US rejects AI copyright for famous state fair-winning Midjourney art
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
copyright exists in the US under this clause in the constitution:
> “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”
not sure how letting people copyright the output of a program that ate the work of a million other people would "promote the progress of science and useful arts"? or how there's an author to reward? or how there's writings or discoveries?
of course this also applies to the US endlessly extending copyright also - nothing Congress can do, no matter how well intentioned, is going to encourage Walt Disney himself to produce anything new of value, nor did keeping Happy Birthday copyrighted until 70 years after the last Hill sister died assist any of them in coming back to life to come up with a second hit.
the dumb optimistic part of my dreams that having matrix multiplications shitting out words and pictures will cause a reassessment of why we let IP laws get so fucked up to begin with, but of course, it won't - it'll just mean Disney and Warner et al will find some way to keep selling tv shows and movies and the humans who produced the art who get shoved into the matrices get shafted.
What does this mean for code generated by GitHub Copilot and friends, and IP assignment contracts?
how do you prove you wrote a particular novel?
The forensics for that are easy.
The forensics here are hard: how does a plaintiff in the USA prove that an AI, and not a person, wrote a novel, when the authors live in China?
I agree with you. It's a mess.
AI output should be copyrightable, but only if the provenance of its input is carefully audited. That is, the owner of its output owns or licenses all copyrights of its inputs. An artist that trains a model on only her own work should be able to copyright its output.
Midjourney is IP theft to the degree that it was trained on copyrighted work without permission.
Why?
If she made a LORA, well she's using someone else's Stable Diffusion checkpoint, which was trained on things she wasn't permitted to use.
If she made a fine tune, same thing.
If she trains the UNets and the VAE from scratch, on just her own work, what did she use for conditioning? CLIP? Which was trained on LAION2b?
Did she also train her own text encoder? What is her conditioning approach?
All these models, why are we talking about them? If it weren't for training on the unpermissioned data, these models would be toiling away in obscurity.
If someone conducts a bunch of unethical medical research, and they discover some important biomechanics, do I get to repeat all of that stuff, "but ethically?" Am I untainted? If the police discover real evidence in a procedurally problematic way, for example by torturing a confession that turns out to be true, do they get a "do-over"?
> but only if the provenance of its input is carefully audited
All I am saying is, you haven't "carefully audited" the feel-good story "artist that trains a model on only her own work should be able to copyright its output."
Everything I talked about is to illustrate that it is impracticable to resolve the issue of authorship by doing something like, "I got permission for the data."
The first step on the expanding brain meme is understanding all the stuff I wrote, it basically means "in order for the generative AI technology to work, you use a lot of other people's unpermissioned data in many, many ways, that are impractical to replace."
The second step in the expanding brain meme is to understand that your opinion, "if you use art you have permission for in a generative AI model, you're In The Ethical Right," is co-opted by Adobe. Because they happen to have the good fortune to run an image licensing bureau, so they can "get permission" for "the data" and you were convinced that's "all they need." When of course, they use tons of unpermissioned data, because that's how these models work, but you just don't know enough about the problem yet to understand that. So you're going around essentially astroturfing this feel good position that has no stronger technical basis than doing what CivitAI users do. It just has a really appealing starch to it.
It is very clear that artists whose art was used to train AI have copyright interest in that AI's output. The implementation details of the model are irrelevant to the interest. The technical difficulty of auditing its inputs' provenance is irrelevant to that interest.
Output from AI should be non-mercantile.
Why? Because most text/images used by AI company to create, test then pretrain/train their tools are creative common /unlicensed (I trained/fine-tuned an OCR in 2016), and thus, copyrighting the output of any model would be stealing from the general public.
"Most"? If any of the training inputs are copyrighted and the AI company does not own or license the work, nor applies all licenses correctly, then the AI company should be liable for copyright infringement.
There's really no other way forward as a society, otherwise creatives' work can always just be stolen at will by laundering it through an AI model. There would be no incentive for the next HR Geiger or Moebius to work hard on a distinctive aesthetic when anyone with a computer could make art just like theirs.
