Item — HN Reader

Outside of AI models, copy/pasting snippets from the likes of StackOverflow is already on unsteady ground. The threshold to bother with (and win) legal fights is pretty high. AI is catalyzing some kind of slow revolution in what "ownership" is, but there doesn't seem to be any definition that would _always_ satisfy common sense. Even if github yields and adds attribution or filters on license types, there's still a massive trove of knotted data in all these newer text/language/image/code models. Most of it is not truly public domain.. and a lot of it is wholly private and would involve contravention of regs like GDPR if used. Data used to feed these huge models is, sometimes (technically speaking...) stolen, commandeered, swiped from unassuming creators. Many artists the world over are rightfully furious about DALL-E and Stable Diffusion. I wonder where this will all end!

AI needs to be regulated somehow. Precedent needs to be set.

3 comments

>Many artists the world over are rightfully furious about DALL-E and Stable Diffusion

I struggle with this one. How are these models different from the typical human creative process of:

1. look at lots of existing art to get inspiration

2. select components from several different styles & add your own flair

3. call the output an "original" painting in your own style

Of course I see the other side as well. These models are just a large multi-dimensional function of all of their input data, which means they ought to be derivative works of all of their inputs, and their outputs should thus also be derivative works of the inputs.

It feels unsatisfying (and a bit naive) to say that filtering a bunch of data through a neural network somehow clears the copyright of that original data, but on the other hand, the AI revolution depends on that interpretation.

In a word scale. Scale matters. How is one locust different to a million? How is hand copying a manuscript (highly controlled in medieval Europe) different to a printing press. These models will and are already having a profound economic impact on the creative sectors they mimic. Whether existing law applies is a specialist question. But they're not remotely comparable from a pragmatic perspective with pieces manually created by individuals taking 'inspiration' from existing work. A closer parallel would be the industrialisation of painting duplication which is done in Chinese 'artist villages' like Dafen. It's a strange kind of equanimity to shrug while others lose their livelihood and have their self expression systematically duplicated and commodified. No kidding they're furious. That you can't empathise or find it 'naive' is your issue. What attitude would be more understandable? Resignation? Calmly retraining to work in a call centre?

>A closer parallel would be the industrialisation of painting duplication

But they directly reproduce the source material.

AI art they clearly does not.

The luddites seem a better parallel when it comes to scale. Where a machine comes along capable of producing in much higher quantities and in much greater efficiencies.

Or perhaps photography? Also a fear of scale. For a long time photographers were not considered artists. And there were calls to tamp down on this innovation for the harm it would cause.

I don't suppose anyone back then could imagine now how photography is used. Perhaps they would feel it much better that a tiny artist quickly sketch out the thing my phone was looking at.

photography is actually a very good example of how this talking point breaks down. there are a great deal of laws and social codes around where you can and cannot film and take photographs. photography is explicitly disallowed in most museums and art galleries. filming in public requires permits and waivers in many places, especially if the filming is done with a commercial interest.

'but how is capturing an image with a camera lens any different from capturing it with my retina? both are simply methods of refracting light and translating that information into a storage medium. the camera is just remembering* like a human remembers and we mustn't let luddites regulate this revolutionary technology or we'll impede the progress of the camera becoming an even more better rememberer'*

the social ramifications of the camera are still being reckoned with to this day and yes, cameras very highly regulated compared to pretty much any other human method of expression or transcription, in fact we are still coming up with new things you cannot film eg the recent crop of revenge porn laws.

I had the same thoughts.

Finally, someone has put into words the logical end of the trite photography analogy.

It's a refreshingly sane perspective to see in this thread.

AI art they clearly does not.

It does not 1-1 recreate source material, but if we didn't have human artists anymore and replaced them all with the current stock of AI we would have no more developing art movements. It is wholly uncreative in a way that humans are not, and it does not understand what humans would find interesting, only what humans have already made. This makes it a pretty good tool for some amateurish applications or places where quality isn't important, but it is not a 1-1 copy of a human capable of making human art.

>it is wholly uncreative in a way that humans are not

The work I've seen manipulating, weilding, and modifying this new tool, has been very creative In painting, reprompting, texture and uv map generation, dreambooth and dedicated fine tuning. Integrating these workflows into human directed procedures to produce in hours what would take days, sometimes months, sometimes not even within the scope of human capability.

If you think the only thing here is people jibbering at a black box and posting 512*512 images, I can see why dumping the entire thing would seem reasonable.

>AI art they clearly does not.

https://twitter.com/kortizart/status/1588915427018559490

I would think these are close enough that any human that produced that output could be claimed to have plagiarized.

ugh, how tedious.

Famous images prevelant in the dataset that are trained against many times and the directly requested are produced as is, because that's litterally what was requested and the model was trained against them.

There's only one way to draw The Mona Lisa. These AI's are not used for this purpose, nor is any of this core to their functioning. And I have to assume you know that.

> In a word scale. Scale matters

> to shrug while others lose their livelihood and have their self expression systematically duplicated and commodified.

The same exact arguments were made when the camera was invented.

In order to be consistent, you would have to argue that the camera should have been banned to protect painters.

> That you can't empathise or find it 'naive'

Oh we understand. We just know that it is the exact same argument, that ludites make every single time a new technology is invented, that increases efficiency.

It is always the same argument repeated over and over again. And if those arguments weren't good in the past, we aren't going to listen to defeated arguments now.

> filtering a bunch of data through a neural network somehow clears the copyright of that original data

There are two kinds of data - the idea and the expression. You can protect expression, but can't stop AI from learning the ideas. This is not "clearing the copyright", it is fair use of the data. Eventually it will even learn how many fingers and heads to draw on a human - the kind of "idea data" you can't copyright.

We should stop mixing together idea and expression. Ideas are not owned by anyone. The real question is what criteria and threshold to use for judging infringement, so AI people can get on to making safe models.

Besides ideas, you can't copyright recipes, APIs and purely functional/obvious code.

> stolen, commandeered, swiped from unassuming creators

swiped from unassuming creators who put it online for everyone and Google Bot to see? I presume they follow robots.txt when they crawl

I don’t believe stack overflow is in the same grey area, they have a pretty clear TOS and license for the code snippets. I’m pretty sure it’s CC-BY-SA.