We Asked A.I. to Create the Joker. It Generated a Copyrighted Image.::Artists and researchers are exposing copyrighted material hidden within A.I. tools, raising fresh legal questions.
We Asked A.I. to Create the Joker. It Generated a Copyrighted Image.::Artists and researchers are exposing copyrighted material hidden within A.I. tools, raising fresh legal questions.
Because this proves that the “AI”, at some level, is storing the data of the Joker movie screenshot somewhere inside of its training set.
Likely because the “AI” was trained upon this image at some point. This has repercussions with regards to copyright law. It means the training set contains copyrighted data and the use of said training set could be argued as piracy.
Legal discussions on how to talk about generative-AI are only happening now, now that people can experiment with the technology. But its not like our laws have changed, copyright infringement is copyright infringement. If the training data is obviously copyright infringement, then the data must be retrained in a more appropriate manner.
I don’t think that’s a justified conclusion.
If I watched a movie, and you asked me to reproduce a simple scene from it, then I could do that if I remembered the character design, angle, framing, etc. None of this would require storing the image, only remembering the visual meaning of it and how to represent that with the tools at my disposal.
If I reproduced it that closely (or even not-nearly-that-closely), then yes, my work would be considered a copyright violation. I would not be able to publish and profit off of it. But that’s on me, not on whoever made the tools I used. The violation is in the result, not the tools.
The problem with these claims is that they are shifting the responsibility for copyright violation off of the people creating the art, and onto the people making the tools used to create the art. I could make the same image in Photoshop; are they going after Adobe, too? Of course not. You can make copyright-violating work in any medium, with any tools. Midjourney is a tool with enough flexibility to create almost any image you can imagine, just like Photoshop.
Does it really matter if it takes a few minutes instead of hours?
AIs are not humans my dude. I don’t know why people keep using this argument. They specifically designed this thing to scrape copyrighted material, it’s not like an artist who was just inspired by something.
Photoshop is not human. AutoTune is not human. Cameras are not human. Microphones are not human. Paintbrushes are not human. Etc.
AI did not create this. A HUMAN created this with AI. The human is responsible for the creating it. The human is responsible for publishing it.
Please stop anthropomorphizing AI!
Is it tho? Honest question.
Yes it is. Honest answer.
So stable diffusion, midjourney, etc., all have massive databases with every picture on the Internet stored in them? I know the AI models are trained on lots of images, but are the images actually stored? I’m skeptical, but I’m no expert.
These models were trained on datasets that, without compensating the authors, used their work as training material. It’s not every picture on the net, but a lot of it is scrubbing websites, portfolios and social networks wholesale.
A similar situation happens with large language models. Recently Meta admitted to using illegally pirated books (Books3 database to be precise) to train their LLM without any plans to compensate the authors, or even as much as paying for a single copy of each book used.
Most of the stuff that inspires me probably wasn’t paid for. I just randomly saw it online or on the street, much like an AI.
AI using straight up pirated content does give me pause tho.
I was on the same page as you for the longest time. I cringed at the whole “No AI” movement and artists’ protest. I used the very same idea: Generations of artists honed their skills by observing the masters, copying their techniques and only then developing their own unique style. Why should AI be any different? Surely AI will not just copy works wholesale and instead learn color, composition, texture and other aspects of various works to find it’s own identity.
It was only when my very own prompts started producing results I started recognizing as “homages” at best and “rip-offs” at worst that gave me a stop.
I suspect that earlier generations of text to image models had better moderation of training data. As the arms race heated up and pace of development picked up, companies running these services started rapidly incorporating whatever training data they could get their hands on, ethics, copyright or artists’ rights be damned.
I remember when MidJourney introduced Niji (their anime model) and I could often identify the mangas and characters used to train it. The imagery Niji produced kept certain distinct and unique elements of character designs from that training data - as a result a lot of characters exhibited “Chainsaw Man” pointy teeth and sticking out tongue - without as much as a mention of the source material or even the themes.
How much profit do you make from this stuff ?
The stuff I sell on jilanico.com? Enough to make it worth my while.
How did the Joker image get replicated?
I posted it on my website as fan art and it scraped it. I just used a different filter which falls under fair use.
It’s too hard to type up how generative AIs work, but look up a video on “how stable diffusion works” or something like that. I seriously doubt they have a massive database with every image from the Internet inside it, with the AI just spitting those pics out, but I’m no expert.
Sure, but so is your memory, you could study the originals and re-draw them a similar way.
