11mo ago

We Asked A.I. to Create the Joker. It Generated a Copyrighted Image.

www.nytimes.com 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 the Joker. It Generated a Copyrighted Image.::Artists and researchers are exposing copyrighted material hidden within A.I. tools, raising fresh legal questions.

411 comments

We asked A.I. to create a copyrighted image from the Joker movie. It generated a copyrighted image as expected.
Ftfy
- What it proves is that they are feeding entire movies into the training data. It is excellent evidence for when WB and Disney decides to sue the shit out of them.
  
  Does it really have to be entire movies when theres a ton of promotional images and memes with similar images?
  
  I think it's much more likely whatever scraping they used to get the training data snatched a screenshot of the movie some random internet user posted somewhere. (To confirm, I typed "joaquin phoenix joker" into Google and this very image was very high up in the image results) And of course not only this one but many many more too.
  Now I'm not saying scraping copyrighted material is morally right either, but I'd doubt they'd just feed an entire movie frame by frame (or randomly spaced screenshots from throughout a movie), especially because it would make generating good labels for each frame very difficult.
  
  WB and Disney would lose, at least without an amendment to copyright law. That in fact just happened in one court case. It was ruled that using a copyrighted work to train AI does not violate that works copyright.
  
  The way it was done if I remember correctly is that someone found out v6 was trained partially with Stockbase images-caption pairs, so they went to Stockbase and found some images and used those exact tags in the prompts.
  
  The image it generated is really widespread
  
  I have that exact same .jpeg stored on my computer and I don't even know where it came from. I don't even watch superhero films
- 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.
  
  I just remembered a copyrighted image. Oops.
  Hey, I bet there were complaints about Google showing image results at some point too! Lol
  
  Wow, voyager app is very nice!
- 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.
  
  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?

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.
  
  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?
  
  I've had this discussion before, but that's not how copyright exceptions work.
  Right or wrong (it hasn't been litigated yet), AI models are being claimed as fair use exceptions to the use of copyrighted material. Similar to other fair uses, the argument goes something like:
  "The AI model is simply a digital representation of facts gleamed from the analysis of copyrighted works, and since factual data cannot be copyrighted (e.g. a description of the Mona Lisa vs the painting itself), the model itself is fair use"
  I think it'll boil down to whether the models can be easily used as replacements to the works being claimed, and honestly I think that'll fail. That the models are quite good at reconstructing common expressions of copyrighted work is novel to the case law, though, and worthy of investigation.
  But as someone who thinks ownership of expressions is bullshit anyway, I tend to think copyright is not the right way to go about penalizing or preventing the harm caused by the technology.
  
  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.
  
  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 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.
  
  I mean anyone can use copyrighted material as inspiration for their work and it’s fair use and not a concern at all.
  Is Ai only bad since it can do what a human does better/faster? If that’s that case, than they don’t actually have an issue with the fact it’s copyrighted, or I wouldn’t be able to use it for inspiration either.
  
  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?
  
  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.
  
  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.
- 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 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.

Copyright issues aside, can we talk about how this implies accurate recall of an image from a never before achievable data compression ratio? If these models can actually recall the images they have been fed this could be a quantum leap in compression technology.
- It's not as accurate as you'd like it to be. Some issues are:
  It's quite lossy.
  It'll do better on images containing common objects vs rare or even novel objects.
  You won't know how much the result deviates from the original if all you're given is the prompt/conditioning vector and what model to use it on.
  You cannot easily "compress" new images, instead you would have to either finetune the model (at which point you'd also mess with everyone else's decompression) or do an adversarial attack onto the model with another model to find the prompt/conditioning vector most likely to create something as close as possible to the original image you have.
  It's rather slow.
  Also it's not all that novel. People have been doing this with (variational) autoencoders (another class of generative model). This also doesn't have the flaw that you have no easy way to compress new images since an autoencoder is a trained encoder/decoder pair. It's also quite a bit faster than diffusion models when it comes to decoding, but often with a greater decrease in quality.
  Most widespread diffusion models even use an autoencoder adjacent architecture to "compress" the input. The actual diffusion model then works in that "compressed data space" called latent space. The generated images are then decompressed before shown to users. Last time I checked, iirc, that compression rate was at around 1/4 to 1/8, but it's been a while, so don't quote me on this number.
  edit: fixed some ambiguous wordings.
- You can hardly consider it compression when you need a compute expensive model with hundreds of gigabytes (if not bigger) to accurately rehydrate it
  
