[bigB]

My rather unpopular view is that if its available for humans to read on the internet, there is nothing different than a machine reading it, other than scale. There is nothing stopping a human from reading your code and using it themselves, or at the very least adapting it for themselves. Unless its a copy or contains actual code you have written then Im not sure you can actually defend it....other than having it locked down on the internet. Of course none of this is tested in court, and my feeling is that once it is, we will end up with a system similar to the robots.txt or maybe even the ML companies forced to attribute work, which would be a major pain for them. Personally Im not sure where I stand with what is right or wrong as I can see both arguments...for example Artists regularly take inspiration from closely studying other artists, producing works from them which is often similar or the same style. Yet this is seen as perfectly ok in the Art world, as long as its not a copy, much of the time they dont even need to say who inspired them. How is this different from AI doing the same thing other than it not being human ? On the other hand someone sees a company making money from something that looks inspired from their art, with no credit, I can also understand how they might feel...its going to be very interesting how this plays out, and at this point either side could win

[quicklime]

> there is nothing different than a machine reading it, other than scale

Copyright itself was introduced because of the scale of the printing press, which fundamentally changed the economics of publishing. Is it reasonable to assume that scale doesn’t change things?

[bigB]

That is a very good point actually, and one that I am sure will be tested in court...as I said it will be interesting to see where it leads

[IYasha]

With ML there's the "M", machine, and that machine (and its algorithms btw) is owned by someone. If we back away from general concept of intelligence a bit, that owner is who can be held accountable. Maybe that would get them motivated a bit.

And with the robots.txt approach, I understand, there'll definively be some rogue AI that would parse and process that on purpose :)

As for "doing the same thing", well, kind of, yeah, we're back to the thousands years old copycat problem. But this time art/code creators don't want others having machine that could recreate years of work in a minute with a push of a button. Also, artists usually acknowledge who did they learn from or who's style are they trying to recreate... but that's an ethic thing..

[dusted]

I agree on this. I don't see any difference between a human looking at my work and learning to imitate it, and some AI doing the same.. The AI will just be better at doing it.

[onion2k]

Artists regularly take inspiration from closely studying other artists, producing works from them which is often similar or the same style

ML is only superficially using the same process. Behind the scenes the computer is not being 'inspired'; it's using the art from other people, along with metadata about it, as a data source to derive a new image using math. That isn't the same as seeing someone else's picture and using it for inspiration.

[bigB]

I do see your point on this, though not sure if you can use that differentiation between human inspiration and what a computer is doing, we take a mental image and interpretation could be seen as metadata. Just because the mechanics are different doesn't mean its not similar in process. I guess you could say the emotion is not there, but is that enough to differentiate ? Still a good point though , adds more questions to the mix

[IYasha]

I wanted to say that the human still commands the genertor to make a form of art using prompt. But then I've got a shivering feeling that someone might connect generator (of prompts) to another generator to another... and then close the loop.

Anyway, I've always said (and keep saying) that art is what (visibly) distinguishes humans from animals. And machines.

[AndrewDucker]

How is that different from the human brain using its internal model of the picture, plus information about it, to derive new images?

[starbugs]

One thing would be that humans are (usually) not able to reproduce the work of others to the same degree of accuracy and speed as ML models.

[IYasha]

And also here's the distinction between man labor and machine calculations come into play.