> The court declined to dismiss copyright infringement claims against the AI companies.
That "major win" being allowed to proceed with the case at all. All they've done is clear the first hurdle meant to kill frivolous lawsuits before they get to discovery. Their other claims were dismissed:
> Claims against the companies for breach of contract and unjust enrichment, plus violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act for removal of information identifying intellectual property, were dismissed. The case will move forward to discovery, where the artists could uncover information related to the way in which the AI firms harvested copyrighted materials that were then used to train large language models.
It's so obvious to me that machine learning models are derivative works of their training set. If they weren't, then why would these companies fight so hard to say otherwise? They need that training data to make their product, so they should pay the licensing fees for it! 10 years ago, when I worked on a machine learning model for my employer, it was unthinkable to train on data we did not have the rights to use. But now it's all fair game because OpenAI executives would make a little less money otherwise? They certainly aren't giving up any of their own copyright in return. It's a very transparent transfer of power and money from regular people to the bosses.
> It's so obvious to me that machine learning models are derivative works of their training set.
Okay, but narrative creators watch movies and listen to music and read books too. Many do indeed "file the serial numbers off" other people's work and publish something else, that makes them money and not the original creators. Does one instance of "filing the serial numbers off" by one author mean that no authors anywhere are allowed to write any books as soon as they've read "a bunch" of other books? I get what you are saying, but it's not so obvious what the right policy is. It is very hard to make it consistent when "AI" is substituted with "human," and it's not so obvious if "AI" is a distinct class from human, because it is after all, something that only exists because a programmer somewhere wrote and operated it.
needing the training data has zero bearing on if they are derivative works. "derivative works" it a term of art with a specific meaning.
I think the derivative work argument is a dead end. However, AI companies did violate use licenses when they first used the data for commercial purpose of training the models.
IANAL. Is it legal to create derivatives of copyright work and then post them on public online forums? For example, I can certainly write, "Mickey Mouse got food poisoning from his Big Mac." But, if I ask an AI generator to "Make a picture of Mickey Mouse getting food poison at McDonald's", could I post the resulting picture?
I am also not a lawyer; I have some background and training in IP law as it pertains to engineering.
As far as I can tell, the image you describe and your example sentence are closer than you might think to each other. Mickey Mouse is a copyrighted character, and Disney could certainly claim infringement for both. Whether you have a fair use claim is down to the tenets of fair use, and whether they sue you is down to their estimation of how likely it is it'd be profitable for them to do so.
The context is generating images based explicitly on intellectual property. The problem is that most AI image generators allow IP as terms and/or they consumed IP to build their model, so they will return IP-based artworks.
If you're a business using the image and used IP terms in your prompt, then you'd need permissions from both parties (Disney, McDonald's) before you post it. If you're writing about AI rights, or making a comment on social media, then less likely you'll need it.
If your prompt was a cartoon mouse gets food poison at a fast food joint, you're off the hook. But if it returns Mickey Mouse at McDonalds, then the AI generator is still on the hook for using IP as a source.
Humans acquire a significant amount of knowledge (or get trained on) by learning from the work of others. If companies can face legal repercussions for training models on materials from elsewhere, a similar argument could be made for individuals.
This argument seems ridiculous to me but it's hard to explain exactly why.
People are people, LLMs are... not people - it seems pretty obvious to me that humans learning from seeing things is a basic fact of nature, and that someone feeding petabytes of copyrighted material into an AI model to fully automate generation of art is obviously copyright infringement.
I can see the argument making more sense if we actually manage to synthesize consciousness, but we don't have anything anywhere near that at the moment.
That human would become another artist whereas the model could potentially replace the entire industry. There’s a comparison to the Industrial Revolution to be made but it’s not one which convinces me. Making artistic dream jobs even more impossible to land is so cynical and shallow. It’s like building a supermarket in Yosemite.
