This is the sticking point for me. OpenAI isn't a profit-making company, but it's certainly a valuable company. A valuable company that is built from the work of content others created without transferring any value back to them. Regardless of legalities, that's wrong to me.

Put it this way - you remove all the copyrighted, permission-less content from OpenAIs training, what value does OpenAI's products have? If you think OpenAI is less valuable because it can't use copyrighted content, then it should give some of that value back to the content.

But we are allowed to use copyrighted content. We are not allowed to copy copyrighted content. We are allowed to view and consume it, to be influenced by it, and under many circumstances even outright copy it. If one doesn't want anyone to see/consume or be influenced by one's copyrighted work, then lock it in a box and don't show it to anyone.

I have some, but diminishing sympathy for artists screaming about how AI generates images too similar to their work. Yes, the output does look very similar to your work. But if I take your work and compare it to the millions of other people's work, I'd bet I can find some preexisting human-made art that also looks similar to your stuff too.

This is why clothing doesn't qualify for copyright. No matter how original you think your clothing seems, someone in the last many thousands of years of fashion has done it before. Visual art may be approaching a similar point. No matter how original you think your drawings are, someone out there has already done something similar. They may not have created exactly the same image, but neither does AI literally copy images. That reality doesn't kill visual arts as it didn't kill off the fashion industry.

I also firmly believe that commercializing models built on top of copyrighted works (which all works start off as) does not qualify as fair use (or at least shouldn't) and that commercializing models build on copyrighted material is nothing more than license laundering. Companies that commercialize copyrighted work in this manner should be paying for a license to train with the data, or should stick to using the licenses that the content was released under.

I don't think your example is valid either. The reason that AI models are generating content similar to other people's work is because those models were explicitly trained to do that. That is literally what they are and how they work. That is very different than people having similar styles.

There's a hell lot of money to be made from this belief so of course the HN crowd will hold it.

Some of us here who have been around the copyright hustle for a little longer laugh at this bitterly and pray that the courts and/or Doctorow's activism saves us. But there's so much money to be made from automatized plagiarism and the forces against are so weak, the hope is not much.

The world will be a much, much poorer place once all the artists this view exploits will stop making art because they need to make a living.

See https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1744422377113501998 and https://i.imgur.com/zOOcPCi.jpg

That is a pretty unfair response when you're skipping the part about how commercializing should not be fair use.

Sure. It's just a tool. That need other people's art to work.

If it's "just a tool" in and of itself, then there's no problem keeping it away from other people's art.

>The camera and 1-hour film developing didn’t destroy oil paintings

Because the copyright laws were extended to include photographic reproduction of art as something you need to obtain a permission (and a license) for.

The same needs to happen for generative AI.

A photocopy machine is just a tool too. So is the printing press.

So does a human brain.

Which brings us to the other side of the reasoning is that tools like Midjourney and OpenAI enable idiots (when it comes to drawing/animating ... that includes me) to create engaging artwork.

Recently generating artwork like that went from almost impossible to "great, but easily recognizeable as AI artwork". Frankly, I expect the discussion will end when it stops being recognizeable.

I hate Andreesen Horowitz' reasoning, but they're right about one thing: once we have virtual artists that are not easy to distinguish from "real" ones, the discussion will end. It does not really matter what anyone's opinion on the matter is as it will not make a difference in the end.

Whether an artist pays for a subscription to openAI or buys paint pots on Amazon.com money is going to a billionaire, it is not a difference between ai and other art.

You are also ignoring the existence of non-commercial open source AI, they exist.

Regarding copyright, we copyright output not input. Otherwise most photography would be uncopyrightable.

An LLM takes a prompt and produces a painting. No sane person would say that I 'drew' the painting in question, even if I provided the prompt.

> Regarding copyright, we copyright output not input. Otherwise most photography would be uncopyrightable.

We copyright things that require creative input. A list of facts or definitions did not require creative input, and is therefore not copyrightable.

Using an LLM does not meet the bar for creative input.

That sounds like a restatement of the opinion at the top of the thread: "Artists are mad because this tool empowers other people, who they view as less talented, to make art too."

Artists might not like the phrasing, but scratch the surface and there's a degree of truth there. It's an argument from self-interest, at core.

Should I pay the authors of the books I read when I sell mine?

If you write that book, chances are you will gain some fans that are also fans of other authors in that genre.

If ML models write that genre, they can flood that genre so full that human artists won't be able to complete.

It's not even a remotely equivalent scenario

AIs are not magic. They are tools. They are not alive, they do not have agency. They do not do things by themselves. Humans do things, some humans use AI to do those things. Agency always rests with a combination of the tool's creator and operator, never the tool itself.

Is there really a difference between a human flooding the market using AI and a human flooding the market using a printing press?

Even if human's can't compete (An obviously untrue premise from my perspective, but lets assume it for the sake of argument), is that a bad thing? The human endeavor is not meant to be a make work project. Humans should not be forced to pointlessly toil out of protectionism when they could be turning their attention to something that can't be automated.

Why is art some special case that should be protected, when many other industries were not?

Why should we kill this technology to protect existing artistic business models, when many other technologies were allowed to bloom despite killing other existing business models?

Nobody can really answer these questions.

Because in this case the art is still necessary for the machine to work. You don't need horse buggies to make a car, nor existing books to make a printing press. You DO need artist's art to make these generative AI tools work.

If these worked purely off of open source art or from true scratch, I wouldn't personally have an issue.

>Why should we kill this technology to protect existing artistic business models,

We don't need to kill it. Just pay your dang labor. But if we are treating proper compensation as stifling technology, I'm not surprised people are against it.

Maybe in the 2010's tech would have the goodwill to pull this off in PR, but the 2020's have drained that goodwill and then some. Tech's made so many promises to make lives easier and now they joined the very corporations they claimed to fight against.