If all of an AI input is public domain, I'm not sure I agree with you but I think your argument has some merit.
Let's say you have all the IP of a LORA. Nice. Now, the model you're using will output something similar to your copyrighted work, but this will be barely .001 percent of what the model used. Most (if not all) other images it used will be cc, unlicensed (most images on the internet) or copyrighted but unidentifiable.
In this case, even if the output resemble the copyrighted work used for the Lora, the rights should be owned by the public.
My opinion is that it should be copyleft (because you can't possibly attribute all the work used for the generated image, so the only fair use is copyleft use).
You keep saying "most". I get that you believe copyright infringement is orthogonal to your point, but it's really not.
If you can argue your point by saying "all, 100%" free and clear - public domain or otherwise permitted by the owners - then I can consider your point.
Otherwise, no, the model does not produce copyleft or public domain work. It's copyright infringement and IP theft.
"Unlicensed" does not mean it is not under copyright, by the way. CC usually means there are restrictions or requirements for use. Attribution, for instance.
But if the model were trained only on public domain work, I'm still not completely convinced. Perhaps. I do find Jason M. Allen's argument more compelling than Tamara Pester's
I don't see a middle ground here, and I fail to imagine see any real-world instance where it's logical that ai-generated images fall under copyright. It's either public domain or no public use (which, tbh, I think is fair too)
Here's a point of view on the difference between painters and everyone else: everyone else lives in the world and deals with its realities, but bonafide painters try to paint the world the way they wish it worked. Some even live the world the way they wish it worked, even when it doesn't make sense (like in terms of an objective reality), as long as they're alive they can do their thing and they can prove that something is possible, even if impracticable.
This isn't a bad thing.
If logical means, "the way orwin wants the world to work," then sure. You're doing the painter thing in the tech world. You said you want the copyright to be this way and the way things to work to be that way. If you want, you can write a license on a model that maybe you trained on all public domain data, and that the license says all the things it makes are also public domain, and maybe people go along and respect that license. This can all coexist with other stuff, it can be real.
It just doesn't mean it makes sense. Just because something happens doesn't mean it makes sense. Another way I've heard this put is, feelings that are more strongly felt are not more valid. That said, in my world, I know people try to pitch "give me a $25,000 grant to write a license," instead of engaging with the core creative part of the RFP, and they don't get the grant. There is little appetite for the painter's way of doing things in the tech world. That's a bad thing but it's also true.
Do we agree that in the _real_ world, it is impossible to determine which image have been used to generate the model (not talking about just the LORA part here).
So the solution i see is:
- we ban AI-generated image from public use because of IP: basically, the use of any image not in the public domain, even CC0, will cause that
- Most non-public-domain images on the internet you can use to train stuff are CC and CC0 (which is kinda public domain if i remember my wikipedia days). My point is: the majority of the images used to create the model (again, not the LORA part) are public domain or free to use as long as they are attributed. It's impossible to attribute according to what CC is demanding. The list would be impossible to find. So either we get back to the first sentence, and sue AI-generated images to oblivion, or the image are public domain/CC0.
Also, the legal point: the creator of the art isn't a human, so it isn't copyrightable. A curator do not have the copyright of the image/painting he found at a garage sale, even if he put a lot of effort to restore it.
The games market has been dealing with this for a while and things work out. We get original, meaningful games that are easily pirated, and original, meaningful game mechanics copied by giant, powerful corporations. Nonetheless those people thrive. So I don't know. This is a kind of doomerism that isn't going to play out, it's reacting to a lack of creativity among monetization for illustrators and a lack of opportunities that have always existed, rather than anything specific about the mechanics of laundering this or AI models that.
As AI advances radically over the next decade or two, it's going to end up being comically hypocritical to pretend humans are more deserving as originators.
What does that have to do with anything?
> “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”
Matrix maths isn’t a human so can’t be an author or inventor so there’s no reason to grant any protection to any of the results of any multiplication .
Here's my argument:
1. Copyright in some sense is probably a net win for society.
2. Copyright in it's current legal form in the US is - fucking unquestionably - abusive.
7 years with a 7 year renewal after review? Probably ok, feels long in today's digital age.
