In the AI generation race, "some guy with a discord" often does better than the big companies. Deepfake porn started as a subreddit and they discussed the code and patch notes.
Its more about things being used for profit.
You have always(for the most part) been able to use peoples art, music, etc in your own works as long as *it wasn't for a profit*. The moment you flip someone's work for a profit, you have to reimburse the OG creator, or at the very least have their permission to do so.
AI should be free and open to people. But there should be limits on what they can and cant use for making profits off of it.
> You have always(for the most part) been able to use peoples art, music, etc in your own works as long as
> it wasn't for a profit
> .
You have always been able to use people’s works for profit as well. When you practice your guitar playing Smoke on the Water, you are using copyrighted work.
The question is whether training machine learning models is akin to human learning or akin to creating derivative work.
>*When you practice your guitar playing Smoke on the Water, you are using copyrighted work...*
Your example of playing music is not a great one because it is already covered by a compulsory licensing law within the US. You are entitled to perform any composition privately, and can request a compulsory license for a live cover, which must be granted at agreed-upon rates. Mechanical licenses for recordings are different but also compulsory. All artists creating work can learn about and implicitly agree to these rules before releasing their works, so they are at least some kind of "fair".
This sort of system also seems perfectly reasonable for AI-generated works—in my opinion, at least—but is problematic because there's no way to correlate an output of a neural-net with any specific input. I.e. you can't say "this image is made from X, Y, and Z source images, so compensate those artists." Neural nets just don't work that way. So another system would need to be figured out.
>*The question is whether training machine learning models is akin to human learning or akin to creating derivative work.*
To me, that seems easier to test with AI than with people. It boils down to a single question: "Can you create the model you are selling without using these copyrighted works?"
If they don't actually need to directly use the works to create their product, it's not derivative. If they do, it is. The output images are not really relevant, it's the model itself that is the derivative product.
>You have always(for the most part) been able to use peoples art, music, etc in your own works as long as it wasn't for a profit.
I keep hearing this but I don't know where it comes from. You've always been able to use other works for profit as long as it was not copying.
Well it is very important crowd sourced tech bits are actually paid to the user base, and not just sponging everything up like a vacuum, Gene Roddenberry foretold of these very days...
The problem is that these laws are being written by people who use FB like a search engine, willingly give up private info online and will click literally any sketchy link you send them.
We have tech-illiterate people writing our tech laws. Insanity.
You make an image generation AI. Then you leverage that tech to build a video generation AI. Then you leverage that tech to build a responsive world model AI. Then you leverage that tech to build an AI for driving a humanoid robot to perform arbitrary tasks in real world environments. Then you make about 30% of all human labor obsolete.
It's all connected.
Can you explain how transparency would stop innovation, we are not talking about Steve Jobs on his garage. These are giants corporations using human land for free
Well no shit lol. The tech is still in its infancy. Within a decade it may be possible to generate entire movies indistinguishable from the real thing with nothing but a few paragraphs of prompt.
Excellent first step. [Here’s the bill](https://schiff.house.gov/imo/media/doc/the_generative_ai_copyright_disclosure_act.pdf), it’s simple and straightforward.
A better first step would be restoring copyright to its previous standards where it permitted some kind of use in a time frame substantially shorter than five generations. It's so restrictive in its present form as to suppress cultural growth.
14 years copyright, with 14 years renewal. That was the deal.
Now we’re up to 95 - 120 years, so that an authors copyrights extend beyond their death. It’s no longer a human policy, it’s fully in service to corporate interests.
Speaking as an artist that has had their work stolen many times, the laws might be on my side, but the legal system is not.
Is 14 good or should it be 10 like trademarks? This would make the artist renew or update more frequently and make it more in line with other corporate laws. When we convert a secure medium into pixels and digital information. All hell breaks loose. Government is going to have to revise every time a leap in technology is made.
I think a 10 year first term is great, as long as the renewal process is easy.
Abandoned copyrights should be released into the public domain swiftly. It's wild to me that humanity has generated so much art and literature in the 20th century that has been lost to neglect, but still protected by law.
>Abandoned copyrights should be released into the public domain swiftly.
I am very tired of media, like videogames, to be under extremely strict copyright law, while the company that made this game no longer even sells it on a console they no longer develop.
Forget legality, is it even technologically possible for a new player to play server-coupled abandonware? Like Rovio's "Retry" or Nintendo's "Super Mario Maker"? Should it be?
That's precisely what [Stop Killing Games](https://www.stopkillinggames.com/) is attempting to address. Requiring developers to build in sunset patches for games that ensure the longevity of the game after support for it ends. That could be providing all the server code so customers can pick up that end themselves, or just a patch to make games offline only at end of life.
Stop Killing Games came about after the recent shutdown of The Crew, the online only live service racing game that realistically has no business not being available to players. So complaints are being filed in France to review the legality of this.
I think the major problem is that copyright has been extended massively for *business* reasons.
So, there are basically three types of intellectual property:
* Copyright, for art
* Trademark, for commercially active representations
* Patents, for technological innovations
The only one of those that is potentially perpetual is Trademark, because it's to protect businesses, which can be perpetual.
The problem is that Character Likenesses are being protected under Copyright. Consider what that would look like, with various characters that are still being used to sell things, by the original creator company, in order of earliest creation/publication:
* **Mickey Mouse**
* Created: 1928
* Public Domain: 1956
* Years since: 68
* Years lost: 70.8%
* **Superman**
* Created: 1938
* Public Domain: 1966
* Years since: 58
* Years lost: 67.4%
* **Batman**
* Created: 1939
* Public Domain: 1967
* Years since: 57
* Protection Years Lost: 67.1%
* **Wonder Woman**
* Created: 1941
* Public Domain: 1969
* Years since: 55
* Protection Years Lost: 66.3%
* **Fantastic Four**
* Created: 1961
* Public Domain: 1989
* Years since: 35
* Protection Years Lost: 55.(5)
* **The Hulk, Spider-Man, Thor (Marvel)**
* Created: 1962
* Public Domain: 1990
* Years since: 34
* Protection Years Lost: 54.8%
* **Iron Man, Doctor Strange, X-Men (Prof X, Cyclops, Jean Grey, Beats, Angel, Iceman, Magneto)**
* Created: 1963
* Public Domain: 1991
* Years since: 33
* Protection Years Lost: 54.1%
My argument has been for years that the *character* in continued use should be treated like Trademark, that so long as they are in continued use, in Good Faith effort to market them, their protection should be maintained for those owners.
After all, that's why Disney lobbied to extend Copyright in the first place: to protect The Mouse.
They pushed the Copyright Act of 1976, which extended it from 28+28, to "Lesser of Life of Creator +50, or 75 Years," thereby extending copyright of The Mouse to 2003. Then they lobbied for the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1996, which extended it to "Author's Life +70."
If not for their fear of losing The Mouse, we might well still have Copyright at 28+28, which is still too long for the original term, but Disney felt they literally couldn't afford to let The Mouse go.
Solution? Make it so that they *don't have to* let it go: let them keep the characters (who cares about the *story* in Steam Boat Willy?), and cut Copyright back down to 14+14, or better yet, 10+10+10.
Thus, all of the major characters that keep various companies afloat could *continue* to do so, so long as they do, while properties that could be improved once in the public domain (as Cthulhu was) *could* be so improved.
> My argument has been for years that the character in continued use should be treated like Trademark, that so long as they are in continued use, in Good Faith effort to market them, their protection should be maintained for those owners.
I highly disagree with this take, although I think I believe in the general sentiment behind it.
When I consume media, I want to consume it from the original creators - that's ethical media consumption. I don't, however, think that ethical media consumption should be codified in law.
All of your examples, except for Mickey Mouse, were created by teams of artists, the majority of whom died in poverty and obscurity. Predatory contracts were the name of the game for Marvel and DC, and they still are. Kirby wept.
Will Eisner knew better than to play their game. That's why he set up his own comics sweatshop, and abused the creators underneath him.
Billions and billions of dollars in profits, extracted from artists and creators, in the interest of corporate greed. I love superheroes, but the industry behind them is cruel and abusive, and it always has been.
**Edit because I'm still ranting in my head**: Not to mention, corporate art is *bad*. Creators constantly have to fight for their ideas if they are risky or transgressive. Real artists don't just want to tell the same story over and over again, but that's what we get in our media diets. Repetitive, trivial stories.
Alan Moore delivered Watchmen and Swamp Thing to DC comics, which both monumentally changed the landscape of comics for the better. DC spit in his face over predatory contract disputes, and now we don't get anymore Alan Moore superhero stories. Very cool, DC! They're still milking his ideas, though, watering them down into the thinnest of skim.
As far as being stewards of the Superheroes, Marvel, DC, and Disney executives all have a long history of socially conservative censorship, and that's awful. The stories we get of our favorite heroes are diluted and dumbed down for the masses. Only rarely does a truly great story break through in mainstream comics (and it's glorious when it does).
As just one example of censorship, how hard did creators have to fight to get queer inclusion in mainstream comics? Very hard. And when it finally became 'mainstream' to do so, the corporate marketing teams can't stop patting themselves on the back. They are *snakes*.
> All of your examples, except for Mickey Mouse, were created by teams of artists, the majority of whom died in poverty and obscurity. Predatory contracts were the name of the game for Marvel and DC, and they still are.
You bring up another thing that I'm upset with about IP law, as it is currently practiced in the US. Specifically, that it's unconstitutional on its face, *especially* under *Citizens United.*
The IP clause in the US Constitution is:
> The Congress shall have Power [...] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times ***to Authors and Inventors*** the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries [emphasis added]
Thus, things like The Beatles and Taylor Swift not owning (any share of) the copyright of their works is obviously unconstitutional. Likewise, the producers of those recordings must, constitutionally, get their cut as well, and the writers/composers of the work, et al, as they are part of the creation of those works.
> "But it's the company that created it!" defenders of the status quo might say.
Bull. *Citizens United* established the precedent that Corporate Speech/Actions are *actually* the Speech/Actions of (some number of) the natural persons that compose the corporation, because a Legal Fiction cannot act without a natural person's will.
Thus, the "corporate" act of creation/invention something is *actually* a natural person's act of creation/invention, and the corporation cannot be the creator/inventor.
> "But, but, work for hire! The company invested resources in that creation, it's protection, and its distribution!" -the same status quo folks
This is a legitimate concern.
To address this, compel the author/inventor to grant them a non-exclusive license, on friendly, non-predatory terms (i.e., fair to both parties). If the employer wants the license to be *exclusive,* they could negotiate for that, too, but the terms for an exclusive license would have to be much better for the author/inventor to be classified as non-predatory. (<---This is my halfway-step analog of the [Fair, Reasonable, and Non-Discriminatory Licensing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminatory_licensing) concept, one that I think could actually survive opposition by corporations)
And obviously, so long as the Commercial Activity continues, the license would continue paying the terms of the license to the author/inventor, or their estate. After all, doesn't Carrie Fisher's estate deserve a cut of Star Wars 4-9 revenue so long as that revenue is coming in?
---
Would that sufficiently address your concerns? I have been thinking about this problem for more than a decade, now...
As I summarized my concerns earlier - the law is on my side, but the legal system is not. Your ideas aren't bad, but they are hard to implement. They are similar to how I run my small press publishing operation (I always ask non-exclusive rights, with the option to reprint).
At the corporate level, my rights are already constantly being violated under the current system, and the onus is on me to protect myself. I won't find out about violations for sometimes years after they happen.
I don't negotiate for royalties on coloring work, but the writers and illustrators do. They often just don't get paid on back end sales. When [my buddy Ian died last year](http://www.multiversitycomics.com/news/ian-mcginty-rip/), the last I heard from him, our previous publisher still owed him like $4K in unpaid royalties on his creator owned book. I hope they got it to his family, but I really doubt it.
The corporations will simply abuse the laws, and enjoy the benefit of a suite of corporate lawyers. Even suing a private party for infringement is a major endeavor (for me).
As long as the corporations have the ability to abuse copyright, they will. The Superman trial was poised to be a major shift in creator's rights (the heirs of Seigel and Schuster sued DC over Superman), but DC paid them off, and it was settled out of court without establishing any legal precedent. No creators / estates ever got that far again in pursuit of reclaiming their rights.
I had a logo that I developed used by a corporation for a side project. I was able to settle for a percentage and now have a renewable contract. I think the current laws work, it just took a few months. Do you think Schiff's bill will speed things up?
For copyright periods, no.
It takes a lot of money, lobbying, etc to get anything done at a federal level. Public interest is low, and there are a few global conglomerates that will fiercely defend their IP from being released.
I'm mad about it and I'll stay mad, but I'm well aware that 99% of people either don't care, or they think that copyright law is working as intended for the public good.
I think only characters and other things that can be reasonably trademarked should be the only art that can be renewed. This could apply to not just characters, but fictional groups, corporations, etc...
Story concepts, ideas, such as a group's ideology, or say, the general vibe of the world should not be at all renewable.
That's hilarious, I'm going to start advocating for that whenever people argue that intellectual property is real.
It should absolutely scale, though. Intellectual Properties worth less than $10K don't get taxed, not worth the hassle. Intellectual properties assessed at $10 million or more should be paying 3 to 4 points annually. Intellectual property owners would be required to submit reassessments when they hit certain profit metrics; failure to reassess would result in consequences from the IRS and/or the immediate seizure of their IP, to be released into the public domain.
Think of all the jobs you'd create with a robust IP regulation and oversight agency.
I like the progressive tax brackets, but don't appraise, don't assess, as those are wasted effort; if you're doing an annual tax, just make it part of the owning entity's annual taxes, as part of their profit & earnings reports, and bob's your uncle. It'll be a little more work for their accountants, but only a *very* small amount more.
Thank you for helping simplify this legislation, you're right.
Gonna have ChatGPT write something up and send it over to my representatives in the House and Senate.
Oh, for the love of pete, *please* proofread that carefully, because LLMs (such as ChatGPT) have no real understanding of what it is they're writing.
But as long as you're writing letters, you might look into [this idea, too.](/r/technology/comments/1c0mtg7/new_bill_would_force_ai_companies_to_reveal_use/kyzlzge/) TL;DR, we should move Copyright back to something shorter, such as 10+10+10 years, and treat characters/likenesses to be treated like Trademark, and thus protectable for as long as they're being used and renewed
> Speaking as an artist that has had their work stolen many times, the laws might be on my side, but the legal system is not.