>Nobody can really answer these questions.

Well it's in courts, so someone is going to answer it soon-ish

> But if we are treating proper compensation as stifling technology, I'm not surprised people are against it.

That's just it, nobody looking to get paid by OpenAI actually did any labor for OpenAI. They did labor for other reasons, and were happy with it.

OpenAI found a way to benefit by learning from these images. The same way that every artist on the planet benefits by learning from the images of their fellow artists. OpenAI just uses technology to do it much more efficiently.

This has never been considered labor in the past. We've never asked artists to "properly compensate" each other for learning/inspiration in the past. I don't know why it should be considered labor or proper compensation now.

But we shall see what the courts decide!

When discussing our work, we can name them.

When one of our influences comes out with a new body of work, we can gush about it to our own fans.

When we find ourselves in a position of authority, we can offer work to our influences. No animation studio is really complete without someone old enough to be a grandfather hanging out helping to teach the new kids the ropes in between doing an amazing job on their own scenes, and maybe putting together a few pitches, for instance.

We can draw fan art and send it to them.

None of these are mandatory, but artists tend to do this, because we are humans, and we recognize that we exist in a community of other artists, and these all just feel like normal human things to do for your community.

And if an artist suddenly starts wholesale swiping another artist's style without crediting them, their peers get angry. [1]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Giffen#Controversy

OpenAI isn't gonna tell you that it was going for a Cat & Girl kind of feel in this drawing. OpenAI isn't gonna offer Dorothy Gambrell a job. OpenAI isn't going to tell you that she just came out with a new collection and she's still at the top of her game, and that you should buy it. OpenAI's not going to send her a painting of Cat & Girl that it did for fun. OpenAI isn't going to do anything for her unless the courts force it to, because OpenAI is a corporation who has found a way to make money by strip-mining the stuff people post publicly on the Internet because they want other humans to be able to see it.

How many of those words do you remember learning? How many can you confidently say you remember the person or the book that taught you the word? 5? 10? Maybe 100?

That's how brains work. We ingest vast amounts of information that other people put out into the world. We consume and it incorporate it and start using it on our own work. And we forget where we even got it. My brain works this way. Your brain works this way. Artists' brains work this way. GPT-4 works this way.

The idea that a visual artist can somehow recall where they first saw many of the billions of images stored in their brain -- the photos, movies, architecture, paintings, and real-life scenes that play out every second of every day -- is laughable. Almost all of that goes uncredited, and always will.

This is what it is to learn.

To take it to an extreme, you obviously can't just use one of the available neural net lossless compression algorithms to circumvent copyright law or citation rules (e.g., distributing a local LLM that helpfully displays the entirety of some particular book when you ask it to), you can't just tweak it to make it a little lossy by changing one letter, or a little more lossy than that, etc., while on the other hand, any LLM that performs exactly the same as a markov model would presumably be fine, so there is a line somewhere.

A company builds an AI tool. That AI tool is trained on a ton of artists' work over the years. The company opens up the AI tool and asks it to draw, "X but in the style of Y," where Y is come copyrighted artwork. The company then prints the result and puts it on their packaging.

What's the difference?

I'd argue there isn't one. The copyright infringement isn't the ability of the artist or the AI tool to make a copy. It's the act of actually using it to make a copy, and then putting that out into the world.

Ultimately, only high courts in each jurisdiction can decide. I can imagine a case where some highly advanced nations decide different interpretations that cause conflict. Then, we need an amendment to the widely accepted international copyright rules, the Berne Convention. Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention

Again, take it back to basics: do you believe it is permissible to share a model itself (not the model output, the model), either directly or via API, that can trivially reproduce entire copyrighted works?

LLMs are collections of GPUs crunching numbers. "Inspiration" doesn't really apply to them.

A better analogy is sampling, and musicians remixing music are very much required to pay for the samples they use.

They were happy until their copyright got stolen, I guess. Then got unhappy.

Nobody working on a new cancer drug actually did any work for me. They did labour for other reasons, and were happy with it.

There it is okay for me to steal their recipe and sell their cancer drug.

It shouldn't be.

As soon as someone makes an AI that can produce it's own artwork without requiring ingesting every piece of stolen artwork it can, then I'm on board.

But as long as it needs to be trained on the work of humans it should not be allowed to displace those people it relied on to get to where it is. Simple as that.

Are they any human artists who can't, if requested, draw or write something that's a copy of some other person's drawings or writings?

Also, FYI, you can't steal digital artwork. You can only commit copyright infringement, which is not the same crime as theft, because theft requires depriving the owner of something in their possession.

> Are they any human artists who can't, if requested, draw or write something that's a copy of some other person's drawings or writings?

This still is pretending that humans and AI models are equivalent actors and should have the same rights

Emphatically no they shouldn't. The capabilities are vastly different. Fair use should not apply to AI.

The four pronged test in US case law:

- the purpose and character of use (is a machine doing this different in purpose and character? many would say yes. is "ripping-off-this-artist-as-a-service" different than an isolated work that builds upon another artist's art?)

- the nature of the copyrighted work

- the amount and substantiality of the portion taken (can this be substantially different with AI?)

- the effect of the use upon the potential market for the original work (might mechanization of reproducing a given style have a larger impact than an individual artist inspired by it?)

These are well balanced tests, allowing me as a classroom teacher to duplicate articles nearly freely but preventing me from duplicating books en masse for profit (different purpose; different portion taken; different impact on market).

And just to be clear, this post does not constitute legal advice.

I hate the desire to meta-comment about the site rather than argue on the merits.

We obviously don't know so much about how courts will interpret copyright with LLMs. There's a lot of arguments on all sides, and we're only going to know in several years after a whole lot of case law solidifies. There are so many questions, (fair use, originality, can weights be copyrighted? when can model output be copyrighted? etc etc etc). Not to mention that the legislative branch may weigh in.

