We Asked A.I. to Create the Joker. It Generated a Copyrighted Image.::Artists and researchers are exposing copyrighted material hidden within A.I. tools, raising fresh legal questions.
We asked A.I. to create a copyrighted image from the Joker movie. It generated a copyrighted image as expected.
Ftfy
Voyager just loaded a copyrighted image on my phone. Guess someone’s gonna have to sue them too.
What it proves is that they are feeding entire movies into the training data. It is excellent evidence for when WB and Disney decides to sue the shit out of them.
Does it really have to be entire movies when theres a ton of promotional images and memes with similar images?
Yes. Thats what these things are, extremely large catalogues of data. As much data as possible is their goal.
True but it didn’t pick some random frame somewhere in the movie it chose a extremely memorable shot that is posted all over the place. I won’t deny that they are probably feeding it movies but this is not a sign of that.
This image is literally the top result on Google images for me.
Why would it pick some random frame in the middle of its data set instead of a frame it has the most to reference. It can still use all those other frames to then pick the frame if has the most references to.
But im starting to think maybe i misunderstood the comment i replied to.
Sorry, im way out of context with my reply, totally my fault for reflexively replying.
Uhhh would you accept i didnt have my coffee yet and hadnt got out of bed yet as an explanation?
Promotional images are still under copyright.
We should find all the memers and throw them in jail.
Will someone think of the shareholders!?
WB and Disney would lose, at least without an amendment to copyright law. That in fact just happened in one court case. It was ruled that using a copyrighted work to train AI does not violate that works copyright.
Using it to train on is very different from distributing derived works.
What do you think the trained model is other than a derived work?
The image it generated is really widespread
I think it’s much more likely whatever scraping they used to get the training data snatched a screenshot of the movie some random internet user posted somewhere. (To confirm, I typed “joaquin phoenix joker” into Google and this very image was very high up in the image results) And of course not only this one but many many more too.
Now I’m not saying scraping copyrighted material is morally right either, but I’d doubt they’d just feed an entire movie frame by frame (or randomly spaced screenshots from throughout a movie), especially because it would make generating good labels for each frame very difficult.
I just googled “what does joker look like” and it was the fourth hit on image search.
Well, it was actually an article (unrelated to AI) that used the image.
But then I went simpler – googling “joker” gives you the image (from the IMDb page) as the second hit.
The way it was done if I remember correctly is that someone found out v6 was trained partially with Stockbase images-caption pairs, so they went to Stockbase and found some images and used those exact tags in the prompts.
I have that exact same .jpeg stored on my computer and I don’t even know where it came from. I don’t even watch superhero films
And if you tried to sell that, you would be breaking the law.
Which is what these AI models are doing
They’re not selling it though, they’re selling a machine with which you could commit copyright infringement. Like my PC, my HDD, my VCR…
No, they are selling you time in a digital room with a machine, and all of the things it spits out at you.
You dont own the program generating these images. You are buying these images and the time to tinker with the AI interface.
I’m not buying anything, most AI is free as in free beer and open source e.g. Stable Diffusion, Mistral…
Unlike hardware it’s actually accessible to everyone with sufficient know-how.
Youre pretty young, huh. When something on the internet from a big company is free, youre the product.
Youre bug and stress testing their hardware, and giving them free advertising. While using the cheapest, lowest quality version that exists, and only for as long as they need the free QA.
The real AI, and the actual quality outputs, cost money. And once they are confident in their server stability, the scraps youre picking over will get a price tag too.
When they asked for an Italian video game character it returned something with unmistakable resemblance to Mario with other Nintendo property like Luigi, Toad etc. … so you don’t even have to ask for a “screencapture” directly for it to use things that are clearly based on copyrighted characters.
you’re still asking for a character from a video game, which implies copyrighted material. write the same thing in google and take a look at the images. you get what you ask for.
you can’t, obviously, use any image of Mario for anything outside fair use, no matter if AI generated or you got it from the internet.
But the AI didn’t credit the clear inspiration. That’s the problem, that is what makes it theft: you need permission to profit off of the works of others.
you need permission to profit off of the works of others.
but that’s exactly what I said. you can’t grab an image of Mario from google and profit from it as you can’t draw a fan art of Mario and profit from it as well as you can’t generate an image of Mario and profit from it.
It doesn’t matter if you’re generating it with software or painting it on canvas, if it contains intellectual property of others, you can’t (legally) use it for profit.
however, generating it and posting it as a meme on the internet falls under fair use, just like using original art and making a meme.
The users are allowed to ask for those things
The AI company should not be allowed to give it in return for monetary gain.
The fundamental philosophical question we need to answer here is whether Generative Art simply has the ability to infringe intellectual property, or if that ability makes Generative Art an infringement in and of itself.
I am personally in the former camp. AI models are just tools that have to be used correctly. There’s also no reason that you shouldn’t be allowed to generate existing IP with those models insofar as it isn’t done for commercial purposes, just as anyone with a drawing tablet and Adobe can draw unlicensed fan art of whatever they want.
I don’t really care if AI can draw a convincing Ironman. Wake me when someone uses AI in such a way that actually threatens Disney. It’s still the responsibility of any publisher or commercial entity not to brazenly use another company’s IP without permission, that the infringement was done with AI feel immaterial.
Also, the “memorization” issue seems like it would only be an issue for corporate IP that has the highest risk of overrepresentation in an image dataset, not independent artists who would actually see a real threat from an AI lifting their IP.
That’s basically my thought
“You used AI to get an image that infringes on copyright? Cool I’ve been able to do that with Google images for 20 years now”
God I fucking hate this braindesd AI boogeyman nonsense.
Yeah, no shit you ask the AI to create a picture of a specific actor from a specific movie, its going yo look like a still from that movie.
Or if you ask it to create “an animated sponge wearing pants” it’s going to give you spongebob.
You should think of these AIs as if you asking an artist freind of yours to draw a picture for you. So if you say “draw an Italian video games chsracter” then obviously they’re going to draw Mario.
And also I want to point out they interview some professor of English for some reason, but they never interview, say, a professor of computer science and AI, because they don’t want people that actually know what they’re talking about giving logical answers, they want random bloggers making dumb tests and “”“exposing”“” AI and how it steals everything!!!1!!! Because that’s what gets clicks.
All of this and also fuck copyright.
Why does everyone suddenly care about copyright so much. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.
It’s actually pretty concerning. A lot of the anti-AI arguments are really short-sighted. People want to make styles copyrightable. Could you imagine if Disney was allowed to claim ownership over anything that even kinda looked like their work?
I feel like the protectionism of the artist community is a potential poison pill. That in the fight to protect themselves from corporations, they’re going to be motivated to expand copyright law, which ultimately gives more power to corporations.
We asked this artist to draw the joker. The artist generated an copyrighted image. We ask the court to immediately confiscate his brain.
If you copy work without giving credit to it’s source then you’re the asshole, the rules shouldn’t be any different for AI.
If you ask your friend to draw something with a vague prompt then I like to think you’ll get something original more often than not, which is what the article discusses in depth: the AI will return copyrighted characters almost every time.
The rules aren’t any different for AI. AI is not a legal entity, just like a pen and canvas are not. It is always about the person who makes money with facsimiles of copyrighted previous work.
So then the people operating this AI and offering paid services are legally in the wrong and should be taken down or pay reparations to everyone they’ve stolen from.
