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Can someone explain again how an ML system scanning and training on a copyrighted work is different from a highly skilled artist doing the same? There are arti

Can someone explain again how an ML system scanning and training on a copyrighted work is different from a highly skilled artist doing the same? There are artists that can study a painting for a few minutes and then recreate it from memory. There are artists who study a particular body of work so long that they can create more works indistinguishable in style. If an artist recreates a copyrighted work or creates a derivative too close to the original, then that new work is potentially copyright infringement. That is, we focus on the output of the process to determine infringement with living artists and ignore the training. But with ML, everyone focuses on the training. It seems an ML tool could add a filter to the output and refuse to output a work that too closely resembles one or more work under copyright. Isn't that basically what legitimate professional artists do as well? Thousands of artists are capable of infringement, but we don't take away their brushes based on capability.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
picadores 3y ago
The AI will not throw a molotowcocktail at you or hang you from a lamppost when it starves?
kranke155 3y ago
Let me change the argument around: Why is it assumed that because an artwork is freely available on the internet, you are allowed to train a machine to reproduce it, being in its totality or just details that are used in the creation of new works? IE why isn't it that an artist could say, hey I'm letting you see this painting, but you are not allowed to sit down with a canvas and learn how to reproduce it? Because you can do that in galleries - no photos, no reproductions. So actually building a machine there, under the cover of darkness, that learns from your work so you can produce new work, why is that allowed in the first place? Certainly wouldn't be at a museum. The key thing here is - if you want artists' data, you should ask for it. They didn't. This would be equivalent of training a Github CoPilot on every available piece of code in existence, ever, instead of what they had available. Why should that be allowed? So if I built some toy code in 1996, and happened to post it on usenet, and it's a great implementation of X, why the heck is CoPilot allowed to read it? It's my property.
- shkkmo 3y ago
  > why isn't it that an artist could say, hey I'm letting you see this painting, but you are not allowed to sit down with a canvas and learn how to reproduce it? Because you can do that in galleries - no photos, no reproductions. But you can't stop people from sitting and studying your painting and then painting stuff similar to it. One of the core assertions that is being decided in this case is if there is any actual reproduction here. Does a model contain a reproduction of every image it was trained on? Can the model actually create a reproduction of any images it was trained on? If it turns out that there is no reproduction here, then it comes down to how much legal control we give copyright owners to regulate access. A gallery can reasonably ban cameras and canvases, but it becomes a lot less reasonable if they try to ban artists. Let's imagine that this isn't just specifically tuned ML but proper General AI that can learn new skills. Is your argument that this AI would be legally prohibited from viewing any images it doesn't have a specific license for? I think that drawing hard lines around what kind of processing can be done on publicly available images is going to become problematic. It's better to regulate around what can be done with the results of the processing than that processing itself. That's how our existing laws work. Making a reproduction, even just from memory, of a copyrighted work is restricted. Memorizing a copyrighted work is not.
  - kranke155 3y ago
    I find the whole comparison "it´s just like a person learning" to be a tiring trope. It's demonstrably not. Like I said to another poster - you've probably seen a Picasso. Can you make me a copy? Because a Diffusion model can. But you can't. Why not? Your denial that there is a demonstrable difference between human and machine attention is part of the core obfuscation these companies are using to win this battle, so I reject it entirely. That difference creates the whole issue. If you don't recognise it, then answer me - Why can't you paint me a Picasso? You're saying the Machine is just like a human, yet a simple question of reproduction tells you it's not like a human in any way. It's a machine, and it produces machine reproductions. It learns faster and more accurately than any human, and its purpose is to produce derivative works. If the machine didn't need human data to do this, this discussion would be academic. But it does. So the whole future of the Arts will be decided by investigating what the machine actually does, not the simplistic idea of it´s just like a human. You have to evaluate the machine's abilities and impact onto the world. And that's the tough part. But just saying "hihih it's just a person" while it produces superhuman output is not a solution, it's just a lie that was invented by the people profiting from these models. >Is your argument that this AI would be legally prohibited from viewing any images it doesn't have a specific license for? Yes. You pay for access.
panta 3y ago
It's a matter of scale. No human being can ingest ALL existing images. If it was the case that the average human artist was able to replicate any other work, without effort, probably we would have had two effects: first, we'd have much less works of art (because the gains would have been eliminated, so why bother), and second, copyright law would have been much more restrictive. This is exactly what we should do: avoid applying a law thought for human beings, and create a new more specific law, much more restrictive. Otherwise future art created by actual human beings will suffer greatly (without mentioning the loss of work and human abilities), to the economic benefit of a very small set of monopolistic players.
