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A thought experiment: Imagine you have a blob of seemingly random data. Nothing in the data contains anything recognizable as illegal or in violation of copyri

A thought experiment: Imagine you have a blob of seemingly random data. Nothing in the data contains anything recognizable as illegal or in violation of copyright. Now imagine that the right input suddenly turns the data into illegal or infringing material, after a transformation operation. And not just a single unique input such as a password which clearly represents a mapping function between two sets of data. But imagine if there were seemingly infinite possible inputs, each of which transformed the data into a different infringing blob of data. If these inputs exactly represented the novel, copyrightable or illegal aspects, but the blob itself was inert. What should be illegal here? The blob, which by itself is free of any questionable bits of data, or the inputs which transform it into something tangible? Both? Neither? Well, it has never been illegal to draw or paint something representing CSAM, for example. And it has never been illegal to draw or paint Mickey Mouse in your own home. What's often illegal is publishing said data. Ignoring the free speech debate around artificially produced CSAM, publishing it is already illegal in many territories. It is also illegal to violate copyright in many countries when publishing information. What's interesting is that it is not illegal to trace a drawing and hanging it up on your wall, instead of buying the the real drawing from its rights-holder. It's also not illegal to reproduce a tracing done by a friend. But the recording and film industries have been more successful in convincing us that it should be illegal to do the same for a song or film. That you should not be able to "trace" the data at home, and that you should not be able to share it with me, that I should not be able to trace over your tracing and bring home a copy for myself. I can understand, and support a copyright system which regulates the publishing of copyrighted material. Even copyleft paradigms lean on regulation for enforcement. But the film and music industry actively try to restrict individual freedoms in the name of corporate profits, while still screwing over their clients and employees with respect to profit-sharing. Back to the point: That blob should never be illegal. The activation functions should never be illegal. That is a basic extension of free speech. But publishing, that is a different story, and we already have laws offering such protections both with respect to illegally-produced or copyrighted content. Any attempt to regulate what kind of model I am allowed to run at home is a massive infringement on my rights as an individual, and is borne either out of gross ignorance of current copyright law from the same people crying, "But think of the copyrights!", or direct, insidious corporate greed. You can adjust this thought experiment so that instead of dealing with a magic blob, we are dealing with a program that makes it really easy to produce illegal or copyrighted works after a bit of human interaction. Is there claim here now? Are we basing the law on how much human involvement was needed to create the output? We've faced similar arguments around technological leaps such as the printing press or mechanical loom. Did we, as a society, reject these advances in technology in order to protect loom workers and scribes? Bottom line. You can pry my models out of my cold, dead or handcuffed hands. Times like these really shine a light on who is complicit in the system, and who suffers from it. If you are in the creative industry, you need to understand how things are going to change. As an engineer with decades of investment into my craft, I also have to face the rude awakening that is ahead in my own industry as automation creates a gap between highly-skilled professionals and newcomers. Being a paid software engineer might become as hard of work as becoming a famous professional artist. Lots of connections, insane specialization and a lifetime devoted to the craft. A lot of people in school for engineering right now might struggle to find employment in 20 years or less if they cannot cross this gap in time. Artists aren't the only tribe experiencing a huge industry shake-up over a technology that will one day be so ubiquitous that it's inside of your toaster.