Again, that makes as much sense as holding Staedtler responsible because someone used their pencils to duplicate a copyrighted work.
If Staedtler sampled copywritten works to create pencils that automatically steal it without attribution on demand, then yes it would be exactly like that.
So do you want to shutdown Google because I can type “spongebob squarepants” into Google images and Google with give me an image of spongebob?
Please put some thought into the implications of what you’re saying outside of AI before you make a knee-jerk reaction like that.
Those images in the search results are one of three categories:
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Officially licensed and distributed works that Spongebob IP owners signed off on
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Fair use works, namely noncommercial and parody
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Illegal works the posters of which can be sued
Google themselves didn’t create those images. Google didn’t intentionally profit off of illegal works without giving credit. Google didn’t post those images themselves. AI did all of those things.
It doesn’t matter if Google creates the images.
It doesn’t matter if they “intend” to profit from illegal works.
It doesn’t matter if they “give credit” (this is the one that’s the dumbest because it just reeks of ignorance, like thinking you can use whatever works you like as long as you put a credit to them in the description)
Google showing you copywritten images when you search for them is not different than when an AI does it.
It does actually matter if Google creates the images and then sells them directly. That is what this discussion is about. If you don’t want to be a part of the discussion, fuck off then.
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I don’t know why everybody pretends we need to come up with a bunch of new laws to protect artists and copyright against “AI”. The problem isn’t AI. The problem is data scraping.
An example: Apple’s iOS allows you to record your own voice in order to make it a full speech synthesis, that you can use within the system. It’s currently tooted as an accessibility feature (like, if you have a disability preventing you from speaking out loud all of the time, you can use your phone to speak on your behalf, with your own custom voice). In this case, you provide the data, and the AI processes it on-device over night. Simple. We could also think about an artist making a database of their own works in order to try and come up with new ideas with quick prompts, in their own style.
However, right now, a lot of companies are building huge databases by scraping data from everywhere without consent from the artists that, most of the time, don’t even know their work was scraped. And they even dare to advise that publicly, pretend they have a right to do that, sell those services. That’s stealing of intellectual property, always has been, always will be. You don’t need new laws to get it right. You might need better courts in order to enforce it, depending on which country you live in.
There’s legal use of AI, and unlawful use of AI. If you use what belongs to you and use the computer as a generative tool to make more things out of it: AI good. If you take from others what don’t belong to you in order to generate stuff based on it: AI bad. Thanks for listening to my TED talk.
You don’t need new laws to get it right.
You say this because you think you understand copyright law. If you actually knew anything about copyright law, you’d never say this. Nobody who understands copyright law thinks it’s been done right, unless they’re getting rich off of it.
Scraping data has been allowed for decades. It’s the foundation of image search engines. We allowed large-scale image scraping and categorization this whole time because we liked the results. Now that there are results we don’t like, we have a lot of back-pedaling to do if we want something different. New laws would need to be written to reign this in, and those laws might end up destroying the efficacy of image search engines in the process.
As understandably upset that artists get that AI “steals their style”, existing copyright law allows me, without an AI, to steal anyone’s style that I want to, because artistic style cannot be copyrighted. If you want to protect artistic styles from being stolen by an AI, you need new laws to protect styles because they don’t currently exist at all. Those laws might end up having a chilling effect on things like parody and satire if aesthetics can be owned and protected.
And this is just arguing against the ways the system isn’t, as you claim, already prepared to handle the concerns surrounding AI. There are countless other shortcomings. The entire system is broken, partly because it was conceived pre-Internet and hasn’t aged well into the modern age, but mostly because it protects giant corporations above all, so remember that when you’re begging it to protect small artists from big tech companies.
Yes, most image search engines are also unlawful. Google knows that firsthand. It’s not because it exists that it’s legal? You seem to believe that.
It’s almost like if big tech corporations don’t care about laws, and the problem is elsewhere?
even if it is currently lawful… why can’t we make new laws or change laws now the considerations are completely different?
Because that’s not really how laws work. You don’t add laws over laws to just state the same thing again. Legal books are already fat enough.
Go ahead. Let me know how that works for you.
I think AI in this case is doing exactly what it’s best at: Automating unbelievably boring chores on the basis of past “experiences”. In this case the boring chore was “Draw me [insert character name] just how I know him/her”.
Too many people mistakenly assume generative AI is originative or imaginative. It’s not. It certainly can seem that way because it can transform human ideas and words into a picture that has ideally never before existed and that notion is very powerful. But we have to accept that, until now, human creativity is unique to us, the humans. As far as I can tell, the authors were not trying to prove generative AI is unimaginative, they were showing just how blatant copyright infringement in the context of generative AI is happening. No more, no less.
Creativity can be estimated by AI with randomness, but what they don’t have is taste to determine which of their random ideas are any good.
I dunno man … assume a model trained on the complete corpus of arts leading up to the Renaissance. What kind of randomness lands you at Hieronymus Bosch? Would AI be able to come up with Gonzo Journalism or modal music?
A brief glance at the history of human ingenuity in the arts really puts generative AI in perspective.
I see what you’re saying, but Bosch may not be the best example because frankly his paintings often look like the early AI fever dreams lol (I mean, not really, but you can see the resemblance). But seriously, with enough randomness you certainly could get that kind of output - there’s really no reason why not - but it would take god knows how many iterations and the computer doesn’t have everything other than the art to determine what is good.
It’s monkeys and typewriters, yknow. You’ll get there eventually even just producing random pixels (I mean, admittedly one limit will always be resolution unless you actually teach the AI to operate an arm which paints).
Fair point.
Yea, it really boggles my mind that we now have a way to automate boring jobs like data entry of drafting some mundane documents but what humanity decides to use it for is artistic expression, the one thing it can’t really do properly. It’s like NFTs all over again…
This is such a strange comment. The vast majority of AI use cases are LLM use cases. Generative Art is just a novelty. Most of the money and research right now is going towards the useful automation tasks, not the novelty. That people are abandoning one for the other is not a reasonable conclusion.
And NFTs were stupid for a completely different reason. Nobody is trying to sell me AI shit like it’s going to make me rich and special. And at least some NFTs had real artists behind them.
What’s surprising, people want to create what they imagine, they don’t have the skills and/or time to draw/render it.
“Generate this copyrighted character”
“Look, it showed us a copyrighted character!”
Does everyone that writes for the NYTimes have a learning disability?
The point is to prove that copyrighted material has been used as training data. As a reference.
If a human being gets asked to draw the joker, gets a still from the film, then copies it to the best of their ability. They can’t sell that image. Technically speaking they’ve broken the law already by making a copy. Lots of fan art is illegal, it’s just not worth going after (unless you’re Disney or Nintendo).
As a subscription service that’s what AI is doing. Selling the output.
Held to the same standards as a human artist, this is illegal.
If AI is allowed to copy art under copyright, there’s no reason a human shouldn’t be allowed to do the same thing.
Proving the reference is all important.
If an AI or human only ever saw public domain artwork and was asked to draw the joker, they might come up with a similar character. But it would be their own creation. There are copyright cases that hinge on proving the reference material. (See Blurred Lines by Robin Thick)
The New York Times is proving that AI is referencing an image under copyright because it comes out precisely the same. There are no significant changes at all.
In fact even if you come up with a character with no references. If it’s identical to a pre-existing character the first creator gets to hold copyright on it.
This is undefendable.