To the author's death? oof, that's a long time to protect works, but maybe I guess, in some specific fields of work.
To the author's death PLUS 70 fucking years? Get the fuck out of here. Literally - who the fuck other than giant corporations is POSSIBLY benefiting from this? This is a fucking insane level of protection, and is outrageously harmful to generating new content (Just take a peak at all the fucking remakes that constitute our new films, and the miserable content licensing restrictions that pop up everywhere and kill so many new things)
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So my stance is firmly: Yep, they probably are taking some of your work. But also: Your work is also grounded in the work of others (again - fucking unquestionably). Further - the copyright system at large is SO fucking harmful that I don't really think it should exist anymore (side note: I'm really underplaying my feelings here, "nuke it from orbit" is probably still an understatement... "I'd like to see it suffer before it dies" is probably close).
So... if you want to talk about bulk exploitation - go fucking yell at the current media companies, because holy fuck are they the worst fucking companies in the world to make this claim. They are leeches.
If you want me to step to your side: CURB THE FUCKING ABUSE.
Otherwise... you are the shitty cab company and the LLM is uber: Are they ethical? Eh - Nope. Are they unquestionable better for most people? Yes. Will I take a useful and unethical company over a stagnating and unethical company? Yes, yes I will. Would I prefer real governmental action to either of those? 100%.
If big art was a thing, your argument would be good, but Disney doesn't account for most of the input to these image algorithms.
But these people are already making essentially zero income from copyright (it's mostly tours/merch), and have been (again, and again, and again) utterly fucked by the current publishing companies that are so interested (financially) in killing this AI work.
They are already victims of the current system. I don't see how introducing AI changes their position all that much: They still have low bargaining power, low financial returns (avg is under 6k/year) and mostly aren't doing it as a career.
Are a few of them exceptions? Absolutely.
Will there keep being successful exceptions with AI: I'd bet yes (with a lot of cash).
Will the way they work change? Probably. Some will enjoy the change, and some won't.
I just don't see any compelling reason in your comment to argue to keep the current cluster-fuck of abuse that is modern copyright.
Arguing that the currently abused might continue to be abused might be a valid reason to reject both systems, but doesn't pass the bar to stopping AI works in my opinion.
To argue an alternative:
If anything - many indie artists might be much more successful if they're allowed to play/remix/sample/use works that are currently sitting unused behind the outrageous copyright duration we have right now.
If I go to an artist and say "make me a picture with X, Y, and Z features", they own the copyright unless they agree to transfer it to me. An AI tool never owns the copyright to its work because it's not a person, so you cannot acquire the copyright on the work since you didn't generate it.
It's an entirely different process from using Photoshop (&c), and I think conflating them requires either a significant lack of understanding of how AI-based generation tools work (the most common issue) or a deliberate desire to confuse the issue.
We will need to seriously revise copyright laws in the age of AI because this new technology is simply not compatible with the assumptions the current ones are based on. (regardless how much lobby power are in them)
> The Board finds that the Work contains more than a de minimis amount of content generated by artificial intelligence (“AI”), and this content must therefore be disclaimed in an application for registration.
The human-authored portion of the work would be copyrightable if the author disclaimed the portions that were created by an LLM.
Not that it doesn't make sense to say what they did, but it seems not quite compatible with how copyright already seems to work in practice. Which is, instead another demonstration that copyright in general is a pretty internally-inconsistent system when it comes to the details.
Did you, perhaps, write the stuff that the autocomplete used as context to give you a selection of choices to make about what to put there? Because that still sounds like a human making choices about things to me.
This is a vaguely recognizable metaphor for prompt engineering, but I think you're orders of magnitude off in estimating the ratio of human choice to computer extrapolation. Sure, a compiler or something maybe is a better metaphor, but even then the concept, the source material is generated by a human.
You could say that a prompt is source material and the generator is just a compiler analogy, but I think they made the only choice they could here. Otherwise you can use a generator to make literally a billion images, copyright them all (including aspects you did not make a choice to add, like details on people in the background there), and control art for the rest of time.
