condition a generative model like Dalle 2, Midjourney or Karlo (open source). The CLIP embeddings extract really well the semantic meaning of an image.
    - gamegoblin 4y ago
      Going image -> vector space -> image feels very much like compression for the purpose of copyright. Like a lower quality JPEG of some image still has the same copyright properties of the original. Something about going image -> prompt -> image feels like it "subverts" this somehow, even if the prompt is hyper-optimized to recreate the original image. Obviously, this is just my feel/impression of it, the real test is how a jury feels about it. The next few years will be really interesting in exposing that this is a really massive gray area.
bee_rider 4y ago
Not a lawyer but I’m under the impression that one of the things they do in law school is spend a bunch of time constructing increasingly ridiculous hypotheticals, to work out the specifics of their arguments. I think AI is overhyped in general, but as a tool to rapidly instantiate absurd hypotheticals it is really impressive. This is cool and good, IMO.
visarga 4y ago
I thought copyright covers just expression, not the ideas. If the model replicates the idea in a different way why should there be an infringement?
- rhizome 4y ago
  The "idea" at issue isn't like "a picture of a tree," though. It's "a picture of a tree as conceived by Ansel Adams and photographed with [technical details]."
  - dxbydt 4y ago
    "a picture of One WTC as conceived by Ansel Adams and photographed with a Hasselblad" is still an idea, because One WTC opened in 2014 & Mr. Adams died thirty years ago in 1984.
jcranmer 4y ago
Not a lawyer, but given that it takes the original picture as an input, there's a very strong claim that it's a tool to create a derivative work. At which point, it's time to ask the question if this is going to be fair use... Okay, when you're advertising your product as a "get around copyright", you're going to so torpedo your credibility before the judge that there's no point trying to analyze the fair use factors--the judge is going to do whatever it takes to make them come out not in your favor.
- rhizome 4y ago
  That tagline certainly seems like it's gonna make their "preponderance of evidence" an uphill battle!
- shagie 4y ago
  > Not a lawyer, but given that it takes the original picture as an input, there's a very strong claim that it's a tool to create a derivative work. If I take an image and then create a thumbnail of it would that be an infringing derivative work? https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2006/02/perfect-10-v-google-more-smooth-crunchy https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2006/02/perfect-10-v-google-mo... and https://web.archive.org/web/20060813093554/https://www.eff.org/legal/cases/Perfect10_v_Google/ https://web.archive.org/web/20060813093554/https://www.eff.o...
  - jcranmer 4y ago
    Thumbnails are absolutely infringing... but they are fair use in most cases! Edit: on second thought, they might not even be derivative works (as a derivative work requires the same spark of creativity necessary for a copyrightable work), just outright reproduction. But the point that they are fair use still stands.
  - wizzwizz4 4y ago
    It would unambiguously be a derivative work. (IANAL, but I'm willing to assert this.) I wouldn't think it would be infringing: I'm not particularly familiar with US law, but it seems like a classic case of fair use. Note: the case you linked was appealed, and that ruling was reversed. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/05/p10-v-google-public-interest-prevails-digital-copyright-showdown https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/05/p10-v-google-public-in...
ghaff 4y ago
IANAL but the Obama Hope poster lawsuit is probably somewhat related. https://www.law.columbia.edu/news/archive/obama-hope-poster-lawsuit-settlement-good-deal-both-sides-says-kernochan-center-director https://www.law.columbia.edu/news/archive/obama-hope-poster-... However, the case was settled and the creator of the poster lied in court about his sources--so I'm not sure I'd draw too much about the poster inspired by photograph.
seizethecheese 4y ago
Corollary question: what if this took two images as input? It couldn’t ever then be purely derivative of one image.
- YurgenJurgensen 4y ago
  A picture of Mickey Mouse dressed as Superman is still a derivative work. The main difference is that the number of lawyers you anger is now doubled.
  - schrodinger 4y ago
    IANAL but wouldn't the creativity involved in doing that fall under Fair Use? Although some googling says that if someone remixed two songs, they'd need copyright permission from each artist. I guess there's a spectrum between that and more of a parody, like Weird Al's Amish Paradise.
    - YurgenJurgensen 4y ago
      Fair use defences aren't automatic, and all go on a case-by-case basis. One of the major criteria is 'effect on the work's value'. Given how easy it is to find people (in this very thread, even) gleefully predicting the death of stock photo sites, it'd pretty easy for a lawyer to tear said defence apart. Weird Al gets permission for all of his music. Even if the parody defence were valid, song licensing is pretty cheap, and defending lawsuits against artists signed with major labels is expensive.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dahart 4y ago
I was also tempted to quote the expression/idea dichotomy, but looking at the examples, you’re totally right: the example you showed is aiming to land directly on the line between legal and illegal, it is legitimately hard to reason about, it is different than borrowing either the idea or the expression, and it absolutely is sketchy (and will probably be tested in court if it gets much more attention). The problem here is that it does more than just clone the idea/concept/vibes, it really does tread into copying the implementation details. It matches lighting & composition, it matches subject and color, it can mimic the equipment used & props. People have done this manually, and been sued for it. Mostly it happens when an unknown artist steals the style of a specific well-known, best-selling artist. But now we’ve built a machine to near-copy anything in any style, with the intent of borrowing as much of the expression as legally possible, which seems like it probably can’t end well from a legal perspective. And because the technology for building these kind of machines is essentially public knowledge now, it’s hard to imagine this won’t be a problem from now on.
