8 ms·

Artists score major win in copyright case against AI art generators

123 points by KZerda 2y ago

0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
So…which is the best art generator I can download and run locally today? Or are there a few top ones specific to art style(photorealistic, scenery, pixel art, vectors, etc)?
- CaptainFever 2y ago
  Flux by Black Forest Labs, by far.
- jncfhnb 2y ago
  Flux is the best base model and you grab small fine tune Loras for specific styles
- washadjeffmad 2y ago
  The most effective practical local workflow is SD1.5 or SDXL (fine-tune/LORA + ControlNet) to Flux.dev img2img or inpainting. Flux.dev is best in class for direction following oneshots, but it's still relatively glacial for volume, even with FP8. I haven't tried Schnell. I'm using flux in comfy, so I expect performance will improve in another webui.
doctorpangloss 2y ago
There are no clean image models. Zero. Using today's model architectures, the problem of using non-expressly-permitted data for training is insurmountable. I welcome anyone more knowledgeable on the matter to go ahead and comment about a counterexample before downvoting. So if the artists prevail, image generators are donezo. Open source, proprietary, whatever. People saying otherwise just don't know enough about how they work. You have heard of Adobe's Firefly. It is not clean. Adobe uses CLIP, T5, or something for text conditioning. None of those things were trained on expressly permitted content. Go ahead and ask them. Maybe you have heard of Open Model Initiative. They are going going to use CLIP or T5. They have no alternative. There are not enough license bureau images to train a CLIP model, not enough expressly licensed text content to train T5. A CLIP model needs 2 billion images to perform well, not the 600m Adobe claims they have access to. It's right in the paper. Good luck training a valuable language model on only expressly permissioned content. You'd become a billionaire if you could keep such an architecture secret. And then when it does exist, such as with some translation models, well they underperform, so who uses them? What do people want? I don't really care about IP, I care about, who is allowed to make money? Is only Apple, who controls the devices and accounts, and therefore can really enforce anti-piracy, permitted to make money? Only parties with good legal representation? It's not so black and white, not so cut and dried, who the good guys and bad guys are. We already live with a huge glut of content and raised interest rates, which have been 100x more impactful to the bottom line - financial and creative - of working artists. Why aren't these artists demanding that the Fed drops rates, or that back catalog media be delisted to boost demand for new media? It's not that simple either! Presumably a lot of people using these image and video generators are narrative creators of a kind too, like video game developers, music video makers, etc. Are they also bad guys? There's no broad solution here, the legal victory here is definitely pyrrhic, but one thing's for sure: Apple, NVIDIA, Meta and Google will still be printing cash. The artists are advocating for a position that boils down to, "The only moral creative-economic status quo is my status quo."
- __loam 2y ago
  Asking why the artists are mad at the corporations that are trying to profit off their labor without permission and not the fed or other artists is definitely a take.
  - doctorpangloss 2y ago
    You are making a bad faith comment. There's no mystery why artists are mad at Stability and Midjourney. I agree that demanding lower interest rates would be ridiculous. That is my point. You could delete Midjourney, Stability, DALL-E3, etc. tomorrow, and it will still suck harder today to be a working artist than it did in 2021, when interest rates were lower and there were literally hundreds more TV series being produced, 2x more video games being made, than today. Why limit ourselves to turning back the clock on AI, on interest rates and content productivity, if we're going to play time machine fantasies? You could also go back in time and buy bitcoin, and be rich. I am mocking the idea of turning back the clock, and you know it, and while anyone has a right to be angry about anything, and to engage in a time machine fantasy about anything, it ought to at least be a fantasy that makes sense and achieves some goals. Because the goal right now, "The smallest, most memetic sentiment of I'll show those corporations!" is kind of well-trodden, kind of old and tired. Brother, there are millions of people trying to do that every day. And when they achieve their goals of showing the big corporations, I cannot think of a single instance where all but the already lucky few - like these famous plaintiffs! - gain anything financially.
    - bugglebeetle 2y ago
      I appreciate the extent to which you’ve demonstrated whataboutism at its extremes, but I think we can take things even further. Let’s suggest that artists direct their ire at the emergence of life itself from the raw materials of the universe, as that is, indisputably, the origin of all suffering.
      - doctorpangloss 2y ago
