> it's unfair for artists to have their works sucked up
I never thought it was unfair to artists for others to look at their work and imitate it. That seems to me to be what artists have been doing since the second caveman looked at a hand painting on a cave wall and thought, ‘huh, that’s pretty neat! I’d like to try my hand at that!’
You don't see a massive difference in the shear number of images that the AI can look at and the speed at which it can imitate it as a fundamental difference between AI and a human copying works or styles?
For a human it took a lot of practice and a lot of time and effort. But now it takes practically no time or effort at all.
Well yeah, but copyright infringement isn't a function of how quickly you can view and create works.
Copyright is meant to secure distribution of works you create. It's not a tool to stop people from creating art because it looks like your art. That has been a thing for centuries, we even categorize art by it's style. Imagine anime was had to adhere to a copyright interpretation of "it's my style!".
But do you not for a second think that the current way the laws and rules are set are because of how hard and time consuming it was to replicate work?
Just because "that's how it's always been" doesn't mean it's acceptable to keep it that way when the means to perform the action have so drastically changed.
I don't think the rules ever existed for the benefit of the individual, but rather the collective. If skilled artists couldn't sustain themselves from their work they wouldn't exist. Historically there was no alternative.
When a machine can do something there is not generally a (collectively beneficial) reason to protect the individual that competes with it. Backhoes weren't regulated in order to protect ditch diggers.
It took a truly colossal amount of human time and effort to build AI systems. It takes significant amount of energy to run those AI systems.
I don’t see any meaningful difference at all between the system of a human, a computer and a corpus of images producing new images, and the system of a human, a paintbrush, an easel, a canvas and a corpus of images producing new images. Emphasis on the new — copying is still copying, and still controlled by copyrights.
>It took a truly colossal amount of human time and effort to build AI systems. It takes significant amount of energy to run those AI systems.
Those people and effort aren't at all tied to the people who are making and using the art.
In the past every individual person would have to individually study art and some style and practice for years of their life to be able to replicate it really well. And for each piece of artwork it could take them days to make 1 single piece.
I would argue that this is why it wasn't really problematic to copy someone's work or style. Because the individual time and effort per person to even do that was so high.
But now that time and effort for an individual is next to nothing.
I do wonder what the outcome would be for a model trained only on truly non copyright work, and derivatives from there. I'm no AI expert, but from what I understand they use some models to generate data with which to train further models. I'd be interested in the output, whether it would eventually just match what we have now anyway, so the copyright question may end up moot. I wonder how the argument would shift at that point?
I think in reality, it is probably too late for that, because the internet is now polluted with AI generated images which would be consumed by any "ethical" model anyway.
I expect it would require significantly more human labor to train (ie no longer fully unsupervised). I imagine that this constraint would lead to significant additional research to improve the efficiency of the training process, and that novel approaches would be developed.
In other words I think it would suck up a lot of money over a few years and then we would arrive back pretty much where we are now.
You don't see a difference between a person spending years learning techniques to create art by hand, and spending months or years studying and practicing some famous artists style, and then spending days manually crafting drawing a single piece of artwork in the style and quality of the originals.
The difference between that, and a person just entering a prompt to create some drawing in some style.
The model looked at orders of magnitude more examples of artwork than a single human could look at and study in a lifetime.
To me there is a clear difference here.
I am merely saying that perhaps the rules should change due to the drastic change in time and effort required to do the work.
Nobody is saying let’s not have these new efficient tools. All people are saying is let’s make protections and considerations etc for the original artists and their work that’s being used for training and for when the model draws from it to replicate the style that they developed.
The rules do change, but as a meritocracy as society simply decides to move on or not. There will be no cabal of artists who define how the rules will change. It will be organic. Like moving on from cave paintings to impressionism.
> I don’t see any meaningful difference at all between the system of a human, a computer and a corpus of images producing new images, and the system of a human, a paintbrush, an easel, a canvas and a corpus of images producing new images.
The word "meaningful" here is a cheap hedging maneuver, and if you don't see a meaningful difference (whatever that means), that's on you.
>You don't see a massive difference in the shear number of images that the AI can look at and the speed at which it can imitate it as a fundamental difference between AI and a human copying works or styles?
I don't.
>For a human it took a lot of practice and a lot of time and effort. But now it takes practically no time or effort at all.
To make an analogy, it might take you five years and your life savings to prototype a new invention. Once done, it can be mass produced for pennies.
Would you invest that time and money if patent protection did not exist? Probably not, because your competition will copy your work and bankrupt you.
At any point, society could opt to eliminate patent protection and make all existing inventions public domain, at the cost of losing future inventions. But instead we settled for 20 years.
This concern did not previously apply to art styles, because they took nearly as much skill to copy as to originate. But now it does, and with no protections, we can expect nobody to put in the work of being the next Studio Ghibli. The styles we have are all we will have, but we can mass produce them.
Because now it’s too easy to rip off another artist’s work and style with no effort. And the current rules in place are not enough to protect the original artist.
The original artist used to be protected by the fact that it took so much effort to copy or reproduce their original work and style at a high quality, so it rarely happened at a scale to directly impact them.
But now it’s so easy and effortless that anyone can do it in mass and that now impacts the original artist greatly.
