10 ms·

> People just see someone else making money in a way that is completely dependent upon their own prior work and want to try and get a piece of it

qt31415926 3y ago
It's actually impressive that Weird Al has made it as far as he did now that I think about it
- sensanaty 3y ago
  Weird Al explicitly seeks out the permission from the people whose songs he's parodying, despite not really having to (legally), and he compensates them in kind as well, so kinda the exact opposite of what the AI crowd wants to do.
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  Weird Al gets permission and licenses for every song parody he makes. The legal definition of parody in fair use wouldn't exactly cover everything he does. That being said, there's still occasionally times where he gets screwed over by the licensing machine anyway - either because the label forgot to ask the artist (Amish Paradise) or because the artist forgot to ask the label (You're Pitiful).
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
Ukv 3y ago
> in a way that is completely dependent upon their own prior work Ultimately information has to come from somewhere. If something has no information about what a "car" is, it cannot paint a car more successfully than a random guess. When you draw a car or write an algorithm to do so, you'll be slightly affected by the existing car designs you've seen. It's not a limitation specific to AI - it's just more obscured for humans since there's no explicit searchable database of all the cars you've glanced at. Whether it was affected by (and dependant on in aggregate) prior work is not the standard for copyright infringement, and I'd claim would implicate essentially all action as infringement. Instead, it should be judged by whether there's substantial similarity - and if there is substantial similarity, then by the factors of fair use.
paulmd 3y ago
> completely dependent No, AI art would exist without Disney or HBO just like human art would. It literally does come back to the idea that either AI is doing more or less the same thing as an art student, and learns styles and structures and concepts, in which case training an art student is infringing because it’s completely dependent on the work of artists who came before. And sure, if you ask a skilled 2d artist if they can draw something in the style of 80s anime, or specific artists, they can do it. There are some artists who specialize in this in fact! Can’t have retro anime porn commissions if it’s not riffing on retro anime images. Yes twitter, I see what you do with that account when you’re not complaining about AI. The problem is that AI lowers the cost of doing this to zero, and thus lays bare the inherent contradictions of IP law and “intellectual ownership” in a society where everyone is diffusing and mashing up each others ideas and works on a continuous basis. It is one of those “everyone does it” crimes that mostly survives because it’s utterly unenforced at scale, apart from a few noxious litigants like disney. It is the old Luddite problem - the common idea that luddites just hated technology is inaccurate. They were textile workers who were literally seeing their livelihoods displaced by automation mass-producing what they saw as inferior goods. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite In general this is a problem that's set up by capitalism itself though. Ideas can’t and shouldn’t be owned, it is an absurd premise and you shouldn’t be surprised that you get absurd results. Making sure people can eat is not the job of capitalism, it’s the job of safety nets and governments. Ideas have no cost of replication and artificially creating one is distorting and destructive. Would a neural net put a tax on neurons firing? No, that’s stupid and counterproductive. Let people write their slash fiction in peace. (HN probably has a good understanding of it, but in general people don't appreciate just how much it is not just aping images it's seen but learning the style and relationships of pixels and objects etc. To wit, the only thing NVIDIA saved from DLSS 1.0 was the model... and DLSS 2.0 has nothing to do with DLSS 1.0 in terms of technical approach. But the model encodes all the contextual understanding of how pixels are supposed to look in human images, even if it's not even doing the original transform anymore! And LLMs can indeed generalize reasonably accurately about things they haven't seen, as long as they know the precepts etc. Because they aren't "just guessing what word comes next", it's the word that comes next given a conceptual understanding of the underlying ideas. And that's a difficult thing to draw a line between a human and an AI large model, college students will "riff on the things they know" if you ask them to "generalize" about a topic they haven't studied too, etc.)

qt31415926 3y ago

It's actually impressive that Weird Al has made it as far as he did now that I think about it

sensanaty 3y ago
Weird Al explicitly seeks out the permission from the people whose songs he's parodying, despite not really having to (legally), and he compensates them in kind as well, so kinda the exact opposite of what the AI crowd wants to do.
kmeisthax 3y ago
Weird Al gets permission and licenses for every song parody he makes. The legal definition of parody in fair use wouldn't exactly cover everything he does. That being said, there's still occasionally times where he gets screwed over by the licensing machine anyway - either because the label forgot to ask the artist (Amish Paradise) or because the artist forgot to ask the label (You're Pitiful).
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

Ukv 3y ago

> in a way that is completely dependent upon their own prior work Ultimately information has to come from somewhere. If something has no information about what a "car" is, it cannot paint a car more successfully than a random guess. When you draw a car or write an algorithm to do so, you'll be slightly affected by the existing car designs you've seen. It's not a limitation specific to AI - it's just more obscured for humans since there's no explicit searchable database of all the cars you've glanced at. Whether it was affected by (and dependant on in aggregate) prior work is not the standard for copyright infringement, and I'd claim would implicate essentially all action as infringement. Instead, it should be judged by whether there's substantial similarity - and if there is substantial similarity, then by the factors of fair use.

paulmd 3y ago

> completely dependent No, AI art would exist without Disney or HBO just like human art would. It literally does come back to the idea that either AI is doing more or less the same thing as an art student, and learns styles and structures and concepts, in which case training an art student is infringing because it’s completely dependent on the work of artists who came before. And sure, if you ask a skilled 2d artist if they can draw something in the style of 80s anime, or specific artists, they can do it. There are some artists who specialize in this in fact! Can’t have retro anime porn commissions if it’s not riffing on retro anime images. Yes twitter, I see what you do with that account when you’re not complaining about AI. The problem is that AI lowers the cost of doing this to zero, and thus lays bare the inherent contradictions of IP law and “intellectual ownership” in a society where everyone is diffusing and mashing up each others ideas and works on a continuous basis. It is one of those “everyone does it” crimes that mostly survives because it’s utterly unenforced at scale, apart from a few noxious litigants like disney. It is the old Luddite problem - the common idea that luddites just hated technology is inaccurate. They were textile workers who were literally seeing their livelihoods displaced by automation mass-producing what they saw as inferior goods. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite In general this is a problem that's set up by capitalism itself though. Ideas can’t and shouldn’t be owned, it is an absurd premise and you shouldn’t be surprised that you get absurd results. Making sure people can eat is not the job of capitalism, it’s the job of safety nets and governments. Ideas have no cost of replication and artificially creating one is distorting and destructive. Would a neural net put a tax on neurons firing? No, that’s stupid and counterproductive. Let people write their slash fiction in peace. (HN probably has a good understanding of it, but in general people don't appreciate just how much it is not just aping images it's seen but learning the style and relationships of pixels and objects etc. To wit, the only thing NVIDIA saved from DLSS 1.0 was the model... and DLSS 2.0 has nothing to do with DLSS 1.0 in terms of technical approach. But the model encodes all the contextual understanding of how pixels are supposed to look in human images, even if it's not even doing the original transform anymore! And LLMs can indeed generalize reasonably accurately about things they haven't seen, as long as they know the precepts etc. Because they aren't "just guessing what word comes next", it's the word that comes next given a conceptual understanding of the underlying ideas. And that's a difficult thing to draw a line between a human and an AI large model, college students will "riff on the things they know" if you ask them to "generalize" about a topic they haven't studied too, etc.)