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Comment by TaylorAlexander | Hacker News Reader

Ah I am glad to see someone else talking about using public domain images!

Honestly it baffles me that in all this discussion, I rarely see people discussing how to do this with appropriately licensed images. There are some pretty large datasets out there of public images, and doing so might even help encourage more people to contribute to open datasets.

Also if the big ML companies HAD to use open images, they would be forced to figure out sample efficiency for these models. Which is good for the ML community! They would also be motivated to encourage the creation of larger openly licensed datasets, which would be great. I still think if we got twitter and other social media sites to add image license options, then people who want to contribute to open datasets could do so in an easy and socially contagious way. Maybe this would be a good project for mastodon contributors, since that is something we actually have control over. I'd be happy to license my photography with an open license!

It is really a wonderful idea to try to do this with open data. Maybe it won't work very well with current techniques, but that just becomes an engineering problem worth looking at (sample efficiency).

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Human artists derive their inspiration and styles from a large set of copyrighted works, but they are free to produce new art despite of that. Art would have developed much slower and be much poorer if, for example, Impressionism or Cubism had been entangled in long ownership confrontations in courts.

Then there's the fact that humanity has been able to develop and share art and literary works for thousands of years without the modern copyright system.

It would be interesting to see if this technology can erode the copyright concept a bit. Maybe not remove it completely, but perhaps influence people to create wider definitions for "fair use", and undo the extensions that Disney lobbyists have created.

That is a very apropos reference. If you're familiar with Cubism, you know that there's Picasso, and then there's Braque. The one is an art celebrity beyond almost any other, and the other isn't.

But they developed Cubism in parallel. There were periods where their work was almost indistinguishable. "Houses at l'Estaque", the trope namer for Cubism thanks to the remarks of a critic, was in fact by Braque.

You can generate infinite recognizable Basquiat from an AI, but is it Basquiat? No, of course not, because Basquiat's style operates within the context of a specific individual human making a point about expectations and the interface between his race and his artistic boldness and audacity as experienced by his wealthy audience. Making an AI 'ape' (!) his art style is itself quite the artistic statement, but it's not the same thing in the slightest.

You can generate infinite Rothko as 512x512 squares, but if you don't understand how the gallery hangings work and their ability to fill your entire visual field with first carefully chosen color, and then a great deal of detail at the threshold of perception of distinctions between color shades meant to further drive home the reaction to the basic color's moods, what you generate is basically arbitrary and nothing. Rothko isn't 'just a random color', Rothko is about giving you a feeling through means that aren't normal or representational, and the unusualness of this (reasonably successful) effort is what gave the work its valuation.

Ownership of the experience by a particular artist isn't the point. Rothko isn't solely celebrity worship and speculation. Picasso isn't all of Cubism. Art is things other than property of particular artists.

What makes it awkward is the great ease by which AI can blindly and unhelpfully wear the mask of an artist, such as Basquiat, to the detriment of art. It's HOW you use the tools, and it's possible to abuse such tools.

> You can generate infinite recognizable Basquiat from an AI, but is it Basquiat? No, of course not, because Basquiat's style operates within the context of a specific individual human making a point about expectations and the interface between his race and his artistic boldness and audacity as experienced by his wealthy audience.

I'm not sure how I feel about this - I agree with the conclusion, but not the reasoning. For me, AI-generated Basquiat is not Basquiat simply because he had no ownership or agency in the process of its creation.

It feels like an overly romantic notion that art requires specific historical/cultural context at the moment of its creation to be valid.

If I could hypothetically pay Basquiat $100 to put his own work into a stable diffusion model that created a Basquiat-esque work, that's still a Basquiat. If I could pay him to draw a circle with a pencil, that's his work - and if I used it in an AI model, then it's not.

It's about who held the paintbrush, or who delegated holding the paintbrush, not a retrospectively applied critical theory.

