[spudlyo]

> Surveys consistently showed that consumers believed artists deserved payment when AI generated content in their style.

It's interesting that "consumers" are generally for the expansion of IP laws. At at the moment, I'm fairly certain that "style" is not something protected by Copyright. I personally do not want this, and I'm sure there are likely many like me. Poorly thought out IP laws lead to chilling-effects, DRM, stupid and unnecessary litigation, and ultimately a loss of digital freedoms.

> What 325 Cold Emails to Artists Taught Us

I'm surprised 1% didn't respond with "EAT HOT FLAMING DEATH SPAMMER" for sending them unsolicited commercial email. ;)

[Gigachad]

Trying to protect a particular style is just unworkable for obvious reasons. The only solution I can think of is requiring AI companies to license all of the content they have in their training set so artists get paid for the training rather than trying to work out which source material links to which outputs which is impossible.

[spudlyo]

When I buy a book, I don't buy a license to read it, I don't sign an EULA that says I won't scan it, digitize it, or write a program to analyze the word frequencies it contains. Do you want buy a license to read a book, because this is how you get there.

[squokko]

The law has always been able to recognize a distinction between Hunter S. Thompson reading Ernest Hemingway and learning from his style and a billion GPUs reading a billion books to be able to produce it on demand. It takes time for the law to catch up to the technology but it will.

[tdb7893]

You don't sign an EULA saying you can't do those things because scanning then distributing is already prohibited by copyright. The way to start a license war is to keep the status quo of these companies being able to ingest and essentially reproduce human work for free. One of my big worries about AI is that it will accelerate companies locking everything down and hoarding their own data.

[pastel8739]

I suspect it’s already has a dampening effect on individuals sharing. It leaves a bad taste in the mouth to know that anything you share intending to help fellow humans will immediately be ripped and profited from by companies that want to take your job and profit from it.

[Gigachad]

The old rules were built on based on old capabilities and and old reality which no longer exists.

[squidbeak]

This is a deceptive line of dismissal. Sound principles needs to be figured out before imposing any kind of restriction on art - "things have changed" doesn't cut it.

[Gigachad]

Figuring things out is exactly what needs to happen. I think it is valid to dismiss arguments of “this is how copyright has always worked” when those rules were written before AI completely changed the game.

[aerhardt]

In Spain books include a copyright notice explicitly prohibiting reproduction and digitalization and alluding to article 270 of the Spanish criminal code.

[franciscop]

The book can say anything it wants, whenever it's true and/or applicable in court later on is a very different matter. Spain's SGAE is a very powerful lobby but still needs to follow the law.

Edit: haven't followed the law in a while, but you could definitely copy, digitalize and scan documents for yourself and your friends (copia privada).

[aerhardt]

In Spain EULAs cannot infringe upon the law either.

[add-sub-mul-div]

Perhaps it's that the transaction for you, an individual not explicitly profiting from the work, should be treated differently than a corporation using a work solely to profit from it.

[throwawaysoxjje]

Of course you don’t, because it’s not the EULA that enforces the copyright. Copyright law is what enforces the EULA. It’s right there in the fact it’s a Licensing Agreement.

[croes]

The problem isn’t the reading. The problem is the output based on somebody’s other work.

There is a reason why we call it styles, because it’s a recognizable pattern someone came up with maybe after decades of work.

[JAlexoid]

The "funny" thing is that we absolutely allow people to copy style... but somehow software isn't allowed to do that?

You don't even need to have a legally acquired source material to produce work in a certain style.

The new reality allows for original creators to actually track the chain, so we're in this situation.

[croes]

If people would have the same mass output as software we wouldn’t allow that too.

If one or two people take an apple from your tree it’s not a big deal, if a machine takes 10,000 it is.

[mitthrowaway2]

When I buy a patented product I don't sign an EULA that says I can't manufacture and sell a copy, but I still can't manufacture and sell a copy.

[esafak]

It is not an individual buying the book but a corporation, with the purpose of being able to create imitations of it, and all other books.

[squidbeak]

It's even worse than that. You then have to pay an additional fee to use its ideas as inspiration for your own book.

[saaaaaam]

Copyright quite literally protects the act of copying or reproducing a work protected by copyright. And you are technically entering into something akin to an end user licensing agreement when you buy a book, the only difference being that the EULA is incorporated into law on an international basis through reciprocal copyright treaties.

So if scan a book you are making a copy. In some copyright jurisdictions this is allowed for individuals under a private copying exception - a copyright opt out, if you like - but the important thing is private use. In some jurisdictions there is also a fair use exception, which allows you to exploit the rights protected by copyright under certain circumstances, but fair use is quite specific and one big issue with fair use is that the rights you are exploiting cannot result in something that competes with the original work.

Other acts restricted by copyright include distribution, adaptation, performance, communication and rental.

So if you copy a book, digitize it, and write a program to analyze the word frequencies it contains you may, in some jurisdictions but not all, be allowed to do this.

If you’re doing it locally on your own machine you are simply copying it. If you do it in the cloud you are copying it and communicating the copy. If you copy it, analyze it and train an AI model on it that could be considered fair use in certain jurisdictions. Whether the outputs are adaptations of the training data is a matter of debate in the copyright community.