- toss1 4y ago
  Yup. Or even more clearly with example [0]. Input request for an image of a person named "Ann Graham Lotz", it returned the exact image in the training set, slightly degraded. MIT Tech Review reports research with hundreds of similar results [1]. "The researchers, from Google, DeepMind, UC Berkeley, ETH Zürich, and Princeton, got their results by prompting Stable Diffusion and Google’s Imagen with captions for images, such as a person’s name, many times. Then they analyzed whether any of the images they generated matched original images in the model’s database. The group managed to extract over 100 replicas of images in the AI’s training set. " [0] https://news.yahoo.com/researchers-prove-ai-art-generators-204500956.html https://news.yahoo.com/researchers-prove-ai-art-generators-2... [1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/02/03/1067786/ai-models-spit-out-photos-of-real-people-and-copyrighted-images/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/02/03/1067786/ai-model...
  - zone411 4y ago
    They only found images that had been replicated 100+ times in Stable Diffusion's training set. Stable Diffusion did a poor job deduplicating.
jefftk 4y ago
I doubt this works. For example, here's a case where someone did essentially the same thing manually and lost: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_Island_Collections_Ltd_v_New_English_Teas_Ltd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_Island_Collections_Ltd_...
kmeisthax 4y ago
In the law you don't have "implementation details", you have ideas and expressions. Ideas are patentable, expressions are copyrightable, and never the two shall meet. The exact boundary of those two things is defined by the merger doctrine and the thin copyright doctrine[0]; but for our purposes we just need to know that if your AI art generator spits out something that's "substantially similar" to the original, it's infringing, even if it's not exactly the same. The law anticipated tracing. What you are proposing is that you just "wash off" the expression from the idea and regenerate a new image from that idea. Great, except this isn't how AI art generators work. They aren't breaking down images into their core ideas, because those only exist in our human minds[1]. They're finding patterns of pixels that happen to match the text prompt well enough; and often times that includes the original image itself. Overfitting is a huge problem with conditional U-Net models and Google even released a paper detailing a way to find and extract memorized images out of an art generator. So what will likely happen is that the art generator will just copy the image, or make one that's close enough that a judge would say that that it's a copy. [0] If an expression is fundamentally wrapped up in an uncopyrightable idea and can't be expressed any other way, then it's also uncopyrightable. But if an expression is made up of uncopyrightable ideas, but separable from them, then you get a thin copyright on the arrangement of such. [1] And, also, most humans are terrible at distinguishing idea and expression in the way that copyright law demands.
- YurgenJurgensen 4y ago
  So these 'copyright laundering' AIs also need to use an LLM to generate a legal defence that shows that the copied aspects were, in fact, the only way to express the idea. Which is a good thing, since having to read thousands of long spurious AI-generated copyright defences will quickly motivate lawyers to create laws against AI-generated legal defences.
  - lanstin 4y ago
    I honestly think that, a parallel ML system to explain in words the decision of the deciding ML, is the only way we will get explainable ML. That is somewhat analogous to how humans decide. Our brain runs over data and various potential outcomes and maybe reasoning and then decides. A bit later it generates a post-how explanation of said decision.I think we all have experienced ourselves and others having a totally wrong explanation about decisions but it is some how more satisfying than “a gut feel” or “because I said so”.
belorn 4y ago
With cases like this I am reminded by the pirate bay case in that there are two ways people can be found guilty of copyright infringement. One can prove that a copy has been made, or one can convince a judge that the opposite story provided by the defendant is not believable. After that case there has been multiple theories on how to evade copyright law which all seem like they would equally fail at convincing a judge. One of my favorite is the method used by freenet, which takes a file and first encrypts it and then splits it into so small parts. Those parts are so small that multiple files will share identical parts with each other, so it is impossible to know for sure which file a person is downloading by just looking at the parts. In a different channel they also provide a recipe in how to reconstruct the file, and recipe by themselves are not enough as evidence to prove a download. Sounds perfect until one would have to try convince a judge that no copying has occurred.
pejrich 4y ago
Every piece of art is a collage of other pieces of art. Everyone is inspired by other, and copies others, whether they admit it or not. You can't write a song or paint a picture and say that the way you stroke a brush or strum a guitar is not something that was learned by watching others. I think in general too often people are awarded copyright judgements when they shouldn't be, however in this instance I do feel that absolutely nothing of artistic value is being added, and it does seem to be intended to replace the original. If you like a song you heard, and you write something with the same chords, and a similar melody, that's fair game, but if you write something so similar, _and_ market, and sell it as a replacement "don't buy that expensive song, this ones basically the same, and half the price", then I'm quite sure you're in some very murky, and potentially illegal waters.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