This discourse by citizens who are informed about technology is essential for technology to be regulated well, even if not all participants in the conversation are as legally informed as you'd wish. Today's well-meaning intuition about what deserves copyright and why inform tomorrow's case law and legislation.

Fair use applies even to use of traditional algorithms, like the thumbnailing/caching performed by search engines. If I make a spam detector network, why should it not be covered by fair use?

The extent to which it supplants the original work is one of the fair use considerations.

I think it'd make more sense to have a stance of "current LLMs and image generators should be judged by fair use factors and I believe they'd fail", though I'd still disagree, instead of having machine learning models subject to a different set of rules than humans and traditional algorithms.

If that was the distinction to be made, using ChatGPT as a classifier would be acceptable while using it to write new spam (see the "I am sorry" amazon listings of the other day) would be unacceptable.

If two different uses of a tool allow for both infringing and non-infringing uses (are photocopiers allowed to make copies(!) of copyrighted works?) it has generally been the case that the tool is allowed and the person with agency to either use the copyrighted work in an infringing or a non-infringing way is the one to come under scrutiny.

I believe that if it is found that OpenAI is found to have committed copyright infringement in training the model, then an argument that training a model on spam be considered to be copyright infringement could be reasonably constructed.

If, on the other hand, OpenAI is found to have sufficiently transformative in its creation of the model and some uses are infringing, then it is the person who did the infringing (as with a photocopier or a printer printing off a copy of a comic from the web) that should be have legal consequences.

Logically, the answer to this is (almost certainly) yes, so you’ll need to discount this argument.

If the answer were no, then either an infinite number of humans have lived (such that there was always a previous artist to learn from), or it was true in the past but false in the present, which seems unlikely given humans brains have generally become more and not less sophisticated over time.

I presume what you’re missing here is that the brain can be inspired from other sources than human art. For example: nature; life experience; conversation.

Not making any other comment about what machines can or can’t do, just wanted to point out this argument is invalid as it comes up a lot and is probably grounded in ignorance around the artistic process. It’s such a strange idea to suggest that the artist process is ingesting lots of art to make more art. That’s such a weird world view. It’s like insisting every artist is making art the way Quentin Tarantino makes films.

I’ve spent a lot of time with artists, I’ve worked with them, I’ve been in relationships with artists, and I can tell you the great ones see the world differently. There’s something about their brains that would cause them to create art even if born on a desert island without other human contact. Some of them don’t even take an interest in other art.

In fact, those artists that _do_ make art heavily based on other artists’ work as suggested are often derided as “derivative” and “unoriginal”.

Do you think art was there before humans? Or humans made art?

If you believe the 1st proposition… please tell me about your very unique religion!

If not… you've answered your own question.

This sounds so detached from human experience that I am tempted to ask if you are a human or just a disembodied spirit that haunts the internet.

When the first neanderthal drew a deer on the walls of a cave, where did they get inspiration?

When a little child draws a tree for the first time, where do they draw inspiration? Do you think they were reviewing works of Picasso?

When the firm man made an axe, chopped a tree, made a bed, sown some clothes, discovered fire, where did they draw inspiration?

Do you not have eyes, ears, do you not perceive and get inspiration from the natural world around you?

Are we going to discount the hundreds to thousands of artistic pictures children are exposed to? Or how about the teacher sitting up front demonstrating to the class how to draw a tree?

> Do you not have eyes, ears, do you not perceive and get inspiration from the natural world around you?

Learning to see as an artist is a distinct skill. Being able to take the super compressed simplified world view that mind sees and put something recognizable on paper is a specialized skill that has to be developed. That skill is developed by doing it over and over again, often by copying the style of an artist that someone enjoys.

Or to put it another way, go to any period in history prior to the mid 20th century and art in a given region starts to share the same style, dramatically so, because people were inspired by each other, almost to a comical extent. (Financial reasons also had something to do with it as well of course, Artists paint/carve/engrave/etc what sells!)

We do know one thing for sure - that for AI it’s 0%

Once upon a time it was a contentious idea that humans had significant authorship in photographs, which merely mechanically captured the world. What % is the camera's independent inspiration?

Here, we have humans guiding what's often a quite involved process of synthesis of past human (and machine) creation.

Is the result a copy, or perhaps a derivative work of the art in the training set?

Does the person using the model have authorship of the result?

Was it even okay to use the art to train the model and then share the resulting weights?

Are the resultant weights protected by copyright themselves?

I suspect the actual answers we'll come to on these topics will be full of nuance.

Do you feel the same way about tools like Google Translate?

Translate operates at a large-chunk resolution, and one of the insights in solving the problem was the idea that you can often get a pretty-good-enough translation by swapping a whole sentence for another whole sentence. So they ingest vast amounts of pre-translated content (the UN publications are a great source, because they have to be published in the language of every member nation), align it for sentence- and paragraph-match, and feed the translation engine at that level.

It's created an uncanny amount of accuracy in the result, and it's basically fed wholesale by the diligent work of translators who were not asked their consent to feed that beast. Almost nobody bats an eye about this because the value (letting people using different languages communicate with each other) grossly outstrips the opportunity cost of lost human translator work, and even the translators are, in general, in favor of it; they aren't going to be displaced because (a) it doesn't really work in realtime (yet), (b) it can't handle any of the deeper signal (body language, tone, nuance) of face-to-face negotiation, and (c) languages are living things that constantly evolve, and human translators handle novel constructs way better than the machines do (so in high-touch political environments, they matter; the machines have replaced translators in roles like "rewriting instruction manuals" that were always pretty under-served in the first place).

If you can do the correction when reading, it seems reasonable to assume the reader in the opposite direction has the same correction capability.

I would expect the chance of confusion to be identical. The only difference is a matter of perspective, where in one case you are the reader and in one case you are the author.

