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Copyright controls the right to copy, not any and all use. Just because somebody holds the copyright on something, it doesn’t mean they can dictate how it is us

Copyright controls the right to copy, not any and all use. Just because somebody holds the copyright on something, it doesn’t mean they can dictate how it is used. “The copyright holder has not agreed for it to be used in these ways” is irrelevant. “The copyright holder has not agreed for it to be copied in these ways” is what matters. Analysing an image and adjusting weights in relation to that image is not making a copy. The images aren’t being copied into the model. You could argue that downloading the images in the first place to make that analysis constitutes copying, but these kinds of incidental copying aren’t normally considered within the bounds of copyright. If they were, you’d be committing copyright infringement every time you surfed the web.

galaxyLogic 4y ago
You make a good point. I can browse the web and while I do I see pictures which get "copied" into my memory, somehow. However somebody looking at my brain with a microscope probably could not see those images in my brain, they are not localized that way. So copying something into my brain is not copyright infringement because I don't copy the image, I only allows the image to have some kind of affect on my brain. That is not copying I would argue. it is "experiencing". AI is a big brain which consumes the web almost like humans do. It "sees" the pictures on the web when it adds their characteristics to its associative memory. The AI then generates images. But unless it comes up with a clear copy of somebody else's work, it is not copyright infringement. I am not a lawyer so take this with a grain of salt.
- regularfry 4y ago
  Copying the image into your brain isn't what's material here. It's copying it into your browser over the network.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    I don't think this is relevant.
  - galaxyLogic 4y ago
    Right but that is allowed, you can browse the web which means the content has to be copied to your computer.
regularfry 4y ago
> The images aren’t being copied into the model. Except where they kind of are. Where it gets fiddly is if the model is capable of spitting out close reproductions of images from its training set. That's been demonstrated on some models. I don't have a particularly good intuition as to which way this would go, but I can see someone making an argument that copying the model is therefore copying all the training set images it could be convinced to make a reproduction of. That's unlikely to be everything in the training set, but by the same token I don't know how you could determine how much of the training set can be reproduced that way.

galaxyLogic 4y ago

You make a good point. I can browse the web and while I do I see pictures which get "copied" into my memory, somehow. However somebody looking at my brain with a microscope probably could not see those images in my brain, they are not localized that way. So copying something into my brain is not copyright infringement because I don't copy the image, I only allows the image to have some kind of affect on my brain. That is not copying I would argue. it is "experiencing". AI is a big brain which consumes the web almost like humans do. It "sees" the pictures on the web when it adds their characteristics to its associative memory. The AI then generates images. But unless it comes up with a clear copy of somebody else's work, it is not copyright infringement. I am not a lawyer so take this with a grain of salt.

regularfry 4y ago
Copying the image into your brain isn't what's material here. It's copying it into your browser over the network.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  I don't think this is relevant.
- galaxyLogic 4y ago
  Right but that is allowed, you can browse the web which means the content has to be copied to your computer.

regularfry 4y ago

> The images aren’t being copied into the model. Except where they kind of are. Where it gets fiddly is if the model is capable of spitting out close reproductions of images from its training set. That's been demonstrated on some models. I don't have a particularly good intuition as to which way this would go, but I can see someone making an argument that copying the model is therefore copying all the training set images it could be convinced to make a reproduction of. That's unlikely to be everything in the training set, but by the same token I don't know how you could determine how much of the training set can be reproduced that way.