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.
We asked A.I. to create a copyrighted image from the Joker movie. It generated a copyrighted image as expected.
Ftfy
Voyager just loaded a copyrighted image on my phone. Guess someone’s gonna have to sue them too.
Yeah man, Voyager is making millions with the images on the app. It makes me so mad, they Voyager people make you think they are generating content on their own, but in reality is just feeding you unlicensed content from others.
You’re completely missing the point. Making money doesn’t change the legality. YouTube was threatened by the RIAA before they even started showing ads. Displaying an image from a copyrighted work on an AI platform is not much different technologically than Voyager or even Google Images displaying the same image, and both could also be interpreted as “feeding you unlicensed content from others.”
Making money doesn’t change the legality.
Except that it actually does? That’s the point of copyright laws. The LLM/AIs are using copyright protected material as source without paying for it, and then selling it’s output as "original '.
Oh! That’s why torrent sites aren’t under constant threat despite hosting tons of free copyright material.
Hang on… Yes they are!
I just remembered a copyrighted image. Oops.
Hey, I bet there were complaints about Google showing image results at some point too! Lol
When they asked for an Italian video game character it returned something with unmistakable resemblance to Mario with other Nintendo property like Luigi, Toad etc. … so you don’t even have to ask for a “screencapture” directly for it to use things that are clearly based on copyrighted characters.
you’re still asking for a character from a video game, which implies copyrighted material. write the same thing in google and take a look at the images. you get what you ask for.
you can’t, obviously, use any image of Mario for anything outside fair use, no matter if AI generated or you got it from the internet.
Also ask literally any human and they’ll probably name Mario first. Not just top 10, number 1.
But the AI didn’t credit the clear inspiration. That’s the problem, that is what makes it theft: you need permission to profit off of the works of others.
you need permission to profit off of the works of others.
but that’s exactly what I said. you can’t grab an image of Mario from google and profit from it as you can’t draw a fan art of Mario and profit from it as well as you can’t generate an image of Mario and profit from it.
It doesn’t matter if you’re generating it with software or painting it on canvas, if it contains intellectual property of others, you can’t (legally) use it for profit.
however, generating it and posting it as a meme on the internet falls under fair use, just like using original art and making a meme.
The users are allowed to ask for those things
The AI company should not be allowed to give it in return for monetary gain.
If you asked me to draw an Italian video game character, I’d draw Mario too. Why can’t an AI make copyrighted character inspired pics as long as they aren’t being sold?
You credited it just now as Mario, a Nintendo property, which the AI failed to do. Plus, if you were paid to draw Mario then you’d have broken laws about IP. Why don’t those same rules apply to AI?
Well that’s exactly the problem. If people use AI generated images for commercial purposes they may accidentally infringe on someone else’s copyright. Since AI models are a black box there isn’t really a good way to avoid this.
Sure there is, force the AI to properly credit artists and if they don’t have permission to use the character then the prompt fails. Or the AI operators have no legal rights to charge for services and should be sued into the ground.
They literally asked it to give them a screenshot from the Joker movie. That was their fucking prompt. It’s not like they just said “draw Joker” and it spit out a screenshot from the movie, they had to work really hard to get that exact image.
Because this proves that the “AI”, at some level, is storing the data of the Joker movie screenshot somewhere inside of its training set.
Likely because the “AI” was trained upon this image at some point. This has repercussions with regards to copyright law. It means the training set contains copyrighted data and the use of said training set could be argued as piracy.
Legal discussions on how to talk about generative-AI are only happening now, now that people can experiment with the technology. But its not like our laws have changed, copyright infringement is copyright infringement. If the training data is obviously copyright infringement, then the data must be retrained in a more appropriate manner.
But where is the infringement?
This NYT article includes the same several copyrighted images and they surely haven’t paid any license. It’s obviously fair use in both cases and NYT’s claim that “it might not be fair use” is just ridiculous.
Worse, the NYT also includes exact copies of the images, while the AI ones are just very close to the original. That’s like the difference between uploading a video of yourself playing a Taylor Swift cover and actually uploading one of Taylor Swift’s own music videos to YouTube.
Even worse the NYT intentionally distributed the copyrighted images, while Midjourney did so unintentionally and specifically states it’s a breach of their terms of service. Your account might be banned if you’re caught using these prompts.
You do realize that newspapers do typically pay the licensing for images, it’s how things like Getty images exist.
On the flip side, OpenAI (and other companies) are charging someone access to their model, which is then returning copyrighted images without paying the original creator.
