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> Surveys consistently showed that consumers believed artists deserved payment when AI generated content in their style. It's interesting that "consumers" are

• Gigachad 7mo ago
  Trying to protect a particular style is just unworkable for obvious reasons. The only solution I can think of is requiring AI companies to license all of the content they have in their training set so artists get paid for the training rather than trying to work out which source material links to which outputs which is impossible.
  • spudlyo 7mo ago
    When I buy a book, I don't buy a license to read it, I don't sign an EULA that says I won't scan it, digitize it, or write a program to analyze the word frequencies it contains. Do you want buy a license to read a book, because this is how you get there.
    • Gigachad 7mo ago
      The old rules were built on based on old capabilities and and old reality which no longer exists.
      • squidbeak 7mo ago
        This is a deceptive line of dismissal. Sound principles needs to be figured out before imposing any kind of restriction on art - "things have changed" doesn't cut it.
        • Gigachad 7mo ago
          Figuring things out is exactly what needs to happen. I think it is valid to dismiss arguments of “this is how copyright has always worked” when those rules were written before AI completely changed the game.
    • squokko 7mo ago
      The law has always been able to recognize a distinction between Hunter S. Thompson reading Ernest Hemingway and learning from his style and a billion GPUs reading a billion books to be able to produce it on demand. It takes time for the law to catch up to the technology but it will.
    • add-sub-mul-div 7mo ago
      Perhaps it's that the transaction for you, an individual not explicitly profiting from the work, should be treated differently than a corporation using a work solely to profit from it.
    • aerhardt 7mo ago
      In Spain books include a copyright notice explicitly prohibiting reproduction and digitalization and alluding to article 270 of the Spanish criminal code.
      • franciscop 7mo ago
        The book can say anything it wants, whenever it's true and/or applicable in court later on is a very different matter. Spain's SGAE is a very powerful lobby but still needs to follow the law. Edit: haven't followed the law in a while, but you could definitely copy, digitalize and scan documents for yourself and your friends (copia privada).
        • aerhardt 7mo ago
          In Spain EULAs cannot infringe upon the law either.
    • tdb7893 7mo ago
      You don't sign an EULA saying you can't do those things because scanning then distributing is already prohibited by copyright. The way to start a license war is to keep the status quo of these companies being able to ingest and essentially reproduce human work for free. One of my big worries about AI is that it will accelerate companies locking everything down and hoarding their own data.
      • pastel8739 7mo ago
        I suspect it’s already has a dampening effect on individuals sharing. It leaves a bad taste in the mouth to know that anything you share intending to help fellow humans will immediately be ripped and profited from by companies that want to take your job and profit from it.
    • esafak 7mo ago
      It is not an individual buying the book but a corporation, with the purpose of being able to create imitations of it, and all other books.
    • throwawaysoxjje 7mo ago
      Of course you don’t, because it’s not the EULA that enforces the copyright. Copyright law is what enforces the EULA. It’s right there in the fact it’s a Licensing Agreement.
    • mitthrowaway2 7mo ago
      When I buy a patented product I don't sign an EULA that says I can't manufacture and sell a copy, but I still can't manufacture and sell a copy.
    • croes 7mo ago
      The problem isn’t the reading. The problem is the output based on somebody’s other work. There is a reason why we call it styles, because it’s a recognizable pattern someone came up with maybe after decades of work.
      • JAlexoid 7mo ago
        The "funny" thing is that we absolutely allow people to copy style... but somehow software isn't allowed to do that? You don't even need to have a legally acquired source material to produce work in a certain style. The new reality allows for original creators to actually track the chain, so we're in this situation.
        • croes 7mo ago
          If people would have the same mass output as software we wouldn’t allow that too. If one or two people take an apple from your tree it’s not a big deal, if a machine takes 10,000 it is.
    • saaaaaam 7mo ago
      Copyright quite literally protects the act of copying or reproducing a work protected by copyright. And you are technically entering into something akin to an end user licensing agreement when you buy a book, the only difference being that the EULA is incorporated into law on an international basis through reciprocal copyright treaties. So if scan a book you are making a copy. In some copyright jurisdictions this is allowed for individuals under a private copying exception - a copyright opt out, if you like - but the important thing is private use. In some jurisdictions there is also a fair use exception, which allows you to exploit the rights protected by copyright under certain circumstances, but fair use is quite specific and one big issue with fair use is that the rights you are exploiting cannot result in something that competes with the original work. Other acts restricted by copyright include distribution, adaptation, performance, communication and rental. So if you copy a book, digitize it, and write a program to analyze the word frequencies it contains you may, in some jurisdictions but not all, be allowed to do this. If you’re doing it locally on your own machine you are simply copying it. If you do it in the cloud you are copying it and communicating the copy. If you copy it, analyze it and train an AI model on it that could be considered fair use in certain jurisdictions. Whether the outputs are adaptations of the training data is a matter of debate in the copyright community. But importantly if you commercialise that model and the resulting outputs compete with the copyright protected material you used to train, your fair use argument may fail. So when you buy a book you are actually party to what is effectively a licence granted by the copyright holder, albeit it to the publisher. But as the end user of the book you are still restricted in what you can do with that copyright protected work, through a universal end user licence encoded in law.
