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If he’s mad at that wait till he sees what the cp command does! In all seriousness, midjourney is like any other tool. You can break the law with it, big surp

If he’s mad at that wait till he sees what the cp command does! In all seriousness, midjourney is like any other tool. You can break the law with it, big surprise. It should still be on the person that broke the law, not the makers of the tool. If you go down the “can’t use my art as training data” how far do you push it? I watched Batman, does that mean if I draw caped super heroes I am stealing training data? Wouldn’t that apply to all comics after Superman? Isn’t he guilty of derivative work himself? Also, nobody is being harmed by this. AI is always derivative. Nobody is interested in copies or impressions of popular art, otherwise the guy selling animes on velvet at the local art fair would be making more money. This just sounds like a Luddite shaking his fist at this perceived enemy.

pylua 3y ago
The picture in the article is a lot more than drawing a caped super hero after watching batman. Not to mention that the access to viewing batman for the inspiration is usually behind some sort of compensation. I would argue that original creators are being harmed by this. Not in a traditional sense, or even in a legal way with any precedence but in a thousand cuts sort of way that is novel.
snickerbockers 3y ago
> If he’s mad at that wait till he sees what the cp command does! in order for that analogy to even remotely be applicable, midjourney would have to be a program you run on your own computer and not a service running on midjourney's computers that does what you ask it to. > In all seriousness, midjourney is like any other tool. You can break the law with it, big surprise. It should still be on the person that broke the law, not the makers of the tool. that would be midjourney, since they're both the creators and operators of their model. > If you go down the “can’t use my art as training data” how far do you push it? I watched Batman, does that mean if I draw caped super heroes I am stealing training data? Wouldn’t that apply to all comics after Superman? Isn’t he guilty of derivative work himself? you just called AI "a tool", that's why it's different. > Also, nobody is being harmed by this. AI is always derivative. Nobody is interested in copies or impressions of popular art, otherwise the guy selling animes on velvet at the local art fair would be making more money. This just sounds like a Luddite shaking his fist at this perceived enemy. that's an argument against IP law in general, not an argument against holding companies which create and operate deep-learning models to the same standards as everybody else.
- boolemancer 3y ago
  > > If he’s mad at that wait till he sees what the cp command does! > > in order for that analogy to even remotely be applicable, midjourney would have to be a program you run on your own computer and not a service running on midjourney's computers that does what you ask it to. So your argument is that the tool running remotely as a service somehow makes it different from one running on your local computer? So if someone copies the contents of a novel into Google Docs, Google is liable for their copyright infringement, but if they paste it into Word running on their computer, all of the liability is on them? At what point does the liability shift? What if all of the functionality is implemented in JavaScript in the browser, rather than running on someone else's server? What if they run all but the last layer of the model on the server, then finish the computation locally? I don't think the situation is nearly as cut and dry as you make it out to be.
  - cycomanic 3y ago
    > > > If he’s mad at that wait till he sees what the cp command does! > > > > in order for that analogy to even remotely be applicable, midjourney would have to be a program you run on your own computer and not a service running on midjourney's computers that does what you ask it to. > So your argument is that the tool running remotely as a service somehow makes it different from one running on your local computer? > So if someone copies the contents of a novel into Google Docs, Google is liable for their copyright infringement, but if they paste it into Word running on their computer, all of the liability is on them? But that's not what happening here. If Google docs hat a button, "put Harry Potter books here" that when pressed it puts the whole text of the Harry Potter books into the document. Now who do you think should be liable for copyright infringement, Google who put the whole text of Harry Potter books somewhere into the Google docs source code, or the user who pressed the button? Your argument seems to be the user, but I find that highly illogical. The central issue is that the copyrighted images are already inside midjourney, the user is just getting them out via queries (pressing a button). The user is _not_ adding the copyrighted material to midjourney.
    - coolhand2120 3y ago
eru 3y ago
> Nobody is interested in copies or impressions of popular art, otherwise the guy selling animes on velvet at the local art fair would be making more money. The vast majority of artists make almost no money off their art. Original or otherwise. Some superstar artists make some money. But that art doesn't have to be original [0], see eg Duchamp's urinal, or the popart people copying comics. Or see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_Square,_Milan_(painting) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_Square,_Milan_(paint... Gerhard Richter's painting 'Cathedral Square, Milan' is a 'bad' copy of a photograph: > The source after which Richter executed Domplatz, Mailand was a newspaper photograph that was in focus, from which Richter clipped a section and modified it. > It was sold by Sotheby's in New York on 14 May 2013 for 37.1 Million dollars, breaking Richter's own record price for an artwork by a living artist, his 1994 32.4 million dollar painting Abstraktes Bild (809-1). [0] Of course, motivated reasoning can always find some aspect that makes the superstar artists and their art original. But the same amount of mental effort can also make 'the guy selling animes on velvet at the local art fair' original.
stubish 3y ago
You are arguing that Spotify should not pay royalties or license fees for songs, because it is the user might break the law by playing an unlicensed song. Oh, wait. It isn't the user. Spotify and Midjourney are actually the guilty party in this scenario, for distributing copyrighted works and probably for storing them without permission in the first place. Midjourney may be a tool, but it is a tool containing a large body of copyrighted and unlicensed images, including trademarks, and even illegal content. And that is what the court cases are going to be about.
MobiusHorizons 3y ago
I believe he is calling out the company not the tool. And calling them out because they infringed copyright by showing the copyrighted material to the model during training (as evidence by it being able to reproduce it so faithfully)
ghusto 3y ago
> In all seriousness, midjourney is like any other tool. You can break the law with it, big surprise. I believe the point was rather that the output makes it obvious the "tool" was trained on copyrighted work. As an aside to your justification though, if a main purpose of a tool is to circumvent copyright, that tool is usually illegal. > I watched Batman, does that mean if I draw caped super heroes I am stealing training data? It means if you draw a near copy and tried to sell it, you are committing copyright "theft" (I don't like the term, but that's what it's called). > Nobody is interested in copies or impressions of popular art, otherwise the guy selling animes on velvet at the local art fair would be making more money People are absolutely interested. I couldn't get RedBubble to even print a non-copyrighted work (which they mistakenly thought was copyrighted) that I had altered. Just because some people are getting away with it, doesn't mean it's legal or wouldn't immediately come to a stop if they came under scrutiny. > This just sounds like a Luddite shaking his fist at this perceived enemy. Luddites had some very good points, so he's in good company.