- thrill 3y ago
  The law does not say it is a matter of scale.
  - xeckr 3y ago
    Scalable GenAI hardly existed as a sci-fi concept when the law was passed.
    - frumper 3y ago
      Then we should write a law to make it a matter of scale.
- theonlybutlet 3y ago
  What you propose is just a different small set of monopolistic players. Copyright has always been a trade off between the creator and society. It should be enforced the exact same way as it currently is. Fair use is fair use. By your same logic, what is the difference between an AI or a very productive human? Where do you draw the line?
  - panta 3y ago
    Fair use by a machine is a concept which has hardly been studied by legislators. Personally I'd draw the line at the human/machine boundary.
CrimsonRain 3y ago
No difference. Some people are just luddites or have vested interest against automation of their own field (but fine with other fields).
- __loam 3y ago
  I don't know. It seems pretty shitty that these systems are literally leveraging their work against them. It also seems shitty that we're trying to automate cultural expression. Even if it's not explicitly illegal, the ai art guys are still ass holes.
  - jofla_net 3y ago
    Totally agree. As someone who hates how commoditization already permeated everything in the West we're sadly in for many years ahead of cheap regurgitated knockoffs in practically every human output domain imaginable, pictures, music, literature. All the while being told that what we were doing in these domains is 'just' this and 'only' that. At the same time it is fascinating from a scientific perspective, when it lands in the same boat as you're sailing it becomes quite unsettling.
koolba 3y ago
> If an artist recreates a copyrighted work or creates a derivative too close to the original, then that new work is potentially copyright infringement. I see no reason the same standard cannot be applied to ML generated content. If the evaluation is being performed on the end result, then that is all that matters. The same judges that decide these things for human generated content can continue to do so for ML generated ones. Even the people submitting and responding to the copyright claims will still be human (with briefs generated by ML…). What will be more interesting is when the judges themselves get replaced with an “objective” AI to quantify similarity for copyright purposes. If that ever happens, it’ll trigger an arms race to hit the razors edge without going over.
_petronius 3y ago
> Can someone explain again how an ML system scanning and training on a copyrighted work is different from a highly skilled artist doing the same? Three things immediately spring to mind: scale (1), accountability (2), and profit (3). 1. An automated system can train on data at huge volume, in a way that no single human is capable of doing. Setting aside the issue that training an ML model and artists learning by copying techniques of other artists is, I would argue, fundamentally different acts, _even if we take them to be the same_, we have to acknowledge that in a single human lifetime one person can only "train" on so many works. Automated systems have no such limitation. 2. If an artist violates copyright or oversteps norms around artistic professional practice, they can be held accountable. Companies which violate this by using automated systems so far hide behind those systems ("the AI is doing it/did it") so aren't held responsible (it should be: the company has built the system, and therefore is responsible for how it is used, and what it does). By building up this false sense of agency on the part of systems (which the marketing term "AI" is designed to bolster), lack of accountability is laundered into the actions being taken at scale. 3. Automated systems are, due to their scale, very profitable. I can generate hundreds or thousands of copyright-violating work that dilute the market for artists, and it is incredibly cheap to do so. Fighting those copyright violations in court has to be done more or less on an individual basis (especially if actions like that in the original article continue to fail), which is extremely slow and expensive. If the cost of violating copyright is tiny, and the cost of enforcing it is huge, then it ceases to be a useful tool except for the most well-resourced organizations. > It seems an ML tool could add a filter to the output and refuse to output a work that too closely resembles one or more work under copyright. Isn't that basically what legitimate professional artists do as well? No, because copyright is more complicated than "these two things look a lot alike", and legitimate professional artists don't run into this issue, because they aren't constantly trying to skirt the line of "as close as possible to copyright violation while still getting away with it". > Thousands of artists are capable of infringement, but we don't take away their brushes based on capability. But they do get sued when they infringe! Enforcement happens, because (for now) it is still possible for independent artists to enforce their copyrights. The argument being made by artists with regard to these ML models is that _they are already infringing copyright_, not that they hypothetically may in the future.
mattigames 3y ago
This is the typical intentionally misleading argument in favor of AI, comparing a software to a human artist conveniently forgetting that a real artist cannot a create millions of pieces every hour, just that difference makes any direct comparison laughtable because such threshold was an absolute immutable constant for all human history until very recently, and that includes among many other things the incentives artists had to persue that career instead of any other. And of course the societal problems that displacing so many jobs entails.
