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I'm kind of surprised by this. I understand there's basically two views: Content creators say "Hey, this is my stuff, you don't have permission to use it, you n

I'm kind of surprised by this. I understand there's basically two views: Content creators say "Hey, this is my stuff, you don't have permission to use it, you need to pay me" and there's Silicon Valley: "I'm allowed to look at your images, feeding your images into my machine is the same thing". Legally, the first view seems probably correct, but from a "history of silicon valley" view, breaking the rules in order to gain a competitive advantage in the market has always been the better strategy. It'd be like if Uber launched by applying for NY taxi medallions. So this seems like a crazy risk:reward ratio here. Adobe is going to end up with a massive bill, a weak model and the hope that the guys who steal everything will face consequences. We've never seen Silicon Valley face consequences like that in the past so i don't see why you would bet it's going to happen this time.

artninja1988 3y ago
The whole differentiator between firefly, the adobe image generator, is that it's trained on their licensed stock image library and commercially safe. Besides that, even openai is licensing some proprietary high quality content from proprietary sources. Even if the open Internet is deemed fair use, there's still a lot of content locked away to license
dehrmann 3y ago
Adobe is an established player with real customers who don't want to deal with copyright issues. Telling them "this is safe to use because we paid for it" solves that issue. With Uber, no one's suing individual riders or drivers over an illegal taxi ride.
- HeatrayEnjoyer 3y ago
  This is such a tectonic shift for what the concept of media even means that any assumptions are on uncertain ground. The courts could find that it isn't possible to sign away these rights. There are many other rights that the law does not permit to be signed away for much more tame reasons than "enables further creations of 'your' work (or in the case of actors, literally 'you') not only without your actual involvement, but even long after your death". I would expect that it at least comes with a time limit. "Artists can sign a license to use these rights but only until their death + 10 years, after that the licensee can't use anything trained on their work. Artists also have an unrevokable right to cancel the license at any time with 90 day notice." might be one possible outcome.
  - alemanek 2y ago
    That seems like a crazy stretch to me. Not a lawyer but the rights courts typically don’t let you sign away are things like your freedom. Signing away your right to profit or control a video you created is super common already. Content licensing is really well established and already allows for licensing for specific use and different royalty structures based on usage. An example of this is streaming vs theater vs syndication. So, now there is a new venue to take into account and have the lawyers add a few pages to their contracts moving forward.
    - HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
      >courts typically don’t let you sign away are things like your freedom. This is exactly my point. An AI that can replace you, personally, is closer to signing away your identity or freedom than the rights to display a specific already completed work.
      - spaced-out 2y ago
        The court telling an artist they're not allowed to sell their videos to the highest bidder seems like a greater infringement on their freedom. What if no one wants to pay for this person's videos except for an AI company? You're basically telling them they're not allowed to profit off of their work.
      - bongodongobob 2y ago
        You can't just make up new definitions of freedom, that's not what freedom is.
- tylerchilds 2y ago
  i was at adobe summit a couple weeks back, the push was ai heavy— the strategy is 100% around no copyright issues. observationally they’re in an interesting position, balancing their artistic clients and their executive clients. a clean model is the easiest way to hedge their portfolio and reputation.
  - Ekaros 2y ago
    Artist don't want their work taken for free. And executive clients can know that court systems can be extremely fickle... It can go one way or an other depending jurisdiction and even one big enough going wrong can be expensive.
    - whywhywhywhy 2y ago
      The Artists it was trained on already signed rights away to Adobe when they put their work for sale on Adobe Stock so they’ll get what they’re given really.
      - Ekaros 2y ago
        That is fair. But I was talking in general, mostly about material that was not sold on Adobe Stock...
- SJC_Hacker 2y ago
  They would have to do the leg work to ensure that the seller is the legitimate rights holder.
- scotty79 2y ago
  > we paid for it *you paid for it.
surfingdino 2y ago
I am struggling with the Silicon Valley's latest business model that seems to be based on stealing all content in order to train AI to replace the very creators who created that content. If we then replace white-collar workers with AI and blue-collar workers with robots... and most of the population are jobless who's going to be able to pay for the content, the services, and the goods produced by AI and robots? Is it why the VC are in favour of universal basic income? But if we all go on UBI then what's the point to selling to us if that money could go to the VCs... but then... what do they do with the money if it ceases to circulate and incentivise people to work and trade?
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  > If we then replace white-collar workers with AI and blue-collar workers with robots... ...we would be living in post-scarcity and everything would be free. But that doesn't happen in the absence of AGI, what actually happens is that technology replaces some jobs and then people do the remaining jobs, which are now in higher demand because the things done by technology become cheaper and the money that had gone to pay for labor there now gets spent on something else, increasing demand for the other thing. Technology has been replacing jobs for hundreds of years and we still have low unemployment.