  You can hardly consider it compression when you need a compute expensive model with hundreds of gigabytes (if not bigger) to accurately rehydrate it
  You can run Stable Diffusion with custom models, variational auto encoders, LoRAs, etc, on an iPhone from 2018. I don’t know what the NYTimes used, but AI image generation is surprisingly cheap once the hard work of creating the models is done. Most SD1.5 model checkpoints are around 2GB in size.
  Edit: But yes, the idea of using this as image compression is absurd.
- If you ignore the fact that the generated images are not accurate, maybe.
  They are very similar so they are infringing but nobody would use this method for compression over an image codec
- Holy shit I didn't even think about that.
  Essentially the model is compressing the image into a prompt.
  Instead of the bitmap being 8MB being condensed down into whatever the jpeg equivalent is, it's still more than a text file with that exact prompt that gave.
  
  But it's not deterministic.
  
  I like that thought too, surely better than calling it AI.
- I was thinking about this back when they first started talking about news articles coming back word for word.
  There's no way for us to tell how much of the original data even in a lossy fashion can be directly recovered. If this was as common as these articles would leave you to believe you just be able to pull anything you wanted out on demand.
  But here we have every news agency vying to make headlines about copyright infringement and we're seeing an article here and there with a close or relatively close result
  There are millions and millions of people using this technology and most of us aren't running across blatant full screen reproductions of stuff.
  You can tell from some of the artifacts that they've trained from some watermark images because the watermarks kind of show up but for the most part you wouldn't know who made the watermarking if all the watermarking companies didn't use rather unique patterns.
  The image that we're seeing on this news site of the joker is quite exceptional, even from a lossy standpoint, but honestly it's just feeding the confirmation bias.
  
  "how much of the data is the original data"?
  Even if you could reverse the process perfectly, what you would prove is that something fed into the AI was identical to a copyrighted image. But the image's license isn't part of that data. The question is: did the license cover use as training data?
  In the case of watermarked images, the answer is clearly no, so then the AI companies have to argue that only tiny parts of any given image come from any given source image, so it still doesn't violate the license. That's pretty questionable when waternarks are visible.
  In these examples, it's clear that all parts of the image come directly or indirectly (perhaps some source images were memes based on the original) from the original, so there goes the second line of defence.
  The fact that the quality is poor is neither here nor there. You can't run an image through a filter that adds noise and then say it's no longer copyrighted.
- Optimal tip-to-tip efficiency has been achieved.
- Chat GPT it's over 500 gigs of training data plus over 300 gigs of RAM, and Sam Altman has been quite adamant about how another order of magnitude worth of storage capacity is needed in order to advance the tech.
  I'm not convinced that these are compressed much at all. I would bet this image in its entirety is actually stored in there someplace albeit in an exploded format.
  
  I purchased a 128 GB flash drive for around 12-15$ (I forgot the exact price) last year, and on Amazon, there are 10 TB hard drives for $100. So, the actual storage doesn't seem to be an issue.
  RAM is expensive 128 GB of RAM on Amazon is $500.
  But then again, I am talking about the consumer grade stuff. It might be different for the people who are making AI's as they might be using the industrial/whatever it's called grade stuff.
- Compression is actually a mathematical field that's fairly well explored, and this isn't compression. There are theoretical limits on how much you can compress data, so the data is always somewhere, either in the dictionary or the input. Trained models like these are gigantic, so even if it was perfect recall the ratio still wouldn't be good. Lossy "compression" is another issue entirely, more of an engineering problem of determining how much data you can throw out while making acceptable compromises.
- Results vary wildly. Some images are near pixel perfect. Others, it clearly knows what image it is intended to be replicating. Like it gets all the conceptual pieces in the right places but fails to render an exact copy.
  Not a very good compression ratio if the image you get back isn't the one you wanted, but merely an image that is conceptually similar.
- I mean, only if you have the entire model downloaded and your computer does a ton of work to figure it out. And then if any new images are created the model will have to be retrained. Maybe if there were a bunch of presets of colors to choose from that everyone had downloaded and then you only send data describing changes to the image
- I made a novel type of language model, and from my calculations after about 30gb it would cross over an event horizon of compression, where it would hold infinitely more pieces of text without getting bigger. With lower vocabulary it would do this at a lower size. For images it's still pretty lossy but it's pretty cool. Honestly I can't mental image much better without drawing it out.
  
  Hmm this sounds like a similar technology to the time cube

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.
- 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.
- 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.
- We asked this artist to draw the joker. The artist generated an copyrighted image. We ask the court to immediately confiscate his brain.
- 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.
  
  The rules aren't any different for AI. AI is not a legal entity, just like a pen and canvas are not. It is always about the person who makes money with facsimiles of copyrighted previous work.

