Good for this guy. Fuck AI and the companies responsible.
Capitalism is the problem. Greed is the reason. I like that shitty idiots are fighting other shitty idiots because I think it’s funny… but neither parties are good guys
Capitalism is precisely the problem, because if the end product were never sold nor used in any commercial capacity, the case for “fair use” would be almost impossible to challenge. They’re betting on judges siding with them in extending a very specific interpretation of fair use that has been successfully applied to digital copying of content for archival and distribution as in e.g. Google Books or the Internet Archive, which is also not air-tight, just precedent.
Even fair uses of media may not respect the dignity of the creators of works used to create “media synthesizers”. In other words, even if a computer science grad student does a bunch of scraping for their machine learning dissertation, unless they ask and get permission from the creators, their research isn’t upholding the principle of data dignity, which current law doesn’t address at all, but is obviously the real issue upsetting people about “Generative AI”.
I’m not sure I follow that first sentence.
Fair use is an affirmative, positive defense to liability under the Copyright Act. It only exists as a concept because there is a marketplace for creative work.
That marketplace, the framers of the Constitution would suggest, only exists because the Constitution allows Congress to grant exclusive licenses to creative Works (i.e., copyright protection). In other words, they viewed creative work as an driven by economics; by securing an exclusive license to the artist, she can make money and create more art.
I am of the belief that even if there was no marketplace for creative work (no exclusive licensing / no copyright laws), people are still inherently creative and will still make creative things. I think the economic model of creativity enshrined in the Constitution is what gives us stuff like one decent movie followed by four shitty sequels. We have tens of thousands of years of original artworks, creative stories, songs, sculptures, etc. The only thing the copyright clause does, in my view, is concentrate the profit from creativity into the hands of a few successful artists or, more likely, a few large employers, such as George Lucas or Walt Disney, Viacom, Comcast, etc.
I think this unjust enrichment claim comes as close to anything as data dignity that I’ve heard of. It’s not a lawsuit to enforce a positive legal right, but rather an plea to the court’s equity to correct a manifest injustice and restore the parties to a more just position.
That the AI companies have been enriched at the detriment of the artists seems obvious. What makes it unjust is that the defendants had no permission and did not pay the artist.
Agreed.
Have you or a friend used YouTube or reddit in the past 10 years? Then you’re entitled to compensation for the training of AI.
Ok, dumb question time. I’m assuming no one has any significant issues, legal or otherwise, with a person studying all Van Gogh paintings, learning how to reproduce them, and using that knowledge to create new, derivative works and even selling them.
But when this is done with software, it seems wrong. I can’t quite articulate why though. Is it because it takes much less effort? Anyone can press a button and do something that would presumably take the person from the example above years or decades to do? What if the person was somehow super talented and could do it in a week or a day?
If you’re looking for a universally-applicable moral framework, join the thousands of years of philosophers striving for the same.
If you’re just looking for an explanation that allows you to put one foot in front of the other…
Laws exist for us to spell out the kind of society we’d like to live in. Generally, we prefer that individuals be able to participate in cultural conversations and offer their own viewpoint. And generally, we prefer that groups of people don’t accumulate massive amounts of power over other groups of people.
Dedicating your life to copying another artist’s style is participating in a cultural conversation, and you won’t be able to help yourself from infusing your own lived experience into your work of copying the artist. If only by the details that you focus on getting exactly right, the slight mistakes that repeat themselves or morph over the course of your career, the pieces you prioritize replicating over and over again. It says something about who you are, and that’s worth appreciating.
Now, if you’re trying to pass those off as originals and not your own tributes, then you’re deceiving people and that’s a problem because you’re damaging the cultural conversation by lying about the elements you’re putting into it. Even so, sometimes that’s an interesting artistic enterprise in itself. Such as when artists pretend to be someone else. Warhol was a fan of this. His whole career revolved around messing with concepts of authenticity in art.
As for power, you don’t gain that much leverage over another artist by simply copying their work. And if you riff on it to upstage them, you’re just inviting them to do the same to you in turn.
But if you can do that mechanically, quickly, so that any creative twist they put out there to undermine your attempts to upstage them, you have an instant response at little cost to yourself, now you’re in a position of great power. The more the original artist produces, the stronger your advantage over them becomes. The more they try, the harder it is for them to win.
We don’t generally like when someone has accumulated tons of power, especially when they subsequently use that power to prevent others from being able to compete.
