[coolhand2120]

If he’s mad at that wait till he sees what the cp command does!

In all seriousness, midjourney is like any other tool. You can break the law with it, big surprise. It should still be on the person that broke the law, not the makers of the tool. If you go down the “can’t use my art as training data” how far do you push it? I watched Batman, does that mean if I draw caped super heroes I am stealing training data? Wouldn’t that apply to all comics after Superman? Isn’t he guilty of derivative work himself?

Also, nobody is being harmed by this. AI is always derivative. Nobody is interested in copies or impressions of popular art, otherwise the guy selling animes on velvet at the local art fair would be making more money. This just sounds like a Luddite shaking his fist at this perceived enemy.

[snickerbockers]

> If he’s mad at that wait till he sees what the cp command does!

in order for that analogy to even remotely be applicable, midjourney would have to be a program you run on your own computer and not a service running on midjourney's computers that does what you ask it to.

> In all seriousness, midjourney is like any other tool. You can break the law with it, big surprise. It should still be on the person that broke the law, not the makers of the tool.

that would be midjourney, since they're both the creators and operators of their model.

> If you go down the “can’t use my art as training data” how far do you push it? I watched Batman, does that mean if I draw caped super heroes I am stealing training data? Wouldn’t that apply to all comics after Superman? Isn’t he guilty of derivative work himself?

you just called AI "a tool", that's why it's different.

> Also, nobody is being harmed by this. AI is always derivative. Nobody is interested in copies or impressions of popular art, otherwise the guy selling animes on velvet at the local art fair would be making more money. This just sounds like a Luddite shaking his fist at this perceived enemy.

that's an argument against IP law in general, not an argument against holding companies which create and operate deep-learning models to the same standards as everybody else.

[boolemancer]

> > If he’s mad at that wait till he sees what the cp command does! > > in order for that analogy to even remotely be applicable, midjourney would have to be a program you run on your own computer and not a service running on midjourney's computers that does what you ask it to.

So your argument is that the tool running remotely as a service somehow makes it different from one running on your local computer?

So if someone copies the contents of a novel into Google Docs, Google is liable for their copyright infringement, but if they paste it into Word running on their computer, all of the liability is on them?

At what point does the liability shift? What if all of the functionality is implemented in JavaScript in the browser, rather than running on someone else's server?

What if they run all but the last layer of the model on the server, then finish the computation locally?

I don't think the situation is nearly as cut and dry as you make it out to be.

[snickerbockers]

>So your argument is that the tool running remotely as a service somehow makes it different from one running on your local computer?

no, my argument is that the tool being run by midjourney makes them liable for how it is operation. because it's their model, their program, their computer. They are responsible at every level.

>So if someone copies the contents of a novel into Google Docs, Google is liable for their copyright infringement, but if they paste it into Word running on their computer, all of the liability is on them?

not sure why you think that's relevant, but yes google is liable for copyright infringement facilitated by their platform. that's why if you upload a full-length video to youtube and the rights-holder posts a DMCA, google will delist or delete your video.

> At what point does the liability shift? What if all of the functionality is implemented in JavaScript in the browser, rather than running on someone else's server?

why the fuck would javascript change anything?

>I don't think the situation is nearly as cut and dry as you make it out to be.

it really is, there are well-established precedents for how this works and it's only not "cut and dry" if you arbitrarily consider AI startups to be exempt from the same rules that apply to everybody else.

[boolemancer]

> no, my argument is that the tool being run by midjourney makes them liable for how it is operation. because it's their model, their program, their computer. They are responsible at every level.

I still don't see how this would be any different from something like Adobe hosting a cloud-based version of Photoshop. Someone could use that tool to create an image that infringes on someone's copyrights, but I think you would be hard-pressed to convince people that Adobe is liable for the drawings that other people create with their tools.

> not sure why you think that's relevant, but yes google is liable for copyright infringement facilitated by their platform. that's why if you upload a full-length video to youtube and the rights-holder posts a DMCA, google will delist or delete your video.

The YouTube case is about Google themselves redistributing the copyrighted material. The distinction with the Google Docs example is that Google isn't distributing the copyrighted material, it's just a tool being used to facilitate the creation of that material.

The JavaScript remark was just because you implied that it made a difference whether the software was running locally or on Midjourney's servers. If that's the case, I want to know where you think the line is drawn between the two situations.

So, no, I still don't see how this is as cut and dry as you claim.

[cycomanic]

> > > If he’s mad at that wait till he sees what the cp command does!

> >

> > in order for that analogy to even remotely be applicable, midjourney would have to be a program you run on your own computer and not a service running on midjourney's computers that does what you ask it to.

> So your argument is that the tool running remotely as a service somehow makes it different from one running on your local computer?

> So if someone copies the contents of a novel into Google Docs, Google is liable for their copyright infringement, but if they paste it into Word running on their computer, all of the liability is on them?

But that's not what happening here. If Google docs hat a button, "put Harry Potter books here" that when pressed it puts the whole text of the Harry Potter books into the document. Now who do you think should be liable for copyright infringement, Google who put the whole text of Harry Potter books somewhere into the Google docs source code, or the user who pressed the button? Your argument seems to be the user, but I find that highly illogical.

The central issue is that the copyrighted images are already inside midjourney, the user is just getting them out via queries (pressing a button). The user is _not_ adding the copyrighted material to midjourney.

[coolhand2120]

If you were to search any Harry Potter book using google search I'm sure you will find the unlicensed content, served up to you by google, very quickly, with less prompt than midjourney needs. You can hand wave about how it's so different but I see the search example returning a hashed copy vs. midjourney making something you could argue in court is infringement. The thing is, both are already illegal. You don't need additional government meddling in code to make illegal something that is already illegal.