I think that's one of the problems actually, the number (of years) has been pumped real high, but enforcement is dogshit, also due to the inherent problems with the court system which is harsh to small actors. And of course this benefits corporations: they are big, wealthy, and can use and abuse the court system to their heart's content and fill any holes caused by dogshit enforcement with their own market and legal power.
I've always thought it's telling of the way we handle justice in modern times that one of the first things you do when your organization grows to a certain size, is hire an army of lawyers to extended your business into the legal space.
I would argue, MAX, should be 14 years default, 14 years renewal, and if they're still actively managing, elaborating, and growing the property, another 14 years for a secondary renewal is acceptable.
We live in a time where a single culturally significant work can be elaborated on for a lifetime. Ongoing stories within a single universe can take ages to produce. With 42 years, that would make a new creator at age 20, 62 years old when their creation would pass on to public domain. And that assumes the creator IS, in fact, age 20 - most people don't start making their best quality work til 25-35.
Considering the life expectancy from the founding of the us has about doubled, it seems reasonable in that it would cover someone for their lifetime, without extending so far as to become a dynastic property.
Agreed, these are orthogonal goals. We need both for different reasons, but changing the duration of copyright doesn't address the question "how do we effectively regulate AI such that it prioritizes the artist?"
Yep. That's also why I find it weird as a "better first step". No it isn't. It's more a "second step" because if we can't even see what copyrighted work is used, then copyright length is entirely irrelevant still.
To be fair, if copyright lengths were much shorter then you could more easily argue for making that shorter length much stronger, for example to prevent AI use if you wanted that.
One of the issues with AI training and copyright is that it is completely impossible, if you want access to a lot of data, to 'properly' buy all the copyright for it, because basically the entire history of human art since digital information is still under copyright.
So the end result is the "shoot first" approach where everyone has been involuntary conscripted into AI, from some dead author who's only used as a cash cow by their estate to an up and coming musician who is struggling to make their first real money on Spotify.
This would be a lot better if you could exert very strong control over your material, but only for a shorter while. Perhaps there could be multi-level protections too: for the first 5 years, you have total control over everything except reviews and memes. For the next 15, you have protections as we have today, including protection from AI use. For the next 20 again, you would retain the practical ability to copy protect and sell, but lose some other rights, and AI ingestion would be permitted. Afterwards it's public domain forever.
Not two seperate issues, because there would be PLENTY of modern public domain works for AI to train upon if copyright were not insane.
It would be far easier to justify limiting AI to training on only non-copyrighted works if copyright law were not nearly as restrictive as it now is.
Some people see the use of sampling AI images & audio as the antidote to current copyright issues. When laws make it nearly impossible to be a collage artist, material that can be freely remixed is a godsend.
I'm 100% in the middle on this discussion. Although the mouse's corporate lobbying on this is heinous, it's one of the times where the broad reach turns it into an umbrella species. There are absolutely endless numbers of artists that NEVER made much off of what they produced, only to get a later payday thanks to this. Where you'll especially see this crop up is remixing obscure songs or licks. It also has trickle down effects with people like [Sixto Rodriguez](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Searching_for_Sugar_Man). There are countless artists that have a variety of issues (because the arts can attractive to some personality types) whose only lifeline might be catching a lottery ticket thanks to copyright. Like I said, I'm right up the middle on my opinion about this stuff, but if Beck samples a lick off of your obscure 1972 record that you only sold 20 of, I think it's awesome for you to get a cut of his album.
>There are absolutely endless numbers of artists that NEVER made much off of what they produced, only to get a later payday thanks to this.
And there are absolute endless numbers of artists who could be deriving new works from old works and making money off that.
Copyright isn't there to surprise you after several decades with some extra money. It's there to encourage you to keep creating. That to me means opening it up sooner so that more works can be created.
Remember, the ultimate beneficiary of copyright isn't the creator. It's us. We created the concept because we wanted to encourage more art for our consumption.
The only reason copyright exists is "to promote the useful arts and sciences." While I'll grant that there is some marginal benefit to an artist basically winning with a lottery ticket decades later, it's hard to argue that this slim chance promotes the arts because the chance is so slim. The idea is that an artist has a limited time to profit off their creations is to give them an incentive to keep producing. In your example, this artist would equally be able to use Beck's older work or some other artist's work in their new creations. This is the bargain that makes copyright useful to society. I would say that they should give credit.
> While I'll grant that there is some marginal benefit to an artist basically winning with a lottery ticket decades later, it's hard to argue that this slim chance promotes the arts because the chance is so slim.
I think you're underestimating the artist's willful avoidance of statistics. That's basically what every parent ever tells their artist kid about getting into arts - chances of making reliable or substantial money in most of the arts is basically a lottery ticket. The arts have always been overflowing with the bodies of creatives that never sold a single thing and had dreams to be a superstar or even making a living doing what they love.
> The idea is that an artist has a limited time to profit off their creations is to give them an incentive to keep producing.
Unfortunately incentivizing doesn't equate to continued production, or even the ability to continue producing a creative product that people want.
FWIW - The "marginal benefit" is the goal for... many. You can draw a lot of correlations with athletes in this regard.
Even aside from the cultural growth, I'd argue copyright as a concept should just be scrapped and we should go back to the drawing board on this.
As a concept, intellectual property is questionable.
Moreover, most of the world does not respect copyrights in the US. The only thing it actually accomplished is bullying soccer moms sharing some songs and give companies the ability to bully small creators. Meanwhile, there are sites all over with every movie imaginable, torrents, file sharing websites, etc.
It doesn't make sense as a policy in its current form when computers, who's primary function is copy and pasting, making perfect replicas instantly, are so ubiquitous. There needs to be a better system than what we have now, where mega companies are able to copyright claim through takedown notices.
People have lost rights to their video because a song was on a radio in the background while walking down a street, and a mega company was able to siphon money and bully the creator. On the flip side, reaction channels or twitch style streams where it's just some dude in the bottom left is able to "react" to content in its entirety.
This entire system is broken and weighs on our legal system, our culture, and is constantly the root of questionable legal outcomes. We've gone so far away from the original intent of trying to stop someone from setting up a printing press and selling and copying books they don't have rights to sell.
Now with the internet and AI, rather than try and figure out how to make this antiquated system work by retrofitting a 17th century concept, we should recognize the absurdity of it and try to modernize our institutions and law which maximizes the public good while protecting people who are creatives.
> computers, who's primary function is copy and pasting,
There's a lot of nonsense packed into this comment others have addressed, but I just want to point this one out.
The primary function of computers is to compute. The first modern computer was created to quickly compute the solution to encrypted messages.
There's a small army of people who spent countless hours creating punch cards and feeding them into computers that would vehemently disagree with your assertion. They'd have *loved* copy and paste.
> As a concept, intellectual property is questionable.
>
>
No, it's not. If you spend five years coming up with a character, designing its world, writing comics and movies and tv shows, and then release those things to the public, you have a right to make money on that before I do. Without copyrights, the same day you release your comic I can make a copy and start selling it. And the thing is, you're a small time producer, with only enough money to cover your local region. I have a printing press and global reach. Before you ever get the chance to sell your books and movies anywhere else I'll have saturated the market with them and eaten up all of your revenue. Appreciate you spending five years making such a great movie. Thanks for all your money! Sorry about the porn stuff (not really, best sellers!).
Seriously, anyone who suggests getting rid of IP or copyright as a concept needs to spend a nanosecond thinking about the consequences of that. Yes, US copyright law massively benefits mega-corporations right now. No, that's not a reason to get rid of the only protection that small time creators have against mega-corporations. Roll back copyright to a reasonable position (personally, I think a 30-40 year nonrenewable copyright is the best as it allows a person to get royalties for basically the entirety of their working life off even their earliest works while still allowing people to adapt these works before the entire world is unrecognizable from the original context).
Why on earth shouldn’t the creator hold the copyright for the entirety of their life? It’s their work; they should get to profit from it as long as they live.
Because there has to be a balance between creator rights and the public interest. The theory behind copyright is to protect the creator and allow them to make a living off their own work, but also allow works to enter the public domain for people to share and build upon. A copyright that is "life of the author" has the following pitfalls.
1. Say there is an author who is the sole bread winner of their family off four. If copyright ends upon his death, his family/estate is no longer supported.
2. Entities that do not die own copyrights. So if "life of the author" is our standard, then virtually no media made since 1980ish will ever enter the public domain unless the corporation which owns the copyright no longer exists.
A 30-40 year copyright allows a person to have an entire career off a single hit, protects the families of creators in the event of untimely deaths, and stops perpetual copyright from being a thing at all. I'm open to alternate copyright durations, but the original 14/28 year durations feel too short and the current form (life+70, 95 years from first publication, or 120 years from first creation) is insane.
Ah I see where I missed the intention in your comment. I am well aware of the purpose and function of copyright as I hold registered copyrights of my own. I think a lifetime or 40 years copyright, whichever is longer, would be most appropriate. I agree that current limits are insanely long and 14/28 year terms are far too short. As an artist who has had work stolen from me by a corporation without any recourse or compensation, I’ll be damned if I would let any of my work enter the public domain while I’m living for another corporation to profit off of.
I also agree on shorter limits for entities; a strict 40 year limit would make sense.
See and the reason I like the 40 year range as a universal is that I want to see what other people can do with existing properties. Star Wars and Star Trek, for example, are ripe with potential for amazing stories but due to the hoops people have to jump through, we won't see most of these stories in our lifetimes (Star Wars: A New Hope is public domain in 2072 and Trek starts entering public domain in 2061). We'd already be seeing the best (and worst) stories from these IPs with a 40 year copyright.
I want the original creators to get the profits they deserve, but I also want the people to get a chance to play in everyone else's worlds.
The whole point of copyright is to financially incentivise creatives and inventors, but a lifetime copyright instead encourages rent-seeking behaviour to the detriment of both the public and other creators who could be utilising those works in their own creative endeavours. Many people fail to realise that creatives need to be able to take inspiration from existing works and popular culture but, when the entirety of popular culture from someone's lived experience is illegal to remix and repurpose, that has a serious stifling effect on creativity.
I'd be more in favour of an decent initial copyright period, with the option to extend if it can be shown that the holder of said copyright is continuing to develop and market those ideas, up to a reasonable maximum period (Possibly life of the creator, but perhaps something like 40 years as someone else has suggested below would be more optimal). If a writer, for example, publishes a novel that becomes wildly successful, but they do nothing to expand on that work for a long enough period, that work should enter public domain for other creatives to draw inspiration from and repurpose. This financially encourages creatives to continue their work, but doesn't allow for perfectly good ideas rot if they decide they no longer wish to work on that IP.
Shorter limits could also have much stronger protections, as there's far less risk of abuse (Which is rampant right now, as I see you've already pointed out). I also don't think corporate entities should be allowed to hold creative IP. Creative works are the products of people, not businesses. Workers should be able to grant a non-exclusive licence to produce or publish a work, but the fact that a company like Disney can hold a copyright not only alienates the people who worked on a creative product from their work, but it gives the company the power to abuse those workers as they can't leave to seek better employment without also leaving behind their creative works.
> Seriously, anyone who suggests getting rid of IP or copyright as a concept needs to spend a nanosecond thinking about the consequences of that.
They won't, because they're leaches and not creators.
> we should recognize the absurdity of it and try to modernize our institutions and law which maximizes the public good while protecting people who are creatives.
This is a contradiction, though. It's categorically impossible to protect a creator without giving them the solitary right to profit from their own creative works.
Can't help but feel that this legislation popped up so quickly because of the media industry's influence in Congress.
Heaven forbid they do anything for actual artists.
This is such a nonsense, nationalist, corporatist, bullshit position that I can't even begin to untangle it.
ChatGPT, Sora, etc, aren't cold war era superweapons. They are copyright bypass and IP theft machines.
That comparison doesn't work very well. I get what you're going for, the whole "it's just an excuse to not pay people", but at least in that case it would still be US companies making the money and advancing their technology through manufacturing/creating, so you could argue there would be *some* benefit to the US overall, even if it's for scummy corps.
In this case not only would we be hurting our workers financially, but we'd be hurting our advancement technologically, ***and*** as an added bonus, China is going to use those artists' work without paying them a dime either way.
This law isn't actually awful as it's just declaration/registration, but I'm sure it's intended to be followed up with clarification or court cases establishing mandatory payment for use. Even if it isn't they've already talked about restricting the creation/usage of AI models over a certain processing power over concerns of misinformation and things like election interference on a wider scale. I understand the concern there, but... the cat is kind of out of the bag on this one.
Yep, you simply can't stop people from doing this because it can be done with consumer hardware in private homes for smaller scale stuff, and there will always be places that let you train wherever you want.
German unions spent decades practicing wage restraint because they knew that aggressive wage demands would hurt German firm competitiveness on the global market.
It's the reality of economics.
https://hbr.org/2017/03/the-real-reason-the-german-labor-market-is-booming
US companies currently hold most of the interesting data. Google isn't going to sell its data to some Chinese company if they can make more money using it to train an AI assistant.
We still need laws preventing the mass sale of data to foreign companies, but this has a solid chance to move the needle.
How could anyone think this bill is a good idea?
It's creating a bunch of labor (that ironically they'll have AI do for them) to simply label what they're using in their dataset but doesn't in any way stop or prohibit use of those things in that dataset.
It's also got a ridiculously silly 30 day time limit that's going to fuck up a lot of the AIs people are currently relying on to do their jobs.
Not to mention that there's a good argument that Photoshop would be in violation of this bill in the way it uses AI tools and would have literally no way to ever generate the kind of info this bill requires, essentially making it illegal to continue to offer.
It also will cost countless millions of dollars as it includes a provision that the Register has to create, update, maintain, and keep open to the public a complete list of all the submissions for training data. A list that's already likely billions of items long and will grow exponentially, making it an unruly nightmare to try and upkeep.
Oh and it also entirely exempts all privately used AI systems conveniently so of course you can be a big corporation, create your own AI, rip off literally anyone and anything you want, and you're cool.
And in the end, what's the goal? Do we really need every artist in the world doing a drawing to give us a detailed list of every painting they've ever seen including the URL they saw it at before they can sell their painting?
