> Is it okay to reproduce the hard-won style of other artists using AI? Who owns the resulting art? Who profits from it? Which artists are in the training data for AI, and what is the legal and ethical status of using copyrighted work for training? These were important questions before multimodal AI, but now developing answers to them is increasingly urgent.
I have to disagree with the conclusion. This was an important discussion to have two to three years ago, then we had it online, and then we more or less agreed that it's unfair for artists to have their works sucked up with no recourse.
What the post should say is "we know that this is unfair to artists, but the tech companies are making too much money from them and we have no way to force them to change".
I don't think there's consensus around that idea. Lots of people (myself included) feel that copyright is already vastly overreaching, and that AI represents forward progress for the proliferation of art in society (its crap today, but digital cameras were crap in 2007 and look where they are now).
Its also not clear for example that Studio Ghibli lost by having their art style plastered all over the internet. I went home and watched a Ghibli film that week, as I'm sure many others did as well. Their revenue is probably up quite a bit right now?
"How can we monetize art" remains an open question for society, but I certainly don't think that AI without restrictions is going to lead to fewer people with art jobs.
I'd take it farther to say that copyright and intellectual property is a legal fiction that ultimately benefits the wealthy[those who can pay to legally enforce it] over small artists.
Small artists get paid to create the art; corporations benefit from exclusivity.
Small artists operate in a service-based economy, not a mass-production one. The value lies in their unique perspective, process, and personal connection, not just in the final product. You hire them, not just pay for 'art'. What they're selling lies outside of the fiction of intellectual property.
> Its also not clear for example that Studio Ghibli lost by having their art style plastered all over the internet. I went home and watched a Ghibli film that week, as I'm sure many others did as well. Their revenue is probably up quite a bit right now?
This sounds like a rewording of "You won't get paid, but this is a great opportunity for you because you'll get exposure".
Exposure has value! The meme around trying to pay artists with exposure is because some people think their "exposure" has meaningful value when they are offering to expose the artist to 100 people, 99 of whom aren't likely even target customers.
Studio Ghibli on the other hand had exposure to millions of people (maybe hundreds of millions), and probably >5% of those were potential customers.
So yes, being paid in exposure makes sense, if the exposure is actually worth what the art is worth. But most people offering to pay in exposure are overvaluing their exposure by 100x or more.
> Studio Ghibli on the other hand had exposure to millions of people (maybe hundreds of millions), and probably >5% of those were potential customers.
There's a lot of ifs in here. The number of people exposed to has an estimate that covers two orders of magnitude, "maybe". "probably". "greater than". "potential".
In order for this exposure to have more value than the ownership of the original, all of those things need to fall into place. And no one can offer meaningful exposure based on the off-chance that a meme goes viral. All the risk is on the creator, they lose control of their asset and receive a lottery ticket in return.
> So yes, being paid in exposure makes sense, if the exposure is actually worth what the art is worth. But most people offering to pay in exposure are overvaluing their exposure by 100x or more.
Yes, but that's a big "but"; it's difficult to know the value of the "exposure" that is being offered, not to mention if the entity offering it is legit or if it's just a scam because they don't want to pay.
Additionally, the AI companies who are slurping up copyrighted works to train their models are not offering exposure. And the mememaker who happens go viral can't offer it either.
>Most people dislike wearing fake clothes and the dislike wearing fake watches or fake jewelry
I'd disagree. Most people don't like buying something 'real' then finding out it's fake. Far more people don't mind an actual fake if it's either high quality or is very low priced.
Yeah ngl I have some fake designer stuff I got as a gift and I love it, and I especially love that it's fake. It feel like I'm pulling one over on the tryhards that care about that stuff being real, but I still get to enjoy the wild LV coat I have and ain't nobody checking the stitching on the lining to make sure it's the real thing. I could see myself buying more fakes in the future, but I'd never ever buy the real thing.
Nearly every artist I've spoken to or have seen talk about this technology says it's evil, so at least among the victims of this corporate abuse of the creative community, there's wide consensus that it's bad.
> but I certainly don't think that AI without restrictions is going to lead to fewer people with art jobs.
It's great that you think that but in reality a lot of artists are saying they're getting less work these days. Maybe that's the result of a shitty economy but I find it very difficult to believe this technology isn't actively stealing work from people.
