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this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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A human is a derivative work of its training data, thus a copyright violation if the training data is copyrighted.
The difference between a human and ai is getting much smaller all the time. The training process is essentially the same at this point, show them a bunch of examples and then have them practice and provide feedback.
If that human is trained to draw on Disney art, then goes on to create similar style art for sale that isn't a copyright infringement. Nor should it be.
This is stupid and I'll tell you why.
As humans, we have a perception filter. This filter is unique to every individual because it's fed by our experiences and emotions. Artists make great use of this by producing art which leverages their view of the world, it's why Van Gogh or Picasso is interesting because they had a unique view of the world that is shown through their work.
These bots do not have perception filters. They're designed to break down whatever they're trained on into numbers and decipher how the style is constructed so it can replicate it. It has no intention or purpose behind any of its decisions beyond straight replication.
You would be correct if a human's only goal was to replicate Van Gogh's style but that's not every artist. With these art bots, that's the only goal that they will ever have.
I have to repeat this every time there's a discussion on LLM or art bots:
The imitation of intelligence does not equate to actual intelligence.
Absolutely agreed! I think if the proponents of AI artwork actually had any knowledge of art history, they'd understand that humans don't just iterate the same ideas over and over again. Van Gogh, Picasso, and many others, did work that was genuinely unique and not just a derivative of what had come before, because they brought more to the process than just looking at other artworks.
Yup. There seems to be a strong motive in many to not understand this concept as it makes their practices clearly ethically questionable.
My feeling is that the vast majority of pro-AI techbros come from a computer science, finance, or business background; undoubtedly intelligent people, but completely and utterly lacking in any appreciation or understanding of what actually goes into creative work. I'm sure they genuinely believe that there's no difference between what a human does and what an AI does, because they think art (or writing, music, etc) are just the product of an algorithm.
Ironically, my background is in mathematics but I also happen to be a writer so I see both sides of the argument. I just see the utter lack of compassion people have for those who produce creative work and the same people believe that if it can be automated, it should be automated.
Likely. Which is weird because algorithms are only a subset of software engineering, which requires abstract and creative thought to perform well.
I really, really, really wish people would understand this.
AI can only create a synthesis of exactly what it's fed. It has no life experience, no emotional experience, no nurture-related experiences, no cultural experiences that color it's thinking, because it isn't thinking.
The "AI are only doing what humans do" is such a brain-dead line of thinking, to the point that it almost feels like it's 100% in bad faith whenever it's brought up.
You're completely wrong, and I'll tell you why.
None of what you said matters, perception filters, intent, intelligence... it's all irrelevant to the discussion.
Copyright infringement only gives certain rights, and at least here in Canada using them to generate a model isn't one of those. Rights are for things like distribution, reproduction, public performance, communication, and exhibition. US law says you can't "Prepare derivative works based upon the work." but the model isn't a derivative work because it's not really a work at all, you can't even visually look at the model. You can't copyright an algorithm in the US or Canada.
Only the created art should be scrutinized for copyright infringement, and these systems can generate both (just like a human can).
Any enforcement should then be handled when that protected work is then used to infringe on the actual rights of the copyright holder.
I wasn't talking about copyright law in regards to the model itself.
I was talking about what is/isn't grounds for plagiarism. I strongly disagree with the idea that artists and art bots go through the same process. They don't and it's reductive to claim otherwise. It negatively impacts the perception of artists' work to assert that these models can automate a creative process which might not even involve looking at other artists' work because humans are able to create on their own.
A person who has never looked upon a single painting in their life can still produce a piece but the same cannot be said for an art bot. A model must be trained on work that you want the model to be able to imitate.
This is why ChatGPT required the internet to do what it does (the privacy violation is another big concern there). The model needed vast quantities of information to be sufficiently trained because language is difficult to decipher. Languages evolved by getting in contact with other languages and organically making new words. ChatGPT will never invent a new word because it's not intelligent, it is merely imitating intelligence.
"A person who has never looked upon a single painting in their life can still produce a piece but the same cannot be said for an art bot. A model must be trained on work that you want the model to be able to imitate."