    • squidbeak 7mo ago
      It's even worse than that. You then have to pay an additional fee to use its ideas as inspiration for your own book.
  • numpad0 7mo ago
    The cumulative license fees required to properly compensate all artists is so absurd that it will probably genuinely burn down the entirety of global economy if paid. The only solution I can think of is to burn down just the AI to be revisited later to be rebuilt as a tool that won't require absurd amount of training data, that also leave a lot more to its human operator beyond merely accepting literal categorical descriptions that are fundamentally tangential to artistic values of outputs. And I think same could happen to LLM. If it took all the fossil fuel on Earth just to barely able to drive a car to a car wash, there's more things wrong with the car than in the oil price.
    • Retric 7mo ago
      > is so absurd that it will probably genuinely burn down the entire global economy if paid. Where did you get that idea. Global economy is ~200T/year PPP. 0.1% of that split across every artist you want the training data from would be insanely difficult for the vast majority of them to turn down. Which makes sense as art isn’t that big a percentage of the global economy compared to say housing, food, medical care, infrastructure, military spending etc. Obviously the incentive to take without compensation is far more appealing, but that doesn’t mean it was impossible to make a reasonable offer.
      • bjterry 7mo ago
        For all the people represented in the training data to receive royalties would be an incredible wealth transfer to the Extremely Online. My forum posts, StackOverflow answers etc are also contributing to the model outputs. The training data, by volume, mostly belongs to blog authors, redditors, Wikipedia editors, to us!
        • abustamam 7mo ago
          Hey finally my reddit and hn habit can be lucrative!
        • nneonneo 7mo ago
          The people in that counting to infinity subreddit would get compensated a lot if this were fully automated - their posts were so overrepresented in the training set that many of their usernames became complete tokens (e.g. SolidGoldMagikarp).
• gedy 7mo ago
  Yes this is where I fear big corps leverage hate for AI into adding even more nonsense copyright rules like protecting "style" which has never been under copyright in the US at least. Not defending AI scraping and training! But this will be abused even if no AI is involved.
• SpicyLemonZest 7mo ago
  I don't think you can infer consumer positions on IP law from positions on who ought to get paid or how much they should be paid. Many of those same consumers, and indeed many of the artists, feel that fan art of your favorite characters should be legal and unrestricted so long as nobody's making too much money off of it.
  • spudlyo 7mo ago
    You're right. It's wrong to think that all of those people are busy writing to congress demanding new laws be enacted. The problem is, the vast majority of people (while possessing a vague sense of right and wrong) do not understand how IP law works, and what the tradeoffs vis-a-vis the public good are. I'm sure many among the supposed consumers in this survey think something akin to "there ought to be a law" -- a sentiment somtimes echoed by readers of this very forum.
• maplethorpe 7mo ago
  It's interesting you interpret the consumer's response as a desire for the expansion of IP laws. As an artist whose work exists in many of these training sets, I'm of a different opinion: IP laws can stay the same, but they should have purchased a license to use my art before including it in their training data. Since the didn't, they should go to jail. The same way I would have gone to jail if I built Sora in my basement and sold it to the public.
  • visarga 7mo ago
    I thought it was at most a monetary fine, do people go to jail for copyright infringement? But you seem to want to own all the air around your work, the ground beneath it too. Nothing can exist around it, so a creative person would do better to avert their eyes rather than loading useless ideas. Why should I install in my brain your "furniture" when I am not allowed to sit on it? In these cases I think authors provide a net negative to society by creating more works that further forbid others from creating in the same space. Here, for example, any comment is open to read and respond to. On ArXiv any paper can be downloaded, read and cited. Wikipedia contains text from many thousands of editors, building on each other. We like collaboration more than asserting our exclusivity rights. That is why these places provide better quality than work for direct profit or, God forbid, ad revenue, that is where the slop starts flowing.
  • protocolture 7mo ago
    >IP laws can stay the same, but they should have purchased a license to use my art before including it in their training data. But including your art in the training data is fair use (or otherwise exempt) by most standards, as no reproduction occurs. You are advocating for a change to IP law to make it more restrictive.
    • throwawaysoxjje 7mo ago
      Which case decided that?