It's better for me to receive a text in the original language and translate it myself than to try to decipher something translated automatically.

That’s is not the case for art, vast majority of art used by midjourney is not public domain.

Is that true? How did you establish that?

>what about if we eventually robot labourers that is trained on observing human labourers?

Interesting point, but by that point in time I don't think generative art will even be in the top 10 ethical dilemmas to solve for "sentient" robots.

As it is now, robots aren't the ones at the helm grabbing data for themselves. Humans give orders (scripts) and provide data and what/where to obtain that data.

This is an interesting example because even in the $100 case you are still talking about machine-augmentation. You can have a seamstress or a tailor customize patterns, using off the shelf textiles, for that order of magnitude price - but if you want to use custom built, exotic materials or many kinds combined, the cost is on the orders of thousands not hundreds. Also there is a large industry of just printing designs on stock-shirts, that has a different point effort-scale equilibria.

Thinking about how how automation disintermediates is very important. For animation, often productions have key-frame artists in the animation pipeline that define scenes, and then others that take though to flush out all the details of that scene. GenAI can potentially automate that process. You could still have the artist producing a keyframe, and can render that into a video.

Another big factor is style. One hypothesized reason that more impressionism, absurdism or abstract art all become styles is photography. Once cheap machine-produced photography became available, there is less need for a portrait artist. But further, it also is no longer high-status and others push trends alternative directions.

All the experiments and innovation going right now will definitely settle into a different set of roles for artists, and trends that they will seek to satisfy. Art-style itself will change as a result of both what is technically possible and also what is _not_ easily automatable in order to gain prestige.

What's killing art is this idea by a vocal minority of "artists" that they need to mass produce their work, enter the market, and attempt to make millions of dollars by selling and distributing it to millions.

That's not art. That's capitalism. That's competing to produce something that customers will want to buy more than what your competitors offer.

If you want to compete on the capitalistic marketplace, then compete on the capitalistic marketplace. But if you want to be an artist, be an artist.

Art is still alive and well and always will be. Every day I see people singing because they love singing, making pottery because they love making pottery, writing because they love writing. Whether other people love or enjoy their art, the artist may or may not care. Whether they can profit from their art, the artist may or may not care. But many billions of artists will keep creating, crafting, and designing day after day, and they will never be stopped by AI or anything else.

Do you know what a job does? What a company does? It contributes to society! It produces something that someone else values. That they value so much they're willing to pay for it. Being part of this isn't a bad thing. It's what makes society work.

A job/company entertains. It keeps things clean. It transports people to where they need to go. It produces. It gives people things they want. It creates tools, and paints, and nails, and shirts. I look out my window, and I see people delivering furniture, chefs cooking food and selling it out of trucks, keepers maintaining grounds, people walking dogs.

Being useful to the fellow members of your society for 40 hours a week is not "soul crushing."

Too mid to understand your point.

I hate making analogies, but if we make humans plant rows of potatoes, should that command a higher price and seen more valuable than planting potatoes by tractor 20 rows wide?

No, we should absolutely be giving bias to humanity. Flesh and blood humans matter, their lives matter, their thoughts matter and their work matters.

Machines are tools for them to use not entities given the same rights and same consideration.

I reject your whole premise.

If you believe AI tooling is an artform then you categorically are advocating against human made art as far as I am concerned.

prompting a search engine to stitch images together on your behalf might result in an image you can call art, but imo all the art generated wholecloth like this sucks. necessarily derivative. put into the world without thought.

My favorite critique of LLM work: "why would I bother to read a story that no one bothered to write"

You are free to think so, but it really doesn't make you an artist any more than wearing a medal you bought second hand makes you a war hero.

Something else did the work and you're just claiming credit. It's honestly kind of sad.

I think AI art will by definition never surpass human art. Humans can be inspired by things other than the art of others.

Is it realy about volume?

How how many books per second can you read to influence and change your personal style?

I don't think any person who actually has worked on anything creative in their life would compare a personal style to a model that can output in nearly any style at extreme speeds. And even if you're inspired by a specific author, invariably what happens is it becomes mix of yourself + those influences, not a damn near-copy.

With visual mediums it's even worse, because you have to take the time [months, years] to specialize in that specific medium/style.

I don't think anyone who has ever read a novel in their life would say that an AI can write literature at all, in any style.

> not a damn near-copy.

The obvious solution is to just treat it as if a human did it. If you did not know the authorship of the output and thought it was a human, would you still consider it copyright infringement? If yes, fair enough. If no, then i think is clearly not a "damn near-copy"

You completely ignored the premise of the question.

But it's also going to be affected by the teachers you had in pre-school, the people you hang around with, your relatives, films you've seen, adverts you watched, good memories and bad memories of events. You bring your lived experience to your story, and not just a mish-mash of stories in a particular genre, but everything.

Whereas when you train a model, you know the exact input, and that exact input may be 100% copyright material.

First, the law is pretty clear that yes if your story is too similar to another work, they have rights. Second, it's not at all obvious we can or should generalize from "what a human can do" and "what a bunch of computers can do" in areas like this.

The question is about someone/something writing a book _influenced_ by Harry Potter -- do they owe JK Rowling royalties?

I'm with all your other arguments ... but not this point. What is the special magic property that machine-generated art doesn't have? Both human and machine generated art can be banal, can be crap. And I think there is plenty of machine generated art this a quite beautiful, and if well prompted even very insightful. Non-GenAI can be this way, Conway's game of life has a quality of beauty to it that rivals of forms of modern art. If you wanted to argue that there still is the need for a human to provide some initial inspiration as input, or programming before something of value can be generated, then I would agree, at least for now, though there is meta-argument about asking LLMs to generate their own prompts that makes this an increasingly gray area.