On reflection, I'm going to say 'nope'. Because it's Basquiat, I'm pretty sure you couldn't get him to make a model of himself (maybe he would, and call it 'samo'?). I don't think you could pay him to draw a circle with a pencil: I think he'd have been offended and angry. And so that is not 'his work'. It trips over what makes him Basquiat, so doing these things is not Basquiat (though it's very, very Warhol).

Even more than that, you couldn't do Rothko that way: the man would be beyond offended and would not deal with you at all. But by contrast, you ABSOLUTELY are doing a Warhol if you train an AI on him and have it generate infinite works, and furthermore I think he'd be absolutely delighted at the notion, and would love exploring the unexplored conceptual space inside the neural net.

In a sense, an AI Warhol is megaWarhol, an unexplored level of Warholiness that wasn't attainable within his lifetime.

Context and intent matter. All of modern art ended up exploring these questions AS the artform itself, so boiling it down to 'did a specific person make a mark on a thing' won't work here.

This seems to me to confuse agency with interpretation - romanticising the life and character of the artist after their heyday and death, talking about what they would have done.

Any drawing Basquiat did is a piece of art by Basquiat, whether or not it fits into the narrative of a book/thesis/lecture/exhibition. The circle metaphor isn't important - replace it with anything else. Artists regularly throw their own work away. Some of this is saved and celebrated posthumously, some never sees the light of day in accordance with their wishes. Scraps that fell on Picasso's floor sell for huge amounts of money.

Does everything he did fit the "brand" that some art historians have labelled him with, or the "brand" that auction houses promote to increase value, or the "brand" which a fashion label licenses for t-shirts? No, but I suspect this is probably what you are talking about ie. a "classic" Basquiat™ with certificate of authenticity?

Is it by Basquiat? vs Is it a Basquiat?

Human artists cannot produce thousands of works in a few hours.

This arguments come up in every thread, and I'm baffled that people don't think the scale matters.

You may also be observed in public areas by police, but it would be an orwellian dystopia to have millions of cameras in spaces analyzing everyone's behavior in public.

Scale matters.

(But I'm indeed in favor of weaker copyright laws! But preferably to take power away from the copyright monopolies than the individual artists who barely get by with their profits)

> it would be an orwellian dystopia to have millions of cameras in spaces analyzing everyone's behavior in public.

Aren't there already 80M+ surveillance cameras in the US?

Outside of the US, London seems to have a lot of CCTV cameras.

Do privacy laws restrict how they can be used and whether they can be monitored by AI systems?

> It would be interesting to see if this technology can erode the copyright concept a bit

What I expect instead is artists being sued by a big tech company for copyright violations because that big tech company used the artist Public Domain image for training their copyrighted AI and as a result it created a copyrighted copy of the original artist's image.

My bet is that big corporations won’t risk suing anyone over a supposed copyright on generated images,as there is a good chance that a court ends up stating that all AI generated images are in fact public domain (no author, not from the original intent and idea of a human)

You can already see the quite strange and toned down language they use on their sites. (And for some the revealing reversal from we licence to you to you licence to us)

Some smaller AI companies might believe they own a clear cut copyright and sue, but it would make sense that they would either be thrown out or loose

So, the US Copyright Office will already refuse to issue a copyright for text-prompt-generated AI art, at least if you try a stunt like naming the artist to be the AI program itself.

However, even if an image is not copyrightable, it can still infringe copyright. For example, mechanical reproductions of images are not copyrightable in the US[0] - which is why you even can have public domain imagery on the web. However, if I scan a copyrighted image into my computer, that doesn't launder the copyright away, and I can still be sued for having that image on my website.

Likewise, if I ask an AI to give me someone else's copyrighted work[1], it will happily regurgitate its training set and do that, and that's infringement. This is separate from the question of training the AI itself; even if that is fair use[2], that does nothing for the people using the AI because fair use is not transitive. If I, say, take every YouTube video essay and review on a particular movie and just clip out and re-edit all the movie clips in those reviews, that doesn't make my re-edit fair use. You cannot "reach through" a fair use to infringe copyright.