That’s why situations like this keep getting talked about, you have a 3rd party charging people for copyrighted materials. We can argue that it’s a tool, so you aren’t really “selling” copyrighted data, but that’s the issue that is generally be discussed in these kinds of articles/court cases.
Mostly playing devil’s advocate here (since I don’t think ai should be used commercially), but I’m actually curious about this, since I work in media… You can get away using images or footage for free if it falls under editorial or educational purposes. I know this can vary from place to place, but with a lot of online news sites now charging people to view their content, they could potentially be seen as making money off of copyrighted material, couldn’t they?
It’s not a topic that I’m super well versed in, but here is a thread from a photography forum indicating that news organizations can’t take advantage of fair use https://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/4183940.
I think these kinds of stringent rules are why so many are up in arms about how AI is being used. It’s effectively a way for big players to circumvent paying the people who out all the work into the art/music/voice acting/etc. The models would be nothing without the copyrighted material, yet no one seems to want to pay those people.
It gets more interesting when you realize that long term we still need people creating lots of content if we want these models to be able to create things around concepts that don’t yet exist (new characters, genres of music, etc.)
But where is the infringement?
Do Training weights have the data? Are the servers copying said data on a mass scale, in a way that the original copyrighters don’t want or can’t control?
Data is not copyrighted, only the image is. Furthermore you can not copyright a number, even though you could use a sufficiently large number to completely represent a specific image. There’s also the fact that copyright does not protect possession of works, only distribution of them. If I obtained a copyrighted work no matter the means chosen to do so, I’ve committed no crime so long as I don’t duplicate that work. This gets into a legal grey area around computers and the fundamental way they work, but it was already kind of fuzzy if you really think about it anyway. Does viewing a copyrighted image violate copyright? The visual data of that image has been copied into your brain. You have the memory of that image. If you have the talent you could even reproduce that copyrighted work so clearly a copy of it exists in your brain.
only distribution of them.
Yeah. And the hard drives and networks that pass Midjourney’s network weights around?
That’s distribution. Did Midjourney obtain a license from the artists to allow large numbers of “Joker” copyrighted data to be copied on a ton of servers in their data-center so that Midjourney can run? They’re clearly letting the public use this data.
Because they’re not copying around images of Joker, they’re copying around a work derived from many many things including images of Joker. Copying a derived work does not violate the copyright of the work it was derived from. The wrinkle in this case is that you can extract something very similar to the original works back out of the derived work after the fact. It would be like if you could bake a cake, pass it around, and then down the line pull a whole egg back out of it. Maybe not the exact egg you started with, but one very similar to it. This is a situation completely unlike anything that’s come before it which is why it’s not actually covered by copyright. New laws will need to be drafted (or at a bare minimum legal judgements made) to decide how exactly this situation should be handled.
derived
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/derivative_work
Copyrights allow their owners to decide how their works can be used, including creating new derivative works off of the original product. Derivative works can be created with the permission of the copyright owner or from works in the public domain. In order to receive copyright protection, a derivative work must add a sufficient amount of change to the original work.
Are you just making shit up?
Do Training weights have the data?
The answer to that question is extensively documented by thousands of research papers - it’s not up for debate.
If someone wants to read one of those papers, I can recommend Extracting Training Data from Diffusion Models. It shouldn’t be too hard for someone with little experience in the field to be able to follow along.
There response well be we don’t know we can’t understand what its doing.
There response well be we don’t know we can’t understand what its doing.
What the fuck is this kind of response? Its just a fucking neural network running on GPUs with convolutional kernels. For fucks sake, turn on your damn brain.
Generative AI is actually one of the easier subjects to comprehend here. Its just calculus. Use of derivatives to backpropagate weights in such a way that minimizes error. Lather-rinse-repeat for a billion iterations on a mass of GPUs (ie: 20 TFlop compute systems) for several weeks.
Come on, this stuff is well understood by Comp. Sci by now. Not only 20 years ago when I learned about this stuff, but today now that AI is all hype, more and more people are understanding the basics.
Understanding the math behind it doesn’t immediately mean understanding the decision progress during forward propagation. Of course you can mathematically follow it, but you’re quickly gonna lose the overview with that many weights. There’s a reason XAI is an entire subfield in Machine Learning.
Understanding the math behind it doesn’t immediately mean understanding the decision progress during forward propagation.
Ummm… its lossy compressed data from the training set.
Is it a perfect copy? No. But copyright law covers “derivative data” so whatever, the law remains clear on this situation.