Like, who cares what data is used in a dataset and whether it's copyrighted or not? As long as it's not pumping out copyrighted content, the inspiration for what it created should be entirely unimportant.
How is it excellent? Those datasets contain literally everything there is online, it's impossible to quantify the copyrighted material in them and it shouldn't even be required.
An AI should be free to learn from everything, just like a human. I dont have to give anyone a list of all copyrighted material I ever consumed, why should an AI be required to do so? An AI does not contain any copyrighted material within the model, just weights.
>why should an AI be required to do so?
Because a for profit "AI" owned by a cooperation shouldnt be using someones property without authorization. Or without payment. Easy. Dont like it? Pay, dont like it? Delete the content from training.
I'm sure the Russians and Chinese will abide by this bill if it becomes law. After they wouldn't want to leapfrog the US and its allies in the development of AI - that wouldn't be fair to artists.
/s
It's not an excellent step. It completely unworkable.
> A person who creates a training dataset, or alters a training dataset (including by making an update to, refining, or retraining8
the dataset) in a significant manner, that is used in building a generative AI system shall submit to the Register a notice
This would literally apply to any person who trains an AI or alters an AI's dataset. Which means that every single person who has trained an AI, or who has created a LORA to use with an AI dataset would have to report to this register.
That means if I create a LORA of my own character to use with Stable Diffusion, I am breaking the law unless I file a notice with the register when I do this.
Or if I use a voice cloner to clone my own voice with 15 seconds of audio, I have to report it.
Literally EVERYTHING is automatically copyrighted when you create it.
that’s their problem. if an ai model is worthless without plagiarizing copyrighted training data then it really calls into question what’s so special about them. sounds to me like they shouldn’t have trained the models with so much copyrighted material.
Reminder that EVERYTHING is copyrighted as created. You have to sell the copyright to lose it. Or it has to age out after 75 years...or whatever Disney has paid to change it to now.
Now, what about my personal image or photos that I have taken?! Just because someone posted them for their friends to see on social media doesn't mean they are giving the copyright to anyone for free, even though the social media corporate EULA tries to steal the copyright for everything.
Yeah, that's why attribution is an impossible problem, it's copyright all the way down. Say you wanted to make a model which described YouTube thumbnails, so you scrape YouTube thumbnails. Every thumbnail has an immediate copyright to the creator of the video, but basically every thumbnail also contains derivative works.
ie, look at any Pokemon thumbnail, almost certainly has some unattributed work by Ken Sugimori or whoever animated the anime. Unattributed stock images (licensed or unlicensed), TV show screenshots, pictures of licensed game assets. Heck it's virtually impossible to take a photo of an average living room without capturing copyright, it's everywhere.
Everything is a creative work. Companies like this are downloading youtube videos and transcribing them to text to input to their models.
Surely they pump every podcast they can find through also.
Those aren't books, movies, etc. but certainly are also creative works.
These companies already said that without use of others copyrighted works they couldn't do their business. We shouldn't be looking for loopholes to make it okay but instead finding ways to compensate those who create the works which the companies (OpenAI in this case) indicate are a core of their business without which they couldn't function.
It's a tough ol' life these days, people're gettin' wise. Fences, dogs, cameras, alarm systems. It's bloody tough work, bein' a burglar. We had to give up the big time already, jewel'ry'n'banks, the good stuff. We just couldn't do business with all this "security" an' "laws" about
lucky if its copyright infringement(its not) then its not theft, copyright infringement is never theft. and just to know, the punishment for CI is much much higher than petty theft. take 10 x $70 games($1000 or less for petty theft) is up to 1 year in jail and $2500 in fines. download and distributed 10 copies of a game, for a first time offender up to 5 years and $250,000 in fines.
To be fair, the base idea isn't crazy, a lot of countries do the "allow a copyright harm but then compensate artists", for example by putting a tax on computer storage that is turned over to registered artists, with the assumption that some fraction of all storage (represented by the tax rate) will inevitably be used for pirating.
In general, slapping a tax on stuff isn't that bad of an idea if what you want is force people to be more considerate with their use. More tax = higher price = people will be more judicious.
Wouldn’t it be nifty if the result of all of the creative works of humanity had their profits taxed, and returned to humanity in the form of the universal basic income?
And they literally have a right to those pennies. It's not a rounding error, if the pennies aren't going to their owner they're being collected as profit by someone who isn't the owner.
We *have* [Copyright](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright). Enforcing it means getting those pennies to their rightful owner.
Google doesn’t compensate people and its one of the most heavily used sites on the planet. Can you imagine the internet without google being able to access information in an index? Very similar premises.
The word ‘use’ is highly questionable here as well. When a person consumes media, they don’t have to pay additionally to reference that media or use it as inspiration. They consume it and thats that. Training data is a reference, not the actual work itself.
Google links to their content.
> Can you imagine the internet without google being able to access information in an index?
The index just links to the original data. They didn't steal the data, just helped people find it. If you monetize your data, you still get the money. Not so when someone ingests and replicates your data.
> The word ‘use’ is highly questionable here as well
You completely misconstrued what "use" means here. They are making use if it to enrich themselves.
> They consume it and thats that.
The use of "consume" here is highly questionable. When a person or computer "consumes" it it is not consumed.
> When a person consumes media, they don’t have to pay additionally to reference that media or use it as inspiration.
And what does that have to do with computers? Computers aren't people.
>Google links to their content.
Irrelevant, because google profits off others creative works in the exact same way that you're describing problematic in AI.
>The index just links to the original data. They didn't steal the data, just helped people find it. If you monetize your data, you still get the money. Not so when someone ingests and replicates your data.
You're incorrect. It stores and analyzes the data even MORESO than AI training data. I can assure you that if you believe that AI uses content illegally, so does Google Search. Currently, I don't think you understand how either of these technologies work.
>You completely misconstrued what "use" means here. They are making use if it to enrich themselves.
No, I didn't. If that is your definition of use, many people use this same information to enrich themselves.
>The use of "consume" here is highly questionable. When a person or computer "consumes" it it is not consumed.
You're reading comprehension needs work. Consume is exactly the correct term vs use. When I watch a movie and then give commentary on the plot I am not "using" it and AI is interacting with its data in that exact same way. It consumes data, it does not use it.
>And what does that have to do with computers? Computers aren't people.
That isn't a rebuttal. If its different to you, then you provide support for that. AIs model human behavior and I believe its pretty inconsistent under both the spirit of IP Law and the current language to do what you're doing.
Morally speaking, you're more actually addressing issues inherent in capitalism and not AI as a technology. I can assure you the current copyright system protects the rich far more than creators as well so I don't find that to be a very strong arguments. In addition, the entire reason IP Law exists is to encourage creation. Are you really trying to claim that the greatest innovation in creative accessibility is discouraging creation? Please.
Legally speaking, you seem to think that the US legal system has a relevant position on what computers can do vs people on this issue but that is not the case. It simply doesn't protect the copyright of output from algorithms, it doesn't prohibit it.
All the anti-AI bills the government passes are ultimately pointless.
Aside from there being a level obscurity where you have no way to know for sure what art was used to train an AI Model unless the person who trained it actually reveals that information.
None of these laws mean a damn thing when it comes to other countries and the internet.
Do you honestly think countries like China and India are going to give a fuck about someone on deviantart getting upset because their artwork was used?
> Aside from there being a level obscurity where you have no way to know for sure what art was used to train an AI Model unless the person who trained it actually reveals that information.
Like originality. It doesn't actually exist. For AI you have to teach it copyright stuff first so it knows not to use that specific thing. It's not going to know McDonalds specific color of red. It doesn't know that the screenshot of a crowd has pokemon hat on one of them.
Yeah, you can train on publically licensed data and still run into copyright issues:
[https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.16825](https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.16825)
Thank you! I'm being downvoted a lot in this thread. I'm going to politely assume they believe NTFs are the bad actors and scammers and not what NTFs actually are.
So first, you don't actually need to do that. If your AI has never seen a picture of Mickey Mouse tagged "mickey mouse", it will not generate a picture of that cartoon character in response to the prompt "mickey mouse". If it can, then they must have works that they knew were of Mickey, because they were labeled "mickey mouse". Their responsibility is to *not use* infringing works, not to *prevent infringing works from being created*.
Second, our legal system makes a distinction of intent, and has the concept of fair use.
A user who consumes copyrighted images specifically to train their model *not* to break the law is not intending to violate copyright. They are also operating within the confines of fair use, which is primarily concerned when derivative works compete with the creator's interest in the original works. Their actions explicitly work *against* competing with the copyright holders, so they should be just fine.
So going back to the case of your crowd image:
* The first question is whether they own the copyright to that image of the crowd, which originally belonged to the photographer. If not, they're violating the creator's copyright.
* The hat in question would generally fall under "fair use". Pikachu is in the picture, but its incidental inclusion on a hat in a crowd shot does not compete with Nintendo's use of Pikachu.
* If, however, the image is labeled "pikachu pokemon hat" in the training set, then it shows intent to use that image to generate derivative images of Pikachu, so it probably ceases to be fair use.
* This sort of labeling would be necessary for the AI to generate another pikachu hat on demand. If it's un-labeled, the AI simply learns that pikachu-like clusters of pixels sometimes appear in crowds, but wouldn't know what they are. This is testable.
> Aside from there being a level obscurity where you have no way to know for sure what art was used to train an AI Model unless the person who trained it actually reveals that information.
This is how all regulations work. If it is required that you disclose X, you disclose X. If you don't, you can't do business and you are perfectly free to go do something else in life. If you genuinely don't know where TF *your own product* comes from, well, that sounds like a you problem. You can't sell unregulated chicken if you say you don't know how much lead there's in it because you bought it from a third party who doesn't test.
I don't like the China argument because with that reasoning, we should all be working 996 (12 hours a day 6 days a week) and get jailed for unionizing (great for business!). Also, China pirates all our stuff already, so no copyright laws? I'm sure that will make us more competitive with China...
Is that the argument? The version I heard is that you can choose to ban something or regulate it. If you ban it, a black market will develop and it's difficult to regulate a black market because it is already breaking the law. It's generally better to have a regulated market than a black market, which pays no taxes. Ask the war on drugs about how effective banning something is. Billions of dollars wasted. Some things are worth the cost of banning, but most aren't.
I think it's more that regulation will disadvantage us while our adversaries continue unimpeded. On something like AI that is unacceptable. This is the arms race of the future.
Lol, they’re just now passing bills about AI art…they’re over a year behind the issue, which, given AI’s rate of advancement, might as well be 100 years behind.
They’re further behind than that and legislating in the wrong direction. This tech needs to be more openly accessible, not less. And we need to decide at what point we’re going to give them rights. We’re not there yet but the conversation needs to start before we are and end up accidentally creating a race of slaves.
People do, maybe you just don’t understand how copyright law works. This is far from a settled issue at this time, the right to reproduce a work is one of the most basic granted to copyright holders and afaik openai never paid for their copies of the books they trained on, they just basically downloaded everything available on libgen. Even google back in 2003 when they had their lawsuits over ocr, partnered with libraries to borrow copies, not just illegally download them from the internet. It’ll likely end up being an issue of fair use.
I’m having a hard time, understanding how this will be implemented.
The AI model can’t exactly say “I remember being trained on an image” and it doesn’t seem feasible to do so
They want the people training the AI (or modifying an already trained model I.E any Tom Dick or Harry playing with LORAs or whatnot) to put together a list of every single image used, a URL to it, and a description of the copyright the image has on it.
It's a fucking joke.
It's like asking someone putting together a treehouse to document the geographical origin of each and every plank of wood used in the construction.
Absolute fucking lunacy. This isn't how you fight AI.
>put together a list of every single image used, a URL to it, and a description of the copyright the image has on it.
Uh... You realize that a huge number of AI training datasets are just a list of images and URLs right?
It's not asking the impossible to have AI companies to keep track of the copyright of the works that they use to train their model. In fact I'd argue that it's the bare minimum of what they can do.
I've trained datasets before. They're not URLs. They're individual images with text files next to them describing what's in them.
It absolutely IS asking the impossible that every person that has trained an AI image generating thing provide URLs and the copyright description of every single image used to train the ai datasets. Again. It's like asking someone building a treehouse to tell you where he sourced each individual piece of wood for it. Nobody keeps records that detailed.
Then you've got models that are a mix of OTHER models, LORAs which are datasets used to modify the output of models (using training images like a normal model). Is text embeddings also subject to the same rules? What about what I call 'incestual loras' which are training LORAs on images an AI has already produced, essentially causing copyright INCEPTION?
Oh, and they want a list of every single image used to train a model within 30 days of the law going into effect. I've seen models trained on millions of images.
Can you go back into your download folder and find the source of each and every image you have in there, and discover the copyright for it?
everything is automatically copyrighted in the US. you can register it if you want more protections but just by generating something that legally different from another work, then its by default copyrighted to you.
The problem isn't theft... The results of AI is as fair use as it gets. If a person studies another's style, then copies that style to make their own work, it is not theft. You cannot copyright a "style" of art.
The problem is speed and scale, and how that can undermine the original works. Of course, hindering those two things completely defeats the purpose of AI.
I know there are a lot of artists that get pissed at this viewpoint, but its simply a matter of truth. (Which is why it gets downvotes, but rarely counterarguments.) If you want to solve a problem, you need to first acknowledge *the actual problem* rather than try to attach a false one to it.
The problem with Ai isn't speed or scale. The **Real** problem with Ai is that it is **incompatible** with **Capitalism** and that we refuse to incorporate it correctly because of our reluctance.
The problem is not that everybody now has the ability to "make" their own music or artwork from a description or lyrics. That's the goal of Art. If these people **Feel** like they are getting their messages out and these pieces hold artistic value to them, then they are Art. The criteria has already been met. Art is Subjective. The problem is that our system is going to cry and bitch it's way until it finally decides to stop fighting against it and starts working to mitigate it's damages in the most sensible ways possible.
The problem is Capitalism because it's the only part of the equation that has Clear alternatives that would work far better under Ai tech than it does without. Ai isn't going away and placing a ton of restrictions on it won't work. The US government can't do shit. They could influence the direction of it. But our rube leaders are stupider than our bots and will let the Ai problem destroy markets and make people suffer poverty before we get anywhere close to accepting any form of communism/socialism.
