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0 pointsRetric1y ago0 comments

The issue here is that the AI model itself is a derivative work.

Further, they will very much recreate things the’ve seen many examples of. Recreating “Mona Lisa” isn’t a problem, but recreating “Iron Man” is. Individual artists may not know how to prompt the system to recreate their work, but looking at the training sets is going to help quite a bit.

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doctorpangloss1y ago

No, the issue is that it makes outputs that compete with artists, and that is a problem if you go and make a fair use argument for appropriating copyrighted works.

If I were to secretly use an image generator, just for my own purposes, trained on public data, the plaintiffs would say it is just as illegal.

The rub is, do you know who else makes work that competes with artists? Other artists! It still kind of goes down on some vibesy stuff that I don't know if the law has a straight answer to. And for what it's worth, the Andy Warhol v. Goldsmith decision was about artists competing with other artists - this is the decision that has created an opening to challenge fair use. I just wonder why limit ourselves to the peculiarities of that case, why not open all forms of competition between artists to litigation over their influences and processes?

RetricOP1y ago

How the model is used isn’t relevant if creating it was already infringement. Training on works creates something of value and artists want to be able to prevent that training without compensation. There’s a long history of case law around just how much of someone’s work can be copied before it’s a problem. But here it’s literally the entire work being used so ‘how much’ is just everything.

The points you bring up are also relevant but artists don’t want to look through a billion individual images to see if that specific image happens to infringe on their work.

Edit: Wrote the response to a comment that got deleted before I posted presumably because I edited this one: IMO many commentators are getting this wrong.

“the less likely it is that the appropriation will serve as a substitute for the original work or its plausible derivatives, shrinking the market opportunities for the copyrighted work” https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/21-869_87ad.pdf

The form of these models is very different, but the purpose is to create directly competing works. Each individual output may not directly infringe with a specific work, but the goal of the model very much is.

The comment brought up commentary about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Warhol_Foundation_for_the...

Workaccount21y ago

It's only clear that training is a violation of copyright if you have a layman's understanding of how training works. There are no images stored in image models, just vectors that represent pixel relationships. You may call this fancy compression, but the ship runs aground if you try to "compress" a small set of images with a transformer - you just will get random noisy junk on the output.

Artists have a much firmer legal ground to stand on if they go after model output, but the goal is to kill image generators, not simply censor their output.

Think of it like this: If I splatter paint on a canvas, does jackson pollock have a copyright claim? Probably not, despite my creation being a product of training on his work. But it would be fair for my creation to be checked to see if it is too similar to one of his works.

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