[0] In Europe there's a concept of neighboring rights, where instead of issuing you a full copyright you get 20 years of ownership instead. This is intended for things like databases and the like. This also applies to images; copyright over there distinguishes between artistic photography (full copyright) and other kinds of photography (20 years neighboring right only). This is also why Wikimedia Commons has a hilarious amount of Italian photos from the 80s in a special PD-Italy category.

[1] Which is not too difficult to do

[2] My current guess is that it is fair use, because the AI can generate novel works if you give it novel input.

> So, the US Copyright Office will already refuse to issue a copyright for text-prompt-generated AI art, at least if you try a stunt like naming the artist to be the AI program itself.

That’s because only humans can own copyrights. People can and have registered copyrights for Midjourney outputs.

> Copyright law (especially in US) only ever changes in the direction that suits corporations. So - no.

There's certainly arguments to be made in this direction, for example corporations tending to have the most money they can afford to spend on lobbying to get their way, but the attitude of "it hasn't been good up 'til now so it definitely can't ever be good" is pretty defeatist and would imply that positive change is impossible in any area.

In this situation, it would seem like the suit would end up at "comparing the timestamp at which the public domain and copyrighted versions were published", wouldn't it ?

There is nothing that the generative AI can do in this process that's legally different from copy pasting the image, editing it a bit by hand, and somehow claiming intellectual property of the _initial_ image, no ?

In theory yes, in practice you have to pay your legal expanses in US even if you win the case. Which means you can bankrupt because a big company thought you infringed on their rights even if you didn't. Simply because you can't afford the costs.

It's absurd.

>Copyright law (especially in US) only ever changes in the direction that suits corporations. So - no.

Just objectively false.

Counterexample?

AI tools aren't people. We don't have to treat them the same.

Doesn't your argument in the first paragraph assume that the methods by which humans derive new works from past experiences is equivalent to the way statistical models iteratively remove noise from images based on a set of abstract features derived from an input prompt?

That seems to be the core of the issue, and a much more interesting conversation to have. So why do I keep seeing a version of your first paragraph everywhere and not an explanation on why the assumption can be made?

The problem is not that people aren't owning ideas hard enough, ideas shouldn't be ownable in this way, the problem is that we've created a system that's obsessed with scarcity and collecting rents. Being able to own and trade ideas a la copyright/patents helps people who can buy copyrights and patents stifle creativity more than it helps artists gather reward for their creation (though it does both).

Human endeavor is inherently collaborative. The idea that my art is my virgin creation is an illusion perpetuated by capitalists. My art is the work of thousands who came before me with my slight additions and tweaks.

Your (and in general, our) suggestion that we should be concerned with respecting or even expanding these protections is incorrect if you want human creativity to flourish.

You misunderstand me. I am strongly in favor of abolishing all intellectual property restrictions. Here is me arguing just that two days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33697341

But I am absolutely not in favor of keeping IP restrictions in place and then letting big corporations scoop up the works of small independent artists for their ML models.

Think of it in terms of software licenses. The people who write GPL protected software are leveraging existing copyright laws to enforce distribution of their code. They would probably be in favor of abolishing the entire IP rights system. But if a big corporation was copying a project from an independent creator that was GPL licensed, they’d sure as hell want to prosecute.

I believe strongly that IP restrictions are harmful. But keeping them in place while letting big corporations benefit from the work of independent artists who don’t want their work used in this way seems wrong to me. As long as artists wouldn’t expect anyone else to be able to copy their works, I’d like them to be able to consent to their work being used in these systems.

Ahh, I don't think that stance is evident from the GP but fair enough. I may even have a less fervent hate for IP protections than you do.

> But keeping them in place while letting big corporations benefit from the work of independent artists who don’t want their work used in this way seems wrong to me.