I didn't realize you could train yourself on a lifetime's worth of YT videos every single day. (If salty sally had a problem with this statement, it's in the other articles on the HN front page right now, gf) The storage, recall, and scale required have always made this interpretation laughable - or rather, the kind of argument that seeks to privilege tools (and corporations) over people.
The plaintiffs are claiming that their art-style is copyrighted intellectual property and that they can sue image generators for damages if it creates an output that resembles theirs. Regardless of what you think about AI art, the precedent of this case will be a huge expansion of the power of IP and copyright law in the US mainly to the benefit of corporations - imagine Disney copyrighting the look of their 3D animated Pixar movies and suing anybody who tries to make a cartoony 3D animated movie for IP theft.
They're claiming that the models were trained on copyright material[1] and that training models doesn't constitute fair use[2]. Their claims are in the first couple of pages of the court ruling.
The claim is not that the style is copyrightable but that producing work in the same style could affect the market for the original product which is one of the parts of the four factor test for fair use. [3]
[1] Which ldo they were
[2] This is the big one and will have enormous ramifications if it ends up with the court ruling substantially in their favour
I doubt the artists really thought this through. If they "win" this AI would be driven into illegality in the west and the global south would not care one bit about those laws and will happily outcompete those very same western artists on very uneven ground.
Definitely concerning and I hope model trainers win. If push comes to shove developers can always go to jurisdictions with more forward looking copyright exemptions regarding text and data mining like Israel and Japan though.
There are no clean image models. Zero. Using today's model architectures, the problem of using non-expressly-permitted data for training is insurmountable. I welcome anyone more knowledgeable on the matter to go ahead and comment about a counterexample before downvoting.
So if the artists prevail, image generators are donezo. Open source, proprietary, whatever. People saying otherwise just don't know enough about how they work.
You have heard of Adobe's Firefly. It is not clean. Adobe uses CLIP, T5, or something for text conditioning. None of those things were trained on expressly permitted content. Go ahead and ask them.
Maybe you have heard of Open Model Initiative. They are going going to use CLIP or T5. They have no alternative.
There are not enough license bureau images to train a CLIP model, not enough expressly licensed text content to train T5. A CLIP model needs 2 billion images to perform well, not the 600m Adobe claims they have access to. It's right in the paper.
Good luck training a valuable language model on only expressly permissioned content. You'd become a billionaire if you could keep such an architecture secret. And then when it does exist, such as with some translation models, well they underperform, so who uses them?
What do people want? I don't really care about IP, I care about, who is allowed to make money? Is only Apple, who controls the devices and accounts, and therefore can really enforce anti-piracy, permitted to make money? Only parties with good legal representation? It's not so black and white, not so cut and dried, who the good guys and bad guys are. We already live with a huge glut of content and raised interest rates, which have been 100x more impactful to the bottom line - financial and creative - of working artists. Why aren't these artists demanding that the Fed drops rates, or that back catalog media be delisted to boost demand for new media? It's not that simple either! Presumably a lot of people using these image and video generators are narrative creators of a kind too, like video game developers, music video makers, etc. Are they also bad guys?
There's no broad solution here, the legal victory here is definitely pyrrhic, but one thing's for sure: Apple, NVIDIA, Meta and Google will still be printing cash. The artists are advocating for a position that boils down to, "The only moral creative-economic status quo is my status quo."
That CLIP is not data / sample efficient is well know, and research to improve this is ongoing. Here is a 2021 paper which outperforms a CLIP baseline, with 7x less data. https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.05208
I am sure there are more recent papers also, possibly with larger gains.
I do not see why Adobe would not be able to make a good CLIP like model with 0.6 billion images.
Where are you getting 2 billion from? The original CLIP paper says:
> We demonstrate that the simple pre-training task of predicting which caption goes with which image is an efficient and scalable way to learn SOTA image representations from scratch on a dataset of 400 million (image, text) pairs collected from the internet. [1]
OpenCLIP was trained on more images, but the datasets like LAION-2B are kind of low-quality in terms of labeling; I find it plausible that a better dataset could outperform it. I'm pretty sure that the stock images Adobe is drawing from have better labeling already.
