Artists lose first copyright battle in the fight against AI-generated images::But the fight may not be lost as the court allowed the artists to claim copyright infringement against Stability AI, Midjourney, and DevianArt, on workpieces that the artists had filed a copyright for.
So now artists are going to have to actually apply for copyright? What the fuck happened to intellectual property?
In the US, copyright is implicit. All work is instantly protected by copyright the moment it is created. Registering with copyright office is optional/voluntary. I think the judge's comments that you are referring to was probably referring to the works where copyright protections were waived by the artists for works placed into public domain (which, on Deviant Art, covers a vast amount).
works placed into public domain (which, on Deviant Art, covers a vast amount)
So especially poor and young artists get exploited. Why am I not surprised.
Bit of a long story…
Some forms of intellectual property require registration. For example patents. Patents are supposed to encourage technological development by allowing inventors to monetize their work. There's a lot of justified criticism of that system but, on the whole, it seems to have worked.
Originally, US copyrights worked in exactly the same way, for the same purpose. The requirement to register for copyright was dropped in 1978. However, registration still plays a role in US law for some legal purposes.
So what happened to copyright?
Europe developed a different copyright tradition, in the 19th century, while it was stilled largely ruled by oppressive autocracies. The monarchs of the 19th century were not the overpaid figureheads that still exist in some countries.
Copyrights today last (usually) until 70 years after the author's death, while patents which underpin tech progress last (usually) only 20 years in total. You can see that this is very different. That copyright revolves around the death of a person shows how it is a personal privilege, as were normal in aristocracies. The purpose is to enable people to extract money without any consideration for the interests of society as a whole. It's about rent-seeking.
Nowadays, US content production (Hollywood, etc.) dwarfs that of Europe. The better copyright laws of the US may have something to do with that. Although the US has gradually shifted over to the rent-seeking European model, there are still some advantages left.
As the content producers in the US grew, the US gradually switched over to the rent-seeking model. I think this is largely because the content producers also gained more lobbying powers.
The biggest trick the rich ever pulled was fooling the public into thinking copyright benefits everybody. It doesn't. It only benefits them. It will only ever benefit them.
yeah Disney is famous for lobbying to protect their Mickey mouse copyright.
intellectual property is a fiction. it's a term used to snow people. there is no such thing, nor should there be.
Intellectual property is a social construct, but that does not negate its reality or make it fictitious. Its the very thing that copyrights, patents, trademarks and countless laws were created to protect. And it's an invaluable tool for people that need to protect their ideas and creations, especially artists and makers. The issue with intellectual property is that most of the laws surrounding it were created by/for corporations and rich people, and wind up fucking the rest of us over.
people share. food, recipes, songs, stories, pictures, tools. to use a government-enforced monopoly to interfere with people sharing is fucking immoral.
copyrights, patents, trademarks
anyone using one term to refer to all of these is being fundamentally dishonest: they are completely separate laws with different histories and uses. stallman says anyone using this term is trying to snow you. i agree.
Yes, please keep fighting to ensure we are locked to adobe's rent seeking model with no open alternatives.
The best thing for the art world is to make sure independent and poorer artists have no available competitive tools as we head into an inevitably advanced future. Where would we be without our intellectual landlords in such a future. The ones who can afford proprietary datasets are the only ones who deserve to prosper.
Right?
Yeah actually I don't like that. Also as an artist with degrading digital dexterity, such a powerful medium that doesn't rely on hours of causing my hands more damage is really cool.
Can't wait to get holodeck style creative experiences. I will enjoy creating such things as well, if it's not exclusively available through corporately aligned rent systems.
It's like we've come full circle from the early 2000s.
At that time, the MPAA and RIAA was paranoid about changing technology disrupting their copyrights, and fought tooth and nail against it.
So what happened was other corporations created products which dominated the markets of that emerging technology.
Now we have individual artists grouping up to fight tooth and nail against the inevitable tides of change, having learned nothing from history, instead of grouping up to own that future.
The generative AI products that are trained using artists' own Photoshop files with full change histories, WIP pencil sketches, etc are going to be WAY better than ones trained off just the final images online.
But those products may never exist at the current pace of things, as the art community unwittingly cedes the stake in their own future to mega corporations.
The artists with power want to keep that power and make sure they are still above the other 99.999% of artists who are forced to give it up and do it as a hobby because it doesn't pay the bills.
They are the true gatekeepers. This is what an incredibly oversaturated industry does to the ones lucky enough to make it.
Unfortunately, they are willing to sacrifice everybody else's future in this tech to do so. Short-sighted assholes.
Copyright has always traditionally required there to be some sort of direct linkage to the source material, like "This has X character that I own in it" or "This is like X story I made, except Y and Z were changed".