Aerroon 3y ago
>Imagine you have a blob of seemingly random data. Nothing in the data contains anything recognizable as illegal or in violation of copyright. R The set of Real numbers contains every positive whole number. This is already the magical blob. Eg the decimal number 65101114114111111110 is "Aerroon" in ASCII. Edit3: real numbers are better than natural numbers or whole numbers for this. They have zero and they solve the "0005" problem.
mithr 3y ago
This feels like a bit of a naive interpretation of the situation. At its core — regardless of specific lawsuits, etc — the questions here are (1) should copyright laws be adapted to the new reality of generative AI, (2) should artists be able to control how their work is used given generative AI is a reality, and (3) do we as a society think people should be able to make a living as artists, and what are the implications of that either way when it comes to AI models and their use. Until this point, an artist who has developed their own personal, recognizable style, could be somewhat confident that it is difficult for someone else to generate a new piece of art exactly mimicking their style. That is to say, it was never impossible — there have certainly always been other artists out there who are capable of taking artwork and creative something new in that style — but there were some barriers to getting there, including that those artists aren’t easily and instantaneously accessible to every human being on the planet, that they generally don’t work for free, and that they would need some time to produce their work. The combination of these factors resulted in a system wherein, for the most part, if you really wanted to create something in the style of a specific artist, you would need to commission them, thereby supporting their ability to live and continue creating art. And/or they sold merchandise with their art, or collections, etc. Now, on the other hand, it is incredibly easy to go to an image generator and have it generate art in the style of a specific (sufficiently well-established) artist quickly, easily, and freely. The barriers have, overnight, gone from being reasonably protective to pretty much nonexistent. As a result, artists are asking themselves how they can continue to live and create art. This is something a sufficiently well-established professional artist used to be able to do before generative AI came into the picture, because other than the odd copycat (which again took time and effort and an actual human with the right ability), they were the only ones who could produce images in their own styles, and this ability was thus a valuable resource that people paid for. If anyone can now produce identical images independently and for free, then this ability may no longer be a resource other people will pay for. Part of what these court cases are trying to determine is exactly whether any copyright does apply to generated images. You wrote that “publishing, that is a different story, and we already have laws offering such protections both with respect to illegally-produced or copyrighted content”, but those laws are exactly what’s being tested here: artists (and organizations like Getty) are seeing what they claim are AI-generated copies of their copyrighted works in use out in the world (so these have been “published” by some definition — they are not only being printed out and hung in people’s garages for them and their friends to look at in private), and are suing to stop that. But aside from that, I think there is a real philosophical discussion here. If you’ve trained as an artist your entire life, have worked hard to develop a unique style, and are one of the relatively few artists who have been successful doing so — should a company be able to wait until you became popular, then just take all of your work, and use it to train a model that can produce works exactly in your style easily and without any effort, which it can then provide to people freely or for a subscription? This also isn’t as much about the output, as about how the output was obtained. If the model did not actually ingest your images, but someone wrote a prompt that involved a super-detailed description of what made your style unique, going into color palettes, line thicknesses, art styles, influences, etc etc, and you would have to get all of that right in order to generate something that looked like your art, then I think most folks would be generally ok with that. But when (1) your prompt can just be “give me art that looks like soulofmischief made it” and it’ll give you just that, and (2) you know that your art was used to train the model in order for it to be able to do that, then there is a question of whether fair use laws should be adjusted to prohibit this behavior and protect your ability to live off of your work. I also think that regardless of the outcome of these lawsuits, no one is really coming for your own models and hour ability to tinker in your garage. It may not be legal today to duplicate a copyrighted image and hang it in your office, but no one will ever know (or care enough to do nothing about it) if you do. Similarly, even if this use becomes copyrighted, nothing will practically stop you from building your own large model that includes any copyrighted images you want, for your own personal use, in your own garage. But if you then turn around and try to profit off of that model, or if you want someone else to produce a model (thus stepping more into the publishing realm) that’s where a line may be drawn. I personally think that’d be fair. Finally, zooming all the way out, I believe that it should be possible to make a living as an artist, and I think when we have discussions like these, we should keep reminding ourselves to think about how our technical or legal arguments affect that outcome.