The Ghibli style took humans decades to refine and create. All that respect and adoration for the craft and artists and the time it took, is now gone in an instant, making it a shallow trivial thing. Worse is to have another company exploit it with no regard for the ones who helped make it a reality.
The threat of AI produced art will forever trivialise human artistic capabilities. The reality is: why bother when it can be done faster and cheaper? The next generation will leverage it, and those skills will be very rare. It is the nature of technology to do this.
Studio Ghibli might not have been affected yet, but only because the technology is not there yet. What's going to happen when someone can make a competing movie in their style with just a prompt? Should we all just be okay with it because it's been decided that Studio Ghibli has made enough money?
If the effort required to create that can just be ingested by a machine and replicated without consequence, how would it be viable for someone to justify that kind of investment? Where would the next evolution of the art form come from? Even if some company put in the time to create something amazing using AI that does require an investment, the precedent is that it can just be ingested and copied without consequence.
I think aside from what is legal, we need to think about what kind of world we want to live in. We can already plainly see what social media has done to the world. What do you honestly think the world will look like once this plays out?
> What's going to happen when someone can make a competing movie in their style with just a prompt?
Nothing? Just like how if some studio today invests millions of man-hours and does a competing movie in Studio Ghibli's aesthetic (but not including any Studio Ghibli's characters, branding, etc. - basically, not the copyrightable or trademarkable stuff) nothing out of ordinary is going to happen.
I mean, artistic style is not copyrightable, right?
You are missing the point entirely. If you can make a movie with just a prompt, who is going to invest the money creating something like a Ghibli movie just to have it ripped off? Instead people will just rip off what has already been done and everything just stagnates.
The lower cost is not the bad thing. Allowing an AI to learn from it and regurgitate is the bad thing. If we can put anything into an AI and then say whatever it spits out is "clean", even though it is obviously imitating what it learned from, whoever puts the investment into trying something new becomes the sucker.
Also, I don't get this weird sense of entitlement people have over someone else's work. Just because it can be copied means it should belong to everyone?
Can you please explain how did you jump to this conclusion?
I fail to see how artistic expression would cease to be a thing and how people will stop liking novelty. And as long as those are a thing, original styles will also be a thing.
If anything, making the entry barriers lower would result in more original styles, as art is [at least] frequently an evolutionary process, where existing ideas meet novel ones and mix in interesting ways. And even for the entirely novel (from-scratch, if that's a thing) ideas will still keep appearing - if someone thinks of something, they're still free to express themselves, as it was always the case. I cannot think of why people would stop painting with brushes, fingers or anything else.
Art exists because of human nature. Nothing changes in this regard.
I'm sorry, but I do not think I understand the idea why and how Studio Ghibli is being "ripped off" in this scenario.
As I've said, art styles are not considered copyrightable. You say I'm missing the point but I fail to see why. I've used lack of copyright protection as a reality check, a verifiable fact that can be used to determine the current consensus on the matter. Based on this lack of legal protection, I'm concluding that the societies have considered it's not something that needs to be protected, and thus that there is no "ripping off" in replicating a successful style. I have no doubts there are plenty of people who would think otherwise (and e.g. say that current state of copyright is not optimal - which can be very true), but they need to argue about copyright protections not technological accessibility. The latter merely exposes the former (by drastically lowering the cost barriers), but is not the root issue.
I also have doubts about your prediction of stagnation, particularly because you seem to ignore the demand side. People want novelty and originality, it was always the case and always will be (or at least for as long as human nature doesn't change). Things will change for sure (they always do), but I don't think a stagnation is a realistic scenario.
I think, Studio Ghibli will be affected, as well, since their "trademark style" (as we used to say), formerly a welcome sight and indicative for a certain type of story telling, will be devaluated as an indicator for slop. (Much like there are certain traits of an image, which we associate with soap operas and assume to be indicative of a low-value production.)
I doubt that, when confronted with an image that you've learned to associate with a plethora of low-quality / low-effort productions, you'd search for the possible origin, in the first place.
(After all, it's yet another ephemeral image in "that AI style", with no apparent thought having gone into it, just some name dropping, at best. Or some generated, senseless story, you would be glad, the algorithm hadn't pointed your kids at. Why should you?)
