Art Wars: The AI Menace
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There have been talks before that art sites would start blocking uploads if they seemed to be generated by one of the recent text-to-image AIs:
Flooded with AI-generated images, some art communities ban them completely
Smaller art communities are banning image synthesis amid a wider art ethics debate.
I was amused that artists on the ArtStation website were now trying to turn the "trending" page into a large mosaic of "No To AI Generated Images" pictures:
Artists stage mass protest against AI-generated artwork on ArtStation
Users of popular portfolio site seek to castigate and disrupt AI-generated art.
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Yeah, I'd also wonder how they want to tell AI ones apart from human ones. And what they'd do about the inevitable blend of the two. If the AI generates a background that a human paints on, is that OK? What about the near-infinite other permutations of that concept?
Second question is whether people care. I'm sure there's plenty of room for 'organically grown' art. There's likely even a crowd that would pay the premium for it. But on the more mass consumer level? E.g., somebody wants a dozens of portraits for a game or similar. Do they care? Maybe, maybe not. They'll for sure want somebody to vet the results, but they'd want that anyway.
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@cvi said in Art Wars: The AI Menace:
@topspin said in Art Wars: The AI Menace:
I think it excessive for the AI to have included a diatribe vs. talentless meathands, in Demotic, in reply, but, here we are.
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@Gribnit middle left hides a rage comic.
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@topspin said in Art Wars: The AI Menace:
@Gribnit middle left hides a rage comic.
That's a yunolater in ISO notation.
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@topspin said in Art Wars: The AI Menace:
@Gribnit middle left hides a rage comic.
I'm more interested in the tropical beach hut, middle right.
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@cvi said in Art Wars: The AI Menace:
Copyright and IP might come into play
I do think that copyright law should probably have a word to say here; IANAL but it seems quite clear to me that AI generated images are derivative works of the images in the training set. Might be some potential for a class action suit in there or something.
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@ixvedeusi Only in that the results are interpolations between the training set points. In some complicated sense involving abstract high-degree hypersurfaces define with respect to nothing other than the basic setup and the input data. (Explaining what these things are really doing is just crazy.)
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@dkf interpolation between copyrighted works makes the result still a derivative work.
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@topspin Ah, but the brillant part is that you interpolate between works of different copyright holders ... then they can battle out who's the owner.
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@cvi said in Art Wars: The AI Menace:
@topspin Ah, but the brillant part is that you interpolate between works of different copyright holders ... then they can battle out who's the owner.
: As far as you having to pay royalties is concerned, all of them.
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@topspin said in Art Wars: The AI Menace:
: As far as you having to pay royalties is concerned, all of them.But you should only give one 5 millionth of a royalty payment (or whatever the proportion is; for the sake of argument I've arbitrarily decided that there were 5×106 items in the training set) to each. The number of inputs digested by these systems are colossal, and it isn't at all easy to say that any specific input work is more valued than any other.
There is something of a generic same-yness about many of the images coming out, making many of the figures unnaturally attractive. That's the effect of large scale averaging (in model building); basic facial structure is shared between many images, but quirks are not.
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@dkf said in Art Wars: The AI Menace:
But you should only give one 5 millionth of a royalty payment (or whatever the proportion is
I'm afraid it's not the end result - how much ketchup from the bottle was used for painting - that decides how much one has to pay for the whole bottle.
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@dkf said in Art Wars: The AI Menace:
But you should only give one 5 millionth of a royalty payment
No, you have to obtain a license to be able to include the work in the training set. What that license costs is determined by the copyright holder (who may also reject the license outright). If the value of your artwork is lower than the sum total of all license costs, that's your problem.
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@dkf said in Art Wars: The AI Menace:
@topspin said in Art Wars: The AI Menace:
: As far as you having to pay royalties is concerned, all of them.But you should only give one 5 millionth of a royalty payment (or whatever the proportion is; for the sake of argument I've arbitrarily decided that there were 5×106 items in the training set) to each. The number of inputs digested by these systems are colossal, and it isn't at all easy to say that any specific input work is more valued than any other.
"Weird Al" Yankovic wishes it worked that way. He would owe the full royalty on each component song in his polka medleys if he didn't go around and get a license from the original artists to only pay them a percentage instead. (From the Ask Al archives.)
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Artist Banned From r/Art Because Mods Thought They Used AI - Slashdot
A moderator on Reddit'sReddit's largest art forum with 22 million members went on lockdown this week after debates and accusations about what constitutes AI-generated art went viral. Motherboard reports: On December 27, a digital artist named Ben Moran tweeted that moderators of r/Art banned them...
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Are we sure the Reddit moderator isn't an AI itself?
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@Zerosquare said in Art Wars: The AI Menace:
Are we sure the Reddit moderator isn't an AI itself?
The moderator is on Reddit, so that rules out the
Iin AI.
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Rather … long, but pretty good arguments.
- No, including publicly presented images in the training set does not violate copyright.
