3 ms·

There’s going to be a lot of low effort takes about this. In the context of the Copyright Office’s previous few decisions this makes sense. Midjourney is toas

There’s going to be a lot of low effort takes about this. In the context of the Copyright Office’s previous few decisions this makes sense. Midjourney is toast if it does nothing to stop the by-design inertia of the quasi-caselaw way these things are decided. The source of the most flaws in the Zarya of the Dawn registration rejection came from the Copyright Office copying and pasting deeply flawed technical explanations directly from Midjourney. It’s on Midjourney and no one else. They ought to be paying a great IP firm to submit rebuttals on behalf of losing users, but whatever. “Yeah bro, but predict the future.” In this particular case, you're going to be able to register AI generated artwork - maybe not in the specific way that Midjourney does it, because the Copyright Office isn't going to pull their own pants down after issuing the Zarya of the Dawn decision, pulling their pants back up, in reaction to social media pulling their pants down. But ControlNets and T5-style grammatically substantive prompts will do. The recent Andy Warhol decision and the way Google Books actually panned out means Stability and Runway are boned, and probably Midjourney too. The Author's Guild-like litigants will get a small payout, they will not prevail in a huge way, but they will prevail - they actually prevailed in Google Books too but people don't understand that, the news reported it as "Google won" but it actually lost in that it settled and didn't get to do any of the things it really wanted to do. Meta will be forced to stop distributing its tainted LLaMA, express permission will be needed for all intents and purposes, but academics will be "fair use." I don't know if there's going to be some loophole to academize their work, it's just going to be hard to argue that compute resources and devops - the things Stability's, Runway's, Meta's teams really bring to the table compared to the academy - mean they ought to benefit from the same protections as a traditional education institution, in spite of being commercial entities. It remains to be seen what will happen with Adobe's efforts. Nobody would be talking about latent diffusion models or pixel diffusers or whatever if it weren't for the fact that they were trained on content that wasn't expressly permitted. So it doesn't matter if Adobe got express permission for the training inputs of its models, so long as it's also using this code that maybe wasn't "trained" (in the ML sense) on unpermissioned content in this particular case but was definitely authored in the context of unpermissioned content in an equally essential way. It's the same reason you can't conduct unethical human research and launder it into something clean. It taints everything. Anyway, I doubt Adobe trained their own text encoder unencumbered. It's acutely obvious with these community efforts at "training" stable diffusion "checkpoints" on "CC0" content. My dudes, you're using CLIP, which is trained on LAION 2b. It's just so painfully low information. Adobe will not prevail. But Adobe surely will convince the low information bros that their way is bulletproof. In an intellectually honest way, nobody using diffusers or transformers with permissioned content will just get away with it.

noobermin 3y ago
Favorite-ing your comment to see if you end up being right. My opinion is the tools are here, whether we like it or not, so AI as a thing will remain in some form, it's just that these efforts where people train on anyone else's content is where things fall apart and thus it will not look like how it looks today, where you have a company or a community effort that provides a NN trained on other people's data. Instead, the data generators and the AI trainers will have to be the same person or entity (company). If I for example trained an LLM on the code I've generated since I was 16 and made a nooberminGPT, it would be fine because I won't sue myself. The only other way things could generally work is like how artists sign their copyrights to be owned by a company or publisher, basically people or entities will have to sell their content to be trained instead of it being trained on for free...And then we'll see old fashioned exploitation, basically people being suckered into contracts where they sign their life away, but it will be on paper as opposed to now where it's the wild west and you can take anyone's content without asking.
- doctorpangloss 3y ago
  > If I for example trained an LLM on the code I've generated since I was 16 and made a nooberminGPT, it would be fine because I won't sue myself. That's like saying you don't need IRB approval to inject yourself with your experimental research chemicals. That's true, but it's impracticable. It's as rare as monkeys taking pictures of themselves, which did produce an interesting but objectively bullshit copyright registration decision. It might as well be random at that scale. nooberminGPT is impracticable because GPTs won't generalize on your tiny dataset, if that's all they're trained on. Making your own math is impracticable, your own alternative to transformers, because you need commercial-entity-scale resources to run that research program. Nobody could have proven that transformers work as well as they do without all the unpermissioned data, and we're talking about it only because it was proven to work. I mean transformers were just as powerful when they were first conceived as Python code, in an objective sense, but we're talking about it because of the data. And if you allow that something changed between that stuff entering the researcher's consciousness and actually reacting to the results of experiments on unpermissioned data, which is definitely true, transformers and diffusers are irreparably tainted. > where it's the wild west and you can take anyone's content without asking. Like long term, if you put something on the Internet, you are implicitly saying that people can do whatever the fuck they want with it. Video games, as an industry and creative pursuit, have evolved, in a Darwinian way, within that objective reality for a long time. And consequently the multiplayer backend servers are highly protected, the clients are free, there's a thriving indie scene of easily pirated games, there's a thriving first party market of expensive prestige single player titles, and the video game industry is huge and makes tons of money, and it has no more (or fewer) exploited creatives toiling in it than any other creative industry, except that they are compared to novelists, actors and directors, always toiling away in obscurity. All of this works. That Hollywood and book publishers are struggling to innovate monetization at all isn't really the copyright office's problem; that these models can generate images and text, which directly threatens Hollywood and doesn't really move the needle on video games, is also not really the copyright office's problem. The AI stuff is a red herring for deeper problems.

