4 ms·

The bigger issue is if I run my machine learning bot on your piano albums, and then reuse that music. It's technically not yours anymore, and I can license the

The bigger issue is if I run my machine learning bot on your piano albums, and then reuse that music. It's technically not yours anymore, and I can license the music out to whoever I want. I think a good middle ground would be to immediately put all AI generated art in the public domain. I'd love to be able to just ask Chat GPT 5 to recreate The Chronic in French or Straight out of Compton in Japanese. But the issue is I shouldn't be able to sell that content as if it's a result of my work.

misja111 3y ago
Honestly many of those artists didn't reach fame because they were such brilliant singers or composers. They were also not bad, but their strong point was building an image, performing live and gathering a large fanbase. You could sample their music for all you want but it would never sell anywhere near the originals.
raven105x 3y ago
To be fair, this is no different than what's done by a human artist. Virtually every song composed today is inspired by or based on, in some manner or other, a previous work of art. This is exactly what machine learning does - a novel recombination of what has been previously observed (ie., "reusing the music" - building upon that which is) Whether this process is done by a human or not is irrelevant. ML, for the most part, does exactly what humans do. There are currently very few capabilities which ML performs that humans do not - namely, blatant plagiarism. People whining about their exact job being done by a machine is as old as time. Farmers, industrial revolution, the printing press (scribes whined), etc. Nothing new here. New jobs will be created to replace the lost ones. We've arguably been in a "BS economy" for quite some time now.
- lbotos 3y ago
  And to be clearer -- We have licensing mechanisms now in music (they aren't perfect) but when you remix/interpolate/sample the original artist gets their cut. The "risks" of Machine learning with large models is you won't know who you are even sampling, which exposes you to unknown risk.
  - raven105x 3y ago
    This is not true. Google LLMs / multi-modals fully support attribution and as explainability goes up, so will attribution. And it will be much more fair / accurate than the droves of human artists who intentionally omit attributions. When a human artist composes a new song, they often have no idea where they got the compound basis for it either. If anything, human attribution is vastly inferior to ML as-is, nevermind of what's to come.
  - mft_ 3y ago
    You're right, but I don't believe the previous poster was talking about sampling. What happens with machine learning models is more similar to someone learning to play music: everyone learning some form of musical expression will by default learn music which has been written previously, and this can't but help to influence them to a degree. Of course, there are systems to police this too, but high profile cases in recent years have shown how imperfect (or difficult?) this is in reality [0]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcCKlsTgjeM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcCKlsTgjeM
- 999900000999 3y ago
  True, but nothing could ever be done so quickly and at such a large scale. If an Italian band wants to make something inspired by Pink Floyd it's going to take real effort. Not a 30 second click to generate. Eventually, and this is probably my biggest fear with AI, is the AI generated noise will crowd out real human innovation. I don't feel that AI generated art should have the same protections that human generated art has.
  - gedy 3y ago
    > AI generated noise will crowd out real human innovation But that’s the key point, “real human innovation” will still be there because by definition that’s not going to be in some model weights based on previous works. If it’s truly innovative, AI won’t be able to duplicate that.
  - dfxm12 3y ago
    Personally, I don't think the amount of effort is what's important. If Roger Waters, or "his people", sniff out something fishy, they're going to sue and they're going to get something for their troubles. I think what's important is that that legal option is uniquely available to him because he's already rich. If someone rips me off, it doesn't matter if they're working with a trained ear or AI. There's nothing I can do about it cause I can't afford a lawyer. There should be a better legal framework for us regular folk who don't have these resources, regardless of AI. A better framework probably includes what you're saying about AI generated things, but there's no reason for it to stop there.
- yowzadave 3y ago
  If we outsource the job of art-making to bots, what will remain for humans to do? Given that there are so many jobs that involve real drudgery, it’s odd to me that we’re trying so hard to automate the fun/rewarding/creative parts, while leaving the difficult, repetitive, mind-numbing parts to humans.
  - raven105x 3y ago
    That's an economic problem to be solved just like the printing press and the industrial revolution. Like I said, we've been in a BS economy for a while now.
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    I think this is probably because interesting jobs require handling information, which computers are good at, and boring ones require just shuffling stuff around in the physical world, which computers are still mediocre at. But, designing a robot that can do tedious tasks is an intellectual job, just a really hard one. If we automate intellectual jobs to the point where, like, any random team of 10 people with engineering degrees can make a really good robot, I guess we should see the tedious jobs taken too.
    - yowzadave 3y ago