I agree, but I don’t think these generative AIs actually store image files off the Internet in a massive database. I could be wrong.
That’s correct. The structure of information isn’t anywhere remotely similar to a file or database. Information pixel by pixel isn’t stored, it more loosely remembers correlations and similarities and facts about the content as opposed to storing and copying it
Which is also very similar to how your brain stores things.
Yeah, much more similar to the brain than a database or file anyway
Wasn’t that known? Have midjourney ever claimed they didn’t use copyrighted works? There’s also an ongoing argument about the legality of that in general. One recent court case ruled that copyright does not protect a work from being used to train an AI. I’m sure that’s far from the final word on the topic, but it does mean this is a legal grey area at the moment.
If it is known, then it is copyright infringement to download the training sets and therefore a crime to do so. You cannot reproduce a copy of the works without the express permission of the copyright holder.
How many computers did Midjourney copy its training weights to? Has Midjourney (and the IT team behind it) paid royalties for every copyrighted image in its training set to have a proper copyright license to copy all of this data from computer to computer?
I’m guessing no. Which means the Midjourney team (if you say is true) is committing copyright infringement every time they spin up a new server with these weights.
Pro-AI side will obviously argue that the training weights do not contain the data of these copyrighted works. A claim that is looking more-and-more laughable as these experiments happen.
No it’s not illegal to download publicly available content it’s a copyright violation to republish it.
And that’s the problem. The internet has drastically reduced the cost of copying information, to the point where entirely new uses like this one are now possible. But those new uses are stifled by copyright law that originates from a time when the only cost was that people with gutenberg presses would be prohibited from printing slightly cheaper books. And there’s no discussion of changing it because the people who benefit from those laws literally are the media.
Copyright was literally invented because its cheap and easy to copy information (ie: Printing Press).
When copies are easy, you screw over the original artist. A large scale regulation of copies must be enforced by the central authorities to make sure small artists get the payments that they deserve. It doesn’t matter if you use a printing press, a xerox machine, a photograph, a phonograph, a record, a CD-ROM copy, a tape recorder, or the newest and fanciest AI to copy someone’s work. Its a copy, and therefore under the copyright regulations.
I mean anyone can use copyrighted material as inspiration for their work and it’s fair use and not a concern at all.
Is Ai only bad since it can do what a human does better/faster? If that’s that case, than they don’t actually have an issue with the fact it’s copyrighted, or I wouldn’t be able to use it for inspiration either.
In these cases it’s bad because it can do what a human does with no ethics, empathy, or regard for the law. If it had those things, it would be worse because we’d then be encroaching on the rights of sentient beings.
Problem is the AI didn’t do anything. People told the program tongo scrape the internet. So humans still made the decision with no regard doe the laws.
Legally speaking, AI is not anything. Its just a computer program. What you’re asking is completely a red-herring.
The question here is if the training-weights constitute copyright infringement. Now look at any clip-art set. Most clip-art is so called “royalty free”, as in you can copy it from computer-to-computer without any copyright issues, because the author specifically said that its royalty free.
But if you have a copyrighted font, then even copying that font from one computer to another constitutes copyright infringement. (IE: Literally, you aren’t allowed to copy this unless you have the permission of the author).
So, when you download Midjourney’s training weights, does that act in of itself constitute a copy that violate’s the authors of “Joker” movie? As far as I can tell, yes. Because the training weights clearly contain Joker images.
Looking at a copyrighted font with your computer means the font is in your computer’s memory. Do I go to jail for every site I visit that uses a fancy font?
Font files ≠ framebuffer
Images ≠ neural network weights
If its a fancy copyrighted font without a license to copy… the Website owner gets sued. Because the website owner is the one making mass copies of said font.
Do… you know what copyrites are? They relate to the copying of data.
The framebuffer on your computer copies the data to display the font to you. That’s my point. Not every form of copying infringes on copyright.
And my argument is that Midjourney’s servers are engaged in illegal copying. So I think your point is moot. Not the Web Browsers downloading images.
The movie Joker’s image is being copied each time the training weights are copied to a new server. Is that not an illegal copy?
When you look at a picture of the joker online, your browser is caching an image file of the joker on your computer. Is that not an illegal copy?
What the hell is this non-sequitur?
What do browser caches have to do with Midjourney servers and training weights?
I get that you wanna change the subject. But I dunno if it’s because you don’t understand my argument, or if you’ve realized that my argument is solid and therefore you have no actual counterargument.