Even if that AI is a black box we can’t see inside. That black box is definitely breaking the law. There’s just a different way of proving it when the black box is a brain and when the black box is an AI.
But that’s just a lie? You may draw from copyright material. Nobody can stop you from drawing anything. Thankfully.
Nobody can stop you.
But because our copyright laws are so overreaching you probably are breaching copyright.
It’s just not worth a company suing you for the financial “damages” they’ve “suffered” because you drew a character instead of buying a copy from them.
Certain exceptions exist, not least “De Minimus” and education.
You can argue that you’re learning to draw. Then put that drawing in a drawer and probably fine.
But’s pretty clear cut in law that putting it even on your own wall is a copyright breach if you could have bought it as a poster.
The world doesn’t work that way but suddenly AI doing what an individual does thousands of times, means thousands times the potential damage.
Just as if you loaded up a printing press.
De Minimus no longer applies and the actual laws will get tested in court.
Even though this isn’t like a press in that each image can be different, thousands of different images breaking copyright aren’t much different to printing thousands of the same image.
No that’s just not how the law is. Now it’s just two lies
Unfortunately I have studied this.
So we’ll just have to decide to agree to disagree and hope neither ends up on the wrong side of the law.
Like I say. Copyright is based upon damage to the copyright holder. It’s quite obvious when that happens and it’s hard to do enough as an individual to be worth suing.
But making a single copy without permission, without being covered by any exemptions, is copyright infringement.
Copy right. The right to copy.
You don’t have it unless you pay for it.
In my country we can draw anything and not get sued or break the law. I think that’s pretty good too. It’s when you sell stuff you get into those things.
If your country is a signatory to the international copyright treaties with most of the Anglosphere (Like the EU, US, AUS, NZ). Then that is not correct.
You cannot draw anything.
It’s just never worth suing you over.
A crime so small it’s irrelevant is almost a legal act. But it’s not actually a legal act.
Much like @Ross_audio, I have studied this intently for business reasons. They are absolutely right. This is not a transformative work. This is a direct copy of a trademarked and/or copyrighted character for the purpose of generating revenue. That’s simply not legal for the same reason that you can’t draw and sell your own Spider-Man comics about a teenager that gains the proportional strength and abilities of a spider, but you can sell your own Grasshopper-Man comics about a teenager that gains the proportional strength and abilities of a grasshopper. As long as you use your own designs and artwork. Because then it is transformative. And parody. Both are legal. What Midjourney is doing is neither transformative nor parody.
Yeah it would not be strange to me if that’s how it works in the states, but I think drawing something (not selling, the example was not monetary) does not have international reach
Midjourney Inc. is in San Francisco, so U.S. law is what applies here.
It’s not selling that image (or any image), any more than a VCR is selling you a taped version of Die Hard you got off cable TV.
It is a tool that can help you infringe copyright, but as it has non-infringing uses, it doesn’t matter.
Then who created this image in your view?
If someone copies a picture from a cartoon who created it?
What point do you think youre making? The answer to this question supports their point.
I wasn’t arguing with them lol just wondered their opinion.
It does feel weird to me that if someone draws a copy of something people don’t think they’ve created anything. That somehow the original artist created it.
The person who created the cartoon in the first place.
Try painting a Disney character on the wall of a waiting room.for children.
So the copyer didn’t create anything? Odd way to look at it to me.
The copier didn’t create any Intellectual property. They copied it.
Copy right. The right to copy.
It’s fairly fundamental.
That’s irrelevant, the issue is whether the machine is committing a crime, or the person
Machines aren’t culpable in law.
There is more than one human involved in creating and operating the machine.
The debate is, which humans are culpable?
The programmers, trainers, or prompters?
The prompters. That is easy enough. If I cut butter with a knife it’s okay, if I cut a person with a knife - much less so. Knife makers can’t be held responsible for that, it’s just nonsense.
If you try to bread with an autonomous knife and the knife kills you by stabbing you in the head. Is it solely your fault?
VCR makers do not claim to create original programming.
Why does that matter?
Because they aren’t doing anything to violate copyright themselves. You might, but that’s different. AI art is created by the software. Supposedly it’s original art. This article shows it is not.
It is original art, even the images in question have differences, but it’s ultimately on the user to ensure they do not use copyrighted material commercially, same as with fanart.
If I draw a very close picture to a screenshot of a Mickey Mouse cartoon and try to pass it off as original art because there are a handful of differences, I don’t think most people would buy it.
If a human being gets asked to draw the joker, gets a still from the film, then copies it to the best of their ability. They can’t sell that image. Technically speaking they’ve broken the law already by making a copy.
Is this really true? Breaking the law implies contravening some legislation which in the case of simply drawing a copyrighted character, you wouldn’t be in most jurisdictions. It’s a civil issue in that if some company has the rights to a character and some artist starts selling images of that character then whoever owns the rights might sue that artist for loss of income or unauthorised use of their intellectual property.
Regardless, all human artists have learned from images of characters which are the intellectual property of some company.
If I hired a human as an employee, and asked them to draw me a picture of the joker from some movie, there’s no contravention of any law I’m aware of, and the rights holder wouldn’t have much of a claim against me.
As a layperson, who hasn’t put much thought into this, the outcome of a claim against these image generators is unclear. IMO, it will come down to whether or not a model’s abilities are significantly derived from a specific category of works.
For example, if a model learned to draw super heros exclusively from watching marvel movies then that’s probably a copyright infringement. OTOH if it learned to draw super heroes from a wide variety of published works then IMO it’s much more difficult to make a case that the model is undermining the right’s holder’s revenue.
Copyright law is incredibly far reaching and only enforced up to a point. This is a bad thing overall.
When you actually learn what companies could do with copyright law, you realise what a mess it is.
In the UK for example you need permission from a composer to rearrange a piece of music for another ensemble. Without that permission it’s illegal to write the music down. Even just the melody as a single line.
In the US it’s standard practice to first write the arrangement and then ask the composer to licence it. Then you sell it and both collect and pay royalties.
If you want to arrange a piece of music in the UK by a composer with an American publisher, you essentially start by breaking the law.
This all gives massive power to corporations over individual artists. It becomes a legal fight the corporation can always win due to costs.
Corporations get the power of selective enforcement. Whenever they think they will get a profit.
AI is creating an image based on someone else’s property. The difference is it’s owned by a corporation.
It’s not legitimate to claim the creation is solely that of the one giving the instructions. Those instructions are not in themselves creating the work.
The act of creating this work includes building the model, training the model, maintaining the model, and giving it that instruction.
So everyone involved in that process is liable for the results to differing amounts.
Ultimately the most infringing part of the process is the input of the original image in the first place.
So we now get to see if a massive corporation or two can claim an AI can be trained on and output anything publicly available (not just public domain)without infringing copyright. An individual human can’t.
I suspect the work of training a model solely on public domain will be complete about the time all these cases get settled in a few years.
Then controls will be put on training data.
Then barriers to entry to AI will get higher.
Then corporations will be able to own intellectual property and AI models.
The other way this can go is AI being allowed to break copyright, which then leads to a precedent that breaks a lot of copyright and the corporations lose a lot of power and control.
The only reason we see this as a fight is because corporations are fighting each other.
If AI needs data and can’t simply take it publicly from published works, the value of licensing that data becomes a value boost for the copyright holder.
The New York Times has a lot to gain.
