I have a ton of respect for calligraphers and believe they are artists, but at the same time I don't think that the millions of people who create custom fonts or use custom fonts are doing a bad thing.
Just to be clear, I think art made with AI also can have value because it's a tool after all. My concern is, it breaks the business for the people that feeds on and that's not OK.
Why not? This is a website that's filled with programmers, almost all of our wealth is built on the skulls of jobs that once existed, and those programs were built without the consent of the people whose jobs were automated away, often through observing and rewriting the processes they used to do.
The standard, this has been going on for decades, the only reason it's getting backlash is because this is a group of people who never expected to have this happen to them.
continuing to transform things which in part centered around exploration, discovery and experimentation into something cold and kind of dumb
like we will make some interesting things but it's the general trend of modern society that upsets people everything just getting easier/worse faster
I think the pushback is around status and elitism, and that people with certain backgrounds are societally expected to be not making art.
Almost everything computers do was once done by a person, and the people who did those jobs laid the framework for which the processes were automated through.
This has happened dozens of times. My entire job is writing software that was written in the 80s, which replaced customer service reps who are needed in the '70s, and the computer does what they used to do. It took what they invented, their processes, and made the computer do it.
This is what automation is. It's always built on top of, and replaced, human beings who used to do those jobs.
That’s kind of the whole point of this debate. Should we change the laws and if so, how?
Style itself is not copyrighted, and that's a good thing.
I can create copyrighted content privately. I cannot share it. Law doesn't forbid imagination, wether human or ai and that's a good thing. But I cannot distribute these private rendition already without violating the content owner copyright.
Law seem pretty complete and well defined to me.
Are there cases where an ai and a human can generate the same media but which result in the media having different legality?
I don't think lawyers would agree with you at all.
> Just because an ai (or a human) comes out with a copyrighted character in a novel pose, it doesn't mean it's not copyrighted
My understanding is that there isn't a legal consensus on whether or not thats true. Copyright law wasn't written with AI generated art in mind. For a work to be copyrightable, my understanding is that it requires that you can make a "sweat off my brow" argument. Ie, you had to work to create something.
Does an AI count? We don't know. Or to put it in other terms, we haven't (collectively) decided as a society whether it should be copyrightable.
On the other side, "fair use" arguments are also at play here. If I train a 1bn parameter model on 5bn images, I could probably make an argument that 1/5th of a f16 probably constitutes fair use of copyrighted work. If that argument holds, I can train my model with impunity on any amount of copyrighted work so long as my model is small and the number of training examples is large.
Will that argument sway a court room? I have no idea. Is that fair? I don't know!
The law is decided by people. And we haven't had AIs like stable diffusion and ChatGPT before, so the laws haven't been written with this stuff in mind. There isn't even a legal precedent yet for how the current laws should apply to AI art. Speculating is fun, but speculating on how a judge will apply old laws to a totally novel problem is a fool's errand.
If you want to read about fun edge cases to copyright law, look up the history of copyright law for maps (can facts be copyrighted?) and how that interacts with trap streets.
This stuff is hairy and complicated even for lawyers. As an outsider, boldly claiming that copyright law is simple only demonstrates that you don't understand law. It'd be like a lawyer boldly arguing (with no knowledge) that compilers are simple.
The worst is that weight may be considered storage, but the point is... Law already covers that. Because it doesn't concern with technology, but with results of actions.
That is the whole problem with the argumentation, law is technology agnostic, just adding a layer of redirection doesn't matter, because tm it cares about the input and the output not what happens in between.
What makes you think that?
The law cares about whatever lawyers decide to care about. There was a case a few years ago where (if memory serves) a black woman sued an insurance company for discrimination after the insurance company refused to provide her cover. The company was using a neural net to decide whether to cover someone. The court demanded they explain the neural networks' decision - and of course, they couldn't. The insurance company lost the case.
In the aftermath they moved from a neural net to a decision tree based ML system. The decision tree made slightly worse decisions, but they figured if it lowered their legal exposure, it was worth it. With a decision tree, they can print out the decision tree if they were ever sued again and hand it to a judge.
> law is technology agnostic
Clearly not in this case.
There's plenty of other examples if you go looking. In criminal law, they care a great deal about the technology used in forensic analysis - both in its strengths and weaknesses.
If you don't know much about law, being humble and wrong will serve you better than being confident and wrong.
Also, differential insurance coverage tends to be one of the worst ways that systemic racism is perpetuated.
And again that case is technology agnostic, discrimination law requires you to be able to provide proof that results are non discriminatory, law itself doesn't care that it was specifically a neural network, it only cares about the end result, the firm lost because it failed to provide required data about their decision process, not because it was using neural networks, that they used a neural network was irrelevant on its own, and it could have been fine if they baked explainability in it.
Yeah, software "doesn't seem too complicated" to non-programmers too.
No offense, but if you aren't a lawyer then your opinion on legal matters has about as much veracity as a dentist explaining how software is made.
I have a certain amount of scorn for non-engineers telling me how their app idea is a weekend job and I should do it for free. I'm sure lawyers feel the same way about us when we claim there are easy answers around stable diffusion and copyright law.
The AI was trained without permission on copyrighted data. If it was as cut and dry as you claim then why do both parties think its worth going to court?
I don't know much about the law, but I know enough to recognise when its a job for the lawyers to figure out.
It's a good thing I never mentioned right or wrong.