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.
- No it is not. What is going on nobody calls intelligence. They train a model to draw this so that is what it does. Nothing here has anything to do with any problems with machine learning
  
  they train a model
  nothing here has anything to do with ... machine learning
  Pick one

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.
  
  But of course you can't turn around and sell that picture of the Joker that you made. That's obvious.
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
  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
- 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.

"Generate this copyrighted character"
"Look, it showed us a copyrighted character!"
Does everyone that writes for the NYTimes have a learning disability?
- The point is to prove that copyrighted material has been used as training data. As a reference.
  If a human being gets asked to draw the joker, gets a still from the film, then copies it to the best of their ability. They can't sell that image. Technically speaking they've broken the law already by making a copy. Lots of fan art is illegal, it's just not worth going after (unless you're Disney or Nintendo).
  As a subscription service that's what AI is doing. Selling the output.
  Held to the same standards as a human artist, this is illegal.
  If AI is allowed to copy art under copyright, there's no reason a human shouldn't be allowed to do the same thing.
  Proving the reference is all important.
  If an AI or human only ever saw public domain artwork and was asked to draw the joker, they might come up with a similar character. But it would be their own creation. There are copyright cases that hinge on proving the reference material. (See Blurred Lines by Robin Thick)
  The New York Times is proving that AI is referencing an image under copyright because it comes out precisely the same. There are no significant changes at all.
  In fact even if you come up with a character with no references. If it's identical to a pre-existing character the first creator gets to hold copyright on it.
  This is undefendable.
  Even if that AI is a black box we can't see inside. That black box is definitely breaking the law. There's just a different way of proving it when the black box is a brain and when the black box is an AI.
  
  But that's just a lie? You may draw from copyright material. Nobody can stop you from drawing anything. Thankfully.
  
  Tough question is, can a tool be infringing anything?
  Although I'd see a legal case if AI companies were to bill picture by picture, but now they are just billing for a tool subscription.
  Still, would Microsoft be liable for my copy-pastes if they charged a penny every time I use it, or am I, if I sell a art piece that uses that infringing image?
  AI could be scraping that picture from anywhere.
  
  It's not selling that image (or any image), any more than a VCR is selling you a taped version of Die Hard you got off cable TV.
  It is a tool that can help you infringe copyright, but as it has non-infringing uses, it doesn't matter.
  
  If a human being gets asked to draw the joker, gets a still from the film, then copies it to the best of their ability. They can’t sell that image. Technically speaking they’ve broken the law already by making a copy.
  Is this really true? Breaking the law implies contravening some legislation which in the case of simply drawing a copyrighted character, you wouldn't be in most jurisdictions. It's a civil issue in that if some company has the rights to a character and some artist starts selling images of that character then whoever owns the rights might sue that artist for loss of income or unauthorised use of their intellectual property.
  Regardless, all human artists have learned from images of characters which are the intellectual property of some company.
  If I hired a human as an employee, and asked them to draw me a picture of the joker from some movie, there's no contravention of any law I'm aware of, and the rights holder wouldn't have much of a claim against me.
  As a layperson, who hasn't put much thought into this, the outcome of a claim against these image generators is unclear. IMO, it will come down to whether or not a model's abilities are significantly derived from a specific category of works.
  For example, if a model learned to draw super heros exclusively from watching marvel movies then that's probably a copyright infringement. OTOH if it learned to draw super heroes from a wide variety of published works then IMO it's much more difficult to make a case that the model is undermining the right's holder's revenue.
- The crux is that they went "draw me a cartoon mouse" and Midjourney went "here is Disney's Mickey Mouse™". A simple prompt should not be able to generate that specific of an image. If you want something specific, you should need to specific it, otherwise the AI failed to generalize or is somehow heavily biased towards existing images.
- Or you do? The point is that these machines are just regurgitating the copyrighted data they are fed, and not actually doing all that transformative work their creators claim in order to legally defend feeding them work they dont have the rights to.
  Its recreating the images it was fed. Not completing the prompt in unique and distinct ways. Just taking a thing it ate and plopping it into your hands.
  It doesnt matter that you asked it to do that, because the whole point was that it "isnt supposed to" do that in order for them to have the legal protection of feeding it artwork they didnt pay the rights to.
- I'm pretty pro AI but I think their point was that the generated images were near identical to existing images. For example, they generate one from Dune that even has whisps of hair in the same place.
  
