Agreed with everything in this comment, except for the finger-wagging tone.
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Everything I’ve said has been about the underlying issues regarding fair use, derivative works, originality/human authorship, etc, and then applying this common law to the case at hand.
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That’s a pretty good description of how the jpeg and mp3 codecs work—and AFAIK a lossy approximate copy of something is still a copy 
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I find that to be an interesting point! Although these ai models aren’t sampling for the purposes of reproducing the sample exactly.
I suppose artists will try to get the ai to spit out images that a judge/jury can recognize as definitely being derivative of one artist.
The AI this, the AI that. No, the AI doesn’t do anything on it’s own. AI might never be able to decide what to do on its own. It always has a human being telling it what to do. The AI can’t do anything else. It can’t decide to not do what a human instructs or to do something different. It’s more like a camera-- a complex tool operated by a person. I believe the person operating the AI should own the copyright to what they create using it, just as a photographer does. The creation is no more or less infringing on another piece of art than anything else human created, and so it must be deemed infringing or not by a judge or jury.
But that isn’t what’s happening here and it’s not how AI works - this fundamental misunderstanding seems to underpin a lot of peoples opinion on this issue and isn’t something I see the media doing a very good job of correcting and educating folks on - somethign we could really do with as these discussions flourish.
AI art is not a collage. It is not taking pre-existing images and combining them to make new ones. AI looks at existing imagery and catalogues its context and visual relationships, and creates new images based on that data. Like if you were to visit an art galary, return home and draw something that looks a bit like a Monet - the insinuation here is that is theft. A broadening of copyright to not only include a direct copy but also anything inspired by another work.
I feel a bit sorry for these artists - they’re faced with a changing world and are attacking it with copyright. I assume that their next target is art schools, I heard a rumour that the artists there also look at other artists works and creative derivitave works - I assume the precedant they want to set is that should be illegal? I see it as no different to the musicians that tried to ban the use of drum machines or the inevtiable hand-wringing that must have occured when the camera was invented.
It’s dehumanizing to compare what is basically a denoising algortihm to a living, feeling human being. I’m tired of AI “art” enthusiats insulting artists like this.
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Imagine how the programmers of these incredible AI’s must feel about the artists that are continually belittling and dismissing their work. Somehow simultaneously completely unimpressed with what it creates and also filing lawsuits to stop it from happening.
I don’t think there’s a single point in history where this kind of progress hasn’t generated a similarly regressive reaction, it always ends the same though.
People hate change.
when it accelerates the concentration of wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people who own shit without producing anything themselves.
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Interesting take. Is that how you feel about photographers?
From a copyright law perspective, someone at some point in the process definitely created a copy of the artwork (bearing in mind that each time any computer does anything with a file, there is a copy).
The only question is were they entitled to do it or not.
Your argument seems to be that the end result of all the copying does not contain any part of the copied works and that may be relevant, it may not.
Copyright law in different jurisdictions might take into account whether the end work bears any relation to the original works to differing degrees.
I would expect in most places that if you trained yourself to paint by copying existing works and then painted your own work “in the style of”, your final work would be fine - but the practice pieces might well infringe.
How does that translate across to a computer programme? It’ll be an interesting argument.
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Agreed, especially since in case of ML image generators the work of others is being appropriated without any compensation. Some of the autors of these image generators then charge money for using them, while depriving artists of their livelihoods.
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I don’t know any fatcat photographers, but I doubt the programmers behind the AI are getting much money out of it either. Everything goes to the owners, even more so when there are no wages to pay at all.
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By that logic simply looking at an image on a computer screen is copyright infringement.
No it isn’t.
Honestly I don’t think people are even ready for this debate until we have a better collective understanding of how this stuff works and how it can be utilised.
It’s actually more scary to me that this regressive perspetive could lead to stricter copyright that strangles creativity. The protectionist nature of people trying to cling onto something that may have less value than we thought is a bit worrysome.
Not sure I follow. As a creative agency if I use an AI to generate imagery instead of a human I’m still making money, and now my artworker can do something more valuable with their time.
When Adobe launched Photoshop were people scared that they were taking all the money away from sign painters? Artists/directors/creatives are still needed, this is a tool.
That’s fair enough, but courts have also sided with claims that just having a similar beat, or even ‘feel’, is grounds for a legitimate claim and a big cash payout.
Which frankly, is fucking ridiculous.
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I would imagine not, because the development and spread of photography wasn’t anything like what people are concerned about with these AI pic generators.
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I do find your point about copying the file in order to input the data pretty interesting!
I’d ask for a citation since I had no luck finding a lawsuit over using cloud-sourced photos for photogrammetry, but I eventually realized while searching that you actually were saying much the same thing that I’d said at the beginning of the thread: That you can publish photos and illustrations and other images on the internet under licenses that specifically preclude retaining the files and other such use cases, only allowing what copying is necessary to view the image on one’s computer, explicitly prohibiting all other processing and copying, i.e. Automated image recognition: How using ‘free’ photos on the internet can lead to lawsuits and fines | Computer Weekly …ironically in that case, the photographer is using an image recognition database that he didn’t license the photos to to find other instances of infringement, but I suppose that might be covered under the same fair use exceptions as Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc.
…Coincidentally, I ran across this from Mr. Doctorow while searching: Why 3D scans aren't copyrightable | Boing Boing
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Does it strike anyone else that all of us having to become experts on highly specific fields of knowledge just to function on the internet and have conversations, and do things like write blogs, etc, is kind of supremely fucked up?
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That is why I have outsourced all of my comments here to GPTChat - it is not better than I am a projecting a false impression of knowledge and confidence, but it is much faster
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