Is training with user-generated content a way to launder copyrighted images? That is, if I upload an image of Ironman or whatever to my Facebook or Instagram page as a public post and Meta trains their model on that data, is there wording in my user agreement that says that I declare that I own the content, which then gives Meta plausible deniability when it comes to training with copyrighted material?
(apologies for the run-on sentence - it is early still)
They don't own the copyright, but they do have a "non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate, and create derivative works". https://www.facebook.com/help/instagram/478745558852511
Another method of copyright laundering is doing ML learning in a country where it doesn't protected under copyright law.
Personally, I'm on a side of using copyrighted data for machine learning input source doesn't violate copyright. Statistically, learned model for generative Ai doesn't retain even 1 bit of input. It's hard to say NN model data infringe any copyright of the input source. The copyright is applied to the expression, not the process. If the generative AI produces an image that's clearly a copy of a specific Ironman image which existed before the image generation, that's copyright infringement.
> When you share, post, or upload content that is covered by intellectual property rights (like photos or videos) on or in connection with our Service, you hereby grant to us a non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate, and create derivative works of your content (consistent with your privacy and application settings). This license will end when your content is deleted from our systems. You can delete content individually or all at once by deleting your account.
I think Meta is already assuming that there will be no liability for training with copyrighted material. I find it very unlikely that image owners will win the AI training battle.
It seems like this is still very much a legal gray area. If it's concretely decided in court that generative AI cannot produce copyrighted work then I assume it makes no difference what the source of the copyrighted training material was.
It's not a legal way to "launder" copyrighted images, because for things where copyright law grants exclusive rights to the authors, they need the author's permission, and having permission from someone and plausible deniability is not a defense against copyright violation - the only thing that it can change is when damages are assessed, then successfully arguing that it's not intentional can ensure that they have to pay ordinary damages, not punitive triple amount.
However, as others note, all the actions of the major IT companies indicate that their legal departments feel safe in assuming that training a ML model is not a derivative work of the training data, they are willing to defend that stance in court, and expect to win.
Like, if their lawyers wouldn't be sure, they'd definitely advise the management not to do it (explicitly, in writing, to cover their arses), and if executives want to take on large risks despite such legal warning, they'd do that only after getting confirmation from board and shareholders (explicitly, in writing, to avoid major personal liability), and for publicly traded companies the shareholders equals the public, so they'd all be writing about these legal risks in all caps in every public company report to shareholders.
Before anyone tries it out from the EU, be warned that it will push to make a Meta account and merge any Facebook/ Instagram profiles together and once you’ve finally bitten that bullet, it will tell you that it isn’t available in your region.
Several beautiful modal dialogs later, my Meta account has been linked to my Facebook account, my Oculus profile is now my Horizon profile, and I have chosen a publicly viewable(!?) display name for my Horizon profile (a profile for a game I have never played and never intend to play). I have been informed that my Oculus friends are now Horizon followers, given the chance to select "how social [I] want to be," asked to invite my Facebook friends to join Horizon -- and I still haven't generated an image. I almost feel like this image generator is somehow a long con to get people to update their Meta accounts.
I want to find the group of product managers responsible for this user journey and just... shake them out of it! The design you shipped is really dumb! None of this makes sense outside of Meta! There's a whole world out here! Nobody cares about Horizon Worlds!
Note that you need to "Log On" to Facebook/Meta/WhateverTheyCallThemselvesNow to try it. Kind of curious, but not curious enough to create yet another burner Facebook account.
Took 4 minutes to log in and do one generation. (Login to FB, then it took me through a process to merge accounts with Meta, which didn't sound good, so I restarted with 'sign in via email' which ended up doing the same thing anyway, I think. Then I was logged in, did the generation.)
My at a glance is that it's:
For image quality
1. Midjourney
2. Dall e 3
3. SDXL and this
For overall ease of use and convenience
1. Dall e 3
2. Midjourney
Of course, this is all biased personal opinion, and YMMV.
Given that FB & IG combined have ~0.5B photos uploaded daily, this effectively translates to training data from just a few days of user generated content.
But is it tiny with respect to the volume of data required to create a good model and the compute costs associated with the training and operation of that model?
If you ask it to generate an image of Taylor Swift, it refuses. But if you ask it to generate an image of a popular celebrity singer performing the song "Blank Space", it generates an image that looks exactly like Taylor Swift some fraction of the time.
I wonder if celebrity doppelgangers can't find modeling work. Like, without EVER referencing your celebrity twin, how closely can your work implicitly approach Swifthood before your free expression gets violated? To dramatize for effect:
Can you act in films? Or model a company's products like a guitar/microphone? Or genuinely start a band? Can your credits/band name reference you, if your given name is coincidentally also "Taylor Swift"? Can Facebook AIs train on your Facebook images, and produce a "celebrity female singer" images (with/without a "Blank Space" reference)? What if your LLM's purpose is strictly "parody, caricature, and images whose likeness is purely coincidental"? Can generative AIs have intention? Let alone intention to break copyright?