This is exactly the “sweat of the brow” argument for copyrightability that courts have consistently rejected in favor of a creativity requirement since long before AI tools existed, though, so its probably not the argument you want to make for copyrightability.
Could the creator of the ai producing code then hold copyright, or maybe it’s those who found the weights?
This ruling seems to suggest any method of automating works would not qualify for copyright.
If so. We are just one step closer to abandoning the notion of a copyright, which still is the only logical solution in a world where we can have and do anything we desire at the click of a button.
The "creator" of the art in that case is also the creator of the system which generates the art. You didn't create Stable Diffusion, MidJourney or whatever else, it's just a tool you have access to.
I'm not sure if that's a difference that should matter, but it's clearly a notable difference.
Again, this doesn't strike me as a useful standard for copyright, but I think it's the state of the law today. Obviously with new technology there's a need to revisit the law, and honestly even without the new tech copyright law was already a steaming mess.
Are paint brushes just tools people have access to, does the manufacturer of the paint brush own the painting?
Prompts are no different than positions and angles the artist instructs the tool to motion. The only real difference is the ratio of perceived work to output.
Even a prompt could take years to derive. I am 40. And 30 years ago I could have not com up with the following, making the prompt below 40 years in the making.
“Field of dead dreams, with copyright monsters flying above looking for there next meal”.
Spell check fixed a few things, along with typo correction, does Apple know own a copyright of my work?
Sure the latter requires less labor and a very different skill, but it's still a creative act.
https://www.ajournalofmusicalthings.com/heres-a-running-list...
It seems like currently the chain of ownership is so complicated and spread out that its not feasible. But I dont see a good claim by another party in your case. Best one might be a library or hardware but thats getting ridiculous.
Im not sure about the process for this image and im not sure what I think is fair, but “AI generated” is a wide spectrum.
Stable Diffusion and the like are much closer to when photoshop first appeared than they are to than the completely automatic art generation machine people make them out to be.
I remember well both digital cameras and photoshop receiving initial criticism from "real" artists... until they were both widely adopted by these communities.
The critique of digital photography was that it's not really art because you can just take a bajillion pictures and then filter out the ones that don't look good. Photoshop users (especially web comic creators) got similar flack that it didn't take real artistic skill to make nice images in photoshop.
For anyone young enough to always have photoshop and digital photography will likely be surprised that there was such resistance and snobbery around using these tools. There was also the same fear that these tools would ruin art by making "real" artists obsolete.
The test is not "input", but "authorship". If you commissioned some art from an artist, you would have input on what they make but the artist would be the author and copyright holder of their work.
Its hard for me to accept that the prompter "authored" the output of an LLM. The output of the LLM was entirely generated and authored by the LLM. It did so at your command, but that doesn't count as authorship.
This was just a bad decision about copyright, the only reason to support this distinction is to protect art and artists.
Not if the computer program uses GenAI, at least without disclosing and disclaiming from copyright the GenAI contribution, under the current (absolutely ludicrous) Copyright Office interpretation.
> If I as a programmer do creative work (ie programming), it should have the same support.
It does: neither copyright law nor the copyright office defines classes of people (“artists” vs. “computer programmers”) with different effects on if they create artwork with the same type of automated tooling.
The copyright office may make a spurious distinction between GenAI and other tools, but it doesn't distinction between classes of creator the way you seem to think is an issue that needs corrected.
We kind of already have automated image-processing today, where does it change from cr to not-cr. I can take creative photos and then edit them and I can own the the copyright. If I took my photo and used automated improvement tools (like in google photo), I think it's still copyrightable. Now I take my automated outdoor camera at my house and take pictures of things, then I put them through google photos in my automated image pipeline, I guess they are copyrightable?
Then I use those photos as input into a non-copyrightable-by-definition system like midjourney or whatever, now the output is not copyrightable. Seems pretty arbitrary. If an artist creates an artistic work (lets say it is a mirror of people), it's cr. If I as a software engineer create software, that software is cr. But the output of the cr is not cr?