I see what you're saying here. My concern is that should copyright style protection be extended to the "vibe" or "style" of a painting it is going to be twisted in a way that ends up being used to silence/abuse artists in the same way that copyright strikes are already.

I think the idea that art is mostly individually creative vs mostly drawing upon the work of all the artists and art-appreciators around you and before you is already really problematic. The corrupting power of the idea is what I worry about. Similarly to crypto/NFTs, the idea that scarcity should exist in the digital world is the most dangerous thing, most of the other bad stems from that.

IMO the most important thing to work on is getting people to reject the idea itself as harmful.

I worry that any short term fix to try to prop up artists' rights in response to this changing landscape will become a long term anchor on our society's equity and cultural progress in the exact same way copyright is.

When I was younger, I also thought that way. I also felt that being artist has nothing to with money: a true artist will always create out of their internal need, not for money.

Then came the brutal reality: creating high-quality artwork needs time. Some can be created after work, but not that much. Some forms of art require expensive instruments. Some, like filmmaking, require collaboration and coordination of many people. So yes, I could do some forms of art part-time using the money from my day job, but I knew it was a far cry from what I could do when working on it full time. It's not capitalism, it's just reality.

Yeah, if you want artists to be able to devote their lives to their craft and reach the highest possible levels, they have to get paid enough to do that.

If all artists are "weekend warriors", they will still produce a lot of art, and some of it will be the best in that world. But the quality will be far from what we enjoy today.

That said, there are of course other ways to pay artists than the capitalist way of having customers pay for what they like. But I think the track record firmly favors a capitalist system.

It's almost like "capitalism" isn't something that needs to be created and forced upon people, it's just the way a world where energy isn't free and can not be created from thin air works. Capitalism is just that, the realization that there's no free lunches and no UBIs are possible without some serious unintended consequences. I pirate everything I consume, but I would never be such an hypocrite to say that all copyright must be abolished.

What? No. Capitalism is a more specific system for organizing goods and services, wherein the means of production and distribution of those goods and services (buildings, land, machines and other tools, vehicles etc) are privately owned and operated by workers (who are paid a wage) for the profit of the owners. That's only been the norm for a few hundred years, and only in certain places. Also, capitalism is separate from copyright and other IP, though IP as currently implemented is pretty obviously a capitalist concept.

> That's only been the norm for a few hundred years, and only in certain places.

Can you point to a system that worked well before that you'd like to go back to?

Your question assumes the only alternatives involve going back, not forwards. There are still many untried sociopolitical systems.

At the moment I'd rather not get involved in an online argument about which economic systems are better than than which other ones... especially not on a forum run by a startup accelerator, with a constraint that my preferred system has to be more than 300 years old.

I just wanted to point out that capitalism is in fact a specific economic system. It's not a law of nature, or another word for "markets" or "freedom", or a realization that some other system doesn't work.

That's one of the great victories of capitalism: somehow it has convinced people that a 300 year-old economic system originating in north-western Europe is as natural as the air we breathe, and as inevitable as gravity or any natural law.

You have to threaten to shoot people to get them to practice any other -ism.

So, yes, capitalism in the sense of the freedom to trade one's labor does appear to be naturally and universally emergent in advanced human societies, in the absence of violent interference.

Capitalism has violent coercion at its core, in order to enforce its property rights. You simply think that that violence is legitimate and unproblematic because you believe the system it upholds is "natural" and legitimate, but at this point you're arguing in circles. But to say that capitalism is not violent is laughable.

Capitalism is certainly not characterized by the absence of violent interference.

Yes, it is. The violence comes in when you interfere with capitalism. It's not imposed upon you forcefully, you just aren't allowed to get in the way.

To the extent that certain aspects of capitalism lead to violence, those are elements that other parties -- generally corporations or governments rather than writers or philosophers -- added to the ideology.

