And yet so many of the debates around this new formation of media and creativity come down to the grey space between what is inspiration and what is plagiarism.
Even if everyone agreed with your point, and I think broadly they do, it doesn’t settle the debate.
But an artist cannot be inspired without content from other artists. I don’t agree to the word “copied” here either, because it is not copying when it creates something new.
I’m sure many artists would love having ultimate knowledge about all art relevant to their craft - it just hasn’t been feasible. Perhaps if art-generating AI could correctly cite their references it would be more acceptable for commercial use.
This argument was settled with electronic music in the 80s/90s. Samples and remixes taken directly from other bits of music to create a new piece aren’t plagiarism.
And you’re absolutely right about that. That’s not the same thing as LLMs being incapable of constituting anything written in a novel way, but that they will readily with very little prodding regurgitate complete works verbatim is definitely a problem. That’s not a remix. That’s publishing the same track and slapping your name on it. Doing it two bars at a time doesn’t make it better.
It’s so easy to get ChatGPT, for example, to regurgitate its training data that you could do it by accident (at least until someone published it last year). But, the critics cry, you’re using ChatGPT in an unintended way. And indeed, exploiting ChatGPT to reveal its training data is a lot like lobotomizing a patient or torture victim to get them to reveal where they learned something, but that really betrays that these models don’t actually think at all. They don’t actually contribute anything of their own; they simply have such a large volume of data to reorganize that it’s (by design) impossible to divine which source is being plagiarised at any given token.
Add to that the fact that every regulatory body confronted with the question of LLM creativity has so far decided that humans, and only humans, are capable of creativity, at least so far as our ordered societies will recognize. By legal definition, ChatGPT cannot transform (term of art) a work. Only a human can do that.
It doesn’t really matter how an LLM does what it does. You don’t need to open the black box to know that it’s a plagiarism machine, because plagiarism doesn’t depend on methods (or sophisticated mental gymnastics); it depends on content. It doesn’t matter whether you intended the work to be transformative: if you repeated the work verbatim, you plagiarized it. It’s already been demonstrated that an LLM, by definition, will repeat its training data a non-zero portion of the time. In small chunks that’s indistinguishable, arguably, from the way a real mind might handle language, but in large chunks it’s always plagiarism, because an LLM does not think and cannot “remix”. A DJ can make a mashup; an AI, at least as of today, cannot. The question isn’t whether the LLM spits out training data; the question is the extent to which we’re willing to accept some amount of plagiarism in exchange for the utility of the tool.
The samples were intentionally rearranged and mixed with other content in a new and creative way.
When sampling took off, the copyright situation was sorted out and the end result is that there are ways to license samples. Some samples are produced like stock footage hat could be pirchased inexpensively, which is why a lot of songs by different artists have the same samples included. Samples of specific songs have to be licensed, so a hip hop song with a riff from an older famous song had some kind of licensing or it wouldnt be played on the radio or streaming services. They might have paid one time, or paid an artist group for access to a bunch of songs, basically the same kind of thing as covers.
Samples and covers are not plagarism if they are licensed and credit their source. Both are creating someing new, but using and crediting existing works.
AI is doing the same sampling and copying, but trying to pretend that it is somehow not sampling and copying and the companies running AI don’t want to credit the sources or license the content. That is why AI is plagarism.
Please tell me how an AI model can distinguish between “inspiration” and plagiarism then. I admit I don’t know that much about them but I was under the impression that they just spit out something that it “thinks” is the best match for the prompt based on its training data and thus could not make this distinction in order to actively avoid plagiarism.
Please tell me how an AI model can distinguish between “inspiration” and plagiarism then.
[…] they just spit out something that it “thinks” is the best match for the prompt based on its training data and thus could not make this distinction in order to actively avoid plagiarism.
I’m not entirely sure what the argument is here. Artists don’t scour the internet for any image that looks like their own drawings to avoid plagiarism, and often use photos or the artwork of others as reference, but that doesn’t mean they’re plagiarizing.