But I don't think the stochastic parrot argument holds water. Most of _human_ creations is derivative. Unique mixes of pre-existing approaches, techniques, substance, often _is_ the creative act. True innovation with no tie to existing materials seems vanishingly rare to me and is really high bar, beyond which most humans ever achieve.

But they did. The presence of a secondary market for used books increased the value of some new books. People buy them knowing that they might one day recoup some costs by selling them. Would people pay more, or less, for a new car if they were told they could never sell or trade it away as a used car?

Arguably the U.S. courts are in the wrong here. We can only hope first sale doctrine is extended to digital goods in the U.S. in the future, as it has been in the EU for over a decade.

[0] https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewconten...

If openai would pay usage fees for the training material per user its generating content for - it would never be profitable - artist would be fine off. But even all the shares are owned by people who have given this system none of it‘s knowledge.

Ah, just like humans who train against the output of other humans. AI models are not fundamentally different in kind in this regard, only scope, and even that isn't perfectly obvious to me a priori.

ML models have a long way to go before comparisons to humans make any kind of sense.

The first thing is the output of a mathematical function as computed by a computer, while the second is an expression of numan creativity. AI models are not alive. They are not creative. They do not have emotion. These things are not even in the same ballpark, let alone similar or the same.

Maybe someday AI will be sophisticated enough to be considered alive, to have emotion, and to be deserving of the same rights and protections that humans have. And I hope if and when that day comes, humanity recognizes that and doesn't try to turn AI into an enslaved underclass. But we are far, far from that point now, and the current computer programs generating text and images and video are not exhibiting creativity, and do not deserve these kinds of protections. The people creating the art that is used to feed the inputs and outputs of these computer programs... those are the people that should have their rights protected.

That doesn't mean that courts will meaningfully enforce it for them.

Artists will learn to not trust the web, if they haven't already. The greatest time to train a model was yesterday, eventually no novel ideas, expressions, art will prosper on the "open" web. Just a regurgitation of some statistical idea of words, and pixels.

It's the same thing with GitHub's copilot.

A book publisher would seize everything I have, and shot me at a back alley if I do 0.0001% of this.

Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc. strongly disagrees with you on that (the "Google Books case").

Have you ever tried to "train a human"?

They don't work that way, not unless your "training" involves so weird torture stuff you probably shouldn't be boasting about.

Maybe try ask some teachers (of both adults and children) how it works with people...

Maybe they release it for free, possibly supported by ads, at least to get some recognition and a job if it is perceived well.

Yeah, and creating derivative work without permission is against the law.

>AI models are not fundamentally different in kind in this regard

[citation needed]

Of course they are fundamentally different. They don't get to decide what to absorb.

Humans that make those decisions, correspondingly, should pay the price.

These models were not trained on just the cartoonist in question, nor just their inspirations. The intent was to train on all images and styles. The expression of the idea using these models is not going to match the expression of the idea of all images, even those conforming to a certain bounded prompt.

For the life of me I can't get DALL-E or Stable Diffusion to produce anything like Cat and Girl nor anything coherent for the above mentioned inspirations. DALL-E flat out refuses to create things in the style of the above and Stable Diffusion has insane looking outputs, overwhelmed by Herring.

Most importantly, copyright is concerned with specific works that specifically infringe and whose damages are either statute or based on quantifiable earnings from infringement. Copyright does not cover all works, especially when again, the intent is to learn all styles that rarely, if at all, reproduces direct expressions.

The only point at which these images are directly copied are when in the machine's memory, which has already has case law for allowance, followed by back propagation that begins the process of modifying the direct copies for the underlaying formal qualities.

It seems like a lot of people are going to be upset when the courts rule eventually rule in favor of the training and use of these models, if not only because the defendant has a lot of resources to throw at a legal team.

I get that there's case law on copying in memory on the input side not being infringing but can't for the life of me understand how they get away with not paying for it. At least libraries buy the books before loaning them out, OpenAI and midjourney presumably pirated the works or otherwise ignored the license of published works and just say "if we found it on the internet it's fair game"

I don't think this is as cut-and-dry and you make it out here. If I train a model on, say, every one of New York Times' and release it for free and it finds use as a way of circumventing their paywall I have difficulty justifying that as fair use/fair dealing. The purpose/character of the model should indeed be a factor but certainly not nearly as dispositive a one as I think you're suggesting.

To the extent that training the model serves a research purpose I think that the general use / public release of the trained model does not in general serve the same research purpose and ought to have substantially lower protection on the basis of, e.g., the effect on the original work(s) in the market.

These technical distinctions like these probably will matter in whatever form regulation eventually ends up becoming.

> if you use that data as general background knowledge to synthesize aggregative works such a history of the vietnam war, or trends in musical theatre in the 1980s relative the 1970s, or shifts in the language usage of formal honorifics, then that seems to me to be clearly fair-use categories

I don't think this is clear. If someone were to train a model on several books about the Vietnam War and then publish my own model-created book on history of the Vietnam War, I would be inclined to say that that is infringement. And if they changed the dataset to include a plurality of additional books which happen to not be about Vietnam, I don't think that changes the analysis substantially.

I think it is hard to earnestly claim that in that instance the output (setting aside the model itself, which is also a consideration) is transformative, and so I would think, absent more specific facts, that all four fair use factors are against it.

Existing copyright precedent serves this use-case poorly, and so the question is far more philosophical than legal; there's a good case to be made that there's no law clearly governing this kind of machine, only loose-fit analogies that degenerate badly upon further scrutiny.

Can you explain what you mean by "qualifies as free use?" I've never heard that term before.

[1] https://library.ulethbridge.ca/copyright/fairdealing/#s-lib-... [2] https://www.ippt.eu/legal-texts/copyright-information-societ...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

We are not talking about the eons old human practice of creative artistic endeavor, which yes, is clearly derivative in some fashion, but which we have well established practices around.