The copy that people care about are the webservers. That’s why when you run Bittorrent, MPAA or RAII sue the people serving the data. Not the people who use the data. Have you followed any copyright case in the last two or three decades? In this case, it’d be a copyright case vs Midjourney servers.
Hows it a red herring to point out we are allowed to use copyrighted materials already? Its not the concern here, yet its what they are using as the concern for their arguments against it.
Because copyright law is clear in that computers can’t own a copyright.
The humans at play are:
The artist who created the original work.
The computer IT team who are copying the data behind the scenes between servers.
You who uses Midjourney to recreate “Joker” movie artwork, likely using the data in #2 which falls under copyright infringement.
It doesn’t matter how #2 works. It doesn’t matter if its H.265 or MPEG2 or from VHS tapes, or if its a Neural Network using the latest-and-greatest training weights from a GPU-based datasystem. Its just a computer. The ones doing the copyright infringement are the people copying data from place to place.
The AI model is not a copy of the set of data used to train it, it’s a derivative work. As such copyright as it currently stands does not apply. It’s possible, likely even, that copyright will be modified in some way soon to account for this, but the situation today says nope, not copyright infringement.
They’re really trying so hard cuz they absolutely want this to be infringement but it simply isnt on any legal level.
But where is the infringement?
This NYT article includes the same several copyrighted images and they surely haven’t paid any license. It’s obviously fair use in both cases and NYT’s claim that “it might not be fair use” is just ridiculous.
Worse, the NYT also includes exact copies of the images, while the AI ones are just very close to the original. That’s like the difference between uploading a video of yourself playing a Taylor Swift cover and actually uploading one of Taylor Swift’s own music videos to YouTube.
Even worse the NYT intentionally distributed the copyrighted images, while Midjourney did so unintentionally and specifically states it’s a breach of their terms of service. Your account might be banned if you’re caught using these prompts.
You do realize that newspapers do typically pay the licensing for images, it’s how things like Getty images exist.
On the flip side, OpenAI (and other companies) are charging someone access to their model, which is then returning copyrighted images without paying the original creator.
That’s why situations like this keep getting talked about, you have a 3rd party charging people for copyrighted materials. We can argue that it’s a tool, so you aren’t really “selling” copyrighted data, but that’s the issue that is generally be discussed in these kinds of articles/court cases.
Mostly playing devil’s advocate here (since I don’t think ai should be used commercially), but I’m actually curious about this, since I work in media… You can get away using images or footage for free if it falls under editorial or educational purposes. I know this can vary from place to place, but with a lot of online news sites now charging people to view their content, they could potentially be seen as making money off of copyrighted material, couldn’t they?
It’s not a topic that I’m super well versed in, but here is a thread from a photography forum indicating that news organizations can’t take advantage of fair use https://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/4183940.
I think these kinds of stringent rules are why so many are up in arms about how AI is being used. It’s effectively a way for big players to circumvent paying the people who out all the work into the art/music/voice acting/etc. The models would be nothing without the copyrighted material, yet no one seems to want to pay those people.
It gets more interesting when you realize that long term we still need people creating lots of content if we want these models to be able to create things around concepts that don’t yet exist (new characters, genres of music, etc.)
Do Training weights have the data? Are the servers copying said data on a mass scale, in a way that the original copyrighters don’t want or can’t control?
Data is not copyrighted, only the image is. Furthermore you can not copyright a number, even though you could use a sufficiently large number to completely represent a specific image. There’s also the fact that copyright does not protect possession of works, only distribution of them. If I obtained a copyrighted work no matter the means chosen to do so, I’ve committed no crime so long as I don’t duplicate that work. This gets into a legal grey area around computers and the fundamental way they work, but it was already kind of fuzzy if you really think about it anyway. Does viewing a copyrighted image violate copyright? The visual data of that image has been copied into your brain. You have the memory of that image. If you have the talent you could even reproduce that copyrighted work so clearly a copy of it exists in your brain.
Yeah. And the hard drives and networks that pass Midjourney’s network weights around?
That’s distribution. Did Midjourney obtain a license from the artists to allow large numbers of “Joker” copyrighted data to be copied on a ton of servers in their data-center so that Midjourney can run? They’re clearly letting the public use this data.
Because they’re not copying around images of Joker, they’re copying around a work derived from many many things including images of Joker. Copying a derived work does not violate the copyright of the work it was derived from. The wrinkle in this case is that you can extract something very similar to the original works back out of the derived work after the fact. It would be like if you could bake a cake, pass it around, and then down the line pull a whole egg back out of it. Maybe not the exact egg you started with, but one very similar to it. This is a situation completely unlike anything that’s come before it which is why it’s not actually covered by copyright. New laws will need to be drafted (or at a bare minimum legal judgements made) to decide how exactly this situation should be handled.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/derivative_work
Are you just making shit up?