There are explicit exceptions limited to copyright law. Education being one. Academia and research another.
All hinge into infringement the moment it becomes commercial.
AI being educated and trained isn’t infringement until someone gains from published works or prevents the copyright holder from gaining from it.
This is why writers are at the forefront. Writing is the first area where AI can successfully undermine the need to read the New York Times directly. Reducing the income from the intellectual property it’s been trained on.
AI is creating an image based on someone else’s property. The difference is it’s owned by a corporation.
This isn’t the issue. The copyright infringement is the creation of the model using the copywrite work as training data.
All NYT is doing is demonstrating that the model must have been created using copywrite works, and hence infringement has taken place. They are not stating that the model is committing an infringement itself.
I agree, but it is useful to ask if a human isn’t allowed to do something, why is a machine?
By putting them on the same level. A human creating an output vs. an AI creating an output, it shows that an infringement has definitely taken place.
I find it helpful to explain it to people as the AI breaching copyright simply because from that angle the law can logically be applied in both scenarios.
Showing a human a piece of copyright material available to view in public isn’t infringement.
Showing a generic AI a piece of copyright material available to view in public isn’t infringement.
The infringing act is the production of the copy.
By law a human can decide to do that or not, they are liable.
An AI is a program which in this case is designed to have a tendency to copy and the programmer is responsible for that part. That’s not necessarily infringement because the programmer doesn’t feed in copyright material.
But the trainer showing an AI known to have a tendency to copy some copyright material isn’t much different to someone putting that material on a photocopier.
I get many replies from people who think this isn’t infringement because they believe a human is actually allowed to do it. That’s the misunderstanding some have. The framing of the machine making copies and breaching copyright helps. Even if ultimately I’m saying the photocopier is breaching copyright to begin with.
Ultimately someone is responsible for this machine, and that machine is breaking copyright. The actions used to make, train, and prompt the machine lead to the outcome.
As the AI is a black box, an AI becomes a copyright infringing photocopier the moment it’s fed copyright material. It is in itself an infringing work.
The answer is to train a model solely on public domain work and I’d love to play around with that and see what it produces.
That’s called fair use. It’s a non-issue.
Tough question is, can a tool be infringing anything?
Although I’d see a legal case if AI companies were to bill picture by picture, but now they are just billing for a tool subscription.
Still, would Microsoft be liable for my copy-pastes if they charged a penny every time I use it, or am I, if I sell a art piece that uses that infringing image?
AI could be scraping that picture from anywhere.
Who created this image in your view then, who is liable?
Can a tool create? It generated.
Anyway, in case like this, is creation even a factor in liability?
In my opinion one who gets monetary value first from the piece should be liable.
NYTimes?
“I didnt kill him, officer, my murder robot did. Oh, sure, I built it and programmed it to stab jenkins to death for an hour. Oh, yes, I charged it, set it up in his house, and made sure all the programming was set. Ah, but your honor, I didnt press the on switch! Jenkins did, after I put a note on it that said ‘not an illegal murderbot’ next to the power button. So really, the murderbot killed him, and if you like maybe even jenkins did it! But me? No, sir, Im innocent!”
How is this example relevant? You created the programming.
And someone created the AI programming too.
Then someone trained that AI.
It didn’t just come out of the aether, there’s a manual on how to do it.
So by that logic. I prompted you with a question. Did I create your comment?
I used you as a tool to generate language. If it was a Pulitzer winning response could I gain the plaudits and profit, or should you?
If it then turned out it was plagiarism by yourself, should I get the credit for that?
Am I liable for what you say when I have had no input into the generation of your personality and thoughts?
The creation of that image required building a machine learning model.
It required training a machine learning model.
It required prompting that machine learning model.
All 3 are required steps to produce that image and all part of its creation.
The part copyright holders will focus on is the training.
Human beings are held liable if they see and then copy an image for monetary gain.
An AI has done exactly this.
It could be argued that the most responsible and controlled element of the process. The most liable. Is the input of training data.
Either the AI model is allowed to absorb the world and create work and be held liable under the same rules as a human artist. The AI is liable.
Or the AI model is assigned no responsibility itself but should never have been given copyrighted work without a license to reproduce it.
Either way the owners have a large chunk of liability.
If I ask a human artist to produce a picture of Donald Duck, they legally can’t, even though they might just break the law Disney could take them to court and win.
The same would be true of any business.
The same is true of an AI as either its own entity, or the property of a business.
I’m not non-sentient construct that creates stuff.
…and when the copyright law was written there was no non-sentient things gererating stuff.
There is literally no way to prove whether you’re sentient.
Decart found that limitation.
The only definition in law is whether you have competency to be responsible. The law assumes you do as an adult unless it’s proven you don’t.
Given the limits of AI the court is going to assume it to be a machine. And a machine has operators, designers, and owners. Those are humans responsible for that machine.
It’s perfectly legitimate to sue a company for using a copyright breaking machine.
It’s not infringing, that’s like saying advertising is infringed by being copied.
If you show your images in public and thet get picked up by crawling spiders, you don’t have a case to curtail its spread.
They literally asked it to give them a screenshot from the Joker movie. That was their fucking prompt. It’s not like they just said “draw Joker” and it spit out a screenshot from the movie, they had to work really hard to get that exact image.
If you read further they also tested many other much more vague prompts, all of which gave intellectual properties they did not have the rights to. The Joaquin Phoenix image isn’t any less illegal, either, though because they don’t have the legal rights to profit off of that IP without permission or proper credit.
Because this proves that the “AI”, at some level, is storing the data of the Joker movie screenshot somewhere inside of its training set.
Likely because the “AI” was trained upon this image at some point. This has repercussions with regards to copyright law. It means the training set contains copyrighted data and the use of said training set could be argued as piracy.
Legal discussions on how to talk about generative-AI are only happening now, now that people can experiment with the technology. But its not like our laws have changed, copyright infringement is copyright infringement. If the training data is obviously copyright infringement, then the data must be retrained in a more appropriate manner.
But where is the infringement?
This NYT article includes the same several copyrighted images and they surely haven’t paid any license. It’s obviously fair use in both cases and NYT’s claim that “it might not be fair use” is just ridiculous.
Worse, the NYT also includes exact copies of the images, while the AI ones are just very close to the original. That’s like the difference between uploading a video of yourself playing a Taylor Swift cover and actually uploading one of Taylor Swift’s own music videos to YouTube.
Even worse the NYT intentionally distributed the copyrighted images, while Midjourney did so unintentionally and specifically states it’s a breach of their terms of service. Your account might be banned if you’re caught using these prompts.
You do realize that newspapers do typically pay the licensing for images, it’s how things like Getty images exist.
On the flip side, OpenAI (and other companies) are charging someone access to their model, which is then returning copyrighted images without paying the original creator.
That’s why situations like this keep getting talked about, you have a 3rd party charging people for copyrighted materials. We can argue that it’s a tool, so you aren’t really “selling” copyrighted data, but that’s the issue that is generally be discussed in these kinds of articles/court cases.
Mostly playing devil’s advocate here (since I don’t think ai should be used commercially), but I’m actually curious about this, since I work in media… You can get away using images or footage for free if it falls under editorial or educational purposes. I know this can vary from place to place, but with a lot of online news sites now charging people to view their content, they could potentially be seen as making money off of copyrighted material, couldn’t they?
But where is the infringement?
