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Completely unenforceable. How can you even tell if an image was made by AI? What if AI created an outline that was worked on by a human artist (or vice versa)?

Completely unenforceable. How can you even tell if an image was made by AI? What if AI created an outline that was worked on by a human artist (or vice versa)? Who would the burden of proof be on? Steam has a “no AI art” policy, and it’s rapidly turning into a “no obvious AI art policy”. How could they tell?

kmeisthax 3y ago
The thing about AI art is that, absent lots of prompt engineering, seed grinding, and touchups, you're likely to have a bunch of images that are obvious tells if your entire project is AI. Anyone trying to hide it would be spending time equivalent to just making the art themselves. There's also another advantage to having a "no obvious AI art" policy; and that's to cut down on spam. AI is extremely useful to people who want to spam art platforms.
- nothercastle 3y ago
  That also devalues the work of the original creators whose work got knocked off by ai and they should be compensated for the damage done
  - Gigachad 3y ago
    This has never happened ever in history. So many jobs were devalued by new machines. And the people doing them were never compensated.
- jwells89 3y ago
  And this will continue to be an issue until ML models have achieved something resembling sentience, because many of these tells are the result of the model not truly comprehending the subject matter and thus struggling to maintain internal consistency in everything from geometry and kinetics of human bodies to lighting and physics. Less obviously, ML models also lack the ability to bake in intent. In human made pieces, everything is as it is for a reason; it’s communicating something. In ML generated pieces, things are the way they are because that’s what’s statistically likely for the type of generated image.
  - PixyMisa 3y ago
    Absolutely correct. This is a far more obvious problem in text models, because you end up with internally flawless arguments as to why your next scuba diving vacation should be in Ulan Bator. With art, it's more subtle, because there there's no single reference point that lets us determine if an artwork is "true". There are the glaring errors that everyone can agree on - notoriously, human hands - but those cases are improving rapidly.
- tavavex 3y ago
  > Anyone trying to hide it would be spending time equivalent to just making the art themselves. The gap of being distinguishable from manually drawn images is still closing - we don't know if it'll ever reach the threshold, but the amount of effort required to stamp out all the wonkiness from an AI generation has been going down ever since the first viable algorithms appeared. I don't think that this was an anti-spam policy - Steam already manually reviews all new applicants that want to publish a game, so they don't need to forbid anything to turn it down. I'm guessing that this policy was because they don't want to be entangled in IP legislation if some copyright exception is carved out to forbid the use of generative AI.
  - PixyMisa 3y ago
    In just the past two years it's gone from obvious horrors like hands attached directly at the elbow to much more subtle errors like chair legs that cross over each other like an Escher drawing or doorknobs adjacent to the hinges. Human artists might have to become used to tracking provenance. If you work with traditional media, that's easy: Here's the painting. For digital artists, software can publish encrypted, timestamped brushstroke-level histories of the work if we need that level of proof.
  - krainboltgreene 3y ago
    > The gap of being distinguishable from manually drawn images is still closing People have been trumpeting this since day one of Stable Diffusion releasing, but I'm seeing the same output quality as that day and I've been keeping up.
    - tavavex 3y ago
      Just because the pace of progress isn't exponential (like what some people would want to believe) doesn't mean it isn't happening. I remember getting an early invite to DALL-E 1 all the way back, and while I don't use it anymore, the modern improvements made seem very substantial. From plain comparisons of different versions where the same inputs produce substantially better outputs, to the mere fact that the latest version can actually generate decent, often discernible text at all (something that people joked would be impossible from AI to achieve) shows that some progress is being made. The reason why it's not as visible with Stable Diffusion is because a lot of the technologies around it circle the same few foundational SD models - people build on top of them, add new ways of interacting with them, but ultimately, the same thing underlies them all. Community support is seen as more important than cutting-edge tech, which is why something like Stable Diffusion XL hasn't even seen universal adoption yet.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  >Anyone trying to hide it would be spending time equivalent to just making the art themselves. Microsoft and every other tech company is indeed investing billions in the tech. I'm sure each company can fund the entire (woefully underpaid) art industry by themselves, let alone the 10 or so tech hubs altogether. But they are happy to throw money at AI instead for the payoff of being the next big tech brand.
- fho 3y ago
