[doctorpangloss]

No, the issue is that it makes outputs that compete with artists, and that is a problem if you go and make a fair use argument for appropriating copyrighted works.

If I were to secretly use an image generator, just for my own purposes, trained on public data, the plaintiffs would say it is just as illegal.

The rub is, do you know who else makes work that competes with artists? Other artists! It still kind of goes down on some vibesy stuff that I don't know if the law has a straight answer to. And for what it's worth, the Andy Warhol v. Goldsmith decision was about artists competing with other artists - this is the decision that has created an opening to challenge fair use. I just wonder why limit ourselves to the peculiarities of that case, why not open all forms of competition between artists to litigation over their influences and processes?

[Retric]

How the model is used isn’t relevant if creating it was already infringement. Training on works creates something of value and artists want to be able to prevent that training without compensation. There’s a long history of case law around just how much of someone’s work can be copied before it’s a problem. But here it’s literally the entire work being used so ‘how much’ is just everything.

The points you bring up are also relevant but artists don’t want to look through a billion individual images to see if that specific image happens to infringe on their work.

Edit: Wrote the response to a comment that got deleted before I posted presumably because I edited this one: IMO many commentators are getting this wrong.

“the less likely it is that the appropriation will serve as a substitute for the original work or its plausible derivatives, shrinking the market opportunities for the copyrighted work” https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/21-869_87ad.pdf

The form of these models is very different, but the purpose is to create directly competing works. Each individual output may not directly infringe with a specific work, but the goal of the model very much is.

The comment brought up commentary about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Warhol_Foundation_for_the...

[Workaccount2]

It's only clear that training is a violation of copyright if you have a layman's understanding of how training works. There are no images stored in image models, just vectors that represent pixel relationships. You may call this fancy compression, but the ship runs aground if you try to "compress" a small set of images with a transformer - you just will get random noisy junk on the output.

Artists have a much firmer legal ground to stand on if they go after model output, but the goal is to kill image generators, not simply censor their output.

Think of it like this: If I splatter paint on a canvas, does jackson pollock have a copyright claim? Probably not, despite my creation being a product of training on his work. But it would be fair for my creation to be checked to see if it is too similar to one of his works.

[Retric]

just vectors that represent pixel relationships

Ask DALL-E 2 for Mona Lisa and it will produce something clearly derived from the original work. The ability to recreate items from the training set depends on how these systems are trained, but they are clearly capable of retraining enough to be problematic.

The Harry Potter the movies aren’t the original books, derivative works don’t imply something is the same just that it’s directly derived from something else.

> If I splatter paint on a canvas, does jackson pollock have a copyright claim?

If you’re trying to copy him then actually yes he would. Being inspired by a technique is fine, but the difference is less subtle than you might think.

Copyright cares how something was created, if you end up with ‘random’ patterns that happen to look suspiciously similar to another work it’s extremely unlikely that you came to that point randomly. What’s the odds you would pick the same 12 colors as someone else and apply them in the same order? 12 factorial isn’t a small number and that’s before considering the color selection.

[Workaccount2]

All what you said is why I believe artists have much firmer ground to stand on by going after output. We can have dumb AI that scans outputs for copyright violation the same way youtube scans for it.

Just because I can draw spider man from memory doesn't mean I owe Disney money or that I am 'problematic'. It means I just have to censor my outputs when doing drawings for people.

But again, artists don't want this outcome, so there is a purposeful muddying of the waters going on.

[Retric]

> I just have to censor my outputs when doing drawings for people.

If any output is infringing the model must itself be infringing by definition. The correct solution isn’t to censor the result the correct solution is to delete the model.