  - bluefirebrand 2y ago
    > we still have low unemployment We have more bullshit jobs than ever before in order to maintain that unemployment rate though
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      The bullshit jobs are allowed by automation, not required. If you had that many bullshit jobs in the old days, everybody would starve because there wouldn't be enough labor going to producing and distributing food. Many of the bullshit jobs are, in fact, destroying the cost/efficiency benefit of automation by imposing bureaucratic waste on things that would otherwise have become less expensive. If someone is doing a job which is useless, we could just give them a portion of someone else's productive work to do, have them each work less and reduce prices by the same amount and then average purchasing power would be the same but there would be less busy work and more recreation/creativity/entrepreneurship.
numpad0 2y ago
> "Hey, this is my stuff, you don't have permission to use it, you need to pay me" I see a lot of the first and second parts, but nowhere near as often the third part: The rights holders aren't seeking financial growth, just wants control in perpetuity. I suspect that's the part proving difficult to solve.
AnthonyMouse 2y ago
> Legally, the first view seems probably correct It's not obvious why that would be. Artists aren't going to like this technology because it competes with them, but it competes with them regardless of whether it was their work or someone else's in the training data. This leads to a visceral response where they want to call this "stealing" and hope that the creators of the technology can be sued into non-existence so their competition can be eliminated. But as Adobe is demonstrating, that isn't going to happen anyway. So the question isn't whether the technology will exist, it's if it will be locked up behind the walls of major corporations. The latter doesn't do artists any good but harms the public -- including artists who want to leverage the technology in their art. So why should the law protect Adobe's moat from the public?
- SilverBirch 2y ago
  The reason I think the first view seems more correct is that it's like downloading a song from spotify. Yes you would think streaming a song from spotify is technologically identitical as downloading it, but legally there is a distinction. If you found a way of ripping a copy of a song from spotify there would be a record company ready to sue you and a law they could use to do it. It's theoretically true that the models could be trained with someone else's training data, but there's a flaw in that argument. If you can train with other data without these legal issues, why don't they? And the answer is actually because they do assign some value to that training data, and there's not an infinite supply and it's actually quite difficult to get large sets of quality data. I think it's a pretty open question how this will resolve, it could be like stremaing music where companies like spotify are little more than puppets for the major record labels. It could end up like youtube where the model started with "We're going to steal stuff" and ended up "We're going to strongly enforce copyright now we're the encumbent" or some other third way. But I don't expect the "We're going to take everything with no regard to the existing legal framework" will sustain long term.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    > The reason I think the first view seems more correct is that it's like downloading a song from spotify. Yes you would think streaming a song from spotify is technologically identitical as downloading it, but legally there is a distinction. If you found a way of ripping a copy of a song from spotify there would be a record company ready to sue you and a law they could use to do it. But the law would probably be DMCA 1201 for circumventing the DRM rather than normal copyright for making the copy, which is much more ambiguous. Also, record companies like to sue people, that doesn't mean they're right and provides no indication of what the law should be. You could just as easily pick some other example, like whether you can rip a music CD or vinyl you bought to put it on your iPod, which the record companies might not like to be allowed, but that doesn't mean that it isn't. > It's theoretically true that the models could be trained with someone else's training data, but there's a flaw in that argument. If you can train with other data without these legal issues, why don't they? To which the answer is that they do. A lot of models are trained on arbitrary content from the internet. As to why Adobe in particular is doing this, think about it. It's because that interpretation benefits them rather than the artists, by creating a moat where companies who already have licenses to bulk stock images etc. are the only ones who can create a model, rather than having lots of competitors because anyone can create one and many of them are free and can be run locally. > I don't expect the "We're going to take everything with no regard to the existing legal framework" will sustain long term. Publishing companies don't like public libraries. So anybody can go there and borrow a copy of any book for free? That doesn't mean that libraries are bad or are or should be illegal. Also, laws are created through the political process, which is not always great. The outcome "individual artists somehow benefit from this" isn't even in the room there. The two most plausible outcomes are that "tech companies" win and anybody can train a model on anything they can get their hands on, and that "content conglomerates" win and then this technology gets locked up as a service from only megacorps and the artists still don't get anything meaningful, but now the world has another abusive cartel imposing arbitrary censorship and using control over this to cement control over adjacent markets etc. Of these, the second is clearly worse.