  > Anyone trying to hide it would be spending time equivalent to just making the art themselves. That's basically the argument why Jason Allen should have been allowed to win the art competition, is it? It's not that he typed "award winning painting" into Midjourney and the image was the result. He tried hundreds of seeds, selected one that he liked and refined it over countless iterations with infilling until he was satisfied with the result. I honestly don't see how this is fundamentally different from other art forms.
geysersam 3y ago
Googled this because that was an astounding claim but Steam does in fact not have an anti ai art policy. They don't allow ai art produced by models trained on material that the model makers don't have copyright to. In practice that's a ban (currently) but in principle it isn't.
- jwells89 3y ago
  It makes perfect sense because much of the friction around generative ML models has to do with the data it was trained on. There’s not much reason to ban images generated by a model that was trained entirely on consensually gathered material.
bsder 3y ago
> Completely unenforceable. Complete wrong. You just flip the defaults--something is AI unless you can prove otherwise. This is done already and has precedent. Producing porn requires that you keep artifacts demonstrating that who the performers were, that they were of age, etc. If you claim a work is not AI generated, you should have to produce some artifacts to back up that claim. In the case of a corporation, that would be easy as you have payment records. In the case of an individual doing digital only, that's a little harder. You probably have to keep some intermediate artifacts.
- raincole 3y ago
  > If you claim a work is not AI generated, you should have to produce some artifacts to back up that claim. So AI (or a simpler, non-statistics-based algorithm) can't produce these artifacts and will never be able to? Why? Are these artifacts "human souls" or something? > In the case of a corporation, that would be easy as you have payment records. Outsourcing.
- tavavex 3y ago
  I'm really struggling to conceptualize a world where every picture that's drawn must have a full notary log of how exactly it was produced, all for the sake of removing generative AI. Besides, it's not that easy of a problem - a lot of corporate artists are salaried workers, they don't get specified commissions with an attached bill per work, but are paid a salary so the company can ask them to draw whatever they need throughout the process. Considering this, all artists would need to retain "intermediate artifacts". And then, how do these artifacts work for other ways of doing art? What about traditional artists whose work gets scanned in after completion - would they have to keep a camera on hand to take photographs as they're working? What about an animated film - would every intermediate step in production, from character design to storyboarding to environmental design etc etc need to have a full record for every single sketch?
  - omeid2 3y ago
    It is for the sake of copyright, if you want society to protect your work, provide evidence for your creative work. It seems rather simple to me. Keep in mind that in the not so far future, producing art will be as cheap as consuming it, this means that the original benefits society got in return for copyright no longer applies, so why should they protect it?
rtpg 3y ago
"I claim this art was made by this person" "Who?" <gives name> "OK <name>. did you work on this?" "Where are related work products? Are there any? What about invoices? Simultaneous employment?" The reality is that most legal things are determined by _convincing people of a truth_. Perhaps you can set up a whole scheme to "launder" AI art and attach names to them. And all the papertrail you generate doing this will show up in discovery in some lawsuit and the copyrights all disappear. Laws are vibes, not code.
- klipt 3y ago
  The way that AI will be laundered into art is by including it into things like Photoshop. There'll still be a human touch just with "smart brushes" and "smart auto fill" that paints 90% of what you want. Art will then take less skill to produce, and be produced faster for lower prices. An 80% price reduction on art (because artists can now produce it 5 times faster thanks to AI) is 80% as good as getting it for free.
  - numpad0 3y ago
    Art will take more skill to produce, not less, at faster speed by select artists. GenAI will become another tool that artists and clients alike must understand and use effectively within unspoken guild rules, that is, if it stays.
colordrops 3y ago
Furthermore, what is the threshold for something to still legally be considered AI art once an artist's hand has modified it? What if they change the brightness? Fix a hand? completely replace a character in a scene? Illustrate most of the scene themselves but add an AI figure or background? Use AI to sharpen a hand drawn image?
- two_in_one 3y ago
  It's a gray area. But if someone generates AI images at scale without human in the loop it's likely not copyrightable.
  - colordrops 3y ago
    What does "at scale" mean here, and how would it be detected or enforced?
    - two_in_one 3y ago
      that means that openai cannot claim copyright on images produced by dalle generator. no can other online services and offline software owners/producers. this is enough to use them without copyright violation for example for other ai models training.
thurn 3y ago
A company today has the burden of proof to demonstrate authorship of a claimed work when they sue for copyright infringement. This isn't a crazy expansion of that concept -- companies do not generally break the law just because there's a low chance of getting caught. Furthermore it's not hard to imagine, for example, a whistleblower calling out their employer for copyrighting AI works.