Edit: I’d also caution against trying to make an objective test for whether a particular act of copying is “okay”. This invites two things:
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Artists can’t help but question what’s acceptable and play around with it. They will deliberately transgress in order to make a point, and you’ll be forced to admit that your objective test is worthless.
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Tech companies are relentlessly horny for this kind of objective legal framework, because they want to be able to algorithmically approach the line and fill its border to fractal levels of granularity without technically crossing the line. RealPage, DoorDash, Uber, Amazon, OpenAI all want “illegal” to be as precisely and quantitatively defined as possible, so that they can optimize for “barely legal”.
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They are copying your intellectual property and digitizing its knowledge. It’s a bit different as it’s PERMANENT. With humans knowledge can be lost, forgotten, or ignored. In these LLMs that’s not an option. Also the skill factor is a big issue imo. It’s very easy to setup an LLM to make AI imagery nowadays.
Your first sentence is truth
Your first sentence is false.
They are copying. These LLM are a product of their input, and solely a product of their input. It’s why they’ll often directly output their training data. Using more data to train reduces this effect, that’s why all these companies are stealing and getting aggressive in stopping others stealing their data.
Proof? I am fairly certain I am correct but I will gladly admit fault. This whole LLM thing is indeed new to me also
Artists who rips off other great works are still developing their talent and skills. They can then go on to use to make original works. The machine will never produce anything original. It is only capable of mixing together things it has seen in its training set.
There is a very real danger that of ai eviscerating the ability for artists to make a living, making it where very few people will have the financial ability to practice their craft day in and day out, resulting in a dearth of good original art.
The machine will never produce anything original. It is only capable of mixing together things it has seen in its training set.
This is patently false and shows you don’t know a single thing about how ai works.
There’s a simple argument: when a human studies Van Gogh and develops their own style based on it, it’s only a single person with very limited output (they can only paint so much in a single day).
With AI you can train a model on Van Gogh and similar paintings, and infinitely replicate this knowledge. The output is almost unlimited.
This means that the skills of every single human artist are suddenly worth less, and the possessions of the rich are suddenly worth more. Wealth concentration is poison for a society, especially when we are still reliant on jobs for survival.
AI is problematic as long as it shifts power and wealth away from workers.
Just as an interesting “what if” scenario - a human making the effort to stylize Van Gogh is okay, and the problem with the AI model is that it can spit out endless results from endless sources.
What if I made a robot and put the Van Gogh painting AI in it, never releasing in elsewhere. The robot can visualize countless iterations of the piece it wants to make but its only way share it is to actually paint it - much in the same way a human must do the same process.
Does this scenario devalue human effort? Is it an acceptable use of AI? If so does that mean that the underlying issue with AI isn’t that it exists in the first place but that its distribution is what makes it devalue humanity?
*This isn’t a “gotcha”, I just want a little discussion!
It’s an interesting question! From my point of view, “devaluing human effort” (from an artistic perspective) doesn’t really matter - humans will still be creating new and interesting art. I’m solely concerned about the shift in economic power/leverage, as this is what materially affects artists.
This means that if your robot creates paintings with an output rate comparable to a human artist, I don’t really see anything wrong with it. The issue arises once you’re surpassing the limits of the individual, as this is where the power starts to shift.
As an aside, I’m still incredibly fascinated by the capabilities and development of current AI systems. We’ve created almost universal approximators that exhibit complex behavior which was pretty much unthinkable 15-20 years ago (in the sense that it was expected to take much longer to achieve current results). Sadly, like any other invention, this incredible technology is being abused by capitalists and populists for profit and gain at the expense of everyone else.
Easier than that:
Google has been doing this for years for their search engine and no one said a thing. Why do you care now that it’s a different program scanning your media?
Generative AI is incapable of contributing new material, because Generative AI does not sense the world through a unique perspective. So the comparison to creators that incorporate prior artists work is a false comparison. Artists are allowed to incorporate other artists work in the same way that scientists cite other’s work without it being plagiarism.
In art, in science, we stand on the shoulders of giants. AI models do not stand on the shoulders of giants. AI models just replicate the giants. Society has been fooled to think otherwise.
Generative AI is a tool. It is neither a creator nor an artist, any more than paintbrushes or cameras are. The problem arises not with the tool itself but with how it is used. The creativity must come from the user, just like the way Procreate or GIMP or even photography works.
The skill factor is certainly lower than other forms of artistic expression, but that is true of photography vs painting as well.
