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Copyright should be the problem of the person using the works and not the problem of the AI generating it. Unless Nintendo plans on busting down the doors of e

Copyright should be the problem of the person using the works and not the problem of the AI generating it. Unless Nintendo plans on busting down the doors of every person who tries to draw Mario or preventing little Timmy from making a parody of Coca-Cola, making it where AI cannot generated copyrighted works is insane imo. Those brands should be proud to be such a big part of the cultural fabric that it is difficult to get away from their branding. Plus it's not infringement to my knowledge until you use it for commercial purposes so as long as no one as creating Lario and Muigi to sell or otherwise use in business, it's no different than drawing it yourself. If the AI is completely unable to generate non-infringing works even if you are _trying_ to get away from it (which the author very much doesn't seem they are, they are purposefully making and show prompts that infringe), that's the problem of the AI creator then.

outside1234 3y ago
The thing is: OpenAI and Microsoft have indemnified their users - so their users problems are their problems.
tsumnia 3y ago
When I cover generative AI in my Ethics in AI lecture, one of few soapbox opinions I give is that GenAI is doing essentially what people do - copy others. Picasso has a quote about "Good Artists copy, Great Artists steal", which doesn't mean try to pass Lario and Muigi off as your own, but rather that great artists are able to take aspects from other works (also called 'inspiration') without being caught. My personality is a combination of elements taken from Jim Carrey, Robin Williams, and King of the Deathmatch Mick Foley. I like making vector graphics based on pictures. I have a folder on my computer called "Website Ideas" that's just screenshots of UIs that I've come across that I really like. I also point to a YouTube video by Kirby Ferguson "Everything is a Remix" [1] which talks about how so much of our collective culture stems from copy. It's a great video if you have an hour. When Little Timmy crayons a copy of Mario, we congratulate him for his creativity. Is it unique, one of a kind art? Well Timmy made it, but he didn't think up the original idea of a video game plumber. I give this view to GenAI right now - it's not capable of achieving that "next step" in "original design", but its performing like a novice artist/musician, it's mimicking what it sees. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9RYuvPCQUA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9RYuvPCQUA
- schneems 3y ago
  Rounding up a transaction and taking the leftovers wouldn’t be a crime worthy of the FBI for one transaction but it would be for a million or a billion. Scale matters and impact matters. If you’re making an ethical argument “it’s okay because it’s already happening to a lesser degree somewhere else” isn’t the flex you think it is. If you’re talking ethics, talk about impact. Who does it help the most who does it hurt the most? Is your argument favoring equality of access or outcome? Who is the most vulnerable in the situation and how will it impact them? > I cover generative AI Wait, are you teaching the class or taking it?
  - stale2002 3y ago
    > “it’s okay because it’s already happening to a lesser degree somewhere else” isn’t the flex you think it is. It actually is. It shows that we as a society are completely OK with this, and nobody is complaining about a very standard and common thing that all artists do. It shows that the outrage is fake, and people don't actually care about the issue.
    - ImPleadThe5th 3y ago
      I don't really care when creative people steal. I care when faceless soulless companies monetize stolen content from Artists.
      - Spivak 3y ago
        It's still copyright violation. Sue them. Being generated by AI doesn't make the final output not copywritten. The interesting question is whether the models themselves are copyright violations not the output.
    - sensanaty 3y ago
      Do you really see no difference between someone drawing a piece of fan art and trillion dollar corporations stealing other people's works and reselling it for their own profit with no regards to anyone or anything else? And yes, obviously society cares about many things depending on the scales in question. It's okay if a dude goes onto a lake on his small rowboat and catches a few fish for dinner, it's a completely different story if you're talking about a massive barge indiscriminately catching literally thousands of fish with huge nets. The latter has to adhere to much stricter rules than the prior, and I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who thinks these 2 situations should be treated equally (unless you're a commercial fisherman with a barge, I suppose, the quote "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." comes to mind here)
achow 3y ago
True. Further extending the argument - I can potentially ask GenAI "Can you show me what does Mario looks like?" since I have never seen one and GenAI is my go to tool.
ImPleadThe5th 3y ago
The problem is the AI companies monetizing the work of copyrighted materials. It's not a problem for me to draw Micky Mouse. It _is_ a problem when someone pays me to draw an animated mouse and I sell them a picture of Micky Mouse. For me, its not really about the AI at all, it's a problem of undervaluing Artists contribution to these tools. And it's not even fully about copyright it's about not asking for permission to use their content and then creating an entire business on top of that stolen content.