prpl 4y ago

IANAL but you can’t copyright a concept.

ROTMetro 4y ago
But you do have copyright claims to derivative works.
- prpl 4y ago
  I think that really depends. You can describe the photo conceptually and build a new photo from that, which would be equivalent to clean room engineering.
  - rhizome 4y ago
    But "you" (or I) don't describe the photo, their process does, and I'm not confident that Separation of Concerns would be enough to establish a clean room.
    - jjeaff 4y ago
      But a derivative work requires that major copyrightable elements remain. So it seems like there is a fuzzy line on whether something is really derivative or not. I don't think it is necessarily enough to have simply started with a copyrighted work.
      - williamcotton 4y ago
        Yes, it has to be visually derivative in order to be a copyright infringement, not mathematically derivative! Imagine if Stable Diffusion was made illegal. Someone accuses me of using this illegal tool for an image that doesn’t look like anyone else’s image as far as the court is concerned for copyright. I put the image on my website. If the image itself is not at all infringing, then what is the evidence that Stable Diffusion was used? Should the police be issued a warrant to search my private property for proof that I used Stable Diffusion without a shred of evidence?
    - prpl 4y ago
      I think that depends on how it’s done. If there’s actual visual representation ( bitmaps or FFT coefficients) copied around (and most importantly - more than what might be described as fair use), that would probably be true. If a highly accurate conceptual description is generated then an image generated on that, I would see no issue. I don’t know how it is implemented for the software in question.
      - rhizome 4y ago
        IANAL, but from my understanding of the points at issue, I think a court might be likely to find that a) sucking the image into RAM is a copy in the first place; b) the FFT/etc. would be a (first) derivative work; c) using a form of the original image sufficient to communicate to the alteration processes what it should be altering would constitute a copy; and/or d) identifying something as a de-copyrighted work will undercut any defenses. Here's an interesting answer apropos to all this: https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/7250/could-i-remove-gplv2-from-this-algorithm-implementation https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/7250/could-i-...

charcircuit 4y ago

It's clearly a derivative work of the original. >On one hand, nothing is stopping me from seeing the copyrighted photo and then recruiting a similar looking model, setting up a photoshoot in a field with some stuffed crows, etc. I could replicate what the AI is doing. It would be work, but I could do it. The AI is just automating this. If you trace art by hand that is still copyright infringement. If you paraphrase a passage from a book by hand that is still copyright infringement.