I agree that this is likely to backfire on artists, but part of that is that I expect the outcome to be that large corporations will license private datasets and open research will starve.
Asking why the artists are mad at the corporations that are trying to profit off their labor without permission and not the fed or other artists is definitely a take.
> Using today's model architectures, the problem of using non-expressly-permitted data for training is insurmountable… So if the artists prevail, image generators are donezo.
This doesn’t follow. Using 2014’s model architectures, image generators were also impossible, but that didn’t prevent progress. The field is moving absurdly rapidly. Suggesting that because we can’t do it one way today, therefore we can’t to it that way tomorrow is like saying that because we couldn’t do it one way yesterday, therefore we can’t do it that way today.
It’s wild to trample people’s livelihoods because researchers haven’t figured out how not to yet, especially when that kind of research is making such quick progress. I’d rather wait a few years and have the best of both worlds.
> There are not enough license bureau images to train a CLIP model, not enough expressly licensed text content to train T5. A CLIP model needs 2 billion images to perform well, not the 600m Adobe claims they have access to. It's right in the paper.
Not an expert on this, but I wonder:
1) how many images you could create/buy/tag with a billion dollar investment, and
2) if you could lower the training requirements with targeted training data creation (e.g. get low-priced/amateur models to come in singly and in groups for an hour each and work through a catalog of poses/costumes designed to result very good generative model for "people").
I'm sure the artists don't give any care about the parts of the training that aren't directly related to generating images, such as models which generate captions for images.
CLIP is just for an embedding for images and text, right?
I might be getting mixed up…
The diffusion part is just trained with the images, and the guidance part… is trained to produce the image when given the additional information of the embedding of the text? I find it difficult to imagine how the information from the CLIP embedding of the text could result in much information about the images that CLIP was trained with, ending up in the generated images?
> There are no clean image models. Zero. Using today's model architectures, the problem of using non-expressly-permitted data for training is insurmountable.
"This would be hard to do while respecting licenses on creative works" is not an argument for being permitted to ignore those licenses.
I don't like copyright, but I strongly believe in everyone following the same rules. If AI companies are finding that copyright is inconvenient: welcome to the club, Open Source developers have been saying that for decades, and others have been saying it for centuries. There shouldn't be a special asymmetric exception for AI training that lets AI ignore licenses while everyone else cannot. By all means remove copyright restrictions for everyone, for all uses.
> So if the artists prevail, image generators are donezo.
And for exactly that reason I hope they prevail. Model training can start over and do it right this time.
Imagine OpenAI put all their code and all their work in a public repo so someone can modify it and sell it without permission. Oh wait... they wouldn't do that.
> Presumably a lot of people using these image and video generators are narrative creators of a kind too, like video game developers, music video makers, etc. Are they also bad guys?
Was their a dearth of video games or music videos before generative AI became mainstream? Yeah, creating takes resources and time and effort and dedication, usually for very little reward.
If these companies can't exist without stealing everyone else's work than maybe they should hire creators with their billions or license the material.
The level of cleanliness you talk about matters for FOSS people like us. The kinds of risks Adobe's Firefly customers might care about might be lower. They probably don't care that the model knows what the text string "C3-PO" means, but absolutely don't want it drawing random bits and pieces of other copyrighted images without being prompted for them.
My understanding was that CLIP handled prompt comprehension - like, there's a set of vectors in CLIP space for "gold humanoid robot" that "C3-PO" would map to from the small language model, and pictures of C3-PO would map to from the image model in CLIP. But the U-net doing the actual image diffusion wouldn't know how to fill that part of CLIP space with the specific copyrightable representation of the Star Wars character unless it'd been trained on the same set of images. It might generalize how to draw a gold robot, which is not a copyrightable image feature, but not C3-PO specifically.
