So no, it's not at all clear where the legal lines are drawn. There have been no court cases yet, regarding the training of ML models. People are trying to draw analogies from other types of cases, but this has not been tried in court yet. And then the answer will likely differ based on country.
Not if Google honors the robots.txt like they say they do. Hosting content with a robots.txt saying "index me please" is essentially an implicit contract with Google for full access to your content in return for showing up in their search results.
Hosting an image/code repository with a very specific license attached and then having that licensed ignored by someone who repackages that content and redistributes it is not the same as sites explicitly telling Google to index their content.
A much closer comparison IMO would be someone compressing a massive library of copyrighted content and then redistributing it and arguing it's legal because "the content has been processed and can't be recovered without a specific setup". I don't think we'd need prior court cases to argue that would most likely be illegal, so I don't see how machine learning models differ.
Then there's the fact that humanity has been able to develop and share art and literary works for thousands of years without the modern copyright system.
It would be interesting to see if this technology can erode the copyright concept a bit. Maybe not remove it completely, but perhaps influence people to create wider definitions for "fair use", and undo the extensions that Disney lobbyists have created.
Copyright law (especially in US) only ever changes in the direction that suits corporations. So - no.
What I expect instead is artists being sued by a big tech company for copyright violations because that big tech company used the artist Public Domain image for training their copyrighted AI and as a result it created a copyrighted copy of the original artist's image.
There is nothing that the generative AI can do in this process that's legally different from copy pasting the image, editing it a bit by hand, and somehow claiming intellectual property of the _initial_ image, no ?
It's absurd.
There's certainly arguments to be made in this direction, for example corporations tending to have the most money they can afford to spend on lobbying to get their way, but the attitude of "it hasn't been good up 'til now so it definitely can't ever be good" is pretty defeatist and would imply that positive change is impossible in any area.
You can already see the quite strange and toned down language they use on their sites. (And for some the revealing reversal from we licence to you to you licence to us)
Some smaller AI companies might believe they own a clear cut copyright and sue, but it would make sense that they would either be thrown out or loose
However, even if an image is not copyrightable, it can still infringe copyright. For example, mechanical reproductions of images are not copyrightable in the US[0] - which is why you even can have public domain imagery on the web. However, if I scan a copyrighted image into my computer, that doesn't launder the copyright away, and I can still be sued for having that image on my website.
Likewise, if I ask an AI to give me someone else's copyrighted work[1], it will happily regurgitate its training set and do that, and that's infringement. This is separate from the question of training the AI itself; even if that is fair use[2], that does nothing for the people using the AI because fair use is not transitive. If I, say, take every YouTube video essay and review on a particular movie and just clip out and re-edit all the movie clips in those reviews, that doesn't make my re-edit fair use. You cannot "reach through" a fair use to infringe copyright.
[0] In Europe there's a concept of neighboring rights, where instead of issuing you a full copyright you get 20 years of ownership instead. This is intended for things like databases and the like. This also applies to images; copyright over there distinguishes between artistic photography (full copyright) and other kinds of photography (20 years neighboring right only). This is also why Wikimedia Commons has a hilarious amount of Italian photos from the 80s in a special PD-Italy category.
[1] Which is not too difficult to do
[2] My current guess is that it is fair use, because the AI can generate novel works if you give it novel input.
That’s because only humans can own copyrights. People can and have registered copyrights for Midjourney outputs.
Just objectively false.
But they developed Cubism in parallel. There were periods where their work was almost indistinguishable. "Houses at l'Estaque", the trope namer for Cubism thanks to the remarks of a critic, was in fact by Braque.
You can generate infinite recognizable Basquiat from an AI, but is it Basquiat? No, of course not, because Basquiat's style operates within the context of a specific individual human making a point about expectations and the interface between his race and his artistic boldness and audacity as experienced by his wealthy audience. Making an AI 'ape' (!) his art style is itself quite the artistic statement, but it's not the same thing in the slightest.
