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Comment by Razengan | Hacker News Reader

If a human learns to draw by studying the works of other artists, is that infringement?

For what should be pretty obvious reason, most society and laws will treat humans and corporation and their output differently.

It could be, if the human uses their skills to draw infringing outputs!

hence the entire Andy Warhol case!

>Echoing a recommendation from Joe Biden’s administration, the supreme court focused on the specific use that allegedly infringed Goldsmith’s copyright – a license of Warhol’s work to Condé Nast – and said it was not transformative because it served the same commercial purpose as Goldsmith’s photo: to depict Prince in a magazine.

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/may/18/andy-wa...

So why are we even arguing about this new form of copyright that restricts who can learn from a work?

If an AI model produces an infringing work and someone distributes it, sue them like you would a human doing the same thing.

This idea of training being a violation of copyright is insane.

No, is not insane at all, a computer can generate millions of derivate copies in a second, a human has limited time for learning and for making artwork, so it doesn't make sense to compare them, not in the slightest.

If suddenly there was a race of humans who could read and retain entire books in a matter of seconds (and other similar feats) the implications would be almost the same, as it would break basic expectations of time and personal resources that our society relies on, and a lot of people would be rightfully worried about such people entering the workforce.

Computers can do all sorts of things humans can't at inhuman scale and speed. Why is AI leveraging the same training data humans do inherently bad just because it can do it better and faster than humans?

Yeah, I'm a programmer, I'm aware of all that by definition. The issue here it's getting to he point where is inevitable that it will replace a huge amount of job positions in a tiny frame of time in ways society is not prepared for, if you think the amount of jobs at risk is anywhere in a similar scale we have seen before you haven't been paying attention; of course the flaw here lies on society's itself and what it means to earn a living, and not really over ML researchers or Adobe or any other company creating those AIs.

Adobe trained their own model only on public domain images and on images that they own. Do you think that they should not be allowed to do that?

That's a different discussion and should have wide ramifications with way more nuance that "allowed" or "not allowed", if suddenly tomorrow Adobe or any other were able to create a model that is able to replace any existing job position how we should it be managed? The societal ramifications are complex, is not binary and should be discussed by politicians and intellectuals, not by corp marketing teams.

They can already replace stock image sites. Why pay getty/shutterstock an obscene amount of money for a photo if you can simply generate something similar with a prompt for free?

I checked how much some images cost on getty images - and their prices are ridiculous - 100-1000eur or more. No wonder they are trying to sue stability.ai now.

Speed isn't an existing factor in copyright law.

That is not a factor may have something to do with the fact the law was created before even sci-fi authors could have predicted machine learning and the huge difference it makes for creating artwork.

Generating synthetic copies of someone voice, or even combining voices (e.g. a CG voice that is a equal parts Kurt Cobain's voice and Laine Staley's voice) are also not currently a factor in copyright law, but it will be.

Wait, so do your same opinions about copyright for AI also apply to copyright for corporations? How is employing 1000 people to generate derivative works any different from using AI?

Because they have to hire those 1000 people and all that entails? They will have to weight if it's worth it to pay that many people, and if in the future they ever want to generate even more images they have to hire them again, instead of just re-running a program which costs them near nothing. The more I think about it the less similar are both processes.

So if you're making the argument that AI is a human when it comes to the copyright, does that mean that its output is copyrightable just like a humans?

Does that mean that OpenAI/SD whoever now owns the work created in such a way?

It would logically follow from your reasoning.

Why are you assuming that deep learning and (human) learning are the same thing?

because he trust Human just a larger matrix.

If an algorithm processes a bunch of copyrighted data into a different form, is that not a derivative work?

only if the output is definitively a derivative work of an existing work. If it's the culmination of a thousand photos, it would be akin to a human spending a month studying a certain historical artists' art and painting a modern Tesla in their style.

No.

But we're not talking about humans, we're talking about software intended to put the artists whose work it was trained on - without permission or compensation - out of business, or which is at least capable of devaluing their work with its ability to copy styles (literally by name.)

Even if one could argue (as I probably have) that AI is more than simply a "stochastic parrot," a philosophical argument about whether it resembles a primitive mind (and therefore whether its output can be considered "art" in any form) doesn't answer a legal argument about copyright infringement. Humans are allowed to be inspired by other humans, software used by other humans is not.

Also you shouldn't delete your comment just because it gets downvotes and repost it. Bad form.

The bigger argument is in the form of cost of reproduction.

A human has finite time and output volume.

A machine has no such limits, only compute/memory/network/disk.

Ergo, gray areas where we could afford a human the benefit of doubt ("What? They can paint 4 in-the-style-of-Rembrandts?") produce substantially different results with machines ("Here are a million in-the-style-of-Rembrandts, produced in 30 minutes").

Whether we should permit or limit machine art is a discussion worth having -- but human copying vs machine copying is clearly a very different discussion.

Right, this is why we should burn the combines and go back to harvesting wheat by scythe, or we should dig ditches with spoons instead of using an excavator...

The problem here is we want the system we currently have to keep working when there is really no possible way that can happen in a world of AGI. IP is already a horribly broken system that can lead to absurdities. While making IP stronger will protect people like artists (maybe) it will provide far more protection to monied corporations that can afford to buy up works, and then feed them into their AI. In the pathological cases you end up with stories like 'The Right To Read'.