It’s very easy to spend hours iterating on prompts for the perfect photo while using human judgment to figure out how to steer the image. That’s meaningful human involvement and should be able to be protected.
I dont know where the line is though and that really blurs the line between “AI tools” and “non AI tools”. Probably the “grayest” example ive seen.
This is a factor in shaping the legal treatment of work generated with the use of “AI” tools.
If I open Photoshop then via my inputs it indirectly generates pixels using various tools/brushes/automations, it is copyrightable.
If I open an LLM, enter a bespoke prompt, then the tool generates pixels using that prompt, it isn't copyrightable.
Things can be copyrightable even if there isn't a 1:1 between human input and copyright output. Where is the cut-off exactly? What about Photoshop's Content-Aware Fill, is that copyright or not?
What if I take LLM output then color correct it, is that now my copyright? Since it effectively has no authorship before I color shifted it.
But then again, fair use also allows citing most (if not all) of the short poem.
This is the difference between legal thinking and CS. There is a spectrum between 100% human-generated (and copyright-eligible) and 100% machine-generated (and ineligible), and in between there are gray areas.
To us, that is a problem, because it implies ambiguity. Where is the cut-off?
In law, that is normal. No actions are the same; everything is on a spectrum from allowed to illegal. Judging the boundary is made on a case-by-case basis through legal argument, evaluated by a judge or jury.
So to the Copyright Office, it is sufficient to say that this particular way of AI generating art doesn't involve enough human creativity. But you won't get them to define enough in the abstract, for any general case, because that is essentially impossible, and can only be done by evaluating concrete cases.
I think it's actually pretty damn easy to define "enough" precisely. If the AI + human generated image cannot be easily recreated by AI, than it's enough.
So, for example, random image from civit.ai which is nothing more than a prompt, and negative prompts. This fails the test because I can run the image through CLIP and get (almost) the same exact prompts used to generate it
Now let's say I generate an image using a bunch of custom tools and extensions, such as regional color-loss (i.e. top right of the image must be blue and I will force the model to prefer blue outputs), and leveraging a lora model at 0.3 weight trained on my kids sketch-book drawing style. There's no way for any AI model that hasn't been configured exactly by my human hands to deduce anything approaching the prompt used to generate it (CLIP/Other LLMs doesn't know about extensions and loras).
Courts need a bright-line here, balancing tests lead to miscarriages of justice, which is what looks like is going to happen here a lot.
For instance, consider your proposed test: The copyrightability of works would change retroactively depending on the capabilities of AI. Something that can't be reproduced by AI today could be next year. Is that a desirable outcome?
That's a terrible test, because the capabilities of LLMs are constantly evolving. And the words "easily" and "recreate" just creates more ambiguity.
Would you be on-board with the inverse of this?
You cannot copyright what cannot be generated by a human.
I often find it interesting how when these types of issues come up, technologists often interpret it using "transitive rules" that are natural in math and engineering, but "the real world" doesn't follow this logical progression. That is, if you have "A implies B, and B implies C, and C implies D, then A implies D". The problem is that in "the real world" there are enough slight differences at each step that most people feel that A does not imply D.
Point being, there are lots of comments here along the lines of "If creating art with a tool can be copyrighted, how is art created with Photoshop copyrightable but art created with AI is not". The difference is that most people (and, most importantly, the US Copyright Office) believe that AI crosses the line between being "just a tool" to actually being the author of significant parts of the work. The fact that that line is gray is not a fundamental problem, and as you point out it occurs all the time in the legal realm.
So you just got it wrong and A does not imply D. Obviously logic applies to the world outside math and computer science.
This is by no means settled legally either.
Normal, sure, but still a problem in the sense that they need to clarify it and try not to write ambiguous laws. The existence of the law, lawyers, and the whole judicial and lawmaking systems is proof that its difficult and complicated.
I just dont see the contrast with computer science here.
If you use a generative tool, we can no longer identify the source of every pixel, or if it derives from someone else's copyrighted work.
You can claim rights over the first, you cannot over the second. This line is pretty bright and identifiable.