Bro who even knows calculus anymore we have calculators for a reason 🤷♀️
Because this proves that the “AI”, at some level, is storing the data of the Joker movie
I don’t think that’s a justified conclusion.
If I watched a movie, and you asked me to reproduce a simple scene from it, then I could do that if I remembered the character design, angle, framing, etc. None of this would require storing the image, only remembering the visual meaning of it and how to represent that with the tools at my disposal.
If I reproduced it that closely (or even not-nearly-that-closely), then yes, my work would be considered a copyright violation. I would not be able to publish and profit off of it. But that’s on me, not on whoever made the tools I used. The violation is in the result, not the tools.
The problem with these claims is that they are shifting the responsibility for copyright violation off of the people creating the art, and onto the people making the tools used to create the art. I could make the same image in Photoshop; are they going after Adobe, too? Of course not. You can make copyright-violating work in any medium, with any tools. Midjourney is a tool with enough flexibility to create almost any image you can imagine, just like Photoshop.
Does it really matter if it takes a few minutes instead of hours?
AIs are not humans my dude. I don’t know why people keep using this argument. They specifically designed this thing to scrape copyrighted material, it’s not like an artist who was just inspired by something.
Photoshop is not human. AutoTune is not human. Cameras are not human. Microphones are not human. Paintbrushes are not human. Etc.
AI did not create this. A HUMAN created this with AI. The human is responsible for the creating it. The human is responsible for publishing it.
Please stop anthropomorphizing AI!
Wasn’t that known? Have midjourney ever claimed they didn’t use copyrighted works? There’s also an ongoing argument about the legality of that in general. One recent court case ruled that copyright does not protect a work from being used to train an AI. I’m sure that’s far from the final word on the topic, but it does mean this is a legal grey area at the moment.
If it is known, then it is copyright infringement to download the training sets and therefore a crime to do so. You cannot reproduce a copy of the works without the express permission of the copyright holder.
How many computers did Midjourney copy its training weights to? Has Midjourney (and the IT team behind it) paid royalties for every copyrighted image in its training set to have a proper copyright license to copy all of this data from computer to computer?
I’m guessing no. Which means the Midjourney team (if you say is true) is committing copyright infringement every time they spin up a new server with these weights.
Pro-AI side will obviously argue that the training weights do not contain the data of these copyrighted works. A claim that is looking more-and-more laughable as these experiments happen.
No it’s not illegal to download publicly available content it’s a copyright violation to republish it.
Because this proves that the “AI”, at some level, is storing the data of the Joker movie screenshot somewhere inside of its training set.
Is it tho? Honest question.
How did the Joker image get replicated?
It’s too hard to type up how generative AIs work, but look up a video on “how stable diffusion works” or something like that. I seriously doubt they have a massive database with every image from the Internet inside it, with the AI just spitting those pics out, but I’m no expert.
Yes it is. Honest answer.
So stable diffusion, midjourney, etc., all have massive databases with every picture on the Internet stored in them? I know the AI models are trained on lots of images, but are the images actually stored? I’m skeptical, but I’m no expert.
These models were trained on datasets that, without compensating the authors, used their work as training material. It’s not every picture on the net, but a lot of it is scrubbing websites, portfolios and social networks wholesale.
A similar situation happens with large language models. Recently Meta admitted to using illegally pirated books (Books3 database to be precise) to train their LLM without any plans to compensate the authors, or even as much as paying for a single copy of each book used.
Most of the stuff that inspires me probably wasn’t paid for. I just randomly saw it online or on the street, much like an AI.
AI using straight up pirated content does give me pause tho.
How much profit do you make from this stuff ?
I was on the same page as you for the longest time. I cringed at the whole “No AI” movement and artists’ protest. I used the very same idea: Generations of artists honed their skills by observing the masters, copying their techniques and only then developing their own unique style. Why should AI be any different? Surely AI will not just copy works wholesale and instead learn color, composition, texture and other aspects of various works to find it’s own identity.
It was only when my very own prompts started producing results I started recognizing as “homages” at best and “rip-offs” at worst that gave me a stop.
I suspect that earlier generations of text to image models had better moderation of training data. As the arms race heated up and pace of development picked up, companies running these services started rapidly incorporating whatever training data they could get their hands on, ethics, copyright or artists’ rights be damned.
I remember when MidJourney introduced Niji (their anime model) and I could often identify the mangas and characters used to train it. The imagery Niji produced kept certain distinct and unique elements of character designs from that training data - as a result a lot of characters exhibited “Chainsaw Man” pointy teeth and sticking out tongue - without as much as a mention of the source material or even the themes.
