[rrauenza]

I had this argument presented to me and I wasn't sure what to do with it.

> Humans are allowed to "absorb" art around them into their brains and generate derivative art. People may copy Miyazaki's style... why shouldn't an AI farm be allowed to?

Let's put aside for a moment that AI may have "consumed" some art without a license (e.g., "google books" - did google purchase every book?).

[NooneAtAll3]

except lawyers keep saying "fanart is actually technically illegal" and resinging/changing lyrics in songs isn't enough to be protected by "fair use" stuff

if anything, I'd campaign for "we should limit copyright because it already doesn't work for Ai"

[rrauenza]

I wasn't intending to include fan art.

Copying Miyazaki's style ... or copying Monet's style... those aren't fan art.

[thiht]

Why not? I’m a fan of X and make art in the style of X using the tools at my disposal (AI). Why is that not fanart?

[rrauenza]

They are. I meant the subset of fan art of the infringing type where you make fan art of, say, Mickey Mouse and sell stickers.

[davidclark]

The same legal rule applies to both for determining whether something is a derivative work.

No one is stopping you from using similar proportions or colors as Miyazaki to draw a character. You are also allowed to draw your own interpretation of an electric mouse-like monster.

Copyright infringement occurs if that character looks exactly like say Totoro or Pikachu. That is not “in the style of”, that is copying.

A problem with LLMs is that since their corpus is so large, it is difficult to identify when any given output is crossing that line because a single observer’s knowledge of the works influencing the output is limited. You might feed it a picture of your grandfather and it returns an almost exact copy of a grandfather character from a Miyazaki film you haven’t seen. If you don’t share the output with others, it might never be noticed that the infringement occurred.

The given argument conflates the slightest influence with direct copying. It is a reductive take that, personally, I’ve found emblematic of pro-LLM arguments.

[rrauenza]

Thanks for helping pick apart the argument presented to me.

I don't like the idea that photos I've published on, say, flickr have been pulled into these. Especially stuff I've published with creative commons non-commercial use.

[mcphage]

> People may copy Miyazaki's style... why shouldn't an AI farm be allowed to?

People may take a penny from the tray at the 7-11, so why can't an AI farm take pennies from all the trays? Or take them from a much bigger tray and do it a couple of million times?