Regardless, the human generating and publishing these images is obviously responsible to ensure they are not violating any IP property. So they might get sued by Disney. I don't get why the AI companies would be effected in any way. Disney is not suing Blender if I render an image of Mickey Mouse with it.
Though I am sure that artists might find an likely ally in Disney against the "AI"'s when they tell them about their idea of making art-styles copyright-able Being able to monopolize art styles would be indeed a dream come true for those huge corporations.
It’s blatantly obvious that regardless of if it will work or not, they’re trying to get companies with enough money to file law suits to make a move and do so.
> I don’t see the point.
…or you don’t agree with the intent?
I’m fine with that, if so, but you’d to be deliberately trying very hard not to understand what they’re trying to do.
Quite obviously they’re hoping, similar to software that lets you download videos from YouTube, that tools that enable things are bad, not neutral.
Agree / disagree? Who cares. I can’t believe anyone who “doesn’t get it” is being earnest in their response.
Will it make any difference? Well, it may or may not, but there’s a fair precedent of it happening, and bluntly, no one is immune to law suits.
Now, as for training "AI" models, who knows. You can argue it is the same thing a human is doing or you could argue it a new, different quality and should be under different rules. Regardless, the current copyright laws were written before "AI" models were in widespread use so whatever is allowed or not is more of a historic accident.
So the discussion needs to be about the intention of copyright laws and what SHOULD be.
Copying a work itself can be copyright infringement if it’s very close to the original to the point people may think they’re the same work.
So in effect, they are pitting Disney's understanding of copyright (maximally strict) against that of the AI companies (maximally loose).
Even if it's technically the responsibility of the user not to publish generated images that contain copyrighted content, I can't imagine that Disney is very happy with a situation where everyone can download Stable Diffusion and generate their own arbitrary artwork of Disney characters in a few minutes.
So that strategy might actually work. I wish them good luck and will restock my popcorn reserves just in case :)
The problem I see though is that both sides are billion dollar companies - and there is probably a lot of interest in AI tech within Disney themselves. So it might just as well happen that both sides find some kind of agreement that's beneficial for both of them and leaves the artists holding the bag.
We might be able to argue that the computer program taking art as input and automatically generating art as output is the exact same as an artist some time after general intelligence is reached, until then, it's still a machine transformation and should be treated as such.
AI shouldn't be a legal avenue for copyright laundering.
And practically speaking, putting aside whether a government should even be able to legislate such things, enforcing such a law would be near impossible without wild privacy violations.
It doesn't mean that. You could "find" Mickey in the latent space of any model using textual inversion and an hour of GPU time. He's just a few shapes.
(Main example: the most popular artist StableDiffusion 1 users like to imitate is not in the StableDiffusion training images. His name just happens to work in prompts by coincidence.)
Go to a baker and commission a Mickey Mouse cake. Is that a violation if the bakery didn't advertise it? (To note, a bakery can't advertise it due to trademark, not copyright. Right?)
For that matter, any privately commissioned art? Is that really what artists want to lock away?
1) the artist is not literally copying the copyrighted pixel data into their "system" for training
2) An individual artist is not a multi billion dollar company with a computer system that spits out art rapidly using copyrighted pixel data. A categorical difference.
> automatically generating art as output
The user is navigating the latent space to obtain said output, I don't know if that's transformative or not, but it is an important distinction
If the program were wholy automated as in it had a random number/words generator added to it and no navigation of the latent space by users happened, then yeah I would agree, but that's not the case at least so far as ml algos like midjourney or stable diffusion are concerned
In 2018[0], didn't Getty force Google to change how Google Images presented results, following a lawsuit in 2016[1]?
[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/internet-rages-after... [1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/04/google-eu-antitr...
On 1, human artists are copying copyrighted pixel data into their system for training. That system is the brain. It's organic RAM.
On 2, money shouldn't make a difference. Jim Carrey should still be allowed to paint even though he's rich.
If Jim uses Photoshop instead of brushes, he can spit out the style ideas he's copied and transformed in his brain more rapidly - but he should still be allowed to do it.
(That's as opposed to a large language model, which does memorize text.)
Also, you can train it to imitate an artist's style just by showing it textual descriptions of the style. It doesn't have to see any images.
No, it would just legislate what images are and which ones are not on the training data to be parsed, artists want a copyright which makes their images unusable for machine learning derivative works.
The trick here is that eventually the algorithms will get good enough that it won't be necessary for said images to even be on the training data in the first place, but we can imagine that artists would be OK with that
They shouldn't be OK with that and they probably aren't. That's a much worse problem for them!
