Yup, I fucking knew it. I knew this is what would happen with everyone bitching about copyright this and that. I knew any legislation that came as a result was going be bastardized and dressed up to make it look like it's for everyone when in reality it's going to mostly benefit big corps that can afford licensing fees and teams of lawyers.

People could not/would not understand how these AI models actually processes images/text or the concept of "If you post publicly, expect it to be used publicly" and here we are....

Exactly, this isn't about any sort of AI, this is the old playbook of trying to digitally track images, just with the current label slapped on. Regardless of your opinion on AI, this is a terrible way to solve this.

To the cheer of so-called progressives who never understood the tech and continue to be wilfully ignorant of it the corporations win again.

This is exactly what OpenAI etc. wanted to achieve with all the “AI safety” bullshit doomer talk. I really hope this doesn’t pass

No open source plagiarism machine :(

I'm the opposite, actually. I like generative AI. But as a creator who shares his work with the public for their (non-commercial) enjoyment, I am not okay with a billionaire industry training their models on my content without my permission, and then use those models as a money machine.

They’re ‘taking inspiration’ if you will, transforming it into something completely different.

That is not at all what takes place with A.I.

An A.I. doesn't "learn" like a human does. It aggregates multiple chunks from multiple sources. It's just really really tiny chunks so it's hard to tell sometimes.

That's why you can ask two AI's to write a story based on the same prompt and some of their lines will be exactly the same. Because it's not taking inspiration from, it's literally copying bits and pieces of other works and it happens that they both chose that particular bit.

If you do that when writing a paper in university it's called plagerism.

Get the fuck out of here with your "A.I. takes inspiration.." it copies nothing more. It doesn't add anything new to the sum total of the creative zeitgeist because it's just remixes of things that already exist.

Just because intellectual property laws currently can be exploited doesnt mean there is no place for it at all.

Incredibly well-put. IP is just land for the wannabe landlords of information and culture.

They are just attempting to squeeze the working class dry, take the last freedoms we have so we have to use their corporate products.

No matter how much you'd like for it to be the case, proprietary algorithms owned by big corporations are not remotely comparable to children.

1. Your machine learning algorithms are not people. No amount of calling it Alex or giving it a voice stolen from a well-known actress will change that fact.
2. If I traced an artwork or copied GPL licensed code into an non-GPL one, my ass would be beaten by others on the internet.
3. So far, the main usecase of this generative technology is scamming, intentionally creating distrust in the artist community, and an even worse and scummier form of plagiarism, but it doesn't matter because some shitpost that goes hard, "what if a content creator needs a stock photo?", and "what if it could be used to resurrect your favorite artist?".
4. Power imbalance. There's a difference a young creator not having money to buy a training material and a big corporation wanting to destroy their profession.

Because even when some of the water has gotten out, you still go plug the dam.

The best moment was earlier. The second best moment is now.

It's strengthening copyright laws by negating the transformative clause when dealing with AI

As if a law could prevent anything of that.

Generating legal liability goes a long way towards curbing how businesses behave, particularly when they can be picked on by rival mega-firms.

But because we've made class action lawsuits increasingly difficult, particularly after Comcast Corp. v. Behrend, the idea that individual claimants can effectively prosecute a case against an interstate or international entity is increasingly farcical. You're either going to need big state agencies (the EU seems increasingly invested in cracking down on American tech companies for anti-competitive practices) or rivalrous business interests (MPAA/RIAA going after Big Tech backed AI firms) to leverage this kind of liability. It's still going to be open season on everyone using DeviantArt or Pinterest or whatever.

I see this argument a lot as a defense for AI art and I see a couple major flaws in this line of thinking.

First, it's treating the AI art as somehow the same as a dirivitive (or parody) work made by an actual person. These two things are not the same and should not be argued like they are.

AI art isn't just dirivitive. It's a Frankenstein's Monster of a bunch of different pieces of art stitched together in a procedural way that doesn't credit and in fact obfuscates the original works. This is problematic at best and flat out dishonest thievery at worst. Whereas a work made by a person that is dirivitive or parody has actual work and thought put into it by an actual person. And would typically at least credit the original works being riffed on. This involves actual creative thought and human touch. Even if it is dirivitive it's unique in some way simply by virtue of being made by a person.

AI art cannot and will not ever be unique, at least not when used to just create a work wholesale. Because it's not being creative. It's calculating and nothing more. (at least if we're talking about current tachnology. A possible future General AI could flout this argument. But that would get into an AI personhood conversation not really relevant to our current machine learning tech).

Secondly, no one is worried that some hypothetical shitty AI video is going to somehow usurp the work that it's stealing from. What people are worried about is that AI art is going to be used in place of hiring actual artists for bigger projects. And the fact that this AI art exists solely because it's scraped the internet of art from those same artists now losing their livelihoods makes the tech incredibly fucked up.

Now don't get me wrong though. I do believe machine learning has its place in society. And we've already been using it for a long time to help with large tasks that would be incredibly difficult if not impossible for people to do on their own in a bunch of different industries. Things like medicine research in the pharmaceutical sector and fraud monitoring in the banking sector come to mind.

Also, there is an argument to be had that machine learning algorithms could be used as tools in creating art. I don't really have a problem with those use cases. Things that come to mind are a bunch of different tools that exist in music production right now that in my opinion help in allowing artists to fulfill their vision. Watch some There I Ruined It videos on YouTube to see what I mean. Yeah that guy is using AI to make himself sound like other musicians. But that guy also had to be a really solid singer and impressionist in the first place for those songs to be any good at all.

cool for small artists

It's certainly very bad for small artists. Can I ask why you think it would be good?

To answer why it is bad for small artists: Money for license fees will mainly go to major content owners like Getty, or Disney. Small artists will have to go through platforms like Shutterstock or Adobe, which will keep most of the fees. At the same time, AI tools like generative fill are becoming ever more important. Such licensing regimes make artists' tools more expensive. Major corporations will be able to extract more value.

Look at Adobe. It has a reputation for abusing its monopoly against small artists, right? Yet Adobe pays license fees for images on its platform, that it used for training its AI tools. Adobe has also created a provenance standard, such as this bill wants to make mandatory. This bill would make Adobe's preferred business model the mandatory standard by law.

In the same way that the law doesn't prevent you from murdering someone, but just makes it illegal to do so.