        > Let’s suggest that artists direct their ire at the emergence of life itself from the raw materials of the universe, as that is, indisputably, the origin of all suffering. Some artists do.
throwup238 2y ago
> The court declined to dismiss copyright infringement claims against the AI companies. That "major win" being allowed to proceed with the case at all. All they've done is clear the first hurdle meant to kill frivolous lawsuits before they get to discovery. Their other claims were dismissed: > Claims against the companies for breach of contract and unjust enrichment, plus violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act for removal of information identifying intellectual property, were dismissed. The case will move forward to discovery, where the artists could uncover information related to the way in which the AI firms harvested copyrighted materials that were then used to train large language models.
- __loam 2y ago
  I'm very excited for discovery.
  - moffkalast 2y ago
    Didn't the Enron dataset that's now part of the Pile become public during discovery too? Some great image datasets might drop.
    - throwup238 2y ago
      IANAL but documents don't become public during discovery, they only become public if they're filed with the court (unless they're sealed). The vast majority of information dredged up during discovery remains confidential.
      - vlovich123 2y ago
        But things like datasets are massive and structure is important. Do they retain them digitally with the same original structure or do they transform them into some kind of massive PDF?
        williamcotton 2y ago
Ajedi32 2y ago
Here's the PDF of the court order: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.407208/gov.uscourts.cand.407208.223.0_2.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.40... (The "major win" in this case is that the court partially denied the defendants' motions to dismiss, so the case can now proceed to discovery.)
warkdarrior 2y ago
If these AI companies get punished, this will be a great win for open-source model training. Looking forward to train models at home, maybe over a distributed, P2P network of open-source enthusiasts, using images off the Internet. Harder to sue and punish a decentralized ML-training coop!
- maxwell 2y ago
  But isn't this about LAION, an open source model? Looks like they're going after Stability, not OpenAI or Anthropic. Maybe this is more about stifling open source models.
  - vlovich123 2y ago
    Apparently also anything training from it so DeviantArt (which reuploaded the model) and Midjourney (which sounds like it did a transference training) are involved. The reason the lawsuit feels weird is that transformative use is pretty clearly fair use: > In computer- and Internet-related works, the transformative characteristic of the later work is often that it provides the public with a benefit not previously available to it, I mean if genAI isn't this I'm not sure what would be. The public gets a benefit of having a computer generate art from spoken speech and that requires quite a substantial transformation of a data corpus of labelled images. Indeed, there's lots of art at Art Basel that depicts Disney characters in various ways to critique Disney & that's a much more direct copying of a different artists style (& even more direct trademark infringement). It really feels like artists are trying to have it both ways because this threatens their livelihood.
    - cowboylowrez 2y ago
      sure we get fair use when humans do it. if we give the same right to AI, why not let AI vote in elections too? This is easy, AI is not human. Once we start letting AI vote, whats to stop AI from concealed carry of weapons?
      - vlovich123 2y ago
segasaturn 2y ago
The plaintiffs are claiming that their art-style is copyrighted intellectual property and that they can sue image generators for damages if it creates an output that resembles theirs. Regardless of what you think about AI art, the precedent of this case will be a huge expansion of the power of IP and copyright law in the US mainly to the benefit of corporations - imagine Disney copyrighting the look of their 3D animated Pixar movies and suing anybody who tries to make a cartoony 3D animated movie for IP theft.
- seanhunter 2y ago
  That's not what they're claiming. They're claiming that the models were trained on copyright material[1] and that training models doesn't constitute fair use[2]. Their claims are in the first couple of pages of the court ruling. The claim is not that the style is copyrightable but that producing work in the same style could affect the market for the original product which is one of the parts of the four factor test for fair use. [3] [1] Which ldo they were [2] This is the big one and will have enormous ramifications if it ends up with the court ruling substantially in their favour [3] https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/ https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