People die trying to break out of non-capitalist countries, while they die trying to break in to capitalist ones. That's one possible way to tell the good guys from the bad guys.

> Yes, it is. The violence comes in when you interfere with capitalism.

Ahahah, I absolutely love this sentence. You might have said the quiet part out loud though.

“You gots to understand”, said Fat Tony, “I'm not a violent man. The violence simply comes in when you interfere with my business.”

(Shrug) Taking peoples' rights away, including their economic rights, is likely to get the hurt put on you. Ric Romero has more on this late-breaking story at 11.

It sounds funny but he may have a point. It's not a quality of capitalism per se, had it been communism instead then communism would have been the best system for the present moment.

But capitalism prevails and may be the best system there is for now because I cannot fathom a change in system overnight that would not result in mass suffering for (almost) everyone.

Paying people to make art is older than “capitalism”. Capitalism is when you can own and trade capital, not when you pay people to do things.

The restrictions on creating art are the product of the society you live in, which means they are the product of capitalism if you live in a capitalist society. The way society is organised determines the cost of people's time, the cost of the tools, and the cost of the materials.

Yea I find when people say "ideas shouldn't be ownable" it's really the more general "deriving profit from private ownership was a mistake". Like you kinda point out, most of the reason I can think of that a person would want control of their intellectual property is to derive profit from it.

That reason has nothing to do with intellectual property or how it's created, it's a consequence of living in a capitalist society.

Perhaps no one wants "your art"? 99% of artists who produce something worthwhile very much care about money/copyright.

The there still is the question of attribution, which 100% of real artists care about.

So anybody who just wanted a thing to exist, and don't care who gets the credit, aren't "real artists"? You must not work on any large art projects that involve other people.

99%? You might have it in reverse because most art is not produced by "fulltime" artists. I would even go as far and say 99% of art is not produced to earn money.

Yup, it really is a good thing they haven't been forced to use open images.

No one is ever going to stop using all the available images until there is a law against it. Why would they?

I've seen many arguments about getting laws on the books around ML learning. I would suggest people create a project that creates movies using ML and train it using existing Hollywood movies. I realize this isn't easy but the issue needs to be pushed to people that have the means to force change.

There are already laws against it but enforcement is laking, as always.

If you can't process/digest copyrighted content with algorithms/machine learning then Google Search (the whole thing, not just Image Search) is dead.

So no, it's not at all clear where the legal lines are drawn. There have been no court cases yet, regarding the training of ML models. People are trying to draw analogies from other types of cases, but this has not been tried in court yet. And then the answer will likely differ based on country.

> If you can't process/digest copyrighted content with algorithms/machine learning then Google Search (the whole thing, not just Image Search) is dead.

Not if Google honors the robots.txt like they say they do. Hosting content with a robots.txt saying "index me please" is essentially an implicit contract with Google for full access to your content in return for showing up in their search results.

Hosting an image/code repository with a very specific license attached and then having that licensed ignored by someone who repackages that content and redistributes it is not the same as sites explicitly telling Google to index their content.

A much closer comparison IMO would be someone compressing a massive library of copyrighted content and then redistributing it and arguing it's legal because "the content has been processed and can't be recovered without a specific setup". I don't think we'd need prior court cases to argue that would most likely be illegal, so I don't see how machine learning models differ.

LAION/StableDiffusion is already legal under the same exemptions as Google Image Search and does respect robots.txt. It was also created in Germany so US court cases wouldn’t apply to it.

Google also indexes sites without robots.txt. Also, it's not mere classic indexing but ML processing too.

No, it has not yet been demonstrated that the current copyright laws forbid the use of copyrighted images to train neural networks.

The moment you make money from it the law is pretty clear.

No, it isn’t. Why are you lying?

Can't wait for law enforcement to start arresting people for looking at images.

As long as they aren't repackaging and redistributing them, why would looking at them be illegal?

You're training your model. Maybe it's producing art that becomes illegal.

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