pylua 3y ago

The picture in the article is a lot more than drawing a caped super hero after watching batman. Not to mention that the access to viewing batman for the inspiration is usually behind some sort of compensation. I would argue that original creators are being harmed by this. Not in a traditional sense, or even in a legal way with any precedence but in a thousand cuts sort of way that is novel.

snickerbockers 3y ago

> If he’s mad at that wait till he sees what the cp command does! in order for that analogy to even remotely be applicable, midjourney would have to be a program you run on your own computer and not a service running on midjourney's computers that does what you ask it to. > In all seriousness, midjourney is like any other tool. You can break the law with it, big surprise. It should still be on the person that broke the law, not the makers of the tool. that would be midjourney, since they're both the creators and operators of their model. > If you go down the “can’t use my art as training data” how far do you push it? I watched Batman, does that mean if I draw caped super heroes I am stealing training data? Wouldn’t that apply to all comics after Superman? Isn’t he guilty of derivative work himself? you just called AI "a tool", that's why it's different. > Also, nobody is being harmed by this. AI is always derivative. Nobody is interested in copies or impressions of popular art, otherwise the guy selling animes on velvet at the local art fair would be making more money. This just sounds like a Luddite shaking his fist at this perceived enemy. that's an argument against IP law in general, not an argument against holding companies which create and operate deep-learning models to the same standards as everybody else.

