This is a pretty old story, the EFF already weighed in on it back in april.
Comment on Visual artists fight back against AI companies for repurposing their work
FireTower@lemmy.world 10 months ago
It seems pretty obvious to me that the artists should win this assuming their images weren’t poorly licenced. Training AI is absolutely a commercial use.
These companies adopted a run fast and don’t look back legal strategy and now they’re going to enter the ‘find out’ phase.
Even_Adder@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 months ago
GFGJewbacca@lemm.ee 10 months ago
I would like to agree with you, but I have doubts this lawsuit will stick because of how prominent corporations are in US law.
joe@lemmy.world 10 months ago
There’s nothing in copyright law that covers this scenario, so anyone that says it’s “obviously” one way or the other is telling you an opinion, not a fact.
Lmaydev@programming.dev 10 months ago
It’s like sueing an artist because they learnt to paint based on your paintings. But also not because the company has acquired your art and fed it into an application.
It’s a very tricky area.
dhork@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I’m not so sure that’s true, there have been several recent rulings that all reinforce that copyright can only be asserted on the output of actual humans. This even goes back to before the AI stuff, when PETA sued over those monkey selfies. It is quite clear that the output of an AI does not, itself, qualify for copyright protection.
Maybe if someone edits or works with the AI output, the end result might qualify. But the you also have to ask about what went into the AI composition. Here is where it gets less certain. The case of the Monkey Selfie is much clearer: the monkey stole the camera and took its own picture, and that creation was not derived from any other copyrighted work. But these AI are trained on a wide range of copyrighted works, and very few of those works were licensed for that purpose. I doubt that sucking everything into AI will be seen as a fair use of those works. This is different than a search engine, which ultimately steers the user toward the original work. This uses the original work to create something new, and because of the way AI works it is impossible to credit the original sources.
Congress may have to step in and clarify this, but is probably not interested unless they can use it to harass Hunter Biden.
joe@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I was under the impression we were talking about using copyright to prevent a work from being used to train a generative model. There’s nothing in copyright that says anything about training anything. I’m not even convinced there should be.
Even_Adder@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 months ago
I recommend reading this article by Kit Walsh, who’s a senior staff attorney at the EFF, a digital rights group, who recently won a historic case: border guards now need a warrant to search your phone.
random_character_a@lemmy.world 10 months ago
This is a tough one, because they are not directly making money from the copyrighted material.
Isn’t this a bit same as using short samples of somebodys song in your own song or somebody getting inspired from somebodys artwork and creating something similar.
FireTower@lemmy.world 10 months ago
If you’re sampling music you aught to be compensating the licence holder unless it’s public domain or your work is under a fair use exception.
lunarul@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Sampling music is literally placing parts of that music in the final product. Gen AI is not placing pieces of other people’s art in the final image, in fact it doesn’t store any image data at all. Using an image in the training data is akin to am artist including that image on their moodboard. Except the AI’s moodboard has way more images and the odds of the work being too similar to a single particular image is lower than when a human does it.
joe@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Are you speaking legally or morally when you say someone “aught” to do something?
kava@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I don’t think it’s obvious at all. Both legally speaking - there is no consensus around this issue - and ethically speaking because AIs fundamentally function the same way humans do.
We take in input, some of which is bound to be copyrighted work, and we mesh them all together to create new things. This is essentially how art works. Someone’s “style” cannot be copyrighted, only specific works.
The government announced an inquiry recently into the copyright questions surrounding AI. They are going to make recommendations to congress about potential legislation, if any, they think would be a good idea. I believe there’s a period of public comment until mid October, if anyone wants to write a comment.
MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 10 months ago
I really hope you’re wrong.
And I think there’s a difference. Humans can draw stuff, build structures, and make tools, in a way that improves upon the previous iteration. Each artists adds something, or combines things in a way that makes for something greater.
AI art, literally cannot do anything, without human training data. It can’t take a previous result, be inspired by it, and make it better.
AI art has NEVER made me feel like it’s greater than the sum of its parts. Unlike art made by humans, which makes me feel that way all the time.
kava@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Ok, take a human being that has never had any other interactions with any other human and has never consumed any content creatd by humans. Give him finger paint and have him paint something on a blank canvas. I think it wouldn’t look any different than a chimpanzee doing finger paint.
In theory, it could. You would just need a way to quantify the “fitness” of a drawing. They do this by comparing to actual content. But you don’t need actual content in some circumstances. For example, look at Alphazero - Deepmind’s AI from a few years back for playing chess. All the AI knew was the rules of the game. It did not have access to any database of games. No data. The way it learned is it played millions of games against itself.
It trained itself on its own data. And that AI, at the time, beat the leading chess engine that has access to databases and other pre-built algorithms.
With art this gets trickier because art is subjective. You can quantify clearly whether you won or lost a chess game. How do you quantify if something is a good piece of art? If we can somehow quantify this, you could in theory create AI that generates art with no input.
We’re in the infancy stages of this technology.
AI can do all of the same. I know it’s scary but it’s here and it isn’t going away. AI designed systems are becoming more and more commonplace. Solar panels, medical devices, computer hardware, aircraft wings, potential drug compounds, etc. Certain things AI can be really good at, and designing things and testing it in a million different simulations is something that AI can do a lot better than humans.
What is art? If I make something that means nothing and you find a meaning in it, is it meaningful? AI is a cold calculated mathematical model that produces meaningless output. But humans love finding patterns in noise.
Trust me, you will eventually see some sort of AI art that makes an impact on you. Math doesn’t lie. If statistics can turn art into data and find the hidden patterns that make something impactful, then it can recreate it in a way that is impactful.
MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 10 months ago
The randomness used by current machine learning to train the neural networks, will never be able to do what a human does when they are being creative.
I have no doubt AI art will be able “say” things. But it wont be saying things, that haven’t already been said.
FooBarrington@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Why do you think so? AI art can take an image and change it in creative ways, just as humans can.
Only an incredibly small amount of humans ever “trained itself” without relying on previous human data. Anyone who has ever seen any piece of artwork wouldn’t qualify.
Art is subjective. I’ve seen great and interesting AI art, and I’ve seen boring and uninspired human art.
Really? Do you have an example for someone who is deaf, blind, mute and can’t feel touch, who became an artist? Because all of those are inputs all humans have since birth.
MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 10 months ago
I’m talking from a perspective of understanding how machine learning networks work.
They cannot make something new. By nature, they can only mimic.
The randomness they use to combine different pieces of work, is not creativeness. It’s brute force. It’s doing the math a million times until it looks right.
Humans fundamentally do not work that way. When an engineer sees a design, and thinks “I can improve that” they are doing so because they understand the mechanism.
Modern AIs do not understand anything. They brute force their way to valid output, and in some cases, like with code, science, or an engineering problem, there might be one single best solution, which an AI can find faster than a human.
But art, DOES NOT HAVE a single correct “solution”.
Grimy@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I think it’s a mistake to see the software as an independent entity. It’s a tool just like the paintbrush or photoshop. So yes, there isn’t any AI art without the human but that’s true for every single art form.