gamegoblin 4y ago
> If you trace art by hand that is still copyright infringement. If you paraphrase a passage from a book by hand that is still copyright infringement. What if I see some fine art, I, a non-artist, make a super-low quality recreation of it with crayons, give that + a verbal description to a different professional artist who has not seen the original, and have them "upscale" my bad drawing into new fine art. Their art would be conceptually very similar to the original. Same layout, same concept, same vibes, same style (if my verbal description was sufficiently good) but all the details would be different. Is this still infringement?
- jcranmer 4y ago
  It's a derivative work of a derivative work, so yes, it's still infringement.
- visarga 4y ago
  If this worked all artists would be passible for lawsuits, how many ways can you draw flowers in a vase? "They stole my idea, your honour! They used the same number of flowers in a vase, I came up with the concept of 3 flowers first." I think artists and copyright intermediaries would like to have "wildcard" copyright, "draw a flower once, all flowers belong to you now", and it would be very bad for creativity if they got their way.
  - XorNot 4y ago
    The vast majority of profit most artists are making is also copyright infringement. Custom porn is where the money is, and Rule 34 is likely a huge part of that.

ronsor 4y ago

Using img2img to "royalty free"-ize an image is clearly copyright infringement, and the output is a clear derivative work of the original. If you described the original image (or made CLIP do it) and fed the description to txt2img generation, then you'd probably be fine.

gamegoblin 4y ago
Seems like it's a matter of time (or maybe it's already done and I haven't seen it yet) before you get optimizers that takes an image and produces a seed+prompt that yields a super super conceptually similar image. I think being able to selectively optimize for "magic" random seeds in the diffusion algorithm will be kind of critically important here. Different seeds can produce very different images given the same prompt. What if an optimizer can find a seed+prompt combos that are just as good as cloning as img2img?
- GaggiX 4y ago
  If you want to clone an image (for some reason) just encode it in latent space and retrieve it using a deterministic sampler such as DDIM. Or you can simply right-click and copy. If you instead don't want to clone an image, you can just extract the CLIP image embeddings from it and use them to condition a generative model like Dalle 2, Midjourney or Karlo (open source). The CLIP embeddings extract really well the semantic meaning of an image.
  - gamegoblin 4y ago
    Going image -> vector space -> image feels very much like compression for the purpose of copyright. Like a lower quality JPEG of some image still has the same copyright properties of the original. Something about going image -> prompt -> image feels like it "subverts" this somehow, even if the prompt is hyper-optimized to recreate the original image. Obviously, this is just my feel/impression of it, the real test is how a jury feels about it. The next few years will be really interesting in exposing that this is a really massive gray area.

bee_rider 4y ago

Not a lawyer but I’m under the impression that one of the things they do in law school is spend a bunch of time constructing increasingly ridiculous hypotheticals, to work out the specifics of their arguments. I think AI is overhyped in general, but as a tool to rapidly instantiate absurd hypotheticals it is really impressive. This is cool and good, IMO.

visarga 4y ago

I thought copyright covers just expression, not the ideas. If the model replicates the idea in a different way why should there be an infringement?

rhizome 4y ago
The "idea" at issue isn't like "a picture of a tree," though. It's "a picture of a tree as conceived by Ansel Adams and photographed with [technical details]."
- dxbydt 4y ago
  "a picture of One WTC as conceived by Ansel Adams and photographed with a Hasselblad" is still an idea, because One WTC opened in 2014 & Mr. Adams died thirty years ago in 1984.

jcranmer 4y ago

Not a lawyer, but given that it takes the original picture as an input, there's a very strong claim that it's a tool to create a derivative work. At which point, it's time to ask the question if this is going to be fair use... Okay, when you're advertising your product as a "get around copyright", you're going to so torpedo your credibility before the judge that there's no point trying to analyze the fair use factors--the judge is going to do whatever it takes to make them come out not in your favor.