bergen 3y ago
An artist can not professionally scan and incorporate millions of pieces of art into his cortex in a minute for commercial purpose.
raincole 3y ago
> how an ML system scanning and training on a copyrighted work is different from a highly skilled artist doing the same? You just answered it? One is a ML system and one is a human? I'm really, really baffled why people keep using this argument. Like you guys know machines are not humans, right? ...right? Humans are special cases in laws. Always have been and always will be (until AGI). A pedestrian is treated differently in laws than a driver is. The fact that a pair of legs and a car both move you from point A to point B doesn't make them same. Selling human livers on your local market is very different from selling cow livers, even biologically they are all organic tissues. Let me say it again: humans are special cases. AI learning copyrighted materials might be illegal or legal, but it has little to do with "what if a human being does the same".
- ben_w 3y ago
  > Always have been and always will be (until AGI) Probably not even then, at least not initially. While some people conflate AGI with personhood, consciousness, qualia, etc. we've got at least 22 different[0] ideas of what consciousness is and no idea how to even determine whether or not a mind has qualia — and even if we did, I see no specific reason to require any of them, as a P-zombie[1] AGI doesn't seem to me like a contradiction in terms. [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41583-022-00587-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41583-022-00587-4 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
- theonlybutlet 3y ago
  In law there is such a thing as legal person as opposed to natural person. When it comes to commercial law, its provisions tends to relate to legal persons.
  - unsui 3y ago
    legal personhood (such as corporate personhood) are tools/frameworks which facilitate certain economic actions, such as the creation of charters for specific initiatives. Like any useful force amplifier, legal personhood has effectively been co-opted to benefit those entities which stand to gain from it (e.g., corporations, large-money political donors, etc). Thus, it probably won't surprise anyone when AIs are granted legal personhood, to bypass the detrimenal effects they will inevitably have on natural persons. That said, it is likely a good thing to keep meatspace in some kind of privileged legal category, lest the rights of legal persons outweight those of natural persons (which seems to be the inevitable conclusion, and goal, of all this).
__loam 3y ago
The issue is that ml companies are using exact copies of the work in question, and using it to make massive for-profit systems without permission or compensation. Individual artists don't threaten the market in the same way.
- frumper 3y ago
  How do they get the works in question to train on?
  - __loam 3y ago
    They download them from the public internet. The issue is that digital artists are basically required to maintain a public portfolio to get work. Them doing that is not implicit permission to use that work for whatever the fuck you want, as at says at the bottom of every image on Google images.
lofaszvanitt 3y ago
Have you been sitting in Midjourney rooms and saw the prompts? :DDD
dragonwriter 3y ago
> Can someone explain again how an ML system scanning and training on a copyrighted work is different from a highly skilled artist doing the same? Its legally different because the human brain is not considered a fixed medium under copyright law, so a human experiencing and learning something is not making what is potentially a copy or derivative work under copyright law, and therefore not exercising, potentially without permission, one of the exclusive rights granted to the copyright holder. > There are artists that can study a painting for a few minutes and then recreate it from memory Right, and those artists violate copyright at the moment they recreate it in a fixed medium without permission, but encoding it into computer storage media is already a copy, so a machine (or, rather, the person using the machine) hits that threshold before creating an actual visual output. > That is, we focus on the output of the process to determine infringement No, we focus on what is set in a fixed medium. If that is done at an intermediate step of the process, rather than being an output, it can still be infringement. Its just that a human doesn’t always need to make a copy in what is legally a fixed medium until the output, but that is not the same as categorically only treating outout of a process as legally relevant.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  People betting on all “lossy compression” being equivalent will lose. It’s a lame argument. Can you encode images to be basically 1:1 with embeddings? Absolutely. Is that what these embeddings are doing? No. If artists try to argue that all copies are equivalent, but are unable to recreate their works from the embeddings, their argument will fall flat. This argument also only applies to sharing models, which is doubly dumb because we want open source models, not closed source models. It’s a harmful status quo to try and enforce.
nextaccountic 3y ago
> Can someone explain again how an ML system scanning and training on a copyrighted work is different from a highly skilled artist doing the same? Because (fortunately) human thoughts can't be subject to copyright law yet. So when we talk about copying and making derivative works, if you have this artistic works -> neural network weights The end result may or may not be copyrightable (that's for the courts to decide), but this artistic works -> human brain Definitively can't be

