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This might be a dumb question... I decide to try my hand at art. So, I take courses at the local college, where I'm exposed to copyrighted art. Anything I prod

This might be a dumb question... I decide to try my hand at art. So, I take courses at the local college, where I'm exposed to copyrighted art. Anything I produce will, in some small way, be based on the totality of my life experience, including any copyrighted material I've encountered along the way? How is training an AI any different than "training" a human? In the human case, isn't any court case really based on the output (my art looks like previous work), not the input (I saw some art somewhere)? I feel like I'm missing something (obv IANAL).

officialchicken 3y ago
> I feel like I'm missing something (obv IANAL). The human did it.
- BestGuess 3y ago
  That doesn't make any sense to me as a line, as the human set up the machine to generate some way to generate images. The human still did "it", the "it" is just one step removed, and we've tons of things where some "it" is one step removed from the human where your line doesn't apply in law or people's concepts.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    Furthermore, but even if a human creates something directly, they've still "trained" on all sorts of things that include copyrighted images--and, yes, if they create something too close to one particular copyrighted image, they can be found to have infringed copyright.
wredue 3y ago
You are actually the one doing something though. If a line appears on the page, it’s because that’s your intent. For an AI, when a line appears, that is always someone else’s intent. AI can only copy. I mean. Do we really need to go over all the reason why an art scanner that copies art and maybe paints it differently is fundamentally not the same as a human learning to create art?
- gattilorenz 3y ago
  > AI can only copy. That's just plain wrong. AI can generate things that are not in the training set, hence it can not "only copy" (on the other hand, I could understand trying to argue that AI can only create pastiche, or that it "uses" training examples in a fundamentally different way than we do).
  - wredue 3y ago
    Prove it. Fundamentally, AI image creators stitch together images, then try to apply an art style. You might call it “unique” because it stitches things together wrong (hello 10 fingers on one hand), but it is still fundamentally just copying, pasting, and then deforming lines together. People claiming that AIs understand what they’re doing and that what AIs do is not fundamentally copying and pasting are the ones who have the burden of proof here.
    - BestGuess 3y ago
      >but it is still fundamentally just copying, pasting, and then deforming lines together That's called "photobashing", very common to see used by concept artists. Also, it's fair use. So now you've got a bigger problem in that almost all concept artists are engaged in theft I suppose? Since they are "only" copying, pasting, and then deforming things together?
      - wredue 3y ago
        Funny how you declare photo bashing as “fair use” but a cursory glance at the actual legality shows that you’re lying and that it is also in a somewhat ambiguous grey area at the moment, with lawsuits pending. It is also massively frowned upon in art sharing circles.
        BestGuess 3y ago
        >but a cursory glance at the actual legality shows that you’re lying [[citation needed]] >a somewhat ambiguous grey area at the moment That's a funny way of admitting I'm right. >It is also massively frowned upon in art sharing circles. Who gives a shit? What part of "commonly used in concept art", and among professionals in drafting and conceptual stages in general, do you deliberately seek to not understand? You mentally unwell or are you just an internet troll?
coldpie 3y ago
It's not a dumb question at all, that is one of the most central questions in this whole debate. I think there's a reasonable argument that humans add their own "stamp" on every artistic output (that isn't a direct 1:1 copy) which would make it a unique work even if closely inspired by another artist. A machine would not add its own "stamp," it's purely a mechanical derivation of others' works. I don't know where I fall on the issue myself, I think there's many good arguments on both side, both in pure IP terms and economic ethics terms.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  The thing with generative models is, it's hard to make them output anything from their training set verbatim. I don't know of a single case of that succeeding with SD or DALL-E or others. So it's not necessarily false to say that the models too always add their own "stamp".
  - coldpie 3y ago
    Yes, but I'd counter that by saying the difference is in its reproducibility. Given the same inputs to the machine (AI model, [copyrighted] training data, prompt, seed), you will get out the exact same output. It's a mechanical derivation of the original works, and therefore, a copyright violation. On the other hand, humans do not work that way, you can't point humans at the same works and get identical outputs. I'm not 1000% sold on this interpretation, but I think it is a reasonable one. A good counter to that is that the training data that was chosen as an input, and the prompt, are sufficiently original to count as their own work. Kind of like how an artist might use a copyrighted stamp to create their own work (Campbell soup cans). And a good counter to that is that a translation of a book into another language is still considered a derivation of the original work, not its own work, despite requiring a whole lot of creative human input on the part of the translator. I don't know!
    - ghaff 3y ago
      >And a good counter to that is that a translation of a book into another language is still considered a derivation of the original work, not its own work, despite requiring a whole lot of creative human input on the part of the translator. At the end of the day, it's all about legislation and case law--and judges making calls on the borderline cases, which creates new case law. It even plays into whether models themselves are copyrightable which, in turn, depends partly upon whether certain doctrines (like "sweat of the brow") apply under current copyright regime.
wavemode 3y ago
I think the detail that makes it tricky is that, in theory, an AI could just have a single neuron and simply output verbatim the image it was trained on. In which case we obviously wouldn't say that the image it outputs is a new work and freed from copyright. So clearly there is some threshold of "transformativeness" which an AI must possess in order to be trained on one image and produce a different one that is considered a new work. Where exactly that threshold lies is difficult to define from a legal perspective.