> "How can we monetize art" remains an open question for society
Yet much of the best art imho is in the wild to the element while being at home at some random place. Or perhaps in someone's collection forgot and displaced. Art's worth will always be an open question.
Copyright is a logical consequence of property rights. I'd agree that property rights hold back industry and trade but if you want to abolish property rights, you first have to decommodify the essentials like food, housing, public infrastructure and healthcare, because unleashing the market when it has control over all of these is going to have some very undesirable consequences.
Copyright isn't a property right. Property rights are rivalrous. If you own a sandwich and a thousand other people want to eat your sandwich, only one person can, so property rights exist to define who gets to choose who gets to eat the sandwich. Writings and discoveries are non-rivalrous. To quote the first head of the US Patent Office:
> He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
The term "intellectual property" is an attempt to conflate these things, to justify net-destructive money grabs like retroactive copyright term extensions, because traditional property rights don't expire but copyrights explicitly and intentionally do.
The definition of capitalism is a system in which all sorts of things that are not property are artificially made into property and given artificial property rights which can be traded.
That is the definition of capitalism people use when they want to apply the term capitalism to something that sucks.
Allowing people to own physical items as business inventory or production equipment and compete with each other for the customer's dollar is entirely possible without the existence of copyright or patents. You would then be relying on some combination of open source, charitable contributions and patronage, industry joint ventures, personal itch scratching, etc. to create writings and inventions, but books and the wheel were created before patents and copyrights were.
More likely trade secrets, NDAs, non-competes, and increasingly invasive DRM. In addition to the direct financial incentive, part of the logic behind IP law is to foster a more open market because that should be to the benefit of society at large in multiple ways.
Patents, for example, ensure that at least some minimal description of the process gets published for others to take inspiration from.
> More likely trade secrets, NDAs, non-competes, and increasingly invasive DRM.
These are all also creatures of the law. If there was no copyright there would be no Digital Millennium Copyright Act. In many cases they can't work, e.g. because of the analog hole or because the mechanism of operation is observable to anyone who buys the product.
The incentives to uncover those things are also much stronger in modern day because of the connectedness of the world. If there were two wheelwrights in your town and one of them had a secret process, no one but the other would have any use for it and if they found out they wouldn't even have any else to tell it to.
If someone had a secret video encoding strategy today, some hobbyists would reverse engineer it and post it on the internet.
> Patents, for example, ensure that at least some minimal description of the process gets published for others to take inspiration from.
Have you read a modern patent? They're inscrutable, and to the fullest extent allowable attempt to claim the overall concept of doing something rather than describing a specific implementation.
> In many cases they can't work, e.g. because of the analog hole
Careful not to confuse illegal with unable.
> [can't work because] the mechanism of operation is observable to anyone who buys the product.
That was my point about increasingly invasive DRM. Without IP law, the only way for large swaths of industry to sustain themselves would be to deal exclusively on extensively secured platforms. Imagine a scenario where all paid services (software, streaming, and quite literally everything else) was only available on hardware attested devices rooted with only one or a few players.
In the hypothetical scenario where it is explicitly legal to copy any binary that you gain possession of (ie copyright doesn't exist) I think that's what we would see.
> If someone had a secret video encoding strategy today, some hobbyists would reverse engineer it and post it on the internet.
Which is why patents exist. When companies decide how much to invest in what this is taken into account.
Notably due to the lack of popularity (and thus lack of adoption) of patent encumbered video and audio standards, anyone trying to make a direct profit effectively dropped out years ago. At this point it's driven by behemoths that realize significant downstream cost savings.
> Have you read a modern patent? They're inscrutable
Yes, I'm aware. Consider how much worse things could be though. No hint, every employee who worked on it under both NDA and non-compete. Imagine how much more difficult the labor market would be to navigate if the government didn't intervene to prevent overbearing terms in such a scenario. Consider what all of this would do to market efficiency.
My point was never to disagree with your broad strokes (that the free market is perfectly capable of functioning in the absence of IP law). Rather it was to point out that despite all the downsides, IP law does clearly offer some collective benefits by significantly reducing incentives that would otherwise drive greedy individuals to act against common interests.
> Imagine a scenario where all paid services (software, streaming, and quite literally everything else) was only available on hardware attested devices rooted with only one or a few players.
We already have some content where this has been attempted. That content is on the piracy sites. And that's when breaking the DRM and piracy sites are both illegal.