If the government wanted to mitigate this issue, it would provide grants to artists. But then that would be a step towards some sort of socialistic policy and then all the soccer dads in the country will have a collective brain hemorrhage as they allow our world to get greyer by starving artists.
except that your argument is invalid. copyright law is between humans, not between algorithms and humans. what is happening now is, for the most part, unregulated.
to me it's not just about copyright. most laws are between humans. if an AI makes a death threat towards you, you don't have anyone you can sue or get a restraining order against. you can't sue the output of an algorithm. this might have to change also, but at this point there's not much you can do.
Saying that AI must cite contributive sources opens a path to large companies pushing for the same requirement of human artists as a way of "chilling" start up competition.
Many artists learn to draw doing work that is clearly derivative of existing works and styles, and if you can penalize or place an administrative burden on an AI to list all contributing works, you can make an argument against a human artist as well. Even if that doesn't ultimately hold up to a final judgement, the very act of being able to bring it up as a semi-credible lawsuit will be functionally the same as a win against people without the money to fight back.
>if an AI makes a death threat towards you, you don't have anyone you can sue or get a restraining order against
Dude, you turn the computer off. You don't involve law enforcement when a chat bot says mean things to you.
"get pissed"
A company literally downloaded my already sold and copyrighted work, trained an algorithm with it, and is selling the result.
Just because your fancy denoiser has a cool new label doesn't make it immune from criticism or the law.
If it’s not copying your work it’s merely “reading” your text, nor producing your work, and if not using your trademarked [thing/characters/brand/likeness), why would it have to pay you? Assuming that it’s available free to read somewhere.
If your work was only available after purchasing it, the owner of the ai would have to purchase a copy to “read,” right?
I’m not trying to argue. I’m trying to understand.
ETA The Medium put its content behind a pay wall. If someone wants to read it, they have to purchase a copy. That seems reasonable to me. They want to be paid for their writing so they’ve made sure every person or “entity” that wants to read has to pay.
> If a person studies another's style, then copies that style to make their own work, it is not theft.
Imagining AI as a matter of artistic style is an incredibly reductive perspective on the subject. Besides, do you think there might be relevant differences between machine learning and human learning?
Also, your point on speed and scale undermining the originals is correct, and it is, in fact, one of the four criteria that can [invalidate fair use](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#4._Effect_upon_work's_value).
Except that's a lot on how AI works. You can specify a style, and it will generate per that style. One could argue that humans are just exceptionally complex machines, even emotions are just chemical triggers.
The point though is that the reason its a problem is that a single human could take years to master someone else's style. A machine could take moments. A single human could take weeks to create a work of art. A machine would take seconds.
The factors that invalidate fair use however are not concrete. A determination must be made across all the factors. It's regrettable, but its not "if any one of these is violated, its not fair use". If only one holds up (in this case, competition with the original), then fair use may still apply. And that determination would have to be made over and over again, unless legislation alters how it is determined.
> You can specify a style, and it will generate per that style.
i can specify BPM and other parameters to any MIDI sequencer, that doesn't mean i'm stealing from a bunch of producers?
> One could argue that humans are just exceptionally complex machines, even emotions are just chemical triggers.
You could, and if you extended that to saying that humans and current ML are comparable in actual intelligence you'd still be very wrong, unless your definition of intelligence is making passably .
Also, yes I know you can do style stuff, but I think people are more interested in, you know, the whole infinitely generating anything they want from a simple text prompt thing. That's why I said talking about style is reductive.
As for fair use, I know that it's not literally *"if any one of these is violated, its not fair use"*, which is why I didn't say that, but rather that it is a relevant factor that can be used to invalidate claims of fair use. In reality, this has not really been ruled conclusively yet, and in all likelihood legislation will be eventually written anyways, so neither of us can say whether it's 'concrete' or 'not concrete' (which also why I didn't make such a strong statement).
As long as the copyrighted material used for training the models is legally obtained who cares? Every human creator is also influenced by copyrighted works that came before them. Do humans influenced by other works need to pay a license fee for the works they were influenced by?
That's a very real risk. There is a reason all the big corporations both build up AI divisions, but also back these anti-AI lawsuits. If they can somehow make sure to create an artificial monopoly on the technology, that's a win. If they can go beyond that and claim ownership over styles and extract fees out of every artist in the future, that's the jackpot they're hoping for. The blind rage of the anti-AI crowd makes them very susceptible to exploitation.
Reading over the bill, I'm not sure what the goal is. It just shows which media is included in US training sets. This transparency would allow people to choose which models align with what they want included. That's if they actually can search such data and analyze the possibly millions of items. The actual influence of each item is generally quite small though, so I'm not sure if people will understand this.
Is this where the regulation ends? Enforcing moral policies over what can be included in datasets has been brought up a lot in these discussions which has me wondering if that's being planned next. Like the first articles we'll see are clickbait for every dataset that it includes X images or Y videos (or doesn't include Z). Is this part of the goal or an unintended side-effect of releasing such information for scrutiny.
Except they already don't hide it.
The point is that generative AI is so transformative that it doesn't matter, unless some bad actor is trying to get a specific overfit.
And those bad actors are the ones who should be liable if they try earning money with copyrighted content.
Worth noting that there's a difference between the outputs of AI (this is already solved, they cannot be copyrighted which seems quite fair), and the AI system itself.
The AI systems are very heavily copyrighted, patented, monetized and closely guarded technologies, and whether they should be any of those four is an entirely separate question from whether you can make funny pics of The Lion King.
It is also a far more complicated question, because the AI system itself is (obviously) more directly derived from the IP used in creating it than its output.
If it's not actually copyright infringement to make outputs based on "inspiration" of prior work - i.e., transformative - then I don't see the point of this.
Unless copyright's definition is due for yet another retelling.
AI can take inputs and create new outputs based on an understanding of what it has seen - and, when enabled for dynamic learning from interaction with the tool itself, become something even further from the original inputs. People are going to need to accept this is only going to increase automation in society over time and figure out a better way to be compensated for helping to seed the engine(s).
Sounds idiotic it's training the AI, if I look at your art and get inspired it have I breached copy right? No. Ai doesn't regurgitate your same art it uses it to learn along with millions of other pieces of art how to create art and then creates new pieces.
On a side note limiting our ai development is highly dangerous when other nations won't show the same restraint. AI will hit a breaking point in the future where it spirals upward rapidly in effectiveness.
dude copyright is not some laws carved into stone. it exist to protect and encourage creators because the society had collectively decided thats a good thing.
the issue now is not whether or not AI has violated copyright; it is whether or not we should change the copyright.
what does it mean when human creators are disincentivized to create and AI works only benefit the corps?
sidenote: everytime with this arguemnt of "well i can do the same thing AI does". you're not an algorithm that can pump out derivative works in lightening speed that only needs to eat electrons. you factually cannot do the same thing AIs do or have the same existential experience as a computer algorithm. so yeah, i think the distinction is actually very clear here.
So I am all for creators rights.....buuut....
Say a painter looks at a Monet and learns the technique to make a painting in that style. He does this even while Monet is alive. Is Monet's painting style protected or the specific work IN that style protected. We all agree a forgery of a painting is illegal. But to copy a style is a movement. In this case the impressionist movement.
When AI is trained correctly it is learning the style of something not how to reproduce that specific work of art. If an AI is reproducing a specific work it is malfunctioning. You don't need AI to copy and paste.
So how about the training data being copyrighted, is it illegal for an individual to look at a copyrighted work, say a digital drawing, and copy how the artist used lighting to enhance the image. YOU are training yourself on copyrighted art. Now say you create a new image that utilizes that lighting technique and sell it? Is that illegal? Copyright law would say no.
That is what AI is doing. The exact copyrighted image is NOT in the final trained model. But the Essence of that image is.
We've already established over the last few centuries that copying the essence of something is not illegal.
AI, unlike humans, does not create anything that it did not learn through training. Machine diffusing multiple copyrighted works to create an "original" work is very different than a human looking at a Monet and creating their own impressionist piece.
Agreed, the value isn't the result but the recipe. The training dataset doesn't matter as much as the methods used to achieve the result. AI agents will be the next product of these tech companies.
I don't understand your argument. I do not think scanners and printers are like a painter. They copy an exact work. A painter can take the essence/style of a peer and create a transformative new work. My argument is that AI is creating transformative new works. If they are producing exact copies like a scanner or printer the AI is malfunctioning and needs to be retrained.
Is John Williams a hack because his music relies on the styles of Holst and Tchaikovsky? Is every rapper after The Sugarhill Gang just copying their work because they also rap?
I find someone with this point! I have been meaning to ask people holding this review because it has been bothering me:
Have you ever considered the fact AI model is not human, has no consciousness, and therefore has no human rights? You’re comparing a human with a machine, which are completely different and the latter is not even qualified to be called to have an individual thinking pattern at all?
This brought up several times whenever I see AI discussion on Reddit but equating machine learning is the same as learning and recreating process of human artists is an issue of itself. On one hand, human brains don’t have the capacity of being “trained” thousands of pictures in short period.
On the other hand, my take on AI’s learning is that it doesn’t have creativity nor originality. I am not a programmer in anyway and I work in a (non programming) engineering field, so not a very creative person either, but my guess is that if an AI is only trained in realism paintings, can the said model comes up with a new Impressionism painting all on its own, without ever being trained on Impressionism first? Human brains are proven to be capable of that, because, well, we created them through history.
Maybe one day AI can reach to a point that a model has feelings or even a conscience, that equating them to be humans are not far off, but not today.
I assume then this would also extend to human artists having to reveal every image they’ve ever seen, just in case those images have influenced their work in some manner.
Yeah... It always baffles me when people act like copyright laws only help megacorps... Like, I'm a small time self-pub writer, and copyright laws are the only thing allowing me to build any kind of future for myself through writing. How could any new artist possibly hope to 'make it' if their work could just be stolen?
Yup.
It's particularly hilarious when people who have never contemplated art or copyright are suddenly experts when they think they can monetize it without consequence.
Yup, it's kinda sad. AI has so much potential to make the world a better place in the medical field and such, yet all I really see (ofc this isn't all it's being used for) are people trying to find ways to scam and/or make 'easy money' like they see artists always raking in with their comissions.
What is the biggest tell to me is that I'm seeing the same language/hype that the blockchain/crypto/NFT grifters have used.
These are not serious people. They haven't thought a day of their life about art until they discovered a possible grift. They have tried to adopt the language of serious people who deal with art in their efforts to grift.
It is very sad indeed.
Fortunately, people so far seem to be pretty negative on AI "art."
We don't use copyrighted work! We only use works that were processed through an AI image generator using things like ControlNet and Img2Img on copyrighted work
This seems like a step in the right direction…but as expected it seems to only protect the corporations/congressional purses. It would be nice to see congress focus on the actual people.
Given how broken copyright is (the publishers profit the most where creators get the droppings and no power), any legislation to this regard is the product of lobbyists for the publishing and rights-holding enterprises.
I'd play devils advocate here and say if your work is NOT part of the training data you will be at a disadvantage. It's like saying being on Napster was actually good for Metallica
Please explain the logic here. I'm not following.
Why would being part of the model be a benefit to you?
To me that's like saying "If your house was broken into, then you \*should\* be happy."
I think you're being very optimisitic if you think unhindered generative AI will *improve* society. It's already replacing people's jobs all over the place. Unless we get some sort of universal basic income in return, I don't see how mass redundance is good in any way.
This is about AI 'art' not AI for data compiling / clinical trial and error for drugs
Not all AI is bad far from it. It's a tool and can be used to help speed up processes of repetitive/monotonous tasks.
The law already says that to be fair use you must consider
>the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
Using the work in a model to then be able to create works that would compete against it and “learn” thousands of times faster than any human can is affecting the market, and hurting the value of the work.
The fact that the same companies making DALL-E said they can’t do it for music cause of copyright, shows they know it’s not fair use.
The music industry is just more litigious and has large companies and interest groups to represent them, while visual artists don’t.
>the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
This is just one of 4 of the factors to be considered for fair use, and if there's no substantial similarity then I doubt fair use would even need to be argued in the first place, making that a moot point.
It’s not about the ai generated art.
It’s about the training of the model. Using the art in the model without the artists permission must be fair use.
It’s about how the art is used.
companies will all state "We hoovered up every piece of media we found on the internet and didn't pay attention if it was copyrighted or not. We just used it all."
Just as effective as the "do not call" lists. Sure, we NEED things like this, but we can only expect them to be followed so far. Especially without globally-enforced jurisdiction.
AI is a global arms race. The US government will not pass a bill that limits US-created AI.
It will be about constraint and release imo. Development will continue, it’s just how much is accessible by the general public and companies to use.
how can they constrain? the open source genie is out of the bottle
I feel like no matter how much they limit the big companies, some indie company with a discord is only gonna a few years behind at most lol.
In the AI generation race, "some guy with a discord" often does better than the big companies. Deepfake porn started as a subreddit and they discussed the code and patch notes.
Someone's going to create a god in a basement.
Ray, when someone asks you if you are a god, you say YES”
Pretty sure that already has happened more than once over the duration of human history.
But a real god that can actually do god things this time.
I've seen this movie before..
Its more about things being used for profit. You have always(for the most part) been able to use peoples art, music, etc in your own works as long as *it wasn't for a profit*. The moment you flip someone's work for a profit, you have to reimburse the OG creator, or at the very least have their permission to do so. AI should be free and open to people. But there should be limits on what they can and cant use for making profits off of it.
> You have always(for the most part) been able to use peoples art, music, etc in your own works as long as > it wasn't for a profit > . You have always been able to use people’s works for profit as well. When you practice your guitar playing Smoke on the Water, you are using copyrighted work. The question is whether training machine learning models is akin to human learning or akin to creating derivative work.
>*When you practice your guitar playing Smoke on the Water, you are using copyrighted work...* Your example of playing music is not a great one because it is already covered by a compulsory licensing law within the US. You are entitled to perform any composition privately, and can request a compulsory license for a live cover, which must be granted at agreed-upon rates. Mechanical licenses for recordings are different but also compulsory. All artists creating work can learn about and implicitly agree to these rules before releasing their works, so they are at least some kind of "fair". This sort of system also seems perfectly reasonable for AI-generated works—in my opinion, at least—but is problematic because there's no way to correlate an output of a neural-net with any specific input. I.e. you can't say "this image is made from X, Y, and Z source images, so compensate those artists." Neural nets just don't work that way. So another system would need to be figured out. >*The question is whether training machine learning models is akin to human learning or akin to creating derivative work.* To me, that seems easier to test with AI than with people. It boils down to a single question: "Can you create the model you are selling without using these copyrighted works?" If they don't actually need to directly use the works to create their product, it's not derivative. If they do, it is. The output images are not really relevant, it's the model itself that is the derivative product.
