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> 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 ar

> 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
    I don't think you should be downvoted for having opinions that are based on a lack of information. Everything I talked about is to illustrate that it is impracticable to resolve the issue of authorship by doing something like, "I got permission for the data." The first step on the expanding brain meme is understanding all the stuff I wrote, it basically means "in order for the generative AI technology to work, you use a lot of other people's unpermissioned data in many, many ways, that are impractical to replace." The second step in the expanding brain meme is to understand that your opinion, "if you use art you have permission for in a generative AI model, you're In The Ethical Right," is co-opted by Adobe. Because they happen to have the good fortune to run an image licensing bureau, so they can "get permission" for "the data" and you were convinced that's "all they need." When of course, they use tons of unpermissioned data, because that's how these models work, but you just don't know enough about the problem yet to understand that. So you're going around essentially astroturfing this feel good position that has no stronger technical basis than doing what CivitAI users do. It just has a really appealing starch to it.
    - rendall 3y ago
      You don't win an argument by gatekeeping and patronizing like that. There's information you don't have, apparently. This is not a technological issue alone, but also a social, legal and artistic issue. It is very clear that artists whose art was used to train AI have copyright interest in that AI's output. The implementation details of the model are irrelevant to the interest. The technical difficulty of auditing its inputs' provenance is irrelevant to that interest.
      - orwin 3y ago
        No. The only things that's clear is that works from AI should be non-copyrightable and under at least a creative commons, and in my opinion a copyleft license akin to AGPL and gpl3 (I think disagreeing on this opinion is fine however). Output from AI should be non-mercantile. Why? Because most text/images used by AI company to create, test then pretrain/train their tools are creative common /unlicensed (I trained/fine-tuned an OCR in 2016), and thus, copyrighting the output of any model would be stealing from the general public.

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
  I don't think you should be downvoted for having opinions that are based on a lack of information. Everything I talked about is to illustrate that it is impracticable to resolve the issue of authorship by doing something like, "I got permission for the data." The first step on the expanding brain meme is understanding all the stuff I wrote, it basically means "in order for the generative AI technology to work, you use a lot of other people's unpermissioned data in many, many ways, that are impractical to replace." The second step in the expanding brain meme is to understand that your opinion, "if you use art you have permission for in a generative AI model, you're In The Ethical Right," is co-opted by Adobe. Because they happen to have the good fortune to run an image licensing bureau, so they can "get permission" for "the data" and you were convinced that's "all they need." When of course, they use tons of unpermissioned data, because that's how these models work, but you just don't know enough about the problem yet to understand that. So you're going around essentially astroturfing this feel good position that has no stronger technical basis than doing what CivitAI users do. It just has a really appealing starch to it.
  - rendall 3y ago
    You don't win an argument by gatekeeping and patronizing like that. There's information you don't have, apparently. This is not a technological issue alone, but also a social, legal and artistic issue. It is very clear that artists whose art was used to train AI have copyright interest in that AI's output. The implementation details of the model are irrelevant to the interest. The technical difficulty of auditing its inputs' provenance is irrelevant to that interest.
    - orwin 3y ago
      No. The only things that's clear is that works from AI should be non-copyrightable and under at least a creative commons, and in my opinion a copyleft license akin to AGPL and gpl3 (I think disagreeing on this opinion is fine however). Output from AI should be non-mercantile. Why? Because most text/images used by AI company to create, test then pretrain/train their tools are creative common /unlicensed (I trained/fine-tuned an OCR in 2016), and thus, copyrighting the output of any model would be stealing from the general public.