[thebooktocome]

Author conflates legal and ethical options for preventing copyrighted work from being used to train ML image generators.

There’s nothing legally inconsistent about passing a law saying, e.g., “ML training is not fair use”. Doing so will not even reduce existing fair use rights being exercised by actual people.

The author’s argument is that doing so is philosophically analogous to human creative processes, but those are—and I can’t underline this enough—human. And the law is not (and cannot be, should not be?) consistent in such a way.

[Jevon23]

People in the US forget that passing new laws is even an option because Congress is dysfunctional.

[msla]

> There’s nothing legally inconsistent about passing a law saying, e.g., “ML training is not fair use”.

Is it still fair use to take inspiration from another artist's work? How can the courts necessarily tell if the art was made using AI or if it's just someone stealing another artist's style? Theft of style isn't currently recognized under the law, but it could be.

[thebooktocome]

1. Yes. Always has been, within the ambiguous limits of fair use.

2. Discovery. https://www.americanbar.org/groups/public_education/resource...

Some variants of “theft of style” are recognized by some courts already, please see the legal literature on music copyright and the recent 7-2 SCOTUS decision on Warhol’s Prince series.

[diiq]

I absolutely agree that an arbitrary line can be drawn; I don't see that that line can be clear and bright enough that forms the kind of precedence that can be relied upon by folks who don't have the money to fight an uncertain battle in court.

But would be overjoyed to be proven wrong.

[thebooktocome]

Can you give an example of a “clear and bright” line in copyright law that does protect “folks who don’t have the money to fight an uncertain battle in court”?

For context, I’m in the process of translating a work that I know for a fact is in the public domain (sole author died 90+ years ago) and I’ve still got legal questions that I’m going to have to hire a lawyer to solve.