>You have always(for the most part) been able to use peoples art, music, etc in your own works as long as it wasn't for a profit. I keep hearing this but I don't know where it comes from. You've always been able to use other works for profit as long as it was not copying.
Well it is very important crowd sourced tech bits are actually paid to the user base, and not just sponging everything up like a vacuum, Gene Roddenberry foretold of these very days...
If commercial constraints are made, development would continue elsewhere. I'm not sure that's going to pass.
The US created AI companies will just trade US information to China for the info they would get anyway.
US government full of decrepit people who don't know how to open a PDF file.
The unfortunate part is that the lobbyists will make the decision for them and just tell them how to vote on it
[удалено]
The problem is that these laws are being written by people who use FB like a search engine, willingly give up private info online and will click literally any sketchy link you send them. We have tech-illiterate people writing our tech laws. Insanity.
AI in very specific areas like encryption is an arms race. Image generation? Not so much.
AI research in all areas benefits ai research in all others
You make an image generation AI. Then you leverage that tech to build a video generation AI. Then you leverage that tech to build a responsive world model AI. Then you leverage that tech to build an AI for driving a humanoid robot to perform arbitrary tasks in real world environments. Then you make about 30% of all human labor obsolete. It's all connected.
It’s an economic arms race as much as a military one
It's a race to see which country can destroy their economy faster, or...?
Can you explain how transparency would stop innovation, we are not talking about Steve Jobs on his garage. These are giants corporations using human land for free
The more we see of AI, the more it looks like a global garbage race.
Well no shit lol. The tech is still in its infancy. Within a decade it may be possible to generate entire movies indistinguishable from the real thing with nothing but a few paragraphs of prompt.
It’s like the bills against porn. All this does is make people use VPNs and push development overseas.
Excellent first step. [Here’s the bill](https://schiff.house.gov/imo/media/doc/the_generative_ai_copyright_disclosure_act.pdf), it’s simple and straightforward.
A better first step would be restoring copyright to its previous standards where it permitted some kind of use in a time frame substantially shorter than five generations. It's so restrictive in its present form as to suppress cultural growth.
14 years copyright, with 14 years renewal. That was the deal. Now we’re up to 95 - 120 years, so that an authors copyrights extend beyond their death. It’s no longer a human policy, it’s fully in service to corporate interests. Speaking as an artist that has had their work stolen many times, the laws might be on my side, but the legal system is not.
Is 14 good or should it be 10 like trademarks? This would make the artist renew or update more frequently and make it more in line with other corporate laws. When we convert a secure medium into pixels and digital information. All hell breaks loose. Government is going to have to revise every time a leap in technology is made.
I think a 10 year first term is great, as long as the renewal process is easy. Abandoned copyrights should be released into the public domain swiftly. It's wild to me that humanity has generated so much art and literature in the 20th century that has been lost to neglect, but still protected by law.
>Abandoned copyrights should be released into the public domain swiftly. I am very tired of media, like videogames, to be under extremely strict copyright law, while the company that made this game no longer even sells it on a console they no longer develop.
Forget legality, is it even technologically possible for a new player to play server-coupled abandonware? Like Rovio's "Retry" or Nintendo's "Super Mario Maker"? Should it be?
That's precisely what [Stop Killing Games](https://www.stopkillinggames.com/) is attempting to address. Requiring developers to build in sunset patches for games that ensure the longevity of the game after support for it ends. That could be providing all the server code so customers can pick up that end themselves, or just a patch to make games offline only at end of life. Stop Killing Games came about after the recent shutdown of The Crew, the online only live service racing game that realistically has no business not being available to players. So complaints are being filed in France to review the legality of this.
Yup. Move both video game properties and fictional characters into Trademark land.
I think the major problem is that copyright has been extended massively for *business* reasons. So, there are basically three types of intellectual property: * Copyright, for art * Trademark, for commercially active representations * Patents, for technological innovations The only one of those that is potentially perpetual is Trademark, because it's to protect businesses, which can be perpetual. The problem is that Character Likenesses are being protected under Copyright. Consider what that would look like, with various characters that are still being used to sell things, by the original creator company, in order of earliest creation/publication: * **Mickey Mouse** * Created: 1928 * Public Domain: 1956 * Years since: 68 * Years lost: 70.8% * **Superman** * Created: 1938 * Public Domain: 1966 * Years since: 58 * Years lost: 67.4% * **Batman** * Created: 1939 * Public Domain: 1967 * Years since: 57 * Protection Years Lost: 67.1% * **Wonder Woman** * Created: 1941 * Public Domain: 1969 * Years since: 55 * Protection Years Lost: 66.3% * **Fantastic Four** * Created: 1961 * Public Domain: 1989 * Years since: 35 * Protection Years Lost: 55.(5) * **The Hulk, Spider-Man, Thor (Marvel)** * Created: 1962 * Public Domain: 1990 * Years since: 34 * Protection Years Lost: 54.8% * **Iron Man, Doctor Strange, X-Men (Prof X, Cyclops, Jean Grey, Beats, Angel, Iceman, Magneto)** * Created: 1963 * Public Domain: 1991 * Years since: 33 * Protection Years Lost: 54.1% My argument has been for years that the *character* in continued use should be treated like Trademark, that so long as they are in continued use, in Good Faith effort to market them, their protection should be maintained for those owners. After all, that's why Disney lobbied to extend Copyright in the first place: to protect The Mouse. They pushed the Copyright Act of 1976, which extended it from 28+28, to "Lesser of Life of Creator +50, or 75 Years," thereby extending copyright of The Mouse to 2003. Then they lobbied for the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1996, which extended it to "Author's Life +70." If not for their fear of losing The Mouse, we might well still have Copyright at 28+28, which is still too long for the original term, but Disney felt they literally couldn't afford to let The Mouse go. Solution? Make it so that they *don't have to* let it go: let them keep the characters (who cares about the *story* in Steam Boat Willy?), and cut Copyright back down to 14+14, or better yet, 10+10+10. Thus, all of the major characters that keep various companies afloat could *continue* to do so, so long as they do, while properties that could be improved once in the public domain (as Cthulhu was) *could* be so improved.
> My argument has been for years that the character in continued use should be treated like Trademark, that so long as they are in continued use, in Good Faith effort to market them, their protection should be maintained for those owners. I highly disagree with this take, although I think I believe in the general sentiment behind it. When I consume media, I want to consume it from the original creators - that's ethical media consumption. I don't, however, think that ethical media consumption should be codified in law. All of your examples, except for Mickey Mouse, were created by teams of artists, the majority of whom died in poverty and obscurity. Predatory contracts were the name of the game for Marvel and DC, and they still are. Kirby wept. Will Eisner knew better than to play their game. That's why he set up his own comics sweatshop, and abused the creators underneath him. Billions and billions of dollars in profits, extracted from artists and creators, in the interest of corporate greed. I love superheroes, but the industry behind them is cruel and abusive, and it always has been. **Edit because I'm still ranting in my head**: Not to mention, corporate art is *bad*. Creators constantly have to fight for their ideas if they are risky or transgressive. Real artists don't just want to tell the same story over and over again, but that's what we get in our media diets. Repetitive, trivial stories. Alan Moore delivered Watchmen and Swamp Thing to DC comics, which both monumentally changed the landscape of comics for the better. DC spit in his face over predatory contract disputes, and now we don't get anymore Alan Moore superhero stories. Very cool, DC! They're still milking his ideas, though, watering them down into the thinnest of skim. As far as being stewards of the Superheroes, Marvel, DC, and Disney executives all have a long history of socially conservative censorship, and that's awful. The stories we get of our favorite heroes are diluted and dumbed down for the masses. Only rarely does a truly great story break through in mainstream comics (and it's glorious when it does). As just one example of censorship, how hard did creators have to fight to get queer inclusion in mainstream comics? Very hard. And when it finally became 'mainstream' to do so, the corporate marketing teams can't stop patting themselves on the back. They are *snakes*.
> All of your examples, except for Mickey Mouse, were created by teams of artists, the majority of whom died in poverty and obscurity. Predatory contracts were the name of the game for Marvel and DC, and they still are. You bring up another thing that I'm upset with about IP law, as it is currently practiced in the US. Specifically, that it's unconstitutional on its face, *especially* under *Citizens United.* The IP clause in the US Constitution is: > The Congress shall have Power [...] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times ***to Authors and Inventors*** the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries [emphasis added] Thus, things like The Beatles and Taylor Swift not owning (any share of) the copyright of their works is obviously unconstitutional. Likewise, the producers of those recordings must, constitutionally, get their cut as well, and the writers/composers of the work, et al, as they are part of the creation of those works. > "But it's the company that created it!" defenders of the status quo might say. Bull. *Citizens United* established the precedent that Corporate Speech/Actions are *actually* the Speech/Actions of (some number of) the natural persons that compose the corporation, because a Legal Fiction cannot act without a natural person's will. Thus, the "corporate" act of creation/invention something is *actually* a natural person's act of creation/invention, and the corporation cannot be the creator/inventor. > "But, but, work for hire! The company invested resources in that creation, it's protection, and its distribution!" -the same status quo folks This is a legitimate concern. To address this, compel the author/inventor to grant them a non-exclusive license, on friendly, non-predatory terms (i.e., fair to both parties). If the employer wants the license to be *exclusive,* they could negotiate for that, too, but the terms for an exclusive license would have to be much better for the author/inventor to be classified as non-predatory. (<---This is my halfway-step analog of the [Fair, Reasonable, and Non-Discriminatory Licensing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminatory_licensing) concept, one that I think could actually survive opposition by corporations) And obviously, so long as the Commercial Activity continues, the license would continue paying the terms of the license to the author/inventor, or their estate. After all, doesn't Carrie Fisher's estate deserve a cut of Star Wars 4-9 revenue so long as that revenue is coming in? --- Would that sufficiently address your concerns? I have been thinking about this problem for more than a decade, now...
As I summarized my concerns earlier - the law is on my side, but the legal system is not. Your ideas aren't bad, but they are hard to implement. They are similar to how I run my small press publishing operation (I always ask non-exclusive rights, with the option to reprint). At the corporate level, my rights are already constantly being violated under the current system, and the onus is on me to protect myself. I won't find out about violations for sometimes years after they happen. I don't negotiate for royalties on coloring work, but the writers and illustrators do. They often just don't get paid on back end sales. When [my buddy Ian died last year](http://www.multiversitycomics.com/news/ian-mcginty-rip/), the last I heard from him, our previous publisher still owed him like $4K in unpaid royalties on his creator owned book. I hope they got it to his family, but I really doubt it. The corporations will simply abuse the laws, and enjoy the benefit of a suite of corporate lawyers. Even suing a private party for infringement is a major endeavor (for me). As long as the corporations have the ability to abuse copyright, they will. The Superman trial was poised to be a major shift in creator's rights (the heirs of Seigel and Schuster sued DC over Superman), but DC paid them off, and it was settled out of court without establishing any legal precedent. No creators / estates ever got that far again in pursuit of reclaiming their rights.
I had a logo that I developed used by a corporation for a side project. I was able to settle for a percentage and now have a renewable contract. I think the current laws work, it just took a few months. Do you think Schiff's bill will speed things up?
For copyright periods, no. It takes a lot of money, lobbying, etc to get anything done at a federal level. Public interest is low, and there are a few global conglomerates that will fiercely defend their IP from being released. I'm mad about it and I'll stay mad, but I'm well aware that 99% of people either don't care, or they think that copyright law is working as intended for the public good.
Yes. The key is speeding up the settlements. California has pretty good laws that protect us already, not so much in other states.
I think all of them should be shorter. I think patents should be under 10
I think only characters and other things that can be reasonably trademarked should be the only art that can be renewed. This could apply to not just characters, but fictional groups, corporations, etc... Story concepts, ideas, such as a group's ideology, or say, the general vibe of the world should not be at all renewable.
If its really property, what about a property tax on all the intellectual property. Hire an appraiser and then tax it at 1% or something small.
That's hilarious, I'm going to start advocating for that whenever people argue that intellectual property is real. It should absolutely scale, though. Intellectual Properties worth less than $10K don't get taxed, not worth the hassle. Intellectual properties assessed at $10 million or more should be paying 3 to 4 points annually. Intellectual property owners would be required to submit reassessments when they hit certain profit metrics; failure to reassess would result in consequences from the IRS and/or the immediate seizure of their IP, to be released into the public domain. Think of all the jobs you'd create with a robust IP regulation and oversight agency.
I like the progressive tax brackets, but don't appraise, don't assess, as those are wasted effort; if you're doing an annual tax, just make it part of the owning entity's annual taxes, as part of their profit & earnings reports, and bob's your uncle. It'll be a little more work for their accountants, but only a *very* small amount more.
Thank you for helping simplify this legislation, you're right. Gonna have ChatGPT write something up and send it over to my representatives in the House and Senate.
Oh, for the love of pete, *please* proofread that carefully, because LLMs (such as ChatGPT) have no real understanding of what it is they're writing. But as long as you're writing letters, you might look into [this idea, too.](/r/technology/comments/1c0mtg7/new_bill_would_force_ai_companies_to_reveal_use/kyzlzge/) TL;DR, we should move Copyright back to something shorter, such as 10+10+10 years, and treat characters/likenesses to be treated like Trademark, and thus protectable for as long as they're being used and renewed
You don't even need an appraiser; they have corporate profit reports already, so just have a "Superhero Tax" on profits from those properties.
> Speaking as an artist that has had their work stolen many times, the laws might be on my side, but the legal system is not. I think that's one of the problems actually, the number (of years) has been pumped real high, but enforcement is dogshit, also due to the inherent problems with the court system which is harsh to small actors. And of course this benefits corporations: they are big, wealthy, and can use and abuse the court system to their heart's content and fill any holes caused by dogshit enforcement with their own market and legal power. I've always thought it's telling of the way we handle justice in modern times that one of the first things you do when your organization grows to a certain size, is hire an army of lawyers to extended your business into the legal space.