rhizome 4y ago
That tagline certainly seems like it's gonna make their "preponderance of evidence" an uphill battle!
shagie 4y ago
> Not a lawyer, but given that it takes the original picture as an input, there's a very strong claim that it's a tool to create a derivative work. If I take an image and then create a thumbnail of it would that be an infringing derivative work? https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2006/02/perfect-10-v-google-more-smooth-crunchy https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2006/02/perfect-10-v-google-mo... and https://web.archive.org/web/20060813093554/https://www.eff.org/legal/cases/Perfect10_v_Google/ https://web.archive.org/web/20060813093554/https://www.eff.o...
- jcranmer 4y ago
  Thumbnails are absolutely infringing... but they are fair use in most cases! Edit: on second thought, they might not even be derivative works (as a derivative work requires the same spark of creativity necessary for a copyrightable work), just outright reproduction. But the point that they are fair use still stands.
- wizzwizz4 4y ago
  It would unambiguously be a derivative work. (IANAL, but I'm willing to assert this.) I wouldn't think it would be infringing: I'm not particularly familiar with US law, but it seems like a classic case of fair use. Note: the case you linked was appealed, and that ruling was reversed. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/05/p10-v-google-public-interest-prevails-digital-copyright-showdown https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/05/p10-v-google-public-in...

ghaff 4y ago

IANAL but the Obama Hope poster lawsuit is probably somewhat related. https://www.law.columbia.edu/news/archive/obama-hope-poster-lawsuit-settlement-good-deal-both-sides-says-kernochan-center-director https://www.law.columbia.edu/news/archive/obama-hope-poster-... However, the case was settled and the creator of the poster lied in court about his sources--so I'm not sure I'd draw too much about the poster inspired by photograph.

seizethecheese 4y ago

Corollary question: what if this took two images as input? It couldn’t ever then be purely derivative of one image.

YurgenJurgensen 4y ago
A picture of Mickey Mouse dressed as Superman is still a derivative work. The main difference is that the number of lawyers you anger is now doubled.
- schrodinger 4y ago
  IANAL but wouldn't the creativity involved in doing that fall under Fair Use? Although some googling says that if someone remixed two songs, they'd need copyright permission from each artist. I guess there's a spectrum between that and more of a parody, like Weird Al's Amish Paradise.
  - YurgenJurgensen 4y ago
    Fair use defences aren't automatic, and all go on a case-by-case basis. One of the major criteria is 'effect on the work's value'. Given how easy it is to find people (in this very thread, even) gleefully predicting the death of stock photo sites, it'd pretty easy for a lawyer to tear said defence apart. Weird Al gets permission for all of his music. Even if the parody defence were valid, song licensing is pretty cheap, and defending lawsuits against artists signed with major labels is expensive.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

dahart 4y ago

I was also tempted to quote the expression/idea dichotomy, but looking at the examples, you’re totally right: the example you showed is aiming to land directly on the line between legal and illegal, it is legitimately hard to reason about, it is different than borrowing either the idea or the expression, and it absolutely is sketchy (and will probably be tested in court if it gets much more attention). The problem here is that it does more than just clone the idea/concept/vibes, it really does tread into copying the implementation details. It matches lighting & composition, it matches subject and color, it can mimic the equipment used & props. People have done this manually, and been sued for it. Mostly it happens when an unknown artist steals the style of a specific well-known, best-selling artist. But now we’ve built a machine to near-copy anything in any style, with the intent of borrowing as much of the expression as legally possible, which seems like it probably can’t end well from a legal perspective. And because the technology for building these kind of machines is essentially public knowledge now, it’s hard to imagine this won’t be a problem from now on.

toss1 4y ago
Yup. Or even more clearly with example [0]. Input request for an image of a person named "Ann Graham Lotz", it returned the exact image in the training set, slightly degraded. MIT Tech Review reports research with hundreds of similar results [1]. "The researchers, from Google, DeepMind, UC Berkeley, ETH Zürich, and Princeton, got their results by prompting Stable Diffusion and Google’s Imagen with captions for images, such as a person’s name, many times. Then they analyzed whether any of the images they generated matched original images in the model’s database. The group managed to extract over 100 replicas of images in the AI’s training set. " [0] https://news.yahoo.com/researchers-prove-ai-art-generators-204500956.html https://news.yahoo.com/researchers-prove-ai-art-generators-2... [1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/02/03/1067786/ai-models-spit-out-photos-of-real-people-and-copyrighted-images/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/02/03/1067786/ai-model...
- zone411 4y ago
  They only found images that had been replicated 100+ times in Stable Diffusion's training set. Stable Diffusion did a poor job deduplicating.

