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> it's unfair for artists to have their works sucked up I never thought it was unfair to artists for others to look at their work and imitate it. That seems t

> it's unfair for artists to have their works sucked up I never thought it was unfair to artists for others to look at their work and imitate it. That seems to me to be what artists have been doing since the second caveman looked at a hand painting on a cave wall and thought, ‘huh, that’s pretty neat! I’d like to try my hand at that!’

BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
Right the difference is that it’s a large company looking at it then copying it and reselling it without credit, which basically everyone would understand as bad without the indirection of a model. Edit: the key words here are “company” and “reselling”
- eadmund 2y ago
  But it’s not copying and reselling — it’s imitation. Copying is controlled by copyrights. And imitation isn’t controlled by anything. As for a company: a company is just a group of people acting together.
  - BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
    #1, it’s extremely easy to coerce direct copies out of models that artists could be pursued for infringement if they drew, but companies reselling said copyrighted artwork face no penalty #2, yes, it’s a group of people who came together to build an algorithm that learns to extract features learned from images made by other people in order to generate images somewhere between these images in a high dimensional space. They sell these images and give no credit or cash to the images being “interpolated” between. Notice this doesn’t extend to open source, it’s the commercial aspect that represents theft. The reality is that laws are meant to be interpreted not by their letter but their spirit. The AI can’t exist without the hard work its trained on, and the outputs often resemble the inputs in a manner that approaches copying, so selling those outputs without compensation for the artists in the training set should be illegal. It won’t be, but it should.
    - RandallBrown 2y ago
      I guess I don't understand what you mean when you say companies reselling said copyrighted artwork face no penalty. Why wouldn't they? If I was to make a copy of a Studio Ghibli movie and sell it, I would absolutely face a penalty if I was caught.
      - BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
        A common joke is to type in a description of some corporate IP and have ChatGPT generate it without ever saying it directly. Plenty of people have paid a subscription to do that, generate corporate IP that an artist could be sued over, but I don’t believe OpenAI has faced any legal issues if I’m correct, just as an example.
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      > it’s extremely easy to coerce direct copies out of models that artists could be pursued for infringement if they drew, but companies reselling said copyrighted artwork face no penalty The purpose of the model isn't to make exact reproductions. It's like saying you can use the internet for copyright infringement. You can, but it's the user who chooses the use, so is that on AT&T and Microsoft or is it on the users doing the infringement? > They sell these images and give no credit or cash to the images being “interpolated” between. A big part of the problem is that machines aren't qualified to be judges. Suppose the image you request is Gollum but instead of the One Ring he wants PewDiePie. Obviously this is using a character from the LOTR films by Warner Bros. If you're PewDiePie and you want this image to use in an ad for your channel, you might be in trouble. But Warner Bros. got into a scandal for paying YouTubers to promote Promote Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor without disclosing the payments. If you're creating the image to criticize the company's behavior, it's likely fair use. The service has no way to tell why you want the image, so what is it supposed to do? A law that requires them to deny you in the second case is restricting a right of the public. But it's the same image. Meanwhile