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seems fine? copyright exists in the US under this clause in the constitution: > “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited t

seems fine? copyright exists in the US under this clause in the constitution: > “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.” not sure how letting people copyright the output of a program that ate the work of a million other people would "promote the progress of science and useful arts"? or how there's an author to reward? or how there's writings or discoveries? of course this also applies to the US endlessly extending copyright also - nothing Congress can do, no matter how well intentioned, is going to encourage Walt Disney himself to produce anything new of value, nor did keeping Happy Birthday copyrighted until 70 years after the last Hill sister died assist any of them in coming back to life to come up with a second hit. the dumb optimistic part of my dreams that having matrix multiplications shitting out words and pictures will cause a reassessment of why we let IP laws get so fucked up to begin with, but of course, it won't - it'll just mean Disney and Warner et al will find some way to keep selling tv shows and movies and the humans who produced the art who get shoved into the matrices get shafted.

candiddevmike 3y ago
How do you prove something wasn't AI generated so you can claim copyright on it? What does this mean for code generated by GitHub Copilot and friends, and IP assignment contracts?
- bananapub 3y ago
  dunno. how do you prove you wrote a particular novel?
  - candiddevmike 3y ago
    You never had to before, this could lead to the end of the current copyright law. Will wait and see what Disney thinks of this.
  - doctorpangloss 3y ago
    > how do you prove you wrote a particular novel? The forensics for that are easy. The forensics here are hard: how does a plaintiff in the USA prove that an AI, and not a person, wrote a novel, when the authors live in China?
- lusus_naturae 3y ago
  You should be able to recreate it to some degree without the use of an AI tool.
rendall 3y ago
> not sure how letting people copyright the output of a program that ate the work of a million other people would "promote the progress of science and useful arts"? I agree with you. It's a mess. AI output should be copyrightable, but only if the provenance of its input is carefully audited. That is, the owner of its output owns or licenses all copyrights of its inputs. An artist that trains a model on only her own work should be able to copyright its output. Midjourney is IP theft to the degree that it was trained on copyrighted work without permission.
- doctorpangloss 3y ago
  > An artist that trains a model on only her own work should be able to copyright its output. Why? If she made a LORA, well she's using someone else's Stable Diffusion checkpoint, which was trained on things she wasn't permitted to use. If she made a fine tune, same thing. If she trains the UNets and the VAE from scratch, on just her own work, what did she use for conditioning? CLIP? Which was trained on LAION2b? Did she also train her own text encoder? What is her conditioning approach? All these models, why are we talking about them? If it weren't for training on the unpermissioned data, these models would be toiling away in obscurity. If someone conducts a bunch of unethical medical research, and they discover some important biomechanics, do I get to repeat all of that stuff, "but ethically?" Am I untainted? If the police discover real evidence in a procedurally problematic way, for example by torturing a confession that turns out to be true, do they get a "do-over"? > but only if the provenance of its input is carefully audited All I am saying is, you haven't "carefully audited" the feel-good story "artist that trains a model on only her own work should be able to copyright its output."
  - rendall 3y ago
    No idea what you're taking about. Throwing arcane technical terms about does not advance your argument. Nor does the triumph or obscurity of the AI research elide the copyright interest of artists in how their own work is used.
    - doctorpangloss 3y ago
adventured 3y ago
Humans produce art in part by taking in what others have created before them and the output is some combination of many input factors, including influences by the works of others (whether we're talking painting or architecture). And today the influence by pre-existing art would be likely to be considerable in terms of factors, given the Internet, access to art and visual media broadly. As AI advances radically over the next decade or two, it's going to end up being comically hypocritical to pretend humans are more deserving as originators.
- bananapub 3y ago
  > As AI advances radically over the next decade or two, it's going to end up being comically hypocritical to pretend humans are more deserving as originators. What does that have to do with anything? > “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.” Matrix maths isn’t a human so can’t be an author or inventor so there’s no reason to grant any protection to any of the results of any multiplication .

candiddevmike 3y ago

How do you prove something wasn't AI generated so you can claim copyright on it? What does this mean for code generated by GitHub Copilot and friends, and IP assignment contracts?

bananapub 3y ago
dunno. how do you prove you wrote a particular novel?
- candiddevmike 3y ago
  You never had to before, this could lead to the end of the current copyright law. Will wait and see what Disney thinks of this.
- doctorpangloss 3y ago
  > how do you prove you wrote a particular novel? The forensics for that are easy. The forensics here are hard: how does a plaintiff in the USA prove that an AI, and not a person, wrote a novel, when the authors live in China?
lusus_naturae 3y ago
You should be able to recreate it to some degree without the use of an AI tool.

rendall 3y ago

> not sure how letting people copyright the output of a program that ate the work of a million other people would "promote the progress of science and useful arts"? I agree with you. It's a mess. AI output should be copyrightable, but only if the provenance of its input is carefully audited. That is, the owner of its output owns or licenses all copyrights of its inputs. An artist that trains a model on only her own work should be able to copyright its output. Midjourney is IP theft to the degree that it was trained on copyrighted work without permission.

doctorpangloss 3y ago
> An artist that trains a model on only her own work should be able to copyright its output. Why? If she made a LORA, well she's using someone else's Stable Diffusion checkpoint, which was trained on things she wasn't permitted to use. If she made a fine tune, same thing. If she trains the UNets and the VAE from scratch, on just her own work, what did she use for conditioning? CLIP? Which was trained on LAION2b? Did she also train her own text encoder? What is her conditioning approach? All these models, why are we talking about them? If it weren't for training on the unpermissioned data, these models would be toiling away in obscurity. If someone conducts a bunch of unethical medical research, and they discover some important biomechanics, do I get to repeat all of that stuff, "but ethically?" Am I untainted? If the police discover real evidence in a procedurally problematic way, for example by torturing a confession that turns out to be true, do they get a "do-over"? > but only if the provenance of its input is carefully audited All I am saying is, you haven't "carefully audited" the feel-good story "artist that trains a model on only her own work should be able to copyright its output."
- rendall 3y ago
  No idea what you're taking about. Throwing arcane technical terms about does not advance your argument. Nor does the triumph or obscurity of the AI research elide the copyright interest of artists in how their own work is used.
  - doctorpangloss 3y ago

adventured 3y ago

Humans produce art in part by taking in what others have created before them and the output is some combination of many input factors, including influences by the works of others (whether we're talking painting or architecture). And today the influence by pre-existing art would be likely to be considerable in terms of factors, given the Internet, access to art and visual media broadly. As AI advances radically over the next decade or two, it's going to end up being comically hypocritical to pretend humans are more deserving as originators.

bananapub 3y ago
> As AI advances radically over the next decade or two, it's going to end up being comically hypocritical to pretend humans are more deserving as originators. What does that have to do with anything? > “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.” Matrix maths isn’t a human so can’t be an author or inventor so there’s no reason to grant any protection to any of the results of any multiplication .