- brookst 3y ago
  That sounds a lot like music copyright, which also has a subjective threshold. It’s kind of a mess but it’s more or less worked for a century. Certainly better than any formula for rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic similarity would.
marcinzm 3y ago
You can argue that artists given an implicit license for people to copy art into their own brains while viewing it. The same way websites give an implicit license for a browser to copy the page to display it. That does not necessarily mean they given an implicit license for someone else to copy the work as part of AI training. Separate to that is the issue of producing new works that are too similar to existing works you've seen. If you do that as a human then you're liable for copyright infringement.
- brookst 3y ago
  I think you’re proposing two big expansions to copyright: 1) that it covers what an observer can do, and 2) that everything is illegal unless explicitly made legal. I don’t think I want to live in that world.
  - marcinzm 3y ago
    I'm proposing nothing, as far as I know that is how it is now. A browser viewing a web page is making a copy of the web page which is governed by copyright. Except by making a web page you give people the right to make that copy. Lots of interesting lawsuits around that regarding bots, scrapping, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implied_license https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implied_license
    - brookst 3y ago
      Copyright has always been about the reproduction of works. Copyright lawsuits about scraping, etc, are about the use of scraped data. That’s why EULAs, which are not copyright, are often used to try to further restrict rights. None of that covers the idea that observing a copyrighted work is a violation of copyright only made acceptable by an implicit license. As the link you posted notes, that’s not what an implicit license is.
    - BestGuess 3y ago
      See this kind of thing here is what I think is a problem and has been a problem forever. We have two opposite laws on this, 1. Copying is theft (contents of a CD [software], movies, stuff on a website sometimes, etc) 2. Copying is not theft (VHS copies of broadcasts, cassettes, etc) Problem is "implied license" (eula-roofie) where we've, without any good reason I think, decided that, (a) Copying is theft when someone unilaterally declares what you buy to be different from the medium (CD vs what's on it [software, movie, etc]) (a)(2) except when it's a really old medium like a book which you're allowed to quote, and use in derivation, but don't you dare "quote a movie" by copying portions off that DVD or blu-ray because that's different. Shut up is why. (b) Copying is theft when someone unilaterally declares their putting something up to view, which necessarily requires copying to view (sent over internet), can't be copied for derivative fair use (b)(2) except when it's over another old medium like public broadcast because... fuck you? I haven't a clue myself how this makes any sense and I suspect it is because "it doesn't". (c) Copying is theft if you take the copy sent you over the internet and do anything with it somebody unilaterally declares they don't want you to be able to do (c)(2) except if it's an old medium, like a book, where you can borrow it and quote from it and do all the fair use stuff, or borrow a picture, or a painting, or... All the fair use and copying and other sensible stuff without this weird "implied license" stuff doesn't exist for formats we've had before to the extent it does now. These formats, in principle, are still just "you get a copy of a thing on some medium", and yet we have two completely different laws based on this pure fiction of an "implied license" that declares you can't copy even portions of one on some format because... because. I am trying, desperately, to explain there is fundamentally and in principle no difference. The root of all of our problems and why the law doesn't make any sense is the pure fiction that there IS a difference. And I feel like a goddamn madman yelling in the streets trying to explain something that feels so dog gon obvious to me but seems like is obvious to nobody else.
judge2020 3y ago
This is the crux of the issue. If courts find that AI draws like a human (at least for the purposes of copyright law), then you can only claim it infringed upon your work if it actually looks like your work was de-facto "traced"/copied by the AI and the output image only has small imperfections that don't qualify for fair use.
- brookst 3y ago
  Copyright law does not care about how an infringing work was produced. It can be traced, or memorized and recreated, or described to a confederate over the phone, or whatever. It is only the actual work that is judged as infringing or not.
bertil 3y ago
You are not missing anything: you are asking the key question in that process. We don’t have an answer. As a society, we agree that you, a human, copying art you’ve seen is original (or at least derivative enough that it warrants a new copyright). We agree that a photocopy machine, or rather a human operating one, is copying art in a way that is not creative enough to warrant a copyright — so the human goes to jail. As a society, we have not agreed upon how transformative a “work” from a generative AI has to be to count as original, or even if it can. A recent decision claimed that no machine work without human effort would count — ignoring the effort to find good prompts, pick an image and edit it further. An AI is different because no much was “trained” to make art before AIs: some animals were (elephants famously), and who owns their work is tricky — there’s a case of a photo, a selfie actually, taken by a macaque that is really interesting in that regard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput... My recommendation would be to have a similar system to what we have for music (and I think plays) where there are two or three “authors”: the person who wrote the score, optionally the person who wrote the lyrics, and the interpret: the singer. It gets really fun when you have orchestras, animals involved in making music, or sound-sampling like in RnB. We could have original human authors and AI adaptors, each paid based on use. If I like your work, I could commission OpenAI to make “a portrait in the style of alistairSH” based on your DeviantArt work, but of my mother (whom you’ve never met), using photos that I’ve uploaded of her. I can pay OpenAI, who would pay you. Style vs. theme could be separated with current AI technology, although that could get just as complicated as every intellectual property process very fast.
- alistairSH 3y ago