kmeisthax 3y ago

The thing about AI art is that, absent lots of prompt engineering, seed grinding, and touchups, you're likely to have a bunch of images that are obvious tells if your entire project is AI. Anyone trying to hide it would be spending time equivalent to just making the art themselves. There's also another advantage to having a "no obvious AI art" policy; and that's to cut down on spam. AI is extremely useful to people who want to spam art platforms.

nothercastle 3y ago
That also devalues the work of the original creators whose work got knocked off by ai and they should be compensated for the damage done
- Gigachad 3y ago
  This has never happened ever in history. So many jobs were devalued by new machines. And the people doing them were never compensated.
jwells89 3y ago
And this will continue to be an issue until ML models have achieved something resembling sentience, because many of these tells are the result of the model not truly comprehending the subject matter and thus struggling to maintain internal consistency in everything from geometry and kinetics of human bodies to lighting and physics. Less obviously, ML models also lack the ability to bake in intent. In human made pieces, everything is as it is for a reason; it’s communicating something. In ML generated pieces, things are the way they are because that’s what’s statistically likely for the type of generated image.
- PixyMisa 3y ago
  Absolutely correct. This is a far more obvious problem in text models, because you end up with internally flawless arguments as to why your next scuba diving vacation should be in Ulan Bator. With art, it's more subtle, because there there's no single reference point that lets us determine if an artwork is "true". There are the glaring errors that everyone can agree on - notoriously, human hands - but those cases are improving rapidly.
tavavex 3y ago
> Anyone trying to hide it would be spending time equivalent to just making the art themselves. The gap of being distinguishable from manually drawn images is still closing - we don't know if it'll ever reach the threshold, but the amount of effort required to stamp out all the wonkiness from an AI generation has been going down ever since the first viable algorithms appeared. I don't think that this was an anti-spam policy - Steam already manually reviews all new applicants that want to publish a game, so they don't need to forbid anything to turn it down. I'm guessing that this policy was because they don't want to be entangled in IP legislation if some copyright exception is carved out to forbid the use of generative AI.
- PixyMisa 3y ago
  In just the past two years it's gone from obvious horrors like hands attached directly at the elbow to much more subtle errors like chair legs that cross over each other like an Escher drawing or doorknobs adjacent to the hinges. Human artists might have to become used to tracking provenance. If you work with traditional media, that's easy: Here's the painting. For digital artists, software can publish encrypted, timestamped brushstroke-level histories of the work if we need that level of proof.
- krainboltgreene 3y ago
  > The gap of being distinguishable from manually drawn images is still closing People have been trumpeting this since day one of Stable Diffusion releasing, but I'm seeing the same output quality as that day and I've been keeping up.
  - tavavex 3y ago
    Just because the pace of progress isn't exponential (like what some people would want to believe) doesn't mean it isn't happening. I remember getting an early invite to DALL-E 1 all the way back, and while I don't use it anymore, the modern improvements made seem very substantial. From plain comparisons of different versions where the same inputs produce substantially better outputs, to the mere fact that the latest version can actually generate decent, often discernible text at all (something that people joked would be impossible from AI to achieve) shows that some progress is being made. The reason why it's not as visible with Stable Diffusion is because a lot of the technologies around it circle the same few foundational SD models - people build on top of them, add new ways of interacting with them, but ultimately, the same thing underlies them all. Community support is seen as more important than cutting-edge tech, which is why something like Stable Diffusion XL hasn't even seen universal adoption yet.
johnnyanmac 3y ago
>Anyone trying to hide it would be spending time equivalent to just making the art themselves. Microsoft and every other tech company is indeed investing billions in the tech. I'm sure each company can fund the entire (woefully underpaid) art industry by themselves, let alone the 10 or so tech hubs altogether. But they are happy to throw money at AI instead for the payoff of being the next big tech brand.
fho 3y ago
> Anyone trying to hide it would be spending time equivalent to just making the art themselves. That's basically the argument why Jason Allen should have been allowed to win the art competition, is it? It's not that he typed "award winning painting" into Midjourney and the image was the result. He tried hundreds of seeds, selected one that he liked and refined it over countless iterations with infilling until he was satisfied with the result. I honestly don't see how this is fundamentally different from other art forms.