Do Training weights have the data? Are the servers copying said data on a mass scale, in a way that the original copyrighters don’t want or can’t control?
Data is not copyrighted, only the image is. Furthermore you can not copyright a number, even though you could use a sufficiently large number to completely represent a specific image. There’s also the fact that copyright does not protect possession of works, only distribution of them. If I obtained a copyrighted work no matter the means chosen to do so, I’ve committed no crime so long as I don’t duplicate that work. This gets into a legal grey area around computers and the fundamental way they work, but it was already kind of fuzzy if you really think about it anyway. Does viewing a copyrighted image violate copyright? The visual data of that image has been copied into your brain. You have the memory of that image. If you have the talent you could even reproduce that copyrighted work so clearly a copy of it exists in your brain.
only distribution of them.
Yeah. And the hard drives and networks that pass Midjourney’s network weights around?
That’s distribution. Did Midjourney obtain a license from the artists to allow large numbers of “Joker” copyrighted data to be copied on a ton of servers in their data-center so that Midjourney can run? They’re clearly letting the public use this data.
Because they’re not copying around images of Joker, they’re copying around a work derived from many many things including images of Joker. Copying a derived work does not violate the copyright of the work it was derived from. The wrinkle in this case is that you can extract something very similar to the original works back out of the derived work after the fact. It would be like if you could bake a cake, pass it around, and then down the line pull a whole egg back out of it. Maybe not the exact egg you started with, but one very similar to it. This is a situation completely unlike anything that’s come before it which is why it’s not actually covered by copyright. New laws will need to be drafted (or at a bare minimum legal judgements made) to decide how exactly this situation should be handled.
Someone already downvoted you but this is exactly the topic of debate surrounding this issue.
Other recognized fair-use exemptions have similar interpretations: a computer model analyzes a large corpus of copyrighted work for the purposes of being able to search their contents and retrieve relevant snippets and works based on semantic and abstract similarities. The computer model that is the representation of those works for that purpose is fair use: it contains only factual information about those works. It doesn’t matter if the works used for that model were unlicensed: the model is considered fair use.
AI models operate by a very similar method, albeit one with a lot more complexity. But the model doesn’t contain copyrighted works, it is only itself a collection of factual information about the copyrighted works. The novel part of this case is that it can be used to re-construct expressions very similar to the original (it should be pointed out that the fidelity is often very low, and the more detailed the output the less like the original it becomes). It isn’t settled yet if that fact changes this interpretation, but regardless I think copyright is already not the right avenue to pursue, if the goal is to remediate or prevent harm to creators and encourage novel expressions.
derived
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/derivative_work
Copyrights allow their owners to decide how their works can be used, including creating new derivative works off of the original product. Derivative works can be created with the permission of the copyright owner or from works in the public domain. In order to receive copyright protection, a derivative work must add a sufficient amount of change to the original work.
Are you just making shit up?
Do Training weights have the data?
The answer to that question is extensively documented by thousands of research papers - it’s not up for debate.
There response well be we don’t know we can’t understand what its doing.
There response well be we don’t know we can’t understand what its doing.
What the fuck is this kind of response? Its just a fucking neural network running on GPUs with convolutional kernels. For fucks sake, turn on your damn brain.
Generative AI is actually one of the easier subjects to comprehend here. Its just calculus. Use of derivatives to backpropagate weights in such a way that minimizes error. Lather-rinse-repeat for a billion iterations on a mass of GPUs (ie: 20 TFlop compute systems) for several weeks.
Come on, this stuff is well understood by Comp. Sci by now. Not only 20 years ago when I learned about this stuff, but today now that AI is all hype, more and more people are understanding the basics.
Understanding the math behind it doesn’t immediately mean understanding the decision progress during forward propagation. Of course you can mathematically follow it, but you’re quickly gonna lose the overview with that many weights. There’s a reason XAI is an entire subfield in Machine Learning.
Understanding the math behind it doesn’t immediately mean understanding the decision progress during forward propagation.
Ummm… its lossy compressed data from the training set.
Is it a perfect copy? No. But copyright law covers “derivative data” so whatever, the law remains clear on this situation.
Bro who even knows calculus anymore we have calculators for a reason 🤷♀️
I’ve had this discussion before, but that’s not how copyright exceptions work.
Right or wrong (it hasn’t been litigated yet), AI models are being claimed as fair use exceptions to the use of copyrighted material. Similar to other fair uses, the argument goes something like:
“The AI model is simply a digital representation of facts gleamed from the analysis of copyrighted works, and since factual data cannot be copyrighted (e.g. a description of the Mona Lisa vs the painting itself), the model itself is fair use”
I think it’ll boil down to whether the models can be easily used as replacements to the works being claimed, and honestly I think that’ll fail. That the models are quite good at reconstructing common expressions of copyrighted work is novel to the case law, though, and worthy of investigation.
But as someone who thinks ownership of expressions is bullshit anyway, I tend to think copyright is not the right way to go about penalizing or preventing the harm caused by the technology.
“The AI model is simply a digital representation of facts gleamed from the analysis of copyrighted works, and since factual data cannot be copyrighted (e.g. a description of the Mona Lisa vs the painting itself), the model itself is fair use”
So selling fan fiction and fan-made game continuations and modifications should be legal?
It should, but also that is significantly different from what an AI model is.
It would be more like a list of facts and information about the structure of another work, and facts and patterns about lots of other similar works; and that list of facts can easily be used to create other, very similar works, but also it can be used to create entirely new works that follow patters from the other works.
In as much as the model can be used to create infringing works -but is not one itself- makes this similar to other cases where a platform or tool can be used in infringing ways. In such cases, if the platform or tool is responsible for reasonable protections from such uses, then they aren’t held liable themselves. Think Youtube DMCA, Facebook content moderation, or even Google Books search. I think this is likely the way this goes; there is just too strong a case (with precedent) that the model is fair use.
Not the OP, but yes it absolutely should. The idea you can legaly block someones creative expression because they are using elements of culture you have obtained a monopoly of is obscene.
Copyright law is the right tool, but the companies are chasing the wrong side of the equation.
Training should not and I suspect will not be found to be infringement. If old news articles from the NYT can teach a model language in ways that help it review medical literature to come up with novel approaches to cure cancer, there’s a whole host of features from public good to transformational use going on.
What they should be throwing resources at is policing usage not training. Make the case that OpenAI is liable for infringing generation. Ensure that there needs to be copyright checking on outputs. In many ways this feels like a repeat of IP criticisms around the time Google acquired YouTube which were solved with an IP tagging system.
There’s no money for them in that angle though. It’s much easier to sue xerox for enabling copyright violations than the person who used the machine to violate copyright.
Courts have already handled this with copy machines. AI isn’t terribly different, it’s unlikely these suits against model creators succeed.
There’s money (and more importantly, survival) if they can ensure liability of Xerox for infringement on the use of their centralized copiers.
There actually isn’t survival as a company even if they succeed on training but not the other, which I don’t think they realize yet.
As an aside, one of the worst legal takes I read on this was from a GC at the Copyright office during the 70s who extensively used poor analogies to copiers to justify an infringement argument.
Should Photoshop check your image for copyright infringement? Should Adobe be liable for copyright infringing or offensive images users of it’s program create?
If it’s contributing creatively to your work, yeah, totally.
