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Comment on Visual artists fight back against AI companies for repurposing their work

joe@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ 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.

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dhork@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Well, of course there’s nothing that can be used to prevent training an AI, just like there’s nothing preventing monkeys from stealing cameras and taking pictures. It’s what happens next that matters.

The Internet Archive didn’t get sued over copyright, even though it had electronic copies of lots and lots of copyrighted works (and even let people “check out” copies), until they changed their distribution model to allow unlimited lending. Nothing about how they gathered their works changed, it was the change in distribution that got them sued.

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- joe@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  The article is literally about someone suing to prevent their art from being used for training. That’s the topic at hand.
  
  Are you confused, or are you trying to shoehorn a different but related discussion into this one?
  
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  - dhork@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    
    The suit alleges that the AI image-generators violate the rights of millions of artists by ingesting huge troves of digital images and then producing derivative works that compete against the originals.
    
    The artists say they are not inherently opposed to AI, but they don’t want to be exploited by it. They are seeking class-action damages and a court order to stop companies from exploiting artistic works without consent.
    
    It says right in the article that they’re suing over the training and the commercial use of the output. Their lawyer obviously felt that it was essential to include both parts of that, and I thunk it’s because simplyusing a copyrighted work to train AI may not be infringing, but using it and the selling the output is.
    
    I just don’t think you can separate how the AI is trained from what the company intends to do with the trained AI. If they intend to sell their output, then I don’t think that will be allowed in current copyright law.
    
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    joe@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    You most certainly can. The discussion about whether copyright applies to the output is nuanced but certainly valid, and notably separate from whether copyright allows copyright holders to restrict who or what gets trained on their work after it’s released for general consumption.
    
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