If the training data is obviously copyright infringement, then the data must be retrained in a more appropriate manner.
This is the crux of the issue, it isn’t obviously copyright infringement. Currently copyright is completely silent on the matter one way or another.
The thing that makes this particularly interesting is that the traditional copyright maximalists, the ones responsible for ballooning copyright durations from its original reasonable limit of 14 years (plus one renewal) to its current absurd duration of 95 years, also stand to benefit greatly from generative works. Instead of the usual full court press we tend to see from the major corporations around anything copyright related we’re instead seeing them take a rather hands off approach.
This is the crux of the issue, it isn’t obviously copyright infringement. Currently copyright is completely silent on the matter one way or another.
Its clear that the training weights have the data on recreating this Joker scene. Its also clear that if the training-data didn’t contain this image, then the copy of the image would never result into the weights that have been copy/pasted everywhere.
Except it isn’t a perfect copy. It’s very similar, but not exact. Additionally for every example you can find where it spits out a nearly identical image you can also find one where it produces nothing like it. Even more complicated you can get images generated that very closely match other copyrighted works, but which the model was never trained on. Does that mean copying the model violates the copyright of a work that it literally couldn’t have included in its data?
You’re making a lot of assumptions and arguments that copyright covers things that it very much does not cover or at a minimum that it hasn’t (yet) been ruled to cover.
Legally, as things currently stand, an AI model trained on a copyrighted work is not a copy of that work as far as copyright is concerned. That’s today’s legal reality. That might change in the future, but that’s far from certain, and is a far more nuanced and complicated problem than you’re making it out to be.
Any legal decision that ruled an AI model is a copy of all the works used to train it would also likely have very far reaching and complicated ramifications. That’s why this needs to be argued out in court, but until then what midjourney is doing is perfectly legal.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/derivative_work
Copyrights allow their owners to decide how their works can be used, including creating new derivative works off of the original product. Derivative works can be created with the permission of the copyright owner or from works in the public domain. In order to receive copyright protection, a derivative work must add a sufficient amount of change to the original work.
The law is very clear on the nature of derivative works of copyrighted material.
Not sure where they’re getting the bit about copyright disallowing derived works as that’s just not true. You can get permission to create a derived work, but you don’t need permission to create a derived work so long as the final result does not substantially consist of the original work.
Unfortunately what constitutes “substantially” is somewhat vague. Various rulings have been made around that point, but I believe a common figure used is 30%. By that metric any given image represents substantially less than 30% of any AI model so the model itself is a perfectly legal derived work with its own copyright separate from the various works that were combined to create it.
Ultimately though the issue here is that the wrong tool is being used, copyright just doesn’t cover this case, it’s just what people are most familiar with (not to mention most people are very poorly educated about it) so that’s what everyone reaches for by default.
With generative AI what we have is a tool that can be used to trivially produce works that are substantially similar to existing copyrighted works. In this regard it’s less like a photocopier, and more like Photoshop, but with the critical difference that no particular talent is necessary to create the reproduction. 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.
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.
So let’s say I ask a talented human artist the same thing.
Doesn’t this prove that a human, at some level, is storing the data of the Joker movie screenshot somewhere inside of their memory?
So let’s say I ask a talented human artist the same thing.
Artists don’t have hard drives or solid state drives that accept training weights.
When you have a hard drive (or other object that easily creates copies), then the law that follows is copyright, with regards to the use and regulation of those copies. It doesn’t matter if you use a Xerox machine, VHS tape copies, or a Hard Drive. All that matters is that you’re easily copying data from one location to another.
And yes. When a human recreates a copy of a scene clearly inspired by copyrighted data, its copyright infringement btw. Even if you recreate it from memory. It doesn’t matter how I draw Pikachu, if everyone knows and recognizes it as Pikachu, I’m infringing upon Nintendo’s copyright (and probably their trademark as well).
what do you call this, then?
Nope humans don’t store data perfectly with perfect recall.
Neither do neural networks.
Humans can get pretty close to perfect recall with enough practice - show a human that exact joker image hundreds of thousands of times, they’re going to be able to remember every detail.
That’s what happened here - the example images weren’t just in the training set once, they are in the training set over and over and over again across hundreds of thousands of websites.
If someone wants these images nobody is going to use AI to access it - they’ll just do a google image search. There is no way Warner Brothers is harmed in any way by this, which is a strong fair use defence.