In all cases, the person committing the crime is the person to prosecute. What would happen if I used Photoshop to carefully recreate the image by hand? Or even a paint brush and canvas? It would still be illegal! What are you arguing to make illegal? The paint brush? For _some people_ making clones of copyrighted work is very easy, this tool makes is easy for more people. But for you, _it's the tool?_

And in any of these cases you're trying to protect the same IP holders that cut off access to content you purchased, so any idea of fairness in copyright is a joke at this point anyway. I work in that industry so I knew it was possible, but I never thought they would do it with a huge swath of content like what happened to play station owners. IP holders deserve no sympathy or protection under the law after that move.

You might say "but these are not the people we're trying to protect". Too bad, that's what any IP law restricting generative AI would protect. And consider the draconian means required to do so.

[cycomanic]

> If you were to search any Harry Potter book using google search I'm sure you will find the unlicensed content, served up to you by google, very quickly, with less prompt than midjourney needs. You can hand wave about how it's so different but I see the search example returning a hashed copy vs. midjourney making something you could argue in court is infringement. The thing is, both are already illegal. You don't need additional government meddling in code to make illegal something that is already illegal.

That's not how the Internet works. Google is not serving you the Harry Potter books contents, they (might) point you to a different server that (might) be serving you the books, but what theat website would be doing is in fact illegal in most jurisdictions. In contrast midjourney are the ones serving you the content, that is a huge difference and not "handwaving". If you don't see a difference there than I really don't know what to say.

> In all cases, the person committing the crime is the person to prosecute.

Yes and it is midjourney who is committing the crime. Their models contain the unlicenced copyrighted material and they sell a service using that material.

> What would happen if I used Photoshop to carefully recreate the image by hand? Or even a paint brush and canvas? It would still be illegal! What are you arguing to make illegal? The paint brush?

Why are you continuing to ignore the central point that midjourney contains the copyrighted work? That's completely different to being a brush?

> For _some people_ making clones of copyrighted work is very easy, this tool makes is easy for more people. But for you, _it's the tool?_

Yes because "the tool" is already making the clone, inside it's model.

> And in any of these cases you're trying to protect the same IP holders that cut off access to content you purchased, so any idea of fairness in copyright is a joke at this point anyway. I work in that industry so I knew it was possible, but I never thought they would do it with a huge swath of content like what happened to play station owners. IP holders deserve no sympathy or protection under the law after that move.

So instead we are happy for even larger corporations to just take all creative outputs (and that includes lots of open source software) simply feed their models and resell this work of others through their models essentially disowning the previous creators without paying anything? Now if these models would actually be freely available and all parameters published I might be OK with it as the end of copyright as we know it, but that's not what is happening here. We are essentially witnessing the dispossession and monopolization of knowledge by a few large corporations and startups.

> You might say "but these are not the people we're trying to protect". Too bad, that's what any IP law restricting generative AI would protect. And consider the draconian means required to do so.

[eru]

> Nobody is interested in copies or impressions of popular art, otherwise the guy selling animes on velvet at the local art fair would be making more money.

The vast majority of artists make almost no money off their art. Original or otherwise.

Some superstar artists make some money. But that art doesn't have to be original [0], see eg Duchamp's urinal, or the popart people copying comics. Or see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_Square,_Milan_(paint...

Gerhard Richter's painting 'Cathedral Square, Milan' is a 'bad' copy of a photograph:

> The source after which Richter executed Domplatz, Mailand was a newspaper photograph that was in focus, from which Richter clipped a section and modified it.

> It was sold by Sotheby's in New York on 14 May 2013 for 37.1 Million dollars, breaking Richter's own record price for an artwork by a living artist, his 1994 32.4 million dollar painting Abstraktes Bild (809-1).

[0] Of course, motivated reasoning can always find some aspect that makes the superstar artists and their art original. But the same amount of mental effort can also make 'the guy selling animes on velvet at the local art fair' original.

[ghusto]

> In all seriousness, midjourney is like any other tool. You can break the law with it, big surprise.

I believe the point was rather that the output makes it obvious the "tool" was trained on copyrighted work.

As an aside to your justification though, if a main purpose of a tool is to circumvent copyright, that tool is usually illegal.

> I watched Batman, does that mean if I draw caped super heroes I am stealing training data?

It means if you draw a near copy and tried to sell it, you are committing copyright "theft" (I don't like the term, but that's what it's called).

> Nobody is interested in copies or impressions of popular art, otherwise the guy selling animes on velvet at the local art fair would be making more money

People are absolutely interested. I couldn't get RedBubble to even print a non-copyrighted work (which they mistakenly thought was copyrighted) that I had altered. Just because some people are getting away with it, doesn't mean it's legal or wouldn't immediately come to a stop if they came under scrutiny.

> This just sounds like a Luddite shaking his fist at this perceived enemy.

Luddites had some very good points, so he's in good company.

[pylua]

The picture in the article is a lot more than drawing a caped super hero after watching batman. Not to mention that the access to viewing batman for the inspiration is usually behind some sort of compensation.

I would argue that original creators are being harmed by this. Not in a traditional sense, or even in a legal way with any precedence but in a thousand cuts sort of way that is novel.

[MobiusHorizons]

I believe he is calling out the company not the tool. And calling them out because they infringed copyright by showing the copyrighted material to the model during training (as evidence by it being able to reproduce it so faithfully)

[stubish]

You are arguing that Spotify should not pay royalties or license fees for songs, because it is the user might break the law by playing an unlicensed song.

Oh, wait. It isn't the user. Spotify and Midjourney are actually the guilty party in this scenario, for distributing copyrighted works and probably for storing them without permission in the first place.

Midjourney may be a tool, but it is a tool containing a large body of copyrighted and unlicensed images, including trademarks, and even illegal content. And that is what the court cases are going to be about.