We Asked A.I. to Create the Joker. It Generated a Copyrighted Image.::Artists and researchers are exposing copyrighted material hidden within A.I. tools, raising fresh legal questions.

  • @dragontamer@lemmy.world
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    110 months ago

    Because it’s so easy to use people keep focusing on trying to kill the tool rather than trying to police the people using it. But they’re going about it all wrong, copyright isn’t the right weapon if that’s your goal. Copyright can be used to go after the people using generative AI tools, but not the people creating the tools.

    Why? If the training weights are created and distributed in violation of copyright laws, it seems appropriate to punish those illegal training weights.

    In fact, all that people really are asking for, is for a new set of training weights to be developed but with appropriate copyright controls. IE: With express permission from the artists and/or entities who made the work.

    • @orclev@lemmy.world
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      110 months ago

      Why? If the training weights are created and distributed in violation of copyright laws, it seems appropriate to punish those illegal training weights.

      Because they aren’t illegal and they don’t violate copyright. People keep wanting them to be against copyright, but that’s just not how copyright works. There either needs to be amendments to copyright law in order to cover this case, but those changes would need to be very carefully tailored. It would be way too easy to make something that’s either overly broad and applies to a bunch of situations it wasn’t intended to, or way too narrow allowing for easy circumventing.

      In fact, all that people really are asking for, is for a new set of training weights to be developed but with appropriate copyright controls. IE: With express permission from the artists and/or entities who made the work.

      While that might appease some people, it wouldn’t appease everyone. There are a lot of workers in the creative fields that are feeling incredibly threatened by generative AI right now. Some of these fears are certainly overblown, but it’s also true corporations are going to be as shitty as possible and so some regulation is probably in order. That said, once again, copyright just doesn’t seem to be the right tool for the job here.

      • @dragontamer@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        Because they aren’t illegal and they don’t violate copyright

        Because they are legal and they do violate copyright? People keep wanting them to be copyright free, but that’s not how copyright works. There don’t need to be amendments to copyright law in order to cover this case.

        I mean, its obviously heading to the courts one way or the other, but I don’t think just making assertions like that are very good kind of arguing. The training weights here have clearly been proven to contain copyrighted data as per this article. I’m not sure if you’re making any kind of serious case that shows otherwise, but are instead just making a bunch of assertions that I could easily reverse.

        • @orclev@lemmy.world
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          110 months ago

          It varies somewhat from country to country, but at least in the US there is ample case law that says it’s legal. The relevant ruling is typically based on the work being transformative and therefore a fair use for a derivative work. This is E.G. how Google can get away with creating thumbnails of websites to show on their search pages without needing to worry about copyright of anything contained on that website.

          This article proved absolutely nothing except that you can use generative AI to create images that would most likely be ruled to violate copyright. Once again though, the model and training weights do not violate copyright, they’re a protected derivative work. The generated image on the other hand very likely does violate copyright.