It's entirely plausible that a court might say training CLIP on copyrighted material is OK, but training the VAE or U-net layers is not, based on the technical capability of each layer to reproduce trained-on material.
The moral arguments being bandied about by artists are broader than copyright. Firefly - or even a fully public-domain-trained model - cannot satisfy them. Being trained on is a moral insult, but they would still be insulted by AI bros and corporate stooges boasting about how AI can eliminate entire classes of artistic work. To be clear, the AI models we currently have - as well as those we will have in the future - are not useful tools for artists. The problem is not a lack of training data or the provenance of said data, it's the fact that text is not a good interface for visual artists.
It is, however, a very good interface for people who want artists to go away. What AI art is doing in 2024 is satisficing - i.e. providing viewers and users of art with a good-enough market substitute.
The bigger questions you raise about ownership are orthogonal to the questions of who gets to own the model. The artists opposing AI rightfully want to see tech companies bleed, because tech companies are the same companies who sold their bosses on the tools that steal their wages - e.g. streaming services that pay fractions of a cent if you're lucky. If AI were to prevail the alternative would then be to engage in copyright laundry in protest. e.g. "If you won't protect us against AI, then we'll weaponize it against the media conglomerates who want to use it to fire us with."
Frankly, I’m not convinced that a world in which generative AIs based on unlicensed data have to shut down is a bad thing. You want to create art, you learn to draw or hire someone who can. You want to create a story, you learn to write or hire someone who can.
> So if the artists prevail, image generators are donezo
Good. If it's impossible to make this particular type of image/whatever (it's not art) generator without exploiting all artists then that it shouldn't be allowed to be made.
You can have a kid, that kid can grow up to be a musician inspired by Taylor Swift, likely with some of their musical output having depended on Taylor's input. That's perfectly legal. But in a possible future, you could produce an AGI that isn't allowed to listen to Taylor Swift, never allowed to be inspired by anything from Taylor's songs?
AGI, I would hope, would be governed by different laws - including worker’s rights - so that the economic relationships between all parties is more similar to human relationships than LLMs.
In other words: turning Taylor Swift into a software product should be a different legal situation than raising a digital consciousness.
We're not at the AGI stage yet. Whether the AI is "inspired" is a poor direction to argue in.
A better question is whether a person who can legally do X without using a tool is legally allowed to do X using a tool. Can a musician who learns Taylor Swift songs make music similar to Taylor Swift songs? If so, then a non-musician should be able to use a tool trained on a body of songs including but not limited to Taylor Swift songs to generate "music" similar to Taylor Swift songs.
As always, it’s not what the thing is but what you do with it. If you click a spotify link and dance around your kitchen that’s okay. If you click a spotify link and put it into a commercial it’s not okay. Same thing for your scenarios. The legality question is about what your kid does with the music they heard.
If these AI companies get punished, this will be a great win for open-source model training. Looking forward to train models at home, maybe over a distributed, P2P network of open-source enthusiasts, using images off the Internet. Harder to sue and punish a decentralized ML-training coop!
throwup238|1 year ago
That "major win" being allowed to proceed with the case at all. All they've done is clear the first hurdle meant to kill frivolous lawsuits before they get to discovery. Their other claims were dismissed:
> Claims against the companies for breach of contract and unjust enrichment, plus violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act for removal of information identifying intellectual property, were dismissed. The case will move forward to discovery, where the artists could uncover information related to the way in which the AI firms harvested copyrighted materials that were then used to train large language models.
johnnyanmac|1 year ago
>Artists suing generative artificial intelligence art generators have cleared a major hurdle
Not "major win".
