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People are way overvaluing this thing right? AI "art", prompt "engineering". All I see is people with too much time throwing words at a parser without understanding what it does until something sticks.

And the result is probably a copyright violation of some poor artist's work.

4 comments

Little strange to comment that users do not understand a technology, then comment that outputs are copyright violations; which to me says you neither understand copyright, nor how the technology works.

The law hasn't caught up, and might never do. But surely a generator that even sometimes inputs the artists' signature (or at least a bizarro version of it) in the output meets the spirit if not the letter of what copyright law is trying to achieve? At the very least you have artists in a more precarious position than they were before.

Copyright law allows for transformative use, signature alone in some from would not negate the work being transformative. If it was claimed to be work of art by an artist associated with a signature, that would be fraud, which is completely different. If signature was trademarked, that might be another basis for legal claims, but unrelated to copyright.

Again, I am aware that legally there's nothing they can do, but the point of copyright law is to facilitate making a living from art (let's ignore the House of Mouse shenanigans for the sake of the argument).

A service that is able to pop out a new piece that will be indistinguishable from the artist's style is going to be disastrous for hundreds of thousands of artists around the world. We can't hide, at least not in good faith, behind the concept of 'transformative' art.

Besides, there clearly hasn't been enough time for the legal system to catch up so arguments about the letter of the law might change too. If you look at musical cases you'll be surprised to see that the 'transformative' part is up to interpretation. Just ask the Verve...

Copyright law protects finished works of art. It does not protect things like facts, ideas, procedures, or an artist's style, no matter how distinct.

And legal system is up to date in any material matter related to the topic. If is not, you not only need to provide a specific notable claim, but back it up with evidence to support it and state why it’s not addressed by current legal code, case law, etc.

Well it looks as though some actors such as Bruce Willis have already signed away their deepfake likeness and/or style, however you'd want to call it. Maybe additional legal concepts are not far behind? There was a time when copyright did not exist at all. It came into being because there was a need for it.

Reddit-style argumentation about the literal aspect of the law is missing the point altogether. These new services are barely a few months old (or at least publicly available) and it remains to be seen how society will react. How can there even be case law if there is literally not enough time for it to appear?

The salient fact is that the living conditions of many artists is going to degrade. If you do not believe that or do not care about it, then we can agree to disagree, but personally I think it would be better to alleviate that problem in some way and to nudge the law towards supporting this.

You randomly mixing in concepts which are wholly related, as such, will not be replying to them; likeliness as a concept under tort law is basically unregistered trade mark rights, not copyright.

You again refuse mention verbatim what legal issues are new that are not covered by existing laws. Law by definition will always have a latent space that’s beyond the law, it is called extralegal, and one of the many reasons in common law that judges exists. Something being extralegal does neither make it illegal, nor shows a law is currently imperfect. Laws and judges further do not represent some idle truth, but a system for bring disagreements to an end without the need to exceed the monopoly governments have on violence as a means of dispute resolution; which is why criminals resort to violence as a means of dispute resolution, because they are frequently unable to resolve disputes using the law.

And then, you inject a yet another completely different topic, for which disagree, that being the impact of AI of professional artists, but as I said before, you lack the sense to understand your response are not in good faith, to me oddly argumentative, and wish you the best.

Last comment is even against HN’s guidelines:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Legal or illegal, there's a big ethical debate to be had. Swallowing up the work of others and using that to generate derivative/new work that _a lot_ of people (I've seen half a dozen stock photo AI sites this week alone) are then trying to use to replace the original creators doesn't feel right.

Someone else can skip training with copyrighted images, so this copyright argument would be unusable there.

Competent creators will not be replaced, they will use the tools to do their job faster/better. I remember soem tiem ago artists having reservations on "digital art". Someone said it better, a person with a camera is not a photographer.

the problems I have with Microsoft Copilot is that the fuckers did not used MS proprietary code train but only trained with other people GPL/MIT code, this was shitty and implies that their implementation is "dangerous" to use with proprietary code but their expensive lawyers can handle a bunch of open source small developers.

GitHub’s terms of service explicitly allow them to do what they did, if anyone is in violation of the licenses you’re referencing it’s the people that loaded the code into GitHub.

>if anyone is in violation of the licenses you’re referencing it’s the people that loaded the code into GitHub.

MS can't use this excuse, if some dude uploads Windows code or say GTA6 code on GitHub I can't just use it and point you to the GitHub repo and ask you to figure it out with that person.

MS should either

1 tell you that the code is BSD,GPL, MIT depending on what is derived from

2 tell you that is not derived but some new code, but at the same time put his fat ass on the line and also put proprietary code in the mix, like their code and private code on GitHub since they claim the output is not derived from the input.

But they did it half ways, they did not had the courage for 2 and they did not want to respect the MIT,GPL either

Please don’t repost same comment to same thread in different places — already replied here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33081744

That is not how copyright law works. If someone uploads an image as public domain, or code as a BSD license, without having the right to do so, that doesn't give others the right to use those things.