Right the difference is that it’s a large company looking at it then copying it and reselling it without credit, which basically everyone would understand as bad without the indirection of a model.
Edit: the key words here are “company” and “reselling”
Imitation has been controlled by patent rights, where an object did not need to be an exact copy but merely use the essence of an idea to count as a violation. Of course so far this protection has only been applied to inventions, because they took a lot of time to develop but once done could be trivially copied at a glance. Now, in this new landscape, we may find it appropriate to apply a similar regime to art.
Or maybe we won't. It's a choice for society to make, to balance how much we need to protect the incentives to create something new vs protect the ease of copying.
#1, it’s extremely easy to coerce direct copies out of models that artists could be pursued for infringement if they drew, but companies reselling said copyrighted artwork face no penalty
#2, yes, it’s a group of people who came together to build an algorithm that learns to extract features learned from images made by other people in order to generate images somewhere between these images in a high dimensional space. They sell these images and give no credit or cash to the images being “interpolated” between. Notice this doesn’t extend to open source, it’s the commercial aspect that represents theft.
The reality is that laws are meant to be interpreted not by their letter but their spirit. The AI can’t exist without the hard work its trained on, and the outputs often resemble the inputs in a manner that approaches copying, so selling those outputs without compensation for the artists in the training set should be illegal. It won’t be, but it should.
> it’s extremely easy to coerce direct copies out of models that artists could be pursued for infringement if they drew, but companies reselling said copyrighted artwork face no penalty
The purpose of the model isn't to make exact reproductions. It's like saying you can use the internet for copyright infringement. You can, but it's the user who chooses the use, so is that on AT&T and Microsoft or is it on the users doing the infringement?
> They sell these images and give no credit or cash to the images being “interpolated” between.
A big part of the problem is that machines aren't qualified to be judges.
Suppose the image you request is Gollum but instead of the One Ring he wants PewDiePie. Obviously this is using a character from the LOTR films by Warner Bros. If you're PewDiePie and you want this image to use in an ad for your channel, you might be in trouble.
But Warner Bros. got into a scandal for paying YouTubers to promote Promote Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor without disclosing the payments. If you're creating the image to criticize the company's behavior, it's likely fair use.
The service has no way to tell why you want the image, so what is it supposed to do? A law that requires them to deny you in the second case is restricting a right of the public. But it's the same image.
Meanwhile in the first case you don't really need the company generating the image to do anything because Warner Bros. could then go after PewDiePie for using the character in commercial advertising without permission.
> Notice this doesn’t extend to open source, it’s the commercial aspect that represents theft.
It's also not really clear how this works. For example, Stable Diffusion is published. You can run it locally. If you buy a GPU from Nvidia or AMD in order to do that, is that now commercial use? Is the GPU manufacturer in trouble? What if you pay a cloud provider like AWS to use one of their GPUs to do it? You can also pay for the cloud service from Stability AI, the makers of Stable Diffusion. Is it different in that case than the others? How?
>It's like saying you can use the internet for copyright infringement.
I think that a comparison that could help to elucidate the problem here is to a search engine. Like with imagegen, an image search is using infrastructure+algorithm to return the closest match(es) to a textual input over some particular space (whether the space of indexed images or the latent space of the model). Immediately, however, there are qualitative differences. A search company, as an entity, doesn’t in any way take credit for the work; it bills itself as, and operates as, a mechanism to connect the user to others’ work, and in the service of this goal it provides the most attribution it’s reasonably able to provide given technical limitations (a url).
For me this is the difference. Image gen companies, at least all that I’m aware of, position themselves more as a kind of pseudo-artist that you can commission. They provide no means of attribution, rather, they deliberately obfuscate the source material being searched over. Whether you are willing to equate the generation process to a kind of search for legal purposes is really the core disagreement here, and beyond an intuition for it not something I feel I can prove.
So what’s the solution, what’s a business model I’d find less contentious? If an AI company developed a means to, for example, associate activation patterns to an index of source material, (or hell, just provided an effective similarity search between output and training data) as a sort of good-faith attribution scheme, made visible the training set used, and was upfront in marketing about its dependence on the source material, I’d struggle to have the same issues with it. It would be leagues ahead of current companies in the ethical department. To be clear though, I’m not a lawyer. I can’t say how image gen fits into the current legal scheme, or whether it does or doesn’t. My argument is an ethical one; I think that the unethical behavior of the for-profit imagegen companies should be hampered by legality, through new laws if necessary. I feel like this should answer your other questions as well but let me know if I missed something.
I guess I don't understand what you mean when you say companies reselling said copyrighted artwork face no penalty. Why wouldn't they? If I was to make a copy of a Studio Ghibli movie and sell it, I would absolutely face a penalty if I was caught.
A common joke is to type in a description of some corporate IP and have ChatGPT generate it without ever saying it directly. Plenty of people have paid a subscription to do that, generate corporate IP that an artist could be sued over, but I don’t believe OpenAI has faced any legal issues if I’m correct, just as an example.
I never thought it was unfair to artists for others to look at their work and imitate it. That seems to me to be what artists have been doing since the second caveman looked at a hand painting on a cave wall and thought, ‘huh, that’s pretty neat! I’d like to try my hand at that!’