3 ms·

If you have trained a person to draw, or paint, and they're really good at it, and if they have general knowledge of pop culture, you could ask them to draw the

by retrac 3y ago

If you have trained a person to draw, or paint, and they're really good at it, and if they have general knowledge of pop culture, you could ask them to draw the Simpsons, or Mario and Luigi, and they could. It is not literally copying so much as re-synthesizing. The artist's mind contains an archetype of Mario, and knows how to draw figurines in general. And if you commissioned an artist to draw that, and published it, it would be copyright infringement. But the artist does not infringe merely by having that potential. I'm of the interpretation that the models do not infringe; the person running inference infringes when they intend to create copyrighted imagery using the model.

deleted 3y ago
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schkolne 3y ago
Yeah but one of the points the article makes is that people don't necessarily know if they're infringing or not with Midjourney, especially when text is generated. Only rarely if at all does this happen with humans (the subconscious is a mysterious place) but it is easy with LLMs and harder to detect because the person doing the generation is not as involved in the creation of the text. Of course LLMs could be patched to detect and alert but... how? and what incentive to do so? Of course the models don't infringe but perhaps the people building them did by basing their IP on other people's IP. for the courts to decide...
- chii 3y ago
  > people don't necessarily know if they're infringing or not with Midjourney it is the copyright owner's responsibility to sue for infringing works.
NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
When I was quite young and visiting my grandmother's home, I made a painting or drawing of Garfield. I was definitely not the artistic type and I had no training or guidance on drawing or coloring, but on that day I felt inspired, and pretty much reproduced that ugly fat cat without reference to an official image. This must be the common case for practically any kid creating art these days; they are going to imitate commercial and copyrighted content that they are most exposed to. It just seems a natural thing to do, the unnatural course being that they come up with something beyond the Threshold of Originality.
- schkolne 3y ago
  Yeah the infringement (in this old school model) would be if you then used that image as -- say -- the cover of a book or something. Then, it would be analyzed to see if it's "fair use" (satire, etc) or infringement. I guess the question with MJ is -- if I make such a Garfield with MJ, show it to my parents etc., put it on the fridge, is that a problem? prob not. i'm not a lawyer but -- that doesn't seem like I'm infringing. but... did MJ infringe by selling me a subscription that gave me that image for pay? (pay that otherwise Garfield's IP owners might've received)
  - everforward 3y ago
    Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that the creation of the image is still infringement. No one is going to sue a child over a drawing on a fridge, though. The PR would be a nightmare, there's no earnings to seize, and it's not cannibalizing the market for the real thing in any way. Midjourney has issues on a couple of fronts One is the direct infringement, ie who is the creator? Is it the AI for creating it or the human who entered the prompt? Whoever created it is infringing, but again, probably not worth it to sue Joe Schmoe over it. The second is that Midjourney hosts all of the images they generate, some of which are infringing. I'm guessing they're trying to use Safe Harbor protections, but I'm a little dubious that they can actually call the output of their own AI "user content". Users are promoting the AI, but Midjourney is still the one generating the content.
tdullien 3y ago
Imagine you take all sorts of copyrighted pictures, compress them lossily, encrypt them separately using a unique passphrase that can be guessed, and place them into a big tarball to be distributed. Are you infringing copyright? I think this is a useful mental model here, as it is difficult to argue that guessing a passphrase is copyright infringement.
- NBJack 3y ago
  That is a bit different as it suggests strict comparmentalization of the reproductions. There is a lot of "concept bleeding" that happens in the models I've used. Perhaps if the compression directly leveraged overlap among the images, via keywords.

by retrac 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

schkolne 3y ago

Yeah but one of the points the article makes is that people don't necessarily know if they're infringing or not with Midjourney, especially when text is generated. Only rarely if at all does this happen with humans (the subconscious is a mysterious place) but it is easy with LLMs and harder to detect because the person doing the generation is not as involved in the creation of the text. Of course LLMs could be patched to detect and alert but... how? and what incentive to do so? Of course the models don't infringe but perhaps the people building them did by basing their IP on other people's IP. for the courts to decide...

chii 3y ago
> people don't necessarily know if they're infringing or not with Midjourney it is the copyright owner's responsibility to sue for infringing works.

NoZebra120vClip 3y ago

When I was quite young and visiting my grandmother's home, I made a painting or drawing of Garfield. I was definitely not the artistic type and I had no training or guidance on drawing or coloring, but on that day I felt inspired, and pretty much reproduced that ugly fat cat without reference to an official image. This must be the common case for practically any kid creating art these days; they are going to imitate commercial and copyrighted content that they are most exposed to. It just seems a natural thing to do, the unnatural course being that they come up with something beyond the Threshold of Originality.

schkolne 3y ago
Yeah the infringement (in this old school model) would be if you then used that image as -- say -- the cover of a book or something. Then, it would be analyzed to see if it's "fair use" (satire, etc) or infringement. I guess the question with MJ is -- if I make such a Garfield with MJ, show it to my parents etc., put it on the fridge, is that a problem? prob not. i'm not a lawyer but -- that doesn't seem like I'm infringing. but... did MJ infringe by selling me a subscription that gave me that image for pay? (pay that otherwise Garfield's IP owners might've received)
- everforward 3y ago
  Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that the creation of the image is still infringement. No one is going to sue a child over a drawing on a fridge, though. The PR would be a nightmare, there's no earnings to seize, and it's not cannibalizing the market for the real thing in any way. Midjourney has issues on a couple of fronts One is the direct infringement, ie who is the creator? Is it the AI for creating it or the human who entered the prompt? Whoever created it is infringing, but again, probably not worth it to sue Joe Schmoe over it. The second is that Midjourney hosts all of the images they generate, some of which are infringing. I'm guessing they're trying to use Safe Harbor protections, but I'm a little dubious that they can actually call the output of their own AI "user content". Users are promoting the AI, but Midjourney is still the one generating the content.

tdullien 3y ago

Imagine you take all sorts of copyrighted pictures, compress them lossily, encrypt them separately using a unique passphrase that can be guessed, and place them into a big tarball to be distributed. Are you infringing copyright? I think this is a useful mental model here, as it is difficult to argue that guessing a passphrase is copyright infringement.

NBJack 3y ago
That is a bit different as it suggests strict comparmentalization of the reproductions. There is a lot of "concept bleeding" that happens in the models I've used. Perhaps if the compression directly leveraged overlap among the images, via keywords.