Unless I am missing something, nothing I said prior conflicts with your point, nor shows that GitHub is willfully violating the law. Are you aware of any copyrighted material that was illegally loaded to GitHub that has been proven to be used by CoPilot, it’s use was not transformative — AND - GitHub has not removed it from the model?

The code used in GitHub copilot is all copyrighted with GPL, MIT,BSD. Also lots of the code was not uploaded to GitHub by the authors so GitHub shity ToS won't apply so you can't claim that the authors agreed to some vague terms that we can now intepret as allows only GitHub to create copilot.

You did

1 MS did not violate copyright since is open source code, andfor soem reason you think that only proprietary code should be removed from copilot

2 even if MS violated the license the guilty person is the dude that uploaded the code to GitHub and click I Agree not he ToS, implying that somehow the GitHub ToS has the ability to change open source license(but t proprietary ones, since you claim MS "removed" such code when it was revealed).

As I mentioned above, MS are cowards, iof their thing is real creating new stuff then put their ass on the line and put their own code in too, put all proprietary code in GitHub in copilot too and then have their well paid lawyers defend their tech.

Art history is literally full of transformation of prior works, technology is clearly transformative (if you understand it), copyright law clearly allows for it, and indexing publicly available data is also legal — there’s no reasonable basis for debating the topic being illegal or unethical.

Legal and ethical are two wholly different concepts. There's quite a few things which are legal and not at all ethical.

Today in many states it's perfectly legal to shoot a native american if you're in a wagon circle. Is that ethical?

Fair use is also a positive defense, which means that only the courts can really say if something is fair use or not.

  > Today in many states it's perfectly legal to shoot a native american if you're in a wagon circle.

Could you please clarify this?

Those laws are illegal and anyone using them as a basis for murder would ultimately be found guilty of it:

https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/25222/is-it-leg...

First line, from the post you replied to:

>> “Art history is literally full of transformation of prior works”

There’s no reasonable ethical basis to take issue with. You’re examples and counter points to me add substantive your claims. What am I missing?

This isn't really transformation though. It's compositing pixel-accurate bits and pieces of multiple pieces of art to make a new piece (as proven by stock photo watermarks being replicated in some pieces).

That difference is enough to assert that there is a wholly reasonable ethical basis. Especially when they're obviously not just training it on images with relaxed copyrights.

A collage of prior works is protected as a transformative work, regardless of if you’re able to recognize the seams between the pieces. Even use of trademarks is not protected in works of art if there is no clearly defined trademark violation; for example, putting fries in a box that looks identical to McDonald fries box and offering them for sell would not be legally justifiable by just saying it is art.

Ethically speaking, for the second time, you ignored that within art world, or real world for that matter, making derivative works is completely ethical if done within any related legal constraints; as such, to me, you’re not making a good faith effort, which is actually unethical if intentionally done, so I will not be replying any further.

And yet, every time GitHub Copilot comes up, people on HN are in arms about their code being used to train a model.

Already responded to comparison to GitHub CoPilot in this thread here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33079278

When you remix someone's art, it's fair use, but when you remix someone's song, they get royalties?

Seems like perhaps copyright is more complicated than folks defending AI Art believe it is.

Transformative use of prior works requires no royalties.

With all due respect, you're wrong. See Tailor Swift's recent, successful, copyright judgement.

And frankly, unless you are a judge overseeing a specific copyright infringement case, you have no basis with which to make these assertions.

As someone who has personally litigated cases, even gotten judges to issues orders by phone, I have every right to present reasonable claims; as do you, unfortunately you’re not doing that.

Case you referenced is scheduled for hearing on January 2023 and I don’t see any reason to review it until it’s finalized.

If I am missing something, please feel free to explicitly state what and why it is related to current topic.

Not really.

The model doesn't store or reproduce anyone's art, maybe except with some intentional img2img prompting. And styles aren't copyrightable.

There's some really impressive stuff being created out there, and it's still very early days. People take sets of personal images, train a mini model on that and use that model to prompt Stable Diffusion to create something that it wasn't even trained on. There are interesting short animations, etc. It's a brave new world to explore.

I've been having immense fun with SD in the past few days, but I think you're right. Prompt "engineering" is educated guesses plus experience, a good way to get a good (txt2img) image seems to be to iterate on prompts until something promising appears then leaving it to churn out 50 similar images with varying parameters.

Using the "by {artistname}" string in prompts does seem to produce a lot of stuff which could potentially be copyright violation - it'll even output a signature/initials fairly frequently.

In the next year or two I'm sure we'll see some a refined version of something like img2img integrated into Photoshop, maybe Adobe will finally justify their "Cloud" approach with a big stack of GPUs in a data center.

You're getting downvoted for a decidedly un-hn opinion, but that is my perception as well. You throw 30 prompts at gpt3 until you get what you know you wanted. Then you post saying "look! gpt3 has domain knowledge". Please...