__loam|1 year ago
mc32|1 year ago
Ajedi32|1 year ago
(The "major win" in this case is that the court partially denied the defendants' motions to dismiss, so the case can now proceed to discovery.)
davexunit|1 year ago
doctorpangloss|1 year ago
Okay, but narrative creators watch movies and listen to music and read books too. Many do indeed "file the serial numbers off" other people's work and publish something else, that makes them money and not the original creators. Does one instance of "filing the serial numbers off" by one author mean that no authors anywhere are allowed to write any books as soon as they've read "a bunch" of other books? I get what you are saying, but it's not so obvious what the right policy is. It is very hard to make it consistent when "AI" is substituted with "human," and it's not so obvious if "AI" is a distinct class from human, because it is after all, something that only exists because a programmer somewhere wrote and operated it.
paulddraper|1 year ago
The question is whether they are transformative.
Right or wrong, the bar for transformative use is probably lower than you think.
Artists are the beneficiaries of this, as they can riff on popular works for inspiration, recognizability, social commentary.
Given the existing case law, I don't see a ruling against AI companies as likely.
jncfhnb|1 year ago
What kind of looney logic is this?
s1artibartfast|1 year ago
I think the derivative work argument is a dead end. However, AI companies did violate use licenses when they first used the data for commercial purpose of training the models.
aabajian|1 year ago
archontes|1 year ago
As far as I can tell, the image you describe and your example sentence are closer than you might think to each other. Mickey Mouse is a copyrighted character, and Disney could certainly claim infringement for both. Whether you have a fair use claim is down to the tenets of fair use, and whether they sue you is down to their estimation of how likely it is it'd be profitable for them to do so.
So what is fair use? https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107
Put simply, you have to argue about it in court and decide on a case by case basis, but the factors are:
The nature of use, such as for profit vs. non-profit.
The nature of the copyrighted work. Your art might be considere literary criticism. How central to that message is Mickey Mouse?
The amount and substantiality of the copyrighted work appearing in your work. Mickey Mouse is the sole feature, so large.
How likely is it that your Mickey Mouse creation will serve as a substitute for people consuming normal Mickey Mouse content?
radley|1 year ago
If you're a business using the image and used IP terms in your prompt, then you'd need permissions from both parties (Disney, McDonald's) before you post it. If you're writing about AI rights, or making a comment on social media, then less likely you'll need it.
If your prompt was a cartoon mouse gets food poison at a fast food joint, you're off the hook. But if it returns Mickey Mouse at McDonalds, then the AI generator is still on the hook for using IP as a source.
At least, that's where this is all going.
reactor|1 year ago
coffeecloud|1 year ago
So are there other examples of a human being allowed to do something where a machine made by a human is not allowed to do that thing?
I am allowed to go to a movie and remember every detail and tell it to my friends, but my camcorder is not allowed to do that.
p1necone|1 year ago
People are people, LLMs are... not people - it seems pretty obvious to me that humans learning from seeing things is a basic fact of nature, and that someone feeding petabytes of copyrighted material into an AI model to fully automate generation of art is obviously copyright infringement.
I can see the argument making more sense if we actually manage to synthesize consciousness, but we don't have anything anywhere near that at the moment.
silver_silver|1 year ago
CatWChainsaw|1 year ago
segasaturn|1 year ago
seanhunter|1 year ago
They're claiming that the models were trained on copyright material[1] and that training models doesn't constitute fair use[2]. Their claims are in the first couple of pages of the court ruling.
The claim is not that the style is copyrightable but that producing work in the same style could affect the market for the original product which is one of the parts of the four factor test for fair use. [3]
[1] Which ldo they were
[2] This is the big one and will have enormous ramifications if it ends up with the court ruling substantially in their favour
[3] https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/
0cf8612b2e1e|1 year ago
Or are there a few top ones specific to art style(photorealistic, scenery, pixel art, vectors, etc)?
washadjeffmad|1 year ago
Flux.dev is best in class for direction following oneshots, but it's still relatively glacial for volume, even with FP8. I haven't tried Schnell.