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

picadores 3y ago

The AI will not throw a molotowcocktail at you or hang you from a lamppost when it starves?

kranke155 3y ago

Let me change the argument around: Why is it assumed that because an artwork is freely available on the internet, you are allowed to train a machine to reproduce it, being in its totality or just details that are used in the creation of new works? IE why isn't it that an artist could say, hey I'm letting you see this painting, but you are not allowed to sit down with a canvas and learn how to reproduce it? Because you can do that in galleries - no photos, no reproductions. So actually building a machine there, under the cover of darkness, that learns from your work so you can produce new work, why is that allowed in the first place? Certainly wouldn't be at a museum. The key thing here is - if you want artists' data, you should ask for it. They didn't. This would be equivalent of training a Github CoPilot on every available piece of code in existence, ever, instead of what they had available. Why should that be allowed? So if I built some toy code in 1996, and happened to post it on usenet, and it's a great implementation of X, why the heck is CoPilot allowed to read it? It's my property.

shkkmo 3y ago
> why isn't it that an artist could say, hey I'm letting you see this painting, but you are not allowed to sit down with a canvas and learn how to reproduce it? Because you can do that in galleries - no photos, no reproductions. But you can't stop people from sitting and studying your painting and then painting stuff similar to it. One of the core assertions that is being decided in this case is if there is any actual reproduction here. Does a model contain a reproduction of every image it was trained on? Can the model actually create a reproduction of any images it was trained on? If it turns out that there is no reproduction here, then it comes down to how much legal control we give copyright owners to regulate access. A gallery can reasonably ban cameras and canvases, but it becomes a lot less reasonable if they try to ban artists. Let's imagine that this isn't just specifically tuned ML but proper General AI that can learn new skills. Is your argument that this AI would be legally prohibited from viewing any images it doesn't have a specific license for? I think that drawing hard lines around what kind of processing can be done on publicly available images is going to become problematic. It's better to regulate around what can be done with the results of the processing than that processing itself. That's how our existing laws work. Making a reproduction, even just from memory, of a copyrighted work is restricted. Memorizing a copyrighted work is not.
- kranke155 3y ago
  I find the whole comparison "it´s just like a person learning" to be a tiring trope. It's demonstrably not. Like I said to another poster - you've probably seen a Picasso. Can you make me a copy? Because a Diffusion model can. But you can't. Why not? Your denial that there is a demonstrable difference between human and machine attention is part of the core obfuscation these companies are using to win this battle, so I reject it entirely. That difference creates the whole issue. If you don't recognise it, then answer me - Why can't you paint me a Picasso? You're saying the Machine is just like a human, yet a simple question of reproduction tells you it's not like a human in any way. It's a machine, and it produces machine reproductions. It learns faster and more accurately than any human, and its purpose is to produce derivative works. If the machine didn't need human data to do this, this discussion would be academic. But it does. So the whole future of the Arts will be decided by investigating what the machine actually does, not the simplistic idea of it´s just like a human. You have to evaluate the machine's abilities and impact onto the world. And that's the tough part. But just saying "hihih it's just a person" while it produces superhuman output is not a solution, it's just a lie that was invented by the people profiting from these models. >Is your argument that this AI would be legally prohibited from viewing any images it doesn't have a specific license for? Yes. You pay for access.

panta 3y ago

It's a matter of scale. No human being can ingest ALL existing images. If it was the case that the average human artist was able to replicate any other work, without effort, probably we would have had two effects: first, we'd have much less works of art (because the gains would have been eliminated, so why bother), and second, copyright law would have been much more restrictive. This is exactly what we should do: avoid applying a law thought for human beings, and create a new more specific law, much more restrictive. Otherwise future art created by actual human beings will suffer greatly (without mentioning the loss of work and human abilities), to the economic benefit of a very small set of monopolistic players.

thrill 3y ago
The law does not say it is a matter of scale.
- xeckr 3y ago
  Scalable GenAI hardly existed as a sci-fi concept when the law was passed.
  - frumper 3y ago
    Then we should write a law to make it a matter of scale.
theonlybutlet 3y ago
What you propose is just a different small set of monopolistic players. Copyright has always been a trade off between the creator and society. It should be enforced the exact same way as it currently is. Fair use is fair use. By your same logic, what is the difference between an AI or a very productive human? Where do you draw the line?
- panta 3y ago
  Fair use by a machine is a concept which has hardly been studied by legislators. Personally I'd draw the line at the human/machine boundary.