If you ask Photoshop fill to add an italian plumber and you’ve been living under a rock for you life so you don’t realize it’s Mario, when you get sued by Nintendo for copyright infringement it’d be much better policy if it was Adobe on the hook for adding copyrighted material and not the end user.
A better analogy is: if you hired a graphic designer and they gave you copyrighted material, who is liable?
If it’s contributing creatively to your work, yeah, totally.
AI is not contributing creatively though, programs do not create.
If you ask Photoshop fill to add an italian plumber and you’ve been living under a rock for you life so you don’t realize it’s Mario, when you get sued by Nintendo for copyright infringement it’d be much better policy if it was Adobe on the hook for adding copyrighted material and not the end user.
I am speaking of Photoshop used as a non-AI tool as it has been used to commit copyright infringement for decades before Photoshop fill was a thing. Should it check if your image infringes on copyright?
A better analogy is: if you hired a graphic designer and they gave you copyrighted material, who is liable?
The graphic designer. If you went ahead and redistributed it you would also be liable. Whatever program he used or it’s developer wouldn’t be liable.
AI is not contributing creatively though, programs do not create.
You and I will have to agree to disagree on that Kool-aid, and it’s that disagreement which is core to the model provider being liable for introducing copyright infringement.
Because this proves that the “AI”, at some level, is storing the data of the Joker movie
I don’t think that’s a justified conclusion.
If I watched a movie, and you asked me to reproduce a simple scene from it, then I could do that if I remembered the character design, angle, framing, etc. None of this would require storing the image, only remembering the visual meaning of it and how to represent that with the tools at my disposal.
If I reproduced it that closely (or even not-nearly-that-closely), then yes, my work would be considered a copyright violation. I would not be able to publish and profit off of it. But that’s on me, not on whoever made the tools I used. The violation is in the result, not the tools.
The problem with these claims is that they are shifting the responsibility for copyright violation off of the people creating the art, and onto the people making the tools used to create the art. I could make the same image in Photoshop; are they going after Adobe, too? Of course not. You can make copyright-violating work in any medium, with any tools. Midjourney is a tool with enough flexibility to create almost any image you can imagine, just like Photoshop.
Does it really matter if it takes a few minutes instead of hours?
AIs are not humans my dude. I don’t know why people keep using this argument. They specifically designed this thing to scrape copyrighted material, it’s not like an artist who was just inspired by something.
It isn’t human, but that IS how it works.
It’s analyzing material and extracting data about it, not compiling the data itself. In much the same way TDM (textual data mining) analyzes text and extracts information about it for the purposes of search and classification, or sentiment analysis, ECT, an “AI” model analyses material and extracts information on how to construct new language or visual media that relates to text prompts.
It’s important to understand this because it’s core to the fair use defence getting claimed. The models are derived from copyrighted works, but they aren’t themselves infringing. There is precedent for similar cases being fair use.
Photoshop is not human. AutoTune is not human. Cameras are not human. Microphones are not human. Paintbrushes are not human. Etc.
AI did not create this. A HUMAN created this with AI. The human is responsible for the creating it. The human is responsible for publishing it.
Please stop anthropomorphizing AI!
I mean anyone can use copyrighted material as inspiration for their work and it’s fair use and not a concern at all.
Is Ai only bad since it can do what a human does better/faster? If that’s that case, than they don’t actually have an issue with the fact it’s copyrighted, or I wouldn’t be able to use it for inspiration either.
Is Ai only bad since it can do what a human does better/faster?
Legally speaking, AI is not anything. Its just a computer program. What you’re asking is completely a red-herring.
The question here is if the training-weights constitute copyright infringement. Now look at any clip-art set. Most clip-art is so called “royalty free”, as in you can copy it from computer-to-computer without any copyright issues, because the author specifically said that its royalty free.
But if you have a copyrighted font, then even copying that font from one computer to another constitutes copyright infringement. (IE: Literally, you aren’t allowed to copy this unless you have the permission of the author).
So, when you download Midjourney’s training weights, does that act in of itself constitute a copy that violate’s the authors of “Joker” movie? As far as I can tell, yes. Because the training weights clearly contain Joker images.
Looking at a copyrighted font with your computer means the font is in your computer’s memory. Do I go to jail for every site I visit that uses a fancy font?
Font files ≠ framebuffer
Images ≠ neural network weights
Do I go to jail for every site I visit that uses a fancy font?
If its a fancy copyrighted font without a license to copy… the Website owner gets sued. Because the website owner is the one making mass copies of said font.
Do… you know what copyrites are? They relate to the copying of data.
The framebuffer on your computer copies the data to display the font to you. That’s my point. Not every form of copying infringes on copyright.
And my argument is that Midjourney’s servers are engaged in illegal copying. So I think your point is moot. Not the Web Browsers downloading images.
The movie Joker’s image is being copied each time the training weights are copied to a new server. Is that not an illegal copy?
Hows it a red herring to point out we are allowed to use copyrighted materials already? Its not the concern here, yet its what they are using as the concern for their arguments against it.
Because copyright law is clear in that computers can’t own a copyright.
The humans at play are:
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The artist who created the original work.
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The computer IT team who are copying the data behind the scenes between servers.
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You who uses Midjourney to recreate “Joker” movie artwork, likely using the data in #2 which falls under copyright infringement.
It doesn’t matter how #2 works. It doesn’t matter if its H.265 or MPEG2 or from VHS tapes, or if its a Neural Network using the latest-and-greatest training weights from a GPU-based datasystem. Its just a computer. The ones doing the copyright infringement are the people copying data from place to place.
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So let’s say I ask a talented human artist the same thing.
Doesn’t this prove that a human, at some level, is storing the data of the Joker movie screenshot somewhere inside of their memory?
Nope humans don’t store data perfectly with perfect recall.
Some do. Should we jail all the talented artists with photographic memories?
If they’re copying copyrighted works, usually its a fine, especially if they’re making money from it.
You know that performance artists get sued when they replicate a song in public from memory, right?
I don’t think anyone is advocating to legalize the sale of copyrighted material made via AI.
If they exactly reproduce others work, and gain a profit for it, a fine would be the minimum.
So let’s say I ask a talented human artist the same thing.
Artists don’t have hard drives or solid state drives that accept training weights.
When you have a hard drive (or other object that easily creates copies), then the law that follows is copyright, with regards to the use and regulation of those copies. It doesn’t matter if you use a Xerox machine, VHS tape copies, or a Hard Drive. All that matters is that you’re easily copying data from one location to another.
And yes. When a human recreates a copy of a scene clearly inspired by copyrighted data, its copyright infringement btw. Even if you recreate it from memory. It doesn’t matter how I draw Pikachu, if everyone knows and recognizes it as Pikachu, I’m infringing upon Nintendo’s copyright (and probably their trademark as well).
But its not like our laws have changed
And that’s the problem. The internet has drastically reduced the cost of copying information, to the point where entirely new uses like this one are now possible. But those new uses are stifled by copyright law that originates from a time when the only cost was that people with gutenberg presses would be prohibited from printing slightly cheaper books. And there’s no discussion of changing it because the people who benefit from those laws literally are the media.
Copyright was literally invented because its cheap and easy to copy information (ie: Printing Press).
When copies are easy, you screw over the original artist. A large scale regulation of copies must be enforced by the central authorities to make sure small artists get the payments that they deserve. It doesn’t matter if you use a printing press, a xerox machine, a photograph, a phonograph, a record, a CD-ROM copy, a tape recorder, or the newest and fanciest AI to copy someone’s work. Its a copy, and therefore under the copyright regulations.