I'm using flux in comfy, so I expect performance will improve in another webui.
CaptainFever|1 year ago
jncfhnb|1 year ago
Paradigma11|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
artninja1988|1 year ago
CaptainFever|1 year ago
doctorpangloss|1 year ago
So if the artists prevail, image generators are donezo. Open source, proprietary, whatever. People saying otherwise just don't know enough about how they work.
You have heard of Adobe's Firefly. It is not clean. Adobe uses CLIP, T5, or something for text conditioning. None of those things were trained on expressly permitted content. Go ahead and ask them.
Maybe you have heard of Open Model Initiative. They are going going to use CLIP or T5. They have no alternative.
There are not enough license bureau images to train a CLIP model, not enough expressly licensed text content to train T5. A CLIP model needs 2 billion images to perform well, not the 600m Adobe claims they have access to. It's right in the paper.
Good luck training a valuable language model on only expressly permissioned content. You'd become a billionaire if you could keep such an architecture secret. And then when it does exist, such as with some translation models, well they underperform, so who uses them?
What do people want? I don't really care about IP, I care about, who is allowed to make money? Is only Apple, who controls the devices and accounts, and therefore can really enforce anti-piracy, permitted to make money? Only parties with good legal representation? It's not so black and white, not so cut and dried, who the good guys and bad guys are. We already live with a huge glut of content and raised interest rates, which have been 100x more impactful to the bottom line - financial and creative - of working artists. Why aren't these artists demanding that the Fed drops rates, or that back catalog media be delisted to boost demand for new media? It's not that simple either! Presumably a lot of people using these image and video generators are narrative creators of a kind too, like video game developers, music video makers, etc. Are they also bad guys?
There's no broad solution here, the legal victory here is definitely pyrrhic, but one thing's for sure: Apple, NVIDIA, Meta and Google will still be printing cash. The artists are advocating for a position that boils down to, "The only moral creative-economic status quo is my status quo."
jononor|1 year ago
ijk|1 year ago
> We demonstrate that the simple pre-training task of predicting which caption goes with which image is an efficient and scalable way to learn SOTA image representations from scratch on a dataset of 400 million (image, text) pairs collected from the internet. [1]
OpenCLIP was trained on more images, but the datasets like LAION-2B are kind of low-quality in terms of labeling; I find it plausible that a better dataset could outperform it. I'm pretty sure that the stock images Adobe is drawing from have better labeling already.
I agree that this is likely to backfire on artists, but part of that is that I expect the outcome to be that large corporations will license private datasets and open research will starve.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.00020
__loam|1 year ago
6gvONxR4sf7o|1 year ago
This doesn’t follow. Using 2014’s model architectures, image generators were also impossible, but that didn’t prevent progress. The field is moving absurdly rapidly. Suggesting that because we can’t do it one way today, therefore we can’t to it that way tomorrow is like saying that because we couldn’t do it one way yesterday, therefore we can’t do it that way today.
It’s wild to trample people’s livelihoods because researchers haven’t figured out how not to yet, especially when that kind of research is making such quick progress. I’d rather wait a few years and have the best of both worlds.
tivert|1 year ago
Not an expert on this, but I wonder:
1) how many images you could create/buy/tag with a billion dollar investment, and
2) if you could lower the training requirements with targeted training data creation (e.g. get low-priced/amateur models to come in singly and in groups for an hour each and work through a catalog of poses/costumes designed to result very good generative model for "people").
Dwedit|1 year ago
drdeca|1 year ago
I might be getting mixed up… The diffusion part is just trained with the images, and the guidance part… is trained to produce the image when given the additional information of the embedding of the text? I find it difficult to imagine how the information from the CLIP embedding of the text could result in much information about the images that CLIP was trained with, ending up in the generated images?
JoshTriplett|1 year ago
"This would be hard to do while respecting licenses on creative works" is not an argument for being permitted to ignore those licenses.