There was a creative algorithm, and 99.999% of the time there was not a specification that determines every single bit.
The work output of the programmers, the thousands of people involved in that pipeline to create the software - "that's different", say the artists.
Drawing your art in Photoshop is clearly authorship. You are manipulating each pixel from scratch to be how you want it. There may be algorithms between your mouse clicks and the final product, but you as the author still have complete control of the whole art. You can tweak each pixel until its exactly how you want.
Asking an LLM for a picture of a duck is clearly not authorship. You did not create any pixels in that image, the LLM did. You just asked for it. Its no different than googling for a picture of a duck and claiming what you find because you engineered the google search query.
There is a lot of murkiness in between, where you take assets from an LLM and use them in your own creation. I think having to disclaim the assets which were not created by you is a very reasonable solution.
Example used above: I tell an artist to make me a picture of a dog. They created the image, and they own the copyright. They would have to give the copyright to me, I do not own it merely because I made the request.
For example, let's say that I generate a bunch of images using Automatic1111 (the main Stable Diffusion webUI). This webUI has hundreds of extensions which give tons of additional functionality. If I generate an image using two controlnets, regional prompting (human deciding where particular prompt or part of prompt is applied in resulting image), and fancy prompt engineering (i.e. blending embeddings of multiple tags together, or deciding to change the prompt midway through the diffusion process), then I claim that I have put in enough human authorship that I think current courts should grant copyright in such a situation.
The courts have decided that a human simply gathering a bunch of AI images into a kids book was "enough work" for the kids book to be copyrightable. If I put at least that kind of effort into making an image (i.e. by writing what is ultimately a program, see comfyUI workflows for a visual example), than I think that image should be owned by the human who wrote the program to generate it.
Courts are dangerously close to deciding that any diffusion model being used as part of the images creative process would nullify the ability to copyright it.
Yes, the book is, the images aren't.
> Courts are dangerously close to deciding that any diffusion model being used as part of the images creative process would nullify the ability to copyright it.
I honestly think it should. Generative AI can't exist without public domain/unlicensed work. Even if your Lora is 100% copyrighted/personal work, most of the images that constitute the model are public property.
Sale with any stuff written by ChatGPT, or any code by copilot. All should be open-source or public domain,at least. To me it should even be copyleft,so the book (to come back to it) should be public domain too.
What about AI generated media that includes / incorporates copyrighted elements, but used the legal loophole of parody? As parody, anyone can include copyright protected elements of others in their original works under US copyright law because satire is protected speech.
If someone were to create a "satire AI" does that completely break copyright law?
Midjourney was made by humans.
Were I to construct a robot that wandered about randomly snapping hundreds of photos, then I select one of the photos, apply Photoshop filters and then win an award, it sounds like the review board would reject registration.
If I trained an AI model only on my own illustrations alone, it sounds like they would reject copyright registration.
In all of these cases, humans were involved at every step.
In the context of the Copyright Office’s previous few decisions this makes sense.
Midjourney is toast if it does nothing to stop the by-design inertia of the quasi-caselaw way these things are decided.
The source of the most flaws in the Zarya of the Dawn registration rejection came from the Copyright Office copying and pasting deeply flawed technical explanations directly from Midjourney. It’s on Midjourney and no one else. They ought to be paying a great IP firm to submit rebuttals on behalf of losing users, but whatever.
“Yeah bro, but predict the future.” In this particular case, you're going to be able to register AI generated artwork - maybe not in the specific way that Midjourney does it, because the Copyright Office isn't going to pull their own pants down after issuing the Zarya of the Dawn decision, pulling their pants back up, in reaction to social media pulling their pants down. But ControlNets and T5-style grammatically substantive prompts will do.
The recent Andy Warhol decision and the way Google Books actually panned out means Stability and Runway are boned, and probably Midjourney too. The Author's Guild-like litigants will get a small payout, they will not prevail in a huge way, but they will prevail - they actually prevailed in Google Books too but people don't understand that, the news reported it as "Google won" but it actually lost in that it settled and didn't get to do any of the things it really wanted to do.