I am not trying to say all uses of generative AI are art, anymore than every photograph is art. But that doesn’t mean it cannot be a tool to create art, part of the workflow as utilized by someone with a vision willing to take the time to get the end product they want.
Generative AI doesn’t stand on the shoulders of giants, but neither does a camera.
So try doing Disney style animation and similar character and similar style story line. And start profiting from it. Lets see if the “Disney” the “corporation” will remain silent or sue you to oblivion.
Damn you musta hated Don Bluth
I don’t hate him. Its just that when corporation steals individual idea or data its for research and stuff. If its other way around, us as individual will have to face lawsuit.
So i hope they sue nvidia and other big corporations who are harvesting our data for AI.
Thats the thing, nothings being stolen. Beauty and the Beast didnt up and disappear because Bluth and Fox Studios made Anastasia. Theres style similarities but it is undeniably its own work. Dont even think about the style sharing going on in the thousands of Anime out there.
If someone studies Van Gogh and reproduces images, they’re still not making Van Gogh - they’re making their art inspired by Van Gogh. It still has their quirks and qualms and history behind the brush making it unique. If a computer studies Van Gogh and reproduces those images, it’s reproducing Van Gogh. It has no quirks or qualms or history. It’s just making Van Gogh as if Van Gogh was making Van Gogh.
tl;dr: copyright law has always been nonsense designed to protect corporations and fuck over artists+consumers
but now corpo daddy and corpo mommy are fighting, and we need to take sides.
and it’s revealing that copyright law never existed to protect artists, and will continue to not do that, but MUCH more obviously, and all the cucks who whined about free culture violating laws are reaping what they fucking sowed.
No, AI does not create new
derivativetransformative works. Copyright law is very clear that the thing that is copyrightable is that modicum of creativity, reduced to a tangible medium of expression, that society must encourage and protect.Derivative works need even more creativity to be protectable than original works because it has to be so newly creative as to be a different work, transformative, even though the original may still be very recognizable.
An AI system does not have creativity. At best, it could mimic someone who is creative, but it could never have creativity on its own. It is generative, not creative.
It’s like that monkey that took a nice picture, but the picture was not copyrightable because the person seeking to enforce the copyright didn’t create the work. It’s creativity that the Constitution seeks to encourage by the copyright clause.
You can make new derivative work without being creative. Just look at all the YouTubers copying each other.
Many of those those reaction videos on YouTube are actually infringing on copyright. Just that the videos they’re reacting to aren’t made by people with deep enough pockets to sue them so they get away with it.
The AI doesn’t need creativity because the “A” in “AI” stands for “artificial,” not “autonomous.” It’s a tool. Someone is controlling the output by setting the input parameters.
it has to be so newly creative as to be a different work, even though the original may still be recognizable
Your definition implies Andy Warhol wasn’t creative.
I think they are considered derivative, and are not protected. Not that he wasn’t creative, just that his work wasn’t so creative to be independently copyrightable. I’m a little rusty on my IP law.
Well said. “Art launderers” is the best ai descriptor I’ve come across so far.
As much as I hate google, they’re not wrong
Google is long doing the same thing.
AI aint going away, it’s already commonly running and on local machines, and being used covertly.
I’m still waiting for somebody to give me a symmetry breaker between AI training on existing media and humans creating media from what they’ve seen, such that one is theft and the other is not.
I agree with you in the though that humans have been doing this stuff for the longest. We’re sophisticated algorithms that look at the work of other people, attempt to discern what has merit, and if the stars align we might write the screenplay to the Notebook, publish Twilight, or doodle Deadpool on a napkin.
But the theft in my opinion is that a minority control this nascent tech, based on existing capital, and most of that ‘venture capital bro’ money funding this was made off of platforms that became wildly profitable for them from humans that were doing this. But now this is going to displace them and create no more need for them.
There’ll come a day when Youtube and Tik Tok design their own ‘content creators’ and at that point they’ll start cutting ad revenue to the people that put them in this position in the first place. Betrayal. It’s like Spez calling mods entitled crybabies, once this is in full gear everyone who helped get it rolling will be cast aside like chaff and a couple dozen people will get billions of dollars out of it
But the theft in my opinion is that a minority control this nascent tech, based on existing capital, and most of that ‘venture capital bro’ money funding this was made off of platforms that became wildly profitable for them from humans that were doing this. But now this is going to displace them and create no more need for them.
So the problem is capitalism, not AI.
