Because, yes, just opening it on/via your computer absolutely can be an infringement of copyright.
In reality, hardly anyone tries to make anything of it but we all do probably at least 90 things a day on the internet that are technically infringement of copyrights.
The internet is not just a series of tubes. It’s a series of tubes entirely predicated on widescale copyright infringement.
Well, yes? And they did.
Which is not to say that anything should be done to prevent that but these concerns are real and yes, people do lose livelihoods over new technologies.
And yes, everytime people say this is terrible, it will be the end of x, y and z. Then everyone except the people left without a livelihood forget about it and accept it as normal.
Eventually there a few people who say things like, oh yeah my grandad was a sign painter or buggy whip maker or illuminator or whatever.
And a much, much smaller group of other people eventually make some money (usually as a sideline) doing the thing for rich folks when it becomes fashionable to have a human do the thing.
I would say part of that debate is a requirement to be clear on what the regime is - in so far as that can even be nailed down.
So when questions come up that I can answer, that’s what I try to do. Regardless of whether I like the answer or not.
I’m also happy to wade in with my opinions but try to make it clear where I’m talking about what should be or could be as opposed to the rules as they are.
In so far as I have a view, I’d say the current regime sucks but it’s probably as good as we can hope for given where we are and how we got here.
I’m also generally sceptical of claims that X technology means that all the old rules are now obsolete and can’t cope with the new technology.
Courts and legislatures are pretty adaptable and can usually find someway of shoehorning the new thing into the existing framework or adjusting the framework to include it.
Usually a claim to be disruptive means “I hope I can get so rich so quickly that no-one wants to take my money away.”
Sure, but that shouldn’t mean just unquestionable describing it, as if it can’t be critique because it exists.
Is it? Given that real world alternatives exist already? And that people have been talking about the problems with it for literally decades at this point? Not some weirdos off in corners - people who are in real places of cultural power in our society.
Can they? I’m less sure, given how much dark money flows into political campaigns. Corporate money from the culture industries are a huge source of campaign contributions, and the rise of the modern technology industry built around social media is a major funder of politicians, in part to keep things the way that they are.
I hope that’s not what I’ve been doing. If it is, let me make it clear that just because I say “the law is X”, that doesn’t mean it’s the only way it could be. Or even that it’s the way it should be.
I think that’s sort of my point. People are debating it, people are suggesting alternatives. Some of those will get taken up, some won’t.
There is no optimum solution because it all comes down to a balance between protecting creators, producers, distributors, etc. vs. access to new goodies.
We’re currently in a place where corporations/money have far more control and protection but then we live in societies where corporations/money generally have more power and control. I don’t think that’s a particular failing of the intellectual property regime, it’s part of the general atmosphere.
In part, that’s what I mean. The structure shifts to accommodate - so long as money is getting made and going to “the right people”.
So for example, YouTube exists and its founders are not in jail but the guy selling bootleg DVDs at your local market may well be looking at a jail term if anyone bothers to catch him.
Is that right? No, but there’s the system shifting to accommodate the new.
Let’s hope other follow suit and we can get a deeper discussion on these issues.
I would argue that the current legal system is pretty much set up to protect corporate interests, and the interests of copyright lawyers, and that’s about it.
I think it’s how we got this particular system, though. Pretty much all the changes made to our copyright laws have almost all come from corporations, not from individual creators.
But the whole structure was created for the purpose of protecting private property - in this case intellectual property.
I think an argument can be made that it’s just a continuation of privilege corporations over individuals (both as creators and consumers).
Category error - machines don’t get inspired, they do what their owners tell them too do. (It’s straight up Orwell time when terms start sliding into arbitrary ontological slots for various rhetorical aims).
This isn’t just an anti-tech knee jerk reaction. Many of us have been studying and watching the development of ANN’s and ML tech for a long time and are coming to these conclusions from a decently informed stance. One example would be some of Jaron Lanier’s commentaries on topic.