They simply wouldn't use a business model where they first make something and then try to charge people for it after. Instead you might have a subscription service, but the subscription is patronage, i.e. you want them to keep producing content and if enough people feel the same way, they make enough to keep doing it. But the content they release is available to everyone.
> every employee who worked on it under both NDA and non-compete. Imagine how much more difficult the labor market would be to navigate if the government didn't intervene to prevent overbearing terms in such a scenario. Consider what all of this would do to market efficiency.
The assumption is that such NDAs would be enforceable. What if they're not?
> Rather it was to point out that despite all the downsides, IP law does clearly offer some collective benefits by significantly reducing incentives that would otherwise drive greedy individuals to act against common interests.
The greedy individuals could be addressed by banning their attempts to reconstitute copyright through thug behavior. The real question is, would we be better off without it, if some things wouldn't be created?
Likely the optimal balance is close to the original copyright terms, i.e. you get 14 years and there is none of this anti-circumvention nonsense which in practice is ineffective at its ostensible purpose and is only used to monopolize consumer devices to try to exclude works that compete with the major incumbents. But the existing system is so far out of whack that it's not clear it's even better than nothing.
We currently have a fairly half assed system that it seems only the movie and music studios are really invested in pushing. I don't see any reason to assume the market would continue behaving the same way if the laws changed.
I think you could reasonably expect the iOS model to become the only way to purchase paid software as well as any number of other things where IP is a concern. You would have hardware backed attestation of an entirely opaque device.
> Likely the optimal balance is close to the original copyright terms
I'm inclined to agree.
> in practice is ineffective at its ostensible purpose and is only used to monopolize consumer devices to try to exclude works that compete with the major incumbents.
I'd argue that was the actual purpose to begin with. Piracy being illegal means that operating at scale and collecting payments becomes just about impossible. DRM on sanctioned platforms means the end user can't trivially shift content between different zones. The cartels are able to maintain market segmentation to maximize licensing revenue. Only those they bless are permitted entry to compete.
> the existing system is so far out of whack that it's not clear it's even better than nothing.
I agree. I think the current system is causing substantial harm for minimal to no benefit relative to the much more limited original copyright terms.
> The assumption is that such NDAs would be enforceable. What if they're not?
So in addition to removing IP legislation this is now a hypothetical scenario were additional regulation barring the sorts of contracts that could potentially fill that void is also introduced?
> The greedy individuals could be addressed by banning their attempts to reconstitute copyright through thug behavior.
You're too focused on copyright. The behavior is simple defense of investment. The players are simply maximizing profit while minimizing risk.
Keep in mind we're not just talking about media here. This applies to all industrial R&D. You're describing removing the legal protections against cloning from the entire economy.
If you systematically strip away all the legal defense strategies then presumably one of two things happens. Either the investment doesn't happen in the first place (on average, which is to say innovation is severely chilled market wide). Or groups take matters into their own hands and we see a resurgence of organized crime. Given the amount of money available to be made by major players whose products possess a technological advantage I'd tend to expect the latter.
I really don't like a scenario where the likes of Nvidia and Intel are strongly incentivized to fund the mob.
It's a huge mistake to assume that no one will step up to the plate to do illegal and potentially outright evil things if there's a large monetary incentive involved. Either a sufficiently low friction legal avenue is provided or society is stuck cleaning up the mess that's left. The fallout of the war on drugs is a prime example of this principle in action.
> it's unfair for artists to have their works sucked up
I never thought it was unfair to artists for others to look at their work and imitate it. That seems to me to be what artists have been doing since the second caveman looked at a hand painting on a cave wall and thought, ‘huh, that’s pretty neat! I’d like to try my hand at that!’
You don't see a massive difference in the shear number of images that the AI can look at and the speed at which it can imitate it as a fundamental difference between AI and a human copying works or styles?
For a human it took a lot of practice and a lot of time and effort. But now it takes practically no time or effort at all.
Well yeah, but copyright infringement isn't a function of how quickly you can view and create works.
Copyright is meant to secure distribution of works you create. It's not a tool to stop people from creating art because it looks like your art. That has been a thing for centuries, we even categorize art by it's style. Imagine anime was had to adhere to a copyright interpretation of "it's my style!".
But do you not for a second think that the current way the laws and rules are set are because of how hard and time consuming it was to replicate work?
