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Comment by quadcore | Hacker News Reader

Fair use would work if we could find an artist for a given generated picture - but we can't. Generate a picture and there is no artist for it closer than the ones who made the pictures in the training set.

I really hope these lawyers wont mess that up, it's an easy win.

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I believe that a further restriction of fair use to what is produced by a generative AI would also give a lot of tools for large copyright holders (e.g. Disney) for suing and removing fan art for anything that "is in the style of" or "makes use of the same characters" including uses that would previously be considered beneath their notice and thus not worth their time (the amount the lawyers would cost combined with the difficulty in doing it).

The lawyers won't "mess it up" but rather that the large copyright holders will be able to use this to enforce these restrictions on human generated fan art just as easily as they (and other humans) will be able to enforce it on generative AI.

While it won't be possible to excise the idea of "draw like Disney" from someone's brain, it will be possible to sue the creator to remove the work.

"is in the style of" or "makes use of the same characters"

No because in that case you're talking about, there is at least an artist.

There is no artist for a generated picture - closer than the training set.

Publishing an image always has a human and has always been the issue.

Doodles, personal art notebooks, photoshopped images - those have never been things that have run afoul of copyright... until they are published.

A person doodling on some paper or running stable diffusion and using it as a background image for their desktop - these have never been at issue before and from a legal point of view are likely very much the same.

Making styles copyrightable would be insane.

I mean, a big problem is that "fair use" is pretty broken already. It's just a really sloppy legal test that ends up bowing to trends, non-expert opinions and utter randomness as much as it does legal rigor.

Lawyers just need to keep pounding on the fact there is no artist for a given generated picture - closer than the training set.

The strartup up Chroma is working on solving attribution.

https://www.stableattribution.com/

Bingo - that's what Im talking about.

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