Based on what I saw while lurking around the site formerly known as Twitter, while some Japanese creatives are totally hostile to AI with their traditional and digital artwork being poached for “training”, others are jumping into Sora to enliven their waifu artwork, mostly posed 3D models or from video games.
Everyone here is either on the side of hating big AI companies or hating IP law. I proudly hate both.
I am cool with everything stuffed into AI and freely distributed, whatever the form. Bluntly, I think copyright sucks, and want it gone. Nintendo shouldn’t be able to patent game mechanics, and I would like to see more mashups of things.
Nintendo shouldn’t be able to patent game mechanics
Those are patents, not copyrights. There are a bunch of different forms of intellectual property. Off the top of my head:
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Copyright
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Trademark
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Patent
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Moral (not very substantial in the US, but more-meaningful in France)
IMO, the way it should be is that concepts and art should be free to be used by anyone. However, specific incarnations made someone can’t be copied. For example, Nintendo can make a Pokemon game, as can Sega with the same characters. Naturally, Nintendo can make a Shin Megami Mario game.
The important thing is that the company or people behind an incarnation is distinctly labelled, so that people can’t confuse who made what. In this way, variants of a media can fulfill niches that otherwise wouldn’t be possible. Say, for example, a WoodRocket “Jessie Does James” hentai anime.
I have, in the past, kind of wished that settings and characters could not be copyrighted. I realize that there’s work that goes into creating each, but I think that we could still live in a world where those weren’t protected and interesting stuff still gets created. If that were to happen, then I agree, it’d be necessary to make it very clear who created what, since the setting and characters alone wouldn’t uniquely identify the source.
Like, there are things like Greek mythology or the Robin Hood collection of stories, very important works of art from our past, that were created by many different unaffiliated people. They just couldn’t be created today with our modern stories, because the settings and characters would be copyrighted and most rightsholders don’t just offer a blanket grant of rights to use them.
That’s actually one unusual and notable thing H.P. Lovecraft did — if you’ve ever seen stuff in the Cthulhu Mythos, that’s him. He encouraged anyone who wanted to do so to create stuff using his universe. One reason why we have that kind of collection of Lovecraftian stuff.
But you can’t do that with, say, Star Wars or a lot of other beloved settings.
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I will support the elimination of copyright. But, as long as copyright exists, I will reject and resist AI.
That said, there are a number of other reasons I think AI sucks, it’s not limited to copyright.
Ah, a man of culture - DBZ Team Training is a classic. I also hear good things about Super Mariomon, though I haven’t tried it yet myself.
I agree that I should be able to use whatever you make and sell it for money without crediting you because I’m a human just like you. We’re basically related so whatever you make is also mine because we’re pretty try much the same person.
Didn’t Japan rule that AI was fine to infringe copyright to train? Why are they complaining now?
Japan didn’t think the face eating leopards would eat their face.
Hate for AI vs hate for big corporations and copyright laws. Which thing that they hate will Lemmy members defend passionately?
AI companies are not on the side of copyright reform or abolition. They just want an exception for themselves. They very much believe in trade secrets. They probably want copyright to eventually cover the current grey areas so that they can stop pretending they give a damn about open models.
It’s not unreasonable to demand AI companies to play by the same rules as everyone else.
It’s not unreasonable to demand AI companies to play by the same rules as everyone else.
But when you hate those very rules, shouldn’t you be cheering on the people that are seemingly ignoring them and are likely to try and challenge them in court/lobby to be changed/removed? Right? “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” and all that?
Oh, but not when those people are evil capitalist companies that make AI product lol.
Likely, whatever benefits the little guy. Most people don’t have a problem with copyright laws in a vacuum. It’s the abuse of those by large corporate entities that are the issue.
Well in this case there’ s no question - OpenAI benefit the “little guy” more.
If we had a fair distribution of wealth I wouldn’t care about either of these really.
Most artists care about attribution/fame somewhat but if they could live comfortably they wouldn’t care about royalties much or others using their art.
Likewise for AI, automation is an amazing thing for civilization but when it is gatekeeped and used to make the rich richer it’s just exploitation of workers everywhere since they have to work as hard as they did one century ago with, arguably, less buying power.
If we had a fair distribution of wealth I wouldn’t care about either of these really.
A “fair distribution of wealth” isn’t really a thing though. What you likely consider “fair” is most likely “not fair” to high income earners, correct?
So, the “don’t use copyrighted data in a training corpus” crowd probably isn’t going to win the IP argument. And I would be quite surprised if IP law changes to accommodate them.