But importantly if you commercialise that model and the resulting outputs compete with the copyright protected material you used to train, your fair use argument may fail.

So when you buy a book you are actually party to what is effectively a licence granted by the copyright holder, albeit it to the publisher. But as the end user of the book you are still restricted in what you can do with that copyright protected work, through a universal end user licence encoded in law.

[numpad0]

The cumulative license fees required to properly compensate all artists is so absurd that it will probably genuinely burn down the entirety of global economy if paid. The only solution I can think of is to burn down just the AI to be revisited later to be rebuilt as a tool that won't require absurd amount of training data, that also leave a lot more to its human operator beyond merely accepting literal categorical descriptions that are fundamentally tangential to artistic values of outputs.

And I think same could happen to LLM. If it took all the fossil fuel on Earth just to barely able to drive a car to a car wash, there's more things wrong with the car than in the oil price.

[Retric]

> is so absurd that it will probably genuinely burn down the entire global economy if paid.

Where did you get that idea. Global economy is ~200T/year PPP. 0.1% of that split across every artist you want the training data from would be insanely difficult for the vast majority of them to turn down. Which makes sense as art isn’t that big a percentage of the global economy compared to say housing, food, medical care, infrastructure, military spending etc.

Obviously the incentive to take without compensation is far more appealing, but that doesn’t mean it was impossible to make a reasonable offer.

[bjterry]

For all the people represented in the training data to receive royalties would be an incredible wealth transfer to the Extremely Online. My forum posts, StackOverflow answers etc are also contributing to the model outputs. The training data, by volume, mostly belongs to blog authors, redditors, Wikipedia editors, to us!

[nneonneo]

The people in that counting to infinity subreddit would get compensated a lot if this were fully automated - their posts were so overrepresented in the training set that many of their usernames became complete tokens (e.g. SolidGoldMagikarp).

[Retric]

I object to calling people chatting online artists.

However, ultimately nobody is going to pay them more than the value of their posts to the AI company which puts a severe cap on what that’s actually worth. People who post a great deal of online content might be worth compensating a few thousand dollars, but it would be hard for them to then turn that down.

[numpad0]

I think the lower bounds of someone signing away rights to their whole art portfolio is more towards $1m than few thousands. Few k is just a month's salary that they can "make" themselves. Offers that small would be almost off-putting.

[abustamam]

Hey finally my reddit and hn habit can be lucrative!

[numpad0]

There are definitely >1m artists worldwide, some popular some less so, and $1M * 1m =1T, not 0.1% * 200T =200B.

Hard cap of 200B divided by 1M equals 200k, and that would be sure more reasonable, but we aren't hearing artists responding favorably to hypotheticals in that range, so I'm skeptical that "ain't nobody gonna turn that down".

[Retric]

This isn’t ownership it’s a license.

I think the vast majority would agree to let AI companies train on their art for 10k let alone 200k. Don’t forget the average global salary is way below what you see in the US.

Put another way how many people would turn down 6+ months salary. Of course the vanishing tiny percentage people care about would want more, but that’s a separate question and not particularly valuable to AI companies.

[numpad0]

> Put another way how many people would turn down 6+ months salary.

Didn't that exact social experiment took place in the US last year? I thought the result of that was disastrous if media reports are to be believed.

OTOH I remember creator of Wordle closed the "low few mil" deal instantly, so I do believe it unlikely that people turn down few _hundred_ months worth of salary. But those artists are not from regions with 50-100x less median income and/or wider income distribution relative to US - I think they're concentrated in relatively high-income-low-disparity regions - so I don't think there's backwater wherever that lifetime income there is equivalent to no more than 6 months worth in US that has abundant supply of artists.

And IMO those artists are basically engaged in a geo-scale dumping of media contents. It's the same phenomenon as how moving consumer electronics manufacturing to US instantly multiply costs by small integers instead of just incurring premiums in percentages. If that phenomenon were to be quenched and those effects were integrated into economy anyhow, that will change the global balances of power to some statistically significant degrees, like, we'd be seeing flying rocket amphibian McBoatfaces everywhere. That might be interesting, but I'm not sure if that's an interesting kind of an interesting thing to see.

[palmotea]

> The cumulative license fees required to properly compensate all artists is so absurd that it will probably genuinely burn down the entirety of global economy if paid.

That's kind of an interesting concept: "since the scale of my transgression was so big, I should get away with it scot-free."

[nickff]

That’s how eminent domain and regulatory takings work in most countries.

[franciscop]

"If it took all the fossil fuel on Earth" What do you mean? To TRAIN an LLM model it takes roughly the same amount of energy as to raise a person, so it's not even really expensive in energy costs.

[JAlexoid]

> I'm fairly certain that "style" is not something protected by Copyright

To a degree it is protected, but not by copyright. Design patents are a thing and companies have sued each other over them (Apple vs Samsung during the "smartphone wars" comes to mind)

[abustamam]

Just out of curiosity, do you believe artists deserve to be compensated when their art is used to generate stuff in their style?

