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What's the difference between a human artist walking around in the world, seeing images and videos (many of which are under copyright) and then using those imag

What's the difference between a human artist walking around in the world, seeing images and videos (many of which are under copyright) and then using those images as inspiration, versus an AI being fed millions of images and videos as part of a large training set? I am not a lawyer but I don't really see the "it's not fair use" argument.

Wistar 4y ago
There's a whole lot of unapologetic artistic theft of others’ work that has contributed to the creation of new art.
- etrautmann 4y ago
  why do we even call it theft or pretend that any artist arrived at ideas without inspiration?
  - someweirdperson 4y ago
    For humans the inspiration can be something else than the medium to use. Watching reality can provide inspiration for creating a video. And I'm pretty sure that's wher most inspiration comes from. It cannot for AI. Of course in a world where everything exists AI doesn't need inspiration from other sources.
    - cma 4y ago
      It can for AI, it is consuming and mixing in training trail cam images, etc. that weren't composed shots.
      - P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
        That's not at all what the other poster was saying.
        nonima 4y ago
        Then what was it saying? It said that humans can take inspiration from outside art, from the real world. You can do the same thing with AI by training it on pictures from the real world.
        P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
        Bill Clinton has stated he was inspired to be president after a trip to the white house in his youth. People have been inspired to write about subject matter because of their experiences. AI takes lots of things that currently exist and mixNmatch. It's not nearly the same thing.
        chii 4y ago
        > It's not nearly the same thing. why not? Just because people take in experiences slowly, via senses, doesn't mean that an AI isn't replicating that learning via a fast method.
        P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
        Do you believe that GPT-3 is going to want to become president after visiting the whitehouse? If you answer no, then you must necessarily admit it's different. It can do a lot of things, but in the end it's still just a glorified function.
        drpyser22 4y ago
        Always back to the same debate then. Why aren't human minds glorified functions, that perhaps deserve their glory a bit more than current state of AI? Obviously they're not currently equivalent. But obviously there are similarities.
        P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
        A gocart and a sedan have a lot of similarities, but only one of them is legal to drive on the highway.
- micromacrofoot 4y ago
  That could describe the entirety of art history.
_dain_ 4y ago
> What's the difference between a human artist walking around in the world, seeing images and videos (many of which are under copyright) and then using those images as inspiration, versus an AI being fed millions of images and videos as part of a large training set? What's the difference between retelling someone's story orally, and using a printing press to make an exact replica? What's the difference between writing down a conversation from memory, and recording that conversation? What's the difference between making a nude painting of someone, and taking a nude photograph? What's the difference between going out in public among human beings, and going out in public where there's a facial recognition camera on every corner feeding everyone's movements into a centralized database? What's the difference between the grandma who knows everyone in the village, vs the social media company that knows everyone in the world? Social customs evolved in a context of fundamental, sharp limits to human cognition and skill. When technology smashes through those limits, those social customs don't work anymore. Copyright law didn't exist in a world where you couldn't copy things mechanically. If you apply the old rules naively, you end up with a nasty world that nobody wants. So we have to invent new rules to limit how people use the new technology, otherwise people get exploited and life becomes intolerable. "What does copyright law say about this" doesn't even make sense as a question. Copyright was invented before AI was. The question should be, "what would a society someone would want to live in, say about this?"
- somesortofthing 4y ago
  > What's the difference between retelling someone's story orally, and using a printing press to make an exact replica? But that's not what's happening. You can't "crack open" a model to find the bitmap of a piece of training data. It's not there any more than a painting you've seen is "in" your brain. A model sometimes creates things that look similar to existing pieces if it got a ton of copies of the same image, for the same reason that most people's artistic rendition of a tree is going to be more accurate than their rendition of an anteater. The entire AI art debate is a symptom of the fact that society is structured such that labor-saving technological advancements can harm more people than they help, and it's baffling to see otherwise intelligent and ideologically similar people fixating on this single, relatively minor technology rather than the much more consequential, broader issue of the fact that automation always moves wealth into the hands of a smaller and smaller group of people.
_gabe_ 4y ago
What's the difference between a programmer looking at lots of open source code and github copilot looking at open source code? (And I'm talking MIT licensed code here).
Jevon23 4y ago
If I can take copyrighted images and feed them into an AI, why can’t I take any code I find online and ignore the license terms and feed it into a compiler? How do you justify the existence of something like the GPL?
- Poppys 4y ago
  This is three separate arguments: Is it ok to scan copyrighted works. I think Google Books' win at the Supreme Court shows that yes it is. Is it ok to process them down to the rawest information? Is it ok for people to generate content from the raw information (and ok for them to charge for it)? The last two I don't have an answer for, but I understand the fear of artists and the anger that their hard work is being shovelled into the monster that is going affect their work. But also more broadly the make-up industry, the lighting industry, studio spaces, lens makers, paint manufacturers, etc etc etc.
- chii 4y ago
  > why can’t I take any code I find online and ignore the license terms and feed it into a compiler? a compiler is not transformative. You translating a book into another language doesn't make it a new work. But an AI that takes billions of images, and uses it to synthesize something different and new, is fairly transformative under my eyes, and deserves new copyright. Unless the AI generated image is largely composed of a small number of works, i don't see why anyone should have copyright ownership of such an output!
  - iExploder 4y ago
    its actually exactly the same thing, the ai doesnt "synthetize" anything, its following its programming and data based on training sets if anything I would argue that human taking code from multiple places and making it compile into something more useful is much more synthetiz-ing than AI...
    - ihuman 4y ago
      There's already an AI that does that: https://github.com/features/copilot https://github.com/features/copilot

