It's a decent lobbying tactic too - companies like OpenAI claim their technology can only exist with unrestricted scraping, and requiring them to license training data would kill the whole industry in the crib, but Adobe and Getty can point to their own products as existence proofs that it can be done but OpenAI just doesn't want to.
There doesn’t exist a LLM trained only on expressly licensed data that works well enough for the image diffusion conditioning task. So unless they made some kind of huge scientific discovery, which they didn’t, they are using a text model like T5 or CLIP to achieve the “text” part of “text to image”, which of course is trained on not expressly licensed data.
That's basically what happened with Spotify. Artists are getting paid something for streaming, but it's fractions of pennies on the dollars they used to make from music sales.
You create the synthetic data, move it through 10s of entities and then buy it back cheaply from an entity.
Break the law so you can undercut the real producers, and then buy the rights when they're broke and everything works out for you!
I'm not sure a dozen companies (before consultation and licensing) having control of 90-something percent of their world's content is a good idea either
Isn't $3/minute exactly the compensation for creators you're looking for?
It’s going to happen anyway, the tech can either be free to everyone so we all benefit or behind a paywall. Those are your two options there isn’t a 3rd if we’re talking reality not fantasy.
I’m not sure why you and others think that using someone’s work as inspiration for creating some new work requires payment. Are we required to pay someone when sharing a meme, or using a sound for a reel or a TikTok? A lot of these creators are just creating shit they saw someone else create.
What you could do is what some of of the original comic book creators did when they ripped off each others work (Doom Patrol/Xmen, Quicksilver/Flash, etc.) - create an alternative version that was close the original but was different enough that it wasn't a straight up copy. So it wouldn't be Spiderman, but Venom or something, and the suit wouldn't be red/blue but like maybe purple/green or something.
A single network transfer alone is enough to qualify "sharing".
Heck some of the content creators are even arguing that the models are essentially a form of lossy compression, because no one quite knows exactly how they work.
Also the users probably won't be the ones with deep pockets, unless it was a studio. And the lawyers are generally going to after the ones with deep pockets.
But even if you think that’s fine it makes using AI models for your own commercial applications more risky.
I suspect that, if the image in the meme is copyrighted, the answer is "yes."
I haven't come across too many memes with Mickey Mouse, but I do see the occasional Marvel one (I have forwarded these, myself).
It can get nasty.
Satire of the work is allowed, but I don't think using the work, itself, in satire of something else, is allowed.
I think that the example a lot of folks use is the "Pissing Calvin" decal.
Watterson never allowed any commercialization of his characters. Every "Pissing Calvin" decal is actually a copyright violation, but I think that they never enforced it, so it may be considered "OK" to use, as the copyright has been allowed to wither.
But IANAL. Things get sticky, here.
This is more akin to buying multiple books on a topic and then writing a new book on the topic using the aggregate learnings from the original books.