  If I build a Rube Goldberg painting machine and somebody else "pulls the trigger" to start the machine, who owns the output? Me or the other person? In the case of today's AI models, I could see arguing that the creator of the AI or the creator of the prompt have some rights to a specific output, but not the AI itself. The monkey case seems fairly cut-and-dry to me - the monkey didn't steal the camera (as often reported) - the photographer engineered a situation to get the result (he set up the camera, the tripod, and held onto the tripod so the monkey wouldn't steal the whole rig). It's his art. If the monkey actually stole the camera, then it's nobody's art - just a random occurrence. If an artist orchestrates a group of humans to create art, the art belongs to the artist, not the group (as far as I know - I'd love to hear otherwise). I guess for me, given today's technology, I don't see an "AI" as any different than a Rube Goldberg machine hurling paint at a wall. A human had to create the AI and a human had to prompt the AI, one or both of them own the art. And in all cases, the art is always based on something the human saw previously. No art exists in a vacuum. And I agree that a system like music rights might be appropriate. The AI author, the AI prompter, and probably anybody involved in the training data, all have some right to the output. Then the question is what % to each, but that's solvable.
BestGuess 3y ago
Yeah, I am equally confused and I fear the law is going to royally bungle this one and we'll be stuck with something really stupid for some arbitrary number of decades or generations. It just seems obvious to me that "human made thing to transform some set of things into a composite+transformation of those things" is fair use if fair use is to make any sense at all. Since analogously, like you said, in the same way you are taking your experience including experience of copyrighted stuff as a set of things you are drawing upon producing something of your own. All art is derivative. It makes zero sense to me at all that it's suddenly a problem that art is derived if, instead of artist directly painting something, artist sets up some device that paints something. In both cases "human takes inputs and produces something unique" (not a copy, not a scanner, in case that was not clear from context). Unless I'm missing something too, but based on what I see so far I just feel like I'm from mars and don't belong here.
- coldpie 3y ago
  > It makes zero sense to me at all that it's suddenly a problem that art is derived if, instead of artist directly painting something, artist sets up some device that paints something. I think a big difference in how this tech makes people feel is the amount of effort required. It's a problem we see with technology in other areas, too: it's not (much of) a problem if a cop sits outside a suspect's house for a few hours to monitor their behavior. Most people think it would be a problem if the cops pointed a camera at the house 24/7 for months. Pretty much everyone agrees canvassing society with cameras and creating a public space surveillance panopticon is bad. Where's the line? Similarly, if some artists spend years learning the craft and mimicking a couple of styles with a relatively small output, it's not a huge problem. The scope is small. But if everyone on earth can do it to anyone on earth at massive scale just by typing "in the style of ..." to an AI, does that start to be a problem?
  - BestGuess 3y ago
    The line is pretty simple for me, because it's the same line that applies to people. It doesn't matter what the training set is so long as it is not reproducing either the same thing or too similar to the thing it's trained from. Somebody else linked that you can't generally copyright style for instance, and if I recall you can't copyright algorithms or things of general knowledge either. So you can copyright "a specific instance of a thing", but not "the general idea of a thing". Here, near as I can tell, these algorithms generate some general idea of the things it's trained on and produce something specific different from the specific things. What should matter is only if it is different enough, same as it matters for people. We've got much bigger problems though but if we, we as people generally not specifically you, can't even agree on something I see as so fundamentally basic bringing up things I think are problems would start war
anon291 3y ago
You're not missing anything. When humans do this it's fair use. The question is... Is fair use an exclusively human right? For example, we have many rights that do not extend to our possessions. Animals have no protected right to life or liberty. The human rights enjoyed by their owner do not flow to them. Similarly, just because a human has a right to fair use, do AIs?
gumballindie 3y ago
[flagged]
- alistairSH 3y ago
  I'm not missing that at all. Put another way, if I create a Rube Goldberg painting machine, what copyright law applies? Why is that different than if I create/train/prompt an AI to do the work? One is physical, one is digital, but both require a human to create and initiate. And in both cases, every decision that human makes is made based on their life's experiences. No art exists in a vacuum. All art is derivative.
  - gumballindie 3y ago
    Let’s try something radical: not putting it any way. A machine has no rights, and it doesnt learn as humans do. I know the cult leader, altman, wants you to think otherwise, but no, stealing people’s work to make ai viable is not OK.
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      Nah, Altman doesn't really want you think machines are like humans and have rights either, because if the law thought that, it would also think Altman was aspiring to be the greatest slaver in all of history.
      - gumballindie 3y ago
        > the greatest slaver Once he manages to replace y'all with ai, what do you think you will become?
belorn 3y ago
The difference in training an AI compared to training a human is that an AI is not a human. Law makes differences between humans and non-humans all the time. AI drivers vs human drivers is a prime example. If the question is in how biologically we learn compared to and AI, the answer is that humans don't learn by calculating math in order to determine how pixels relate to each other. Humans uses chemical signals between neurons and neuron activiation among other things in order to approximate the concept of what we consider to be learning. I find a similar and equal important question when asking whats the difference between an AI learning and a human learning, is to ask whats the difference when a computer remembers information by storing it on a file compared to a human remembering information by storing it in long term memory.

