no you wouldn't, but these diffusion models do way more than ffmpeg, and do qualitatively different things.
I am on the fence, but i lean towards the side where training an AI using existing works is not infringement, as long as the AI's output is (or can be) majority new works. For example, a poor training algorithm that merely repeats the training dataset (and cannot output new works) is infringing, while a different algorithm (such as the current stable diffusion one) that can output works that has never been made and is totally new, does not infringe - after all, style and ideas are not infringing and if the algorithm managed to extract those ideas from the training set, all the better.
so by that standard, why isnt photoshop a copyright infringement? You can use it to create a copy just the same.
If I look at a photo of Prince and then using that image as reference create a new silkscreen painting is that fair use or infringement?
Because the US Supreme Court has ruled that instance I referenced was infringement as both images were used for magazine covers [0].
the existing copyright rulings are sufficient to determine this, and has nothing to do with ai models.
You've already pointed out a case - if you use an AI to generate an image which has sufficient likeness to an existing one, then the AI portion is irrelevant to the ruling. You could've made that same image in photoshop without AI, and should obtain the same ruling.
But in the above circumstance, the silkscreen used in the creation of the image does not itself infringe. And replace that silkscreen with AI model, nothing has changed.
But it isn’t. It’s just a series of vectors that point to a likely occurrence of the next word or pixel or bit in a sequence.
https://twitter.com/StefanKarpinski/status/14109710611816816...
It’s hard for people to understand this concept, but the fact that a model repeated some data verbatim is a happy coincidence (!) solely based on patterns of data that it seen before.
I think people have also have a hard time with how these models are trained. They are vacuuming up all sorts of data and learning from them by creating vectors that determine how follow-up data should be generated.
Sure, the original creators of this content aren’t being compensated or even recognized for it. I don’t have a good idea on how that should be handled.
For normal humans though, looking at art or reading a book, and later repeating some passage or drawing something from your own memory is not a crime. (Unless you’re sharing the DeCSS source code I guess…)
Slightly changing the topic here, but I do wonder what were to happen if someone wrote a program called “Monkeys on Typewriters” that just iterated through various combinations of characters (or bits or pixels) and was able to recreate things verbatim.
Is that random happenstance copyright infringement?
False, actually; memorizing a copyrighted work and reproducing it other than in conditions specifically excepted from copyright protection is a violation of the exclusive rights of the copyright holder to make copies.
Copyright doesn't just apply to mechanical copies which don't have a human brain in the middle of the process.