  They just didn't use a clean model, this is actually so frustrating to read this many "experts" talk about stable diffusion... It's really not hard to teach a model to draw a specific image. This is like running people over with a car going LOOK! It's a killing machine!
- It just proves that there is not actual intelligence going on with this AI. It's basically just a glorified search engine that claims the work of others as it's own. It wouldn't be as much of a problem if it attributed it's sources, but they can't do that because that opens them up to copyright infringement lawsuits. It's still copyright infringement, just combined with plagiarism. But it's claimed to be a creation of "AI" to muddy the waters enough to delay the inevitable avalanche of copyright lawsuits long enough to siphon as much investment dollars as possible before the whole thing comes crashing down.
  
  Calling anything we have now "AI" is a marketing gimmick.
  There is not one piece of software that exists currently that can truly be labelled AI, it's just advertising for the general population that doesn't educate themselves on current computing technology.

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 suppose it's time to copyleft all the things on the internet
- Copyleft is not public domain, and requires copyright law to function.
  
  Ugh,time to open source everything then
- Now this I'm down with
- you're for sure entitled to everyone else's work dude
  
  Thanks. I suspected as much

I don't know why everybody pretends we need to come up with a bunch of new laws to protect artists and copyright against "AI". The problem isn't AI. The problem is data scraping.
An example: Apple's iOS allows you to record your own voice in order to make it a full speech synthesis, that you can use within the system. It's currently tooted as an accessibility feature (like, if you have a disability preventing you from speaking out loud all of the time, you can use your phone to speak on your behalf, with your own custom voice). In this case, you provide the data, and the AI processes it on-device over night. Simple. We could also think about an artist making a database of their own works in order to try and come up with new ideas with quick prompts, in their own style.
However, right now, a lot of companies are building huge databases by scraping data from everywhere without consent from the artists that, most of the time, don't even know their work was scraped. And they even dare to advise that publicly, pretend they have a right to do that, sell those services. That's stealing of intellectual property, always has been, always will be. You don't need new laws to get it right. You might need better courts in order to enforce it, depending on which country you live in.
There's legal use of AI, and unlawful use of AI. If you use what belongs to you and use the computer as a generative tool to make more things out of it: AI good. If you take from others what don't belong to you in order to generate stuff based on it: AI bad. Thanks for listening to my TED talk.
- You don't need new laws to get it right.
  You say this because you think you understand copyright law. If you actually knew anything about copyright law, you'd never say this. Nobody who understands copyright law thinks it's been done right, unless they're getting rich off of it.
  Scraping data has been allowed for decades. It's the foundation of image search engines. We allowed large-scale image scraping and categorization this whole time because we liked the results. Now that there are results we don't like, we have a lot of back-pedaling to do if we want something different. New laws would need to be written to reign this in, and those laws might end up destroying the efficacy of image search engines in the process.
  As understandably upset that artists get that AI "steals their style", existing copyright law allows me, without an AI, to steal anyone's style that I want to, because artistic style cannot be copyrighted. If you want to protect artistic styles from being stolen by an AI, you need new laws to protect styles because they don't currently exist at all. Those laws might end up having a chilling effect on things like parody and satire if aesthetics can be owned and protected.
  And this is just arguing against the ways the system isn't, as you claim, already prepared to handle the concerns surrounding AI. There are countless other shortcomings. The entire system is broken, partly because it was conceived pre-Internet and hasn't aged well into the modern age, but mostly because it protects giant corporations above all, so remember that when you're begging it to protect small artists from big tech companies.
  
  Yes, most image search engines are also unlawful. Google knows that firsthand. It's not because it exists that it's legal? You seem to believe that.
  It's almost like if big tech corporations don't care about laws, and the problem is elsewhere?

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.
  
  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.

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.
  
  That's patents
  
  Non-exclusively, so if something works everyone will make it and get a piece of the pie.
  I see no problem.

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?

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"

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.
- 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.

Copyright is a scam anyway so who cares?
- I can’t believe all the simping for copyright that’s come out of AI. What the fuck happened to the internet? On a place like lemmy no less.
  
  People are smart enough to understand the difference between someone copying for personal use and a billion dollar corporation copying to generate millions while laying off all the creative people. The latter is what these non-open-source AI companies are enabling - for profit too.
- Nah, that's like saying capitalism is a scam.
  Copyright and capitalism in general is fine. It's when billion dollar corporations use political donations to control regulations
  Like, imagine a year after Hangover came out. 20 production companies all released Hangover 2.
  Imagine it was a movie by a small Indie studio so a big studio paid off the original actors to be in their knockoff.
  Or an animated movie that used the same digital assets.
  We need some copyright protection, just not a never ending system
  
  Capitalism is a scam.
  It's an unsustainable system predicted on infinite growth that necessitates unconscionable inequality.
  
