this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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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.

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[–] FireTower@lemmy.world 41 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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.

[–] Even_Adder@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is a pretty old story, the EFF already weighed in on it back in april.

[–] Grimy@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

"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.

[–] Even_Adder@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] GFGJewbacca@lemm.ee 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I would like to agree with you, but I have doubts this lawsuit will stick because of how prominent corporations are in US law.

[–] joe@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (14 children)

There's nothing in copyright law that covers this scenario, so anyone that says it's "absolutely" one way or the other is telling you an opinion, not a fact.

[–] Lmaydev@programming.dev 5 points 1 year ago

It's like sueing an artist because they learnt to paint based on your paintings. But also not because the company has acquired your art and fed it into an application.

It's a very tricky area.

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[–] kava@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (45 children)

I really hope you're wrong.

And I think there's a difference. Humans can draw stuff, build structures, and make tools, in a way that improves upon the previous iteration. Each artists adds something, or combines things in a way that makes for something greater.

AI art, literally cannot do anything, without human training data. It can't take a previous result, be inspired by it, and make it better. There has to be actual human input, it can't train itself on its own data, the way humans do. It absolutely does not "work the same way".

AI art has NEVER made me feel like it's greater than the sum of its parts. Unlike art made by humans, which makes me feel that way all the time.

If a human does art without input, you still get "something".

With an AI, you don't have that. Without the training data, you have nothing.

[–] kava@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

If a human does art without input, you still get “something”.

Ok, take a human being that has never had any other interactions with any other human and has never consumed any content created by humans. Give him finger paint and have him paint something on a blank canvas. I think it wouldn't look any different than a chimpanzee doing finger paint.

it can’t train itself on its own data

In theory, it could. You would just need a way to quantify the "fitness" of a drawing. They do this by comparing to actual content. But you don't need actual content in some circumstances. For example, look at Alphazero - Deepmind's AI from a few years back for playing chess. All the AI knew was the rules of the game. It did not have access to any database of games. No data. The way it learned is it played millions of games against itself.

It trained itself on its own data. And that AI, at the time, beat the leading chess engine that has access to databases and other pre-built algorithms.

With art this gets trickier because art is subjective. You can quantify clearly whether you won or lost a chess game. How do you quantify if something is a good piece of art? If we can somehow quantify this, you could in theory create AI that generates art with no input.

We're in the infancy stages of this technology.

Humans can draw stuff, build structures, and make tools, in a way that improves upon the previous iteration. Each artists adds something, or combines things in a way that makes for something greater.

AI can do all of the same. I know it's scary but it's here and it isn't going away. AI designed systems are becoming more and more commonplace. Solar panels, medical devices, computer hardware, aircraft wings, potential drug compounds, etc. Certain things AI can be really good at, and designing things and testing it in a million different simulations is something that AI can do a lot better than humans.

AI art has NEVER made me feel like it’s greater than the sum of its parts

What is art? If I make something that means nothing and you find a meaning in it, is it meaningful? AI is a cold calculated mathematical model that produces meaningless output. But humans love finding patterns in noise.

Trust me, you will eventually see some sort of AI art that makes an impact on you. Math doesn't lie. If statistics can turn art into data and find the hidden patterns that make something impactful, then it can recreate it in a way that is impactful.

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[–] Grimy@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I think it's a mistake to see the software as an independent entity. It's a tool just like the paintbrush or photoshop. So yes, there isn't any AI art without the human but that's true for every single art form.

The best art is a mix of different techniques and skills. Many digital artists are implementing ai into their workflow and there is definitely depth to what they are making.

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[–] random_character_a@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] FireTower@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] lunarul@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] joe@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Are you speaking legally or morally when you say someone "aught" to do something?