- You still need to have artistic talent to make the AI generate really good images, therefore its a tool that can make artists better and more productive, but won't put them out of business.
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@Bulb said in Art Wars: The AI Menace:
No, including publicly presented images in the training set does not violate copyright.
But the images generated by the AI are derivatives of the ones in the training set, by definition, which is a case where copyright can apply.
You could argue that the training set is so large that it's not really different from human artists drawing inspiration from existing works, but is there a guarantee that the AI will never generate anything too close to an image from the training set?
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@Zerosquare said in Art Wars: The AI Menace:
but is there a guarantee that the AI will never generate anything too close to an image from the training set
The model itself is way smaller than the images in the training set, so there is no way it actually remembers them separately. It will only generate something close to a specific image if you specifically provide it.
There are two modes, one generates new image from a text prompt (and noise) and the other modifies given image according to a text prompt. In the later if you only tell it to modify the image slightly, it can be argued that is a derivative work (but the video contains some examples where a human artist made something very close to previous work and it is still considered fair use). So when someone uses the modify image mode, uses a copyrighted image as input, and tells it to only do superficial changes, they are violating the copyright in that specific instance, not the AI in general.
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@Bulb said in Art Wars: The AI Menace:
The model itself is way smaller than the images in the training set
It doesn't matter one bit how much of the copyrighted data it uses and in what way. I'm not allowed to make a copy even if I just want to set the copy on fire.
@Zerosquare said in Art Wars: The AI Menace:
which is a case where copyright can apply.
Copyright law always applies. For everything ever created. Even when something enters public domain, it is the law that says so.
When those laws were written, nobody [could have] predicted the scale at which technology will be able to process data and what the effects will be. It's fine to keep some freedom from the corporate greed on the table. You wouldn't download a car (but you totally would!), memes want to be free, and all that. But there are two very big problems with that:
- Large amount of publicly available images have already exceeded their fair use capacity or have mixed or unknown copyright status, in which case one should default to "don't"
- Without AI-specific legislation rampant theft will be happening and models trained from copyrighted material will be used for profit
a) Loosely-defined or weakly-enforced legislation that currently arguably lets you photoshop and post funny cat gifs is not there to let people use stuff for free in the name of freedom. It is there so that corporate can steal things back, make money from it and get away with it. And so it will be with this shit.
Goddamn starry-eyed turbonerds.
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in Art Wars: The AI Menace:
Copyright law always applies. For everything ever created. Even when something enters public domain, it is the law that says so.
: What I meant is "in this case, someone claiming a copyright violation would have a reasonable case".
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@Zerosquare said in Art Wars: The AI Menace:
but is there a guarantee that the AI will never generate anything too close to an image from the training set?
https://what.thedailywtf.com/post/2034640
https://what.thedailywtf.com/post/2034919
This wasn't from a small training set, either.
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in Art Wars: The AI Menace:
Copyright law always applies. For everything ever created.
... since 1980, in countries that have ratified the Berne convention. Before then copyright didn't attach unless specifically requested and registered. And were it not for Disney, that'd just be for at most 56 years.
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@TwelveBaud Ah. So all we have to do is move the scraping servers to Palestine?
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@Applied-Mediocrity Or limit the corpus to pre-contemporary art. No later than the mid-1920's -- because of the mixed or unknown copyright status you reference -- but everything before then is absolutely fair game. As everything eventually will become. Public domain is supposed to be the default, as the constitution recognizes that Congress may establish copyright "for limited times" as an exception to that default "to promote the arts and sciences". And until the 1980's, works were in the public domain immediately unless you registered them. (Also, rote photographs or digital scans of existing artwork are not copyrightable, despite what museums think; since there's no creativity the only copyrightable elements are those of the original work. So scraping digital versions of those pre-1920's paintings is fine.)
I agree that what people are doing now is stupid and illegal: contemporary works are copyrighted, there's no licensing going on that I'm aware of, and the fair use and fair dealing rights don't apply: it's not for research, it's not for education, and it's not for commentary about that work. Maybe if a memer gets smacked for $50K per meme, like the law says, it'll get our Congresscritters to update the laws as you see fit. But to say that copyright law always applies for everything ever created forever? Fuck right off.
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@TwelveBaud said in Art Wars: The AI Menace:
But to say that copyright law always applies for everything ever created forever? Fuck right off.
I don't believe I mentioned forever, so I won't be doing that at this time.
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@TwelveBaud said in Art Wars: The AI Menace:
I agree that what people are doing now is stupid and illegal: contemporary works are copyrighted, there's no licensing going on that I'm aware of, and the fair use and fair dealing rights don't apply: it's not for research, it's not for education, and it's not for commentary about that work.
There's an interesting consequence. Somebody like Disney will own a metric fuckton of art/images created by their artists (copyrights transferred, or work for hire stuff). They're also among the ones that would benefit from cheaper assets immensely (specifically filler and background stuff).
