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0 pointscsallen2y ago0 comments

That's not how it works, never has been how it works, and should not be how it works.

For thousands of years, human workers and artists have trained themselves by looking at copies of other people's work, and used the ideas and inspiration the gain from that material to produce new works. Artists will literally sit down and copy another artist's work as part of training. This happens as a matter of course. Sometimes the new works produced after training are fresh and original. And just as often, they are derivative copycats (see: fan fiction, most clothing, most music, half the stuff on DeviantArt, etc.).

The law is only concerned with a creator's output, not the input.

If you produce and distribute something that's an obvious copy of someone else's work, that could be a copyright violation. However, if what you produce is sufficiently original, it's fair game, regardless of who you were inspired or trained by. The law does not require compensating or crediting those who inspired you or helped with training. Again, the law is only concerned with output, not with training, not with inspiration, not with input.

What you are advocating for is a huge change. Would this change apply to humans who are learning/training by looking at and copying others' work? If so, that would be a nightmare. If not, why not? Why only apply it to AI? Because the AI is more efficient at it than humans?

If that's your reason, could you justify it? New technology is always more efficient than the status quo. That's the entire point of new technology. Making laws to stop it accomplishes nothing except limiting technology in order to protect old jobs and business models. Why should we do that?

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xeckr2y ago· 2 in thread

Yes, of course I can justify applying a different standard to AI than to humans when it comes to the generation of art.

Despite everything you said about humans copying the work of other humans, the fact is that humans are capable of producing new art without reference to prior art. You can prove this by considering the emergence of the very first cave paintings.

On the other hand, GenAI like Stable Diffusion is capable of outputting art only if the following two conditions are met:

1. there is a prompt (and perhaps special configuration) made by the artist using the GenAI

2. there is training data (i.e. art made by prior artists) that makes the AI capable of translating the prompt into an image.

Of course it is possible to create programs that output something that may be considered art without reference to the work of other people. However, without (2) GenAI specifically cannot exist, and so the people that make (2) possible are right to demand credit if their work is used in this context.

Note that this says nothing about technological progress. If you train GenAI on material you have a right to use (e.g. art that is in the public domain, or copyrighted art that you have a license to use), then it's all good. The problem arises when you use a copy of someone's work in a process without their permission, when the law clearly says that the creator of that work has the legal right to decide how copies of that work are used (with the exception of "fair use").

csallenOP2y ago

Your point still doesn't make sense to me. Real humans today are creating art based on other artists' work. Their art would have absolutely zero chance of being created if not for the training, copying, and inspiration they're drawing from other works. Cavemen were not creating the art that we see people creating today, because people today rely on learning from and copying others' examples.

None of the targeted artists are being compensated or credited. Nor are you demanding they be.

Why not?

If I train myself by copying your work, by your logic, shouldn't you be compensated or credited? The fact that my neurons could've theoretically created some other type of art from scratch even if I hadn't trained on your work, doesn't change the situation that I did in fact train on your work.

xeckr2y ago

When you train a GenAI on an image, legally speaking you're training it on a COPY of that image.

If you intend to train a GenAI on a copy of an image I own the rights to (perhaps because I created it), then you have to negotiate with me. If you don't, then you are violating my copyright.

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