You can generate infinite Rothko as 512x512 squares, but if you don't understand how the gallery hangings work and their ability to fill your entire visual field with first carefully chosen color, and then a great deal of detail at the threshold of perception of distinctions between color shades meant to further drive home the reaction to the basic color's moods, what you generate is basically arbitrary and nothing. Rothko isn't 'just a random color', Rothko is about giving you a feeling through means that aren't normal or representational, and the unusualness of this (reasonably successful) effort is what gave the work its valuation.
Ownership of the experience by a particular artist isn't the point. Rothko isn't solely celebrity worship and speculation. Picasso isn't all of Cubism. Art is things other than property of particular artists.
What makes it awkward is the great ease by which AI can blindly and unhelpfully wear the mask of an artist, such as Basquiat, to the detriment of art. It's HOW you use the tools, and it's possible to abuse such tools.
I'm not sure how I feel about this - I agree with the conclusion, but not the reasoning. For me, AI-generated Basquiat is not Basquiat simply because he had no ownership or agency in the process of its creation.
It feels like an overly romantic notion that art requires specific historical/cultural context at the moment of its creation to be valid.
If I could hypothetically pay Basquiat $100 to put his own work into a stable diffusion model that created a Basquiat-esque work, that's still a Basquiat. If I could pay him to draw a circle with a pencil, that's his work - and if I used it in an AI model, then it's not.
It's about who held the paintbrush, or who delegated holding the paintbrush, not a retrospectively applied critical theory.
Even more than that, you couldn't do Rothko that way: the man would be beyond offended and would not deal with you at all. But by contrast, you ABSOLUTELY are doing a Warhol if you train an AI on him and have it generate infinite works, and furthermore I think he'd be absolutely delighted at the notion, and would love exploring the unexplored conceptual space inside the neural net.
In a sense, an AI Warhol is megaWarhol, an unexplored level of Warholiness that wasn't attainable within his lifetime.
Context and intent matter. All of modern art ended up exploring these questions AS the artform itself, so boiling it down to 'did a specific person make a mark on a thing' won't work here.
Any drawing Basquiat did is a piece of art by Basquiat, whether or not it fits into the narrative of a book/thesis/lecture/exhibition. The circle metaphor isn't important - replace it with anything else. Artists regularly throw their own work away. Some of this is saved and celebrated posthumously, some never sees the light of day in accordance with their wishes. Scraps that fell on Picasso's floor sell for huge amounts of money.
Does everything he did fit the "brand" that some art historians have labelled him with, or the "brand" that auction houses promote to increase value, or the "brand" which a fashion label licenses for t-shirts? No, but I suspect this is probably what you are talking about ie. a "classic" Basquiat™ with certificate of authenticity?
Is it by Basquiat? vs Is it a Basquiat?
That seems to be the core of the issue, and a much more interesting conversation to have. So why do I keep seeing a version of your first paragraph everywhere and not an explanation on why the assumption can be made?
This arguments come up in every thread, and I'm baffled that people don't think the scale matters.
You may also be observed in public areas by police, but it would be an orwellian dystopia to have millions of cameras in spaces analyzing everyone's behavior in public.
Scale matters.
(But I'm indeed in favor of weaker copyright laws! But preferably to take power away from the copyright monopolies than the individual artists who barely get by with their profits)
Aren't there already 80M+ surveillance cameras in the US?
Outside of the US, London seems to have a lot of CCTV cameras.
Do privacy laws restrict how they can be used and whether they can be monitored by AI systems?
Human endeavor is inherently collaborative. The idea that my art is my virgin creation is an illusion perpetuated by capitalists. My art is the work of thousands who came before me with my slight additions and tweaks.
Your (and in general, our) suggestion that we should be concerned with respecting or even expanding these protections is incorrect if you want human creativity to flourish.