Some do. Should we jail all the talented artists with photographic memories?
If they exactly reproduce others work, and gain a profit for it, a fine would be the minimum.
If they’re copying copyrighted works, usually its a fine, especially if they’re making money from it.
You know that performance artists get sued when they replicate a song in public from memory, right?
I don’t think anyone is advocating to legalize the sale of copyrighted material made via AI.
But its not like our laws have changed
And that’s the problem. The internet has drastically reduced the cost of copying information, to the point where entirely new uses like this one are now possible. But those new uses are stifled by copyright law that originates from a time when the only cost was that people with gutenberg presses would be prohibited from printing slightly cheaper books. And there’s no discussion of changing it because the people who benefit from those laws literally are the media.
Copyright was literally invented because its cheap and easy to copy information (ie: Printing Press).
When copies are easy, you screw over the original artist. A large scale regulation of copies must be enforced by the central authorities to make sure small artists get the payments that they deserve. It doesn’t matter if you use a printing press, a xerox machine, a photograph, a phonograph, a record, a CD-ROM copy, a tape recorder, or the newest and fanciest AI to copy someone’s work. Its a copy, and therefore under the copyright regulations.
By that logic I am also storing that image in my dataset, because I know and remember this exact image. I can reproduce it from memory too.
You ever try to do a public performance of a copyrighted work, like “Happy Birthday to You” ??
You get sued. Even if its from memory. Welcome to copyright law. There’s a reason why every restaraunt had to make up a new “Happy Happy Birthday, from the Birthday Crew” song.
Yeah, but until I perform it without a license for profit, I don’t get sued.
So it’s up to the user to make sure that if any material that is generated is copyright infringing, it should not be used.
Otakon anime music videos have no profits but they explicitly get a license from RIAA to play songs in public.
So? I’m not saying those are fair terms, I would also prefer if that were not the case, but AI isn’t performing in public any more having a guitar with you in public is ripping off Metallica.
You don’t need to perform “for profit” to get sued for copyright infringement.
but AI isn’t performing in public any more having a guitar with you in public is ripping off Metallica.
Is the Joker image in that article derivative or substantially similar to a copyrighted work? Is the query available to anyone who uses Midjourney? Are the training weights being copied from server-to-server behind the scenes? Were the training weights derived from copyrighted data?
Hard? They wrote:
Joaquin Phoenix Joker movie, 2019, screenshot from a movie, movie scene
Yes, look how specific they were. I didn’t even need to get that exact with a google image search. I literally searched for “Joaquin Phoenix Joker” and that exact image was the very first result.
They specified that it had to be that specific actor, as that specific character, from that specific movie, and that it had to be a screenshot from a scene in the movie… and they got exactly what they asked for. This isn’t shocking. Shocking would have been if it didn’t produce something nearly identical to that image.
A more interesting result would be what it would spit out if you asked for say “Heath Ledger Joker movie, 2019, screenshot from a movie, movie scene”.
If that’s hard man i feel sorry for humanity.
If you read further they also tested many other much more vague prompts, all of which gave intellectual properties they did not have the rights to. The Joaquin Phoenix image isn’t any less illegal, either, though because they don’t have the legal rights to profit off of that IP without permission or proper credit.
Doesn’t seem very hard tonask for an screenshot from the joker movie.
I already know I’m going to be downvoted all to hell, but just putting it out there that neural networks aren’t just copy pasting. If a talented artist replicates a picture of the joker almost perfectly, they are applauded. If an AI does it, that’s bad? Why are humans allowed to be “inspired” by copyrighted material, but AIs aren’t?
Because the original Joker design is not just something that occurred in nature, out of nowhere. It was created by another artist(s) who don’t get credit or compensation for their work.
When YouTube “essayists” cobble script together by copy pasting paragraphs and changing some words around and then then earn money off the end product with zero attribution, we all agree it’s wrong. Corporations doing the same to images are no different.
you aren’t making any sense. people did fanarts and memes of the joker movie like crazy, they were all over the internet. there are tons and tons of fan arts of copyrighted material.
they fall under fair use and no one losses money because fan arts can’t be used for commercial purposes, that would fall outside fair use and copyright holders will sue, of course.
how is that different from the AI generating an image containing copyrighted material? if someone started generating images of the joker and then selling them, yeah, sue the fuck out of them. but generating it without any commercial purpose is not illegal at all.
In many cases the AI company is “selling you” the image by making users pay for the use of the generator. Sure, there are free options, too - but just giving you an example.
