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Comment by agomez314 | Hacker News Reader

Probably because they disdain the use of AI being used to copy their IP and distribute it at "machine" scale? Not an artist myself but can imagine I'd be pissed off that a bot is replicating my art with random changes.

HOWEVER, if a person were to ask for permission to use my pictures to feed into an AI to generate a number of images, and that person _selected_ a few and decided to sell them, I wouldn't have a problem with that. Something to do with the permission provided to the artist and an editing/filtering criteria being used by a human makes me feel ok with such use.

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What you're describing is basically copyright, which is exactly what artists are demanding: the legal protection to which they are entitled to.

Edit: Silicon Valley exceptionalism seems to preclude some thought leaders in the field to remember the full definition of copyright: it's an artist's exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work.

A number of additional provisions, like fair use, are meant to balance artists' rights against public interest. Private commercial interest is not meant to be covered by fair use.

No one is disputing that everyone, including companies in the private sector, is entitled to using artists' images for AI research. But things like e.g. using AI-generated images for promotional purposes are not research, and not covered by fair use. You want to use the images for that, great -- ask for permission, and pay royalties. Don't mooch.

Copyright (in the US) also includes fair use provisions of which education and research is a fair use of copyrighted work for which no permission from the artist is needed

> fair use provisions of which education and research is a fair use

I don't think people are debating fair use for education and research. It's the obvious corporate and for profit use which many see coming that is the issue. Typically, licensing structures were a solution for artists, but "AI" images seem to enable for-profit use by skirting around who created the image by implying the "AI" did, a willful ignorance of the way that the image was generated/outputted.

>>I don't think people are debating fair use for education and research. It's the obvious corporate and for profit use

Sounds like you are, because in copyright law there is not carve out for only non-profit education / research. Research and Education can be both profit and non-profit, copyright law does not distinguish between the 2, but it sounds like you claim is research can only ever be non-profit but given the entire computing sector in large part owes itself to commercial research (i.e Bell Labs) I find that a bit odd

Doesn't fair use make a distinction in the use though? Fair use in terms of commentary on something for instance is not the same as a company presenting marketing images, for example, as theirs in the selling of a product. If someone has legally protected their artwork, you can't just apply a photoshop layer to it and claim it is yours as fair use though, right? The issue seems to become almost more about provenance.

>If someone has legally protected their artwork, you can't just apply a photoshop layer to it and claim it is yours as fair use though, right?

That depends on what the layer was, and there is current cases heading to supreme court that have something similar to that so we may see

however commentary is just one type of fair use and would not be a factor here, nor is anyone claiming the AI is reselling the original work. The claim is that copyright law prevents unauthorized use of a work in the training of AI, AI training could (and likely would) be treated as research, and the result of the research is a derivative work wholly separate from the original and created under fair use

The copyright to what exactly though? Imagine you're an artist that draws abstract paintings of trees. If an AI uses those, the results it produces will be generic abstract trees in your style. And since I doubt that you can copyright trees, you would have to copyright your specific style. But is that possible?

It is not possible. And EU law (which is where these models were trained) has explicit allowances for machine learning anyway.

Artists have always been inspired by each other and copied each other's styles and ideas.

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