The reason they're complaining about copyright is most likely coping because this is what they're actually concerned about.
Absolutely. Google previously had a direct link to the full-size image, but it has removed this due to potential legal issues. See [0].
> Is that a violation if the bakery didn't advertise it?
According to Disney, it is. See [1].
> Any privately commissioned art?
Not any art, no. Only that which uses IP/material they do not have a license to.
[0]: https://www.ghacks.net/2018/02/12/say-goodbye-to-the-view-im...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cake_copyright#Copyright_of_ar...
You can however disallow Google from indexing your content using robots.txt a met tag in the HTML or an HTTP header.
Or you can ask Google to remove it from their indexes.
Your content will disappear from then on.
You can't un-train what's already been trained.
You can't disallow scraping for training.
The damage is already done and it's irreversible.
It's like trying to unbomb Hiroshima.
Going painting > raw photo (derivative work), raw photo > jpg (derivative work), jpg > model (derivative work), model > image (derivative work). At best you can make a fair use argument at that last step, but that falls apart if the resulting images harm the market for the original work.
you have rights.
AIs don't.
Because they don't have will.
It's like arresting a gun for killing people.
So, as a human, the individual(s) training the AI or using the AI to reproduce copyrighted material, are responsible for the copyright infringement, unless explicitly authorized by the author(s).
It's quite possible to apply the same kind of protections to generative models. (I hope this does not happen, but it is fully possible.)
A tool that catalogues attributed links can't really be evaluated the same way as pastiche machine.
You'd be much closer using the example of Google's first page answer snippets, that are pulled out of a site's content with minimal attribution.
The matters of the baker and the privately comissioned art are more complicated. The artist and baker hold copyrigh for their creation, but their products are also derived from copyrighted work, so Disney also has rights here [1]. This is just usually not enforced by copyright holders because who in their right mind would punish free marketing.
That might be a good way to go about it
A latent space that contains every image contains every copyrighted image. But the concept of sRGB is not copyrighted by Disney just yet.
That's actually a tricky question and lengthy court battles were held over this in both the US and Europe. In the end, all courts decided that the image result page is questionable when it comes to copyright, but generally covered by fair use. The question is how far fair use goes when people are using the data in derivative work. Google specifically added licensing info about images to further cover their back, but this whole fair use stuff gets really murky when you have automatic scrapers using google images to train AIs who in turn create art for sale eventually. There's a lot of actors in that process that profit indirectly from the provided images. This will probably once again fall back to the courts sooner or later.
They probably aren't doing that. Studying the production methods and WIPs is more useful for a human. (ML models basically guess how to make images until they produce one that "looks like" something you show it.)
If you have views on whether they'll win, the prediction market is currently at 49%: https://manifold.markets/JeffKaufman/will-the-github-copilot...
Automated transformation is not guaranteed to remove the original copyright, and for simple transformations it won't, but it's an open question (no legal precedent, different lawyers interpreting the law differently) whether what these models are doing is so transformative that their output (when used normally, not trying to reproduce a specific input image) passes the fair use criteria.
Mind you, this is not talking about the usage rights of images generated from such a model, that's a completely different story and a legal one.
It doesn't necessarily matter if they're affected. My thought when seeing this is that they want some legal precedent to be set which determines that this is not fair use.
hear hear...
> Passively training a model on an artwork does not change the art in the slightest
copyright holders, I mean individual authors, people who actually produced the content being used, disagree.
They say AI is like a bulldozer destroying the park to them.
Which technically is true, it's a machine that someone (some interested party maybe?) is trying to disguise as a human, doing human stuff.
But it's not.
> passive, non-destructive
Passive, non-destructive, in this context means
- passive: people send the images to you, you don't go looking for them
- non-destructive: people authorized you, otherwise it's destructive of their rights.
"Mickey" does work as a prompt, but if they took that word out of the text encoder he'd still be there in the latent space, and it's not hard to find a way to construct him out of a few circles and a pair of red shorts.
<https://waxy.org/2019/12/how-artists-on-twitter-tricked-spam...>
If art streams are tree-spiked with copyrighted or trademarked works, then AI generators might be a bit more gun-shy about training with abandon on such threads.
It's a form of monkeywrenching.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_spiking>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabotage#As_environmental_acti...>
Can probably do all that well-enough (probably doesn't need to be perfect) by leaning on FAANG, with or without legislation.