    > and that training models doesn't constitute fair use How can it not constitute fair use? They both made no copies of that data (copyright infringement) nor did they commit actual theft by stealing the data from some vault. Everything else is permitted. For that matter, this is equivalent to some human artist studying a piece of art and then starting to create art in that same style too... is that no longer fair use? There are some court rulings so bad that the judge should just be removed from the bench. > could affect the market for the original product Oh, that makes more sense. The "negative movie reviews for newly released films is copyright infringement" argument. Nice.
    - akersten 2y ago
      Even the fair use argument is putting the cart before the horse. I would think these plaintiffs need to convince a court that the works are derivative first, and iff they are derivative, then the fair use argument can be made (that the reproduction is not a copyright infringement, {because e.g., the result is substantially different from the input}). Asking "is it fair use for a [human/computer] to [study/be trained on] copyrighted works" simply does not make sense as a fair use question because the answer has always been "looking at a painting and internalizing it has nothing to do with fair use, of course studying the old masters is permitted." I'm far from convinced the answer should be any different here. So to me they're barking up a non productive tree by trying to essentially say "the entire model is copyright infringement." Hopefully a judge/jury is not convinced. IMO it should be case by case for any given artifact, whether human or machine produced, does it infringe. Obviously a harder hill to climb for the plaintiffs.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
reactor 2y ago
Humans acquire a significant amount of knowledge (or get trained on) by learning from the work of others. If companies can face legal repercussions for training models on materials from elsewhere, a similar argument could be made for individuals.
- coffeecloud 2y ago
  To me it sounds like this argument is claiming that "training models" is legally equivalent to "training humans". So are there other examples of a human being allowed to do something where a machine made by a human is not allowed to do that thing? I am allowed to go to a movie and remember every detail and tell it to my friends, but my camcorder is not allowed to do that.
  - slavik81 2y ago
    If you redrew The Lion King frame by frame from memory, it would still be copyright infringement if you redistributed it to your friends. The difference is how similar your recreation is to the original, not whether it was done by a human or by a machine.
    - epoxia 2y ago
      Funnily enough, The Lion King is a property that has its own controversy of plagiarism of a different animation, Kimba The White Lion. But, I guess if Disney does it it's okay...
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - jncfhnb 2y ago
      If you drew it shittily from memory it would still be copyright infringement. As would retelling it. Discoverability of the infringement and the irrelevance of the violation is the reason you don’t get sued
    - j0hnyl 2y ago
      Punish for the re-drawing, not the memorizing.
artninja1988 2y ago
Definitely concerning and I hope model trainers win. If push comes to shove developers can always go to jurisdictions with more forward looking copyright exemptions regarding text and data mining like Israel and Japan though.
- CaptainFever 2y ago
  Don't forget the EU and SG! :)
throwaway4837 2y ago
You can have a kid, that kid can grow up to be a musician inspired by Taylor Swift, likely with some of their musical output having depended on Taylor's input. That's perfectly legal. But in a possible future, you could produce an AGI that isn't allowed to listen to Taylor Swift, never allowed to be inspired by anything from Taylor's songs?
- RangerScience 2y ago
  AGI, I would hope, would be governed by different laws - including worker’s rights - so that the economic relationships between all parties is more similar to human relationships than LLMs. In other words: turning Taylor Swift into a software product should be a different legal situation than raising a digital consciousness.
- XMPPwocky 2y ago
  The existence of sentient AGIs would certainly have wide-ranging impacts on the law! This case is not about sentient AGIs.
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  I think it is more nuanced than that. Imagine you write a book and release it with a non-commercial use license, but a company copies it and uses it for employee training. Imagine you wrote software and released it with a non-commercial use license, but the company includes it in their for-profit workflow.
  - wiredfool 2y ago
    Imagine you wrote a book, released it using a publisher who put it on dead trees, and sold it in e-book format. And imagine that a whole industry does this, and doesn't release the books for free to copy use in any format. Which is not hard to do, because that's basically the current situation for the publishing industry. Now imagine that all of that was used to train an LLM without compensation to the authors and publishers who paid the authors. This is apparently current situation with some of the training dataset. While at the same time, libraries have to pay per e-loan. Archive.org can't do a 1:1 dead tree format shift loan to ebook. I get that the tech industry wants everyone else's information to be free to use and their products to generate money enough for big exits and big salaries, but at some point the optics look pretty bad.