The asymmetry is legal I’d say. If I tried to scrap that much data, especially if it included anything about a rich person, I’d be arrested and probably never see daylight again.
I used to be a very popular and successful collage artist (I’m now an illustrator, I like painting more), and my work has been copied by AI. However, I don’t really care. In fact, I was musing once the idea of licensing everything under the CC-BY license. I don’t mind if AI copies my stuff, because if eventually this democratizes art (as it has already), all the better. Yes, these AI belong to corporations, but if they’re easy to access, or free to use, all the better. I want people to extend what I did, and remix it. I don’t want to be remembered as me, as a singular artist, that somehow I emerged from the void. Because I didn’t. EVERY artist is built on top of their predecessors, and all art is a remix. That’s the truth that other artists don’t wanna hear because it’s all about their ego.
The issue isn’t ego from any artists I’ve talked to. The issue is that most enjoy DOING their art for a living, and AI threatening their ability to make a living doing the thing they love, by actively taking their work and emulating it.
Add to that, that no one seems to believe AI does a better job than a trained artist, and it also threatens to lower the quality bar at the top end.
Personally I think that if AI is free to use and any work done by AI cannot be covered by copyright (due to being trained on people’s art against their will), then I don’t have an issue with it.
If society benefits from the democratization of art/books/etc then it’s not a loss, it’s a win for everyone. There were many jobs in the past that were lost because technology made them obsolete. Being a commissioned artist is one of these professions. However, there IS still going to be a SMALL niche for human-made original artworks (not made on ipads). But that’d be a niche. And no one stopping anyone from doing art, be it a profession or not. That’s the beauty of art. If you were to be a plumber, and robots took your job, you’d have trouble to do it as a hobby, since it would require a lot of sinks and pipes to play around, and no one would care. But with art, you can do it on the cheap, and people STILL like your stuff, EVEN if they won’t buy it anymore.
If you can’t live off of doing something, you cannot dedicate very much time to it and not everyone will have a fulfilling life doing what they want on only a hobby basis.
It is not to the benefit of everyone, if most people in that sector lose their jobs they’ve spent all their working life striving to master. Artist still do commissioned work today.
If there is only only going to be a small niche of people able to do it, it will displaced all the rest of the people currently working in that industry. In which case AI is literally stopping people from doing art for a living, if they can get paid to do it.
People who followed their idea for a fulfilling life
I don’t know about you, but I want AI to do the tasks in my life that prevents me from living a fulfilling life. I don’t want it to do the things that I would have made my life fulfilling for me.
I think we might be coming at this from a different angle. You seem to think only about whether art will survive, whereas I’m thinking of the artists.
AI generated content cannot be copyrighted because it is not the product of creativity, but the product of generative computing.
This article is about a lawsuit that sounds in unjust enrichment, not copyright. Unjust enrichment is an equitable claim, not a legal claim, and it’s based on a situation in which one party is enriched at the expense of another, unjustly. If an AI company is taking content without permission, using it to train its model, and then profiting off its model without having paid or secured any license from the original artists, that seems pretty unjust to me.
If you’re at all interested in how the law is going to shake out on this stuff, this is a case to follow.
I wasn’t commenting on the article or it’s contents. Although I do find it interesting and is something I intend to keep an eye on.
I was simply responding to another comment, which also wasn’t directly related to the article.
i USED to be an artist , not anymore 😢
Nobody stops you to be an artist. You can still have a job that is still alive today, AND be an artist in your own free time. As I mentioned, I was a very successful collage artist (NYTimes pick for best book cover, lots of commissions, lots of print sales etc). I decided to leave the surrealness of collage behind because I enjoyed children’s illustrations more. Guess what, I don’t make a dime with my illustrations. I’ve spent $15k on art supplies in 5 years and I made $1k back. But that doesn’t stop me from painting nearly EVERY DAY. I share my work online, and whoever likes it, likes it. I don’t expect sales anymore. Be it because it’s not a popular look, or because of AI. It doesn’t matter to me, I still paint daily.
Lmao, cope harder. You’re being replaced like the rest of us 🤣
What’s the cope here? That guy saw a way to make money from suing and took it.
turns out, copyright laws have literally never been used to protect artists!
Another rent eeeker trying to hold back human progress for personal greed, they’re super common.
Oh no, poor huge corporation that can not steal from private citizens 😢 they should be allowed do whatever they need to maximize their profits!!! Fuck normal people and their rights!!!
/s
