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An artist fights Midjourney
- pylua 3y agoDuplication without attribution? Wasn't the attribution in the prompt?
- ksjskskskkk 3y agohe's asking for "movie screenshot" those are probably stills from press releases. meh.
- klyrs 3y agoWhen the cops search your car for meth and they find coke instead, they don't merrily send you on your way.
- sjfjsjdjwvwvc 3y agoAbsolutely baffling comparison, not sure what you’re trying to say
- polishTar 3y agoEh, it depends. I don't know if this is the case, but if these images were released to press & public as part of a media resource pack with a permissive license used to market the movie (which I believe is commonly done in this industry), I'd have a hard time empathizing with the viewpoint that Midjourney is doing something wicked by including it in their training data.
- klyrs 3y agohttps://www.gadgets360.com/entertainment/news/dune-2020-first-look-photos-movie-cast-release-date-poster-timothee-chalamet-jason-momo-2211994 https://www.gadgets360.com/entertainment/news/dune-2020-firs... You are right, the regurgitation was indeed produced by the studio for promotional purposes. But notice how the image is rendered at the link: with credit and copyright. And specifically, for promotional purposes. And while I don't presume to know the specifics of the licensing of that image, I wouldn't either assume that this use is licensed. Especially without copyright and credit.
- ekianjo 3y agoBad analogies are bad
- buildartefact 3y agoAsks for screenshot from movie. Image generator gives screenshot from movie. Who’s at fault here?
- crooked-v 3y agoProbably the people who put the screenshot from the movie into the source data of the image generator.
- passwordoops 3y agoThe image generator that provided the screenshot without licensing/permission. This isn't complicated, we have laws on the books, and I hope legislators learned their lesson after the "Uber's not a taxi company, and AirBNBs are not like hotels"
- Glyptodon 3y agoI don't know. This sort of thing will lead to stuff like recording your own memories requiring a licensing fee if not careful. I also think there's a reasonable argument that the prompter is the one creating infringement.
- passwordoops 3y agoWow. You really do need to walk me down the path you took from a correlation black box machine breaking obvious copyright laws and recording memories
- Glyptodon 3y agoIf someone says "imagine batman on a boat" am I not prompting what's essentially my own internal generative AI that's been trained on seeing copyrighted content at some point? If someone says "remember that scene in..." isn't that a form of recovering a copyrighted sequence from your own "trained" memories? Once there's a better ability to extract data from someone's neural activity, remembering or imagining will just be another form of prompting.
- vunderba 3y agoI'm not sure this really qualifies as anything new. It's been well known for a long time that many generative AI models are capable of reconstructing copyrighted works (copilot, SD, etc.) from their original training data with nearly 100% fidelity, but until we have a definitive legal ruling it doesn't really matter.
- everforward 3y agoSomewhat unrelated, but I wonder if it makes a legal difference if the AI acts like a browser and goes out, finds and image and downloads it. Basically the AI doesn't have a copyrighted image in its data set, but it will go grab YouTube screenshots or images from Google Images or something.
- stubish 3y agoIt would still be distributing copyrighted work, even if it doesn't store a copy at any stage. It would go the way of Napster.
- felipeerias 3y agoMidjourney claims that you own all of the images it creates for you.
- sjfjsjdjwvwvc 3y agoIs a definitive legal ruling even possible? Looking at music for example there are still many cases being fought over stolen melodies and that’s been a thing for generations. I think it’s going to go a similar way with „AI“ - lots of court cases, lots of different and nuanced rulings converging on a general idea what the legal boundaries are but with many grey areas in between.
- Bjartr 3y agoWhich is genuinely the(US) legal system working as intended
- charcircuit 3y agoA web browser lets you easily commit copyright infringement by right clicking on a copyrighted image you do not have the rights to and selecting download. It is also shockingly easy to do.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nocoiner 3y agoPlease, leave my apes out of this.
- passwordoops 3y agoI can't understand how people tie themselves into knots with non-equivalent whataboutism when it comes to these correlation black boxes. The generative "AI" sports out an image it's owners claim is original. That's the infringement.