So, I suspect that as always, the individual artists are the ones that will get screwed over in the end.
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@cvi said in Art Wars: The AI Menace:
There's an interesting consequence. Somebody like Disney will own a metric fuckton of art/images created by their artists (copyrights transferred, or work for hire stuff). They're also among the ones that would benefit from cheaper assets immensely (specifically filler and background stuff).
It wouldn't be at all surprising to see different bits of Disney trying to get diametrically opposed positions supported in a bill. It also wouldn't be surprising if things get held up a lot in Congress. It's traditional after all.
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@cvi said in Art Wars: The AI Menace:
Somebody like Disney will own a metric fuckton of art/images created by their artists (copyrights transferred, or work for hire stuff). They're also among the ones that would benefit from cheaper assets immensely (specifically filler and background stuff).
If I were them, I'd invest in creating a private model trained exclusively on their own art, thus sidestepping the issue.
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@Bulb said in Art Wars: The AI Menace:
- No, including publicly presented images in the training set does not violate copyright.
Yes, it absolutely does, unless those images are in the public domain. "Public display" doesn't put them in the public domain.
@Bulb said in Art Wars: The AI Menace:
but the video contains some examples where a human artist made something very close to previous work and it is still considered fair use
Fair use doesn't mean something isn't copyrighted. In fact, for "fair use" to apply, it has to be copyrighted. Also, fair use obviously applies per use and not per work, so one artist creating a derivative of a copyrighted work which is considered fair use in no way implies that every other use of that work is also fair use. And "feed it into a digital reproduction network" is, so far, not ruled to be fair use.
So when someone uses the modify image mode, uses a copyrighted image as input, and tells it to only do superficial changes, they are violating the copyright in that specific instance, not the AI in general.
The copyright violation on the image to be modified is on the person using it as input, the countless violations on the copyrighted images used in the training set is on whoever created/distributed the model.
You can argue that the current copyright laws are broken, they certainly are, but that doesn't mean "It's AI, hurr durr" is a valid legal loophole.
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@topspin said in Art Wars: The AI Menace:
doesn't mean "It's AI, hurr durr" is a valid legal loophole
And nobody is saying that. Well, except the opponents of AI. The argument is that those things would be perfectly fine if human artist did them, so they should still be fine if the human artist uses AI to do them.
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@Bulb in that case, you make the artist fully responsible to check whether the image the AI has created is one which violates some copyrights or one which doesn’t. Since it is obviously capable of producing images which do violate copyright.
That would mean the artist has to know all the images that went into the training set and their copyright status to have even a fraction of a chance to assess that.Easier to just not train using copyrighted works in the first place.
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@Bulb said in Art Wars: The AI Menace:
@topspin said in Art Wars: The AI Menace:
doesn't mean "It's AI, hurr durr" is a valid legal loophole
And nobody is saying that. Well, except the opponents of AI. The argument is that those things would be perfectly fine if human artist did them, so they should still be fine if the human artist uses AI to do them.
Nobody is saying that, but everybody is doing that. You better bet that Metabook, Microbing, Goolag, Amabezon and numerous fart-ups that keep springing up are putting in their models all the garbage they can, while they can.
After all it's always been in the spirit of the web wild west to take something, and then only if they get caught, half-heartedly own up to get a little slap on the wrist from the courts.
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Seeing many of the prompts that go into some of these images, a lot of them do stylistic tuning by calling out specific artists by name (Greg Rutowski seems popular). Could those artists have any more claim that their work is being used when the prompter has specifically told the generator to favour using it?
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@Watson No. You cannot copyright ideas, concepts, patterns or other such intanglible stuff. And that used to be perfectly reasonable, because imitation used to be naturally rate limited. If a human is capable of imitating someone else's work, it takes at least talent, but often also lots of work and time. A severely autistic machine specifically built at finding patterns in things is without precedent. The existing legislation is insufficient. At the latest deepfakes should have been a wake-up call. Now the cat is not only out of the bag, but in another country altogether.
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@Zerosquare said in Art Wars: The AI Menace:
If I were them, I'd invest in creating a private model trained exclusively on their own art, thus sidestepping the issue.
Precisely. And it extends to other stuff as well. Voice? Make it nicely tweakable for the director - great. They've already been looking at facial animations. They will have the data, and they will have covered their bases in the consent forms with their artists/performers...
(Others too, of course. I imagine if you're a company that holds a ton of content, now might be the time to start looking at what you have and where you hold it.)
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@boomzilla
E_CORRECT_NUMBER_OF_FINGERS
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@boomzilla Posted before: https://what.thedailywtf.com/post/2051042
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@JBert
I guess that's possible.
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Getty Images files suit against one of the biggest AI art tools
Stability AI is being taken to court in the UK, accused of infringing on Getty Images' terms of service and licensing.
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It annoys me that if I push a button in my phone camera the picture is protected by copyright, but some people that spent hours crafting a prompt and retouching an image aren't getting copyright for stupid reasons
