lemm.ee

25 points

10 months ago

You should check out this article by Kit Walsh, a senior staff attorney at the EFF. The EFF is a digital rights group who recently won a historic case: border guards now need a warrant to search your phone.

A few quotes:

First, copyright law doesn’t prevent you from making factual observations about a work or copying the facts embodied in a work (this is called the “idea/expression distinction”). Rather, copyright forbids you from copying the work’s creative expression in a way that could substitute for the original, and from making “derivative works” when those works copy too much creative expression from the original.

Second, even if a person makes a copy or a derivative work, the use is not infringing if it is a “fair use.” Whether a use is fair depends on a number of factors, including the purpose of the use, the nature of the original work, how much is used, and potential harm to the market for the original work.

and

Even if a court concludes that a model is a derivative work under copyright law, creating the model is likely a lawful fair use. Fair use protects reverse engineering, indexing for search engines, and other forms of analysis that create new knowledge about works or bodies of works. Here, the fact that the model is used to create new works weighs in favor of fair use as does the fact that the model consists of original analysis of the training images in comparison with one another.

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gapbetweenus@feddit.de

4 points

10 months ago

Yeah, that’s what I’m saying - our current copiright laws are insufficient to deal with AI art generation.

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11 points

10 months ago

They aren’t insufficient, they are working just fine. In the US, fair use balances the interests of copyright holders with the public’s right to access and use information. There are rights people can maintain over their work, and the rights they do not maintain have always been to the benefit of self-expression and discussion. We shouldn’t be trying to make that any worse.

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Dkarma@lemmy.world

11 points

10 months ago

Yep. Copyright should not include “viewing or analyzing the picture” rights. Artists want to start charging you or software to even look at their art they literally put out for free. If u don’t want your art seen by a person or an AI then don’t publish it.

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EldritchFeminity@lemmy.blahaj.zone

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3 points

10 months ago

Copyright should absolutely include analyzing when you’re talking about AI, and for one simple reason: companies are profiting off of the work of artists without compensating them. People want the rewards of work without having to do the work. AI has the potential to be incredibly useful for artists and non artists alike, but these kinds of people are ruining it for everybody.

What artists are asking for is ethical sourcing for AI datasets. We’re talking paying a licensing fee or using free art that’s opt-in. Right now, artists have no choice in the matter - their rights to their works are being violated by corporations. Already the music industry has made it illegal to use songs in AI without the artist’s permission. You can’t just take songs and make your own synthesizer out of them, then sell it. If you want music for something you’re making, you either pay a licensing fee of some kind (like paying for a service) or use free-use songs. That’s what artists want.

When an artist, who does art for a living, posts something online, it’s an ad for their skills. People want to use AI to take the artist out of the equation. And doing so will result in creativity only being possible for people wealthy enough to pay for it. Much of the art you see online, and almost all the art you see in a museum, was paid for by somebody. Van Gogh died a poor man because people didn’t want to buy his art. The Sistine Chapel was commissioned by a Pope. You take the artist out of the equation and what’s left? Just AI art made as a derivative of AI art that was made as a derivative of other art.

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1 point

10 months ago

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EldritchFeminity@lemmy.blahaj.zone

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3 points

10 months ago

MidJourney is already storing pre-rendered images made from and mimicking around 4,000 artists’ work. The derivative works infringement is already happening right out in the open.

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2 points

10 months ago

It’s sad some people feel that way. That kind of monopoly on expression and ideas would only serve to increase disparities and divisions, manipulate discourse in subtle ways, and in the end, fundamentally alter how we interact with each other for the worse.

What they want would score a huge inadvertent home run for corporations and swing the doors open for them hindering competition, stifling undesirable speech, and monopolizing spaces like nothing we’ve seen before. There are very good reasons we have the rights we have, and there’s nothing good that can be said about anyone trying to make them worse.

Also, rest assured they’d collude with each other and only use their new powers to stamp out the little guy. It’ll be like American ISPs busting attempts at municipal internet all over again.

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