However, the “don’t generate and distribute infringing material” is a whole different story. IP holders are on pretty solid ground there. One thing that I am very certain that IP law is not going to permit is just passing copyrighted data into a model and then generating and distributing material that would otherwise be infringing. I understand that anime rightsholders often have something of a tradition of sometimes letting fan-created material slide, but if generative AI massively reduces the bar to creating content, I suspect that that is likely to change.
Right now, you have generative AI companies saying — maybe legally plausibly — that they aren’t the liable ones if a user generates infringing material with their model.
And while you can maybe go after someone who is outright generating and selling material that is infringing, something doesn’t have to be commercially sold to be infringing. Like, if LucasArts wants to block for-fun fan art of Luke and Leia and Han, they can do that.
One issue is attribution. Like, generative AI companies are not lying when they say that there isn’t a great way to just “reverse” what training corpus data contributed more to an output.
However, I am also very confident that it is very possible to do better than they do today. From a purely black-box standpoint, one possibility would be, for example, to use TinEye-style fuzzy hashing of images and then try to reverse an image, probably with a fuzzier hash than TinEye uses, to warn a user that they might be generating an image that would be derivative. That won’t solve all cases, especially if you do 3d vision and generative AI producing models (though then you could also maybe do computer vision and a TinEye-equivalent for 3D models).
Another complicating factor is that copyright only restricts distribution of derivative works. I can make my own, personal art of Leia all I want. What I can’t do is go distribute it. I think — though I don’t absolutely know what case law is like for this, especially internationally — that generating images on hardware at OpenAI or whatever and then having them move to me doesn’t count as distribution. Otherwise, software-as-a-service in general, stuff like Office 365, would have major restrictions on working with IP that locally-running software would not. Point is that I expect that it should be perfectly legal for me to go to an image generator and generate material as long as I do not subsequently redistribute it, even if it would be infringing had I done so. And the AI company involved has no way of knowing what I’m doing with the material that I’m generating. If they block me from making material with Leia, that’s an excessively-broad restriction.
But IP holders are going to want to have a practical route to either be able to go after the generative AI company producing the material that gets distributed, or the users generating infringing material and then distributing it. AI companies are probably going to say that it’s the users, and that’s probably correct. Problem is from a rightsholder standpoint, yeah, they could go after the users before, but if it’s a lot cheaper and easier to create the material now, that presents them with practical problems. If any Tom, Dick, and Harry can go out and generate material, they’ve got a lot more moles to whack in their whack-a-mole game.
And in that vein, an issue that I haven’t seen come up is what happens if generative AI companies start permitting deterministic generation of content – that is, where if I plug in the same inputs, I get the same outputs. Maybe they already do; I don’t know, run my generative AI stuff locally. But supposing you have a scenario like this:
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I make a game called “Generic RPG”, which I sell.
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I distribute — or sell — DLC for this game. This uses a remote, generative AI service to generate art for the game using a set of prompts sold as part of the DLC for that game. No art is distributed as part of the game. Let’s say I call that “Adventures A Long Time Ago In A Universe Far, Far Away” or something that doesn’t directly run afoul of LucasArts, creates enough distance. And let’s set aside trademark concerns, for the sake of discussion. And lets say that the prompts are not, themselves infringing on copyright (though I could imagine them doing so, let’s say that they’re sufficiently distant to avoid being derivative works).
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Every user buys the DLC, and then on their computer, reconstitutes the images for the game. At least if done purely-locally, this should be legal under case law — the GPL specifically depends on the fact that one can combine material locally to produce a derivative work as long as one does not then distribute it. Mods to (copyrighted) games can just distribute the deltas, producing a derivative work when the mod is applied, and that’s definitely legal.
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One winds up with someone selling and distributing what is effectively a “Star Wars” game.
Now, maybe training the model on images of Star Wars content so that it knows what Star Wars looks like isn’t, as a single step, creating an infringing work. Maybe distributing the model that knows about Star Wars isn’t infringement. Maybe the prompts being distributed designed to run against that model are not infringing. Maybe reconstituting the apparently-Star-Wars images in a deterministic fashion using SaaS to hardware that can run the model is not infringing. But if the net effect is equivalent to distributing an infringing work, my suspicion is that courts are going to be willing to create some kind of legal doctrine that restricts it, if they haven’t already.
Now, this situation is kind of contrived, but I expect that people will do it, sooner or later, absent legal restrictions.
However, the “don’t generate and distribute infringing material” is a whole different story. IP holders are on pretty solid ground there.
Is any of it infringing? Explain the knock-off music & art in popular media when they don’t want to pay royalty fees for the authentic article. Explain knock-off brands. Cheap imitations to sidestep copyright restrictions have been around long before generative AI, yet businesses aren’t getting sued: they apparently understand legal standards enough to safely imitate. Why is shoddy imitation for distribution okay when human-generated yet not when AI-generated?