aabajian 2y ago
IANAL. Is it legal to create derivatives of copyright work and then post them on public online forums? For example, I can certainly write, "Mickey Mouse got food poisoning from his Big Mac." But, if I ask an AI generator to "Make a picture of Mickey Mouse getting food poison at McDonald's", could I post the resulting picture?
- radley 2y ago
  The context is generating images based explicitly on intellectual property. The problem is that most AI image generators allow IP as terms and/or they consumed IP to build their model, so they will return IP-based artworks. If you're a business using the image and used IP terms in your prompt, then you'd need permissions from both parties (Disney, McDonald's) before you post it. If you're writing about AI rights, or making a comment on social media, then less likely you'll need it. If your prompt was a cartoon mouse gets food poison at a fast food joint, you're off the hook. But if it returns Mickey Mouse at McDonalds, then the AI generator is still on the hook for using IP as a source. At least, that's where this is all going.
  - Workaccount2 2y ago
    >At least, that's where this is all going. Not really, because that would still be a loss for artists. Where they are trying to steer the ship is to "training on IP is copyright violation". Artists are looking to stop AI from taking their jobs. An AI generator with an IP filter on it's output will still very much be a threat to their work.
    - archontes 2y ago
      I agree that interested parties are trying to steer the ship there. I just don't see the legal arguments that will get them there. Given the fact that images are transmitted to a person in a manner that doesn't violate copyright (and even if they are, the transmitter, not receiver is guilty of infringement), training an AI is not something that copyright law limits. The AI weights that result are about the farthest thing from a derivative work, as the weights as a separate object, don't seem to contain the slightest remnant of the original work.
davexunit 2y ago
It's so obvious to me that machine learning models are derivative works of their training set. If they weren't, then why would these companies fight so hard to say otherwise? They need that training data to make their product, so they should pay the licensing fees for it! 10 years ago, when I worked on a machine learning model for my employer, it was unthinkable to train on data we did not have the rights to use. But now it's all fair game because OpenAI executives would make a little less money otherwise? They certainly aren't giving up any of their own copyright in return. It's a very transparent transfer of power and money from regular people to the bosses.
- doctorpangloss 2y ago
  > It's so obvious to me that machine learning models are derivative works of their training set. Okay, but narrative creators watch movies and listen to music and read books too. Many do indeed "file the serial numbers off" other people's work and publish something else, that makes them money and not the original creators. Does one instance of "filing the serial numbers off" by one author mean that no authors anywhere are allowed to write any books as soon as they've read "a bunch" of other books? I get what you are saying, but it's not so obvious what the right policy is. It is very hard to make it consistent when "AI" is substituted with "human," and it's not so obvious if "AI" is a distinct class from human, because it is after all, something that only exists because a programmer somewhere wrote and operated it.
  - Retric 2y ago
    The issue here is that the AI model itself is a derivative work. Further, they will very much recreate things the’ve seen many examples of. Recreating “Mona Lisa” isn’t a problem, but recreating “Iron Man” is. Individual artists may not know how to prompt the system to recreate their work, but looking at the training sets is going to help quite a bit.
    - doctorpangloss 2y ago
      No, the issue is that it makes outputs that compete with artists, and that is a problem if you go and make a fair use argument for appropriating copyrighted works. If I were to secretly use an image generator, just for my own purposes, trained on public data, the plaintiffs would say it is just as illegal. The rub is, do you know who else makes work that competes with artists? Other artists! It still kind of goes down on some vibesy stuff that I don't know if the law has a straight answer to. And for what it's worth, the Andy Warhol v. Goldsmith decision was about artists competing with other artists - this is the decision that has created an opening to challenge fair use. I just wonder why limit ourselves to the peculiarities of that case, why not open all forms of competition between artists to litigation over their influences and processes?
Paradigma11 2y ago
I doubt the artists really thought this through. If they "win" this AI would be driven into illegality in the west and the global south would not care one bit about those laws and will happily outcompete those very same western artists on very uneven ground.