Aerroon 3y ago

>Imagine you have a blob of seemingly random data. Nothing in the data contains anything recognizable as illegal or in violation of copyright. R The set of Real numbers contains every positive whole number. This is already the magical blob. Eg the decimal number 65101114114111111110 is "Aerroon" in ASCII. Edit3: real numbers are better than natural numbers or whole numbers for this. They have zero and they solve the "0005" problem.

mithr 3y ago

This feels like a bit of a naive interpretation of the situation. At its core — regardless of specific lawsuits, etc — the questions here are (1) should copyright laws be adapted to the new reality of generative AI, (2) should artists be able to control how their work is used given generative AI is a reality, and (3) do we as a society think people should be able to make a living as artists, and what are the implications of that either way when it comes to AI models and their use. Until this point, an artist who has developed their own personal, recognizable style, could be somewhat confident that it is difficult for someone else to generate a new piece of art exactly mimicking their style. That is to say, it was never impossible — there have certainly always been other artists out there who are capable of taking artwork and creative something new in that style — but there were some barriers to getting there, including that those artists aren’t easily and instantaneously accessible to every human being on the planet, that they generally don’t work for free, and that they would need some time to produce their work. The combination of these factors resulted in a system wherein, for the most part, if you really wanted to create something in the style of a specific artist, you would need to commission them, thereby supporting their ability to live and continue creating art. And/or they sold merchandise with their art, or collections, etc. Now, on the other hand, it is incredibly easy to go to an image generator and have it generate art in the style of a specific (sufficiently well-established) artist quickly, easily, and freely. The barriers have, overnight, gone from being reasonably protective to pretty much nonexistent. As a result, artists are asking themselves how they can continue to live and create art. This is something a sufficiently well-established professional artist used to be able to do before generative AI came into the picture, because other than the odd copycat (which again took time and effort and an actual human with the right ability), they were the only ones who could produce images in their own styles, and this ability was thus a valuable resource that people paid for. If anyone can now produce identical images independently and for free, then this ability may no longer be a resource other people will pay for. Part of what these court cases are trying to determine is exactly whether any copyright does apply to generated images. You wrote that “publishing, that is a different story, and we already have laws offering such protections both with respect to illegally-produced or copyrighted content”, but those laws are exactly what’s being tested here: artists (and organizations like Getty) are seeing what they claim are AI-generated copies of their copyrighted works in use out in the world (so these have been “published” by some definition — they are not only being printed out and hung in people’s garages for them and their friends to look at in private), and are suing to stop that. But aside from that, I think there is a real philosophical discussion here. If you’ve trained as an artist your entire life, have worked hard to develop a unique style, and are one of the relatively few artists who have been successful doing so — should a company be able to wait until you became popular, then just take all of your work, and use it to train a model that can produce works exactly in your style easily and without any effort, which it can then provide to people freely or for a subscription? This also isn’t as much about the output, as about how the output was obtained. If the model did not actually ingest your images, but someone wrote a prompt that involved a super-detailed description of what made your style unique, going into color palettes, line thicknesses, art styles, influences, etc etc, and you would have to get all of that right in order to generate something that looked like your art, then I think most folks would be generally ok with that. But when (1) your prompt can just be “give me art that looks like soulofmischief made it” and it’ll give you just that, and (2) you know that your art was used to train the model in order for it to be able to do that, then there is a question of whether fair use laws should be adjusted to prohibit this behavior and protect your ability to live off of your work. I also think that regardless of the outcome of these lawsuits, no one is really coming for your own models and hour ability to tinker in your garage. It may not be legal today to duplicate a copyrighted image and hang it in your office, but no one will ever know (or care enough to do nothing about it) if you do. Similarly, even if this use becomes copyrighted, nothing will practically stop you from building your own large model that includes any copyrighted images you want, for your own personal use, in your own garage. But if you then turn around and try to profit off of that model, or if you want someone else to produce a model (thus stepping more into the publishing realm) that’s where a line may be drawn. I personally think that’d be fair. Finally, zooming all the way out, I believe that it should be possible to make a living as an artist, and I think when we have discussions like these, we should keep reminding ourselves to think about how our technical or legal arguments affect that outcome.