geysersam 3y ago

Googled this because that was an astounding claim but Steam does in fact not have an anti ai art policy. They don't allow ai art produced by models trained on material that the model makers don't have copyright to. In practice that's a ban (currently) but in principle it isn't.

jwells89 3y ago
It makes perfect sense because much of the friction around generative ML models has to do with the data it was trained on. There’s not much reason to ban images generated by a model that was trained entirely on consensually gathered material.

bsder 3y ago

> Completely unenforceable. Complete wrong. You just flip the defaults--something is AI unless you can prove otherwise. This is done already and has precedent. Producing porn requires that you keep artifacts demonstrating that who the performers were, that they were of age, etc. If you claim a work is not AI generated, you should have to produce some artifacts to back up that claim. In the case of a corporation, that would be easy as you have payment records. In the case of an individual doing digital only, that's a little harder. You probably have to keep some intermediate artifacts.

raincole 3y ago
> If you claim a work is not AI generated, you should have to produce some artifacts to back up that claim. So AI (or a simpler, non-statistics-based algorithm) can't produce these artifacts and will never be able to? Why? Are these artifacts "human souls" or something? > In the case of a corporation, that would be easy as you have payment records. Outsourcing.
tavavex 3y ago
I'm really struggling to conceptualize a world where every picture that's drawn must have a full notary log of how exactly it was produced, all for the sake of removing generative AI. Besides, it's not that easy of a problem - a lot of corporate artists are salaried workers, they don't get specified commissions with an attached bill per work, but are paid a salary so the company can ask them to draw whatever they need throughout the process. Considering this, all artists would need to retain "intermediate artifacts". And then, how do these artifacts work for other ways of doing art? What about traditional artists whose work gets scanned in after completion - would they have to keep a camera on hand to take photographs as they're working? What about an animated film - would every intermediate step in production, from character design to storyboarding to environmental design etc etc need to have a full record for every single sketch?
- omeid2 3y ago
  It is for the sake of copyright, if you want society to protect your work, provide evidence for your creative work. It seems rather simple to me. Keep in mind that in the not so far future, producing art will be as cheap as consuming it, this means that the original benefits society got in return for copyright no longer applies, so why should they protect it?

rtpg 3y ago

"I claim this art was made by this person" "Who?" <gives name> "OK <name>. did you work on this?" "Where are related work products? Are there any? What about invoices? Simultaneous employment?" The reality is that most legal things are determined by _convincing people of a truth_. Perhaps you can set up a whole scheme to "launder" AI art and attach names to them. And all the papertrail you generate doing this will show up in discovery in some lawsuit and the copyrights all disappear. Laws are vibes, not code.

klipt 3y ago
The way that AI will be laundered into art is by including it into things like Photoshop. There'll still be a human touch just with "smart brushes" and "smart auto fill" that paints 90% of what you want. Art will then take less skill to produce, and be produced faster for lower prices. An 80% price reduction on art (because artists can now produce it 5 times faster thanks to AI) is 80% as good as getting it for free.
- numpad0 3y ago
  Art will take more skill to produce, not less, at faster speed by select artists. GenAI will become another tool that artists and clients alike must understand and use effectively within unspoken guild rules, that is, if it stays.

colordrops 3y ago

Furthermore, what is the threshold for something to still legally be considered AI art once an artist's hand has modified it? What if they change the brightness? Fix a hand? completely replace a character in a scene? Illustrate most of the scene themselves but add an AI figure or background? Use AI to sharpen a hand drawn image?

two_in_one 3y ago
It's a gray area. But if someone generates AI images at scale without human in the loop it's likely not copyrightable.
- colordrops 3y ago
  What does "at scale" mean here, and how would it be detected or enforced?
  - two_in_one 3y ago
    that means that openai cannot claim copyright on images produced by dalle generator. no can other online services and offline software owners/producers. this is enough to use them without copyright violation for example for other ai models training.

thurn 3y ago

A company today has the burden of proof to demonstrate authorship of a claimed work when they sue for copyright infringement. This isn't a crazy expansion of that concept -- companies do not generally break the law just because there's a low chance of getting caught. Furthermore it's not hard to imagine, for example, a whistleblower calling out their employer for copyrighting AI works.