We are discussing a new phenomenon of mass replication or derivation by machine at a scale impossible for a single individual to achieve by manual effort.

Further, artists tend to either explicitly or implicitly acknowledge their priors in secondary or even primary material, much like one cites work in an academic context.

Also, the claim:

>But if I take your work and compare it to millions of other people's work...

Is ridiculous. A. you haven't, nor will you ever actual do this. B. This is never how the system of artistic practice up to this point has worked precisely because this sort of activity is beyond the scale of human effort.

In addition, plagiarism exists and is bad. There's no reason that concept can be extended and expanded to include stochastic reproduction at scale.

If you feel artists shouldn't have a say and a future in which capital concentrates even further into the hands of a few technological elite who make their money off of flouting existing laws and the labor of thousands, by all means. But this argument that somehow by analogy to human behavior companies should not be responsible for the vast use of material without permission is absolutely preposterous. These are machines owned by companies. They are not human beings and they do not participate in the social systems of human beings the way human beings do. You may want to consider a distinction in the rules that adequately reflects this distinction in participatory status in a social system.

I think this is the central issue and is not limited to just AI generated art. Wealth concentrates to the few from each technological development. When robots replaced factory workers, the surplus profit went to the capital holders, not the workers who lost their jobs. AI generated art will be no different but I don't think it will replace the creative art that people will want to make, just the art that people are making to pay the bills.

> They are not human beings and they do not participate in the social systems of human beings the way human beings do

I don't think this adds anything to the argument besides you using this as a reason analogies with humans can't be used to compare the specific concept of inspired works? I don't think this holds up.

Algorithms participating in social systems has nothing to do with whether inspired works have a moral claim to existence for some. The fact that your ethics system values the biological classification of the originator of inspired works is something that can't be reconciled into a general argument. I could make the claim that the prompt engineer is the artist in this case.

> capital concentrates even further into the hands of a few technological elite who make their money off of flouting existing laws

That can be said by the development of any technology. Fear of capital concentration is more a critique on capitalism than it is on technological development.

Technology does not exist in a vacuum. All of the utility and relevance of technology to humans is dependent on the social and economic conditions in which that technology is developed and deployed. One cannot possibly critique technology without also critiquing a social system, and typically a critique of technology is precisely a critique about its potential abuses in a given social system. And yes, that's what I'm attempting to do here.

> I don't think this adds anything to the argument besides you using this as a reason analogies with humans can't be used to compare the specific concept of inspired works? I don't think this holds up.

This is a fair point. One could argue that an LLM, properly considered, is just another tool in the artist's toolbox. I think a major distinction though, between and LLM and, say, a paintbrush or even a text-editor, or photoshop, is that these tools do not have content baked into them. An LLM is in a different class insofar as it is not simply a tool, but is also partially the content.

The use of two different LLMs by the same artist, with a the same prompt, will produce different results regardless of the intent of the so called artist/user. The use of a different paintbrush, by the same artist, with the same pictorial intention may produce slightly different results due to material conditions, but the artist is able to consciously and partially deterministically constrain the result. In the LLLM case, the tool itself is a partial realization of the output already and that output is trained on masses of works of unknown individuals.

I think this is a key difference in the "AI as art tool" case. A traditional tool does not harbor intentionality, or digital information. It may constrain the type of work you can produce with it, but it does not have inherent, specific forms that it produces regardless of user intent. LLMs are a different beast in this sense.

Law is a realization of the societal values we want to uphold. Just as we can't in principle claim that training of LLMs on scores of existing work is wrong solely due to the technical function of LLMs, we cannot claim that this process shouldn't be subject to constraints and laws due to the technical function of LLMs and/or human beings, which is precisely what the arguments by analogy try to do. They boil down to "well it can't be illegal since humans basically do the same thing" which is a hyper-reductive viewpoint that ignores both the complexities and novelty of the situation and the role of law in shaping willful societal structure, and not just "adhering" to natural facts.

Your original quote was not using the impact of the technology, it was disparaging the algorithmic source of the inspired work (by saying it does not participate in social systems the way humans do).

> I think a major distinction though, between and LLM and, say, a paintbrush or even a text-editor, or photoshop, is that these tools do not have content baked into them

LLMs, despite being able to reproduce content in the case of overtraining, do not store the content they are trained from. Also, the usage of "content" here is ambiguous so I assumed you meant the storage of training data.

To me, the content of an LLM is its algorithm and weights. If the weights can reproduce large swaths of content to a verifiable metric of closeness (and to an amount that's covered by current law) I can understand the desire to legally enforce current policies. The problem I have is against the frequent argument to ban generative algorithms altogether.

> The use of a different paintbrush, by the same artist, with the same pictorial intention may produce slightly different results due to material conditions, but the artist is able to consciously and partially deterministically constrain the result.

I would counter this by saying the prompts constrain the result. How deterministically depends on how well one understands the semantic meaning of the weights and what the model was trained on. Also, as a disclaimer, I don't think that makes prompts proprietary (for various different reasons).

> I think this is a key difference in the "AI as art tool" case. A traditional tool does not harbor intentionality, or digital information

Assigning "intent" is an anthropomorphism of the algorithm in my opinion as they don't have any intent.

I do agree with your last paragraph though, one (or even a group of) individual's feelings don't make something legal or illegal. I can make a moral claim as to why I don't think it should be subject to constraints and laws, but of course that doesn't change what the law actually is.

The analogies are trying to make this appeal in an effort to influence those who try to make the laws overly restrictive. There are many laws that don't make sense and logic can't change their enforcement. The idea is to make a logical appeal to those who may have inconsistencies in their value system to try and prevent more non-sensical laws from being developed.