jefftk 4y ago

I doubt this works. For example, here's a case where someone did essentially the same thing manually and lost: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_Island_Collections_Ltd_v_New_English_Teas_Ltd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_Island_Collections_Ltd_...

kmeisthax 4y ago

In the law you don't have "implementation details", you have ideas and expressions. Ideas are patentable, expressions are copyrightable, and never the two shall meet. The exact boundary of those two things is defined by the merger doctrine and the thin copyright doctrine[0]; but for our purposes we just need to know that if your AI art generator spits out something that's "substantially similar" to the original, it's infringing, even if it's not exactly the same. The law anticipated tracing. What you are proposing is that you just "wash off" the expression from the idea and regenerate a new image from that idea. Great, except this isn't how AI art generators work. They aren't breaking down images into their core ideas, because those only exist in our human minds[1]. They're finding patterns of pixels that happen to match the text prompt well enough; and often times that includes the original image itself. Overfitting is a huge problem with conditional U-Net models and Google even released a paper detailing a way to find and extract memorized images out of an art generator. So what will likely happen is that the art generator will just copy the image, or make one that's close enough that a judge would say that that it's a copy. [0] If an expression is fundamentally wrapped up in an uncopyrightable idea and can't be expressed any other way, then it's also uncopyrightable. But if an expression is made up of uncopyrightable ideas, but separable from them, then you get a thin copyright on the arrangement of such. [1] And, also, most humans are terrible at distinguishing idea and expression in the way that copyright law demands.

YurgenJurgensen 4y ago
So these 'copyright laundering' AIs also need to use an LLM to generate a legal defence that shows that the copied aspects were, in fact, the only way to express the idea. Which is a good thing, since having to read thousands of long spurious AI-generated copyright defences will quickly motivate lawyers to create laws against AI-generated legal defences.
- lanstin 4y ago
  I honestly think that, a parallel ML system to explain in words the decision of the deciding ML, is the only way we will get explainable ML. That is somewhat analogous to how humans decide. Our brain runs over data and various potential outcomes and maybe reasoning and then decides. A bit later it generates a post-how explanation of said decision.I think we all have experienced ourselves and others having a totally wrong explanation about decisions but it is some how more satisfying than “a gut feel” or “because I said so”.

belorn 4y ago

With cases like this I am reminded by the pirate bay case in that there are two ways people can be found guilty of copyright infringement. One can prove that a copy has been made, or one can convince a judge that the opposite story provided by the defendant is not believable. After that case there has been multiple theories on how to evade copyright law which all seem like they would equally fail at convincing a judge. One of my favorite is the method used by freenet, which takes a file and first encrypts it and then splits it into so small parts. Those parts are so small that multiple files will share identical parts with each other, so it is impossible to know for sure which file a person is downloading by just looking at the parts. In a different channel they also provide a recipe in how to reconstruct the file, and recipe by themselves are not enough as evidence to prove a download. Sounds perfect until one would have to try convince a judge that no copying has occurred.

pejrich 4y ago

Every piece of art is a collage of other pieces of art. Everyone is inspired by other, and copies others, whether they admit it or not. You can't write a song or paint a picture and say that the way you stroke a brush or strum a guitar is not something that was learned by watching others. I think in general too often people are awarded copyright judgements when they shouldn't be, however in this instance I do feel that absolutely nothing of artistic value is being added, and it does seem to be intended to replace the original. If you like a song you heard, and you write something with the same chords, and a similar melody, that's fair game, but if you write something so similar, _and_ market, and sell it as a replacement "don't buy that expensive song, this ones basically the same, and half the price", then I'm quite sure you're in some very murky, and potentially illegal waters.