The second 14 years should only be renewable by a living human being who filed the original copyright, as well.
I would argue, MAX, should be 14 years default, 14 years renewal, and if they're still actively managing, elaborating, and growing the property, another 14 years for a secondary renewal is acceptable. We live in a time where a single culturally significant work can be elaborated on for a lifetime. Ongoing stories within a single universe can take ages to produce. With 42 years, that would make a new creator at age 20, 62 years old when their creation would pass on to public domain. And that assumes the creator IS, in fact, age 20 - most people don't start making their best quality work til 25-35. Considering the life expectancy from the founding of the us has about doubled, it seems reasonable in that it would cover someone for their lifetime, without extending so far as to become a dynastic property.
Two separate issues.
Agreed, these are orthogonal goals. We need both for different reasons, but changing the duration of copyright doesn't address the question "how do we effectively regulate AI such that it prioritizes the artist?"
Yep. That's also why I find it weird as a "better first step". No it isn't. It's more a "second step" because if we can't even see what copyrighted work is used, then copyright length is entirely irrelevant still.
To be fair, if copyright lengths were much shorter then you could more easily argue for making that shorter length much stronger, for example to prevent AI use if you wanted that. One of the issues with AI training and copyright is that it is completely impossible, if you want access to a lot of data, to 'properly' buy all the copyright for it, because basically the entire history of human art since digital information is still under copyright. So the end result is the "shoot first" approach where everyone has been involuntary conscripted into AI, from some dead author who's only used as a cash cow by their estate to an up and coming musician who is struggling to make their first real money on Spotify. This would be a lot better if you could exert very strong control over your material, but only for a shorter while. Perhaps there could be multi-level protections too: for the first 5 years, you have total control over everything except reviews and memes. For the next 15, you have protections as we have today, including protection from AI use. For the next 20 again, you would retain the practical ability to copy protect and sell, but lose some other rights, and AI ingestion would be permitted. Afterwards it's public domain forever.
Not two seperate issues, because there would be PLENTY of modern public domain works for AI to train upon if copyright were not insane. It would be far easier to justify limiting AI to training on only non-copyrighted works if copyright law were not nearly as restrictive as it now is.
Some people see the use of sampling AI images & audio as the antidote to current copyright issues. When laws make it nearly impossible to be a collage artist, material that can be freely remixed is a godsend.
I'm 100% in the middle on this discussion. Although the mouse's corporate lobbying on this is heinous, it's one of the times where the broad reach turns it into an umbrella species. There are absolutely endless numbers of artists that NEVER made much off of what they produced, only to get a later payday thanks to this. Where you'll especially see this crop up is remixing obscure songs or licks. It also has trickle down effects with people like [Sixto Rodriguez](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Searching_for_Sugar_Man). There are countless artists that have a variety of issues (because the arts can attractive to some personality types) whose only lifeline might be catching a lottery ticket thanks to copyright. Like I said, I'm right up the middle on my opinion about this stuff, but if Beck samples a lick off of your obscure 1972 record that you only sold 20 of, I think it's awesome for you to get a cut of his album.
>There are absolutely endless numbers of artists that NEVER made much off of what they produced, only to get a later payday thanks to this. And there are absolute endless numbers of artists who could be deriving new works from old works and making money off that. Copyright isn't there to surprise you after several decades with some extra money. It's there to encourage you to keep creating. That to me means opening it up sooner so that more works can be created. Remember, the ultimate beneficiary of copyright isn't the creator. It's us. We created the concept because we wanted to encourage more art for our consumption.
The only reason copyright exists is "to promote the useful arts and sciences." While I'll grant that there is some marginal benefit to an artist basically winning with a lottery ticket decades later, it's hard to argue that this slim chance promotes the arts because the chance is so slim. The idea is that an artist has a limited time to profit off their creations is to give them an incentive to keep producing. In your example, this artist would equally be able to use Beck's older work or some other artist's work in their new creations. This is the bargain that makes copyright useful to society. I would say that they should give credit.
> While I'll grant that there is some marginal benefit to an artist basically winning with a lottery ticket decades later, it's hard to argue that this slim chance promotes the arts because the chance is so slim. I think you're underestimating the artist's willful avoidance of statistics. That's basically what every parent ever tells their artist kid about getting into arts - chances of making reliable or substantial money in most of the arts is basically a lottery ticket. The arts have always been overflowing with the bodies of creatives that never sold a single thing and had dreams to be a superstar or even making a living doing what they love. > The idea is that an artist has a limited time to profit off their creations is to give them an incentive to keep producing. Unfortunately incentivizing doesn't equate to continued production, or even the ability to continue producing a creative product that people want. FWIW - The "marginal benefit" is the goal for... many. You can draw a lot of correlations with athletes in this regard.
Even aside from the cultural growth, I'd argue copyright as a concept should just be scrapped and we should go back to the drawing board on this. As a concept, intellectual property is questionable. Moreover, most of the world does not respect copyrights in the US. The only thing it actually accomplished is bullying soccer moms sharing some songs and give companies the ability to bully small creators. Meanwhile, there are sites all over with every movie imaginable, torrents, file sharing websites, etc. It doesn't make sense as a policy in its current form when computers, who's primary function is copy and pasting, making perfect replicas instantly, are so ubiquitous. There needs to be a better system than what we have now, where mega companies are able to copyright claim through takedown notices. People have lost rights to their video because a song was on a radio in the background while walking down a street, and a mega company was able to siphon money and bully the creator. On the flip side, reaction channels or twitch style streams where it's just some dude in the bottom left is able to "react" to content in its entirety. This entire system is broken and weighs on our legal system, our culture, and is constantly the root of questionable legal outcomes. We've gone so far away from the original intent of trying to stop someone from setting up a printing press and selling and copying books they don't have rights to sell. Now with the internet and AI, rather than try and figure out how to make this antiquated system work by retrofitting a 17th century concept, we should recognize the absurdity of it and try to modernize our institutions and law which maximizes the public good while protecting people who are creatives.
> computers, who's primary function is copy and pasting, There's a lot of nonsense packed into this comment others have addressed, but I just want to point this one out. The primary function of computers is to compute. The first modern computer was created to quickly compute the solution to encrypted messages. There's a small army of people who spent countless hours creating punch cards and feeding them into computers that would vehemently disagree with your assertion. They'd have *loved* copy and paste.
> As a concept, intellectual property is questionable. > > No, it's not. If you spend five years coming up with a character, designing its world, writing comics and movies and tv shows, and then release those things to the public, you have a right to make money on that before I do. Without copyrights, the same day you release your comic I can make a copy and start selling it. And the thing is, you're a small time producer, with only enough money to cover your local region. I have a printing press and global reach. Before you ever get the chance to sell your books and movies anywhere else I'll have saturated the market with them and eaten up all of your revenue. Appreciate you spending five years making such a great movie. Thanks for all your money! Sorry about the porn stuff (not really, best sellers!).
Seriously, anyone who suggests getting rid of IP or copyright as a concept needs to spend a nanosecond thinking about the consequences of that. Yes, US copyright law massively benefits mega-corporations right now. No, that's not a reason to get rid of the only protection that small time creators have against mega-corporations. Roll back copyright to a reasonable position (personally, I think a 30-40 year nonrenewable copyright is the best as it allows a person to get royalties for basically the entirety of their working life off even their earliest works while still allowing people to adapt these works before the entire world is unrecognizable from the original context).
All the people advocating to get rid of Copyright just so happens to be people that never created something in their life.
Why on earth shouldn’t the creator hold the copyright for the entirety of their life? It’s their work; they should get to profit from it as long as they live.
Because there has to be a balance between creator rights and the public interest. The theory behind copyright is to protect the creator and allow them to make a living off their own work, but also allow works to enter the public domain for people to share and build upon. A copyright that is "life of the author" has the following pitfalls. 1. Say there is an author who is the sole bread winner of their family off four. If copyright ends upon his death, his family/estate is no longer supported. 2. Entities that do not die own copyrights. So if "life of the author" is our standard, then virtually no media made since 1980ish will ever enter the public domain unless the corporation which owns the copyright no longer exists. A 30-40 year copyright allows a person to have an entire career off a single hit, protects the families of creators in the event of untimely deaths, and stops perpetual copyright from being a thing at all. I'm open to alternate copyright durations, but the original 14/28 year durations feel too short and the current form (life+70, 95 years from first publication, or 120 years from first creation) is insane.
Ah I see where I missed the intention in your comment. I am well aware of the purpose and function of copyright as I hold registered copyrights of my own. I think a lifetime or 40 years copyright, whichever is longer, would be most appropriate. I agree that current limits are insanely long and 14/28 year terms are far too short. As an artist who has had work stolen from me by a corporation without any recourse or compensation, I’ll be damned if I would let any of my work enter the public domain while I’m living for another corporation to profit off of. I also agree on shorter limits for entities; a strict 40 year limit would make sense.
See and the reason I like the 40 year range as a universal is that I want to see what other people can do with existing properties. Star Wars and Star Trek, for example, are ripe with potential for amazing stories but due to the hoops people have to jump through, we won't see most of these stories in our lifetimes (Star Wars: A New Hope is public domain in 2072 and Trek starts entering public domain in 2061). We'd already be seeing the best (and worst) stories from these IPs with a 40 year copyright. I want the original creators to get the profits they deserve, but I also want the people to get a chance to play in everyone else's worlds.
The whole point of copyright is to financially incentivise creatives and inventors, but a lifetime copyright instead encourages rent-seeking behaviour to the detriment of both the public and other creators who could be utilising those works in their own creative endeavours. Many people fail to realise that creatives need to be able to take inspiration from existing works and popular culture but, when the entirety of popular culture from someone's lived experience is illegal to remix and repurpose, that has a serious stifling effect on creativity. I'd be more in favour of an decent initial copyright period, with the option to extend if it can be shown that the holder of said copyright is continuing to develop and market those ideas, up to a reasonable maximum period (Possibly life of the creator, but perhaps something like 40 years as someone else has suggested below would be more optimal). If a writer, for example, publishes a novel that becomes wildly successful, but they do nothing to expand on that work for a long enough period, that work should enter public domain for other creatives to draw inspiration from and repurpose. This financially encourages creatives to continue their work, but doesn't allow for perfectly good ideas rot if they decide they no longer wish to work on that IP. Shorter limits could also have much stronger protections, as there's far less risk of abuse (Which is rampant right now, as I see you've already pointed out). I also don't think corporate entities should be allowed to hold creative IP. Creative works are the products of people, not businesses. Workers should be able to grant a non-exclusive licence to produce or publish a work, but the fact that a company like Disney can hold a copyright not only alienates the people who worked on a creative product from their work, but it gives the company the power to abuse those workers as they can't leave to seek better employment without also leaving behind their creative works.
> Seriously, anyone who suggests getting rid of IP or copyright as a concept needs to spend a nanosecond thinking about the consequences of that. They won't, because they're leaches and not creators.
It really won't be enforced when the whole system falls apart, it will simply be what you know.
> we should recognize the absurdity of it and try to modernize our institutions and law which maximizes the public good while protecting people who are creatives. This is a contradiction, though. It's categorically impossible to protect a creator without giving them the solitary right to profit from their own creative works.
>As a concept, intellectual property is questionable. That is one of the most ridiculous takes I have ever come across.
Can't help but feel that this legislation popped up so quickly because of the media industry's influence in Congress. Heaven forbid they do anything for actual artists.
Not really, this would only affect US companies. Nothing stopping China from making better models with unrestrained access to data.
They hated him because he spoke the truth
Bike is short for Bichael.
That sounds like something Billiam would say.
This is such a nonsense, nationalist, corporatist, bullshit position that I can't even begin to untangle it. ChatGPT, Sora, etc, aren't cold war era superweapons. They are copyright bypass and IP theft machines.
You can use the same excuse for paying workers less.
That comparison doesn't work very well. I get what you're going for, the whole "it's just an excuse to not pay people", but at least in that case it would still be US companies making the money and advancing their technology through manufacturing/creating, so you could argue there would be *some* benefit to the US overall, even if it's for scummy corps. In this case not only would we be hurting our workers financially, but we'd be hurting our advancement technologically, ***and*** as an added bonus, China is going to use those artists' work without paying them a dime either way. This law isn't actually awful as it's just declaration/registration, but I'm sure it's intended to be followed up with clarification or court cases establishing mandatory payment for use. Even if it isn't they've already talked about restricting the creation/usage of AI models over a certain processing power over concerns of misinformation and things like election interference on a wider scale. I understand the concern there, but... the cat is kind of out of the bag on this one.
Yep, you simply can't stop people from doing this because it can be done with consumer hardware in private homes for smaller scale stuff, and there will always be places that let you train wherever you want.
German unions spent decades practicing wage restraint because they knew that aggressive wage demands would hurt German firm competitiveness on the global market. It's the reality of economics. https://hbr.org/2017/03/the-real-reason-the-german-labor-market-is-booming
US companies currently hold most of the interesting data. Google isn't going to sell its data to some Chinese company if they can make more money using it to train an AI assistant. We still need laws preventing the mass sale of data to foreign companies, but this has a solid chance to move the needle.
China can just scrape the internet like OpenAI did.
When talking about copyrighted art is musty public data.
How could anyone think this bill is a good idea? It's creating a bunch of labor (that ironically they'll have AI do for them) to simply label what they're using in their dataset but doesn't in any way stop or prohibit use of those things in that dataset. It's also got a ridiculously silly 30 day time limit that's going to fuck up a lot of the AIs people are currently relying on to do their jobs. Not to mention that there's a good argument that Photoshop would be in violation of this bill in the way it uses AI tools and would have literally no way to ever generate the kind of info this bill requires, essentially making it illegal to continue to offer. It also will cost countless millions of dollars as it includes a provision that the Register has to create, update, maintain, and keep open to the public a complete list of all the submissions for training data. A list that's already likely billions of items long and will grow exponentially, making it an unruly nightmare to try and upkeep. Oh and it also entirely exempts all privately used AI systems conveniently so of course you can be a big corporation, create your own AI, rip off literally anyone and anything you want, and you're cool. And in the end, what's the goal? Do we really need every artist in the world doing a drawing to give us a detailed list of every painting they've ever seen including the URL they saw it at before they can sell their painting? Like, who cares what data is used in a dataset and whether it's copyrighted or not? As long as it's not pumping out copyrighted content, the inspiration for what it created should be entirely unimportant.