123 points by KZerda 2y ago

So…which is the best art generator I can download and run locally today? Or are there a few top ones specific to art style(photorealistic, scenery, pixel art, vectors, etc)?

CaptainFever 2y ago
Flux by Black Forest Labs, by far.
jncfhnb 2y ago
Flux is the best base model and you grab small fine tune Loras for specific styles
washadjeffmad 2y ago
The most effective practical local workflow is SD1.5 or SDXL (fine-tune/LORA + ControlNet) to Flux.dev img2img or inpainting. Flux.dev is best in class for direction following oneshots, but it's still relatively glacial for volume, even with FP8. I haven't tried Schnell. I'm using flux in comfy, so I expect performance will improve in another webui.

doctorpangloss 2y ago

There are no clean image models. Zero. Using today's model architectures, the problem of using non-expressly-permitted data for training is insurmountable. I welcome anyone more knowledgeable on the matter to go ahead and comment about a counterexample before downvoting. So if the artists prevail, image generators are donezo. Open source, proprietary, whatever. People saying otherwise just don't know enough about how they work. You have heard of Adobe's Firefly. It is not clean. Adobe uses CLIP, T5, or something for text conditioning. None of those things were trained on expressly permitted content. Go ahead and ask them. Maybe you have heard of Open Model Initiative. They are going going to use CLIP or T5. They have no alternative. There are not enough license bureau images to train a CLIP model, not enough expressly licensed text content to train T5. A CLIP model needs 2 billion images to perform well, not the 600m Adobe claims they have access to. It's right in the paper. Good luck training a valuable language model on only expressly permissioned content. You'd become a billionaire if you could keep such an architecture secret. And then when it does exist, such as with some translation models, well they underperform, so who uses them? What do people want? I don't really care about IP, I care about, who is allowed to make money? Is only Apple, who controls the devices and accounts, and therefore can really enforce anti-piracy, permitted to make money? Only parties with good legal representation? It's not so black and white, not so cut and dried, who the good guys and bad guys are. We already live with a huge glut of content and raised interest rates, which have been 100x more impactful to the bottom line - financial and creative - of working artists. Why aren't these artists demanding that the Fed drops rates, or that back catalog media be delisted to boost demand for new media? It's not that simple either! Presumably a lot of people using these image and video generators are narrative creators of a kind too, like video game developers, music video makers, etc. Are they also bad guys? There's no broad solution here, the legal victory here is definitely pyrrhic, but one thing's for sure: Apple, NVIDIA, Meta and Google will still be printing cash. The artists are advocating for a position that boils down to, "The only moral creative-economic status quo is my status quo."

__loam 2y ago
Asking why the artists are mad at the corporations that are trying to profit off their labor without permission and not the fed or other artists is definitely a take.
- doctorpangloss 2y ago
  You are making a bad faith comment. There's no mystery why artists are mad at Stability and Midjourney. I agree that demanding lower interest rates would be ridiculous. That is my point. You could delete Midjourney, Stability, DALL-E3, etc. tomorrow, and it will still suck harder today to be a working artist than it did in 2021, when interest rates were lower and there were literally hundreds more TV series being produced, 2x more video games being made, than today. Why limit ourselves to turning back the clock on AI, on interest rates and content productivity, if we're going to play time machine fantasies? You could also go back in time and buy bitcoin, and be rich. I am mocking the idea of turning back the clock, and you know it, and while anyone has a right to be angry about anything, and to engage in a time machine fantasy about anything, it ought to at least be a fantasy that makes sense and achieves some goals. Because the goal right now, "The smallest, most memetic sentiment of I'll show those corporations!" is kind of well-trodden, kind of old and tired. Brother, there are millions of people trying to do that every day. And when they achieve their goals of showing the big corporations, I cannot think of a single instance where all but the already lucky few - like these famous plaintiffs! - gain anything financially.
  - bugglebeetle 2y ago
    I appreciate the extent to which you’ve demonstrated whataboutism at its extremes, but I think we can take things even further. Let’s suggest that artists direct their ire at the emergence of life itself from the raw materials of the universe, as that is, indisputably, the origin of all suffering.
    - doctorpangloss 2y ago
      > Let’s suggest that artists direct their ire at the emergence of life itself from the raw materials of the universe, as that is, indisputably, the origin of all suffering. Some artists do.