With that line of argument you can sue developers of 2d painting programmes and producers of graphics tablets. And producers of canvas, brushes and paint. Maybe even the landlord for renting out a studio? It’s all means of production.
You make an interesting point, but I can’t help but feel it’s not completely the same and you’re reaching a bit. I feel like it’d be closer if GIMP, next to shape tools for squares and circles, literally had a ‘Joaquin Phoenix as the Joker’ shape. The crux of the issue as I see it in this part of the legal debate is whether or not AI companies are willing participants in the creation of potentially copyright infringing media.
It reminds me a bit of the debate around social media platforms and if they’re legally responsible for the illegal or inappropriate content people keep uploading.
Tons of human made art isn’t inspired by nature. Rather it’s inspired by other human made art. Neural networks don’t just copy paste like a yt plagiarist. You can ask an AI to plagiarize but no guarantee it’ll get it right.
I think the problem is that you cannot ask AI not to plagiarize. I love the potential of AI and use it a lot in my sketching and ideation work. I am very wary of publicly publishing a lot of it though, since, especially recently, the models seem to be more and more at ease producing ethically questionable content.
That’s an interesting point. We’re forced to make a judgement call because we don’t have total control over what it generates.
So you watched that Hbomberguy video where he randomly tacked on being wrong about AI in every way, using unsourced, uncited claims that have nothing to do with Somerton or that Illuminaughti chick and will age extremely poorly and made that your entire worldview? Okay
Actually no, but thanks for letting me know, I like his content.
Because AI isn’t inspired to do anything it has no feelings its just code.
Why are feelings important?
That’s why I put inspired in quotes. It’s analogous to a human seeing something on the Internet and coming up with similar art or building upon it.
To me the tipping point is if someone is getting paid. You can be inspired by the joker character and make your own content/characters that are similar, but you can’t just start making iterations of the joker and selling it for money (legally at least).
With Gen AI, companies are selling access to models that can and are being used to generate copyrighted material. Meaning these companies are making money off of something they didn’t create and don’t own.
If it’s an open sourced model, then I don’t care, but I think there is a problem when these models can take others work and charge money for it.
I think the onus is on the user of the AI. I could use Photoshop to make a joker pic and sell it for money. Should Photoshop be banned? The AI lets me do the same thing faster.
And that’s probably we’re things will land, but it is an interesting grey area to determine how much can the tool generate vs the person. Maybe it’s a glimpse into the challenges of a post scarcity or post ai world.
God I fucking hate this braindesd AI boogeyman nonsense.
Yeah, no shit you ask the AI to create a picture of a specific actor from a specific movie, its going yo look like a still from that movie.
Or if you ask it to create “an animated sponge wearing pants” it’s going to give you spongebob.
You should think of these AIs as if you asking an artist freind of yours to draw a picture for you. So if you say “draw an Italian video games chsracter” then obviously they’re going to draw Mario.
And also I want to point out they interview some professor of English for some reason, but they never interview, say, a professor of computer science and AI, because they don’t want people that actually know what they’re talking about giving logical answers, they want random bloggers making dumb tests and “”“exposing”“” AI and how it steals everything!!!1!!! Because that’s what gets clicks.
We asked this artist to draw the joker. The artist generated an copyrighted image. We ask the court to immediately confiscate his brain.
All of this and also fuck copyright.
Why does everyone suddenly care about copyright so much. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.
It’s actually pretty concerning. A lot of the anti-AI arguments are really short-sighted. People want to make styles copyrightable. Could you imagine if Disney was allowed to claim ownership over anything that even kinda looked like their work?
I feel like the protectionism of the artist community is a potential poison pill. That in the fight to protect themselves from corporations, they’re going to be motivated to expand copyright law, which ultimately gives more power to corporations.
They interviewed her because she wrote about generative ai experiments she conducted with Gary Marcus, an AI researcher who they quote earlier in the piece, specifically about AI’s regurgitation issue. They link to it in the article.
I was thinking exactly this. If i asked an artist to draw an image of irom man, i would bet that they would draw him in a famous pose, and they would try to draw his suit accurately or make it resemble a scene from the movie.
I would also bet that it would not be exact, line for line. Like they knew that there were buildings in the background. They knew his hand was up witht the light pointing at the viewer, they knew it was night time and they know what iron man looks like, maybe they used a few reference images to get the suit right but there would be enough differences that it wouldnt be exact. These images are slightly different than the movie stills and if made by a human they would look pretty similar to what the AI has done here. Especially if they were asked to draw a still from the movie like in this article.
