for non-photorealistic work, or if it becomes virtually indistinguishable from photography, how would you know whether an image was expensively sourced from a human artists/photographer or cheaply generated by an AI? how would we enforce copyrights in relation to AI if anyone can lie and claim "oh yeah, i paid a wetware neural net to do that, no problem.."?
in particular, the argument that "ai generated works is not copyrightable" in support of it being untenable to use it for business purposes is challenged by the observation that "we won't be able to tell whether where it came from anyway"
You won't be able to if you look solely at the output. There are ways to check audit and verify the process by which said output was produced. They are also gamable but the cost of gaming them is not insignificant.
i think is the scenario in question if someone is lying about the source of an image
> There are ways to check audit and verify the process by which said output was produced. They are also gamable but the cost of gaming them is not insignificant.
this is interesting to know about. do you have some zero knowledge proof arrangement in mind here?
- i've worked for a company which acquired its art content from a foreign outsourcing business.
- the foreign outsourcing business of course hired human artists, albeit at much lower wages than is possible where the company i worked for was located.
- the company i worked for launched a product containing this art content and never encountered a copyright challenge.
if AI eventually produces content indistinguishable from what humans can produce, what prevents these foreign outsourcing businesses from quietly pretending they still hire humans? the true origin of the content can be trivially "laundered".
>if AI eventually produces content indistinguishable from what humans can produce, what prevents these foreign outsourcing businesses from quietly pretending they still hire humans?
The fact that they don't and if it is discovered, it will mean all of the work generated by them is not copyrightable and therefore everyone is free to copy it. They'd also have to lie to the copyright office and the businesses they were selling their services. The only thing doing the work here is the lie.
Right now I can go to another place and find another photographer who will recreate something for less. Technology might make that more trivial, but it doesn't change the fact that as a business opportunity it'd only work by having to massively misrepresent oneself.
Ostensibly, if I was a business and I was contracting these kinds of services, one thing guaranteed to be in the contract would be a clause that they authored the works, obtained the copyrights, etc, lawfully. And generally in a contract they would represent what the business represents (we are an illustration shop that sells images that we authored... etc).
So to more specifically answer your question - "what would stop them?" the same exact repercussions as would right now (which is what I intended to make clear in my initial response to you).
you and i have extremely different impressions of how effective regulatory repercussions are at actually constraining behaviour.
circumventing laws and regulations really does do a lot of the work in the economy. vast amounts of plagiarised code run in software we touch every day. artistic work gets crudely lifted. i don't see something as powerful as ai content generation being constrained by dictums about what can be copyrighted.
But with improvements to the models I can see it fitting into a "integrated into professional creative tooling" business model. Generate a rough "first draft" based on a prompt and edit. It simultaneously keeps a human in the loop to filter some of the model's zanier outputs, makes sure the output coheres with some design vision, and also people using these features professionally are much more likely to actually pay for what will be fairly expensive-to-operate features.
I'm excited about generative models, buuuuut I will echo the other thoughts here re: VC hype. The last cycle of VC investments turned out to be full of hot air and no substance. The kind of hype around generative models feels a lot like crypto: lots of breathless excitement combined with few details. We are simply being promised that this technology will usher in some kind of golden era but nobody can seem to point to killer use cases. There's so much hand-waving around actual applications that it threatens to generate a hurricane from the sheer amount of air being displaced.
As someone who works in the AI/ML field I've explored this stuff and it's definitely promising for some use cases and can potentially be transformative for some niches, but I do not see this as world-transformative at this point and considering where said breathless hypeness is coming from I'd encourage caution in over-exuberance.
[edit] My sincere hope for this new cycle of tech hype is that we actually create some businesses of worth. I do not expect this to come from VC-world, who seem to have spent the last decade building wholly incompetent businesses and foisting them on public investors (or in the case of crypto and ICOs, just fleecing retail investors directly).
My hope is that developers can actually use these models to do valuable things that people will pay for, as opposed to shovel yet more money into yet more furnaces to prop up absurd valuations around comparably tiny revenue.