The issue isn’t necessarily the output, it’s that a non-consensual incorporation of creative works into a training set occurred. Something. something paraphrasing John Locke; ‘mixing of ones labor with nature is how wealth is created’ - except in this case “nature” is just other peoples creative works. It’s one thing if it’s a person doing this mixing (creative) work through their personal effort - (we all have just one person). That shouldn’t be considered reasonably comparable to a large scale industrial machine that is effectively a deep-sea sea-bed scraping dragnet of all available online cultural works.
(Why is it that with any new technology, and to its enthusiasts/acolytes, all previously existing material is just “natural resources”?)
I don’t like the new AI “art”. I am 100% sure it will be used by corporations in the future because it is cheaper and easier.
Rob is using it for that reason. I am not faulting Rob, his options are either to use some AI art, search for some soulless stock photo, or swallow hard as another bit of his soul melts away with each mouths-for-eyes Phototshop he does.
But as it gets better, everyone will use it. Small companies will use it for logo creation (already being done). It will get good enough for other standard collateral material. It will be another “menial” labor task relegated to more efficient machines, like harvesting corn, or washing clothes, or welding car frames, or even sign painting.
I don’t like it. Artists whose work are being used to train AI have a completely valid point, IMO. It is going to be one of hundreds of industries eventually turned on its head with automation. Fortunately, the company I work for is not on the cutting edge of technology, so I won’t be replaced for a little while.
I don’t know, the reason we have copyright is because it became easier to copy works. It’s only gotten easier and easier, so I see even more need for copyright now than before. Until we have a complete economic restructuring like UBI that eliminates the need to directly labor for income, creators big and small need copyright to secure their income, whether it’s by licensing or royalties, a paywall, or advertising in their own venue.
I mean, I’m on board with restoring the old term limits, and maybe even limiting the term of automatic copyright, but even then I still have reservations.
With something like UBI, sure, I can even see blockbuster movies and AAA video games still being made… Even though Valve only rarely releases a game thanks to printing money w/ Steam, plenty of hobby groups are able to release their own projects despite only working on them in their free time. A well respected film production club could secure grants for resources they need beyond their own time and labor, just like a theatre group or chorale can.
I just can’t see alternatives like, say, patronage working well enough for enough people in the current modern world without copyright to disincentivize and stigmatize freeloading.
SaaS may work pretty well in my creative field of software, but I don’t think it translates well to art.
I agree with the claims these artists make and I think Butterick did a good job putting those complaints in words. For folks who want to hear a counterpoint to Butterick’s side, I recommend reading http://www.stablediffusionfrivolous.com/
It’s written anonymously and tends to make some dubious claims, but it was interesting to hear other sides of the argument.
A lot of us are still learning about this tech and formulating our ideas. It will be interesting to see how this lawsuit plays out. AI could be a neat tool, but not if the only way they can do it is by scraping images from the internet that they don’t have permission to use. If they can’t build it using ethically sourced data, then it wasn’t worth building in the first place.
… and the people feeding some of these black boxes haven’t learned that if you feed it garbage data, you’ll get garbage results, but that debate is nearly old enough to vote. /rimshot
THIS TIMES INFINITY- When the system shows ‘some form’ of sapience and sentience, then I’ll ask the sentience what pronouns to use and what classification we should use to refer to them and similar sentients. (“…While I may be running on non-organic based hardware, my intelligence is anything but artificial!” - CUR1E, Synthetic Conversations, and a Press Conference)
YES YES YES YES!!! YE GODS YES!!! THAT is the core of what this is about- The artists whose works were part of the training dataset did not consent to that usage of their work, and were never even asked or offered the choice of refusal, and there’s no process for artists to have their works removed from the training set, if that’s possible. the people who assembled the training data just scraped a bunch of images from the internet, regardless if they were copyrighted or not.
But we all know that this is exactly what is going to happen. Which, I think, is fueling the anger. Nobody would care if this was just some hobbyists tinkering with image generation. But this is the future of the publishing industry and the entire profession of illustrators and graphic designers. Not to mention that we will all soon drown in AI generated imagery on every leaflet and website. For those of us who don’t work in the creative industries it will just make everyday life a bit shittier and more frustrating. And that alone is a reason to question this development.