boolemancer 3y ago
> > If he’s mad at that wait till he sees what the cp command does! > > in order for that analogy to even remotely be applicable, midjourney would have to be a program you run on your own computer and not a service running on midjourney's computers that does what you ask it to. So your argument is that the tool running remotely as a service somehow makes it different from one running on your local computer? So if someone copies the contents of a novel into Google Docs, Google is liable for their copyright infringement, but if they paste it into Word running on their computer, all of the liability is on them? At what point does the liability shift? What if all of the functionality is implemented in JavaScript in the browser, rather than running on someone else's server? What if they run all but the last layer of the model on the server, then finish the computation locally? I don't think the situation is nearly as cut and dry as you make it out to be.
- cycomanic 3y ago
  > > > If he’s mad at that wait till he sees what the cp command does! > > > > in order for that analogy to even remotely be applicable, midjourney would have to be a program you run on your own computer and not a service running on midjourney's computers that does what you ask it to. > So your argument is that the tool running remotely as a service somehow makes it different from one running on your local computer? > So if someone copies the contents of a novel into Google Docs, Google is liable for their copyright infringement, but if they paste it into Word running on their computer, all of the liability is on them? But that's not what happening here. If Google docs hat a button, "put Harry Potter books here" that when pressed it puts the whole text of the Harry Potter books into the document. Now who do you think should be liable for copyright infringement, Google who put the whole text of Harry Potter books somewhere into the Google docs source code, or the user who pressed the button? Your argument seems to be the user, but I find that highly illogical. The central issue is that the copyrighted images are already inside midjourney, the user is just getting them out via queries (pressing a button). The user is _not_ adding the copyrighted material to midjourney.
  - coolhand2120 3y ago

eru 3y ago

> Nobody is interested in copies or impressions of popular art, otherwise the guy selling animes on velvet at the local art fair would be making more money. The vast majority of artists make almost no money off their art. Original or otherwise. Some superstar artists make some money. But that art doesn't have to be original [0], see eg Duchamp's urinal, or the popart people copying comics. Or see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_Square,_Milan_(painting) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_Square,_Milan_(paint... Gerhard Richter's painting 'Cathedral Square, Milan' is a 'bad' copy of a photograph: > The source after which Richter executed Domplatz, Mailand was a newspaper photograph that was in focus, from which Richter clipped a section and modified it. > It was sold by Sotheby's in New York on 14 May 2013 for 37.1 Million dollars, breaking Richter's own record price for an artwork by a living artist, his 1994 32.4 million dollar painting Abstraktes Bild (809-1). [0] Of course, motivated reasoning can always find some aspect that makes the superstar artists and their art original. But the same amount of mental effort can also make 'the guy selling animes on velvet at the local art fair' original.

stubish 3y ago

You are arguing that Spotify should not pay royalties or license fees for songs, because it is the user might break the law by playing an unlicensed song. Oh, wait. It isn't the user. Spotify and Midjourney are actually the guilty party in this scenario, for distributing copyrighted works and probably for storing them without permission in the first place. Midjourney may be a tool, but it is a tool containing a large body of copyrighted and unlicensed images, including trademarks, and even illegal content. And that is what the court cases are going to be about.

MobiusHorizons 3y ago

I believe he is calling out the company not the tool. And calling them out because they infringed copyright by showing the copyrighted material to the model during training (as evidence by it being able to reproduce it so faithfully)

ghusto 3y ago

> In all seriousness, midjourney is like any other tool. You can break the law with it, big surprise. I believe the point was rather that the output makes it obvious the "tool" was trained on copyrighted work. As an aside to your justification though, if a main purpose of a tool is to circumvent copyright, that tool is usually illegal. > I watched Batman, does that mean if I draw caped super heroes I am stealing training data? It means if you draw a near copy and tried to sell it, you are committing copyright "theft" (I don't like the term, but that's what it's called). > Nobody is interested in copies or impressions of popular art, otherwise the guy selling animes on velvet at the local art fair would be making more money People are absolutely interested. I couldn't get RedBubble to even print a non-copyrighted work (which they mistakenly thought was copyrighted) that I had altered. Just because some people are getting away with it, doesn't mean it's legal or wouldn't immediately come to a stop if they came under scrutiny. > This just sounds like a Luddite shaking his fist at this perceived enemy. Luddites had some very good points, so he's in good company.