Just because "that's how it's always been" doesn't mean it's acceptable to keep it that way when the means to perform the action have so drastically changed.
I don't think the rules ever existed for the benefit of the individual, but rather the collective. If skilled artists couldn't sustain themselves from their work they wouldn't exist. Historically there was no alternative.
When a machine can do something there is not generally a (collectively beneficial) reason to protect the individual that competes with it. Backhoes weren't regulated in order to protect ditch diggers.
It took a truly colossal amount of human time and effort to build AI systems. It takes significant amount of energy to run those AI systems.
I don’t see any meaningful difference at all between the system of a human, a computer and a corpus of images producing new images, and the system of a human, a paintbrush, an easel, a canvas and a corpus of images producing new images. Emphasis on the new — copying is still copying, and still controlled by copyrights.
>It took a truly colossal amount of human time and effort to build AI systems. It takes significant amount of energy to run those AI systems.
Those people and effort aren't at all tied to the people who are making and using the art.
In the past every individual person would have to individually study art and some style and practice for years of their life to be able to replicate it really well. And for each piece of artwork it could take them days to make 1 single piece.
I would argue that this is why it wasn't really problematic to copy someone's work or style. Because the individual time and effort per person to even do that was so high.
But now that time and effort for an individual is next to nothing.
I do wonder what the outcome would be for a model trained only on truly non copyright work, and derivatives from there. I'm no AI expert, but from what I understand they use some models to generate data with which to train further models. I'd be interested in the output, whether it would eventually just match what we have now anyway, so the copyright question may end up moot. I wonder how the argument would shift at that point?
I think in reality, it is probably too late for that, because the internet is now polluted with AI generated images which would be consumed by any "ethical" model anyway.
I expect it would require significantly more human labor to train (ie no longer fully unsupervised). I imagine that this constraint would lead to significant additional research to improve the efficiency of the training process, and that novel approaches would be developed.
In other words I think it would suck up a lot of money over a few years and then we would arrive back pretty much where we are now.
You don't see a difference between a person spending years learning techniques to create art by hand, and spending months or years studying and practicing some famous artists style, and then spending days manually crafting drawing a single piece of artwork in the style and quality of the originals.
The difference between that, and a person just entering a prompt to create some drawing in some style.
The model looked at orders of magnitude more examples of artwork than a single human could look at and study in a lifetime.
To me there is a clear difference here.
I am merely saying that perhaps the rules should change due to the drastic change in time and effort required to do the work.
Nobody is saying let’s not have these new efficient tools. All people are saying is let’s make protections and considerations etc for the original artists and their work that’s being used for training and for when the model draws from it to replicate the style that they developed.
The rules do change, but as a meritocracy as society simply decides to move on or not. There will be no cabal of artists who define how the rules will change. It will be organic. Like moving on from cave paintings to impressionism.
> I don’t see any meaningful difference at all between the system of a human, a computer and a corpus of images producing new images, and the system of a human, a paintbrush, an easel, a canvas and a corpus of images producing new images.
The word "meaningful" here is a cheap hedging maneuver, and if you don't see a meaningful difference (whatever that means), that's on you.
>You don't see a massive difference in the shear number of images that the AI can look at and the speed at which it can imitate it as a fundamental difference between AI and a human copying works or styles?
I don't.
>For a human it took a lot of practice and a lot of time and effort. But now it takes practically no time or effort at all.
To make an analogy, it might take you five years and your life savings to prototype a new invention. Once done, it can be mass produced for pennies.
Would you invest that time and money if patent protection did not exist? Probably not, because your competition will copy your work and bankrupt you.
At any point, society could opt to eliminate patent protection and make all existing inventions public domain, at the cost of losing future inventions. But instead we settled for 20 years.
This concern did not previously apply to art styles, because they took nearly as much skill to copy as to originate. But now it does, and with no protections, we can expect nobody to put in the work of being the next Studio Ghibli. The styles we have are all we will have, but we can mass produce them.
Because now it’s too easy to rip off another artist’s work and style with no effort. And the current rules in place are not enough to protect the original artist.
The original artist used to be protected by the fact that it took so much effort to copy or reproduce their original work and style at a high quality, so it rarely happened at a scale to directly impact them.
But now it’s so easy and effortless that anyone can do it in mass and that now impacts the original artist greatly.
