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Comment by batmenace | Hacker News Reader

I would assume that the point is that you had to pay - in one way or another - for access to this material, which is the intention when it is published and shared. You bought your books, your toys, your TV shows (through ads). SD, by scraping the web, gets all the benefits of prior work without necessarily having adequately compensated the work's creators.

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I'm pretty sure I didn't buy any of the images I view while browsing the web.

Sending me ads doesn't constitute a transaction, besides I usually don't choose to look at them anyway.

you also didn't flip millions of illustrations into a commercial product without paying the creators or rights holders to license them. this is theft plain and simple.

I think the point is that he did, and that we all do, when we train our meat neural networks (on copyrighted material) in a way that makes us better at providing a commercial service (our job).

If a human has a right to view and learn from a copyrighted image on the internet, why shouldn't an AI?

Yes, this is exactly my point. And I’d go even one step further: creating real artificial intelligence cannot be possible without learning from the real world - which means learning also from copyrighted material. So a law that prevents this (even by just requiring to pay a minuscule fee) would effectively ensure that such a technology will be developed in a country with different laws.

Besides the point that these are freely viewable images anyways, this is also clearly not people's real objection. If you were making a novel-writing ai, it would not placate anybody if you bought a single copy of each book before incorporating it into the model.

> it would not placate anybody if you bought a single copy of each book before incorporating it into the model.

because by buying the book you are not buying the right to distribute derivative works of that book.

I prefer straightforward movie piracy than the "hidden behind a curtain of supposedly artistic value" one.

I agree. In theory, some may be placated if the person creating an SD artwork had to ultimately compensate the creators of those artworks that were used by SD in order to stich together the image, akin to sampling records in music.

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