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Copyright, it’s broken anyway. Some people abuse it, some are getting ripped off despite it. Fair use also is a concept that differs around the world. So I don’t know how legal AI training is and frankly I don’t care. All I care about is respecting authors. If they’re saying “No AI training” then you should respect it. This is also nothing like the Nintendo saying “Don’t reverse-engineer our products”.
Let me explain. Aside from the fact that you shouldn’t compare a soulless corporation to a living, breathing individual the most important difference is that for example Nintendo sells you a product in a way that even though you bought it you don’t own it. It’s your console so you should be able to reverse engineer, modify however you want it. But that doesn’t mean you can distribute their assets around the internet. You can’t just take Mario’s character model and put it into your game. For example every emulation project works like that.

Using things without permission is fine as long as you won’t blatantly copy it and AI basically does exactly that. No respectable artists would do that, there’s no artistic expression in that. You’re just copying things. AI can’t get inspired by some work, can’t come up with a new personal artstyle. Maybe AGI can but AGI doesn’t exists yet.

I said this before but I’m going to say it again: This machine is nothing without artists and it tries to put them out of their work.

Besides there’s so much amazing art posted every day you won’t be able to keep up with it anyway. AI is not needed.

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Even_Adder@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
Please actually read the things I linked, they’ll explain this better than I can. Here are a few quotes:

Pluralistic: AI “art” and uncanniness

counting words and measuring pixels are not activities that you should need permission to perform, with or without a computer, even if the person whose words or pixels you’re counting doesn’t want you to. You should be able to look as hard as you want at the pixels in Kate Middleton’s family photos, or track the rise and fall of the Oxford comma, and you shouldn’t need anyone’s permission to do so.

How We Think About Copyright and AI Art

Moreover, AI systems learn to imitate a style not just from a single artist’s work, but from other human creations that are tagged as being “in the style of” another artist. Much of the information contributing to the AI’s imitation of style originates with images by other artists who are enjoying the freedom copyright law affords them to imitate a style without being considered a derivative work.

The people who train these systems still have rights like you and I, and the public interest transcends individual consent. Rights holders, even when they are living, breathing individuals, would always prefer to restrict our access to materials, but from an ethical standpoint, the benefits we see from of fair use and library lending, outweigh author permissions. We need to uphold a higher ethical standard here for the benefit of society so that we don’t end up building a utopia for corporations, bullies, and every wannabe autocrat, destroying open dialogue in the process.

What do you think someone who thinks you’re going to write an unfavorable review would say when you ask them permission to analyze their work? They’ll say no. One point for the scammers. When you ask someone to scrutinize their interactions online, what will they say? They’ll say no, one point for the misinformation spreaders. When you ask someone to analyze their thing for reverse engineering, what will they say? They’ll say no, one point for the monopolists. When you ask someone to analyze their data for indexing, what will they say? They’ll say no, one point for the obstructors.

And again, I urge you to read this article by Kit Walsh, and this one by Tory Noble, both of them staff attorneys at the EFF, this open letter by Katherine Klosek, the director of information policy and federal relations at the Association of Research Libraries, and these two blog posts by Cory Doctorow.

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- hypertown@ani.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  Well I did quick-read those articles and let me tell you again: I don’t care about the legal aspect of this. As I said, copyright is broken and either adding clauses that either favor or disfavor AI models won’t change that. I don’t doubt that just as those articles say, it’s either legal or yet to be determined. Obviously I could argue with even the quotes you provided that nobody stops you from analyzing every pixel on the art but important is this analysis itself and how you use it; or that the fact that human artists imitating others still add their own personal touch to it while AI is not. I’d rather focus on the fact that those articles don’t endorse AI from a moral standpoint. The best I could find was a neutral position but no endorsement. Just because you have a right to do something doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do. Those living individuals that made these machines are not the ones that are generating 80 images per day burying the true creator of the source material. And the ones operating the machine should at least think about consequences.
  You also say: “public interest transcends individual consent”, what is the public interest here? How big is that interest? Is it bigger than backlash against AI? Is it worth degrading the life of mentioned individuals?
  You also mention “creating utopia for corporations”. We’re talking about individuals! It is actually the corporations that want to push this AI down our throats. Because it’s way cheaper to generate something than pay artist to do the work and most corporations care only about money.
  Let me also remind you that most comments online are very sceptical or outright against use of AI, especially in the creative field but corporations absolutely love AI.
  