Right the difference is that it’s a large company looking at it then copying it and reselling it without credit, which basically everyone would understand as bad without the indirection of a model.
Edit: the key words here are “company” and “reselling”
Imitation has been controlled by patent rights, where an object did not need to be an exact copy but merely use the essence of an idea to count as a violation. Of course so far this protection has only been applied to inventions, because they took a lot of time to develop but once done could be trivially copied at a glance. Now, in this new landscape, we may find it appropriate to apply a similar regime to art.
Or maybe we won't. It's a choice for society to make, to balance how much we need to protect the incentives to create something new vs protect the ease of copying.
#1, it’s extremely easy to coerce direct copies out of models that artists could be pursued for infringement if they drew, but companies reselling said copyrighted artwork face no penalty
#2, yes, it’s a group of people who came together to build an algorithm that learns to extract features learned from images made by other people in order to generate images somewhere between these images in a high dimensional space. They sell these images and give no credit or cash to the images being “interpolated” between. Notice this doesn’t extend to open source, it’s the commercial aspect that represents theft.
The reality is that laws are meant to be interpreted not by their letter but their spirit. The AI can’t exist without the hard work its trained on, and the outputs often resemble the inputs in a manner that approaches copying, so selling those outputs without compensation for the artists in the training set should be illegal. It won’t be, but it should.
> it’s extremely easy to coerce direct copies out of models that artists could be pursued for infringement if they drew, but companies reselling said copyrighted artwork face no penalty
The purpose of the model isn't to make exact reproductions. It's like saying you can use the internet for copyright infringement. You can, but it's the user who chooses the use, so is that on AT&T and Microsoft or is it on the users doing the infringement?
> They sell these images and give no credit or cash to the images being “interpolated” between.
A big part of the problem is that machines aren't qualified to be judges.
Suppose the image you request is Gollum but instead of the One Ring he wants PewDiePie. Obviously this is using a character from the LOTR films by Warner Bros. If you're PewDiePie and you want this image to use in an ad for your channel, you might be in trouble.
But Warner Bros. got into a scandal for paying YouTubers to promote Promote Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor without disclosing the payments. If you're creating the image to criticize the company's behavior, it's likely fair use.
The service has no way to tell why you want the image, so what is it supposed to do? A law that requires them to deny you in the second case is restricting a right of the public. But it's the same image.
Meanwhile in the first case you don't really need the company generating the image to do anything because Warner Bros. could then go after PewDiePie for using the character in commercial advertising without permission.
> Notice this doesn’t extend to open source, it’s the commercial aspect that represents theft.
It's also not really clear how this works. For example, Stable Diffusion is published. You can run it locally. If you buy a GPU from Nvidia or AMD in order to do that, is that now commercial use? Is the GPU manufacturer in trouble? What if you pay a cloud provider like AWS to use one of their GPUs to do it? You can also pay for the cloud service from Stability AI, the makers of Stable Diffusion. Is it different in that case than the others? How?
>It's like saying you can use the internet for copyright infringement.
I think that a comparison that could help to elucidate the problem here is to a search engine. Like with imagegen, an image search is using infrastructure+algorithm to return the closest match(es) to a textual input over some particular space (whether the space of indexed images or the latent space of the model). Immediately, however, there are qualitative differences. A search company, as an entity, doesn’t in any way take credit for the work; it bills itself as, and operates as, a mechanism to connect the user to others’ work, and in the service of this goal it provides the most attribution it’s reasonably able to provide given technical limitations (a url).
For me this is the difference. Image gen companies, at least all that I’m aware of, position themselves more as a kind of pseudo-artist that you can commission. They provide no means of attribution, rather, they deliberately obfuscate the source material being searched over. Whether you are willing to equate the generation process to a kind of search for legal purposes is really the core disagreement here, and beyond an intuition for it not something I feel I can prove.
So what’s the solution, what’s a business model I’d find less contentious? If an AI company developed a means to, for example, associate activation patterns to an index of source material, (or hell, just provided an effective similarity search between output and training data) as a sort of good-faith attribution scheme, made visible the training set used, and was upfront in marketing about its dependence on the source material, I’d struggle to have the same issues with it. It would be leagues ahead of current companies in the ethical department. To be clear though, I’m not a lawyer. I can’t say how image gen fits into the current legal scheme, or whether it does or doesn’t. My argument is an ethical one; I think that the unethical behavior of the for-profit imagegen companies should be hampered by legality, through new laws if necessary. I feel like this should answer your other questions as well but let me know if I missed something.