In a world where particular things can be created in almost infinite amounts, why will we go to such efforts to ensure they are only created in limited supply?

> we want the system we currently have to keep working

No.

We want *a* working system, that probably looks very different than the previous one.

But the "AI and let the chips fall where they may" crowd is being disingenuous with the "just like human copying" argument.

It's not. It's fundamentally different in scale.

> It's fundamentally different in scale.

yes, it is. But this increase in scale is going to be something that produces progress (ala, cheap imitations of good styles that already exist). And with unprecedented amount of "generated" works, originality is going to be highly sought after, and those who do produce original content will be capable of succeeding.

And yet, once they succeed, they cannot rest on their laurels as the AI will be very quick to reproduce that "originality" - therefore, forcing the artists/creatives to continuously come out with highly original works all the time.

> originality is going to be highly sought after

You and I are not seeing the same Walmart, McDonald's, Amazon, Netflix, etc.

The issue with comments like this is that many people are talking about the law as it is, and others are approaching it from a moral/solution-based point of view.

Legally, AI is likely free and clear since the work it outputs is vastly different from any one art piece, therefore not being a derivative work of anything else (unless you tell it to copy an artists' style AND ask it specifically to remake an artists' existing work with the intent to recreate it).

But morally, there are indeed externalities that can/should be thought of, and possible even put into law, but starting a discussion of this front is a losing game since everyone will have a different opinion on how much we should restrict, and whether it will even work (if you consider that China and Russia will forego any sort of copyright protection for AI generation, these laws could enable these countries to surpass the rest of the world in capability and quality).

> edit

What if someone trains a model on public domain works only?

Also adobe sort-of did that already - they trained their own model only on their own images. So no "IP theft" there.

This is almost precisely the argument made by the Luddite movement. “Intended to put artists out of work” is a tellingly emotional way to describe a transformer NN which self-evidently is “intended” to do no such thing. I can imagine 19th century textile workers terrified of mechanical looms using very similar language.

> Humans are allowed to be inspired by other humans, software used by other humans is not.

This absurd statement is not supported by any law you can cite. It’s nothing more than wishful thinking.

It’s hilarious that people confidently compare the anti-AI crowd to the Luddite movement, while at the same time demonstrating they know absolutely nothing about its actual history. Workers were not “terrified of mechanical looms,” but outraged that they were used to reduce pay and working conditions, instead of improve them. Of course the same will be true of AI, but I don’t expect the “can’t be bothered to even read the Wikipedia entry” crowd to understand this.

It's funny in a sickening but not unexpected way that a crowd that professes to be more learned, and interested in learning, than most others, chooses to ignore this on a consistent basis. They know they're building a world of pain, they just think if they ignore it and feign ignorance of it that they can launder their consciences.

> Workers were not “terrified of mechanical looms,” but outraged that they were used to reduce pay and working conditions, instead of improve them.

This is consistent with what I wrote. They were terrified of their jobs vanishing and sought to stop this. Ultimately it’s not realistic to prohibit useful new technology, even if it has harmful effects on some groups.

I’m sympathetic to people that are fearful of new technology that will obviously have a major impact on our society but there’s a reason Luddite is a shorthand for futile technological obstructionism.

It’s not a matter of pro vs anti AI and I wouldn’t put myself in either camp, it’s a matter of naïveté vs realism about how the world works.

The ignorance of history continues. The Luddites were not naive, but less successful in labor organizing than, say, their French counterparts, who quite successfully resisted downward pressure on wages and working conditions, allowing a more gradual transition to the new technologies. As a result, they likewise did not suffer much of the injury, cruelty, and dispossession that was inflicted on their counterparts in their English working class. The Luddite movement is more popularly know for precisely this reason: it was crushed and humiliated by the ruling class, and thus became useful for those interests to cite as an example of what happens when you oppose them vs. those who practiced solidarity, overcame them, and preserved more of their dignity and quality of life.

Letting the wealthy and powerful inflict whatever they want on you is not realism. It’s cowardice.

People are using the term "luddite" as a means to trivialize and dismiss real concerns others have. It's just an insult that deserves to be ignored, nothing more.

What if someone trains a model on public domain works only? It hasn't been done, because the law doesn't require it.

LAION-5B is a big mess and its caption quality is all over the place. Stability.ai basically chose a brute-force approach and threw a lot of data at the problem.

But now imagine if someone took all the public domain images that they could find, properly labelled them and then trained a base model on all of that.

I'm pretty sure that its output would also be very good. There are a ton of public domain photos out there so photorealism shouldn't be a problem.

So - what's your argument then?

https://huggingface.co/Mitsua/mitsua-diffusion-one is an image generation model which is "trained from scratch using only public domain/CC0 or copyright images with permission for use".

Thanks for the link. The project looks really interesting. If it's successful - it will basically kill all the arguments about ethics.

> Humans are allowed to be inspired by other humans, software used by other humans is not.

Why?

Because humans are beings capable of inspiration and software is a tool that can only transfer and transform data, and that data is subject to existing copyright laws, because we recognize the difference between ourselves and the tools we use.

And (more importantly) because the intent behind this violation is anti-human, creating a system that debases human creative endeavor, leeches off of talent and puts humans out of work for the sake of banal facsimile.

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