4 ms·

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 reproduc

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.
  - lt 3y ago
    A diffusion model can't make a copy. That's the whole point. The original Picasso isn't in the model weights. It has learned to make pixels a particular color to mimic that style, but that's it.
    - kranke155 3y ago
      If the model didn't learn anything important from Picasso, it wouldn't be in the training data. This whole argument of "ah but it doesnt really need it" doesn't hold up. If the model didn't need it, it wouldn't have used it in the first place. Same thing in Artstation. It was of course propitious for AI scientists to find such a lovely database of high quality imagery, and all so helpfully tagged into categories. All they had to do was take it.
Vvector 3y ago
"It's my property." When you publish it, you lose some property rights. While under copyright, there is a short list of things that others are prohibited from doing (reproduce, distributed, etc.). And you lose all your rights once the copyright expires.
creer 3y ago
The question is about copyright law. You can raise other legal theories or ask congress to create an entirely new class of intellectual property law. Sure. The lawsuit is about whether copyright applies, it seems to me.

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.
- lt 3y ago
  A diffusion model can't make a copy. That's the whole point. The original Picasso isn't in the model weights. It has learned to make pixels a particular color to mimic that style, but that's it.
  - kranke155 3y ago
    If the model didn't learn anything important from Picasso, it wouldn't be in the training data. This whole argument of "ah but it doesnt really need it" doesn't hold up. If the model didn't need it, it wouldn't have used it in the first place. Same thing in Artstation. It was of course propitious for AI scientists to find such a lovely database of high quality imagery, and all so helpfully tagged into categories. All they had to do was take it.

Vvector 3y ago

"It's my property." When you publish it, you lose some property rights. While under copyright, there is a short list of things that others are prohibited from doing (reproduce, distributed, etc.). And you lose all your rights once the copyright expires.

creer 3y ago

The question is about copyright law. You can raise other legal theories or ask congress to create an entirely new class of intellectual property law. Sure. The lawsuit is about whether copyright applies, it seems to me.