No, they really can't. Go look a 1 year old's first attempt at "art" because it's nothing more than random smashing of colour on paper. A computer could easily generate such "work" as well with no training data at all. They've seen art at that point, and still can't replicate it because they need much more training first.
Humans require books (or teachers who read books) to learn how to read and write. That is "vast quantities of information" being consumed to learn how to do it. If you had never seen or heard of a book, you wouldn't be able to write a novel. It's also completely ignoring the fact that you had to previously learn the spoken language as well (which is a vast quantity of information that takes a human decades to acquire proficiency in even with daily practice)
Once again, being reductive about artists' work. Jackson Pollock's entire career was smashing colours on a canvas. If you want to argue that Pollock had to look at thousands of paintings before making his, I honestly can't take you seriously at that point.
Yes and in the eyes of its creators, that was deemed a failure which is why Midjourney and Dall-E are the way they are. These bots don't want to create art, they want to imitate it.
Children have barely any experiences and can still create something. You might not deem it worthy of calling it art but they created something despite their limited knowledge and life experience.
Of course, you'd need books to read and write. The words have to be written and you need to see the words in written form if you also want to write them. But one thing you don't take into account is handwriting. Another thing that is unique to every individual. Some have worse handwriting than others and with practice (like any muscle) it can be improved but you haven't had to have seen handwritten text before writing it yourself. You only need to be taught how to hold a pen and you can write.
Novels are complex structures of language just like poetry. In order to write novels, you have to consume novels because it's well understood that to find your own narrative voice you must see how others express theirs. Stories are told in unique ways and it's crucial as a writer to understand and break these concepts down. Intention and purpose form a core part of storytelling and an LLM cannot and will not be able to express those things.
They're written in certain ways because the author intended them to be that way, such as Cormac McCarthy deciding to be very minimalist with his punctuation.
I would love to see you make a point that an LLM without being specifically prompted to do so would make that stylistic decision. An LLM can't make that decision because unless you specify a style it is aware of, it won't organically do it.
I am also a writer. I've written a short story. One of my stylistic choices is that I don't use dialogue tags like "said". An LLM won't make that choice because it isn't designed to do so, it won't decide to minimise its use of dialogue tags to improve the flow of the narrative unless you told it to.
Yes, in order to learn a spoken language you have to have heard it. However, languages evolve over time. You develop regional accents and dialects. All of the UK speaks English but no two towns speak the same way.
Jackson Pollock didn't create paintings, Jackson Pollock's art was story telling and showmanship.
Just like different models have their own patterns of writing...
You're thinking about LLMs like they're equivalent to multiple people(or groups of people) but each LLM is equivalent to a single person. The training and resulting function of each one is as distinct as an individual human.
I could raise one of my children to perform the exact same functions as an LLM or art creation tool. Give them exactly the same image/text sets that these models are trained on, and have them practice for a decade or two. Then I could tell them "Hey I need a picture of an orange rabbit riding a bike" and they could draw me one, or write a story about the same topic. There's clearly no copyright infringement in that process, so why would it be different for creating a machine to do the same thing?
An LLM or art creation tool is barely equatable to one person. The difference between a child and an art creation tool is that you could show a child a single picture of a bunny, a bike and a carrot then ask them to draw an orange bunny riding a bike and they could draw something resembling that. An art bot would require hundreds to thousands of images of each object to understand what it is before it can even make a reasonable attempt. It's not even comparable the level of training required.
At least the child's drawing will have some personality in it, every output from an art bot ends up looking soulless. The reason for that is the simple concept that an art bot only imitates what it's been trained on and an artist draws on inspiration before applying the two things an art bot will never have; intent or purpose.
You're missing the training even a child has received to reach the state where they could do that. If you raised a child to 5 years completely by themselves in an empty room they wouldn't be able to draw anything at all, let alone something based on pictures. The act of drawing a variation on a bunny from a picture requires they learn and practice fine motor skills, and it requires them to have an understanding of animals.
Humans get literally 150,000+ hours of training time before we even let them try to become an adult.
Sure but the training isn't an algorithm deciding probabilities. Children do not 100% express themselves based on environment. On one side you have nature and the other you have nurture.
