Have they removed copyrighted "training" material or are they still relying on people's hard work which they "learned from" without consent and are selling without permission?
"DALL·E 3 is designed to decline requests that ask for an image in the style of a living artist. Creators can now also opt their images out from training of our future image generation models."
Very carefully-worded statement. So...still relying on people's hard work, but on the upside, you get to opt out of having your work be fodder for DALL·E4." </s>
* using living artists work to train models = good
* generating living artists work using said models = bad
Good ethical consistency from the OpenAI crew
An artist tracing an image in an artbook and selling it = bad
Seems consistent to me
An artist using an artbook as reference material = good
An artist with one billion arms, using every artbook ever published, creating millions of images per second in every possible style for fractions of a penny per image, outcompeting every other artist forever = bad
Or maybe one could argue that because it's owned?
If, however, the rights holder chooses to just give them away; or, y'know, puts them on their own website for anyone to look at - there is then no license fee to be paid for looking.
Note that this still does not mean someone can make copies and sell them. That's a separate right. But using such materials as a reference is just fine, and people do this all the time.
This even applies if the AI copies an artists art style (in the same vein as a human looking at one artists art over a weekend and then being commissioned to paint something in the same style, which is completely legal since you can't copyright an art style; although Adobe would love that[0]).
(I would also argue that it learns and generates images in ways that are non-human, just based on speed and scale alone)
But systems of law are still capable of recognizing the distinction between the personhood of corporations and of people, just as they can recognize the difference between humans and AI even if AIs can be demonstrated to "learn" the way humans do. As always, context and nuance matter. Laws aren't written or decided upon based on pure logic or calculus but on what human beings want and consider to be in their self-interest.
If you wouldn't be able to sue a painter over producing an image, why should you be allowed to sue a programmer over producing that image?
Also another thing that's been on my mind is I wonder if all this AI generation stuff could cause a Games Industry style crash where due to such a over saturation of highly advertised but meaningless/worthless AI content consumers lose interest and stop spending money in different respective industries (books, ganes, films, digital art, music, etc.) and then they crash.
https://investor.shutterstock.com/news-releases/news-release...
More transparency about the training data, as always, would be greatly appreciated.
You can't do that. It's copyright-maximalist copyright infringement.
Copyright in the United States was drafted into the Constitution as a way of rewarding creators so they could create more.
They're already being rewarded, perhaps too handsomely, there is no need to extend it further. If they persist in trying to take more than they're given, then the public will just need to revoke the privilege. It's not a human right.
It's in your own fucking link for godsakes.
Also in my "own fucking link":
> Prior to the invention of movable type in the West in the mid-15th century, texts were copied by hand and the small number of texts generated few occasions for these rights to be tested. During the Roman Empire, a period of prosperous book trade, no copyright or similar regulations existed, copying by those other than professional booksellers was rare. This is because books were, typically, copied by literate slaves, who were expensive to buy and maintain. Thus, any copier would have had to pay much the same expense as a professional publisher. Roman book sellers would sometimes pay a well-regarded author for first access to a text for copying, but they had no exclusive rights to a work and authors were not normally paid anything for their work. Martial, in his Epigrams, complains about receiving no profit despite the popularity of his poetry throughout the Roman Empire.
> The printing press came into use in Europe in the 1400s and 1500s, and made it much cheaper to produce books. As there was initially no copyright law, anyone could buy or rent a press and print any text. Popular new works were immediately re-set and re-published by competitors, so printers needed a constant stream of new material. Fees paid to authors for new works were high, and significantly supplemented the incomes of many academics.
Incidentally, if you click the link about King Dermott and get to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_C%C3%BAl_Dreimhne, it says that's "an account that first appears... nearly a thousand years after the alleged events supposedly took place, and therefore a highly unreliable source".
or attribution even
A tale as old as time, "it's different when we do it".
It was a pithy one-liner about categories in response to a pithy one-liner about categories.
But I'd say the underlying question I'm trying to ask is philosophical: what property do humans have and machines lack that makes the first's learning from copyrighted works acceptable, and the second's unacceptable? (eastof suggested a property below).
Humans have had parts removed and reattached. With transplants components have been replaced entirely. There is a point at which you can destruct a machine from which it is impossible to reconstruct without getting into ship of Theseus issues. That point is different for different things.
The appeal is thus to a completely novel principle that you have come up with for yourself; and it seems that rather than presenting arguments for why others should adopt this principle, you are trying to present it in such a way that someone not paying close attention would be fooled into believing that it is common sense and widely accepted. An analogy with the classic "you wouldn't download a car" comes to mind.