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.
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.