I think the is exacty the gap the gp is mentionning: to a trained artist it is clear as water that the original image has been lifted wholesale, even if for instance the colors are adjusted here and there.
You put it as a remix, but remixes are credited and expressed as such.
Exactly
to a programmer copilot is clear violation, to a writer gpt-3 is clear violation, to an artist dalle-2 is clear violation.
The artist might love copilot, the writer might love dalle, the programmer might love gpt-3.
It's similar to saying that any digital representation of an image isn't an image just a dataset that represent it.
If what you said was any sort of defense every image copyright would never apply to any digital image, because the images can be saved in different resolutions, different file formats, or encoded down. e.g. if a jpeg 'image' was only an image at an exact set of digital bits i could save it again with a different quality setting and end up with a different set of digital bits.
But everyone still recognises when an image looks the same, and courts will uphold copyright claims regardless of the digital encoding of an image. So goodluck with that spurious argument that it's not copyright because 'its on the internet (oh its with AI etc).
I don't understand what is nonsense, how it works? Your response seems to be for something entirely different.
But anyway, how I see stable diffusion being different is that it's a tool to generate all sorts of images, including copyrighted images.
It's more like a database of *how to* generate images rather than a database *of* images. Maybe there isn't that much of a difference when it comes to copyright law. If you ask an artist to draw a copyrighted image for you, who should be in trouble? I'd say the person asking most of the time, but in this case we argue it's the people behind the pencil or whatever. Why? Because it's too easy? Where does a service like fiver stand here?
So if a tool is able to generate something that looks indistinguishable from some copyrighted artwork, is it infringing on copyright? I can get on board with yes if it was trained on that copyrighted artwork, but otherwise I'm not so sure.
A tool can't be held accountable and can't infringe on copyright or any other law for that matter. It's more of a product. It seems to me like it's a gray area that's just going to have to be decided in court. Like did the company that sells the tool that can very easily be used to do illegal things take enough reasonable measures to prevent it from being accidently used in such a way? In the case of Copilot, I don't believe so, because there aren't really even any adequate warnings to the end user that say it can produce code which can only legally be used in software that meets the criteria of the original license.
The issue is not about what it produces. Copilot i am sure has safeguards to not output copyrighted code (they even mention they have tests). So it will sufficiently change the code to be legally safe.
The issue is in how it creates the output. Both Dalle and Copilot can work only by taking work of people in past, sucking up their earned know how and creations and remixing it. All that while not crediting (or paying) anyone. The software itself might be great but it only works because it was fed with loads of quality material.
It's smart copy&paste with obfuscation. If thats ok legally. You can imagine soon it could be used to rewrite whole codebases while avoiding any copyright. All the code will technically be different, but also the same.
The DMCA disagrees. Specific methods of "circumvention" which inevitably take the form of a software tool are prohibited. Tools and their authors can be held accountable.
If the original art is still copyrighted, and you’d start selling your hand drawn variation, you’d totally be violating the copyright.
To make it concrete, imagine the latest Disney movie poster. You redraw it 95% close to the original, just changing the actual title. Then you sell your poster on Amazon at half the price of the actual poster. Would you get a copyright strike ?
The scenes à faire doctrine would certainly let you paint your own picture of a pretty girl with a large earring, even a pearl one. That, however, is definitely the same person, in the same pose/composition, in the same outfit. The colors are slightly off, but the difference feels like a technical error rather than an expressive choice.
Even if it is an expressive choice of the new artist, if enough of the original artist's expressive choice remains, it could still be a copyright violation. Fair use can sometimes be a defense, but there are a lot of factors that go into determining whether something is fair use.
That’s a really apt comparison, since the Supreme Court just heard Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts v. Goldsmith, which hinges on whether Warhol’s use of a copyrighted photo of Prince as the basis for “Orange Prince” was Fair Use.
Warhol’s estate seems likely to lose and their strongest argument is that Warhol took a documentary photo and transformed it into a commentary on celebrity culture. Here, I don’t even see that applying: it just looks like a bad copy.
The photograph of the art, which will be more recent, might have copyright protections.
It looks like it wouldn't in the UK, probably wouldn't in the US but would in Germany. The cases seem to hinge on the level of intellectual creativity of the photograph involved. The UK said that trying to create an exact copy was not an original endeavour whereas Germany said the task of exact replication requires intellectual/technical effort of it's own merit.
It's really interesting. I suspect the face was inpainted in, or this was a "img2img".
I think over time we are going to see the following:
- If you take say a star wars poster, and inpaint in a trained face over luke's, and sell that to people as a service, you will probably be approached for copyright and trademark infringement.
- If you are doing the above with a satirical take, you might be able to claim fair use.
- If you are using AI as a "collage generator" to smash together a ton of prompts into a "unique" piece, you may be safe from infringement but you are taking a risk as you don't know what % of source material your new work contains. I'd like to imagine if you inpaint in say 20 details with various sub-prompts that you are getting "safer".
Features outside the face is lost/changed from original on the right, so can’t be face inpainting. Unlikely to be style transfers, because some body parts are moved. Most plausibly this was generated.
So much for “generation” - it seems as if these models are just overfitting on extremely small subset of input data that it did not utterly failed to train on, almost that there could be geniuses who would be able to directly generate weight data from said images without all the gradient descent thing.
That's clearly lifting style, pose and general location but in each of those there are changes. Even for the original art we could find tons of examples of very similar poses and backgrounds because anime girl in a bathing suit on a beach background isn't that original of an image at the concept level. That pose also is a pretty well worn.
This is the problem of applying the idea of ownership to ideas and expression like art. Art in particular is a very remix and recombination driven field.
I think the key detail is to look at what happened in the bottom left - in the original drawing, there's dark blue (due to lighting) cloth filling the scene, but the network has instead generated oddly-hued water there, even though on the right side there's sand from the beach shore. There's seemingly no geometric representation driving the AI so it ended up turning clothing into mystery ocean water when synthesizing an image that (for whatever reason) looked like the original one. It's an interesting error to me because it only looks Wrong once you notice the sand on the right.
But it means the models were trained on images that are under copyright. In fact many of these models were trained exclusively on such images without any permission. For example Midjourney is clearly trained on everything on artstation.com where almost all images have commercial purpose / licenses.
You put it as a remix, but remixes are credited and expressed as such.