The answer to that question is extensively documented by thousands of research papers - it’s not up for debate.
There response well be we don’t know we can’t understand what its doing.
What the fuck is this kind of response? Its just a fucking neural network running on GPUs with convolutional kernels. For fucks sake, turn on your damn brain.
Generative AI is actually one of the easier subjects to comprehend here. Its just calculus. Use of derivatives to backpropagate weights in such a way that minimizes error. Lather-rinse-repeat for a billion iterations on a mass of GPUs (ie: 20 TFlop compute systems) for several weeks.
Come on, this stuff is well understood by Comp. Sci by now. Not only 20 years ago when I learned about this stuff, but today now that AI is all hype, more and more people are understanding the basics.
Understanding the math behind it doesn’t immediately mean understanding the decision progress during forward propagation. Of course you can mathematically follow it, but you’re quickly gonna lose the overview with that many weights. There’s a reason XAI is an entire subfield in Machine Learning.
Ummm… its lossy compressed data from the training set.
Is it a perfect copy? No. But copyright law covers “derivative data” so whatever, the law remains clear on this situation.
Bro who even knows calculus anymore we have calculators for a reason 🤷♀️
So let’s say I ask a talented human artist the same thing.
Doesn’t this prove that a human, at some level, is storing the data of the Joker movie screenshot somewhere inside of their memory?
Artists don’t have hard drives or solid state drives that accept training weights.
When you have a hard drive (or other object that easily creates copies), then the law that follows is copyright, with regards to the use and regulation of those copies. It doesn’t matter if you use a Xerox machine, VHS tape copies, or a Hard Drive. All that matters is that you’re easily copying data from one location to another.
And yes. When a human recreates a copy of a scene clearly inspired by copyrighted data, its copyright infringement btw. Even if you recreate it from memory. It doesn’t matter how I draw Pikachu, if everyone knows and recognizes it as Pikachu, I’m infringing upon Nintendo’s copyright (and probably their trademark as well).
Nope humans don’t store data perfectly with perfect recall.
Neither do neural networks.
Humans can get pretty close to perfect recall with enough practice - show a human that exact joker image hundreds of thousands of times, they’re going to be able to remember every detail.
That’s what happened here - the example images weren’t just in the training set once, they are in the training set over and over and over again across hundreds of thousands of websites.
If someone wants these images nobody is going to use AI to access it - they’ll just do a google image search. There is no way Warner Brothers is harmed in any way by this, which is a strong fair use defence.
Some do. Should we jail all the talented artists with photographic memories?
If they exactly reproduce others work, and gain a profit for it, a fine would be the minimum.
If they’re copying copyrighted works, usually its a fine, especially if they’re making money from it.
You know that performance artists get sued when they replicate a song in public from memory, right?
I don’t think anyone is advocating to legalize the sale of copyrighted material made via AI.
This is the crux of the issue, it isn’t obviously copyright infringement. Currently copyright is completely silent on the matter one way or another.
The thing that makes this particularly interesting is that the traditional copyright maximalists, the ones responsible for ballooning copyright durations from its original reasonable limit of 14 years (plus one renewal) to its current absurd duration of 95 years, also stand to benefit greatly from generative works. Instead of the usual full court press we tend to see from the major corporations around anything copyright related we’re instead seeing them take a rather hands off approach.
Its clear that the training weights have the data on recreating this Joker scene. Its also clear that if the training-data didn’t contain this image, then the copy of the image would never result into the weights that have been copy/pasted everywhere.
Except it isn’t a perfect copy. It’s very similar, but not exact. Additionally for every example you can find where it spits out a nearly identical image you can also find one where it produces nothing like it. Even more complicated you can get images generated that very closely match other copyrighted works, but which the model was never trained on. Does that mean copying the model violates the copyright of a work that it literally couldn’t have included in its data?
You’re making a lot of assumptions and arguments that copyright covers things that it very much does not cover or at a minimum that it hasn’t (yet) been ruled to cover.
Legally, as things currently stand, an AI model trained on a copyrighted work is not a copy of that work as far as copyright is concerned. That’s today’s legal reality. That might change in the future, but that’s far from certain, and is a far more nuanced and complicated problem than you’re making it out to be.