But: opt-in by default, or opt-out by default?
-> here is the actual judgement though: https://juris.bundesgerichtshof.de/cgi-bin/rechtsprechung/do...
There are noninfringing usecases for generating images containing Mickey Mouse - not least, Disney themselves produce thousands of images containing the mouse's likeness every year; but also parody usecases exist.
But even if you are just using SD to generate images, if we want to make sure to avoid treading on Disney's toes, the AI would need to know what Mickey Mouse looks like in order to avoid infringing trademark, too. You can feed it negative weights already if you want to get 'cartoon mouse' but not have it look like Mickey.
The AI draws what you tell it to draw. You get to choose whether or not to publish the result (the AI doesn't automatically share its results with the world). You have the ultimate liability and credit for any images so produced.
But currently, first, there is a reasonable argument that the model weights may be not copyrightable at all - it doesn't really fit the criteria of what copyright law protects, no creativity was used in making them, etc, in which case it can't be a derivative work and is effectively outside the scope of copyright law. Second, there is a reasonable argument that the model is a collection of facts about copyrighted works, equivalent to early (pre-computer) statistical ngram language models of copyrighted books used in e.g. lexicography - for which we have solid old legal precedent that creating such models are not derivative works (again, as a collection of facts isn't copyrightable) and thus can be done against the wishes of the authors.
Fair use criteria comes into play as conditions when it is permissible to violate the exclusive rights of the authors. However, if the model is not legally considered a derivative work according to copyright law criteria, then fair use conditions don't matter because in that case copyright law does not assert that making them is somehow restricted.
Note that in this case the resulting image might still be considered derivative work of an original image, even if the "tool-in-the-middle" is not derivative work.
In any case, in the example images here, the AI clearly knew who Mickey is and used that to generate Mickey Mouse images. Mickey has got to be in the training data.
In the same way, making the model deliberately unable to generate Micky Mouse images would be much more far-reaching than just removing Micky imagery from the trainset.
Of course that probably means that those copyrighted images exist in some encoded form in the data or neural network of the AI, and also in our brain. Is that legal? With humans it's unavoidable, but that doesn't have to mean that it's also legal for AI. But even if those copyrighted images exist in some form in our brains, we know not to reproduce them and pass them off as original. The AI does that. Maybe it needs a feedback mechanism to ensure its generated images don't look too much like copyrighted images from its data set. Maybe art-AI necessarily also has to become a bit of a legal-AI.
Copyright infringement does generally require you to have been aware of the work you were copying. So for sure there's an issue with using AI to generate art where you could use the tool to generate you an image, which you think looks original, because you are unaware of a similar original work, so you could not be guilty of copyright infringement - but if the AI model was trained on a dataset that includes an original copyrighted work that is similar, obviously it seems like someone has infringed something there.
But that's not what we're talking about in the case of mickey mouse imagery, is it? You're not asking for images of 'utterly original uncopyrighted untrademarked cartoon mouse with big ears' and then unknowingly publishing a mouse picture that the evil AI copied from Disney without your knowledge.
Say it with me: Computer algorithms are NOT people. They should NOT have the same rights as people.
And the weights. The weights it has learned come originally from the images.
I think this is exactly the problem that many artists have with imagine generators. Yes, we could all easily identify if a generated artwork contained popular Disney characters - but that's because it's Disney, owners of some of the most well-known IP in the world. The same isn't true for small artists: There is a real risk that a model reproduces parts of a lesser known copyrighted work and the user doesn't realise it.
I think this is what artists are protesting: Their works have been used as training data and will now be parts of countless generated images, all with no permission and no compensation.
Also, a jpg seemingly fits your definition as “no creativity was used in making them, etc” but clearly they embody the original works creativity. Similarly, a model can’t be trained on random data it needs to extract information from it’s training data to be useful.
The specific choice of algorithm used to extract information doesn’t change if something is derivative.
So Disney don’t need to worry about AI art tools - so ‘attacking’ them with such tools does nothing.
The Mickey Mouse case though is obviously bs, the training data definitely does just have tons of infringing examples of Mickey Mouse, it didn't somehow reinvent the exact image of him from first principles.
No they won't. If AI art was just as good as it is today, but didn't use copyrighted images in the training set, people would absolutely still be finding some other thing to complain about.
Artists just don't want the tech to exist entirely.
Which is why e.g. Bethesda is not going to slap you for your Mr House or Pip-Boy fanart, but will slap the projects that recreate Fallout 3 in engine X.