- CamperBob2 3y ago
  It's a problem that it's still a problem to do that 100+ years after Mickey Mouse's creation. When the law doesn't respect the people, the people will not respect the law. Fix the existing copyright system, then we can talk about AI.
dangus 3y ago
The AI generating it (Hosted on OpenAI-controlled servers in the case of ChatGPT and DALL-E) is the entity redistributing the work. The end user who asked for the infringing content isn't the entity that is infringing on the copyrights and trademarks. I'm perfectly free to ask people on the street for t-shirt with Mario on it, but as soon as someone who isn't Nintendo or licensed by Nintendo sells me that t-shirt they're the ones infringing on the copyright and trademark. As the consumer I did nothing illegal, and a court would say that I was deceived by the infringing party. Distribution (seeding, uploading) and facilitating copyright infringement is what gets you in trouble. When you ask DALL-E (a paid, commercial product) for a picture of Italian plumbers and it gives you an obvious picture of Mario 100% recognizable to the layperson as Mario and not a distinctly different image of a similar character, that's blatant trademark and/or copyright infringement on the part of OpenAI. > If the AI is completely unable to generate non-infringing works even if you are _trying_ to get away from it (which the author very much doesn't seem they are, they are purposefully making and show prompts that infringe), that's the problem of the AI creator then. I see some parallels to the Napster lawsuit. The fact that the users were the bad people asking for infringing content didn't give Napster the right to facilitate infringement. Napster was ordered to monitor its network and make sure that they were blocking non-legitimate uses. They couldn't logistically comply and went bankrupt. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napster Which begs the question: Does OpenAI even have the technological ability to block trademark and copyright infringing content generation? Even if they do, how useful will ChatGPT be if all phrases and imagery that closely resemble copyrighted works are blocked from output? Whats even worse for OpenAI compared to Napster is that it wasn’t individual users uploading copyrighted content, it was OpenAI’s ingesting the data. Nobody twisted their arm to include copyrighted works in their models.
- madamelic 3y ago
  > OpenAI is the entity redistributing the work It's difficult to say really. If I essentially encode knowledge of something then can recall and remix at will, am I redistributing the exact work or the knowledge of it? Yes, it is capable of producing a close to exact replica, if not the exact same input image byte-for-byte, but I find it difficult to say OpenAI is willfully redistributing copyrighted work in a whole like you would with torrenting a movie or right-click saving an image from Google where you are copying the intellectual property 1:1. Opening this Pandora's box could have large implications on a lot of creative work that could cause artists to be unable to work if taken to the end conclusion: you cannot create any creative work that has a talking mouse if you have knowledge of Mickey Mouse existing because you have been tainted (similar to whiteroom re-creations but now any sufficiently large copyrighted figure causes a deadlock condition for all derivative ore even similar topics). Is Ratatouille derative of Mickey Mouse? Ehhh, well they are both talking rodents. They both have cartoon faces. You can certainly draw parallels between them but they aren't the same character. Is Mickey with a chef hat infringing on Ratatouille? The trademark law, to my knowledge, is asking would someone be tricked or misled into believing you are the other guys. I think that is applicable here where someone drawing a talking mouse isn't infringing as long as it cannot be mistaken for Mickey Mouse, which again would be the fault of the person inducing the creation and not the tool that allowed it to happen. Where does "inspired by" / derived from the encoded knowledge turn into outright exploitation of copyrighted work? There's certainly _a_ line but I find it difficult to define it at it being encoded into knowledge of it existing.
Forgeties79 3y ago
> Copyright should be the problem of the person using the works and not the problem of the AI generating it. All parties are responsible on some level. This just reads like passing the buck/burying ones head in the sand to me.
Zambyte 3y ago
Copyright shouldn't be a problem for anyone. It's simply a bogus idea that artificial scarcity of information is a benefit to society.
- fireflash38 3y ago
  Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? 'No!' says the man in Washington, 'It belongs to the poor.' 'No!' says the man in the Vatican, 'It belongs to God.' 'No!' says the man in Moscow, 'It belongs to everyone.' Are you trying to say that no one is entitled to their own inventions? Cause that is a rapid descent into a capitalist hellhole where only those who can steal ideas the most effectively are able to profit.
  - Zambyte 3y ago
    > Are you trying to say that no one is entitled to their own inventions? The subject of this thread is copyright, not patents. Though I do believe all intellectual property is bogus (including trademark, which repealing would limit the influence that would be required for the capitalist hellhole you mention), I feel the most strongly so about copyright, which has nothing to do with inventions.