Any legal decision that ruled an AI model is a copy of all the works used to train it would also likely have very far reaching and complicated ramifications. That’s why this needs to be argued out in court, but until then what midjourney is doing is perfectly legal.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/derivative_work
The law is very clear on the nature of derivative works of copyrighted material.
Not sure where they’re getting the bit about copyright disallowing derived works as that’s just not true. You can get permission to create a derived work, but you don’t need permission to create a derived work so long as the final result does not substantially consist of the original work.
Unfortunately what constitutes “substantially” is somewhat vague. Various rulings have been made around that point, but I believe a common figure used is 30%. By that metric any given image represents substantially less than 30% of any AI model so the model itself is a perfectly legal derived work with its own copyright separate from the various works that were combined to create it.
Ultimately though the issue here is that the wrong tool is being used, copyright just doesn’t cover this case, it’s just what people are most familiar with (not to mention most people are very poorly educated about it) so that’s what everyone reaches for by default.
With generative AI what we have is a tool that can be used to trivially produce works that are substantially similar to existing copyrighted works. In this regard it’s less like a photocopier, and more like Photoshop, but with the critical difference that no particular talent is necessary to create the reproduction. Because it’s so easy to use people keep focusing on trying to kill the tool rather than trying to police the people using it. But they’re going about it all wrong, copyright isn’t the right weapon if that’s your goal. Copyright can be used to go after the people using generative AI tools, but not the people creating the tools.
Why? If the training weights are created and distributed in violation of copyright laws, it seems appropriate to punish those illegal training weights.
In fact, all that people really are asking for, is for a new set of training weights to be developed but with appropriate copyright controls. IE: With express permission from the artists and/or entities who made the work.
Because they aren’t illegal and they don’t violate copyright. People keep wanting them to be against copyright, but that’s just not how copyright works. There either needs to be amendments to copyright law in order to cover this case, but those changes would need to be very carefully tailored. It would be way too easy to make something that’s either overly broad and applies to a bunch of situations it wasn’t intended to, or way too narrow allowing for easy circumventing.
While that might appease some people, it wouldn’t appease everyone. There are a lot of workers in the creative fields that are feeling incredibly threatened by generative AI right now. Some of these fears are certainly overblown, but it’s also true corporations are going to be as shitty as possible and so some regulation is probably in order. That said, once again, copyright just doesn’t seem to be the right tool for the job here.
Because they are legal and they do violate copyright? People keep wanting them to be copyright free, but that’s not how copyright works. There don’t need to be amendments to copyright law in order to cover this case.
I mean, its obviously heading to the courts one way or the other, but I don’t think just making assertions like that are very good kind of arguing. The training weights here have clearly been proven to contain copyrighted data as per this article. I’m not sure if you’re making any kind of serious case that shows otherwise, but are instead just making a bunch of assertions that I could easily reverse.
By that logic I am also storing that image in my dataset, because I know and remember this exact image. I can reproduce it from memory too.
You ever try to do a public performance of a copyrighted work, like “Happy Birthday to You” ??
You get sued. Even if its from memory. Welcome to copyright law. There’s a reason why every restaraunt had to make up a new “Happy Happy Birthday, from the Birthday Crew” song.
Yeah, but until I perform it without a license for profit, I don’t get sued.
So it’s up to the user to make sure that if any material that is generated is copyright infringing, it should not be used.
Otakon anime music videos have no profits but they explicitly get a license from RIAA to play songs in public.
So? I’m not saying those are fair terms, I would also prefer if that were not the case, but AI isn’t performing in public any more having a guitar with you in public is ripping off Metallica.
You don’t need to perform “for profit” to get sued for copyright infringement.
Is the Joker image in that article derivative or substantially similar to a copyrighted work? Is the query available to anyone who uses Midjourney? Are the training weights being copied from server-to-server behind the scenes? Were the training weights derived from copyrighted data?
Yes and none of that matters in the slightest. By that logic the Library of Babel is also copyright infringement. By that logic my memory of the movie is copyright infringing even if I don’t do anything with it.
You’re taking a fictional work and trying to apply real world laws to it?
Copyright assumes that Library of Babel would take up so much space as it’d be impossible to create.
Which is true. Every possible combination of letters, spaces, and characters would never fit on anything in today’s universe (be it a 24 TB Hard Drive, or even a collection of thousands of them).
Secondly: any computer-generated work is automatically non-copyrighted as per US Law.
… Do you think youre a robot?
What’s the difference? I could be just some code in the simulation
Edit: downvoted by people who unironically stan Ted Kaczynski