artninja1988 3y ago

The whole differentiator between firefly, the adobe image generator, is that it's trained on their licensed stock image library and commercially safe. Besides that, even openai is licensing some proprietary high quality content from proprietary sources. Even if the open Internet is deemed fair use, there's still a lot of content locked away to license

dehrmann 3y ago

Adobe is an established player with real customers who don't want to deal with copyright issues. Telling them "this is safe to use because we paid for it" solves that issue. With Uber, no one's suing individual riders or drivers over an illegal taxi ride.

HeatrayEnjoyer 3y ago
This is such a tectonic shift for what the concept of media even means that any assumptions are on uncertain ground. The courts could find that it isn't possible to sign away these rights. There are many other rights that the law does not permit to be signed away for much more tame reasons than "enables further creations of 'your' work (or in the case of actors, literally 'you') not only without your actual involvement, but even long after your death". I would expect that it at least comes with a time limit. "Artists can sign a license to use these rights but only until their death + 10 years, after that the licensee can't use anything trained on their work. Artists also have an unrevokable right to cancel the license at any time with 90 day notice." might be one possible outcome.
- alemanek 2y ago
  That seems like a crazy stretch to me. Not a lawyer but the rights courts typically don’t let you sign away are things like your freedom. Signing away your right to profit or control a video you created is super common already. Content licensing is really well established and already allows for licensing for specific use and different royalty structures based on usage. An example of this is streaming vs theater vs syndication. So, now there is a new venue to take into account and have the lawyers add a few pages to their contracts moving forward.
  - HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
    >courts typically don’t let you sign away are things like your freedom. This is exactly my point. An AI that can replace you, personally, is closer to signing away your identity or freedom than the rights to display a specific already completed work.
    - spaced-out 2y ago
      The court telling an artist they're not allowed to sell their videos to the highest bidder seems like a greater infringement on their freedom. What if no one wants to pay for this person's videos except for an AI company? You're basically telling them they're not allowed to profit off of their work.
    - bongodongobob 2y ago
      You can't just make up new definitions of freedom, that's not what freedom is.
tylerchilds 2y ago
i was at adobe summit a couple weeks back, the push was ai heavy— the strategy is 100% around no copyright issues. observationally they’re in an interesting position, balancing their artistic clients and their executive clients. a clean model is the easiest way to hedge their portfolio and reputation.
- Ekaros 2y ago
  Artist don't want their work taken for free. And executive clients can know that court systems can be extremely fickle... It can go one way or an other depending jurisdiction and even one big enough going wrong can be expensive.
  - whywhywhywhy 2y ago
    The Artists it was trained on already signed rights away to Adobe when they put their work for sale on Adobe Stock so they’ll get what they’re given really.
    - Ekaros 2y ago
      That is fair. But I was talking in general, mostly about material that was not sold on Adobe Stock...
SJC_Hacker 2y ago
They would have to do the leg work to ensure that the seller is the legitimate rights holder.
scotty79 2y ago
> we paid for it *you paid for it.

surfingdino 2y ago

I am struggling with the Silicon Valley's latest business model that seems to be based on stealing all content in order to train AI to replace the very creators who created that content. If we then replace white-collar workers with AI and blue-collar workers with robots... and most of the population are jobless who's going to be able to pay for the content, the services, and the goods produced by AI and robots? Is it why the VC are in favour of universal basic income? But if we all go on UBI then what's the point to selling to us if that money could go to the VCs... but then... what do they do with the money if it ceases to circulate and incentivise people to work and trade?