CrimsonRain 3y ago

No difference. Some people are just luddites or have vested interest against automation of their own field (but fine with other fields).

__loam 3y ago
I don't know. It seems pretty shitty that these systems are literally leveraging their work against them. It also seems shitty that we're trying to automate cultural expression. Even if it's not explicitly illegal, the ai art guys are still ass holes.
- jofla_net 3y ago
  Totally agree. As someone who hates how commoditization already permeated everything in the West we're sadly in for many years ahead of cheap regurgitated knockoffs in practically every human output domain imaginable, pictures, music, literature. All the while being told that what we were doing in these domains is 'just' this and 'only' that. At the same time it is fascinating from a scientific perspective, when it lands in the same boat as you're sailing it becomes quite unsettling.

koolba 3y ago

> If an artist recreates a copyrighted work or creates a derivative too close to the original, then that new work is potentially copyright infringement. I see no reason the same standard cannot be applied to ML generated content. If the evaluation is being performed on the end result, then that is all that matters. The same judges that decide these things for human generated content can continue to do so for ML generated ones. Even the people submitting and responding to the copyright claims will still be human (with briefs generated by ML…). What will be more interesting is when the judges themselves get replaced with an “objective” AI to quantify similarity for copyright purposes. If that ever happens, it’ll trigger an arms race to hit the razors edge without going over.

_petronius 3y ago

> Can someone explain again how an ML system scanning and training on a copyrighted work is different from a highly skilled artist doing the same? Three things immediately spring to mind: scale (1), accountability (2), and profit (3). 1. An automated system can train on data at huge volume, in a way that no single human is capable of doing. Setting aside the issue that training an ML model and artists learning by copying techniques of other artists is, I would argue, fundamentally different acts, _even if we take them to be the same_, we have to acknowledge that in a single human lifetime one person can only "train" on so many works. Automated systems have no such limitation. 2. If an artist violates copyright or oversteps norms around artistic professional practice, they can be held accountable. Companies which violate this by using automated systems so far hide behind those systems ("the AI is doing it/did it") so aren't held responsible (it should be: the company has built the system, and therefore is responsible for how it is used, and what it does). By building up this false sense of agency on the part of systems (which the marketing term "AI" is designed to bolster), lack of accountability is laundered into the actions being taken at scale. 3. Automated systems are, due to their scale, very profitable. I can generate hundreds or thousands of copyright-violating work that dilute the market for artists, and it is incredibly cheap to do so. Fighting those copyright violations in court has to be done more or less on an individual basis (especially if actions like that in the original article continue to fail), which is extremely slow and expensive. If the cost of violating copyright is tiny, and the cost of enforcing it is huge, then it ceases to be a useful tool except for the most well-resourced organizations. > It seems an ML tool could add a filter to the output and refuse to output a work that too closely resembles one or more work under copyright. Isn't that basically what legitimate professional artists do as well? No, because copyright is more complicated than "these two things look a lot alike", and legitimate professional artists don't run into this issue, because they aren't constantly trying to skirt the line of "as close as possible to copyright violation while still getting away with it". > Thousands of artists are capable of infringement, but we don't take away their brushes based on capability. But they do get sued when they infringe! Enforcement happens, because (for now) it is still possible for independent artists to enforce their copyrights. The argument being made by artists with regard to these ML models is that _they are already infringing copyright_, not that they hypothetically may in the future.

mattigames 3y ago

This is the typical intentionally misleading argument in favor of AI, comparing a software to a human artist conveniently forgetting that a real artist cannot a create millions of pieces every hour, just that difference makes any direct comparison laughtable because such threshold was an absolute immutable constant for all human history until very recently, and that includes among many other things the incentives artists had to persue that career instead of any other. And of course the societal problems that displacing so many jobs entails.