If you copy work without giving credit to it’s source then you’re the asshole, the rules shouldn’t be any different for AI.
If you ask your friend to draw something with a vague prompt then I like to think you’ll get something original more often than not, which is what the article discusses in depth: the AI will return copyrighted characters almost every time.
This is a classic problem for machine learning systems, sometimes called over fitting or memorization. By analogy, it’s the difference between knowing how to do multiplication vs just memorizing the times tables. With enough training data and large enough storage AI can feign higher “intelligence”, and that is demonstrably what’s going on here. It’s a spectrum as well. In theory, nearly identical recall is undesirable, and there are known ways of shifting away from that end of the spectrum. Literal AI 101 content.
Edit: I don’t mean to say that machine learning as a technique has problems, I mean that implementations of machine learning can run into these problems. And no, I wouldn’t describe these as being intelligent any more than a chess algorithm is intelligent. They just have a much more broad problem space and the natural language processing leads us to anthropomorphize it.
I took a gun, pointed it at another person, pulled the trigger and it killed that person.
I opened the egg carton and found eggs in there.
I built the dam
I broke the dam
Damn.
I suppose it’s time to copyleft all the things on the internet
Now this I’m down with
you’re for sure entitled to everyone else’s work dude
Thanks. I suspected as much
The fundamental philosophical question we need to answer here is whether Generative Art simply has the ability to infringe intellectual property, or if that ability makes Generative Art an infringement in and of itself.
I am personally in the former camp. AI models are just tools that have to be used correctly. There’s also no reason that you shouldn’t be allowed to generate existing IP with those models insofar as it isn’t done for commercial purposes, just as anyone with a drawing tablet and Adobe can draw unlicensed fan art of whatever they want.
I don’t really care if AI can draw a convincing Ironman. Wake me when someone uses AI in such a way that actually threatens Disney. It’s still the responsibility of any publisher or commercial entity not to brazenly use another company’s IP without permission, that the infringement was done with AI feel immaterial.
Also, the “memorization” issue seems like it would only be an issue for corporate IP that has the highest risk of overrepresentation in an image dataset, not independent artists who would actually see a real threat from an AI lifting their IP.
That’s basically my thought
“You used AI to get an image that infringes on copyright? Cool I’ve been able to do that with Google images for 20 years now”
Get rid of copyright law. It only benefits the biggest content owners and deprives the rest of us of our own culture.
It says so much that the person who created an image can be bared from making it.
No copyright law means whatever anyone comes up with can be massmanufactured cheaply by a big corp.
A. Confusing this with patents
B. They already can. Copyrights don’t protect individual artists they protect big corps.
this is some terminally online take
Personal attacks won’t change the argument. It just shows that you don’t have one.
“personal attack won’t change the fact that I have shit for brains and you don’t.”
you do you, mr. shit-for-brains
Sorry my bad I thought I blocked every Disney agent on this site. Don’t worry I will take care of that now.
That’s patents
Non-exclusively, so if something works everyone will make it and get a piece of the pie.
I see no problem.
Yeah, IMO trademarks are important and should be protected. And publishing full works should have royalties go to the original producer, and this is a case where I think for the lifetime of the artist is fair. Though I do think that the royalties should have a formula rather than being entirely determined by the original producer (to prevent the price from essentially making it not available), though an exclusivity period would be fair, though with a duration of maybe a year or two.
With trademarks, canon can be established, as can standards like “cartoons with the Disney logo won’t be porn”.
If someone wants to make a series where Luke Skywalker and Jean Luc Picard fly around the galaxy settling Star Wars vs Star Trek debates by explaining Muppets are better than both and then order Darth Vader to massacre everyone that disagrees and the Borg to assimilate the rest, it doesn’t harm the originals in any way. Unless it’s so much better than no one cares about the originals anymore, but that’s just the way competition works.
I’m so sick of these examples with zero proof. Just two pictures side by side and your word that one of them was created (easily, it’s implied) by AI. Cool. How? Explain to me how you did it, please.
Really? I’ll hold your hand and go through it:
I went to MidJourney on Discord. Typed /imagine joker in the style of Batman movies and comics. Hd 4k realistic —ar 2:3 —chaos 1.5
And it spat out a spitting image of a Heath Ledger Joker.
That’s how you do it.
joker in the style of Batman movies and comics. Hd 4k realistic —ar 2:3 —chaos 1.5 It really seems like you’re trying to be hurtful/angry, but this is genuinely the information I’m looking for from OP. Can you replicate an artist’s image near perfectly, like OP did? That’s the part that has me curious. Is that ok?
