Comment on [AI] Niwatari Kutaka
Even_Adder@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week agoPlease 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.
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.
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:
If you’re not willing to do that, there isn’t much I can do, since all of your questions are answered there.
hypertown@ani.social 1 week ago
Except you kinda do. Why do you put this part here?
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.
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:
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.
Even_Adder@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
I asked you to think about what copy write protects. It gives artists protection over specific expressions, not broad concepts like styles, and this fosters ethical self-expression and discourse. If we allow that type of overreach, we would be giving anyone a blank check to threaten the general populace with legal trouble off of just from the way you draw the eyes on a character. This is bad, and I shouldn’t have to explain or spell it out to you.
What these people want unfairly restricts self-expression and speech. Art isn’t a product, it is speech, and people are allowed to participate in conversations even when there are parties that rather they didn’t. Wanting to bar others from iterating on your ideas or expressing the same ideas differently is both is selfish and harmful. That’s why the restrictions on art are so flexible and allow for so much to pulled from to make art.
It is spelled out in the links I’ve replied with how these short sided power grabs will consolidate power at the top and damage life for us all. While Cory Doctorow doesn’t endorse AI art, he agrees that it should exist. He goes on to say that you can’t fix a labor problem with copyright, the way some artists are trying to do. That just changes how and how much you end up paying the people at the top.
And I want to reiterate, I’m not talking about the law here, I’m talking about the effects the laws have. I feel for the artists here, but honoring a special monopoly on abstract ideas and general forms of expression is a recipe for disaster that will only make our situation ×10 worse.