      I used to work as an architect. As far as I am aware, AI/automation has so far only made inroads in the earliest "concept" phases--image-making, concept massing, conceptual space-planning, etc. That is only the first, shortest, and most creative part of designing a building. After the concept design has finished, there are longer and more expensive phases of design development and construction drawing that still require huge amounts of coordination between the various design/construction professionals & stakeholders. At this phase, the work is much more practical: adding detail to the drawings reveals that, say, the size of the required mechanical units exceed the area that originally been allocated to them in the concept phase, and the architect will need to work with the structural engineer/mechanical engineer/client/etc. to modify the solution so that the building still works. It's this latter phase of drawing/coordinating/redrawing that has so far been very resistant to automation. I would still call this part of an architect's job "intellectual work". My guess is that it hasn't been automated because it requires deep domain knowledge in multiple areas...knowledge which your typical AI software person doesn't have.
- mcguire 3y ago
  Two problems here: 1. If a human does that, they can be sued for doing so. If the reuse is egregious enough they will lose in court. 2. Industrial farming and industrial production have in fact been some of the more contentious economic projects. And the results have often been a race to the bottom in terms of quality.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- rurp 3y ago
  > To be fair, this is no different than what's done by a human artist. Scale matters. It's like the difference between a cop sitting on the side of a road writing down the cars he sees on a pad of paper versus cameras plastered everywhere tracking every individual with ML software. You could say the computers are just doing the same thing as the human, but one is fairly benign while the other enables a totalitarian surveillance state.
EgoIncarnate 3y ago
Purely AI driven art is already defacto public domain in the US in that it is not copyrightable. See https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/21/22944335/us-copyright-office-reject-ai-generated-art-recent-entrance-to-paradise https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/21/22944335/us-copyright-off... There is a spectrum of what AI generated means. At one end is simply photoshopped pictures. In many cases these were touched by AI, in that some algorithm decided on the specific pixels, but the image was largely directed by a person and is generally considered copyrightable. On the other end is the uncopyrightable case where a person just typed in a prompt and out comes art. Where the line is in between has yet to be decided. What if I spend hours tweaking an image generated initally by an AI. At what point does it become copyrightable? What if I spend hours creating a complex graph? That's similar to source code of a computer program, and the output of compilers is protected... From the other direction, at what point does something copyrightable manipulated by AI lose it's protected status?
- creer 3y ago
  That ruling doesn't say that AI driven art is not copyrightable
  - EgoIncarnate 3y ago
    I tried to explain that AI was ruled not copyrightable if a human wasn't meaningfully involved. Meaningfully involved being a bit blurry, with art generated from a prompt being the only explict thing so far ruled not copyrightable. Do you have a different take?
    - creer 3y ago
      My impression is that in all these rulings, the humans doing the filings go out of their way to claim that the author was the AI or machine or animal ("machine" thereafter), or the owner of the patent or copyright is the machine, or the plaintiff in a copyright court filing is the machine. With usually the human acting on behalf of the machine, or the machine transfering their copyright to the human, etc. They have an agenda which is NOT about generating art mechanically. It's more about "machine personhood light" - perhaps as a first step to full machine personhood. These people are not trying to "copyright AI-generated stuff", they are trying to make a legal person of the machine. And the copyright office or the courts are not ready to go there - certainly not for a BS copyright claim. In this 2022 ruling, the human further goes out of their way to provide a note saying they didn't have anything to do with it! - they just want to own the copyright on the "work of authorship of the machine". So anyway, I don't think any of these rulings preclude a human clicking five times in a generative AI tool (basically just logging in and saving one image they choose out of a dozen - perhaps even saying "I will claim the first image" before logging in) and then filing for copyright protection - as long they they claim human authorship. That is, none of these rulings seem to demand significant human intervention in the use of a tool, as long it is filed with the human as the author and copyright owner and financially impacted entity (for a court filing). And this would be consistent with the art world view that art is whatever the (self-described) artist says is art. That is, anyone can call themselves an artist, and then by definition if they say they created something and that this something is art then it's art. And they certainly don't need to do any of the manual work themselves - that's what assistants, contractors, dumb luck etc are there for. It's possible that there will be eventually some ruling that "more human intervention" is needed but I haven't seen that. There has been mention of "element of human creativity needed" but - as far as I can tell - not in a clean case where there wasn't some other agenda or shenanigans going on.