I don’t think your understanding of copyright infringement is solid.
Even supposing someone manages to generate work whose distribution infringes copyright, wouldn’t legality follow the same model as a human requesting a commercial (human-based) service to generate that work?
This is a distressingly unusually solid analysis for lemmy. I agree with one exception–writing to memory absolutely counts as a distribution. Accordingly, if a generative model output an infringing work, it for sure could create liability for infringement. I think this will ultimately work similarly to music copyright where conscious/explicitly intentional copying is not itself the threshold test, but rather degree of similarity. And if you have prompts that specifically target towards infringement, you’re going to get some sort of contributory infringement structure. I think there is also potentially useful case law to look at in terms of infringement arising out of work-for-hire situations, where the contractor may not have infringed intentionally but the supervisor knew and intended their instructions to produce an effectively infringing work. That is, if there is any case law on this pretty narrow fact pattern.
It sounds like it would be an analogue issue that is already similarly solved in other respects.
For example, its not only illegal for someone to make and sell known illegal drugs, but its additionally illegal to make or sell anything that is not the specifically illegal drug but is analogous to it in terms of effect (and especially facets of chemical structure)
So any process that produces an end result analogous to copyright infringement would be viewed as copyright infringement, even if it skirts the existing laws on a technical basis, is probably what the prevailing approach will be
For example, its not only illegal for someone to make and sell known illegal drugs, but its additionally illegal to make or sell anything that is not the specifically illegal drug but is analogous to it in terms of effect (and especially facets of chemical structure)
Hmm. I’m not familiar with that as a legal doctrine.
kagis
At least in the US — and this may not be the case everywhere — it sounds like there’s a law that produces this, rather than a doctrine. So I don’t think that there’s a general legal doctrine that would automatically apply here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Analogue_Act
The Federal Analogue Act, 21 U.S.C. § 813, is a section of the United States Controlled Substances Act passed in 1986 which allows any chemical “substantially similar” to a controlled substance listed in Schedule I or II to be treated as if it were listed in Schedule I, but only if intended for human consumption. These similar substances are often called designer drugs. The law’s broad reach has been used to successfully prosecute possession of chemicals openly sold as dietary supplements and naturally contained in foods (e.g., the possession of phenethylamine, a compound found in chocolate, has been successfully prosecuted based on its “substantial similarity” to the controlled substance methamphetamine).[1] The law’s constitutionality has been questioned by now Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch[2] on the basis of Vagueness doctrine.
But I guess that it might be possible to pass a similar such law for copyright, though.
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yeah like he gaf
OpenAI is copyright infringement.
I’m amazed that these shady chatbot apps aren’t getting sued to death. I see ads all the time for Simpsons, Family Guy, Incredibles characters and I’m like “Disney is going to murder you.”
Disney bought into a long history of Fox animated properties being lax in infringement enforcement online.
But this is a whole different level. That’s where I agree with you.
They’ll wait until the bubble bursts (or OpenAI shows signs of weakness) and then they’ll eat it alive.
It’s not profitable to go after them when the government is tweeting out Pokémon ICE commercials and the president is making deepfakes of himself.
And the other government with large contributors is China and intellectual property rights have never been strong there. Walk around a tech startup in China and you’ll see plenty of posters they’ve made with their products and with the faces of Elon Musk or Steve Jobs there as if they’re endorsing or part of the product
And the other government with large contributors is China and intellectual property rights have never been strong there. Walk around a startup and you’ll see plenty of posters they’re made with their products and with the faces of Elon Musk or Steve Jobs there as if they’re endorsing or part of the product
They will just make deal with OpenAI that benefit both sides while all the small players get crushed. Same as with all types of media…
That’s their whole business model
I don’t think these companies give a shit 😥. If it means US companies fall behind the White House is going to aide with these companies and allow it. Or hostilely take over your company like they’re doing with Tiktok.
OenAI replies: “but line go up…?”
deleted by creator
“Irreplaceable treasures”
ROFL!
japan:
- people make rule34 porn of underage children: “i sleep”
- people make unsanctioned videos of characters from mega-corps like nintendo doing stupid stuff: “i weep”
always interesting to see where their priorities lie.
Insane that that’s your takeaway from this post. This had nothing to do with underage children, so why is your mind already there? So fucking weird.
AI is like stealing a brick from everyone in your town to build your own house. As a medical writer it has absolutely destroyed my business.
And build it seeming convincingly well before it falls apart once a storm passes by.
Go back to Reddit.
Go back to your mums basement.