- sjfjsjdjwvwvc 3y agoI would say it depends on the details. The generated image are clearly derivative and not pixel perfect recreations
- semiquaver 3y agoHow many pixels must be the same to qualify as copyright infringement?
- eru 3y agoAlmost no pixels are the same here. (But neither do the pixels stay the same when you re-compress in JPG. So I'm not sure if Pixel sameness is a good metric?)
- sjfjsjdjwvwvc 3y agoThat is for a judge to decide probably
- Glyptodon 3y agoShould you pay royalties if someone says to you "remember that scene from Blade Runner" or "imagine if Jean Luc Picard beamed into the middle of a Batman movie" and visualize something similar to something highly similar to a movie or TV show you've seen?
- kingkawn 3y agoIf they’re making money producing images of IP then…
- sjfjsjdjwvwvc 3y agoWho was making any money in this instance? I’m not super familiar with midjourney but it looks to me like he used the free version
- Glyptodon 3y agoEven if it's the paid version, the prompter had it make the infringing content for their own use. And it's only going to be anything more than equivalent to someone making their own sketch of Batman if the prompter reproduces and distributes. It's not like it's illegal for you to tell your artist friend to sketch a Batman either - Comic Cons and such are full of that.
- felipeerias 3y agoMidjourney is returning copies of copyrighted works while its Terms of Service state that “You own all Assets You create with the Services”.
- sjfjsjdjwvwvc 3y agoSo you need a legal process to determine if that generation was actually infringing on copyright. IANAL so I have no idea really, and I think most of the other commenters here can’t say for sure either.
- Glyptodon 3y ago
- coolhand2120 3y agoIf he’s mad at that wait till he sees what the cp command does! In all seriousness, midjourney is like any other tool. You can break the law with it, big surprise. It should still be on the person that broke the law, not the makers of the tool. If you go down the “can’t use my art as training data” how far do you push it? I watched Batman, does that mean if I draw caped super heroes I am stealing training data? Wouldn’t that apply to all comics after Superman? Isn’t he guilty of derivative work himself? Also, nobody is being harmed by this. AI is always derivative. Nobody is interested in copies or impressions of popular art, otherwise the guy selling animes on velvet at the local art fair would be making more money. This just sounds like a Luddite shaking his fist at this perceived enemy.
- pylua 3y agoThe picture in the article is a lot more than drawing a caped super hero after watching batman. Not to mention that the access to viewing batman for the inspiration is usually behind some sort of compensation. I would argue that original creators are being harmed by this. Not in a traditional sense, or even in a legal way with any precedence but in a thousand cuts sort of way that is novel.
- snickerbockers 3y ago> If he’s mad at that wait till he sees what the cp command does! in order for that analogy to even remotely be applicable, midjourney would have to be a program you run on your own computer and not a service running on midjourney's computers that does what you ask it to. > In all seriousness, midjourney is like any other tool. You can break the law with it, big surprise. It should still be on the person that broke the law, not the makers of the tool. that would be midjourney, since they're both the creators and operators of their model. > If you go down the “can’t use my art as training data” how far do you push it? I watched Batman, does that mean if I draw caped super heroes I am stealing training data? Wouldn’t that apply to all comics after Superman? Isn’t he guilty of derivative work himself? you just called AI "a tool", that's why it's different. > Also, nobody is being harmed by this. AI is always derivative. Nobody is interested in copies or impressions of popular art, otherwise the guy selling animes on velvet at the local art fair would be making more money. This just sounds like a Luddite shaking his fist at this perceived enemy. that's an argument against IP law in general, not an argument against holding companies which create and operate deep-learning models to the same standards as everybody else.
- felipeerias 3y agoThey know exactly what they are doing: “If You knowingly infringe someone else’s intellectual property, and that costs us money, we’re going to come find You and collect that money from You. We might also do other stuff, like try to get a court to make You pay our legal fees. Don’t do it.” https://docs.midjourney.com/docs/terms-of-service https://docs.midjourney.com/docs/terms-of-service
- pylua 3y agoSeems like you could easily add a couple of adjectives / adverbs to make a completely new scene from the movie and it may be considered fair use?