  Those are fundamental features of the current system. If you want to suggest a copyright system that does protect smaller creators from bad actors but doesn’t allow the mega-corps to bully and control everyone, then feel free. But until such a system is implemented it see no reason to defend the current one which is actively harmful to the vast majority of creators.

What is the non paywall version of this
- https://archive.ph/58A8B

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?
- New York Times and just making shit up, name a better combo.

I can take any image you give me and make a stable diffusion model that makes only that image.
You are confusing bad conduct with bad technology.
Just like mowing down children is not the correct way to use a bus.
Sensationalism and the subsequent tech bro takes is actually unbearable if you just know how the technology works.
Stop pretending to know gen art if you just used one once and know IT! Please stop spreading misinformation just because you feel like you can guesstimate how it works!
- The article uses Midjourney. Nobody is tuning it.
  
  ? Midjourney is of course tuned
- They said copyright infringement is hidden in AI tools, not that AI inherently infringes copyrights.
  
  No. That the midjourney team uses copyrighted art
  We already knew this

Hey AI, I’m ready to download a car.

When they say "copyrighted by Warner bros" they actually mean "created by a costume designer, production designer, lighting designer, cinematographer, photographer or camera operator, makeup artist, hairdresser, and their respective crews who were contractually employed by Warner bros but get no claim to their work," right?
- Well yeah, you don't buy a car built by a list of every motherfucker in the factory, you buy a Toyota or a fucking ford.
- ...who were all paid for their work!

It's not infringing, that's like saying advertising is infringed by being copied.
If you show your images in public and thet get picked up by crawling spiders, you don't have a case to curtail its spread.

it's a shame that @NYTOnIt isn't being updated anymore

The AI one is better :trollface:

Wah fuckin Wah.

If I ask an "ai" bot to create an image of batman, it does make sense to be modern or take inspiration from the batman of recent, the same applies to information it provides when asked questions. It makes sense to crawl news and websites with copyrighted footers if the information is relevant.
I do totally get their argument and think of the children angle. Getting to the point, it's all about the money, nothing to do with protecting peoples work. They want a cut of the profits these companies will make.
In that case so should open licences demand that they do not make profit from such content. In that case I believe the free AI will be much more useful, if of course people be aggressive back with this tit for tat.

I have a question for the author of this stupid fucking article. What the fuck do you think half of the artists on the planet do? They use copyrighted images as reference when drawing fictional characters and they often end up looking very similar to the original. There are thousands of people on social media that sell these drawings on a regular basis.
- That's not the point. If Joe the artist makes $25,000 a year breaking copyright, that doesn't mean copyright is now meaningless.
  
  Yes but image copyright is fickle thing, because at what point does it become not a copyrighted image? I have to reference the "Ship of Theseus" thought experiment, because it does sort of apply here. A fictional character cannot be drawn from a first hand perspective, so some sort of copyrighted image HAS to be used as a reference. So where does one draw the line?
- Actually humans are quite capable of creating art while having never seen art in their whole life.
  
  Utter nonsense. Have you ever looked at the history of art? It's all a slow incremental crawl based on previous efforts. Nothing comes from nothing.
- It's a bit different for MidjourneyV6, previous AI models would create their own original images based on patterns learned from the data. MidjourneyV6 on the other side reproduces the original images to such a degree where they look identical to the originals for the average observer, you have to see them side by side to even spot the differences at all. DALLE3 has that problem as well, but to a much lesser degree.
  That means there is something going wrong in the training, e.g. some images end up being duplicated so often in the training data that the AI remembers them completely. Normally that should be reduced or avoided by filtering out duplicate images, but that seems to not be happening or the images slip through due to small changes (e.g. size or crop will be different on different websites).
  Note this doesn't just impact exact duplication, it also impacts remixing, e.g. when you tell it to draw Joker doing some task, you'll get Joaquin Phoenix's Arthur Fleck, not some random guy with clown features.
  All of this happens with very simple prompts that do not contain all those very specific details.
  In AI's defense: All the examples I have seen so far are from press releases of movie stills. So they naturally end up getting copied all over the place and claiming copyright violation for your own material that you released to be reused by the press wouldn't fly either. But either way, Midjourney is still misbehaving here and needs to be fixed.
  More broadly speaking, I think it would be a good time to move away training those AI almost exclusively on images and start training them on video. Not just to be able to reproduce video, but so that the AI get a more holistic understanding of how the world works. At the moment all its knowledge is based on deliberate photo moments and there are very large gaps in its understanding.

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