It has been fascinating to watch “copyright infringement is not theft” morph into “actually yes it’s stealing” over the last few years.
It used to be incredibly rare to find copyright maximalists on HackerNews, but with GitHub Co-pilot and StableDiffusion it seems to have created a new generation of them.
If artists I employ want to incorporate this stuff into their workflow, that sounds great. They can get more done. There won't be less artists on payroll, just more and better art will be produced. I don't even think it is at the point of incorporating it into a workflow yet though, so this really seems like a nothing burger to me.
At least github copilot is useful. This stuff is really not useful in a professional context, and the idea that it is going to take artists jobs really doesn't make any sense to me. I mean, if there aren't any artists then who exactly do I have that is using these AI tools to make new designs? If you think the answer to that is just some intern, then you really don't know what you're talking about.
Personally, I think "copyright infringement is not theft" but I also think that using artists' work without their permission for profit is never OK, and that's what's happening here.
Yes, artists can also utilize AI as a photoshop filter, and some artists have started using it to fill in backgrounds in drawings, etc. Inpainting can also be used to do unimportant textures for 3d models. But that doesn't mean that AI art is no threat to artists' livelihoods, especially for scenarios like "I need a dozen illustrations to go with these articles" where quality isn't so important to the commissioner that they are willing to spend an extra few hundred bucks instead of spending 15 minutes in midjourney or stable diffusion.
As long as these networks continue being trained on artists' work without permission or compensation, they will continue to improve in output quality and muscle the actual artists out of work.
The confusion is that “copyright infringement is not theft” really was about being against corporate abuse of individuals. It's still the same situation here.
How is training AI on imagery from the internet without permission different than decades of film and game artists borrowing H. R. Giger's style for alien technology?[1]
How is it different from decades of professional and amateur artists using the characteristic big-eyed manga/anime look without getting permission from Osamu Tezuka?
Copyright law doesn't cover general "style". Try to imagine the minefield that would exist if it were changed to work that way.
[1] No, I don't mean Alien, or other works that actually involved Giger himself.
Will human artists be able to compete with artificial artists commercially? If not, is that bad or is it progress, like Photoshop or Autotune?
Are there any documented cases where copyright law didn't seem to offer sufficient protection against something that really did seem like copyright infringement but done using AI tooling? I started looking for some a few weeks ago because of this debate and still haven't seen anything conclusive.
Take for example video games. They distracted many people from movies, but also created a huge new field, hungry for talents. Or another one, quite a few genres calcified into distinctive boring styles over the years (see anything related to manga/anime as an example) simply because those styles require less mechanical work and are cheaper to produce. They could use a deep refresh. This tech will also lead to novel applications, created by those who embraced it and are willing to learn the increasingly complex toolset. That's what been happening the last several decades, which have seen several tech revolutions.
>As long as these networks continue being trained on artists' work
This misses the point. The real power of those things is not in the collection of styles baked into it. It's in the ability to learn new stuff. Finetuning and style transfer is what all the wizards do. Construct your own visual style by hand, make it produce more of that. And that's not just about static 2D images; neither do 2D illustrators represent all artists in the broad sense. Everyone who types "blah blah in the style of Ilya Kuvshinov" or is using img2img or whatever is just missing out, because the same stuff is going to be everywhere real soon.
Try telling one of the programmers to produce a work of art based on a review of all of the works that went into training the models and see how it works out.
It's almost like the real problem is asymmetry and abuse of power.
This is like saying that photoshop is going to put all the artists out of work because one artist can now do the work of a team of people drawing by hand. So far these AIs are just tools. Tools help humans to produce more and the economy keeps chugging ever upwards.
There is no upper limit of how much art we need. Marvel movies and videogames will just keep looking better and better as our artists increase their capabilities using AI tools to assist them.
Daz3d didn't put modelers and artists out of work, and what Daz and iClone can do is way way more impressive(and useful in a professional setting) than AI Art.
Is it though? What if I were to look at your art style and replicate that style manually in my own works? I see no difference whether it's done by a machine, or done by hand. The reality is that every art is a derivative of some other art. Interestingly, the music industry has been doing this for years. Ever since samplers became a thing, musicians spliced and diced loops into their own tracks for donkeys years, and created an explosion of new genres and sound. Hip-hop, techno, dark ambient, EDM, ..., all fall into the same category. Machine learning is just another new tool to create something.
Personally, I'm all for AI training and using human artwork. I think telling it not to prevents progress/innovation, and that innovation is going to happen somewhere.
If it happens somewhere, humans who live in that somewhere will just use those tools to launder the AI-generated artwork, and companies will hire those offshore humans and reap the benefits, all the while, the effect on local artists' wages is even more negative because now they don't have access to the tools to compete in this ar(tificial intelligence)ms race.
Most people do not understand the purpose of copyright. Copyright is a bargain between society and the creator. The creator receives limited protection of the work for a limited time. Why is this the deal?
The purpose of copyright is to advance the progress of science and the useful arts. It is to benefit humanity as a whole.
AI takes nothing more than an idea. It does not take a “creative expression fixed in a tangible media”.
We don’t need to “try to imagine”, we just need to wait a bit and watch Walt’s reanimated corpse and army of undead lawyers come out swinging for those “mice in the general style of Mickey Mouse”.
Ok so now many more people can generate cool looking photos now in an automatic fashion. So what? It just means we’ve raised the bar… for what can be considered cool.
I wonder if the nerds have shot themselves in the foot here with terminology? I suspect the nerd’s lawyers would have been much happier if the entire field was named “automated mechanical creativity” instead of “artificial intelligence”. It’d be kinda amusing to see the whole field of study lose in court because of their own persistent claims that what they’re doing is not just “creating in a mechanical fashion” but creating “intelligence” which can therefore be held to account for copyright infringement. Shades of Al Capone getting busted for taxes…
Also, should a human artist creating a pastiche count as copyright infringement as well?
It amounts to saying that anything that benefits me is good and anything to my detriment is bad. Sure, there's a consistency to that. However, if that's the foundation of one's positions, it leads to all manner of other logical inconsistencies and hypocrisies.
Intellectual property generally includes copyright, patents, trademark, and trade secrets, though there are broader claims such as likeness, celebrity rights, moral rights (e.g., droit d'auteur in French/EU law), and probably a few others since I began writing this comment (the scope seems to be increasing, generally).
I suspect you intended to distinguish trademark and copyright.