officialchicken 3y ago

> I feel like I'm missing something (obv IANAL). The human did it.

BestGuess 3y ago
That doesn't make any sense to me as a line, as the human set up the machine to generate some way to generate images. The human still did "it", the "it" is just one step removed, and we've tons of things where some "it" is one step removed from the human where your line doesn't apply in law or people's concepts.
- ghaff 3y ago
  Furthermore, but even if a human creates something directly, they've still "trained" on all sorts of things that include copyrighted images--and, yes, if they create something too close to one particular copyrighted image, they can be found to have infringed copyright.

wredue 3y ago

You are actually the one doing something though. If a line appears on the page, it’s because that’s your intent. For an AI, when a line appears, that is always someone else’s intent. AI can only copy. I mean. Do we really need to go over all the reason why an art scanner that copies art and maybe paints it differently is fundamentally not the same as a human learning to create art?

gattilorenz 3y ago
> AI can only copy. That's just plain wrong. AI can generate things that are not in the training set, hence it can not "only copy" (on the other hand, I could understand trying to argue that AI can only create pastiche, or that it "uses" training examples in a fundamentally different way than we do).
- wredue 3y ago
  Prove it. Fundamentally, AI image creators stitch together images, then try to apply an art style. You might call it “unique” because it stitches things together wrong (hello 10 fingers on one hand), but it is still fundamentally just copying, pasting, and then deforming lines together. People claiming that AIs understand what they’re doing and that what AIs do is not fundamentally copying and pasting are the ones who have the burden of proof here.
  - BestGuess 3y ago
    >but it is still fundamentally just copying, pasting, and then deforming lines together That's called "photobashing", very common to see used by concept artists. Also, it's fair use. So now you've got a bigger problem in that almost all concept artists are engaged in theft I suppose? Since they are "only" copying, pasting, and then deforming things together?
    - wredue 3y ago
      Funny how you declare photo bashing as “fair use” but a cursory glance at the actual legality shows that you’re lying and that it is also in a somewhat ambiguous grey area at the moment, with lawsuits pending. It is also massively frowned upon in art sharing circles.
      - BestGuess 3y ago
        >but a cursory glance at the actual legality shows that you’re lying [[citation needed]] >a somewhat ambiguous grey area at the moment That's a funny way of admitting I'm right. >It is also massively frowned upon in art sharing circles. Who gives a shit? What part of "commonly used in concept art", and among professionals in drafting and conceptual stages in general, do you deliberately seek to not understand? You mentally unwell or are you just an internet troll?