bergen 3y ago

An artist can not professionally scan and incorporate millions of pieces of art into his cortex in a minute for commercial purpose.

raincole 3y ago

> how an ML system scanning and training on a copyrighted work is different from a highly skilled artist doing the same? You just answered it? One is a ML system and one is a human? I'm really, really baffled why people keep using this argument. Like you guys know machines are not humans, right? ...right? Humans are special cases in laws. Always have been and always will be (until AGI). A pedestrian is treated differently in laws than a driver is. The fact that a pair of legs and a car both move you from point A to point B doesn't make them same. Selling human livers on your local market is very different from selling cow livers, even biologically they are all organic tissues. Let me say it again: humans are special cases. AI learning copyrighted materials might be illegal or legal, but it has little to do with "what if a human being does the same".

ben_w 3y ago
> Always have been and always will be (until AGI) Probably not even then, at least not initially. While some people conflate AGI with personhood, consciousness, qualia, etc. we've got at least 22 different[0] ideas of what consciousness is and no idea how to even determine whether or not a mind has qualia — and even if we did, I see no specific reason to require any of them, as a P-zombie[1] AGI doesn't seem to me like a contradiction in terms. [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41583-022-00587-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41583-022-00587-4 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
theonlybutlet 3y ago
In law there is such a thing as legal person as opposed to natural person. When it comes to commercial law, its provisions tends to relate to legal persons.
- unsui 3y ago
  legal personhood (such as corporate personhood) are tools/frameworks which facilitate certain economic actions, such as the creation of charters for specific initiatives. Like any useful force amplifier, legal personhood has effectively been co-opted to benefit those entities which stand to gain from it (e.g., corporations, large-money political donors, etc). Thus, it probably won't surprise anyone when AIs are granted legal personhood, to bypass the detrimenal effects they will inevitably have on natural persons. That said, it is likely a good thing to keep meatspace in some kind of privileged legal category, lest the rights of legal persons outweight those of natural persons (which seems to be the inevitable conclusion, and goal, of all this).

__loam 3y ago

The issue is that ml companies are using exact copies of the work in question, and using it to make massive for-profit systems without permission or compensation. Individual artists don't threaten the market in the same way.

frumper 3y ago
How do they get the works in question to train on?
- __loam 3y ago
  They download them from the public internet. The issue is that digital artists are basically required to maintain a public portfolio to get work. Them doing that is not implicit permission to use that work for whatever the fuck you want, as at says at the bottom of every image on Google images.

lofaszvanitt 3y ago

Have you been sitting in Midjourney rooms and saw the prompts? :DDD

dragonwriter 3y ago

> Can someone explain again how an ML system scanning and training on a copyrighted work is different from a highly skilled artist doing the same? Its legally different because the human brain is not considered a fixed medium under copyright law, so a human experiencing and learning something is not making what is potentially a copy or derivative work under copyright law, and therefore not exercising, potentially without permission, one of the exclusive rights granted to the copyright holder. > There are artists that can study a painting for a few minutes and then recreate it from memory Right, and those artists violate copyright at the moment they recreate it in a fixed medium without permission, but encoding it into computer storage media is already a copy, so a machine (or, rather, the person using the machine) hits that threshold before creating an actual visual output. > That is, we focus on the output of the process to determine infringement No, we focus on what is set in a fixed medium. If that is done at an intermediate step of the process, rather than being an output, it can still be infringement. Its just that a human doesn’t always need to make a copy in what is legally a fixed medium until the output, but that is not the same as categorically only treating outout of a process as legally relevant.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jncfhnb 3y ago
People betting on all “lossy compression” being equivalent will lose. It’s a lame argument. Can you encode images to be basically 1:1 with embeddings? Absolutely. Is that what these embeddings are doing? No. If artists try to argue that all copies are equivalent, but are unable to recreate their works from the embeddings, their argument will fall flat. This argument also only applies to sharing models, which is doubly dumb because we want open source models, not closed source models. It’s a harmful status quo to try and enforce.

nextaccountic 3y ago

> Can someone explain again how an ML system scanning and training on a copyrighted work is different from a highly skilled artist doing the same? Because (fortunately) human thoughts can't be subject to copyright law yet. So when we talk about copying and making derivative works, if you have this artistic works -> neural network weights The end result may or may not be copyrightable (that's for the courts to decide), but this artistic works -> human brain Definitively can't be