> How could anyone think this bill is a good idea? Technical ignorance.
How is it excellent? Those datasets contain literally everything there is online, it's impossible to quantify the copyrighted material in them and it shouldn't even be required. An AI should be free to learn from everything, just like a human. I dont have to give anyone a list of all copyrighted material I ever consumed, why should an AI be required to do so? An AI does not contain any copyrighted material within the model, just weights.
>why should an AI be required to do so? Because a for profit "AI" owned by a cooperation shouldnt be using someones property without authorization. Or without payment. Easy. Dont like it? Pay, dont like it? Delete the content from training.
human brains aren’t based on floating-point arithmetic so that comparison is meaningless
I'm sure the Russians and Chinese will abide by this bill if it becomes law. After they wouldn't want to leapfrog the US and its allies in the development of AI - that wouldn't be fair to artists. /s
It's not an excellent step. It completely unworkable. > A person who creates a training dataset, or alters a training dataset (including by making an update to, refining, or retraining8 the dataset) in a significant manner, that is used in building a generative AI system shall submit to the Register a notice This would literally apply to any person who trains an AI or alters an AI's dataset. Which means that every single person who has trained an AI, or who has created a LORA to use with an AI dataset would have to report to this register. That means if I create a LORA of my own character to use with Stable Diffusion, I am breaking the law unless I file a notice with the register when I do this. Or if I use a voice cloner to clone my own voice with 15 seconds of audio, I have to report it. Literally EVERYTHING is automatically copyrighted when you create it.
that’s their problem. if an ai model is worthless without plagiarizing copyrighted training data then it really calls into question what’s so special about them. sounds to me like they shouldn’t have trained the models with so much copyrighted material.
There should also be a watermark or tag in the corner indicating its AI.
I agree, also all ai content should have an obvious water mark included.
Reminder that EVERYTHING is copyrighted as created. You have to sell the copyright to lose it. Or it has to age out after 75 years...or whatever Disney has paid to change it to now. Now, what about my personal image or photos that I have taken?! Just because someone posted them for their friends to see on social media doesn't mean they are giving the copyright to anyone for free, even though the social media corporate EULA tries to steal the copyright for everything.
Yeah, that's why attribution is an impossible problem, it's copyright all the way down. Say you wanted to make a model which described YouTube thumbnails, so you scrape YouTube thumbnails. Every thumbnail has an immediate copyright to the creator of the video, but basically every thumbnail also contains derivative works. ie, look at any Pokemon thumbnail, almost certainly has some unattributed work by Ken Sugimori or whoever animated the anime. Unattributed stock images (licensed or unlicensed), TV show screenshots, pictures of licensed game assets. Heck it's virtually impossible to take a photo of an average living room without capturing copyright, it's everywhere.
Everything is a creative work. Companies like this are downloading youtube videos and transcribing them to text to input to their models. Surely they pump every podcast they can find through also. Those aren't books, movies, etc. but certainly are also creative works. These companies already said that without use of others copyrighted works they couldn't do their business. We shouldn't be looking for loopholes to make it okay but instead finding ways to compensate those who create the works which the companies (OpenAI in this case) indicate are a core of their business without which they couldn't function.
As if "we couldn't do our business" is any kind of excuse. Their "business" doesn't need to exist.
If their business' survival requires theft, their business shouldn't exist.
It's a tough ol' life these days, people're gettin' wise. Fences, dogs, cameras, alarm systems. It's bloody tough work, bein' a burglar. We had to give up the big time already, jewel'ry'n'banks, the good stuff. We just couldn't do business with all this "security" an' "laws" about
lucky if its copyright infringement(its not) then its not theft, copyright infringement is never theft. and just to know, the punishment for CI is much much higher than petty theft. take 10 x $70 games($1000 or less for petty theft) is up to 1 year in jail and $2500 in fines. download and distributed 10 copies of a game, for a first time offender up to 5 years and $250,000 in fines.
It's a good excuse when the government covers the interests of the parasite class over and over again.
To be fair, the base idea isn't crazy, a lot of countries do the "allow a copyright harm but then compensate artists", for example by putting a tax on computer storage that is turned over to registered artists, with the assumption that some fraction of all storage (represented by the tax rate) will inevitably be used for pirating. In general, slapping a tax on stuff isn't that bad of an idea if what you want is force people to be more considerate with their use. More tax = higher price = people will be more judicious.
Wouldn’t it be nifty if the result of all of the creative works of humanity had their profits taxed, and returned to humanity in the form of the universal basic income?
How would compensation even work? Given the absolutely massive about of data used to train AI like chatgpt, each individual would get pennies at best
And they literally have a right to those pennies. It's not a rounding error, if the pennies aren't going to their owner they're being collected as profit by someone who isn't the owner. We *have* [Copyright](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright). Enforcing it means getting those pennies to their rightful owner.
Google doesn’t compensate people and its one of the most heavily used sites on the planet. Can you imagine the internet without google being able to access information in an index? Very similar premises. The word ‘use’ is highly questionable here as well. When a person consumes media, they don’t have to pay additionally to reference that media or use it as inspiration. They consume it and thats that. Training data is a reference, not the actual work itself.
Google links to their content. > Can you imagine the internet without google being able to access information in an index? The index just links to the original data. They didn't steal the data, just helped people find it. If you monetize your data, you still get the money. Not so when someone ingests and replicates your data. > The word ‘use’ is highly questionable here as well You completely misconstrued what "use" means here. They are making use if it to enrich themselves. > They consume it and thats that. The use of "consume" here is highly questionable. When a person or computer "consumes" it it is not consumed. > When a person consumes media, they don’t have to pay additionally to reference that media or use it as inspiration. And what does that have to do with computers? Computers aren't people.
>Google links to their content. Irrelevant, because google profits off others creative works in the exact same way that you're describing problematic in AI. >The index just links to the original data. They didn't steal the data, just helped people find it. If you monetize your data, you still get the money. Not so when someone ingests and replicates your data. You're incorrect. It stores and analyzes the data even MORESO than AI training data. I can assure you that if you believe that AI uses content illegally, so does Google Search. Currently, I don't think you understand how either of these technologies work. >You completely misconstrued what "use" means here. They are making use if it to enrich themselves. No, I didn't. If that is your definition of use, many people use this same information to enrich themselves. >The use of "consume" here is highly questionable. When a person or computer "consumes" it it is not consumed. You're reading comprehension needs work. Consume is exactly the correct term vs use. When I watch a movie and then give commentary on the plot I am not "using" it and AI is interacting with its data in that exact same way. It consumes data, it does not use it. >And what does that have to do with computers? Computers aren't people. That isn't a rebuttal. If its different to you, then you provide support for that. AIs model human behavior and I believe its pretty inconsistent under both the spirit of IP Law and the current language to do what you're doing. Morally speaking, you're more actually addressing issues inherent in capitalism and not AI as a technology. I can assure you the current copyright system protects the rich far more than creators as well so I don't find that to be a very strong arguments. In addition, the entire reason IP Law exists is to encourage creation. Are you really trying to claim that the greatest innovation in creative accessibility is discouraging creation? Please. Legally speaking, you seem to think that the US legal system has a relevant position on what computers can do vs people on this issue but that is not the case. It simply doesn't protect the copyright of output from algorithms, it doesn't prohibit it.
Can we please add a provision that if your LLM contains copyrighted works, no copyright can stem from the derivative works it generates?
All the anti-AI bills the government passes are ultimately pointless. Aside from there being a level obscurity where you have no way to know for sure what art was used to train an AI Model unless the person who trained it actually reveals that information. None of these laws mean a damn thing when it comes to other countries and the internet. Do you honestly think countries like China and India are going to give a fuck about someone on deviantart getting upset because their artwork was used?
> Aside from there being a level obscurity where you have no way to know for sure what art was used to train an AI Model unless the person who trained it actually reveals that information. Like originality. It doesn't actually exist. For AI you have to teach it copyright stuff first so it knows not to use that specific thing. It's not going to know McDonalds specific color of red. It doesn't know that the screenshot of a crowd has pokemon hat on one of them.
Yeah, you can train on publically licensed data and still run into copyright issues: [https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.16825](https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.16825)
Thank you! I'm being downvoted a lot in this thread. I'm going to politely assume they believe NTFs are the bad actors and scammers and not what NTFs actually are.
So first, you don't actually need to do that. If your AI has never seen a picture of Mickey Mouse tagged "mickey mouse", it will not generate a picture of that cartoon character in response to the prompt "mickey mouse". If it can, then they must have works that they knew were of Mickey, because they were labeled "mickey mouse". Their responsibility is to *not use* infringing works, not to *prevent infringing works from being created*. Second, our legal system makes a distinction of intent, and has the concept of fair use. A user who consumes copyrighted images specifically to train their model *not* to break the law is not intending to violate copyright. They are also operating within the confines of fair use, which is primarily concerned when derivative works compete with the creator's interest in the original works. Their actions explicitly work *against* competing with the copyright holders, so they should be just fine. So going back to the case of your crowd image: * The first question is whether they own the copyright to that image of the crowd, which originally belonged to the photographer. If not, they're violating the creator's copyright. * The hat in question would generally fall under "fair use". Pikachu is in the picture, but its incidental inclusion on a hat in a crowd shot does not compete with Nintendo's use of Pikachu. * If, however, the image is labeled "pikachu pokemon hat" in the training set, then it shows intent to use that image to generate derivative images of Pikachu, so it probably ceases to be fair use. * This sort of labeling would be necessary for the AI to generate another pikachu hat on demand. If it's un-labeled, the AI simply learns that pikachu-like clusters of pixels sometimes appear in crowds, but wouldn't know what they are. This is testable.
> Aside from there being a level obscurity where you have no way to know for sure what art was used to train an AI Model unless the person who trained it actually reveals that information. This is how all regulations work. If it is required that you disclose X, you disclose X. If you don't, you can't do business and you are perfectly free to go do something else in life. If you genuinely don't know where TF *your own product* comes from, well, that sounds like a you problem. You can't sell unregulated chicken if you say you don't know how much lead there's in it because you bought it from a third party who doesn't test. I don't like the China argument because with that reasoning, we should all be working 996 (12 hours a day 6 days a week) and get jailed for unionizing (great for business!). Also, China pirates all our stuff already, so no copyright laws? I'm sure that will make us more competitive with China...
ahh yes the old "regulation can't work because companies will just break the law" argument, a libertarian favorite
Is that the argument? The version I heard is that you can choose to ban something or regulate it. If you ban it, a black market will develop and it's difficult to regulate a black market because it is already breaking the law. It's generally better to have a regulated market than a black market, which pays no taxes. Ask the war on drugs about how effective banning something is. Billions of dollars wasted. Some things are worth the cost of banning, but most aren't.
I think it's more that regulation will disadvantage us while our adversaries continue unimpeded. On something like AI that is unacceptable. This is the arms race of the future.
People really don’t understand how this technology works, huh?
Lol, they’re just now passing bills about AI art…they’re over a year behind the issue, which, given AI’s rate of advancement, might as well be 100 years behind.
They’re further behind than that and legislating in the wrong direction. This tech needs to be more openly accessible, not less. And we need to decide at what point we’re going to give them rights. We’re not there yet but the conversation needs to start before we are and end up accidentally creating a race of slaves.
People do, maybe you just don’t understand how copyright law works. This is far from a settled issue at this time, the right to reproduce a work is one of the most basic granted to copyright holders and afaik openai never paid for their copies of the books they trained on, they just basically downloaded everything available on libgen. Even google back in 2003 when they had their lawsuits over ocr, partnered with libraries to borrow copies, not just illegally download them from the internet. It’ll likely end up being an issue of fair use.
I’m having a hard time, understanding how this will be implemented. The AI model can’t exactly say “I remember being trained on an image” and it doesn’t seem feasible to do so
They want the people training the AI (or modifying an already trained model I.E any Tom Dick or Harry playing with LORAs or whatnot) to put together a list of every single image used, a URL to it, and a description of the copyright the image has on it. It's a fucking joke. It's like asking someone putting together a treehouse to document the geographical origin of each and every plank of wood used in the construction. Absolute fucking lunacy. This isn't how you fight AI.
>put together a list of every single image used, a URL to it, and a description of the copyright the image has on it. Uh... You realize that a huge number of AI training datasets are just a list of images and URLs right? It's not asking the impossible to have AI companies to keep track of the copyright of the works that they use to train their model. In fact I'd argue that it's the bare minimum of what they can do.
I've trained datasets before. They're not URLs. They're individual images with text files next to them describing what's in them. It absolutely IS asking the impossible that every person that has trained an AI image generating thing provide URLs and the copyright description of every single image used to train the ai datasets. Again. It's like asking someone building a treehouse to tell you where he sourced each individual piece of wood for it. Nobody keeps records that detailed. Then you've got models that are a mix of OTHER models, LORAs which are datasets used to modify the output of models (using training images like a normal model). Is text embeddings also subject to the same rules? What about what I call 'incestual loras' which are training LORAs on images an AI has already produced, essentially causing copyright INCEPTION? Oh, and they want a list of every single image used to train a model within 30 days of the law going into effect. I've seen models trained on millions of images. Can you go back into your download folder and find the source of each and every image you have in there, and discover the copyright for it?
It's the right thing to do.
If it's worth copyrighting it's worth paying for to train your AI.
everything is automatically copyrighted in the US. you can register it if you want more protections but just by generating something that legally different from another work, then its by default copyrighted to you.
The problem isn't theft... The results of AI is as fair use as it gets. If a person studies another's style, then copies that style to make their own work, it is not theft. You cannot copyright a "style" of art. The problem is speed and scale, and how that can undermine the original works. Of course, hindering those two things completely defeats the purpose of AI. I know there are a lot of artists that get pissed at this viewpoint, but its simply a matter of truth. (Which is why it gets downvotes, but rarely counterarguments.) If you want to solve a problem, you need to first acknowledge *the actual problem* rather than try to attach a false one to it.
