Visual artists fight back against AI companies for repurposing their work::Three visual artists are suing artificial intelligence image-generators to protect their copyrights and careers.
It seems pretty obvious to me that the artists should win this assuming their images weren’t poorly licenced. Training AI is absolutely a commercial use.
These companies adopted a run fast and don’t look back legal strategy and now they’re going to enter the ‘find out’ phase.
I don’t think it’s obvious at all. Both legally speaking - there is no consensus around this issue - and ethically speaking because AIs fundamentally function the same way humans do.
We take in input, some of which is bound to be copyrighted work, and we mesh them all together to create new things. This is essentially how art works. Someone’s “style” cannot be copyrighted, only specific works.
The government announced an inquiry recently into the copyright questions surrounding AI. They are going to make recommendations to congress about potential legislation, if any, they think would be a good idea. I believe there’s a period of public comment until mid October, if anyone wants to write a comment.
This is a pretty old story, the EFF already weighed in on it back in april.
“The Stable Diffusion model makes four gigabytes of observations regarding more than five billion images. That means that its model contains less than one byte of information per image analyzed (a byte is just eight bits—a zero or a one).”
What a great article, it really lays it out well and concisely. I like the above point especially.
Yeah, there’s gold wherever you look. I like:
First, copyright law doesn’t prevent you from making factual observations about a work or copying the facts embodied in a work (this is called the “idea/expression distinction”). Rather, copyright forbids you from copying the work’s creative expression in a way that could substitute for the original, and from making “derivative works” when those works copy too much creative expression from the original.
This is a tough one, because they are not directly making money from the copyrighted material.
Isn’t this a bit same as using short samples of somebodys song in your own song or somebody getting inspired from somebodys artwork and creating something similar.
If you’re sampling music you aught to be compensating the licence holder unless it’s public domain or your work is under a fair use exception.
Are you speaking legally or morally when you say someone “aught” to do something?
Sampling music is literally placing parts of that music in the final product. Gen AI is not placing pieces of other people’s art in the final image, in fact it doesn’t store any image data at all. Using an image in the training data is akin to an artist including that image on their moodboard. Except the AI’s moodboard has way more images and the odds of the work being too similar to a single particular image is lower than when a human does it.
