Why is this difference in opinion?
We've been in discussions with image agencies who are afraid that their images will be remixed by AI and then distributed as CC0. If that happens, they are competing against free "derived works" of their own photos, but with the AI remixing proving that in court will be difficult and expensive. The result is that prices will go so low that they can't pay their photographers a fair salary anymore.
I believe this is also why Adobe and some photography industry groups now heavily promote their "Content Authenticity" initiative which aims to make it illegal to use photos where there is no matching camera RAW file with Metadata. Because, obviously, AI-generated images don't have that.
That said, I find things like "DALL-E 2 Variations" much more worrying. If you look at their flower shop example, it's difficult to argue that we still need stock photographers if you can get those variations for "free". But of course, the AI can only produce the variations, because some human took the original photo. So in effect the DALL-E variations then become a tool to obfuscate the original photographer so that you can use his/her work without paying.
As for the datamining, I believe that's unrelated to the license. I believe in the US you are legally allowed to train your AI on any data, no matter what the original license was. Otherwise, Co-Pilot on GPL or MIT code would also not be permitted.
Bigger models get better at copying style with fewer examples. At some point, it'll be enough for a big model to see sufficiently few examples of real people drawing, "X in the style of Y" to get a sense for how to draw a thing in the style of Y.
Or an end-user could just feed a single instance of parody art in some artists style, ask for variations, in-paint what they want, and voila! Copyright free [citation needed] style transfer.
It will always be possible to launder style, even while adhering to promises to never touch an artists work (directly). Training on an artists entire body of work is not the only way (and thanks to copyright, a not even desirable) way to do so. edit: Open source models will also mean blacklists are unworkable.
How is that different from telling a person to do the same?
† light-tight box contains high-resolution WiFi-enabled tablet hooked up to camera whose button is automatically pushed by a small motorized mechanism. Subscription required.
It might stay useful for documenting reality, and in the space where art and documentation meets (e.g. it's still nice to have pretty pictures in your review of the latest smartphone, so that incorporates a manner of artistic expression).
For DALL-E, I can’t select components in it and search for it. It may well copy components on other peoples art verbatim (is that the right word for images?) or exactly, but I can’t show where it’s ripped it from.
The AI art generators are trained on copyrighted work, which is still a legal grey area, but they don't stamp or copy/paste parts of the source images unchanged into larger ones. Though I'd imagine if you used the same algorithms for something like logo or typeface generation you'd run into trademark issues.
This is a straw man with examples caused by going out of the way to create the environment in which they would occur, when in fact they are edge chases outside the vast majority of usage.
I'd be willing to bet there's a MUCH higher likelihood that a junior dev is copying in part of a SO answer without considering licence than that Copilot generates an identifiable and unique snippet in an actual codebase with thousands of existing LOC.
Don't be so sure about that.
I had somewhat of a legal background? Understanding? Whatever term means I’m not a lawyer started down pre law and learned a few tidbits so I was concerned enough to always start from scratch instead of copy and pasting when helping. Fuck me though if a good 25%-33% of my coworkers functions weren’t an exact copy of what’s in other companies codebase
> False premise? Loads of artists hate DALL-E and AI art in general; they typically have much less feelings about Copilot. Unsurprisingly, for devs and DALL-E, it's the other way around.
Secondly, if by theft you actually mean copyright infringement, which is not the same thing, I believe we are reaching the breaking point of copyright legislation. We are getting to the point where copyright is so detached from reality it is no longer maskable and the notion itself becomes nonsensical.
As others have stated, even without AI, code gets routinely copied. There are only so many ways you can write a well defined, common knowledge algorithm, your version is bound to look like someone elses.
Just like genes are a fundamental part of the biological world, memes are are a fundamental part of human society. They exist ever since humanity exists. They replicate (copy) and mutate (remix) and evolve due to selective pressure. Copyright is an aberration opposed to the very nature of memes, because it is a mechanism designed to restrict their replication and mutation.
After decades of professional software development, it should be clear that code is a liability. The more you have, the worse things get. A tool that makes it easy to crank out a ton of it, is exactly the opposite of what we need.
If a coworker uses it, I will consider it an admission of incompetence. Simple as that.
I also hate 90% of default linter rules because they are pointless busywork designed to catch noob mistakes.
These tools keep devs stuck in local maxima of mediocrity. It's like writing prose with a thesaurus on, and accepting every single suggestion blindly.
I coded for 20 years without them, why would I need them now? If you can't even fathom coding without these crutches, and think this is somehow equivalent to coding in a bare notepad, you are proving my point.
You saw the same thing with how online forums which were predominantly dev/tech focused (/., Digg) used to decry any attempts to protect online music/video, but would simultaneously complain about software piracy.
It boils down to hypocrisy, really.
Combine that with rulings in other areas of IP law, such as the patent office ruling that an inventor must be a human and AI cannot be assigned IP rights[1], I think that would lead towards DALL-E created art being assigned to the human who prompted the tool for art or the creator of the tool.
Compare this to software when you can be sued for using the same pieces of code, and that seems to be the root cause for the difference
[1] https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2020/07/13/artificial-intelligenc...