Plagiarism is about passing off someone else’s work as your own, and image-generation models are trained with the intent to generalize - that is, being able to generate things it’s never seen before, not just copy, which is why we’re able to create an image of an astronaut riding a horse even though that’s something the model obviously would’ve never seen, and why we’re able to teach the models new concepts with methods like textual inversion or Dreambooth.
I get your point, but as soon as you ask them to draw something that has been drawn before, all the AI models I fiddled with tend to effectively plagiarize the hell out of their training data unless you jump through hoops to tell them not to
Not my point at all. Latent diffusion is a tool used by people in a creative manner. It’s a new medium. Every argument you’re making was made again photography a century ago, and against pre-mixed paints before that! You have no idea what you’re talking about and can;t even figure out where the argument is let alone that you lost it before you were born!
Or do you think no people are involved? That computers are just sitting there producing images with no involvement and no-one is ever looking at them, and that that is somehow a threat to you? What? How dumb are you?
Dude I am actively trying to take your arguments in good faith but the fact that you can hardly post an answer without name calling someone is making it real hard to believe you are being genuine about this
I repeatedly agreed that AI models can be used as a tool by creative people. All I’m saying is that it can’t be creative by itself.
When I say they’re “plagiarism machines”, I’m claiming that they’re currently mostly used to plagiarise by people without a creative bone in their body who directly use the output of an AI, mistaking it for artwork.
Ray parker’s Ghostbusters is inspired by huey lewis and the new’s i want a new drug. But actually it’s just blatant plagiarism. Is it okay because a human did it?
Not the same thing, dog. Being inspired by other things is different than plagiarism.
And yet so many of the debates around this new formation of media and creativity come down to the grey space between what is inspiration and what is plagiarism.
Even if everyone agreed with your point, and I think broadly they do, it doesn’t settle the debate.
The real problem is that ai will never ever be able to make art without using content copied from other artists which is absolutely plagiarism
But an artist cannot be inspired without content from other artists. I don’t agree to the word “copied” here either, because it is not copying when it creates something new.
Yeah, unless they lived in a cave with some pigments, everyone started by being inspired in some way.
But nobody’s starts by downloading and pulling elements of all living and dead artists works without reference or license, it is not the same.
I’m sure many artists would love having ultimate knowledge about all art relevant to their craft - it just hasn’t been feasible. Perhaps if art-generating AI could correctly cite their references it would be more acceptable for commercial use.
This argument was settled with electronic music in the 80s/90s. Samples and remixes taken directly from other bits of music to create a new piece aren’t plagiarism.
I’m not claiming that DJs plagiarise. I’m stating that AIs are plagiarism machines.
And you’re absolutely right about that. That’s not the same thing as LLMs being incapable of constituting anything written in a novel way, but that they will readily with very little prodding regurgitate complete works verbatim is definitely a problem. That’s not a remix. That’s publishing the same track and slapping your name on it. Doing it two bars at a time doesn’t make it better.
It’s so easy to get ChatGPT, for example, to regurgitate its training data that you could do it by accident (at least until someone published it last year). But, the critics cry, you’re using ChatGPT in an unintended way. And indeed, exploiting ChatGPT to reveal its training data is a lot like lobotomizing a patient or torture victim to get them to reveal where they learned something, but that really betrays that these models don’t actually think at all. They don’t actually contribute anything of their own; they simply have such a large volume of data to reorganize that it’s (by design) impossible to divine which source is being plagiarised at any given token.
Add to that the fact that every regulatory body confronted with the question of LLM creativity has so far decided that humans, and only humans, are capable of creativity, at least so far as our ordered societies will recognize. By legal definition, ChatGPT cannot transform (term of art) a work. Only a human can do that.
It doesn’t really matter how an LLM does what it does. You don’t need to open the black box to know that it’s a plagiarism machine, because plagiarism doesn’t depend on methods (or sophisticated mental gymnastics); it depends on content. It doesn’t matter whether you intended the work to be transformative: if you repeated the work verbatim, you plagiarized it. It’s already been demonstrated that an LLM, by definition, will repeat its training data a non-zero portion of the time. In small chunks that’s indistinguishable, arguably, from the way a real mind might handle language, but in large chunks it’s always plagiarism, because an LLM does not think and cannot “remix”. A DJ can make a mashup; an AI, at least as of today, cannot. The question isn’t whether the LLM spits out training data; the question is the extent to which we’re willing to accept some amount of plagiarism in exchange for the utility of the tool.
