So, the “don’t use copyrighted data in a training corpus” crowd probably isn’t going to win the IP argument. And I would be quite surprised if IP law changes to accommodate them.
However, the “don’t generate infringing material” is a whole different story. IP holders are on pretty solid ground there. One thing that I am very certain that IP law is not going to permit is just passing copyrighted data into a model and then generating material that would otherwise be infringing. I understand that anime has something of a tradition of sometimes letting fan-created material slide, but if generative AI massively reduces the bar to creating content, I suspect that that is likely to change.
Right now, you have generative AI companies saying — maybe legally plausibly — that they aren’t the liable ones if a user generates infringing material with their model.
And while you can maybe go after someone who is outright generating and selling material that is infringing, something doesn’t have to be commercially sold to be infringing. Like, if LucasArts wants to block for-fun fan art of Luke and Leia and Han, they can do that.
One issue is attribution. Like, generative AI companies are not lying when they say that there isn’t a great way to just “reverse” what training corpus data contributed more to an output.
However, I am also very confident that it is very possible to do better than they do today. From a purely black-box standpoint, one possibility would be, for example, to use TinEye-style fuzzy hashing of images and then try to reverse an image, probably with a fuzzier hash than TinEye uses, to warn a user that they might be generating an image that would be derivative. That won’t solve all cases, especially if you do 3d vision and generative AI producing models (though then you could also maybe do computer vision and a TinEye-equivalent for 3D models).
Another complicating factor is that copyright only restricts distribution of derivative works. I can make my own, personal art of Leia all I want. What I can’t do is go distribute it. I think — though I don’t absolutely know what case law is like for this, especially internationally — that generating images on hardware at OpenAI or whatever and then having them move to me doesn’t count as distribution. Otherwise, software-as-a-service in general, stuff like Office 365, would have major restrictions on working with IP that locally-running software would not. Point is that I expect that it should be perfectly legal for me to go to an image generator and generate material as long as I do not subsequently redistribute it, even if it would be infringing had I done so. And the AI company involved has no way of knowing what I’m doing with the material that I’m generating. If they block me from making material with Leia, that’s an excessively-broad restriction.
But IP holders are going to want to have a practical route to either be able to go after the generative AI company that gets distributed, or the users generating infringing material and then distributing it. Yeah, they could go after the users before, but if it’s a lot cheaper and easier to create the material now, that presents them with practical problems.
And in that vein, an issue that I haven’t seen come up is what happens if generative AI companies start permitting deterministic generation of content – that is, where if I plug in the same inputs, I get the same outputs. Maybe they already do; I don’t know, run my gen AI stuff locally. But supposing you have a scenario like this:
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I make a game called “Generic RPG”, which I sell.
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I distribute — or sell — DLC for this game. This uses a remote, generative AI service to generate art for the game using a set of prompts sold as part of the DLC for that game. No art is distributed as part of the game. Let’s say I call that “Adventures A Long Time Ago In A Universe Far, Far Away” or something that doesn’t directly run afoul of LucasArts, creates enough distance. And let’s set aside trademark concerns, for the sake of discussion. And lets say that the prompts are not, themselves infringing (though I could imagine infringing art).
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Every user buys the DLC, and then on their computer, reconstitutes the images for the game. At least if done purely-locally, this should be legal under case law — the GPL specifically depends on the fact that one can combine material locally as long as one does not then distribute it. Mods to (copyrighted) games can just distribute the deltas, and that’s definitely legal.
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One winds up with someone selling what is effectively a “Star Wars” game.
Now, maybe training the model on images of Star Wars content so that it knows what Star Wars looks like isn’t creating an infringing work. Maybe the distributing the model that knows about Star Wars isn’t infringement. Maybe the prompts being distributed designed to run against that model are not infringing. Maybe reconstituting the apparently-Star-Wars images in a deterministic fashion is not infringing. But if the net effect is equivalent to distributing an infringing work my suspicion is that courts are going to be willing to create some kind of legal doctrine that restricts it, if they haven’t already.
Now, this situation is kind of contrived, but I expect that people will do it, sooner or later, absent legal restrictions.
jsomae@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
Everyone here is either on the side of hating big AI companies or hating IP law. I proudly hate both.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
We need two things:
They should happen in that order, and ideally copyright would only be awarded to individuals (or perhaps specifically named lists of individuals, with some reasonable cap), not corporations. The current system is absolutely bonkers.
Zink@programming.dev 3 weeks ago
Making it so corporations cannot directly own some random valuable thing?
It’s a nice thing to think about, but it has 0% chance of happening in our current system.
bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 3 weeks ago
That’s actually the law in Germany. Here it’s not called copyright but originator’s right. The big caveat being that things you create while under contract are licensed to companies. But the originator’s rights can not be transferred or erased.
Of course international contracts severely muddy the waters here.
LillyPip@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
I disagree, because I think all of these things address the wrong problem.
Individuals should be able to gain from their own inventions, and others shouldn’t be able to force them into poverty by stealing people’s IP. Corporations especially should not be incentivised to do that.
Then again, unfettered capitalism is geared towards incentivising corporations to do that.
The answer isn’t to weaken people’s already vanishing IP, but to change what’s incentivised. Also to stop treating corporations as people. They aren’t.
uairhahs@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
This is the way
WhatGodIsMadeOf@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
But remember piracy is legal for the big AI companies.
brbposting@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
$1.5b judgement against Anthropic for it (not paid yet of course, gotta see how it plays from here)
utopiah@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
2 wrongs don’t make a right, I did enjoy
on the topic.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
It’s a “heads-I-win / tails-you-lose” system when business can violently extract the value of labor coming and going.
Either the state protects owners of IP (inevitably a business entity looking to collect rents on its use) or it facilitates robbing the original artist (inevitably a talented individual/team that lacks the money for a lengthy legal fight). The legal system never seems to break in favor of the people themselves. It can only exist as a gradient to move wealth from the sweet of one’s brow to the pocket of one’s bosses.