I don't like copyright, but I strongly believe in everyone following the same rules. If AI companies are finding that copyright is inconvenient: welcome to the club, Open Source developers have been saying that for decades, and others have been saying it for centuries. There shouldn't be a special asymmetric exception for AI training that lets AI ignore licenses while everyone else cannot. By all means remove copyright restrictions for everyone, for all uses.
> So if the artists prevail, image generators are donezo.
And for exactly that reason I hope they prevail. Model training can start over and do it right this time.
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
minimaxir|1 year ago
lancesells|1 year ago
> Presumably a lot of people using these image and video generators are narrative creators of a kind too, like video game developers, music video makers, etc. Are they also bad guys?
Was their a dearth of video games or music videos before generative AI became mainstream? Yeah, creating takes resources and time and effort and dedication, usually for very little reward.
If these companies can't exist without stealing everyone else's work than maybe they should hire creators with their billions or license the material.
kmeisthax|1 year ago
My understanding was that CLIP handled prompt comprehension - like, there's a set of vectors in CLIP space for "gold humanoid robot" that "C3-PO" would map to from the small language model, and pictures of C3-PO would map to from the image model in CLIP. But the U-net doing the actual image diffusion wouldn't know how to fill that part of CLIP space with the specific copyrightable representation of the Star Wars character unless it'd been trained on the same set of images. It might generalize how to draw a gold robot, which is not a copyrightable image feature, but not C3-PO specifically.
It's entirely plausible that a court might say training CLIP on copyrighted material is OK, but training the VAE or U-net layers is not, based on the technical capability of each layer to reproduce trained-on material.
The moral arguments being bandied about by artists are broader than copyright. Firefly - or even a fully public-domain-trained model - cannot satisfy them. Being trained on is a moral insult, but they would still be insulted by AI bros and corporate stooges boasting about how AI can eliminate entire classes of artistic work. To be clear, the AI models we currently have - as well as those we will have in the future - are not useful tools for artists. The problem is not a lack of training data or the provenance of said data, it's the fact that text is not a good interface for visual artists.
It is, however, a very good interface for people who want artists to go away. What AI art is doing in 2024 is satisficing - i.e. providing viewers and users of art with a good-enough market substitute.
The bigger questions you raise about ownership are orthogonal to the questions of who gets to own the model. The artists opposing AI rightfully want to see tech companies bleed, because tech companies are the same companies who sold their bosses on the tools that steal their wages - e.g. streaming services that pay fractions of a cent if you're lucky. If AI were to prevail the alternative would then be to engage in copyright laundry in protest. e.g. "If you won't protect us against AI, then we'll weaponize it against the media conglomerates who want to use it to fire us with."
dhosek|1 year ago
davexunit|1 year ago
Good. If it's impossible to make this particular type of image/whatever (it's not art) generator without exploiting all artists then that it shouldn't be allowed to be made.
__MatrixMan__|1 year ago
Just sayin, zero is a strong claim.
throwaway4837|1 year ago
RangerScience|1 year ago
In other words: turning Taylor Swift into a software product should be a different legal situation than raising a digital consciousness.
s1artibartfast|1 year ago
Imagine you write a book and release it with a non-commercial use license, but a company copies it and uses it for employee training.
Imagine you wrote software and released it with a non-commercial use license, but the company includes it in their for-profit workflow.
XMPPwocky|1 year ago
This case is not about sentient AGIs.
hn_acker|1 year ago
A better question is whether a person who can legally do X without using a tool is legally allowed to do X using a tool. Can a musician who learns Taylor Swift songs make music similar to Taylor Swift songs? If so, then a non-musician should be able to use a tool trained on a body of songs including but not limited to Taylor Swift songs to generate "music" similar to Taylor Swift songs.
rurp|1 year ago
6gvONxR4sf7o|1 year ago
warkdarrior|1 year ago
maxwell|1 year ago
Maybe this is more about stifling open source models.