throwup238 2y ago

> The court declined to dismiss copyright infringement claims against the AI companies. That "major win" being allowed to proceed with the case at all. All they've done is clear the first hurdle meant to kill frivolous lawsuits before they get to discovery. Their other claims were dismissed: > Claims against the companies for breach of contract and unjust enrichment, plus violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act for removal of information identifying intellectual property, were dismissed. The case will move forward to discovery, where the artists could uncover information related to the way in which the AI firms harvested copyrighted materials that were then used to train large language models.

__loam 2y ago
I'm very excited for discovery.
- moffkalast 2y ago
  Didn't the Enron dataset that's now part of the Pile become public during discovery too? Some great image datasets might drop.
  - throwup238 2y ago
    IANAL but documents don't become public during discovery, they only become public if they're filed with the court (unless they're sealed). The vast majority of information dredged up during discovery remains confidential.
    - vlovich123 2y ago
      But things like datasets are massive and structure is important. Do they retain them digitally with the same original structure or do they transform them into some kind of massive PDF?
      - williamcotton 2y ago

Ajedi32 2y ago

Here's the PDF of the court order: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.407208/gov.uscourts.cand.407208.223.0_2.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.40... (The "major win" in this case is that the court partially denied the defendants' motions to dismiss, so the case can now proceed to discovery.)

warkdarrior 2y ago

If these AI companies get punished, this will be a great win for open-source model training. Looking forward to train models at home, maybe over a distributed, P2P network of open-source enthusiasts, using images off the Internet. Harder to sue and punish a decentralized ML-training coop!

maxwell 2y ago
But isn't this about LAION, an open source model? Looks like they're going after Stability, not OpenAI or Anthropic. Maybe this is more about stifling open source models.
- vlovich123 2y ago
  Apparently also anything training from it so DeviantArt (which reuploaded the model) and Midjourney (which sounds like it did a transference training) are involved. The reason the lawsuit feels weird is that transformative use is pretty clearly fair use: > In computer- and Internet-related works, the transformative characteristic of the later work is often that it provides the public with a benefit not previously available to it, I mean if genAI isn't this I'm not sure what would be. The public gets a benefit of having a computer generate art from spoken speech and that requires quite a substantial transformation of a data corpus of labelled images. Indeed, there's lots of art at Art Basel that depicts Disney characters in various ways to critique Disney & that's a much more direct copying of a different artists style (& even more direct trademark infringement). It really feels like artists are trying to have it both ways because this threatens their livelihood.
  - cowboylowrez 2y ago
    sure we get fair use when humans do it. if we give the same right to AI, why not let AI vote in elections too? This is easy, AI is not human. Once we start letting AI vote, whats to stop AI from concealed carry of weapons?
    - vlovich123 2y ago

segasaturn 2y ago

The plaintiffs are claiming that their art-style is copyrighted intellectual property and that they can sue image generators for damages if it creates an output that resembles theirs. Regardless of what you think about AI art, the precedent of this case will be a huge expansion of the power of IP and copyright law in the US mainly to the benefit of corporations - imagine Disney copyrighting the look of their 3D animated Pixar movies and suing anybody who tries to make a cartoony 3D animated movie for IP theft.