- felipeerias 3y agoWould it, really? And would you own that new scene? Midjourney is a paid service which uses copyrighted works as source, without any agreement with the copyright holders, while declaring that its users own all the assets that it creates for them.
- pylua 3y agoI am not a lawyer but adding your own items and creating a hypothetical scenes seems more like fair use than the reaction videos on youtube do? Or, is that a different ballgame altogether? Curious to find out. I am not a lawyer.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- cycomanic 3y agoIt's amazing to read what people think is fair use. Have a read of the wikpedia article, it's definitely not as straight forward as adding a slight variation and then I'm good. If that was the case all of the following would be fair use (hint they typically are not). - making a movie from a book (I mean it's a pretty big variation) - making a sequel/prequel to a book, movie using the characters of the book - making new comic stories using Mickey Mouse/Batman/Superman... - Making merchandise using redrawn characters from comic books... ... Also it's important to note that one of the important aspects to judge fair use is commercial interest, i.e. what is allowed for an individual privately, might very well be copyright infringement for a company (like Midjourney) who sells a commercial product.
- stubish 3y agoQuite similar to the New York Times lawsuit. If you can reproduce an original work, then use of the source material was obviously not transformative, and not covered under fair use. These systems can currently function like a lossy compression algorithm. This is going to be a mess until higher courts in the US or Europe make some rulings. Personally, I think they are going to favor the copyright holders. A few billion handed out to damaged parties, and future commercial systems only trained on licensed content.
- thrill 3y agoIt's perfectly legal to paint a copy of another image.
- cycomanic 3y agoNo it's not. Especially not to sell it after (or sell a service that paints other images).
- pylua 3y agoDoes us law prohibit selling machines or services that potentially can perform copyright infringement?
- cycomanic 3y agoThe NN has copyright material stored (maybe in compressed form) inside of it. That's quite literally the definition of copying, and if you do that without licence copyright infringement. Note how software licences typically give you the licence to make a copy for running the program? That's because the act of copying the program from the medium (cd, USB stick, HDD...) is considered copying. I really don't understand what's so difficult to grasp about this. And yes it is illegal to sell equipment whose purpose is circumventing copyright protections.
- pylua 3y ago
- pylua 3y agoI feel like an artist should be more upset with what could be created from the prompt that was not true to the original film, with only minor changes to the prompt. For instance, a picture of batman and joker having drinks together on the roof top.
- getynge 3y agoTo me it seems pretty unambiguous that the infringement is a problem, and I even agree with the idea that Midjourney, not the users, should be held responsible if their model is being used as a service. I can’t come down on what solution I actually think is reasonable though. Restricting training data to non-copyrighted works would pretty much make AI art non-viable for any modern style, which would make plenty of people happy but feels potentially problematic if the nature of AI continues to change which it certainly will. Restricting output feels more right to me but also feels substantially less effective, since you would need AI to do any practical restriction automatically and what margin of error there would be acceptable? I definitely think this should be clamped down on but I can never settle on what I think would be reasonable and not just totally dismissive of at least one major set of concerns.
- danaris 3y agoThe answer is simple: Require consent for any training use. This may also require compensation.
- yetanother12345 3y agoIn the Visual Arts (drawing, printmaking, painting, even sculpture) copying the masters has been practised, and even recommended for centuries (if not longer). I believe it's the same with music. It's what you will want to do to some extent in order to get better at doing your own thing - some do it a lot, some do it less. None does not do it. The tool may be a brush, it may be a pencil, it may even be a contraption or machine of some kind. It could even be a camera, or software. This does not matter. The result is typically labelled "a studio", "a reproduction", or if has significant deviations from the original "a paraphrase". Some artists include elements of the work of other artists in their own work regularly, even copyrighted "characters". The thing known as "sampling" did not originate with rap music. Here there's a line somewhere (just like in rap) that, how much is too much? The answer is always that some cases are "fair use" and others are not. My concern in all this is that people scared of this new tool (AI) will react in a way that leads them to demand restrictions in the way that traditional artists have worked like, forever. In my view the AI model is no different from a camera, or that combined with some software suite like blender, photoshop, or even gimp. It's just a tool. And, well it can create reproductions. Reproductions are just that, and no more.