in the first case you don't really need the company generating the image to do anything because Warner Bros. could then go after PewDiePie for using the character in commercial advertising without permission. > Notice this doesn’t extend to open source, it’s the commercial aspect that represents theft. It's also not really clear how this works. For example, Stable Diffusion is published. You can run it locally. If you buy a GPU from Nvidia or AMD in order to do that, is that now commercial use? Is the GPU manufacturer in trouble? What if you pay a cloud provider like AWS to use one of their GPUs to do it? You can also pay for the cloud service from Stability AI, the makers of Stable Diffusion. Is it different in that case than the others? How?
  - __loam 2y ago
    You need to copy the work to use it for AI training.
    - BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
      I’d argue that would be fine for non-commercial use; it’s once the AI outputs are sold that the problem arises.
  - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
    Imitation has been controlled by patent rights, where an object did not need to be an exact copy but merely use the essence of an idea to count as a violation. Of course so far this protection has only been applied to inventions, because they took a lot of time to develop but once done could be trivially copied at a glance. Now, in this new landscape, we may find it appropriate to apply a similar regime to art. Or maybe we won't. It's a choice for society to make, to balance how much we need to protect the incentives to create something new vs protect the ease of copying.
  - otabdeveloper4 2y ago
    Try "imitating" some Mario Brothers in a commercial context and see how that goes. Good luck.
SirMaster 2y ago
You don't see a massive difference in the shear number of images that the AI can look at and the speed at which it can imitate it as a fundamental difference between AI and a human copying works or styles? For a human it took a lot of practice and a lot of time and effort. But now it takes practically no time or effort at all.
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  Well yeah, but copyright infringement isn't a function of how quickly you can view and create works. Copyright is meant to secure distribution of works you create. It's not a tool to stop people from creating art because it looks like your art. That has been a thing for centuries, we even categorize art by it's style. Imagine anime was had to adhere to a copyright interpretation of "it's my style!".
  - SirMaster 2y ago
    Current copyright yes. But do you not for a second think that the current way the laws and rules are set are because of how hard and time consuming it was to replicate work? Just because "that's how it's always been" doesn't mean it's acceptable to keep it that way when the means to perform the action have so drastically changed.
    - fc417fc802 2y ago
      I don't think the rules ever existed for the benefit of the individual, but rather the collective. If skilled artists couldn't sustain themselves from their work they wouldn't exist. Historically there was no alternative. When a machine can do something there is not generally a (collectively beneficial) reason to protect the individual that competes with it. Backhoes weren't regulated in order to protect ditch diggers.
- eadmund 2y ago
  It took a truly colossal amount of human time and effort to build AI systems. It takes significant amount of energy to run those AI systems. I don’t see any meaningful difference at all between the system of a human, a computer and a corpus of images producing new images, and the system of a human, a paintbrush, an easel, a canvas and a corpus of images producing new images. Emphasis on the new — copying is still copying, and still controlled by copyrights.
mitthrowaway2 2y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42720749 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42720749
ZoomZoomZoom 2y ago
False, copyism as a career has been always looked down at in the arts community. Learning and reinterpreting is a qualitatively different process.

BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago

Right the difference is that it’s a large company looking at it then copying it and reselling it without credit, which basically everyone would understand as bad without the indirection of a model. Edit: the key words here are “company” and “reselling”

eadmund 2y ago
But it’s not copying and reselling — it’s imitation. Copying is controlled by copyrights. And imitation isn’t controlled by anything. As for a company: a company is just a group of people acting together.
- BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
  #1, it’s extremely easy to coerce direct copies out of models that artists could be pursued for infringement if they drew, but companies reselling said copyrighted artwork face no penalty #2, yes, it’s a group of people who came together to build an algorithm that learns to extract features learned from images made by other people in order to generate images somewhere between these images in a high dimensional space. They sell these images and give no credit or cash to the images being “interpolated” between. Notice this doesn’t extend to open source, it’s the commercial aspect that represents theft. The reality is that laws are meant to be interpreted not by their letter but their spirit. The AI can’t exist without the hard work its trained on, and the outputs often resemble the inputs in a manner that approaches copying, so selling those outputs without compensation for the artists in the training set should be illegal. It won’t be, but it should.
  - RandallBrown 2y ago
    I guess I don't understand what you mean when you say companies reselling said copyrighted artwork face no penalty. Why wouldn't they? If I was to make a copy of a Studio Ghibli movie and sell it, I would absolutely face a penalty if I was caught.
    - BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
      A common joke is to type in a description of some corporate IP and have ChatGPT generate it without ever saying it directly. Plenty of people have paid a subscription to do that, generate corporate IP that an artist could be sued over, but I don’t believe OpenAI has faced any legal issues if I’m correct, just as an example.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    > it’s extremely easy to coerce direct copies out of models that artists could be pursued for infringement if they drew, but companies reselling said copyrighted artwork face no penalty The purpose of the model isn't to make exact reproductions. It's like saying you can use the internet for copyright infringement. You can, but it's the user who chooses the use, so is that on AT&T and Microsoft or is it on the users doing the infringement? > They sell these images and give no credit or cash to the images being “interpolated” between. A big part of the problem is that machines aren't qualified to be judges. Suppose the image you request is Gollum but instead of the One Ring he wants PewDiePie. Obviously this is using a character from the LOTR films by Warner Bros. If you're PewDiePie and you want this image to use in an ad for your channel, you might be in trouble. But Warner Bros. got into a scandal for paying YouTubers to promote Promote Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor without disclosing the payments. If you're creating the image to criticize the company's behavior, it's likely fair use. The service has no way to tell why you want the image, so what is it supposed to do? A law that requires them to deny you in the second case is restricting a right of the public. But it's the same image. Meanwhile in the first case you don't really need the company generating the image to do anything because Warner Bros. could then go after PewDiePie for using the character in commercial advertising without permission. > Notice this doesn’t extend to open source, it’s the commercial aspect that represents theft. It's also not really clear how this works. For example, Stable Diffusion is published. You can run it locally. If you buy a GPU from Nvidia or AMD in order to do that, is that now commercial use? Is the GPU manufacturer in trouble? What if you pay a cloud provider like AWS to use one of their GPUs to do it? You can also pay for the cloud service from Stability AI, the makers of Stable Diffusion. Is it different in that case than the others? How?
- __loam 2y ago
  You need to copy the work to use it for AI training.
  - BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
    I’d argue that would be fine for non-commercial use; it’s once the AI outputs are sold that the problem arises.
- mitthrowaway2 2y ago
  Imitation has been controlled by patent rights, where an object did not need to be an exact copy but merely use the essence of an idea to count as a violation. Of course so far this protection has only been applied to inventions, because they took a lot of time to develop but once done could be trivially copied at a glance. Now, in this new landscape, we may find it appropriate to apply a similar regime to art. Or maybe we won't. It's a choice for society to make, to balance how much we need to protect the incentives to create something new vs protect the ease of copying.
- otabdeveloper4 2y ago
  Try "imitating" some Mario Brothers in a commercial context and see how that goes. Good luck.

SirMaster 2y ago

You don't see a massive difference in the shear number of images that the AI can look at and the speed at which it can imitate it as a fundamental difference between AI and a human copying works or styles? For a human it took a lot of practice and a lot of time and effort. But now it takes practically no time or effort at all.

Workaccount2 2y ago
Well yeah, but copyright infringement isn't a function of how quickly you can view and create works. Copyright is meant to secure distribution of works you create. It's not a tool to stop people from creating art because it looks like your art. That has been a thing for centuries, we even categorize art by it's style. Imagine anime was had to adhere to a copyright interpretation of "it's my style!".
- SirMaster 2y ago
  Current copyright yes. But do you not for a second think that the current way the laws and rules are set are because of how hard and time consuming it was to replicate work? Just because "that's how it's always been" doesn't mean it's acceptable to keep it that way when the means to perform the action have so drastically changed.
  - fc417fc802 2y ago
    I don't think the rules ever existed for the benefit of the individual, but rather the collective. If skilled artists couldn't sustain themselves from their work they wouldn't exist. Historically there was no alternative. When a machine can do something there is not generally a (collectively beneficial) reason to protect the individual that competes with it. Backhoes weren't regulated in order to protect ditch diggers.
eadmund 2y ago
It took a truly colossal amount of human time and effort to build AI systems. It takes significant amount of energy to run those AI systems. I don’t see any meaningful difference at all between the system of a human, a computer and a corpus of images producing new images, and the system of a human, a paintbrush, an easel, a canvas and a corpus of images producing new images. Emphasis on the new — copying is still copying, and still controlled by copyrights.

mitthrowaway2 2y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42720749 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42720749

ZoomZoomZoom 2y ago

False, copyism as a career has been always looked down at in the arts community. Learning and reinterpreting is a qualitatively different process.