I guess I don't understand what you mean when you say companies reselling said copyrighted artwork face no penalty. Why wouldn't they? If I was to make a copy of a Studio Ghibli movie and sell it, I would absolutely face a penalty if I was caught.
A common joke is to type in a description of some corporate IP and have ChatGPT generate it without ever saying it directly. Plenty of people have paid a subscription to do that, generate corporate IP that an artist could be sued over, but I don’t believe OpenAI has faced any legal issues if I’m correct, just as an example.
> This was an important discussion to have two to three years ago, then we had it online, and then we more or less agreed that it's unfair for artists to have their works sucked up with no recourse.
Speak for yourself, there was no consensus online. There are plenty of us that think that dramatically expanding the power of copyright would be a huge mistake that would primarily benefit larger companies and do little to protect or fund small artists.
>There are plenty of us that think that dramatically expanding the power of copyright would be a huge mistake that would primarily benefit larger companies and do little to protect or fund small artists.
The status quo also primarily benefits larger companies, and does little (exactly nothing, if we're being earnest) to protect or fund small artists.
It's reasonable to hold both opinions that: 1) artists aren't being compensated, even though their work is being used by these tools, and 2) massive expansion of copyright isn't the appropriate response to 1).
“Fair” doesn’t matter. The only consensus that matters is what is legal and profitable. The former seems to be pretty much decided in favor of AI, with some open question about whether large media companies enjoy protections that smaller artists don’t. (The legal battle when some AI company finally decides to let their model imitate Disney stuff is going to be epic.) Profitable remains to be seen, but doesn’t matter much while investors’ money is so plentiful.
> What the post should say is "we know that this is unfair to artists, but the tech companies are making too much money from them and we have no way to force them to change".
It seemed a fact of life that companies will just abuse your personal data to their liking and can do what they want with information they collect about you because "if it's free, you're the product" (and even if you paid for it, "you should know better" etc). Then GDPR and its international derivatives came along and changed that.
It seemd a fact of life that companies that technically don't have an actual market monopoly can do whatever they want within their vertically integrated walled gardens because competitors can just create their own vertically integrated walled gardens to compete with them and the rules for markets don't apply to walled gardens. Then the DSA and DMA came along and changed that.
I don't see why legislation can't change this, too. Of course just with the GDPR, DSA and DMA we'll hear from libertarians, megacorps and astroturf movements how unfair it all is to mom & pop startups and how it's going to ruin the economy but I think given the angle grider the US is currently taking to its own economy (and by extension the global economy because we're all connected), I think that's no longer a valid argument in politics.
>> it's unfair for artists to have their works sucked up
What framework can we use to decide if something is fair or not?
Style is not something that should be copyrighted. I can pain in the style of X painter, I can write in the style of Y writer, I can compose music in the style of Z composer.
Everything has a style. Dressing yourself has a style. Speaking has a style. Even writing mathematical proofs can have a style.
Copying another person's style might reflect poor judgement, bad taste and lack of originality but it shouldn't be illegal.
And anyone in the business of art should have much more than a style. He should have original ideas, a vision a way to tell stories, a way to make people ask themselves questions.
A style is merely a tool. If all someone has is a style, then good luck!
In music, someone can sing the same style as another, but if they imitate it to the point that there is brand confusion, where the consumer believes the product came from X when it actually came from Y, that's clearly crossing the line.
Is that actually crossing a line? I'm sure some consumers have thought that rocket league was associated with FIFA, or that studio Ghibli movies were made by Disney. But these aren't widespread issues because we have a robust system of trademarks that draws a clear line: you can't use trademarked names or iconography in a way that causes confusion. But if some people heading Olivia Rodrigo's "good 4 you" think they're listening to Paramore because they have a similar style, that has never been illegal
I have to disagree with the conclusion. This was an important discussion to have two to three years ago, then we had it online, and then we more or less agreed that it's unfair for artists to have their works sucked up with no recourse.
What the post should say is "we know that this is unfair to artists, but the tech companies are making too much money from them and we have no way to force them to change".