outside1234 3y ago

The thing is: OpenAI and Microsoft have indemnified their users - so their users problems are their problems.

tsumnia 3y ago

When I cover generative AI in my Ethics in AI lecture, one of few soapbox opinions I give is that GenAI is doing essentially what people do - copy others. Picasso has a quote about "Good Artists copy, Great Artists steal", which doesn't mean try to pass Lario and Muigi off as your own, but rather that great artists are able to take aspects from other works (also called 'inspiration') without being caught. My personality is a combination of elements taken from Jim Carrey, Robin Williams, and King of the Deathmatch Mick Foley. I like making vector graphics based on pictures. I have a folder on my computer called "Website Ideas" that's just screenshots of UIs that I've come across that I really like. I also point to a YouTube video by Kirby Ferguson "Everything is a Remix" [1] which talks about how so much of our collective culture stems from copy. It's a great video if you have an hour. When Little Timmy crayons a copy of Mario, we congratulate him for his creativity. Is it unique, one of a kind art? Well Timmy made it, but he didn't think up the original idea of a video game plumber. I give this view to GenAI right now - it's not capable of achieving that "next step" in "original design", but its performing like a novice artist/musician, it's mimicking what it sees. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9RYuvPCQUA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9RYuvPCQUA

schneems 3y ago
Rounding up a transaction and taking the leftovers wouldn’t be a crime worthy of the FBI for one transaction but it would be for a million or a billion. Scale matters and impact matters. If you’re making an ethical argument “it’s okay because it’s already happening to a lesser degree somewhere else” isn’t the flex you think it is. If you’re talking ethics, talk about impact. Who does it help the most who does it hurt the most? Is your argument favoring equality of access or outcome? Who is the most vulnerable in the situation and how will it impact them? > I cover generative AI Wait, are you teaching the class or taking it?
- stale2002 3y ago
  > “it’s okay because it’s already happening to a lesser degree somewhere else” isn’t the flex you think it is. It actually is. It shows that we as a society are completely OK with this, and nobody is complaining about a very standard and common thing that all artists do. It shows that the outrage is fake, and people don't actually care about the issue.
  - ImPleadThe5th 3y ago
    I don't really care when creative people steal. I care when faceless soulless companies monetize stolen content from Artists.
    - Spivak 3y ago
      It's still copyright violation. Sue them. Being generated by AI doesn't make the final output not copywritten. The interesting question is whether the models themselves are copyright violations not the output.
  - sensanaty 3y ago
    Do you really see no difference between someone drawing a piece of fan art and trillion dollar corporations stealing other people's works and reselling it for their own profit with no regards to anyone or anything else? And yes, obviously society cares about many things depending on the scales in question. It's okay if a dude goes onto a lake on his small rowboat and catches a few fish for dinner, it's a completely different story if you're talking about a massive barge indiscriminately catching literally thousands of fish with huge nets. The latter has to adhere to much stricter rules than the prior, and I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who thinks these 2 situations should be treated equally (unless you're a commercial fisherman with a barge, I suppose, the quote "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." comes to mind here)

achow 3y ago

True. Further extending the argument - I can potentially ask GenAI "Can you show me what does Mario looks like?" since I have never seen one and GenAI is my go to tool.

ImPleadThe5th 3y ago

The problem is the AI companies monetizing the work of copyrighted materials. It's not a problem for me to draw Micky Mouse. It _is_ a problem when someone pays me to draw an animated mouse and I sell them a picture of Micky Mouse. For me, its not really about the AI at all, it's a problem of undervaluing Artists contribution to these tools. And it's not even fully about copyright it's about not asking for permission to use their content and then creating an entire business on top of that stolen content.