Then came the brutal reality: creating high-quality artwork needs time. Some can be created after work, but not that much. Some forms of art require expensive instruments. Some, like filmmaking, require collaboration and coordination of many people. So yes, I could do some forms of art part-time using the money from my day job, but I knew it was a far cry from what I could do when working on it full time. It's not capitalism, it's just reality.
That reason has nothing to do with intellectual property or how it's created, it's a consequence of living in a capitalist society.
So, yes, capitalism in the sense of the freedom to trade one's labor does appear to be naturally and universally emergent in advanced human societies, in the absence of violent interference.
To the extent that certain aspects of capitalism lead to violence, those are elements that other parties -- generally corporations or governments rather than writers or philosophers -- added to the ideology.
People die trying to break out of non-capitalist countries, while they die trying to break in to capitalist ones. That's one possible way to tell the good guys from the bad guys.
Ahahah, I absolutely love this sentence. You might have said the quiet part out loud though.
“You gots to understand”, said Fat Tony, “I'm not a violent man. The violence simply comes in when you interfere with my business.”
But capitalism prevails and may be the best system there is for now because I cannot fathom a change in system overnight that would not result in mass suffering for (almost) everyone.
Can you point to a system that worked well before that you'd like to go back to?
I just wanted to point out that capitalism is in fact a specific economic system. It's not a law of nature, or another word for "markets" or "freedom", or a realization that some other system doesn't work.
If all artists are "weekend warriors", they will still produce a lot of art, and some of it will be the best in that world. But the quality will be far from what we enjoy today.
That said, there are of course other ways to pay artists than the capitalist way of having customers pay for what they like. But I think the track record firmly favors a capitalist system.
The there still is the question of attribution, which 100% of real artists care about.
But I am absolutely not in favor of keeping IP restrictions in place and then letting big corporations scoop up the works of small independent artists for their ML models.
Think of it in terms of software licenses. The people who write GPL protected software are leveraging existing copyright laws to enforce distribution of their code. They would probably be in favor of abolishing the entire IP rights system. But if a big corporation was copying a project from an independent creator that was GPL licensed, they’d sure as hell want to prosecute.
I believe strongly that IP restrictions are harmful. But keeping them in place while letting big corporations benefit from the work of independent artists who don’t want their work used in this way seems wrong to me. As long as artists wouldn’t expect anyone else to be able to copy their works, I’d like them to be able to consent to their work being used in these systems.
> But keeping them in place while letting big corporations benefit from the work of independent artists who don’t want their work used in this way seems wrong to me.
I see what you're saying here. My concern is that should copyright style protection be extended to the "vibe" or "style" of a painting it is going to be twisted in a way that ends up being used to silence/abuse artists in the same way that copyright strikes are already.
I think the idea that art is mostly individually creative vs mostly drawing upon the work of all the artists and art-appreciators around you and before you is already really problematic. The corrupting power of the idea is what I worry about. Similarly to crypto/NFTs, the idea that scarcity should exist in the digital world is the most dangerous thing, most of the other bad stems from that.
IMO the most important thing to work on is getting people to reject the idea itself as harmful.
I worry that any short term fix to try to prop up artists' rights in response to this changing landscape will become a long term anchor on our society's equity and cultural progress in the exact same way copyright is.
Honestly it baffles me that in all this discussion, I rarely see people discussing how to do this with appropriately licensed images. There are some pretty large datasets out there of public images, and doing so might even help encourage more people to contribute to open datasets.
Also if the big ML companies HAD to use open images, they would be forced to figure out sample efficiency for these models. Which is good for the ML community! They would also be motivated to encourage the creation of larger openly licensed datasets, which would be great. I still think if we got twitter and other social media sites to add image license options, then people who want to contribute to open datasets could do so in an easy and socially contagious way. Maybe this would be a good project for mastodon contributors, since that is something we actually have control over. I'd be happy to license my photography with an open license!
It is really a wonderful idea to try to do this with open data. Maybe it won't work very well with current techniques, but that just becomes an engineering problem worth looking at (sample efficiency).