If AI’s are plagarism machines, then the mentioned situation must be example of DJs plagarising
Nope, since DJs partake in a creative process.
And you’re stating utter bollocks
The samples were intentionally rearranged and mixed with other content in a new and creative way.
When sampling took off, the copyright situation was sorted out and the end result is that there are ways to license samples. Some samples are produced like stock footage hat could be pirchased inexpensively, which is why a lot of songs by different artists have the same samples included. Samples of specific songs have to be licensed, so a hip hop song with a riff from an older famous song had some kind of licensing or it wouldnt be played on the radio or streaming services. They might have paid one time, or paid an artist group for access to a bunch of songs, basically the same kind of thing as covers.
Samples and covers are not plagarism if they are licensed and credit their source. Both are creating someing new, but using and crediting existing works.
AI is doing the same sampling and copying, but trying to pretend that it is somehow not sampling and copying and the companies running AI don’t want to credit the sources or license the content. That is why AI is plagarism.
This is true but AI is not plagiarism. Claiming it is shows you know absolutely nothing about how it works
Correction: they’re plagiarism machines.
I actually took courses in ML at uni, so… Yeah…
At the ML course at uni they said verbatime that they are plagiarism machines?
Did they not explain how neural networks start generalizing concepts? Or how abstractions emerge during the training?
I was refuting your point of me not knowing how these things work. They’re used to obfuscate plagiarism.
That’s not the same as being creative, tho.
So did I. Clearly you failed
Oh, please tell me how well my time in university was. I’m begging to get information about my academical life from some stranger on the internet. /s
Sure. You wasted your life. Hope that helps
Go back to 4chan, incel.
Please tell me how an AI model can distinguish between “inspiration” and plagiarism then. I admit I don’t know that much about them but I was under the impression that they just spit out something that it “thinks” is the best match for the prompt based on its training data and thus could not make this distinction in order to actively avoid plagiarism.
I’m not entirely sure what the argument is here. Artists don’t scour the internet for any image that looks like their own drawings to avoid plagiarism, and often use photos or the artwork of others as reference, but that doesn’t mean they’re plagiarizing.
Plagiarism is about passing off someone else’s work as your own, and image-generation models are trained with the intent to generalize - that is, being able to generate things it’s never seen before, not just copy, which is why we’re able to create an image of an astronaut riding a horse even though that’s something the model obviously would’ve never seen, and why we’re able to teach the models new concepts with methods like textual inversion or Dreambooth.
I get your point, but as soon as you ask them to draw something that has been drawn before, all the AI models I fiddled with tend to effectively plagiarize the hell out of their training data unless you jump through hoops to tell them not to
Go read about latent diffusion
In what way is latent diffusion creative?
Go read how it works, then think about how it is used by people, then realise you are an absolute titweasel, then come back and apologise
I know how it works. And you obviously can’t admit, that you can’t explain how latent diffusion is supposedly a creative process.
Not my point at all. Latent diffusion is a tool used by people in a creative manner. It’s a new medium. Every argument you’re making was made again photography a century ago, and against pre-mixed paints before that! You have no idea what you’re talking about and can;t even figure out where the argument is let alone that you lost it before you were born!
Or do you think no people are involved? That computers are just sitting there producing images with no involvement and no-one is ever looking at them, and that that is somehow a threat to you? What? How dumb are you?
Dude I am actively trying to take your arguments in good faith but the fact that you can hardly post an answer without name calling someone is making it real hard to believe you are being genuine about this
I repeatedly agreed that AI models can be used as a tool by creative people. All I’m saying is that it can’t be creative by itself.
When I say they’re “plagiarism machines”, I’m claiming that they’re currently mostly used to plagiarise by people without a creative bone in their body who directly use the output of an AI, mistaking it for artwork.
Ray parker’s Ghostbusters is inspired by huey lewis and the new’s i want a new drug. But actually it’s just blatant plagiarism. Is it okay because a human did it?
You talk like a copyright lawyer and have no idea about music.