An example:
The FBI's studies into serial killers uncovered that these people, even though have been influenced by their environment to become what they are, respond to external stimuli in an abnormal way which is what leads them down that path to begin with.
A child learns how language and creativity is expressed before attempting to express themselves. These bots aren't built to deal with this expression because at their core, they are statistical models. It looks at a sentence like a series of variables to determine what comes next. The sentence itself could be nonsensical but the bot doesn't know that, it's using the probabilities it's been trained on to construct the sentence.
You might say bots have their own way of expressing themselves but I would say that's something we're applying to the bot than it is demonstrating itself. I'm sure it's very cute when it apologises for making a mistake but that apology isn't sincere, it's been programmed to respond that way when it thinks you're pointing out its mistakes. It's merely imitating a sense of remorse than displaying actual remorse.
Not sure why you think anyone would read anything if that’s how you start it.
a human does not copy previous work exactly like these algorithms, whats this shit take?
A human can absolutely copy previous works, and they do it all the time. Disney themselves license books teaching you how to do just that. https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/learn-to-draw-disney-celebrated-characters-collection-disney-storybook-artists/1124097227
Not to mention the amount of porn online based on characters from copyrighted works. Porn that is often done as a paid commission, expressly violating copyright laws.
Neither does AI?
But considering that humans do get copyright strikes when they do something too similar that should also applies to AI, doesn't matter if it's not exact.
That should tell you something about how companies act. They're fine with these LLMs plagiarising content but when someone gets marginally close to their own trademarks, they get slammed.
Humans and AI are not the same and an equivalence should never be drawn.
Your feelings don't really matter, the fact of the matter is that the goal of ai is literally to replicate the function of a human brain. The way we're building them is often mimicking the same processes.
And LLMs and related technologies, by themselves, are artificial but not intelligent. So, the facts are not in favor of your argument to allow commercial parasitism on creative works.
I think you're missing a point here. If someone uses these to models to produce and distribute copyright infringing works, the original rights holder could go after the infringer.
The model itself isn't infringing though, and the process of creating the model isn't either.
It's a similar kind of argument to the laws that protect gun manufacturers from culpability from someone using their weapon to commit a crime. The user is the one doing the bad thing, they just produce a tool.
Otherwise, could Disney go after a pencil company because someone used one of their pencils to infringe on their copyright. Even if that pencil company had designed the pencil to be extremely good at producing Disney imagery by looking at a whole bunch of Disney images and movies to make sure it matches the size, colour, etc? No, because a pencil isn't a copyright infringement of art, regardless of the process used to design it.
Nah. You're missing the forest for the trees. Let's get abstract:
Person A makes a living by making product X and selling it.
Person B makes a living by making product Y and selling it.
Both A and B are in the same industry.
Person C uses a machine to extract the essence of product X and Y and blend them. Person C then claims authorship and sells it as product Z, which they sell in competition to X and Y.
Person C has not created anything. Their machine does not have value in the absence of products X and Y, yet received no permission, offers no credit nor compensation. In addition, they are competing for the same customers and harming the livelihoods of A and B. Person C is acting in a purely parasitic manner that cannot be seen as ethical in any widely accepted definition of the word.
You're missing something even more basic.
The machine Person C has created is not infringing on anything by itself. It's creation was not an infringement. "Extracting essence" isn't a protected right provided by the copyright frameworks. Only the actual art it is used to create could infringe (which most of the generated images do not).
If the final art created is an infringement, the existing copyright system handles that situation just like an infringing piece of art created by a human. The person at fault is the person who used the machine to create an infringing work, not the creator of the machine.
In your scenario, if a human C came along and looked at the art from Person A and B, blended them together into their own style, there wouldn't be any problem either. Even though they received no permission, and offered no credit nor compensation to the original creators. They would only get in trouble if they created an actual piece of art that was too similar to either of the specific artists works and therefore found to be infringing upon the copyright.
The scope here is not limited to "can someone legally get in trouble under current law" (which, seems likely but is still working its way through courts). The discussion is specifically discussing ethics. Person C has created nothing. They should have no product to sell, if not for persons A and B. Their competition with those that their product is derived from is a parasitic relationship, plain and simple. They are performing an act of exploitation with measurable harm both to persons A and B but also to further development of their craft by destroying any incentive to continue it.
