Edit: Apparently LAION doesn't republish the content, only the metadata, so it's not a copyright violation. Still, it would be nice if got permission or offered a way for artists to be excluded from the data set.
It obeys robots.txt, and the user-agent is documented.
"LAION datasets are simply indexes to the internet, i.e. lists of URLs to the original images together with the ALT texts found linked to those images."
I'm surprised link rot doesn't make this a big problem.
that the non-profit LAION is going as far as intimidating the creators of the images they used.
They don't publish the image, yes, and that is also their reasoning. However, in my opinion, the intention behind all of this seems obvious. They circumvent copyright claims by being a non-profit and not publishing, but with the clear intent that the image will be used to train some system further down the road. LAION appears to be a key player in how these text-to-image models dodge the copyright bullet.
Links are still mostly legal in Germany, if the link is to something which is not, it’s a different situation and different from "hey, I own the copyright of my images, don’t link to them!"
I very much disagree.
No, their reasoning is that they only keep a link to the image so there’s nothing to remove.
A more interesting angle would be copyrightable ALT tags in the form of poems or other creative content. But, the cat is already out of the bag as it’s probably easy enough to strip poetry or other copyrightable out of alt tags with the technology we’ve got at this point.
I'm well aware of it, and that's also what I wanted to say. However, as I mentioned, the dataset with the links (to copyrighted material) is provided for machine learning purposes. Saying "We only provide links" is a lazy excuse from a guy with a smirking face.
If artists don't want their work to impact the world, they're free to keep it to themselves.
This whole discussion that we should allow individual artists to opt out of AI art through contracts or some other legal vehicle is a non starter, because it'll be impossible to administrate and enforce at scale, and there's too much incentive and ability for big tech to just ignore them and steamroll artists. They aren't a unified bloc, and even if they were how would they ever compete against big tech?
So what to do? Looking at productivity gains over the decades, it's not clear why we are still working as hard as we are. It's long overdue that productivity gains should come back to the people. Maybe "artist" shouldn't be a job title associated with profit/income seeking. If you want to be an artist, maybe society can support that.
Maybe instead of using all those productivity gains to do more more more, we can just work less for the same. Because it seems to me the more we work, the more they get richer. What if instead, they didn't get so rich, and we gave that money to artists in the form of grants, like we do for scientists. You do some art, apply for some grants, and you get some money to do more art. It'll all be public domain, anyone can use it, and big business gets to make a profit on it just like with scientific advancements (I have issues about that, but at least there's precedent).
Once that happens, of course the "black market" data aggregators won't care, but they're small and their product can't be used by legitimate channels so it can't compete in the mainstream market of ideas. What capital will do to screw over artists though is... Pay them. Once a framework is in place, a hundred or a thousand legit artists can produce enough AI seed-feed to legally supplant the work of hundreds of thousands.
This is the thing that will never happen, because all artists are interested parties, and as I said, they are not a unified bloc. So whatever solution big companies come up with for themselves, we all know ahead of time that they will 1) overwhelmingly benefit big corporations and 2) but insufficient to address artist concerns. When they coalesce around whatever standards they end up with, artists will still largely be making the same complaints.
Plus, LAION is just an index, whereas Pinterest actually hosts it.
If you'd now go and do the same, create a website that rehosts known content, Google will simply delist you.
But magically, not for Pinterest, they get a boost instead. I've always wondered what kind of under the table deal makes this possible.
Pinterest, "their content"... not sure I agree with that but if we're going to use the logic that things saved to Pinterest by it's users becomes Pinterest's content then isn't LAION doing the same thing and the content becomes LAION's content when it's saved to their database of images...