Frodo: What?
Sam: If I take one more step, I'll be the farthest away from home I've ever been.
Popup: And you can do that for just $29.99 when you buy The Hobbits Shire Expansion DLC!
The movie making studios already own those 3d "digital assets" from their films. IDK if there is a real "free-for-all" right now, but the monetisation play has already been planned for.
Never underestimate the power of a sufficiently motivated rich individual to create legal hell (see Gawker). There are many very rich artists. There just needs to be an obvious large enough irritant which will happen as these generative models start getting used beyond toy amusements. The class action lawsuit against Copilot was filed just as pricing models started.
This is going to be an interesting area to watch. Use in commercial projects at your own risk of exposure to liability.
It really feels like the textile factory worker problem all over again. We can't let the big players be the benefactors every time.
That is impossible (assigning credit to training images from the output is arbitrary, not deterministic) and wouldn't help anyone (imagine Spotify except it pays you even less).
> It really feels like the textile factory worker problem all over again. We can't let the big players be the benefactors every time.
Industrialization is better for society because it produces more customer surplus. Even Marx thought the Luddites were wrong.
Also my point.
>Even Marx thought the Luddites were wrong.
Sure they are wrong in that they confuse what the problem is. If workers owned the factory they would be happy to automate the work. But their feeling of being left out has some validity because if they weren't the total value would improve.
The real issue is that the revenue brought back through automation doesn't benefit the worker. If it did, the automation would happen sooner because incentives would align better and the total value for society would thus likely improve faster.
But what if you use only three films? Or two?
Where are they saying that? Nobody thinks it's a gray area, they think it's explicitly legal and they're probably right too. Claiming it's a copyright violation is actually a rather weak case artists are just saying is obvious.
Microsoft has licensed DALL-E. They're not venturing into legal gray areas.
The argument I heard most often goes along the lines of: "people also learn from a lot of examples and other artists, and that is not copyrighted".
It is an interesting argument, but AI is not people and the argument could easily be the opposite (not taking sides here). They might think it is legal, but it is far from clear, IMHO.
IANAL, but it will be interesting to see if this is enforceable and by whom.
Their history as litigation defendants would suggest your optimism may perhaps be unfounded.
How does it infringe? Are your memories of a movie copyright infringement?
Note that this doesn't mean that Stable Diffusion (and friends) are copyright infringing just because they're trained on copyrighted material. My brain doesn't infringe the LOTR copyright because of my memories of the films. If I turn my experience of fantasy epics into a new novel with a different storyline than LOTR, that's not copyright infringement. That's creativity. But those same memories can likewise be used to make works that are infringing. The question of infringement isn't in the creative act, it's in the artifact. I think it's plausible (though not certain of course) that IP questions will be settled for AIs in the same way: it's not infringement to train your AI on copyrighted material. It is infringement to use your AI to generate works that a reasonable person would conclude are intended to replicate or imitate copyrighted material.
If that's the case, it should probably should be codified in law. Copyright has a lot of exceptions, and if the existence of AI models trained with copyrighted data are in public interest then it could be an exception too, but this should not be up to the courts.
I guess you can pirate Lord of the Rings on bitorrent all you want then? Cause computers are just a bunch of brains remembering things?
This is not a winning legal argument. However this is resolved, no court is going to treat an intentionally designed piece of computer software as a "brain". Or the machine storage of information as equivilent to a human being's "memory".
Obviously if OpenAI or other AI researchers are committing media piracy as part of their research, that is something they're legally liable for. It doesn't mean that their AI "remembering" it is inherently infringing.
I predict A.I. trained on LOTR will be found to be infringing because it's a derivative work unless the court determines that use of the original work constitutes a fair use.
My general point in my intentionally silly brain metaphor is brain metaphors are inapplicable and unconvincing.
Okay, but that's just a prediction, not an argument. I don't agree with the prediction. I think it makes some sense to think about the AI training data on analogy with memories, because they contain impressions of a thing without being able to reproduce it exactly. They can both be the source of both real creativity as well as the source of infringing works.
I don't see an argument for considering the training data produced by AI training a derivative work, at least not in any copyrightable sense. ChatGPT is "software"; the training data that it operates on is not "software" in the strictest sense and exists in an uncomfortable middle space at present with respect to copyright law. That's what the memory analogy is supposed to show: just like human memories aren't subject to copyright, AI training data that is similar in structure and capabilities to human memories is likewise not subject to copyright. More precisely, my point is that that's one entirely reasonable way courts could rule: AI training data represents "fair use" of its sources (provided they are legally obtained of course), but the products of an AI trained on those sources might not be.
It also has no precedent in it's favor. As far as I know no court has ever used "Is it like a brain?" to settle a copyright issue.
As a society we ask people to branch out into various expertise… through no fault of their own maybe someone’s expertise is randomly obsoleted by a new technology. Just as copyright laws incentivize new creations, we as a society should incentivize people to embrace new disrupting technologies by safety-netting those displaced by them since it’s a gamble more or less of who is next to be displaced.
If you build your own replica of the bridge of the Enterprise, then yes.
This is pretty settled law.
The point of copyright in general is to protect the economic value for the producer. Being so grabby about "IP rights" that they literally claw back the experience of consuming it means that the economic value of the IP drops to zero. It only has value in the context of being consumed, remembered, etc., and where the person purchasing the experience has confidence that such a thing will be allowed.
I suppose hypothetical future simulated humans could be shaped and molded until they give up some real value for an "experience" they won't be allowed to remember tomorrow, but by then they have passed so far beyond what is "human" that I have no further guesses what they may act like. (That's the true meaning of the "singularity" term, not any particular future, but the point at which our predictions are meaningless.)
Copyright also has nothing to do with the tool.
What a piece depicts and how it is used are much more important than how a piece was created. If I paint a picture by hand of a particular scene from a Disney movie, that's clearly a derived work and may be subject to copyright protection (it depends, there could be a fair use argument in specific situations, so even "it's copyright!" is not a cut-and-dried argument). If I paint a picture of Hercules in the style of Disney, that's trademark violation. But I can paint Hercules in any other style and Disney can't say shit (though they certainly try).
This is an age-old argument. Some artists think they should have a monopoly on certain ideas. As a society, we've already said no, you only get to own your expression of your ideas.
And as ideas go, "like a trending artist on ArtStation" isn't a particularly strong one.
I'm sure there will be no questions there.
The questions about the copyright of models like DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, etc. exist solely because it infringes on the rights of thousands of random artists all around the world. There is no one single entity with enough power to clearly oppose it so people making the models can get away with "questionable copyright", "legal gray area", etc. kind of talk.
Try the same with a model trained on a single movie created by a multinational with infinite money and all this will be resolved and defined real quick and strongly worded cease & desist letters sent out by end of work day.