coldpie 3y ago

It's not a dumb question at all, that is one of the most central questions in this whole debate. I think there's a reasonable argument that humans add their own "stamp" on every artistic output (that isn't a direct 1:1 copy) which would make it a unique work even if closely inspired by another artist. A machine would not add its own "stamp," it's purely a mechanical derivation of others' works. I don't know where I fall on the issue myself, I think there's many good arguments on both side, both in pure IP terms and economic ethics terms.

TeMPOraL 3y ago
The thing with generative models is, it's hard to make them output anything from their training set verbatim. I don't know of a single case of that succeeding with SD or DALL-E or others. So it's not necessarily false to say that the models too always add their own "stamp".
- coldpie 3y ago
  Yes, but I'd counter that by saying the difference is in its reproducibility. Given the same inputs to the machine (AI model, [copyrighted] training data, prompt, seed), you will get out the exact same output. It's a mechanical derivation of the original works, and therefore, a copyright violation. On the other hand, humans do not work that way, you can't point humans at the same works and get identical outputs. I'm not 1000% sold on this interpretation, but I think it is a reasonable one. A good counter to that is that the training data that was chosen as an input, and the prompt, are sufficiently original to count as their own work. Kind of like how an artist might use a copyrighted stamp to create their own work (Campbell soup cans). And a good counter to that is that a translation of a book into another language is still considered a derivation of the original work, not its own work, despite requiring a whole lot of creative human input on the part of the translator. I don't know!
  - ghaff 3y ago
    >And a good counter to that is that a translation of a book into another language is still considered a derivation of the original work, not its own work, despite requiring a whole lot of creative human input on the part of the translator. At the end of the day, it's all about legislation and case law--and judges making calls on the borderline cases, which creates new case law. It even plays into whether models themselves are copyrightable which, in turn, depends partly upon whether certain doctrines (like "sweat of the brow") apply under current copyright regime.

wavemode 3y ago

I think the detail that makes it tricky is that, in theory, an AI could just have a single neuron and simply output verbatim the image it was trained on. In which case we obviously wouldn't say that the image it outputs is a new work and freed from copyright. So clearly there is some threshold of "transformativeness" which an AI must possess in order to be trained on one image and produce a different one that is considered a new work. Where exactly that threshold lies is difficult to define from a legal perspective.

brookst 3y ago
That sounds a lot like music copyright, which also has a subjective threshold. It’s kind of a mess but it’s more or less worked for a century. Certainly better than any formula for rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic similarity would.

marcinzm 3y ago

You can argue that artists given an implicit license for people to copy art into their own brains while viewing it. The same way websites give an implicit license for a browser to copy the page to display it. That does not necessarily mean they given an implicit license for someone else to copy the work as part of AI training. Separate to that is the issue of producing new works that are too similar to existing works you've seen. If you do that as a human then you're liable for copyright infringement.