Now, in some sort of alternate economic system, where one's livelihood is not tied to their vocation, sure, it's possibly not problematic because the economic harm is removed. However, in current capitalist systems that are in place where LLMs are heavily hyped, it's an ethically bankrupt action to take.
ETA: No amount of mental gymnastics can change the fact that use of others' works without their consent to train a model, then claiming authorship and competing IS plainly theft of the labor that went into creating the original works.
That's not too say that LLMs and they like don't have value or often require effort to produce something worthwhile. Just that they need to be used in an ethical manner that improves the human condition, not as another tool to rob others of the fruit of their labors.
I'll remind you the original article title literally contains the words "copyright law"
This discussion is entirely about legality, not ethics.
By your stupid logic, I have created nothing in my job designing automation systems, since I just look at what people currently do, program a computer to do those tasks instead, and I profit off those people no longer needing to do that job.
You want to keep everyone fully employed in needless tasks? Go join the Mennonites.
I feel that you're being deliberately obtuse here in order to avoid the ethics dilemma.
A design is a "thing", software is a "thing" even if it is physically intangible. Designing automation systems requires more than just looking at existing processes or algorthmic modeling. It requires synthetic and abstract thought. Nor is it a parasitic process; the automation has value by itself nor is it dependent upon the outputs of those whose tasks it automates. Automation, in theory, also improves the human condition by reducing amount of labor required by a given individual (though this particular good has largely been stolen since the 80s).
First, feeding something into a machine is not the same as looking at it. Person C literally creates nothing. They are a parasite. There's far more to creating than using statistical modeling algorithms. One cannot claim that that's what people studying a style and then creating someone are doing because it is empirically false.
Second, the scope of the discussion is not just "can someone legally get in trouble".
"Feeding something into a machine is not the same as looking at it" Most scientists would vehemently disagree. Human brains are just a complex and squishy computer. The fact that they're biological makes no difference to how we function. Input goes in, processing occurs, output comes out. Even the term "Computer" started as a job title for a human prior to the invention of mechanical and electric devices.
The scope of the discussion is absolutely what would get you in trouble. That's literally the entire post we're commenting on. We're not arguing if this SHOULD be allowed or not, we're arguing about whether current laws prohibit it.
You keep harping on about parasites, is every person who creates a machine to do a task that competes with humans parasitical in your fucked up world logic? If we want to make a machine to build widgets, an engineer will study how widgets get built, design a machine to do it instead, produce the machine, then a company will use it to outcompete the original manual widget makers. Same process for essentially every machine we've ever invented.
In that aspect, we are absolutely in agreement. We are meat computers in meat cages containing necessary support systems. That statement was, perhaps, an oversimplification.
Things like LLMs are attempts to model how the human brain works but are not identical, nor are LLMs, by themselves, capable of intelligence. If one argues contrarily that feeding data into an LLM and using it to produce something is the same, then the one using the LLM is clearly not the author and claiming so is plagiarism of the work of either the creator of the LLM or the LLM itself.
The argument that, legally, IP owners cannot specify that their works may not be used as feedstock for competing commercial products is rather absurd itself and would invalidate all but the most permissive open-source licenses as well as proprietary licenses. As pointed out elsewhere, this line of thought would allow one to steal leaked source code and use it to effectively clone existing software. Use of the source in this manner would be infringing on the owner's IP rights.
Perhaps a good way to think about LLMs is as automated reverse engineering. They take data and statistically model it in order to characterize it. There is substantial case law there and the EFF has a great FAQ on the topic: https://www.eff.org/issues/coders/reverse-engineering-faq
The goal of AI is fictional, and there's no solid evidence today that it will ever stop being fiction.
What at have today are stupid learning algorithms that are surprisingly good at mimicing intelligent people.
The most apt comparison today is a particularly clever parrot.
I'm all for having the discussion about how to handle AI when we have it, but it's bad faith to apply it to what we have today.
Critically, what we have today will never ever go on strike, or really make any kind of correct moral decision on it's own. We must treat it like dumb automation, because it is dumb automation.
…says who? That’s absolutely your feeling and not facts.