On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney

Re:On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train... by jacobr1 on Tuesday January 16, 2024 @03:34PM (#39018760)

Wouldn't that depend on the use case? If you just had the model regenerate articles that roughly approximate its source material that is much a more clear cut violation of a paywall. But if you use that data as general background knowledge to synthesize aggregative works such a history of the vietnam war, or trends in musical theatre in the 1980s relative the 1970s, or shifts in the language usage of formal honorifics, then that seems to me to be clearly fair-use categories. There are gray areas, such as aggregating the opinions of a certain op-ed writer over a short timeframe that while it might produce a novel work, is basically is mixmash of recent articles. But would that be unfair, especially if not done in the original authors style?

These technical distinctions like these probably will matter in whatever form regulation eventually ends up becoming.

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Re:On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train... by kopecs on Tuesday January 16, 2024 @04:24PM (#39019350)

Yes, I think this is a rather fact-specific inquiry. My main point is that the research/commercial distinction is not the only factor (and not even the most important one).

> if you use that data as general background knowledge to synthesize aggregative works such a history of the vietnam war, or trends in musical theatre in the 1980s relative the 1970s, or shifts in the language usage of formal honorifics, then that seems to me to be clearly fair-use categories

I don't think this is clear. If someone were to train a model on several books about the Vietnam War and then publish my own model-created book on history of the Vietnam War, I would be inclined to say that that is infringement. And if they changed the dataset to include a plurality of additional books which happen to not be about Vietnam, I don't think that changes the analysis substantially.

I think it is hard to earnestly claim that in that instance the output (setting aside the model itself, which is also a consideration) is transformative, and so I would think, absent more specific facts, that all four fair use factors are against it.

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Re:On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train... by jacobr1 on Wednesday January 17, 2024 @04:01PM (#39033394)

> And if they changed the dataset to include a plurality of additional books which happen to not be about Vietnam, I don't think that changes the analysis substantially.

I think the question is if it changes analysis if the dataset DOES include a bunch of books and articles related to Vietnam beyond your specific book.

In the first cast where it just rewriting a single books content, the unfairness is clear.

But in case where it is producing a new synthesis and analysis of the data, derived in part, but not regurgitating the source material, is that unfair?

The latter isn't clear to me.

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Re:On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train... by makomk on Tuesday January 16, 2024 @05:01PM (#39019752)

Quite a lot of what news publications like the New York Times do is precisely regenerating articles that roughly approximate source material from some other publication. If I remember rightly, a lot of smaller, more local news organisations aren't happy about this because of course it's a more or less direct substitute for the original and a handful of big news organisations (particularly the New York Times) are taking so much of the money that people are willing to pay for news that it's affecting the viability of the rest - but it's not illegal, since facts cannot be copyrighted.

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