4 ms·

Copyright already cover characters and stories. Just because an ai (or a human) comes out with a copyrighted character in a novel pose, it doesn't mean it's not

Copyright already cover characters and stories. Just because an ai (or a human) comes out with a copyrighted character in a novel pose, it doesn't mean it's not copyrighted Style itself is not copyrighted, and that's a good thing. I can create copyrighted content privately. I cannot share it. Law doesn't forbid imagination, wether human or ai and that's a good thing. But I cannot distribute these private rendition already without violating the content owner copyright. Law seem pretty complete and well defined to me. Are there cases where an ai and a human can generate the same media but which result in the media having different legality?

josephg 4y ago
> Law seem pretty complete and well defined to me. I don't think lawyers would agree with you at all. > Just because an ai (or a human) comes out with a copyrighted character in a novel pose, it doesn't mean it's not copyrighted My understanding is that there isn't a legal consensus on whether or not thats true. Copyright law wasn't written with AI generated art in mind. For a work to be copyrightable, my understanding is that it requires that you can make a "sweat off my brow" argument. Ie, you had to work to create something. Does an AI count? We don't know. Or to put it in other terms, we haven't (collectively) decided as a society whether it should be copyrightable. On the other side, "fair use" arguments are also at play here. If I train a 1bn parameter model on 5bn images, I could probably make an argument that 1/5th of a f16 probably constitutes fair use of copyrighted work. If that argument holds, I can train my model with impunity on any amount of copyrighted work so long as my model is small and the number of training examples is large. Will that argument sway a court room? I have no idea. Is that fair? I don't know! The law is decided by people. And we haven't had AIs like stable diffusion and ChatGPT before, so the laws haven't been written with this stuff in mind. There isn't even a legal precedent yet for how the current laws should apply to AI art. Speculating is fun, but speculating on how a judge will apply old laws to a totally novel problem is a fool's errand. If you want to read about fun edge cases to copyright law, look up the history of copyright law for maps (can facts be copyrighted?) and how that interacts with trap streets. This stuff is hairy and complicated even for lawyers. As an outsider, boldly claiming that copyright law is simple only demonstrates that you don't understand law. It'd be like a lawyer boldly arguing (with no knowledge) that compilers are simple.
- avereveard 4y ago
  Training method and recall are of no consequences because copyright law doesn't deal with technology for the most part. There is a test to wether the image is stored or not which is interesting here for the topic at hand, but it's always in the context of distribution. The worst is that weight may be considered storage, but the point is... Law already covers that. Because it doesn't concern with technology, but with results of actions. That is the whole problem with the argumentation, law is technology agnostic, just adding a layer of redirection doesn't matter, because tm it cares about the input and the output not what happens in between.
  - josephg 4y ago
    > law is technology agnostic, just adding a layer of redirection doesn't matter, because tm it cares about the input and the output not what happens in between. What makes you think that? The law cares about whatever lawyers decide to care about. There was a case a few years ago where (if memory serves) a black woman sued an insurance company for discrimination after the insurance company refused to provide her cover. The company was using a neural net to decide whether to cover someone. The court demanded they explain the neural networks' decision - and of course, they couldn't. The insurance company lost the case. In the aftermath they moved from a neural net to a decision tree based ML system. The decision tree made slightly worse decisions, but they figured if it lowered their legal exposure, it was worth it. With a decision tree, they can print out the decision tree if they were ever sued again and hand it to a judge. > law is technology agnostic Clearly not in this case. There's plenty of other examples if you go looking. In criminal law, they care a great deal about the technology used in forensic analysis - both in its strengths and weaknesses. If you don't know much about law, being humble and wrong will serve you better than being confident and wrong.
    - couchand 4y ago
      It's worth noting that "worse decisions" is from the point of view of the insurance company, which would prefer to act racist if only that pesky law didn't stop them, and will continue to do so to the extent they can get away with it.

josephg 4y ago

> Law seem pretty complete and well defined to me. I don't think lawyers would agree with you at all. > Just because an ai (or a human) comes out with a copyrighted character in a novel pose, it doesn't mean it's not copyrighted My understanding is that there isn't a legal consensus on whether or not thats true. Copyright law wasn't written with AI generated art in mind. For a work to be copyrightable, my understanding is that it requires that you can make a "sweat off my brow" argument. Ie, you had to work to create something. Does an AI count? We don't know. Or to put it in other terms, we haven't (collectively) decided as a society whether it should be copyrightable. On the other side, "fair use" arguments are also at play here. If I train a 1bn parameter model on 5bn images, I could probably make an argument that 1/5th of a f16 probably constitutes fair use of copyrighted work. If that argument holds, I can train my model with impunity on any amount of copyrighted work so long as my model is small and the number of training examples is large. Will that argument sway a court room? I have no idea. Is that fair? I don't know! The law is decided by people. And we haven't had AIs like stable diffusion and ChatGPT before, so the laws haven't been written with this stuff in mind. There isn't even a legal precedent yet for how the current laws should apply to AI art. Speculating is fun, but speculating on how a judge will apply old laws to a totally novel problem is a fool's errand. If you want to read about fun edge cases to copyright law, look up the history of copyright law for maps (can facts be copyrighted?) and how that interacts with trap streets. This stuff is hairy and complicated even for lawyers. As an outsider, boldly claiming that copyright law is simple only demonstrates that you don't understand law. It'd be like a lawyer boldly arguing (with no knowledge) that compilers are simple.

avereveard 4y ago
Training method and recall are of no consequences because copyright law doesn't deal with technology for the most part. There is a test to wether the image is stored or not which is interesting here for the topic at hand, but it's always in the context of distribution. The worst is that weight may be considered storage, but the point is... Law already covers that. Because it doesn't concern with technology, but with results of actions. That is the whole problem with the argumentation, law is technology agnostic, just adding a layer of redirection doesn't matter, because tm it cares about the input and the output not what happens in between.
- josephg 4y ago
  > law is technology agnostic, just adding a layer of redirection doesn't matter, because tm it cares about the input and the output not what happens in between. What makes you think that? The law cares about whatever lawyers decide to care about. There was a case a few years ago where (if memory serves) a black woman sued an insurance company for discrimination after the insurance company refused to provide her cover. The company was using a neural net to decide whether to cover someone. The court demanded they explain the neural networks' decision - and of course, they couldn't. The insurance company lost the case. In the aftermath they moved from a neural net to a decision tree based ML system. The decision tree made slightly worse decisions, but they figured if it lowered their legal exposure, it was worth it. With a decision tree, they can print out the decision tree if they were ever sued again and hand it to a judge. > law is technology agnostic Clearly not in this case. There's plenty of other examples if you go looking. In criminal law, they care a great deal about the technology used in forensic analysis - both in its strengths and weaknesses. If you don't know much about law, being humble and wrong will serve you better than being confident and wrong.
  - couchand 4y ago
    It's worth noting that "worse decisions" is from the point of view of the insurance company, which would prefer to act racist if only that pesky law didn't stop them, and will continue to do so to the extent they can get away with it.