noobermin 3y ago

Favorite-ing your comment to see if you end up being right. My opinion is the tools are here, whether we like it or not, so AI as a thing will remain in some form, it's just that these efforts where people train on anyone else's content is where things fall apart and thus it will not look like how it looks today, where you have a company or a community effort that provides a NN trained on other people's data. Instead, the data generators and the AI trainers will have to be the same person or entity (company). If I for example trained an LLM on the code I've generated since I was 16 and made a nooberminGPT, it would be fine because I won't sue myself. The only other way things could generally work is like how artists sign their copyrights to be owned by a company or publisher, basically people or entities will have to sell their content to be trained instead of it being trained on for free...And then we'll see old fashioned exploitation, basically people being suckered into contracts where they sign their life away, but it will be on paper as opposed to now where it's the wild west and you can take anyone's content without asking.

doctorpangloss 3y ago
> If I for example trained an LLM on the code I've generated since I was 16 and made a nooberminGPT, it would be fine because I won't sue myself. That's like saying you don't need IRB approval to inject yourself with your experimental research chemicals. That's true, but it's impracticable. It's as rare as monkeys taking pictures of themselves, which did produce an interesting but objectively bullshit copyright registration decision. It might as well be random at that scale. nooberminGPT is impracticable because GPTs won't generalize on your tiny dataset, if that's all they're trained on. Making your own math is impracticable, your own alternative to transformers, because you need commercial-entity-scale resources to run that research program. Nobody could have proven that transformers work as well as they do without all the unpermissioned data, and we're talking about it only because it was proven to work. I mean transformers were just as powerful when they were first conceived as Python code, in an objective sense, but we're talking about it because of the data. And if you allow that something changed between that stuff entering the researcher's consciousness and actually reacting to the results of experiments on unpermissioned data, which is definitely true, transformers and diffusers are irreparably tainted. > where it's the wild west and you can take anyone's content without asking. Like long term, if you put something on the Internet, you are implicitly saying that people can do whatever the fuck they want with it. Video games, as an industry and creative pursuit, have evolved, in a Darwinian way, within that objective reality for a long time. And consequently the multiplayer backend servers are highly protected, the clients are free, there's a thriving indie scene of easily pirated games, there's a thriving first party market of expensive prestige single player titles, and the video game industry is huge and makes tons of money, and it has no more (or fewer) exploited creatives toiling in it than any other creative industry, except that they are compared to novelists, actors and directors, always toiling away in obscurity. All of this works. That Hollywood and book publishers are struggling to innovate monetization at all isn't really the copyright office's problem; that these models can generate images and text, which directly threatens Hollywood and doesn't really move the needle on video games, is also not really the copyright office's problem. The AI stuff is a red herring for deeper problems.