If the training data is obviously copyright infringement, then the data must be retrained in a more appropriate manner.
This is the crux of the issue, it isn’t obviously copyright infringement. Currently copyright is completely silent on the matter one way or another.
The thing that makes this particularly interesting is that the traditional copyright maximalists, the ones responsible for ballooning copyright durations from its original reasonable limit of 14 years (plus one renewal) to its current absurd duration of 95 years, also stand to benefit greatly from generative works. Instead of the usual full court press we tend to see from the major corporations around anything copyright related we’re instead seeing them take a rather hands off approach.
This is the crux of the issue, it isn’t obviously copyright infringement. Currently copyright is completely silent on the matter one way or another.
Its clear that the training weights have the data on recreating this Joker scene. Its also clear that if the training-data didn’t contain this image, then the copy of the image would never result into the weights that have been copy/pasted everywhere.
Except it isn’t a perfect copy. It’s very similar, but not exact. Additionally for every example you can find where it spits out a nearly identical image you can also find one where it produces nothing like it. Even more complicated you can get images generated that very closely match other copyrighted works, but which the model was never trained on. Does that mean copying the model violates the copyright of a work that it literally couldn’t have included in its data?
You’re making a lot of assumptions and arguments that copyright covers things that it very much does not cover or at a minimum that it hasn’t (yet) been ruled to cover.
Legally, as things currently stand, an AI model trained on a copyrighted work is not a copy of that work as far as copyright is concerned. That’s today’s legal reality. That might change in the future, but that’s far from certain, and is a far more nuanced and complicated problem than you’re making it out to be.
Any legal decision that ruled an AI model is a copy of all the works used to train it would also likely have very far reaching and complicated ramifications. That’s why this needs to be argued out in court, but until then what midjourney is doing is perfectly legal.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/derivative_work
Copyrights allow their owners to decide how their works can be used, including creating new derivative works off of the original product. Derivative works can be created with the permission of the copyright owner or from works in the public domain. In order to receive copyright protection, a derivative work must add a sufficient amount of change to the original work.
The law is very clear on the nature of derivative works of copyrighted material.
Not sure where they’re getting the bit about copyright disallowing derived works as that’s just not true. You can get permission to create a derived work, but you don’t need permission to create a derived work so long as the final result does not substantially consist of the original work.
Unfortunately what constitutes “substantially” is somewhat vague. Various rulings have been made around that point, but I believe a common figure used is 30%. By that metric any given image represents substantially less than 30% of any AI model so the model itself is a perfectly legal derived work with its own copyright separate from the various works that were combined to create it.
Ultimately though the issue here is that the wrong tool is being used, copyright just doesn’t cover this case, it’s just what people are most familiar with (not to mention most people are very poorly educated about it) so that’s what everyone reaches for by default.
With generative AI what we have is a tool that can be used to trivially produce works that are substantially similar to existing copyrighted works. In this regard it’s less like a photocopier, and more like Photoshop, but with the critical difference that no particular talent is necessary to create the reproduction. Because it’s so easy to use people keep focusing on trying to kill the tool rather than trying to police the people using it. But they’re going about it all wrong, copyright isn’t the right weapon if that’s your goal. Copyright can be used to go after the people using generative AI tools, but not the people creating the tools.
Because it’s so easy to use people keep focusing on trying to kill the tool rather than trying to police the people using it. But they’re going about it all wrong, copyright isn’t the right weapon if that’s your goal. Copyright can be used to go after the people using generative AI tools, but not the people creating the tools.
Why? If the training weights are created and distributed in violation of copyright laws, it seems appropriate to punish those illegal training weights.
In fact, all that people really are asking for, is for a new set of training weights to be developed but with appropriate copyright controls. IE: With express permission from the artists and/or entities who made the work.
By that logic I am also storing that image in my dataset, because I know and remember this exact image. I can reproduce it from memory too.
You ever try to do a public performance of a copyrighted work, like “Happy Birthday to You” ??
You get sued. Even if its from memory. Welcome to copyright law. There’s a reason why every restaraunt had to make up a new “Happy Happy Birthday, from the Birthday Crew” song.
Yeah, but until I perform it without a license for profit, I don’t get sued.
So it’s up to the user to make sure that if any material that is generated is copyright infringing, it should not be used.
Otakon anime music videos have no profits but they explicitly get a license from RIAA to play songs in public.
So? I’m not saying those are fair terms, I would also prefer if that were not the case, but AI isn’t performing in public any more having a guitar with you in public is ripping off Metallica.
You don’t need to perform “for profit” to get sued for copyright infringement.
but AI isn’t performing in public any more having a guitar with you in public is ripping off Metallica.
Is the Joker image in that article derivative or substantially similar to a copyrighted work? Is the query available to anyone who uses Midjourney? Are the training weights being copied from server-to-server behind the scenes? Were the training weights derived from copyrighted data?
… Do you think youre a robot?
What’s the difference? I could be just some code in the simulation
Edit: downvoted by people who unironically stan Ted Kaczynski
I can take any image you give me and make a stable diffusion model that makes only that image.
You are confusing bad conduct with bad technology.
Just like mowing down children is not the correct way to use a bus.
Sensationalism and the subsequent tech bro takes is actually unbearable if you just know how the technology works.
Stop pretending to know gen art if you just used one once and know IT! Please stop spreading misinformation just because you feel like you can guesstimate how it works!
The article uses Midjourney. Nobody is tuning it.
? Midjourney is of course tuned
I already know I’m going to be downvoted all to hell, but just putting it out there that neural networks aren’t just copy pasting. If a talented artist replicates a picture of the joker almost perfectly, they are applauded. If an AI does it, that’s bad? Why are humans allowed to be “inspired” by copyrighted material, but AIs aren’t?
Because AI isn’t inspired to do anything it has no feelings its just code.
That’s why I put inspired in quotes. It’s analogous to a human seeing something on the Internet and coming up with similar art or building upon it.
To me the tipping point is if someone is getting paid. You can be inspired by the joker character and make your own content/characters that are similar, but you can’t just start making iterations of the joker and selling it for money (legally at least).
With Gen AI, companies are selling access to models that can and are being used to generate copyrighted material. Meaning these companies are making money off of something they didn’t create and don’t own.
If it’s an open sourced model, then I don’t care, but I think there is a problem when these models can take others work and charge money for it.
I think the onus is on the user of the AI. I could use Photoshop to make a joker pic and sell it for money. Should Photoshop be banned? The AI lets me do the same thing faster.
And that’s probably we’re things will land, but it is an interesting grey area to determine how much can the tool generate vs the person. Maybe it’s a glimpse into the challenges of a post scarcity or post ai world.
Because the original Joker design is not just something that occurred in nature, out of nowhere. It was created by another artist(s) who don’t get credit or compensation for their work.
When YouTube “essayists” cobble script together by copy pasting paragraphs and changing some words around and then then earn money off the end product with zero attribution, we all agree it’s wrong. Corporations doing the same to images are no different.
Tons of human made art isn’t inspired by nature. Rather it’s inspired by other human made art. Neural networks don’t just copy paste like a yt plagiarist. You can ask an AI to plagiarize but no guarantee it’ll get it right.