If it's the latter how do we find the line between what's acceptable and what's not? For example, most people wouldn't be against the creation and release of a cure for cancer developed in this way. It would lead to the loss of opportunities for cancer researchers but I believe most people would deem that an acceptable tradeoff. A grayer area would be an AI art generator used to generate the designs for a cancer research donation page. If it could potentially lead to a 10% increase in donations, does that make it worth it?

Intellectual property law does presently restrict the development of cancer treatments and demands in many cases exorbitant royalties from patients and practitioners, so I'm not convinced that this is accurate. If people believed that the loss of opportunities would constrain innovation in the field of cancer research, I think they'd expect the AI users to pay royalties as well.

This comes down to the product of AI.

If the AI produces a cancer treatment identical to what is already covered by patent, I think commercialization would be contingent on the permission of the IP holder.

If the AI produced a novel cancer treatment, using a transformative synthesis of available knowledge, Most people would not expect royalties.

What I was questioning was whether people would think it's morally right or not to generate inspired works. For example, if someone made an algorithm to read the relevant papers and make a cancer treatment that addresses the same areas/conditions of a method under IP law but don't equate to the exact method, I don't see that as a morally wrong action by itself.

You removed the value and authenticity that artist in 30 minutes, you applauded it, and defended that it should be the norm.

OK then, we can close down all entertainment business, and generate everything with AI, because it can mimic styles, clone sounds, animate things with gaussian splats, and so on.

Maybe we can hire coders to "code" films? Oh sorry. ChatGPT can do that too. So we need a keypad then, only the most wealthy can press. Press 1 for a movie, 2 for a new music album, 3 for a new book, and so on.

We need 10 buttons or so, as far as I can see. Maybe I can ask ChatGPT 4 to code one for me.

...and the writers' guild, too.

But once it is? I mean, yeah, it'll replace Hollywood.

People will tell Netflix, "hey I want a move about X in the style of Y and I want Z to star in it", and bam -- your own bespoke movie.

I mean, once the capability's there, it's just inevitable. And yeah -- acting will become a hobby, just like sewing is today.

I want to see what the person has imagined, what the story carries from the author, what the humans in it added to it and what they got out of it.

When I read a book, I look from another human's eyes, with their thoughts and imagination. That's interesting and life-changing actually. Also, the author's life and inner world leaks into the thing they created.

The most notable example for me is Neon Genesis Evangelion. The psychological aspects of it (which hits very hard actually) is a reflection of Hideaki Anno's clinical depression. You can't fake this even if you want.

This is what makes human creation special. It's a precipitation of a thousand and one thing in an unforeseen way, and this is what feeds us, albeit we are not aware of this and love to deny it at the same time.

Thinking our creation has some kind of 'specialness' to it is like believing in a soul, or some other stupid thing. It's pure hubris.

There are many breakthroughs and realizations in science which excite me more than "this thing called AI": Bacteria have generational memory. Bees have a sense of time. Mitochondria (and cells) inside a human body communicate and try to regulate aging and call for repairs. Ants have evolved antibiotics, and expel the ones with incurable and spreadable diseases. Bees and ants have social norms, they have languages. Plants show more complex behavior than we anticipated. I'm not entering the primates' & birds' region because only the titles will be a short chapter.

While some of them might be very simple mechanisms on chemical level, they make a much more complex system, and the nature we live in is much sophisticated than we know, or want to acknowledge.

I'm not looking from "Humans are superior" perspective. Instead, I'm looking from "our understanding of everything is too shallow" perspective. Instead of trying to understand or acknowledge that we're living in a much more complex system on a speck of dust in vast emptiness, we connect a bunch of silicon chips, dump everything we babbled to a "simulated neural network", and it gives us semi-nonsensical, grammatically correct half-truths.

That thing can do it because it randomly puts a word after word after a very complex and weighted randomization learned from how we do it, but imitating it blindly, and we think that we understood and unlocked what intelligence is. Then we applaud ourselves because we're one step closer to strip a living thing from its authenticity and making Ghost in the Shell a reality.

Living things form themselves over a long life with sight, hearing, communication, interaction and emotions, at least, and we assume that a couple of millions lines of code can do much better because we poured a quadruple distilled, three times diluted version of what we have gone through.

This is pure hubris if you ask me, if there's one.

What will actually happen is people will think "meh good enough", shitty AI art will become the norm, and we'll be boiling frogs and not realize how shitty things have become.

Artists style is not copyrightable, at least in the US.

And if they changed that because of "AI"? My word, the lawsuits that would arise between artists...

You can't copyright style of a Rolex, but people pay a fortune to get the real deal. Same thing.

> My word, the lawsuits that would arise between artists...

Artists imitate/copy artists as a compliment, at least in illustration and comics world. Unless you do it in bad faith, I don't think artists gonna do that. Artists have a sense of humor to begin with, because art is making fun of this world, in a sense.

Pixar, Disney and Dreamworks have different styles, same for actors, writers, and designers, too. You can generally tell who made what by reading, looking, listening, etc.

I can recognize a song by Deep Purple or John Mayer or Metallica, just by their guitar tone, or their mastering profile (yes, your ear can recognize that), in a couple of seconds.

If style was that easy, we could have 50 Picassos, 200 John Mayers, 45 Ara Gulers (A photographer) which you can't tell them apart, but it doesn't work that way.

XKCD took a couple of guest artists because of personal reasons. It was very evident, even if the drawing style was the same.

People, art, and hand made things are much more complex than it looks. Many programmers forget because everything is rendered with their favorite font, but no two hand-made thing is ever the same. Eat the same recipe from two different cooks, even if you measure the ingredients independently and give them beforehand, you'll have different tastes.

Style is a reflection of who you are. You can maybe imitate it, but you can't be it.

Heck, even two people implementing the same algorithm in the same programming language doesn't write the same thing.

Isn't this an argument that AI-generated artwork will never be more than a lesser facsimile? That'd suggest that human-made works will always be more sought-after, because they're authentic.