CamperBob2 3y ago
It's a problem that it's still a problem to do that 100+ years after Mickey Mouse's creation. When the law doesn't respect the people, the people will not respect the law. Fix the existing copyright system, then we can talk about AI.

dangus 3y ago

The AI generating it (Hosted on OpenAI-controlled servers in the case of ChatGPT and DALL-E) is the entity redistributing the work. The end user who asked for the infringing content isn't the entity that is infringing on the copyrights and trademarks. I'm perfectly free to ask people on the street for t-shirt with Mario on it, but as soon as someone who isn't Nintendo or licensed by Nintendo sells me that t-shirt they're the ones infringing on the copyright and trademark. As the consumer I did nothing illegal, and a court would say that I was deceived by the infringing party. Distribution (seeding, uploading) and facilitating copyright infringement is what gets you in trouble. When you ask DALL-E (a paid, commercial product) for a picture of Italian plumbers and it gives you an obvious picture of Mario 100% recognizable to the layperson as Mario and not a distinctly different image of a similar character, that's blatant trademark and/or copyright infringement on the part of OpenAI. > If the AI is completely unable to generate non-infringing works even if you are _trying_ to get away from it (which the author very much doesn't seem they are, they are purposefully making and show prompts that infringe), that's the problem of the AI creator then. I see some parallels to the Napster lawsuit. The fact that the users were the bad people asking for infringing content didn't give Napster the right to facilitate infringement. Napster was ordered to monitor its network and make sure that they were blocking non-legitimate uses. They couldn't logistically comply and went bankrupt. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napster Which begs the question: Does OpenAI even have the technological ability to block trademark and copyright infringing content generation? Even if they do, how useful will ChatGPT be if all phrases and imagery that closely resemble copyrighted works are blocked from output? Whats even worse for OpenAI compared to Napster is that it wasn’t individual users uploading copyrighted content, it was OpenAI’s ingesting the data. Nobody twisted their arm to include copyrighted works in their models.

madamelic 3y ago
> OpenAI is the entity redistributing the work It's difficult to say really. If I essentially encode knowledge of something then can recall and remix at will, am I redistributing the exact work or the knowledge of it? Yes, it is capable of producing a close to exact replica, if not the exact same input image byte-for-byte, but I find it difficult to say OpenAI is willfully redistributing copyrighted work in a whole like you would with torrenting a movie or right-click saving an image from Google where you are copying the intellectual property 1:1. Opening this Pandora's box could have large implications on a lot of creative work that could cause artists to be unable to work if taken to the end conclusion: you cannot create any creative work that has a talking mouse if you have knowledge of Mickey Mouse existing because you have been tainted (similar to whiteroom re-creations but now any sufficiently large copyrighted figure causes a deadlock condition for all derivative ore even similar topics). Is Ratatouille derative of Mickey Mouse? Ehhh, well they are both talking rodents. They both have cartoon faces. You can certainly draw parallels between them but they aren't the same character. Is Mickey with a chef hat infringing on Ratatouille? The trademark law, to my knowledge, is asking would someone be tricked or misled into believing you are the other guys. I think that is applicable here where someone drawing a talking mouse isn't infringing as long as it cannot be mistaken for Mickey Mouse, which again would be the fault of the person inducing the creation and not the tool that allowed it to happen. Where does "inspired by" / derived from the encoded knowledge turn into outright exploitation of copyrighted work? There's certainly _a_ line but I find it difficult to define it at it being encoded into knowledge of it existing.

Forgeties79 3y ago

> Copyright should be the problem of the person using the works and not the problem of the AI generating it. All parties are responsible on some level. This just reads like passing the buck/burying ones head in the sand to me.

Zambyte 3y ago

Copyright shouldn't be a problem for anyone. It's simply a bogus idea that artificial scarcity of information is a benefit to society.

fireflash38 3y ago
Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? 'No!' says the man in Washington, 'It belongs to the poor.' 'No!' says the man in the Vatican, 'It belongs to God.' 'No!' says the man in Moscow, 'It belongs to everyone.' Are you trying to say that no one is entitled to their own inventions? Cause that is a rapid descent into a capitalist hellhole where only those who can steal ideas the most effectively are able to profit.
- Zambyte 3y ago
  > Are you trying to say that no one is entitled to their own inventions? The subject of this thread is copyright, not patents. Though I do believe all intellectual property is bogus (including trademark, which repealing would limit the influence that would be required for the capitalist hellhole you mention), I feel the most strongly so about copyright, which has nothing to do with inventions.