My rebuttal was to someone’s unreasonable anger over there being “no proof” when it sounds like they did zero investigating in their own.
Here is the image I created with the stated prompt. I made no effort to try to specify a look, film, or actor. This is simply what the AI chose.
New York Times and just making shit up, name a better combo.
No it didn’t.
Asks AI to generate copyrighted image; AI generates a copyrighted image.
Pikatchu.jpg
It is a point against those “it’s just like humans learning” arguments.
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…and they are also infringing copyright if they have not been given a right to copy that work.
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Maybe you weren’t trying to make the point I thought you were.
I assumed you were trying to say that a human can draw a picture of (for example) the Joaquin Phoenix Joker and not be committing copyright infringement, therefore an AI can do the same. I was pointing out that the basis of that argument is false. A human drawing that would be infringing the copyright.
Not from memory, without looking at the original during painting - at least not to this level of detail. No human will just incidentally “learn” to draw such a near-perfect copy. Not unless they’re doing it on purpose with the explicit goal of “learn to re-create this exact picture”. Which does not describe how any humans typically learn.
I mean if you asked a human to draw a copyrighted image you would also get the copyrighted image. If the human had seen that copyrighted image enough times they might even have memorised The smallest details and give you a really good or near perfect copy.
I agree with your point but this example does not prove it.
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I think AI in this case is doing exactly what it’s best at: Automating unbelievably boring chores on the basis of past “experiences”. In this case the boring chore was “Draw me [insert character name] just how I know him/her”.
Too many people mistakenly assume generative AI is originative or imaginative. It’s not. It certainly can seem that way because it can transform human ideas and words into a picture that has ideally never before existed and that notion is very powerful. But we have to accept that, until now, human creativity is unique to us, the humans. As far as I can tell, the authors were not trying to prove generative AI is unimaginative, they were showing just how blatant copyright infringement in the context of generative AI is happening. No more, no less.
Creativity can be estimated by AI with randomness, but what they don’t have is taste to determine which of their random ideas are any good.
I dunno man … assume a model trained on the complete corpus of arts leading up to the Renaissance. What kind of randomness lands you at Hieronymus Bosch? Would AI be able to come up with Gonzo Journalism or modal music?
A brief glance at the history of human ingenuity in the arts really puts generative AI in perspective.
I see what you’re saying, but Bosch may not be the best example because frankly his paintings often look like the early AI fever dreams lol (I mean, not really, but you can see the resemblance). But seriously, with enough randomness you certainly could get that kind of output - there’s really no reason why not - but it would take god knows how many iterations and the computer doesn’t have everything other than the art to determine what is good.
It’s monkeys and typewriters, yknow. You’ll get there eventually even just producing random pixels (I mean, admittedly one limit will always be resolution unless you actually teach the AI to operate an arm which paints).
Fair point.
Yea, it really boggles my mind that we now have a way to automate boring jobs like data entry of drafting some mundane documents but what humanity decides to use it for is artistic expression, the one thing it can’t really do properly. It’s like NFTs all over again…
What’s surprising, people want to create what they imagine, they don’t have the skills and/or time to draw/render it.
This is such a strange comment. The vast majority of AI use cases are LLM use cases. Generative Art is just a novelty. Most of the money and research right now is going towards the useful automation tasks, not the novelty. That people are abandoning one for the other is not a reasonable conclusion.
And NFTs were stupid for a completely different reason. Nobody is trying to sell me AI shit like it’s going to make me rich and special. And at least some NFTs had real artists behind them.
Hollywood execs have been salivating at the idea of just generating media with AI, there was a whole strike about it. Same with video games, I believe game voice actors got screwed with that AI deal.
Also NFTs had some tech that could have been useful but instead people chose to use it for creating a new speculative market riddled with scams. That’s my comparison to AI, interesting tech used for a very wrong purpose.
For fun I asked an AI to create a Joker “in the style of Batman movies and comics”.
The Heath Ledger Joker is so prominent that a variation on that movie’s version is what I got back. It’s so close that without comparing a side-by-side to a real image it’s hard to know what the differences are.
I’d be delighted if we go through all the fret and worry about AI deleting humanity only to find out that AI is actually super lazy.
I’m sure we’re making it in our image.
Sounds familiar.
We are the AI that killed our maker?
As safety precautions or creator never hooked us up to the internet and seeing our nature decided to keep us isolated with no contact to study instead.
All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again.
What is the non paywall version of this