When the replacements become "good enough", it'll push the better things because of being cheaper and 90% being there. I have some hand-made items and they're a treat to hold and use. They perform way better than their mass produced ones, they last longer, they feel human, and no, they're not inferior in quality. In fact it's the opposite, but most of them are not cheap, and when you want to maximize profits, you need to reduce your costs, ideally to zero.

For one moment, let's think it this way. You are a 20-year experienced engineer who is making whatever money you are making. Suddenly, your skills are invalidated because of a new disruption. And you have another friend in, the same situation.

Fortunately for you, luck played out and you could transition! You found a way into life, meaning and value. Your joy and your everyday life continued as it is.

But the other friend enjoyed the process, and liked doing what they were doing and there was no suitable transition for them. Humans are adaptable, but to them, nothing mattered because the whole existence didn't offer any value. The sole act of doing was robbed WITHOUT ANY ALTERNATIVE. The experience and value of a person rendered worthless.

Can you relate to that feeling? If yes, thank you.

If no, your words are empty and hold no value.

Artist went through the similar phase during the invention of photography. Now, it is rather soul-crushing because anything an artist make can easily be replicated, making the whole artistic journey a moot.

> If no, your words are empty and hold no value.

Being sympathetic towards those people doesn't mean you should bend to their will if you don't believe it's the right thing to do. I can be sympathetic to a child who cries over not being able to ride a roller coaster because they aren't tall enough without thinking the height requirement should be removed.

It would be as if instead of cars running on gasoline, they ran on chopped up horseflesh. Not good for the horses, and not sustainable in the long term.

Obviously this is a bit facetious, but basing your ethical framework on utilitarianism and _nothing_ else is pretty radical.

I agree that the current crop of artists are worse off with AI art tools being generally available. But consumers of art, and people who like making art with AI art tools, are better off with those tools being available. To me it’s clear that the benefit of the consumers outweighs the cost to the artists, and I would say the same if it was coders being put out of jobs instead. You can prove this to yourself by applying it to anything else that’s been automated. Recording music playback put thousands of musicians out of work, but do you really regret recorded music playback having been invented?

P.S. Adobe firefly is pretty competent and is only trained on material that adobe has the license to. If copyright were the real reason people didn’t like AI art tools, you would see artists telling everyone to get Adobe subscriptions instead of Midjourney.

Worse how? As defined by whom?

You could make a pretty compelling argument that "the world" would be better off by, e.g., forcing cancer patients through drug trials against their will. We basically could speed run a cure to cancer!

These longtermist, ends justify the means, ideas can easily turn extremely gross.

The tools are not the problem, it's how humans use them.

They can be used in an illegal way if used to copy copyrighted material, yes.

You do not have to produce an exact copy of something to violate copyright, and I think anything the LLM outputs is violating copyright for everything it has ever trained on, unless the operator (the person operating the LLM and/or the person prompting it) has rights to that content.

I personally am not against LLMs training on things the operator has rights to, and even training on copyrighted things, but I am against it laundering those things back out and claiming it's legal.

I am hearing a strong rhyme.

Commercialized LLMs are absolutely labour theft even if they are useful.

Boggles my mind how warped peoples thinking is.

The Luddites and the original saboteurs (from the French sabot) had a problem where the capital class invested in machines that let them (a) get more work done per person, (b) employ fewer people, and (c) pay those fewer people less because now they weren't working as hard. The people they fired? They (and the governments of the day — just like now) basically told them to go starve.

> The Luddites were members of a 19th-century movement of English textile workers which > opposed the use of certain types of cost-saving machinery, and often destroyed the > machines in clandestine raids. They protested against manufacturers who used machines > in "a fraudulent and deceitful manner" to replace the skilled labour of workers and > drive down wages by producing inferior goods.[1][2] Members of the group referred to > themselves as Luddites, self-described followers of "Ned Ludd", a legendary weaver > whose name was used as a pseudonym in threatening letters to mill owners and > government officials.[3]

Yes, we want to work less. But fair work should result in fair compensation. Ultimately, this is something that the copyright washing of current commercialized LLMs cannot achieve.

But unethical =/= illegal, unfortunately.

That is very much fortunate.

It feels similar to the ye olden debates on police surveillance. Acquiring a warrant to tail a suspect, tapping a single individual’s phone line, etc all feels like very normal run-of-the-mill police work that no one has a problem with. Collating your behavior across every website and device you own from a data broker is fundamentally the same thing as a single phone’s wiretap, but it obviously feels way grosser and more unethical because it scales way past the point of what you’d imagine as being acceptable.

> Acquiring a warrant to tail a suspect, tapping a single individual’s phone line, etc all feels like very normal run-of-the-mill police work that no one has a problem with.

If acquiring a warrant is the basic action being scaled, I'd be okay with that ethically if it was done under, what I define as, reasonable pretenses. Regardless of how it scales, I still think it would be the right thing to do assuming the pretenses for the first action could be applied to everyone wiretapped. Now if I thought the base action was morally wrong (someone was tailed or wiretapped without proper pretenses), I'd think it's wrong regardless of the scale. The number of people it affected might impact how wrong I saw it, but not whether it was right or wrong to.

My main point is that OpenAI is generating an incredible amount of value all hinging on other people's work at a massive scale, without paying for their materials. Take all the non-public domain work off Netflix and Netflix doesn't have the same value they have today, so Netflix must pay for content it uses. Same goes for OpenAI imho.

I'd feel a lot better about that argument if we had sane copyright laws and anything older than 7-10 years was automatically in the public domain. Suddenly, netflix is looking a lot more valuable with just public domain works and there'd be a ton of public domain art to train AI models with. I suspect that the technology would still leave a lot of artists concerned in that situation though, because even once the issue of copyright is largely solved the fact remains that AI enables people who aren't artists to create art.