  Reviewing someone’s work is nothing like generating stuff based on that work.
  Decompiling the game for a purpose of running the game on different hardware that was intended to is nothing like decompiling for the purpose of disturbing the game code without permission.
  Reverse-engineering for a purpose of enhancing functionality, making things repairable is nothing like reverse-engineering for a purpose of making a highly advertised clone to outsell original on Amazon.
  It’s all about the outcome.
  
  Just because you’re free to do something doesn’t mean you should besides absolute freedom to do whatever you want is just anarchy.
  
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  - Even_Adder@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    I’m not telling you to ponder this from a legal perspective, look at it what those laws protect from an ethical perspective. And I urge you again to actually read the material. It goes in depth and explains how all this works and the ways in it’s all related. A quick excerpt:
    
    Break down the steps of training a model and it quickly becomes apparent why it’s technically wrong to call this a copyright infringement. First, the act of making transient copies of works – even billions of works – is unequivocally fair use. Unless you think search engines and the Internet Archive shouldn’t exist, then you should support scraping at scale:
    
    pluralistic.net/…/how-to-think-about-scraping/
    
    And unless you think that Facebook should be allowed to use the law to block projects like Ad Observer, which gathers samples of paid political disinformation, then you should support scraping at scale, even when the site being scraped objects (at least sometimes):
    
    pluralistic.net/2021/…/get-you-coming-and-going/#…
    
    After making transient copies of lots of works, the next step in AI training is to subject them to mathematical analysis. Again, this isn’t a copyright violation.
    
    Making quantitative observations about works is a longstanding, respected and important tool for criticism, analysis, archiving and new acts of creation. Measuring the steady contraction of the vocabulary in successive Agatha Christie novels turns out to offer a fascinating window into her dementia:
    
    theguardian.com/…/agatha-christie-alzheimers-rese…
    
    Programmatic analysis of scraped online speech is also critical to the burgeoning formal analyses of the language spoken by minorities, producing a vibrant account of the rigorous grammar of dialects that have long been dismissed as “slang”:
    
    researchgate.net/…/373950278_Lexicogrammatical_An…
    
    Since 1988, UCL Survey of English Language has maintained its “International Corpus of English,” and scholars have plumbed its depth to draw important conclusions about the wide variety of Englishes spoken around the world, especially in postcolonial English-speaking countries:
    
    www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage/projects/ice.htm
    
    The final step in training a model is publishing the conclusions of the quantitative analysis of the temporarily copied documents as software code. Code itself is a form of expressive speech – and that expressivity is key to the fight for privacy, because the fact that code is speech limits how governments can censor software:
    
    eff.org/…/remembering-case-established-code-speec…
    
    If you’re not willing to do that, there isn’t much I can do, since all of your questions are answered there.
    
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    hypertown@ani.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    
    I’m not telling you to ponder this from a legal perspective
    
    Except you kinda do. Why do you put this part here?
    
    Break down the steps of training a model and it quickly becomes apparent why it’s technically wrong to call this a copyright infringement. …
    
    I NEVER said that it’s copyright infringement.
    
    The rest of the quotes also don’t really matter in this context. Sure you can analyse data. But how do you use the results of that analysis… Artists are against AI training only because of how those results are being used.
    Nobody would give a shit if you’d train a model to convert drawings into text that can convey artstyle in a way even blind people can enjoy it. If anything people would probably just support it.
    
    You also completely ignored the part where I compare different situations.
    Just like that quote before says that it’s fine because scrapers do the same. Except we’re ignoring in this port how is this information used. Scrapers don’t hurt artists as an end result.
    
    Quick-read doesn’t mean “didn’t read” and yeah, I didn’t really find an endorsement from a moral standpoint.
    
    As an artist, I’m foursquare against anything that stands in the way of making art. As an artistic worker, I’m entirely committed to things that help workers get a fair share of the money their work creates, feed their families and pay their rent.
    
    I think today’s AI art is bad, and I think tomorrow’s AI art will probably be bad, but even if you disagree (with either proposition), I hope you’ll agree that we should be focused on making sure art is legal to make and that artists get paid for it.
    
    This doesn’t look like an endorsement to me. And yes the author does say it’s not copyright infringement at the beginning but still, the article ends on a rather negative note:
    
    They don’t care if it’s slop – they just care about their bottom line. A studio executive who cancels a widely anticipated film prior to its release to get a tax-credit isn’t thinking about artistic integrity. They care about one thing: money. The fact that AI works can be freely copied, sold or given away may not mean much to a creative worker who actually makes their own art, but I assure you, it’s the only thing that matters to our bosses.
    
    And those are just your own sources. \ Look up for artists profiles, their standpoint on this. Many are devastated that people are generating and uploading 10x of the art in their style.
    
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