Commercial entities take things that are written and maintained by volunteers in their free time and barely give back. And this culture has just developed in a way that this is at most a moral failure, not a legal.
People put it on the internet with a permissive license because they want others use it. This is great because people love sharing, but now, before you know it, you're suddenly supporting large enerprises and not just people that want to put cool things together like you. And you don't get any kind of compensation, even though it'd be peanuts for the company to pay for the time you put into maintenance and new development.
And if you stop, someone else will always fill the void, eager to work for free.
Maintainer burnout is a real thing and I wish the largest user of FOSS code would do their part to make the time spent on every piece of code they use worth it.
Half of "open source" is a success story, the other half is just sad.
Copilot just automated this entire process and sells the product of code back to developers, not enterprises.
[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/us-copyright-offic...
> 2. OpenAI owns generations created by DALL·E; you own your uploaded images.
I suppose that could refer to ownership in some other sense besides copyright, though I don't know what that would mean.
e.g. Adobe does not own the pictures you create with Photoshop or Illustrator. Even if Photoshop is filling in the pixels with content aware fill, Adobe doesn’t get any authorship rights to your works.
As far as copyright is concerned, the author is the human in the loop making the creative decisions. For generated images, that is primarily the person writing the prompt, and secondarily the creators of the training set (the extent to which the authors of the training set hold copyright to derived works is a more interesting legal question).
OpenAI are neither writing the prompt, nor did they create the images in the training set. So it I don’t see where their authorship claim is supposed to come from.
They could ask for copyright assignment. I haven’t read the full terms of service so I don’t know if they require copyright assignment. But them merely asserting that they own the images is not a copyright assignment, “We own the images” is legally meaningless by itself - own what form of IP, through what mechanism?
If I were to ask you to draw a rabbit, you'd own the copyright on the picture despite me giving you the prompt.
In the case where a neural net is given the prompt, who owns the copyright? The prompter, the neural net, or the creator of the neural net?
A neural net's existence might be considered as a benefit in that case, so you don't need to dive into possible personship before establishing the owner.
Depends entirely on where you live. [0] Whilst the attached case was rejected in the UK and US, Australia reached the conclusion that AI itself, not its creators, might have ownership over its production, as... Insane... As that is.
(There's another High Court case to come. Hence the 'may' have ownership.)
[0] https://www.judgments.fedcourt.gov.au/judgments/Judgments/fc...
> Source code [is] relatively low entropy compared to, say, images. It's a lot easier to see how feeding a pile of photographs into an AI that maps them to subject erases the copyright of the photographers, because the subject isn't copyrighted.
> It's trickier when you feed artwork or music into an AI, because the AI might reproduce specific artistic or musical choices that happen to pinpoint a copyrighted work too well. With prose it's even worse. And code has to compile, [so] it's even more constrained!
If your code is released with no license, it should be fair to assume free use. But if it is licensed, tools like Copilot should be forced to respect that.
Yes.
Are you allowed to remember it?
Yes.
Are you allowed to use similar patterns / naming conventions / algorithms when your are trying to solve your own unique problems?
…I hope so, or you won’t be much value to your employer.
That’s all an AI does. Same thing as you, it’s just more efficient (in some ways).
Legally? The opposite is true. Source-available is not open source, and is emphatically not public domain.
There's a reason that StackOverflow and all the other code bins have legal agreements that you are notified of when using them.
Actually I think it should be up to the art community to decide how they want to deal with dall-e. I know that musicians have a very complex system for dealing with samples, and arrangements and lyrics. As an outsider I have barely scratched the surface on how it works, so trying to understand the why is hopeless.
But Dall-E in general can be another medium for art, which is why some artists give it massive praise.
- People at art conventions walking up to artists and asking them what model and keywords they used, insinuating that no human talent was involved in the process.
- An unresolvable divide between "AI is just another tool" and "AI instills distrust" spreading to mainstream discourse.
- Comments on art posted online filled with requests for "keywords please," because that's what AI would train us to expect out of creators.
- Commercialization and legitimation of plagiarism through the "just another tool" argument.
- No longer being able to detach yourself from the AI debate every time you see a photo or illustration online. No longer being capable of knowing if there was a human behind a creation. Constantly having to worry if the person you're chatting with is the entire human, or if some parts were outsourced.
- Never being able to go back to now, before the sphere of illustration has been "polluted" from the proliferation of AI art, when we cannot uninvent the tools and anyone can spin up another private instance. Banning the use of a technology is impossible but perhaps nothing less would prevent such a hypothetical outcome in the face of perceived progress.
Main difference is there isn't as hard a line between it and lower resource projects such as disco diffusion.
that's literally all it is.
Google created imagen which is better than dall-e.
While software engineering, on the other hand, is considered a "real" profession. Millions of people make a steady living coding, designing, testing, architecting, etc. The impact of AI on the software development work-flow will be immense. Tooling has already impacted GIT PRs at my place of work, and when these tools get smarter the impact will only grow. And, if the pattern holds, such tooling will be introduced earlier and earlier in the design/development workflow.
I'm probably way off, but at the rate things are progressing, I'll give it 10-to-15 years before software development paradigms such as cucumber test files or hexagonal designs/drawing are directly transformed into coded, reviewed, tested, running and deployed solutions.