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.
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 🤷♀️