Generative AI for the most part doesn't do that. There is no line to draw from their pictures to the AI's pictures. The lawsuit that maybe stabs these programs in the back would be a big artist claiming that they used the research LAION training set, knowingly, to create a product that copies their style exactly via their labeling of works with their name, and thus reducing their way to make money. Whether that has enough basis in law to work… debatable.
But "This work it generated violated my copyright" is for sure not the way to get them.
I’m so conflicted about this; on the one hand AI’s can be a great tool for humanity, on the other hand they will likely destroy the livelyhood of thousands of people and probably give more power to big corporations.
I propose the following solution: Everyone is free to use any publicly available data to train AI. Any data generated by AI is automatically in the public domain and cannot be copyrighted.
No, that doesn't work at all. That gives all the power to people with billions of dollars to train and run the best proprietary models, at the expense of the people who created the data.
Welcome to the internet where you can literally experience everything that AI was trained on right now for free.
That's how the internet works. You put your stuff out there and people and software experience it.
THIS IS NOTHING NEW
Yeah? Where did you get the impression I'm in favor of a completely unregulated marketplace where corporations are free to harvest everything from everyone for free?
Try to block right clicking or blocking a recording u fucking moron. Why do u think those things are possible? If they were nfts would have value.
See how stupid u look?
bozo
No u lol. Ur the idiot who can't figure out right clicking hahahaha
That's literally how it works now. There are no legal restrictions on training ais and courts have rules ai generated works are not copyrightable.
They will also very likely make less people pursue drawing, (graphic) design and painting as a skill.
The same was said about Photoshop decades ago.
Also reminds me of this.
To compare this with what happened when Photoshop came up is not a fitting comparison at all.
Digital art pushed more people into learning how to draw (with traditional and digital media) leading to a surge in courses, books, workshops etc. Digital drawing made it affordable for more people to get into drawing. And it also encouraged them to learn traditional drawing to improve their skills and expand their portfolio.
This is not comparable to what is happening now with AI image generators.
Photography versus traditional media realism paintings like still lifes and portraits is a better analogy. But photography only touched one specific area of drawing/painting not all of it. And in this case it really did lead to a skill becoming incredibly rare.
I have a feeling you may not have seen the difference between how digital artists are using generative AI in workflows and users just creating generative AI images from a prompt with no additional work.
The idea that digital art capabilities are going to disappear because diffusion models can generate digital art may be a bit too binary of a consideration from the reality.
You are right, that photography did replace a lot of still life work, such as in magazine ads, etc. But it only reduced the market for the skill set, and many people still produce 'photorealistic' art today.
I'd agree the market for drawing and especially prototyping is going to be made more efficient, but I'm skeptical it's going to be entirely reduced as you put forward by your analogy.
Making something like a movie poster already went from making 10 mock-ups by hand from a team of artists to making a hundred mock-ups compositing using asset libraries and moving forward will likely end up in a place where there's 1,000-10,000 versions which are each run though virtual focus groups to create a selection set for the client.
But the final product will absolutely still involve digital artists, and if anything the component that's mostly being replaced is the asset library, along with around a 10x or more time savings on an individual artist's generation.
That will either result in a 10x increase in variations or 1/10th the staffing or somewhere in between, but as mentioned parallel advances in AI mean that significantly increased output is very likely going to have significantly increased return, so you may even ultimately see slightly larger digital art teams from today as time goes on.
There's a bizarre assumption that modern labor output represents a demand cap and as such efficiency in supply means less people making the same amount of things.
That's almost never historically been the case during industrialization and unless the role becomes entirely obsolete, scaling up productivity with a new tool will bias towards increased output not decreased suppliers - outside of decreased demand for suppliers who have eschewed the new technology and efficiencies.
God DAMN that's a well reasoned and written comment that demonstrates a lot of familiarity with the material.
I hope digg 2.0 never happens to reddit. Lemmy needs to stay like this forever.
Only thing id add is that for the moment any ai generated art needs quite a bit of human intervention for it to be exactly what the artists envisions. You're argument about the lack of cap on demand for what AI can generate is a great point, because that would need to be the case for people in some industries to keep jobs as ai progresses. In image generation were already starting to see the prompts needed to generate what one wants be less cryptic and more like natural language, though we ain't there yet. It's moving quickly though.
I think a lot of the uncertainty lies in not knowing for sure where a lot of this tech will land. Will it be able to write engaging, novel, and new scripts / books, or even entire movies one day? Or is it always gooing to be the eloquent, stupid dumpster firebthay is chatgpt?
If the tech never becomes seamless, competent, and all around useful, the need for human intervention increases. If it does, it decreases. Which doesn't mean there won't be jobs dealing with creating the input and directing the output, but unless regulations cut off access to these tools to all but the richest individuals and companies those jobs will be handling a commodity that is essentially post scarcity.