Wistar 4y ago

There's a whole lot of unapologetic artistic theft of others’ work that has contributed to the creation of new art.

etrautmann 4y ago
why do we even call it theft or pretend that any artist arrived at ideas without inspiration?
- someweirdperson 4y ago
  For humans the inspiration can be something else than the medium to use. Watching reality can provide inspiration for creating a video. And I'm pretty sure that's wher most inspiration comes from. It cannot for AI. Of course in a world where everything exists AI doesn't need inspiration from other sources.
  - cma 4y ago
    It can for AI, it is consuming and mixing in training trail cam images, etc. that weren't composed shots.
    - P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
      That's not at all what the other poster was saying.
      - nonima 4y ago
        Then what was it saying? It said that humans can take inspiration from outside art, from the real world. You can do the same thing with AI by training it on pictures from the real world.
        P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
        Bill Clinton has stated he was inspired to be president after a trip to the white house in his youth. People have been inspired to write about subject matter because of their experiences. AI takes lots of things that currently exist and mixNmatch. It's not nearly the same thing.
        chii 4y ago
        > It's not nearly the same thing. why not? Just because people take in experiences slowly, via senses, doesn't mean that an AI isn't replicating that learning via a fast method.
        P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
        Do you believe that GPT-3 is going to want to become president after visiting the whitehouse? If you answer no, then you must necessarily admit it's different. It can do a lot of things, but in the end it's still just a glorified function.
        drpyser22 4y ago
        Always back to the same debate then. Why aren't human minds glorified functions, that perhaps deserve their glory a bit more than current state of AI? Obviously they're not currently equivalent. But obviously there are similarities.
        P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
        A gocart and a sedan have a lot of similarities, but only one of them is legal to drive on the highway.
micromacrofoot 4y ago
That could describe the entirety of art history.

_dain_ 4y ago

> What's the difference between a human artist walking around in the world, seeing images and videos (many of which are under copyright) and then using those images as inspiration, versus an AI being fed millions of images and videos as part of a large training set? What's the difference between retelling someone's story orally, and using a printing press to make an exact replica? What's the difference between writing down a conversation from memory, and recording that conversation? What's the difference between making a nude painting of someone, and taking a nude photograph? What's the difference between going out in public among human beings, and going out in public where there's a facial recognition camera on every corner feeding everyone's movements into a centralized database? What's the difference between the grandma who knows everyone in the village, vs the social media company that knows everyone in the world? Social customs evolved in a context of fundamental, sharp limits to human cognition and skill. When technology smashes through those limits, those social customs don't work anymore. Copyright law didn't exist in a world where you couldn't copy things mechanically. If you apply the old rules naively, you end up with a nasty world that nobody wants. So we have to invent new rules to limit how people use the new technology, otherwise people get exploited and life becomes intolerable. "What does copyright law say about this" doesn't even make sense as a question. Copyright was invented before AI was. The question should be, "what would a society someone would want to live in, say about this?"

somesortofthing 4y ago
> What's the difference between retelling someone's story orally, and using a printing press to make an exact replica? But that's not what's happening. You can't "crack open" a model to find the bitmap of a piece of training data. It's not there any more than a painting you've seen is "in" your brain. A model sometimes creates things that look similar to existing pieces if it got a ton of copies of the same image, for the same reason that most people's artistic rendition of a tree is going to be more accurate than their rendition of an anteater. The entire AI art debate is a symptom of the fact that society is structured such that labor-saving technological advancements can harm more people than they help, and it's baffling to see otherwise intelligent and ideologically similar people fixating on this single, relatively minor technology rather than the much more consequential, broader issue of the fact that automation always moves wealth into the hands of a smaller and smaller group of people.

_gabe_ 4y ago

What's the difference between a programmer looking at lots of open source code and github copilot looking at open source code? (And I'm talking MIT licensed code here).

Jevon23 4y ago

If I can take copyrighted images and feed them into an AI, why can’t I take any code I find online and ignore the license terms and feed it into a compiler? How do you justify the existence of something like the GPL?

Poppys 4y ago
This is three separate arguments: Is it ok to scan copyrighted works. I think Google Books' win at the Supreme Court shows that yes it is. Is it ok to process them down to the rawest information? Is it ok for people to generate content from the raw information (and ok for them to charge for it)? The last two I don't have an answer for, but I understand the fear of artists and the anger that their hard work is being shovelled into the monster that is going affect their work. But also more broadly the make-up industry, the lighting industry, studio spaces, lens makers, paint manufacturers, etc etc etc.
chii 4y ago
> why can’t I take any code I find online and ignore the license terms and feed it into a compiler? a compiler is not transformative. You translating a book into another language doesn't make it a new work. But an AI that takes billions of images, and uses it to synthesize something different and new, is fairly transformative under my eyes, and deserves new copyright. Unless the AI generated image is largely composed of a small number of works, i don't see why anyone should have copyright ownership of such an output!
- iExploder 4y ago
  its actually exactly the same thing, the ai doesnt "synthetize" anything, its following its programming and data based on training sets if anything I would argue that human taking code from multiple places and making it compile into something more useful is much more synthetiz-ing than AI...
  - ihuman 4y ago
    There's already an AI that does that: https://github.com/features/copilot https://github.com/features/copilot