seanhunter 2y ago
That's not what they're claiming. They're claiming that the models were trained on copyright material[1] and that training models doesn't constitute fair use[2]. Their claims are in the first couple of pages of the court ruling. The claim is not that the style is copyrightable but that producing work in the same style could affect the market for the original product which is one of the parts of the four factor test for fair use. [3] [1] Which ldo they were [2] This is the big one and will have enormous ramifications if it ends up with the court ruling substantially in their favour [3] https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/ https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
  > and that training models doesn't constitute fair use How can it not constitute fair use? They both made no copies of that data (copyright infringement) nor did they commit actual theft by stealing the data from some vault. Everything else is permitted. For that matter, this is equivalent to some human artist studying a piece of art and then starting to create art in that same style too... is that no longer fair use? There are some court rulings so bad that the judge should just be removed from the bench. > could affect the market for the original product Oh, that makes more sense. The "negative movie reviews for newly released films is copyright infringement" argument. Nice.
  - akersten 2y ago
    Even the fair use argument is putting the cart before the horse. I would think these plaintiffs need to convince a court that the works are derivative first, and iff they are derivative, then the fair use argument can be made (that the reproduction is not a copyright infringement, {because e.g., the result is substantially different from the input}). Asking "is it fair use for a [human/computer] to [study/be trained on] copyrighted works" simply does not make sense as a fair use question because the answer has always been "looking at a painting and internalizing it has nothing to do with fair use, of course studying the old masters is permitted." I'm far from convinced the answer should be any different here. So to me they're barking up a non productive tree by trying to essentially say "the entire model is copyright infringement." Hopefully a judge/jury is not convinced. IMO it should be case by case for any given artifact, whether human or machine produced, does it infringe. Obviously a harder hill to climb for the plaintiffs.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

reactor 2y ago

Humans acquire a significant amount of knowledge (or get trained on) by learning from the work of others. If companies can face legal repercussions for training models on materials from elsewhere, a similar argument could be made for individuals.

coffeecloud 2y ago
To me it sounds like this argument is claiming that "training models" is legally equivalent to "training humans". So are there other examples of a human being allowed to do something where a machine made by a human is not allowed to do that thing? I am allowed to go to a movie and remember every detail and tell it to my friends, but my camcorder is not allowed to do that.
- slavik81 2y ago
  If you redrew The Lion King frame by frame from memory, it would still be copyright infringement if you redistributed it to your friends. The difference is how similar your recreation is to the original, not whether it was done by a human or by a machine.
  - epoxia 2y ago
    Funnily enough, The Lion King is a property that has its own controversy of plagiarism of a different animation, Kimba The White Lion. But, I guess if Disney does it it's okay...
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - jncfhnb 2y ago
    If you drew it shittily from memory it would still be copyright infringement. As would retelling it. Discoverability of the infringement and the irrelevance of the violation is the reason you don’t get sued
  - j0hnyl 2y ago
    Punish for the re-drawing, not the memorizing.

artninja1988 2y ago

Definitely concerning and I hope model trainers win. If push comes to shove developers can always go to jurisdictions with more forward looking copyright exemptions regarding text and data mining like Israel and Japan though.

CaptainFever 2y ago
Don't forget the EU and SG! :)

throwaway4837 2y ago

You can have a kid, that kid can grow up to be a musician inspired by Taylor Swift, likely with some of their musical output having depended on Taylor's input. That's perfectly legal. But in a possible future, you could produce an AGI that isn't allowed to listen to Taylor Swift, never allowed to be inspired by anything from Taylor's songs?

RangerScience 2y ago
AGI, I would hope, would be governed by different laws - including worker’s rights - so that the economic relationships between all parties is more similar to human relationships than LLMs. In other words: turning Taylor Swift into a software product should be a different legal situation than raising a digital consciousness.
XMPPwocky 2y ago
The existence of sentient AGIs would certainly have wide-ranging impacts on the law! This case is not about sentient AGIs.
s1artibartfast 2y ago
I think it is more nuanced than that. Imagine you write a book and release it with a non-commercial use license, but a company copies it and uses it for employee training. Imagine you wrote software and released it with a non-commercial use license, but the company includes it in their for-profit workflow.
- wiredfool 2y ago
  Imagine you wrote a book, released it using a publisher who put it on dead trees, and sold it in e-book format. And imagine that a whole industry does this, and doesn't release the books for free to copy use in any format. Which is not hard to do, because that's basically the current situation for the publishing industry. Now imagine that all of that was used to train an LLM without compensation to the authors and publishers who paid the authors. This is apparently current situation with some of the training dataset. While at the same time, libraries have to pay per e-loan. Archive.org can't do a 1:1 dead tree format shift loan to ebook. I get that the tech industry wants everyone else's information to be free to use and their products to generate money enough for big exits and big salaries, but at some point the optics look pretty bad.