brookst 3y ago
I think you’re proposing two big expansions to copyright: 1) that it covers what an observer can do, and 2) that everything is illegal unless explicitly made legal. I don’t think I want to live in that world.
- marcinzm 3y ago
  I'm proposing nothing, as far as I know that is how it is now. A browser viewing a web page is making a copy of the web page which is governed by copyright. Except by making a web page you give people the right to make that copy. Lots of interesting lawsuits around that regarding bots, scrapping, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implied_license https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implied_license
  - brookst 3y ago
    Copyright has always been about the reproduction of works. Copyright lawsuits about scraping, etc, are about the use of scraped data. That’s why EULAs, which are not copyright, are often used to try to further restrict rights. None of that covers the idea that observing a copyrighted work is a violation of copyright only made acceptable by an implicit license. As the link you posted notes, that’s not what an implicit license is.
  - BestGuess 3y ago
    See this kind of thing here is what I think is a problem and has been a problem forever. We have two opposite laws on this, 1. Copying is theft (contents of a CD [software], movies, stuff on a website sometimes, etc) 2. Copying is not theft (VHS copies of broadcasts, cassettes, etc) Problem is "implied license" (eula-roofie) where we've, without any good reason I think, decided that, (a) Copying is theft when someone unilaterally declares what you buy to be different from the medium (CD vs what's on it [software, movie, etc]) (a)(2) except when it's a really old medium like a book which you're allowed to quote, and use in derivation, but don't you dare "quote a movie" by copying portions off that DVD or blu-ray because that's different. Shut up is why. (b) Copying is theft when someone unilaterally declares their putting something up to view, which necessarily requires copying to view (sent over internet), can't be copied for derivative fair use (b)(2) except when it's over another old medium like public broadcast because... fuck you? I haven't a clue myself how this makes any sense and I suspect it is because "it doesn't". (c) Copying is theft if you take the copy sent you over the internet and do anything with it somebody unilaterally declares they don't want you to be able to do (c)(2) except if it's an old medium, like a book, where you can borrow it and quote from it and do all the fair use stuff, or borrow a picture, or a painting, or... All the fair use and copying and other sensible stuff without this weird "implied license" stuff doesn't exist for formats we've had before to the extent it does now. These formats, in principle, are still just "you get a copy of a thing on some medium", and yet we have two completely different laws based on this pure fiction of an "implied license" that declares you can't copy even portions of one on some format because... because. I am trying, desperately, to explain there is fundamentally and in principle no difference. The root of all of our problems and why the law doesn't make any sense is the pure fiction that there IS a difference. And I feel like a goddamn madman yelling in the streets trying to explain something that feels so dog gon obvious to me but seems like is obvious to nobody else.

judge2020 3y ago

This is the crux of the issue. If courts find that AI draws like a human (at least for the purposes of copyright law), then you can only claim it infringed upon your work if it actually looks like your work was de-facto "traced"/copied by the AI and the output image only has small imperfections that don't qualify for fair use.

brookst 3y ago
Copyright law does not care about how an infringing work was produced. It can be traced, or memorized and recreated, or described to a confederate over the phone, or whatever. It is only the actual work that is judged as infringing or not.

bertil 3y ago

You are not missing anything: you are asking the key question in that process. We don’t have an answer. As a society, we agree that you, a human, copying art you’ve seen is original (or at least derivative enough that it warrants a new copyright). We agree that a photocopy machine, or rather a human operating one, is copying art in a way that is not creative enough to warrant a copyright — so the human goes to jail. As a society, we have not agreed upon how transformative a “work” from a generative AI has to be to count as original, or even if it can. A recent decision claimed that no machine work without human effort would count — ignoring the effort to find good prompts, pick an image and edit it further. An AI is different because no much was “trained” to make art before AIs: some animals were (elephants famously), and who owns their work is tricky — there’s a case of a photo, a selfie actually, taken by a macaque that is really interesting in that regard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput... My recommendation would be to have a similar system to what we have for music (and I think plays) where there are two or three “authors”: the person who wrote the score, optionally the person who wrote the lyrics, and the interpret: the singer. It gets really fun when you have orchestras, animals involved in making music, or sound-sampling like in RnB. We could have original human authors and AI adaptors, each paid based on use. If I like your work, I could commission OpenAI to make “a portrait in the style of alistairSH” based on your DeviantArt work, but of my mother (whom you’ve never met), using photos that I’ve uploaded of her. I can pay OpenAI, who would pay you. Style vs. theme could be separated with current AI technology, although that could get just as complicated as every intellectual property process very fast.

alistairSH 3y ago
If I build a Rube Goldberg painting machine and somebody else "pulls the trigger" to start the machine, who owns the output? Me or the other person? In the case of today's AI models, I could see arguing that the creator of the AI or the creator of the prompt have some rights to a specific output, but not the AI itself. The monkey case seems fairly cut-and-dry to me - the monkey didn't steal the camera (as often reported) - the photographer engineered a situation to get the result (he set up the camera, the tripod, and held onto the tripod so the monkey wouldn't steal the whole rig). It's his art. If the monkey actually stole the camera, then it's nobody's art - just a random occurrence. If an artist orchestrates a group of humans to create art, the art belongs to the artist, not the group (as far as I know - I'd love to hear otherwise). I guess for me, given today's technology, I don't see an "AI" as any different than a Rube Goldberg machine hurling paint at a wall. A human had to create the AI and a human had to prompt the AI, one or both of them own the art. And in all cases, the art is always based on something the human saw previously. No art exists in a vacuum. And I agree that a system like music rights might be appropriate. The AI author, the AI prompter, and probably anybody involved in the training data, all have some right to the output. Then the question is what % to each, but that's solvable.