misja111 3y ago

Honestly many of those artists didn't reach fame because they were such brilliant singers or composers. They were also not bad, but their strong point was building an image, performing live and gathering a large fanbase. You could sample their music for all you want but it would never sell anywhere near the originals.

raven105x 3y ago

To be fair, this is no different than what's done by a human artist. Virtually every song composed today is inspired by or based on, in some manner or other, a previous work of art. This is exactly what machine learning does - a novel recombination of what has been previously observed (ie., "reusing the music" - building upon that which is) Whether this process is done by a human or not is irrelevant. ML, for the most part, does exactly what humans do. There are currently very few capabilities which ML performs that humans do not - namely, blatant plagiarism. People whining about their exact job being done by a machine is as old as time. Farmers, industrial revolution, the printing press (scribes whined), etc. Nothing new here. New jobs will be created to replace the lost ones. We've arguably been in a "BS economy" for quite some time now.

lbotos 3y ago
And to be clearer -- We have licensing mechanisms now in music (they aren't perfect) but when you remix/interpolate/sample the original artist gets their cut. The "risks" of Machine learning with large models is you won't know who you are even sampling, which exposes you to unknown risk.
- raven105x 3y ago
  This is not true. Google LLMs / multi-modals fully support attribution and as explainability goes up, so will attribution. And it will be much more fair / accurate than the droves of human artists who intentionally omit attributions. When a human artist composes a new song, they often have no idea where they got the compound basis for it either. If anything, human attribution is vastly inferior to ML as-is, nevermind of what's to come.
- mft_ 3y ago
  You're right, but I don't believe the previous poster was talking about sampling. What happens with machine learning models is more similar to someone learning to play music: everyone learning some form of musical expression will by default learn music which has been written previously, and this can't but help to influence them to a degree. Of course, there are systems to police this too, but high profile cases in recent years have shown how imperfect (or difficult?) this is in reality [0]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcCKlsTgjeM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcCKlsTgjeM
999900000999 3y ago
True, but nothing could ever be done so quickly and at such a large scale. If an Italian band wants to make something inspired by Pink Floyd it's going to take real effort. Not a 30 second click to generate. Eventually, and this is probably my biggest fear with AI, is the AI generated noise will crowd out real human innovation. I don't feel that AI generated art should have the same protections that human generated art has.
- gedy 3y ago
  > AI generated noise will crowd out real human innovation But that’s the key point, “real human innovation” will still be there because by definition that’s not going to be in some model weights based on previous works. If it’s truly innovative, AI won’t be able to duplicate that.
- dfxm12 3y ago
  Personally, I don't think the amount of effort is what's important. If Roger Waters, or "his people", sniff out something fishy, they're going to sue and they're going to get something for their troubles. I think what's important is that that legal option is uniquely available to him because he's already rich. If someone rips me off, it doesn't matter if they're working with a trained ear or AI. There's nothing I can do about it cause I can't afford a lawyer. There should be a better legal framework for us regular folk who don't have these resources, regardless of AI. A better framework probably includes what you're saying about AI generated things, but there's no reason for it to stop there.
yowzadave 3y ago
If we outsource the job of art-making to bots, what will remain for humans to do? Given that there are so many jobs that involve real drudgery, it’s odd to me that we’re trying so hard to automate the fun/rewarding/creative parts, while leaving the difficult, repetitive, mind-numbing parts to humans.
- raven105x 3y ago
  That's an economic problem to be solved just like the printing press and the industrial revolution. Like I said, we've been in a BS economy for a while now.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  I think this is probably because interesting jobs require handling information, which computers are good at, and boring ones require just shuffling stuff around in the physical world, which computers are still mediocre at. But, designing a robot that can do tedious tasks is an intellectual job, just a really hard one. If we automate intellectual jobs to the point where, like, any random team of 10 people with engineering degrees can make a really good robot, I guess we should see the tedious jobs taken too.
  - yowzadave 3y ago
    I used to work as an architect. As far as I am aware, AI/automation has so far only made inroads in the earliest "concept" phases--image-making, concept massing, conceptual space-planning, etc. That is only the first, shortest, and most creative part of designing a building. After the concept design has finished, there are longer and more expensive phases of design development and construction drawing that still require huge amounts of coordination between the various design/construction professionals & stakeholders. At this phase, the work is much more practical: adding detail to the drawings reveals that, say, the size of the required mechanical units exceed the area that originally been allocated to them in the concept phase, and the architect will need to work with the structural engineer/mechanical engineer/client/etc. to modify the solution so that the building still works. It's this latter phase of drawing/coordinating/redrawing that has so far been very resistant to automation. I would still call this part of an architect's job "intellectual work". My guess is that it hasn't been automated because it requires deep domain knowledge in multiple areas...knowledge which your typical AI software person doesn't have.
mcguire 3y ago
Two problems here: 1. If a human does that, they can be sued for doing so. If the reuse is egregious enough they will lose in court. 2. Industrial farming and industrial production have in fact been some of the more contentious economic projects. And the results have often been a race to the bottom in terms of quality.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
rurp 3y ago
> To be fair, this is no different than what's done by a human artist. Scale matters. It's like the difference between a cop sitting on the side of a road writing down the cars he sees on a pad of paper versus cameras plastered everywhere tracking every individual with ML software. You could say the computers are just doing the same thing as the human, but one is fairly benign while the other enables a totalitarian surveillance state.