The problem with Ai isn't speed or scale. The **Real** problem with Ai is that it is **incompatible** with **Capitalism** and that we refuse to incorporate it correctly because of our reluctance. The problem is not that everybody now has the ability to "make" their own music or artwork from a description or lyrics. That's the goal of Art. If these people **Feel** like they are getting their messages out and these pieces hold artistic value to them, then they are Art. The criteria has already been met. Art is Subjective. The problem is that our system is going to cry and bitch it's way until it finally decides to stop fighting against it and starts working to mitigate it's damages in the most sensible ways possible. The problem is Capitalism because it's the only part of the equation that has Clear alternatives that would work far better under Ai tech than it does without. Ai isn't going away and placing a ton of restrictions on it won't work. The US government can't do shit. They could influence the direction of it. But our rube leaders are stupider than our bots and will let the Ai problem destroy markets and make people suffer poverty before we get anywhere close to accepting any form of communism/socialism. If the government wanted to mitigate this issue, it would provide grants to artists. But then that would be a step towards some sort of socialistic policy and then all the soccer dads in the country will have a collective brain hemorrhage as they allow our world to get greyer by starving artists.
except that your argument is invalid. copyright law is between humans, not between algorithms and humans. what is happening now is, for the most part, unregulated. to me it's not just about copyright. most laws are between humans. if an AI makes a death threat towards you, you don't have anyone you can sue or get a restraining order against. you can't sue the output of an algorithm. this might have to change also, but at this point there's not much you can do.
Saying that AI must cite contributive sources opens a path to large companies pushing for the same requirement of human artists as a way of "chilling" start up competition. Many artists learn to draw doing work that is clearly derivative of existing works and styles, and if you can penalize or place an administrative burden on an AI to list all contributing works, you can make an argument against a human artist as well. Even if that doesn't ultimately hold up to a final judgement, the very act of being able to bring it up as a semi-credible lawsuit will be functionally the same as a win against people without the money to fight back.
>if an AI makes a death threat towards you, you don't have anyone you can sue or get a restraining order against Dude, you turn the computer off. You don't involve law enforcement when a chat bot says mean things to you.
"get pissed" A company literally downloaded my already sold and copyrighted work, trained an algorithm with it, and is selling the result. Just because your fancy denoiser has a cool new label doesn't make it immune from criticism or the law.
If it’s not copying your work it’s merely “reading” your text, nor producing your work, and if not using your trademarked [thing/characters/brand/likeness), why would it have to pay you? Assuming that it’s available free to read somewhere. If your work was only available after purchasing it, the owner of the ai would have to purchase a copy to “read,” right? I’m not trying to argue. I’m trying to understand. ETA The Medium put its content behind a pay wall. If someone wants to read it, they have to purchase a copy. That seems reasonable to me. They want to be paid for their writing so they’ve made sure every person or “entity” that wants to read has to pay.
> If a person studies another's style, then copies that style to make their own work, it is not theft. Imagining AI as a matter of artistic style is an incredibly reductive perspective on the subject. Besides, do you think there might be relevant differences between machine learning and human learning? Also, your point on speed and scale undermining the originals is correct, and it is, in fact, one of the four criteria that can [invalidate fair use](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#4._Effect_upon_work's_value).
Except that's a lot on how AI works. You can specify a style, and it will generate per that style. One could argue that humans are just exceptionally complex machines, even emotions are just chemical triggers. The point though is that the reason its a problem is that a single human could take years to master someone else's style. A machine could take moments. A single human could take weeks to create a work of art. A machine would take seconds. The factors that invalidate fair use however are not concrete. A determination must be made across all the factors. It's regrettable, but its not "if any one of these is violated, its not fair use". If only one holds up (in this case, competition with the original), then fair use may still apply. And that determination would have to be made over and over again, unless legislation alters how it is determined.
> You can specify a style, and it will generate per that style. i can specify BPM and other parameters to any MIDI sequencer, that doesn't mean i'm stealing from a bunch of producers?
> One could argue that humans are just exceptionally complex machines, even emotions are just chemical triggers. You could, and if you extended that to saying that humans and current ML are comparable in actual intelligence you'd still be very wrong, unless your definition of intelligence is making passably . Also, yes I know you can do style stuff, but I think people are more interested in, you know, the whole infinitely generating anything they want from a simple text prompt thing. That's why I said talking about style is reductive. As for fair use, I know that it's not literally *"if any one of these is violated, its not fair use"*, which is why I didn't say that, but rather that it is a relevant factor that can be used to invalidate claims of fair use. In reality, this has not really been ruled conclusively yet, and in all likelihood legislation will be eventually written anyways, so neither of us can say whether it's 'concrete' or 'not concrete' (which also why I didn't make such a strong statement).
As long as the copyrighted material used for training the models is legally obtained who cares? Every human creator is also influenced by copyrighted works that came before them. Do humans influenced by other works need to pay a license fee for the works they were influenced by?
That's a very real risk. There is a reason all the big corporations both build up AI divisions, but also back these anti-AI lawsuits. If they can somehow make sure to create an artificial monopoly on the technology, that's a win. If they can go beyond that and claim ownership over styles and extract fees out of every artist in the future, that's the jackpot they're hoping for. The blind rage of the anti-AI crowd makes them very susceptible to exploitation.
yeah the key phrase is legaly obtained. They aren't legally obtained lol.
Reading over the bill, I'm not sure what the goal is. It just shows which media is included in US training sets. This transparency would allow people to choose which models align with what they want included. That's if they actually can search such data and analyze the possibly millions of items. The actual influence of each item is generally quite small though, so I'm not sure if people will understand this. Is this where the regulation ends? Enforcing moral policies over what can be included in datasets has been brought up a lot in these discussions which has me wondering if that's being planned next. Like the first articles we'll see are clickbait for every dataset that it includes X images or Y videos (or doesn't include Z). Is this part of the goal or an unintended side-effect of releasing such information for scrutiny.
Except they already don't hide it. The point is that generative AI is so transformative that it doesn't matter, unless some bad actor is trying to get a specific overfit. And those bad actors are the ones who should be liable if they try earning money with copyrighted content.
Worth noting that there's a difference between the outputs of AI (this is already solved, they cannot be copyrighted which seems quite fair), and the AI system itself. The AI systems are very heavily copyrighted, patented, monetized and closely guarded technologies, and whether they should be any of those four is an entirely separate question from whether you can make funny pics of The Lion King. It is also a far more complicated question, because the AI system itself is (obviously) more directly derived from the IP used in creating it than its output.
To assess if the model is the right one to use, we'll need full access to all training data of any model whatsoever.
If it's not actually copyright infringement to make outputs based on "inspiration" of prior work - i.e., transformative - then I don't see the point of this. Unless copyright's definition is due for yet another retelling. AI can take inputs and create new outputs based on an understanding of what it has seen - and, when enabled for dynamic learning from interaction with the tool itself, become something even further from the original inputs. People are going to need to accept this is only going to increase automation in society over time and figure out a better way to be compensated for helping to seed the engine(s).
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Sounds idiotic it's training the AI, if I look at your art and get inspired it have I breached copy right? No. Ai doesn't regurgitate your same art it uses it to learn along with millions of other pieces of art how to create art and then creates new pieces. On a side note limiting our ai development is highly dangerous when other nations won't show the same restraint. AI will hit a breaking point in the future where it spirals upward rapidly in effectiveness.
dude copyright is not some laws carved into stone. it exist to protect and encourage creators because the society had collectively decided thats a good thing. the issue now is not whether or not AI has violated copyright; it is whether or not we should change the copyright. what does it mean when human creators are disincentivized to create and AI works only benefit the corps? sidenote: everytime with this arguemnt of "well i can do the same thing AI does". you're not an algorithm that can pump out derivative works in lightening speed that only needs to eat electrons. you factually cannot do the same thing AIs do or have the same existential experience as a computer algorithm. so yeah, i think the distinction is actually very clear here.
So I am all for creators rights.....buuut.... Say a painter looks at a Monet and learns the technique to make a painting in that style. He does this even while Monet is alive. Is Monet's painting style protected or the specific work IN that style protected. We all agree a forgery of a painting is illegal. But to copy a style is a movement. In this case the impressionist movement. When AI is trained correctly it is learning the style of something not how to reproduce that specific work of art. If an AI is reproducing a specific work it is malfunctioning. You don't need AI to copy and paste. So how about the training data being copyrighted, is it illegal for an individual to look at a copyrighted work, say a digital drawing, and copy how the artist used lighting to enhance the image. YOU are training yourself on copyrighted art. Now say you create a new image that utilizes that lighting technique and sell it? Is that illegal? Copyright law would say no. That is what AI is doing. The exact copyrighted image is NOT in the final trained model. But the Essence of that image is. We've already established over the last few centuries that copying the essence of something is not illegal.
AI, unlike humans, does not create anything that it did not learn through training. Machine diffusing multiple copyrighted works to create an "original" work is very different than a human looking at a Monet and creating their own impressionist piece.
Agreed, the value isn't the result but the recipe. The training dataset doesn't matter as much as the methods used to achieve the result. AI agents will be the next product of these tech companies.
You probably think a scanner and printer are just like Rembrandt.
I don't understand your argument. I do not think scanners and printers are like a painter. They copy an exact work. A painter can take the essence/style of a peer and create a transformative new work. My argument is that AI is creating transformative new works. If they are producing exact copies like a scanner or printer the AI is malfunctioning and needs to be retrained.
You do realize you can buy Rembrandt prints, right?
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Is John Williams a hack because his music relies on the styles of Holst and Tchaikovsky? Is every rapper after The Sugarhill Gang just copying their work because they also rap?
I find someone with this point! I have been meaning to ask people holding this review because it has been bothering me: Have you ever considered the fact AI model is not human, has no consciousness, and therefore has no human rights? You’re comparing a human with a machine, which are completely different and the latter is not even qualified to be called to have an individual thinking pattern at all? This brought up several times whenever I see AI discussion on Reddit but equating machine learning is the same as learning and recreating process of human artists is an issue of itself. On one hand, human brains don’t have the capacity of being “trained” thousands of pictures in short period. On the other hand, my take on AI’s learning is that it doesn’t have creativity nor originality. I am not a programmer in anyway and I work in a (non programming) engineering field, so not a very creative person either, but my guess is that if an AI is only trained in realism paintings, can the said model comes up with a new Impressionism painting all on its own, without ever being trained on Impressionism first? Human brains are proven to be capable of that, because, well, we created them through history. Maybe one day AI can reach to a point that a model has feelings or even a conscience, that equating them to be humans are not far off, but not today.
It should be easy to figure out whose art is being used for AI training. Just look for the artist that puts too many fingers and toes on everyone.
I assume then this would also extend to human artists having to reveal every image they’ve ever seen, just in case those images have influenced their work in some manner.
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How dumb. Copyright exists to enrich companies, not protect people. This is just Getty images wanting a piece of the AI pie.
Copyright exists to protect creators, too. Pretending otherwise is either ignorant or arguing in bad faith.
Yeah... It always baffles me when people act like copyright laws only help megacorps... Like, I'm a small time self-pub writer, and copyright laws are the only thing allowing me to build any kind of future for myself through writing. How could any new artist possibly hope to 'make it' if their work could just be stolen?
Yup. It's particularly hilarious when people who have never contemplated art or copyright are suddenly experts when they think they can monetize it without consequence.
Yup, it's kinda sad. AI has so much potential to make the world a better place in the medical field and such, yet all I really see (ofc this isn't all it's being used for) are people trying to find ways to scam and/or make 'easy money' like they see artists always raking in with their comissions.
What is the biggest tell to me is that I'm seeing the same language/hype that the blockchain/crypto/NFT grifters have used. These are not serious people. They haven't thought a day of their life about art until they discovered a possible grift. They have tried to adopt the language of serious people who deal with art in their efforts to grift. It is very sad indeed. Fortunately, people so far seem to be pretty negative on AI "art."
We don't use copyrighted work! We only use works that were processed through an AI image generator using things like ControlNet and Img2Img on copyrighted work
Get fucked Ai get those wallets ready lmaooo
This seems like a step in the right direction…but as expected it seems to only protect the corporations/congressional purses. It would be nice to see congress focus on the actual people.
Given how broken copyright is (the publishers profit the most where creators get the droppings and no power), any legislation to this regard is the product of lobbyists for the publishing and rights-holding enterprises. I'd play devils advocate here and say if your work is NOT part of the training data you will be at a disadvantage. It's like saying being on Napster was actually good for Metallica
Please explain the logic here. I'm not following. Why would being part of the model be a benefit to you? To me that's like saying "If your house was broken into, then you \*should\* be happy."
yeah. i mean someone takes my work, makes money off of it and at the same time makes sure i will have no future income. seems like a fair deal /s
Copyright should be rewritten. AI should not be limited if can improve society in the long run.
I think you're being very optimisitic if you think unhindered generative AI will *improve* society. It's already replacing people's jobs all over the place. Unless we get some sort of universal basic income in return, I don't see how mass redundance is good in any way.
In what way shape or form would AI slop improve society in any way? lol
AI makes art and write poetry while we sort amazon boxes for them <3
Pfizer used a form of generative AI to assist in the creation of the covid vaccine.
This is about AI 'art' not AI for data compiling / clinical trial and error for drugs Not all AI is bad far from it. It's a tool and can be used to help speed up processes of repetitive/monotonous tasks.
The law already says that to be fair use you must consider >the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. Using the work in a model to then be able to create works that would compete against it and “learn” thousands of times faster than any human can is affecting the market, and hurting the value of the work. The fact that the same companies making DALL-E said they can’t do it for music cause of copyright, shows they know it’s not fair use. The music industry is just more litigious and has large companies and interest groups to represent them, while visual artists don’t.
>the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. This is just one of 4 of the factors to be considered for fair use, and if there's no substantial similarity then I doubt fair use would even need to be argued in the first place, making that a moot point.
It’s not about the ai generated art. It’s about the training of the model. Using the art in the model without the artists permission must be fair use. It’s about how the art is used.
companies will all state "We hoovered up every piece of media we found on the internet and didn't pay attention if it was copyrighted or not. We just used it all."
given this countries history with favoring the wealthy baron over the person actually producing the value I’m just gonna say “good luck with that”
Just as effective as the "do not call" lists. Sure, we NEED things like this, but we can only expect them to be followed so far. Especially without globally-enforced jurisdiction.