aabajian 2y ago

IANAL. Is it legal to create derivatives of copyright work and then post them on public online forums? For example, I can certainly write, "Mickey Mouse got food poisoning from his Big Mac." But, if I ask an AI generator to "Make a picture of Mickey Mouse getting food poison at McDonald's", could I post the resulting picture?

radley 2y ago
The context is generating images based explicitly on intellectual property. The problem is that most AI image generators allow IP as terms and/or they consumed IP to build their model, so they will return IP-based artworks. If you're a business using the image and used IP terms in your prompt, then you'd need permissions from both parties (Disney, McDonald's) before you post it. If you're writing about AI rights, or making a comment on social media, then less likely you'll need it. If your prompt was a cartoon mouse gets food poison at a fast food joint, you're off the hook. But if it returns Mickey Mouse at McDonalds, then the AI generator is still on the hook for using IP as a source. At least, that's where this is all going.
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  >At least, that's where this is all going. Not really, because that would still be a loss for artists. Where they are trying to steer the ship is to "training on IP is copyright violation". Artists are looking to stop AI from taking their jobs. An AI generator with an IP filter on it's output will still very much be a threat to their work.
  - archontes 2y ago
    I agree that interested parties are trying to steer the ship there. I just don't see the legal arguments that will get them there. Given the fact that images are transmitted to a person in a manner that doesn't violate copyright (and even if they are, the transmitter, not receiver is guilty of infringement), training an AI is not something that copyright law limits. The AI weights that result are about the farthest thing from a derivative work, as the weights as a separate object, don't seem to contain the slightest remnant of the original work.

davexunit 2y ago

It's so obvious to me that machine learning models are derivative works of their training set. If they weren't, then why would these companies fight so hard to say otherwise? They need that training data to make their product, so they should pay the licensing fees for it! 10 years ago, when I worked on a machine learning model for my employer, it was unthinkable to train on data we did not have the rights to use. But now it's all fair game because OpenAI executives would make a little less money otherwise? They certainly aren't giving up any of their own copyright in return. It's a very transparent transfer of power and money from regular people to the bosses.

doctorpangloss 2y ago
> It's so obvious to me that machine learning models are derivative works of their training set. Okay, but narrative creators watch movies and listen to music and read books too. Many do indeed "file the serial numbers off" other people's work and publish something else, that makes them money and not the original creators. Does one instance of "filing the serial numbers off" by one author mean that no authors anywhere are allowed to write any books as soon as they've read "a bunch" of other books? I get what you are saying, but it's not so obvious what the right policy is. It is very hard to make it consistent when "AI" is substituted with "human," and it's not so obvious if "AI" is a distinct class from human, because it is after all, something that only exists because a programmer somewhere wrote and operated it.
- Retric 2y ago
  The issue here is that the AI model itself is a derivative work. Further, they will very much recreate things the’ve seen many examples of. Recreating “Mona Lisa” isn’t a problem, but recreating “Iron Man” is. Individual artists may not know how to prompt the system to recreate their work, but looking at the training sets is going to help quite a bit.
  - doctorpangloss 2y ago
    No, the issue is that it makes outputs that compete with artists, and that is a problem if you go and make a fair use argument for appropriating copyrighted works. If I were to secretly use an image generator, just for my own purposes, trained on public data, the plaintiffs would say it is just as illegal. The rub is, do you know who else makes work that competes with artists? Other artists! It still kind of goes down on some vibesy stuff that I don't know if the law has a straight answer to. And for what it's worth, the Andy Warhol v. Goldsmith decision was about artists competing with other artists - this is the decision that has created an opening to challenge fair use. I just wonder why limit ourselves to the peculiarities of that case, why not open all forms of competition between artists to litigation over their influences and processes?

Paradigma11 2y ago

I doubt the artists really thought this through. If they "win" this AI would be driven into illegality in the west and the global south would not care one bit about those laws and will happily outcompete those very same western artists on very uneven ground.