The consequences are endless in both kind/degree when pretending that "likeness" is some unique fingerprint. Ditto for thought-policing what (artificial or human) neural networks can learn from without paying royalties or whatever. It's all absurd.
What's more, our society must face these issues. We can't dismiss them as all hyperbolic catastrophizing about slippery slopes. Our system is already subjective, inadequate, and incapable of sorting itself out. The situation becomes more dire each day. Given our trend of sacrificing public interest for private greed (e.g. Disney's hatchet job on copyright), I'm worried about our future.
Because it’s trained on “real” people, will it be easier to generate ugly people? I have a hard time convincing DALL-E to give me ugly DnD character portraits.
> Because it’s trained on “real” people, will it be easier to generate ugly people?
In the literature, testing concepts in image generation is asking human graders "which image do you prefer more for this caption?," so the answer is probably no. You could speculate on all the approaches that would help this system learn the concept "ugly," and they would probably work, but it would be hard to measure.
Interesting. Unlike some other popular image generation training, is there a chance that Meta technically got copyright permission for many/most of the images that were posted to its properties?
I'm thinking: When the user who uploaded the image was also the copyright holder, that might've been covered by an agreement that technically permitted this use by Meta.
(Copyright isn't the only legal issue, though. For example, a person in a photo that someone else uploaded doesn't necessarily lose right to their likeness being used for every purpose to which a generative AI service might be put.)
Meta is asking me to log in with my facebook account. Then after authenticating with my FB account meta says I don't have a meta account.
Is this all some sort of scam to get me to click accept on whatever godforsaken ToS comes with a meta account? If the FB account is good enough to freakin AUTHENTICATE me then just use that ffs.
I'm not sure if they cut me off for generating too many images or because of the content of my images. Everything is now giving the response "This image can't be generated. Please try something else."
This only started after I put in the prompt manbearpig did 9/11. It was ok with some really weird stuff though
Really struggles with fingers, probably worse than any AI image generator I've seen so far. Maybe there aren't a lot of finger-showing images on IG and FB!
to me these innovations seem akin to Concept Cars in the Motor industry; there's some utility, until some executive takes it center-stage, and pisses-off most of the core users.
the biggest value in these networks is real User-generated content, you can't beat billions of real users capturing real content and sharing habitually.
even if wording in the Terms permit certain research/usage, you've got market and political climates to consider.
[+] [-] cowboyscott|2 years ago|reply
(apologies for the run-on sentence - it is early still)
[+] [-] sp332|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ezoe|2 years ago|reply
Personally, I'm on a side of using copyrighted data for machine learning input source doesn't violate copyright. Statistically, learned model for generative Ai doesn't retain even 1 bit of input. It's hard to say NN model data infringe any copyright of the input source. The copyright is applied to the expression, not the process. If the generative AI produces an image that's clearly a copy of a specific Ironman image which existed before the image generation, that's copyright infringement.
[+] [-] KaiserPro|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] glimshe|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sosodev|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PeterisP|2 years ago|reply
However, as others note, all the actions of the major IT companies indicate that their legal departments feel safe in assuming that training a ML model is not a derivative work of the training data, they are willing to defend that stance in court, and expect to win.
Like, if their lawyers wouldn't be sure, they'd definitely advise the management not to do it (explicitly, in writing, to cover their arses), and if executives want to take on large risks despite such legal warning, they'd do that only after getting confirmation from board and shareholders (explicitly, in writing, to avoid major personal liability), and for publicly traded companies the shareholders equals the public, so they'd all be writing about these legal risks in all caps in every public company report to shareholders.
[+] [-] zeruch|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] caesil|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SirMaster|2 years ago|reply
I don’t think there’s a question that people are allowed to upload photos like that.
[+] [-] raincole|2 years ago|reply
If you can[0］crawl materials from other sites, why can't you crawl from your own site?
[0]: "can" in quotes
[+] [-] FpUser|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onlyrealcuzzo|2 years ago|reply
Doubt it. If you upload child porn to Instagram and they distribute it - it's still an Instagram problem, AFAIK.
[+] [-] junto|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xnx|2 years ago|reply
One of many AI updates from Meta yesterday: https://about.fb.com/news/2023/12/meta-ai-updates/#:~:text=E...