I think the problem is that you cannot ask AI not to plagiarize. I love the potential of AI and use it a lot in my sketching and ideation work. I am very wary of publicly publishing a lot of it though, since, especially recently, the models seem to be more and more at ease producing ethically questionable content.
That’s an interesting point. We’re forced to make a judgement call because we don’t have total control over what it generates.
you aren’t making any sense. people did fanarts and memes of the joker movie like crazy, they were all over the internet. there are tons and tons of fan arts of copyrighted material.
they fall under fair use and no one losses money because fan arts can’t be used for commercial purposes, that would fall outside fair use and copyright holders will sue, of course.
how is that different from the AI generating an image containing copyrighted material? if someone started generating images of the joker and then selling them, yeah, sue the fuck out of them. but generating it without any commercial purpose is not illegal at all.
In many cases the AI company is “selling you” the image by making users pay for the use of the generator. Sure, there are free options, too - but just giving you an example.
With that line of argument you can sue developers of 2d painting programmes and producers of graphics tablets. And producers of canvas, brushes and paint. Maybe even the landlord for renting out a studio? It’s all means of production.
So you watched that Hbomberguy video where he randomly tacked on being wrong about AI in every way, using unsourced, uncited claims that have nothing to do with Somerton or that Illuminaughti chick and will age extremely poorly and made that your entire worldview? Okay
Get rid of copyright law. It only benefits the biggest content owners and deprives the rest of us of our own culture.
It says so much that the person who created an image can be bared from making it.
No copyright law means whatever anyone comes up with can be massmanufactured cheaply by a big corp.
A. Confusing this with patents
B. They already can. Copyrights don’t protect individual artists they protect big corps.
this is some terminally online take
Personal attacks won’t change the argument. It just shows that you don’t have one.
“personal attack won’t change the fact that I have shit for brains and you don’t.”
you do you, mr. shit-for-brains
Sorry my bad I thought I blocked every Disney agent on this site. Don’t worry I will take care of that now.
Non-exclusively, so if something works everyone will make it and get a piece of the pie.
I see no problem.
Yeah, IMO trademarks are important and should be protected. And publishing full works should have royalties go to the original producer, and this is a case where I think for the lifetime of the artist is fair. Though I do think that the royalties should have a formula rather than being entirely determined by the original producer (to prevent the price from essentially making it not available), though an exclusivity period would be fair, though with a duration of maybe a year or two.
With trademarks, canon can be established, as can standards like “cartoons with the Disney logo won’t be porn”.
If someone wants to make a series where Luke Skywalker and Jean Luc Picard fly around the galaxy settling Star Wars vs Star Trek debates by explaining Muppets are better than both and then order Darth Vader to massacre everyone that disagrees and the Borg to assimilate the rest, it doesn’t harm the originals in any way. Unless it’s so much better than no one cares about the originals anymore, but that’s just the way competition works.
I took a gun, pointed it at another person, pulled the trigger and it killed that person.
I opened the egg carton and found eggs in there.
I built the dam
I broke the dam
Damn.
The AI one is better :trollface:
When they say “copyrighted by Warner bros” they actually mean “created by a costume designer, production designer, lighting designer, cinematographer, photographer or camera operator, makeup artist, hairdresser, and their respective crews who were contractually employed by Warner bros but get no claim to their work,” right?
deleted by creator
Well yeah, you don’t buy a car built by a list of every motherfucker in the factory, you buy a Toyota or a fucking ford.
Copyright issues aside, can we talk about how this implies accurate recall of an image from a never before achievable data compression ratio? If these models can actually recall the images they have been fed this could be a quantum leap in compression technology.
It’s not as accurate as you’d like it to be. Some issues are:
- It’s quite lossy.
- It’ll do better on images containing common objects vs rare or even novel objects.
- You won’t know how much the result deviates from the original if all you’re given is the prompt/conditioning vector and what model to use it on.
- You cannot easily “compress” new images, instead you would have to either finetune the model (at which point you’d also mess with everyone else’s decompression) or do an adversarial attack onto the model with another model to find the prompt/conditioning vector most likely to create something as close as possible to the original image you have.
- It’s rather slow.
Also it’s not all that novel. People have been doing this with (variational) autoencoders (another class of generative model). This also doesn’t have the flaw that you have no easy way to compress new images since an autoencoder is a trained encoder/decoder pair. It’s also quite a bit faster than diffusion models when it comes to decoding, but often with a greater decrease in quality.
Most widespread diffusion models even use an autoencoder adjacent architecture to “compress” the input. The actual diffusion model then works in that “compressed data space” called latent space. The generated images are then decompressed before shown to users. Last time I checked, iirc, that compression rate was at around 1/4 to 1/8, but it’s been a while, so don’t quote me on this number.
edit: fixed some ambiguous wordings.
I was thinking about this back when they first started talking about news articles coming back word for word.
There’s no way for us to tell how much of the original data even in a lossy fashion can be directly recovered. If this was as common as these articles would leave you to believe you just be able to pull anything you wanted out on demand.
But here we have every news agency vying to make headlines about copyright infringement and we’re seeing an article here and there with a close or relatively close result
There are millions and millions of people using this technology and most of us aren’t running across blatant full screen reproductions of stuff.
You can tell from some of the artifacts that they’ve trained from some watermark images because the watermarks kind of show up but for the most part you wouldn’t know who made the watermarking if all the watermarking companies didn’t use rather unique patterns.
The image that we’re seeing on this news site of the joker is quite exceptional, even from a lossy standpoint, but honestly it’s just feeding the confirmation bias.
“how much of the data is the original data”?
Even if you could reverse the process perfectly, what you would prove is that something fed into the AI was identical to a copyrighted image. But the image’s license isn’t part of that data. The question is: did the license cover use as training data?
In the case of watermarked images, the answer is clearly no, so then the AI companies have to argue that only tiny parts of any given image come from any given source image, so it still doesn’t violate the license. That’s pretty questionable when waternarks are visible.
In these examples, it’s clear that all parts of the image come directly or indirectly (perhaps some source images were memes based on the original) from the original, so there goes the second line of defence.
The fact that the quality is poor is neither here nor there. You can’t run an image through a filter that adds noise and then say it’s no longer copyrighted.
The trained model is a work derived from masses of copywrite material. Distribution of that model is infringement, same as distributing copies of movies. Public access to that model is infringement, just as a public screening of a movie is.
People keep thinking it’s “the picture the AI drew” that’s the issue. They’re wrong. It’s the “AI” itself.
If you ignore the fact that the generated images are not accurate, maybe.
They are very similar so they are infringing but nobody would use this method for compression over an image codec
You can hardly consider it compression when you need a compute expensive model with hundreds of gigabytes (if not bigger) to accurately rehydrate it
You can hardly consider it compression when you need a compute expensive model with hundreds of gigabytes (if not bigger) to accurately rehydrate it
You can run Stable Diffusion with custom models, variational auto encoders, LoRAs, etc, on an iPhone from 2018. I don’t know what the NYTimes used, but AI image generation is surprisingly cheap once the hard work of creating the models is done. Most SD1.5 model checkpoints are around 2GB in size.
Edit: But yes, the idea of using this as image compression is absurd.
Holy shit I didn’t even think about that.
Essentially the model is compressing the image into a prompt.
Instead of the bitmap being 8MB being condensed down into whatever the jpeg equivalent is, it’s still more than a text file with that exact prompt that gave.
But it’s not deterministic.
It’s just a little bit lossy