Meta will be forced to stop distributing its tainted LLaMA, express permission will be needed for all intents and purposes, but academics will be "fair use." I don't know if there's going to be some loophole to academize their work, it's just going to be hard to argue that compute resources and devops - the things Stability's, Runway's, Meta's teams really bring to the table compared to the academy - mean they ought to benefit from the same protections as a traditional education institution, in spite of being commercial entities.
It remains to be seen what will happen with Adobe's efforts. Nobody would be talking about latent diffusion models or pixel diffusers or whatever if it weren't for the fact that they were trained on content that wasn't expressly permitted. So it doesn't matter if Adobe got express permission for the training inputs of its models, so long as it's also using this code that maybe wasn't "trained" (in the ML sense) on unpermissioned content in this particular case but was definitely authored in the context of unpermissioned content in an equally essential way. It's the same reason you can't conduct unethical human research and launder it into something clean. It taints everything.
Anyway, I doubt Adobe trained their own text encoder unencumbered. It's acutely obvious with these community efforts at "training" stable diffusion "checkpoints" on "CC0" content. My dudes, you're using CLIP, which is trained on LAION 2b. It's just so painfully low information. Adobe will not prevail.
But Adobe surely will convince the low information bros that their way is bulletproof. In an intellectually honest way, nobody using diffusers or transformers with permissioned content will just get away with it.
My opinion is the tools are here, whether we like it or not, so AI as a thing will remain in some form, it's just that these efforts where people train on anyone else's content is where things fall apart and thus it will not look like how it looks today, where you have a company or a community effort that provides a NN trained on other people's data. Instead, the data generators and the AI trainers will have to be the same person or entity (company). If I for example trained an LLM on the code I've generated since I was 16 and made a nooberminGPT, it would be fine because I won't sue myself.
The only other way things could generally work is like how artists sign their copyrights to be owned by a company or publisher, basically people or entities will have to sell their content to be trained instead of it being trained on for free...And then we'll see old fashioned exploitation, basically people being suckered into contracts where they sign their life away, but it will be on paper as opposed to now where it's the wild west and you can take anyone's content without asking.
That's like saying you don't need IRB approval to inject yourself with your experimental research chemicals. That's true, but it's impracticable. It's as rare as monkeys taking pictures of themselves, which did produce an interesting but objectively bullshit copyright registration decision. It might as well be random at that scale.
nooberminGPT is impracticable because GPTs won't generalize on your tiny dataset, if that's all they're trained on. Making your own math is impracticable, your own alternative to transformers, because you need commercial-entity-scale resources to run that research program. Nobody could have proven that transformers work as well as they do without all the unpermissioned data, and we're talking about it only because it was proven to work. I mean transformers were just as powerful when they were first conceived as Python code, in an objective sense, but we're talking about it because of the data. And if you allow that something changed between that stuff entering the researcher's consciousness and actually reacting to the results of experiments on unpermissioned data, which is definitely true, transformers and diffusers are irreparably tainted.
> where it's the wild west and you can take anyone's content without asking.
Like long term, if you put something on the Internet, you are implicitly saying that people can do whatever the fuck they want with it. Video games, as an industry and creative pursuit, have evolved, in a Darwinian way, within that objective reality for a long time. And consequently the multiplayer backend servers are highly protected, the clients are free, there's a thriving indie scene of easily pirated games, there's a thriving first party market of expensive prestige single player titles, and the video game industry is huge and makes tons of money, and it has no more (or fewer) exploited creatives toiling in it than any other creative industry, except that they are compared to novelists, actors and directors, always toiling away in obscurity. All of this works.
That Hollywood and book publishers are struggling to innovate monetization at all isn't really the copyright office's problem; that these models can generate images and text, which directly threatens Hollywood and doesn't really move the needle on video games, is also not really the copyright office's problem. The AI stuff is a red herring for deeper problems.
Did you read the EULA of the LLM you're using closely enough?
I know that sounds shifty and underhanded, but the providers of these services have every right to slide a little nugget into their EULA that shares the rights to your prompts with them. Most even explicitly say they'll use prompts and other data to "improve the offering".