[+] [-] Centigonal|2 years ago|reply
Several beautiful modal dialogs later, my Meta account has been linked to my Facebook account, my Oculus profile is now my Horizon profile, and I have chosen a publicly viewable(!?) display name for my Horizon profile (a profile for a game I have never played and never intend to play). I have been informed that my Oculus friends are now Horizon followers, given the chance to select "how social [I] want to be," asked to invite my Facebook friends to join Horizon -- and I still haven't generated an image. I almost feel like this image generator is somehow a long con to get people to update their Meta accounts.
I want to find the group of product managers responsible for this user journey and just... shake them out of it! The design you shipped is really dumb! None of this makes sense outside of Meta! There's a whole world out here! Nobody cares about Horizon Worlds!
[+] [-] floathub|2 years ago|reply
[edit: still learning to spell]
[+] [-] tikkun|2 years ago|reply
My experience:
Took 4 minutes to log in and do one generation. (Login to FB, then it took me through a process to merge accounts with Meta, which didn't sound good, so I restarted with 'sign in via email' which ended up doing the same thing anyway, I think. Then I was logged in, did the generation.)
My at a glance is that it's:
For image quality
1. Midjourney
2. Dall e 3
3. SDXL and this
For overall ease of use and convenience
1. Dall e 3
2. Midjourney
Of course, this is all biased personal opinion, and YMMV.
[+] [-] misja111|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tiffanyh|2 years ago|reply
Given that FB & IG combined have ~0.5B photos uploaded daily, this effectively translates to training data from just a few days of user generated content.
https://www.brandwatch.com/blog/facebook-statistics/#:~:text....
https://www.zippia.com/advice/instagram-statistics/#:~:text=....
[+] [-] acchow|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] next_xibalba|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ssss11|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dmazzoni|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] a_wild_dandan|2 years ago|reply
Can you act in films? Or model a company's products like a guitar/microphone? Or genuinely start a band? Can your credits/band name reference you, if your given name is coincidentally also "Taylor Swift"? Can Facebook AIs train on your Facebook images, and produce a "celebrity female singer" images (with/without a "Blank Space" reference)? What if your LLM's purpose is strictly "parody, caricature, and images whose likeness is purely coincidental"? Can generative AIs have intention? Let alone intention to break copyright?
The consequences are endless in both kind/degree when pretending that "likeness" is some unique fingerprint. Ditto for thought-policing what (artificial or human) neural networks can learn from without paying royalties or whatever. It's all absurd.
What's more, our society must face these issues. We can't dismiss them as all hyperbolic catastrophizing about slippery slopes. Our system is already subjective, inadequate, and incapable of sorting itself out. The situation becomes more dire each day. Given our trend of sacrificing public interest for private greed (e.g. Disney's hatchet job on copyright), I'm worried about our future.
[+] [-] WendyTheWillow|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PUSH_AX|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wobbly_bush|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] doctorpangloss|2 years ago|reply
In the literature, testing concepts in image generation is asking human graders "which image do you prefer more for this caption?," so the answer is probably no. You could speculate on all the approaches that would help this system learn the concept "ugly," and they would probably work, but it would be hard to measure.
[+] [-] hbossy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheCoreh|2 years ago|reply
Imagine with Meta Al isn't available in your location yet. You can learn more about Al at Meta in the meantime and try again soon.”
I wonder why it's region-locked?
[+] [-] lxgr|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philipov|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] astrange|2 years ago|reply
eg: "horse riding an astronaut", "upside-down mini cooper", "kanji alphabet soup".
[+] [-] brucethemoose2|2 years ago|reply
This is a interesting statement, as Stable Diffusion XL implementations vary from "worse than SD 1.5" to "Competitive with DALL-E 3."
[+] [-] neilv|2 years ago|reply
I'm thinking: When the user who uploaded the image was also the copyright holder, that might've been covered by an agreement that technically permitted this use by Meta.
(Copyright isn't the only legal issue, though. For example, a person in a photo that someone else uploaded doesn't necessarily lose right to their likeness being used for every purpose to which a generative AI service might be put.)
[+] [-] deegles|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Havoc|2 years ago|reply
Is this all some sort of scam to get me to click accept on whatever godforsaken ToS comes with a meta account? If the FB account is good enough to freakin AUTHENTICATE me then just use that ffs.
[+] [-] RegW|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mr_toad|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andsoitis|2 years ago|reply
An intelligence that knows a shit ton about a very very large number of people.
[+] [-] zoklet-enjoyer|2 years ago|reply
This only started after I put in the prompt manbearpig did 9/11. It was ok with some really weird stuff though
[+] [-] miguelazo|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neom|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] al_be_back|2 years ago|reply
the biggest value in these networks is real User-generated content, you can't beat billions of real users capturing real content and sharing habitually.
even if wording in the Terms permit certain research/usage, you've got market and political climates to consider.
[+] [-] nextworddev|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewstuart|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jafitc|2 years ago|reply