Most jobs today focus either on selling things people have created and are all governed in some way by scarcity - of natural resources, of the time it takes to create software or art, supply chains, etc. If ai is good enough the human input needed is trivial or even nonexistent, and the output governed only by computing resources, efficiency of the code, etc. Both of these CAN be(aren't always - the compute cost of AI has ready raised eyebrows and running dozens of enterprise-grade GPUs isn't exactly gree) so trivial st scale that the driving force behind what's crested is a demand for curation stronger than any weve seen in the world. The noise:signal ratio is going to get so bad, and it wouldn't surprise me if one day thousands of novels better than any human being has ever written lie unread on magnetic tape .
You are only arguing about labour output and corporate work but I explicitly wrote about the impact on how many people in the future will invest in learning skills like digital illustration, drawing and painting.
As you probably know, it's not a three year apprenticeship and then you have an artist.
People learn how to draw, which takes an enormous amount of effort and time and often money as well, because they want to visualise their ideas as convincing as possible. On their way of doing that communities like Deviant Art are created and filled with their work.
I for example will not continue digital illustration, especially not posting it somewhere online. My work is easily replaceable by AI. I did commissioned fan art mostly and sci-fi illustrations for collectors sometimes. But it was only a side gig, I am in one of the bigger groups of artists who barely can pay for their hobby with what they earn. That's over now.
Why would I continue investing so much time and money in a skill that's not appreciated or paid anymore? When a younger person asks me if they should invest the tens of thousands of hours necessary to become a good artist I will tell them to better learn something else.
Perhaps there will be an increase in traditional drawing skills learned. But that's vastly more expensive. Most people don't have the money and space to learn how to create oil paintings for example.
Will companies still higher some people who know about digital art? Probably, for a while. But that's not what I was writing about.
There haven't been sword duels in a long time. And yet people still learn fencing (which tends to only cost money and not make it).
The commercial market for clothing doesn't require people to learn to hand knit, and yet that's a skill that's still pretty popular.
If you think people are going to stop drawing as a hobby, I guess I just don't really see it that way.
You may stop drawing out of a concern that an AI can use your images to learn how to draw similar images (though do keep in mind your images in the training set is about the relative equivalent of spitting in the ocean).
And that's entirely your prerogative. It's your skill and output to do with what you want.
But there's plenty of artists who will continue to produce art both professionally and others as a hobby that they enjoy, and many will continue to share it.
And the idea that drawing as a skillset is going to disappear is ridiculous.
Did computerized synthesizers cause people to stop learning to play musical instruments? Because one half of US households today have someone who plays, even though there are alternative technologies to create very similar end results without the same investment of skill and patience.
Edit: Also, regarding this:
Why would I continue investing so much time and money in a skill that's not appreciated or paid anymore?
I'd recommend learning about the overjustification effect - it's pretty insidious to a life well lived.
You are building a strawman. I never said the skill of drawing will vanish or no one ever will learn how to draw anymore. This is what I wrote:
They will also very likely make less people pursue drawing, (graphic) design and painting as a skill.
And right now you have wrote nothing to dispute that. Quite the opposite, you seem to agree with it. You just disagree with the strawman that no one will draw by hand anymore.
The dynamics are also very different depending on the specific activity. Making music and sports as a hobby have other perks that drawing doesn't have. And not everybody who doodles from time to time is an artist (in the sense of someone honing the craft).
To make the ideology more fitting you would have to ask: How many people will continue to learn how to fence if we had ultra fast learning, extremely competent and getting even better fencing AI robots? They copy the fencing styles of all people they see fencing. They will from now on be at most fencing tournaments, they will be at all local gyms, Olympia, can be booked as teachers and used in movies. Instead of fencing themselves your opponents can just put a fencing AI robot into the duel.
Do you really think this wouldn't have a significant impact on the motivation to pursue fencing as a skill?
they will likely destroy the livelyhood of thousands of people and probably give more power to big corporations.
i doubt it.
in the long run it is not good for humanity. it leads to sameness and boredom. there's less incentive to make something new when an ai trained on existing work can make a thing that you know already works for most people.
downvote this post if you like gpu rendered squirting anime tits
I don't understand how it's not plausible to know whether works aren't copyrighted in the data or not. That has to be tracked for multiple reasons and if AI teams pulled in the full data set to train the model it should be a matter of filtering out works that have usage restrictions applied. I would think it is just a matter of the AI team choosing to ignore usage restrictions rather than an inability to adhere to them.
It seems to me like the judge is misunderstanding or disregarding the nature of the data and procedures for deselecting cases.
Removed by mod
I'd like to see you create high quality art using either a mouse or graphics tablet. It takes a lot of time and practice to draw something as simple as a decent looking circle without using the circle tool or a brush stablizer.
Why would I do that when I can use an AI prompt and get high quality customizable results almost instantly? If anything AI has made art a race to the bottom.
Sad really.
Removed by mod
Then just use a circle tool or a brush stabilizer have you ever thought of that nerd?
this is a joke i say as someone struggling to practice art for fun
