Excuse me when I make an apple pie from scratch.
https://mnhardy.umn.edu/apples/licensing https://provarmanagement.com/cosmic-crisp/
You’ll have to invent the universe first.
If someone copies your thesis, abstract, poem word for word, that is clear violation of your IP, but we are all remixing words that everyone uses, colors, brush strokes, API terms, programming language keywords, and notes. Copyright law has the fair use doctrine and transformative use is explicitly allowed to allow iteration. There is some level of granularity that is essential to creativity - otherwise one entity can copyright all possible combinations and prevent any creativity from happening legally. If AI goes below that threshold, all of humanity has a chance to iterate far faster and find new spaces and fill new needs for everyone. Humans have been able to draw in the style of Picasso or Monet for centuries. A program doing it is not infringement, just much faster iteration.
"Much faster" is absolutely relevant, morally and legally. Visiting a website a bunch of times is not illegal, programmatically DDoSing it is. Having a private conversation with someone and writing down what they said afterwards is not illegal, but recording the conversation and perfectly reproducing it without their permission often is. Shouting at someone in public is generally ok, having a drone follow them around anytime they're in public playing a recording of whatever you shouted is probably not ok.
Computers are not people. Just because it's ok for a person to do something, doesn't mean it's ok to have a computer do the same thing a billion times per second.
Computers are not people. Computers are iteration tools people use to free up precious lifetime they have and bring more value to the world. If you are a human who trains 10000 hrs to invest like Paul Graham, or draw like Thomas Kincade, or play the piano, or operate as a top brain surgeon, you have spent a fraction of your life to do this fast and reap the rewards. But that fraction of your life has tremendous cost on society. Many people paid with their time and money to feed you, teach you, house you, during that time and during your upbringing which allowed you to have those 10k hrs to dedicate to this task. Now all of that work can be used by you to do exponentially more with your precious life. Instead of spending days or years making a portrait, you’d spend seconds. Now you can find higher purpose and solve much bigger problems - instead of asking for 100 to hand draw a portrait for a few hundred people in your lifetime, you could create one for every teen who needs a boost in their self esteem and raise their confidence and ability to cope with challenges in their life at massive scale.
More importantly, since there is a huge scarcity of people trained to fulfill each niche need that forms a bottleneck on society’s capacity to use that. Imagine if instead of airplane we counted on a few trained supermen to fly people who needed to cross places fast by hand. How many people would die before they see the world or are taken to a doctor, etc. The world can’t survive on superheroes or super trained people. The world can do more with the time and lives of people in it.
> instead of asking for 100 to hand draw a portrait for a few hundred people in your lifetime, you could create one for every teen who needs a boost in their self esteem and raise their confidence and ability to cope with challenges in their life at massive scale.
This is a misunderstanding that reminds of those startups that were like "we realized people love getting hand-written cards, so we built a product to learn your handwriting and generate them for you!" No, the effort is the point. For people who like those cards it's not about the aesthetics of handwritten text, it's about knowing somebody dedicated some of their limited time to you personally. A depressed person is not going to be cheered up by an auto-generated portrait, even if it's indistinguishable from one a human artist spent 12 hours on. You can't "scale" human connection like this, unless you hide the fact that robots are involved.
I'm not saying all technology is bad. I think robo-surgeons would be great if they can save more lives, even if they put human surgeons out of work. In this particular domain, right now it seems like these tools have the potential to discourage future generations of artists, which would be self-defeating because the models are not AI and will stagnate without additional training data. I don't think they should be banned, but I think we should take human artists' concerns seriously, not co-opt someone's artistic identity if they ask us not to, and try to make sure we think about the unintended consequences of a powerful new tool.
There will always be unintended consequences and some will be severe. But what is happening now is pent up demand that finally found an outlet - like a bunch of high pressure mountain water that found a hole through a cave wall and into the ocean - it is gushing.
Instead of blind fear of change, I try to see the value previously unseen and it is tremendous. As the creator in the article said she does not see her true art in the stable diffusion creations: the eyes that speak to character in each character, the poses that show confidence or query, or passion. Instead she sees images that mimic her style of drawing.
I do see how someone may choose to not become an artist for a living because AI art becomes so ubiquitous that they could never make a living with a paintbrush. BUT, with so much 80-90% of desired art generated by AI, there will now be huge demand for skilled artists who can take a generated image the rest of the way to desired results. I trust that human ambition and taste always expands past superhuman capabilities. The artists if tomorrow will have much different brushes than those of yesterday and be far better and more productive than those of yesterday. There will likely be 3D art in the real world and universes to explore in the virtual one. I’m more concerned we will and are running out of space to store our contraptions. Data storage manufacturers will be thriving.
----- People claiming you can copyright a canvas that is just a color (when you can't, you can only copyright the art installation/display). People claiming that you can copyright the alphabet (when you can't). It's just frustrating that HN wants to keep having this discussion but with ZERO basis in actual copyright law, and people making factually inaccurate claims as if they understand it. I had the same issue on a criminal law post. Someone posted completely factually inaccurate information regarding title 18 statutes, and HN blocking me from responding in a timely manner while people were reading the post. This just isn't a forum for informed discussion I guess, but peoples gut feelings and what they THINK copyright law is. Opinions are great, and needed, but established law is a real thing and should be part of a discussion that at it's core is about copyright.
Why? Because Ai generated "art" is a soupy mess and real life human artists can speak and understand colloquial language, work quickly, and develop new styles based on new direction.
But then again maybe we're looking at the death of a widespread industry like when gigantic industrial looms came on the scene, but I highly doubt it.
Then again, last of all, I do see a future where AIs generate full feature length photo-real movies in minutes based on prompts and cheaply.
I was complaining about all of this when the derivation was based on "the internet" and everyone was being ripped off at once. All the AI-generated art out there is doing the same thing.
Of course most of this is being used to create derivations of trendy pop art, so are we really losing anything? Was there ever any hope for artistic capitalism as something that communicates in meaningful ways beyond the most local of scale?
If the copyright violation occured by the AI's inputs looking at the work... how is that different than an image of the work landing on a human's retinas?
This may appeal to naive people (students, hippies, etc.), for whom socialist/communist ideas are attractive, but it's poison in the real world because it eliminates the reward system that motivates most creative work.
Ask yourself, why does the MIT License (https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT) contain the following text?
These systems are a mechanism that can regurgitate (digest, remix, emit) without attribution all of the world's open code and all of the world's art.With these systems, you're giving everyone the ability to plagiarize everything, effortlessly and unknowingly. No skill, no effort, no time required. No awareness of the sources of the derivative work.
My work is now your work. Everyone and his 10-year old brother can "write" my code (and derivatives), without ever knowing I wrote it, without ever knowing I existed. Everyone can use my hard work, regurgitated anonymously, stripped of all credit, stripped of all attribution, stripped of all identity and ancestry and citation.
It's a new kind of use not known (or imagined?) when the copyright laws were written.
Training must be opt in, not opt out.
Every artist, every creative individual, must EXPLICITLY OPT IN to having their hard work regurgitated anonymously by Copilot or Dall-E or whatever.
If you want to donate your code or your painting or your music so it can easily be "written" or "painted", in whole or in part, by everyone else, without attribution, then go ahead and opt in.
But if an author or artist does not EXPLICITLY OPT IN, you can't use their creative work to train these systems.
All these code/art washing systems, that absorb and mix and regurgitate the hard work of creative people must be strictly opt in.