    • bluefirebrand 7mo ago
      > But including your art in the training data is fair use It shouldn't be!
• abustamam 7mo ago
  Just out of curiosity, do you believe artists deserve to be compensated when their art is used to generate stuff in their style? I'm staunchly against expansion of IP laws. But I personally think that when a corporate machine gobbles up an artist's works so that people like me who can't draw can generate silly memes for a few bucks a month, the artist should be compensated. The company is profiting off of other people's work! That's not right. The mechanism by which compensation is calculated appears to be an unsolved problem currently though.
  • csallen 7mo ago
    > The company is profiting off of other people's work! That's not right. What's wrong with it? We live in an interconnected world. Every company or individual who profits off anything does so, in very large part, thanks to work left behind by others that they don't directly compensate each other for. Stated differently, if we look at the other side of the coin, it's one thing to create value, and another thing to capture value. If you are a business (and artists seeking profit are businesses), you create value then try to capture that value. Creating value and trying to capture (in the form of profit) is the entire name of the game. But no business captures 100% the value they create. If you make a product/artwork/service/whatever and release it to the public, lots of people may use it, view it, be inspired by it, learn from it, and ultimately profit off it in their own way without you necessarily being able to capture some part of it. And what's wrong with that? Do we really want the entire world to be endlessly full of cookie-licking rent seekers who demand profit every time anyone does anything? Because they failed to capture the value they created, and thus demand a piece of the pie from those who are better at capturing value? I like the way Thomas Jefferson put it: > If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea.
• JAlexoid 7mo ago
  > I'm fairly certain that "style" is not something protected by Copyright To a degree it is protected, but not by copyright. Design patents are a thing and companies have sued each other over them (Apple vs Samsung during the "smartphone wars" comes to mind)
• j16sdiz 7mo ago
  > It's interesting that "consumers" are generally for the expansion of IP laws. It's not. This total depends on how you ask it. Q: Do you think artists deserved payment? A: YES. Q: Will you pay for art? A: MAYBE. Q: Do you think people should go to jail not paying for art A: NO.
• AnthonyMouse 7mo ago
  > It's interesting that "consumers" are generally for the expansion of IP laws. Don't forget how polling works. Change the wording of the question and you get a different answer. Try asking them if they think Comcast or Sony should be able to sue individuals for posting memes that don't even contain any copyrighted material.
• onion2k 7mo ago
  It's interesting that "consumers" are generally for the expansion of IP laws. At at the moment, I'm fairly certain that "style" is not something protected by Copyright. I personally do not want this, and I'm sure there are likely many like me. Poorly thought out IP laws lead to chilling-effects, DRM, stupid and unnecessary litigation, and ultimately a loss of digital freedoms. Kapwing is specifically designed for artists to share IP with other people in an IP-friendly and financially profitable way. A 'consumer' on Kapwing is not the same as an ordinary person browsing for AI generated art, and the fact that people who make money from selling their IP on there are in favour of expanding IP law shouldn't be a surprise. All this really tells us is that Kapwing's artist community believe protecting their individual art style is more valuable to them than any money they'd earn from licensing it on a per-image basis to Kapwing's AI tool. I'd be willing to bet that if Kapwing changed the offer to a flat-fee-of-$50,000-a-year-plus-per-image-fee they'd find 99% of artists on there changed their minds. As with most things, people feel strongly about their rights all the way up until the price is right.
• fennecfoxy 7mo ago
  Yeah as a furry (exposed to commission scene a lot) the number of commissions available for "Disney" or "Pixar" or whatever style art even before the whole AI era really tells you that they're hypocrites.
  • NateEag 7mo ago
    As others have pointed out in this discussion, there's a big difference between some humans producing drawings in a given style and a machine producing millions of illustrations per day in that style. I have rarely been as disheartened as I am by the transformation of Studio Ghibli's beautiful art style, painstakingly developed over decades, into a heap of slop-trash that actively erases the human connections so artfully depicted in Hayao Miyazaki's work. All that sorrow and it's not even my style. So, no - a human who's willing to draw an illustration in a particular style, perhaps one they live and admire, is not necessarily a hypocrite for seeing genAI's ability to produce billions of images in that style.
    • fennecfoxy 7mo ago
      I don't think mass production cheapens the handcrafted experience. Just because a factory can pump out cheap shoes doesn't mean it's no longer enjoyable to buy, own and experience a handmade pair of leather shoes; it's only that the reason for buying them becomes different (necessity vs. luxury). The Ghibli thing is a great example; who's still actually doing that? It was a passing fad. But let's not pretend that that passing fad has changed the fact that Ghibli's films are absolute masterpieces that will continue being enjoyed by generations to come. Because they are and still are.