2y ago

Visual artists fight back against AI companies for repurposing their work

Visual artists fight back against AI companies for repurposing their work::Three visual artists are suing artificial intelligence image-generators to protect their copyrights and careers.

Technology @kbin.social

Madison_rogue @kbin.social

2y ago

apnews.com /article/artists-ai-image-generators-stable-diffusion-midjourney-7ebcb6e6ddca3f165a3065c70ce85904

74 comments

It seems pretty obvious to me that the artists should win this assuming their images weren't poorly licenced. Training AI is absolutely a commercial use.
These companies adopted a run fast and don't look back legal strategy and now they're going to enter the 'find out' phase.
- This is a pretty old story, the EFF already weighed in on it back in april.
  
  "The Stable Diffusion model makes four gigabytes of observations regarding more than five billion images. That means that its model contains less than one byte of information per image analyzed (a byte is just eight bits—a zero or a one)."
  What a great article, it really lays it out well and concisely. I like the above point especially.
- I would like to agree with you, but I have doubts this lawsuit will stick because of how prominent corporations are in US law.
  
  There's nothing in copyright law that covers this scenario, so anyone that says it's "absolutely" one way or the other is telling you an opinion, not a fact.
- I don't think it's obvious at all. Both legally speaking - there is no consensus around this issue - and ethically speaking because AIs fundamentally function the same way humans do.
  We take in input, some of which is bound to be copyrighted work, and we mesh them all together to create new things. This is essentially how art works. Someone's "style" cannot be copyrighted, only specific works.
  The government announced an inquiry recently into the copyright questions surrounding AI. They are going to make recommendations to congress about potential legislation, if any, they think would be a good idea. I believe there's a period of public comment until mid October, if anyone wants to write a comment.
  
  I really hope you're wrong.
  And I think there's a difference. Humans can draw stuff, build structures, and make tools, in a way that improves upon the previous iteration. Each artists adds something, or combines things in a way that makes for something greater.
  AI art, literally cannot do anything, without human training data. It can't take a previous result, be inspired by it, and make it better. There has to be actual human input, it can't train itself on its own data, the way humans do. It absolutely does not "work the same way".
  AI art has NEVER made me feel like it's greater than the sum of its parts. Unlike art made by humans, which makes me feel that way all the time.
  If a human does art without input, you still get "something".
  With an AI, you don't have that. Without the training data, you have nothing.
- This is a tough one, because they are not directly making money from the copyrighted material.
  Isn't this a bit same as using short samples of somebodys song in your own song or somebody getting inspired from somebodys artwork and creating something similar.
  
  If you're sampling music you aught to be compensating the licence holder unless it's public domain or your work is under a fair use exception.
Resistance is futile
This is the best summary I could come up with:
NEW YORK (AP) — Kelly McKernan’s acrylic and watercolor paintings are bold and vibrant, often featuring feminine figures rendered in bright greens, blues, pinks and purples.
The Nashville-based McKernan, 37, who creates both fine art and digital illustrations, soon learned that companies were feeding artwork into AI systems used to “train” image-generators — something that once sounded like a weird sci-fi movie but now threatens the livelihood of artists worldwide.
The lawsuit may serve as an early bellwether of how hard it will be for all kinds of creators — Hollywood actors, novelists, musicians and computer programmers — to stop AI developers from profiting off what humans have made.
The case was filed in January by McKernan and fellow artists Karla Ortiz and Sarah Andersen, on behalf of others like them, against Stability AI, the London-based maker of text-to-image generator Stable Diffusion.
The teacher, Christoph Schuhmann, said he has no regrets about the nonprofit project, which is not a defendant in the lawsuit and has largely escaped copyright challenges by creating an index of links to publicly accessible images without storing them.
The idea that such a development is inevitable — that it is, essentially, the future — was at the heart of a U.S. Senate hearing in July in which Ben Brooks, head of public policy for Stability AI, acknowledged that artists are not paid for their images.
The original article contains 1,215 words, the summary contains 229 words. Saved 81%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

74 comments