BestGuess 3y ago

Yeah, I am equally confused and I fear the law is going to royally bungle this one and we'll be stuck with something really stupid for some arbitrary number of decades or generations. It just seems obvious to me that "human made thing to transform some set of things into a composite+transformation of those things" is fair use if fair use is to make any sense at all. Since analogously, like you said, in the same way you are taking your experience including experience of copyrighted stuff as a set of things you are drawing upon producing something of your own. All art is derivative. It makes zero sense to me at all that it's suddenly a problem that art is derived if, instead of artist directly painting something, artist sets up some device that paints something. In both cases "human takes inputs and produces something unique" (not a copy, not a scanner, in case that was not clear from context). Unless I'm missing something too, but based on what I see so far I just feel like I'm from mars and don't belong here.

coldpie 3y ago
> It makes zero sense to me at all that it's suddenly a problem that art is derived if, instead of artist directly painting something, artist sets up some device that paints something. I think a big difference in how this tech makes people feel is the amount of effort required. It's a problem we see with technology in other areas, too: it's not (much of) a problem if a cop sits outside a suspect's house for a few hours to monitor their behavior. Most people think it would be a problem if the cops pointed a camera at the house 24/7 for months. Pretty much everyone agrees canvassing society with cameras and creating a public space surveillance panopticon is bad. Where's the line? Similarly, if some artists spend years learning the craft and mimicking a couple of styles with a relatively small output, it's not a huge problem. The scope is small. But if everyone on earth can do it to anyone on earth at massive scale just by typing "in the style of ..." to an AI, does that start to be a problem?
- BestGuess 3y ago
  The line is pretty simple for me, because it's the same line that applies to people. It doesn't matter what the training set is so long as it is not reproducing either the same thing or too similar to the thing it's trained from. Somebody else linked that you can't generally copyright style for instance, and if I recall you can't copyright algorithms or things of general knowledge either. So you can copyright "a specific instance of a thing", but not "the general idea of a thing". Here, near as I can tell, these algorithms generate some general idea of the things it's trained on and produce something specific different from the specific things. What should matter is only if it is different enough, same as it matters for people. We've got much bigger problems though but if we, we as people generally not specifically you, can't even agree on something I see as so fundamentally basic bringing up things I think are problems would start war

anon291 3y ago

You're not missing anything. When humans do this it's fair use. The question is... Is fair use an exclusively human right? For example, we have many rights that do not extend to our possessions. Animals have no protected right to life or liberty. The human rights enjoyed by their owner do not flow to them. Similarly, just because a human has a right to fair use, do AIs?

gumballindie 3y ago

[flagged]

alistairSH 3y ago
I'm not missing that at all. Put another way, if I create a Rube Goldberg painting machine, what copyright law applies? Why is that different than if I create/train/prompt an AI to do the work? One is physical, one is digital, but both require a human to create and initiate. And in both cases, every decision that human makes is made based on their life's experiences. No art exists in a vacuum. All art is derivative.
- gumballindie 3y ago
  Let’s try something radical: not putting it any way. A machine has no rights, and it doesnt learn as humans do. I know the cult leader, altman, wants you to think otherwise, but no, stealing people’s work to make ai viable is not OK.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    Nah, Altman doesn't really want you think machines are like humans and have rights either, because if the law thought that, it would also think Altman was aspiring to be the greatest slaver in all of history.
    - gumballindie 3y ago
      > the greatest slaver Once he manages to replace y'all with ai, what do you think you will become?

belorn 3y ago

The difference in training an AI compared to training a human is that an AI is not a human. Law makes differences between humans and non-humans all the time. AI drivers vs human drivers is a prime example. If the question is in how biologically we learn compared to and AI, the answer is that humans don't learn by calculating math in order to determine how pixels relate to each other. Humans uses chemical signals between neurons and neuron activiation among other things in order to approximate the concept of what we consider to be learning. I find a similar and equal important question when asking whats the difference between an AI learning and a human learning, is to ask whats the difference when a computer remembers information by storing it on a file compared to a human remembering information by storing it in long term memory.