EgoIncarnate 3y ago

Purely AI driven art is already defacto public domain in the US in that it is not copyrightable. See https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/21/22944335/us-copyright-office-reject-ai-generated-art-recent-entrance-to-paradise https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/21/22944335/us-copyright-off... There is a spectrum of what AI generated means. At one end is simply photoshopped pictures. In many cases these were touched by AI, in that some algorithm decided on the specific pixels, but the image was largely directed by a person and is generally considered copyrightable. On the other end is the uncopyrightable case where a person just typed in a prompt and out comes art. Where the line is in between has yet to be decided. What if I spend hours tweaking an image generated initally by an AI. At what point does it become copyrightable? What if I spend hours creating a complex graph? That's similar to source code of a computer program, and the output of compilers is protected... From the other direction, at what point does something copyrightable manipulated by AI lose it's protected status?

creer 3y ago
That ruling doesn't say that AI driven art is not copyrightable
- EgoIncarnate 3y ago
  I tried to explain that AI was ruled not copyrightable if a human wasn't meaningfully involved. Meaningfully involved being a bit blurry, with art generated from a prompt being the only explict thing so far ruled not copyrightable. Do you have a different take?
  - creer 3y ago
    My impression is that in all these rulings, the humans doing the filings go out of their way to claim that the author was the AI or machine or animal ("machine" thereafter), or the owner of the patent or copyright is the machine, or the plaintiff in a copyright court filing is the machine. With usually the human acting on behalf of the machine, or the machine transfering their copyright to the human, etc. They have an agenda which is NOT about generating art mechanically. It's more about "machine personhood light" - perhaps as a first step to full machine personhood. These people are not trying to "copyright AI-generated stuff", they are trying to make a legal person of the machine. And the copyright office or the courts are not ready to go there - certainly not for a BS copyright claim. In this 2022 ruling, the human further goes out of their way to provide a note saying they didn't have anything to do with it! - they just want to own the copyright on the "work of authorship of the machine". So anyway, I don't think any of these rulings preclude a human clicking five times in a generative AI tool (basically just logging in and saving one image they choose out of a dozen - perhaps even saying "I will claim the first image" before logging in) and then filing for copyright protection - as long they they claim human authorship. That is, none of these rulings seem to demand significant human intervention in the use of a tool, as long it is filed with the human as the author and copyright owner and financially impacted entity (for a court filing). And this would be consistent with the art world view that art is whatever the (self-described) artist says is art. That is, anyone can call themselves an artist, and then by definition if they say they created something and that this something is art then it's art. And they certainly don't need to do any of the manual work themselves - that's what assistants, contractors, dumb luck etc are there for. It's possible that there will be eventually some ruling that "more human intervention" is needed but I haven't seen that. There has been mention of "element of human creativity needed" but - as far as I can tell - not in a clean case where there wasn't some other agenda or shenanigans going on.