AnthonyMouse 2y ago
> If we then replace white-collar workers with AI and blue-collar workers with robots... ...we would be living in post-scarcity and everything would be free. But that doesn't happen in the absence of AGI, what actually happens is that technology replaces some jobs and then people do the remaining jobs, which are now in higher demand because the things done by technology become cheaper and the money that had gone to pay for labor there now gets spent on something else, increasing demand for the other thing. Technology has been replacing jobs for hundreds of years and we still have low unemployment.
- bluefirebrand 2y ago
  > we still have low unemployment We have more bullshit jobs than ever before in order to maintain that unemployment rate though
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    The bullshit jobs are allowed by automation, not required. If you had that many bullshit jobs in the old days, everybody would starve because there wouldn't be enough labor going to producing and distributing food. Many of the bullshit jobs are, in fact, destroying the cost/efficiency benefit of automation by imposing bureaucratic waste on things that would otherwise have become less expensive. If someone is doing a job which is useless, we could just give them a portion of someone else's productive work to do, have them each work less and reduce prices by the same amount and then average purchasing power would be the same but there would be less busy work and more recreation/creativity/entrepreneurship.

numpad0 2y ago

> "Hey, this is my stuff, you don't have permission to use it, you need to pay me" I see a lot of the first and second parts, but nowhere near as often the third part: The rights holders aren't seeking financial growth, just wants control in perpetuity. I suspect that's the part proving difficult to solve.

AnthonyMouse 2y ago

> Legally, the first view seems probably correct It's not obvious why that would be. Artists aren't going to like this technology because it competes with them, but it competes with them regardless of whether it was their work or someone else's in the training data. This leads to a visceral response where they want to call this "stealing" and hope that the creators of the technology can be sued into non-existence so their competition can be eliminated. But as Adobe is demonstrating, that isn't going to happen anyway. So the question isn't whether the technology will exist, it's if it will be locked up behind the walls of major corporations. The latter doesn't do artists any good but harms the public -- including artists who want to leverage the technology in their art. So why should the law protect Adobe's moat from the public?

SilverBirch 2y ago
The reason I think the first view seems more correct is that it's like downloading a song from spotify. Yes you would think streaming a song from spotify is technologically identitical as downloading it, but legally there is a distinction. If you found a way of ripping a copy of a song from spotify there would be a record company ready to sue you and a law they could use to do it. It's theoretically true that the models could be trained with someone else's training data, but there's a flaw in that argument. If you can train with other data without these legal issues, why don't they? And the answer is actually because they do assign some value to that training data, and there's not an infinite supply and it's actually quite difficult to get large sets of quality data. I think it's a pretty open question how this will resolve, it could be like stremaing music where companies like spotify are little more than puppets for the major record labels. It could end up like youtube where the model started with "We're going to steal stuff" and ended up "We're going to strongly enforce copyright now we're the encumbent" or some other third way. But I don't expect the "We're going to take everything with no regard to the existing legal framework" will sustain long term.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  > The reason I think the first view seems more correct is that it's like downloading a song from spotify. Yes you would think streaming a song from spotify is technologically identitical as downloading it, but legally there is a distinction. If you found a way of ripping a copy of a song from spotify there would be a record company ready to sue you and a law they could use to do it. But the law would probably be DMCA 1201 for circumventing the DRM rather than normal copyright for making the copy, which is much more ambiguous. Also, record companies like to sue people, that doesn't mean they're right and provides no indication of what the law should be. You could just as easily pick some other example, like whether you can rip a music CD or vinyl you bought to put it on your iPod, which the record companies might not like to be allowed, but that doesn't mean that it isn't. > It's theoretically true that the models could be trained with someone else's training data, but there's a flaw in that argument. If you can train with other data without these legal issues, why don't they? To which the answer is that they do. A lot of models are trained on arbitrary content from the internet. As to why Adobe in particular is doing this, think about it. It's because that interpretation benefits them rather than the artists, by creating a moat where companies who already have licenses to bulk stock images etc. are the only ones who can create a model, rather than having lots of competitors because anyone can create one and many of them are free and can be run locally. > I don't expect the "We're going to take everything with no regard to the existing legal framework" will sustain long term. Publishing companies don't like public libraries. So anybody can go there and borrow a copy of any book for free? That doesn't mean that libraries are bad or are or should be illegal. Also, laws are created through the political process, which is not always great. The outcome "individual artists somehow benefit from this" isn't even in the room there. The two most plausible outcomes are that "tech companies" win and anybody can train a model on anything they can get their hands on, and that "content conglomerates" win and then this technology gets locked up as a service from only megacorps and the artists still don't get anything meaningful, but now the world has another abusive cartel imposing arbitrary censorship and using control over this to cement control over adjacent markets etc. Of these, the second is clearly worse.