I'm staunchly against expansion of IP laws. But I personally think that when a corporate machine gobbles up an artist's works so that people like me who can't draw can generate silly memes for a few bucks a month, the artist should be compensated. The company is profiting off of other people's work! That's not right.

The mechanism by which compensation is calculated appears to be an unsolved problem currently though.

[csallen]

> The company is profiting off of other people's work! That's not right.

What's wrong with it?

We live in an interconnected world. Every company or individual who profits off anything does so, in very large part, thanks to work left behind by others that they don't directly compensate each other for.

Stated differently, if we look at the other side of the coin, it's one thing to create value, and another thing to capture value. If you are a business (and artists seeking profit are businesses), you create value then try to capture that value. Creating value and trying to capture (in the form of profit) is the entire name of the game. But no business captures 100% the value they create. If you make a product/artwork/service/whatever and release it to the public, lots of people may use it, view it, be inspired by it, learn from it, and ultimately profit off it in their own way without you necessarily being able to capture some part of it. And what's wrong with that?

Do we really want the entire world to be endlessly full of cookie-licking rent seekers who demand profit every time anyone does anything? Because they failed to capture the value they created, and thus demand a piece of the pie from those who are better at capturing value?

I like the way Thomas Jefferson put it:

> If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea.

[sciencejerk]

Do we really want the entire world to be endlessly full of cookie-licking rent seekers who demand profit every time anyone does anything? Because they failed to capture the value they created, and thus demand a piece of the pie from those who are better at capturing value?

The starving artists I know would be extremely happy to get even one cookie to lick. I know an artist prodogy that paints on canvas and has work in a sizable gallery, at least one institution patron, and is constantly hosting paid workshop events. He architected and built his own custom 40ft ceiling pine art house covered in beautful stained wood and arches, with large metal cuttings and engravings of wild horses on the railings. This artistic prodigy is still starving and works as a handyman/construction worker part-time. He is strongly opposed to AI, by the way.

Most artists are "starving artists"; there are extremely few artists that can support themselves by their creations alone. Many artists make no money at all, and many artists seem to work or create alone as individuals, meaning that they almost always lack the funds or community resources to protect their creative work.

[csallen]

To the extent that you care about deriving money from your art, you aren't just an artist, you're a business. And that's fine. I love businesses and the people who start them.

But, sadly, art isn't an easy business. There is a tremendous supply of art, and not enough demand for it. In other words, it's very competitive.

So, just like every other competitive industry on earth, if you're going to be in the art business, then simply making a good product/service isn't enough. You have to think about marketing and sales and differentiation and distribution and strategy and the whole big picture.

There are plenty of starving artists who make incredible art that nobody pays for, just like there are plenty of starving startup founders who build well-coded apps that nobody pays for.

[pastel8739]

> Do we really want the entire world to be endlessly full of cookie-licking rent seekers who demand profit every time anyone does anything?

No, far better that we have four rent-seekers who gobble up everything that anyone is naive enough to share with the world, then turn around to demand profit in order to keep up with the new pace of the world that they’ve created.

[JAlexoid]

But original artists being rent-seekers is OK, right?

PS: I categorically disagree that AI developers are rent-seekers, unless they require rent for the products their models generate

[abustamam]

Uh, is there an AI developer that does not charge for their services that I don't know about? I'd love to use that one.

[JAlexoid]

Charging for a service isn't rent-seeking.

[JoshTriplett]

I'd love to see copyright abolished. As long as it continues to exist, however, AI should not get an exemption; that would directly advantage a few large companies over everyone else, giving them a special privilege to violate licenses that nobody else gets.

[csallen]

What's the exemption? To me it seems like we're trying to do the opposite, make the laws even more stringent for AI than we do for people.

Imagine a genius person went out, trained himself by studying all the great art, and in doing so gained the ability to paint or draw in just about any style. That wouldn't be a copyright violation. In fact, plenty of people do this, or some version of it. But we say it should be illegal for AI... why, exactly? Because artists don't like it? Because it's "too good"?

If we're going to keep copyright around, then imo what should be illegal here is using the AI as tool to create copies of people's work. Like, if I go out and use AI generate a book of poetry and it's got a bunch of Beatles lyrics in it, fine, sue me.

[abustamam]

Yeah, that is true. I'd be on-board with abolishing copyright then.

[onion2k]

It's interesting that "consumers" are generally for the expansion of IP laws. At at the moment, I'm fairly certain that "style" is not something protected by Copyright. I personally do not want this, and I'm sure there are likely many like me. Poorly thought out IP laws lead to chilling-effects, DRM, stupid and unnecessary litigation, and ultimately a loss of digital freedoms.

Kapwing is specifically designed for artists to share IP with other people in an IP-friendly and financially profitable way. A 'consumer' on Kapwing is not the same as an ordinary person browsing for AI generated art, and the fact that people who make money from selling their IP on there are in favour of expanding IP law shouldn't be a surprise.

All this really tells us is that Kapwing's artist community believe protecting their individual art style is more valuable to them than any money they'd earn from licensing it on a per-image basis to Kapwing's AI tool. I'd be willing to bet that if Kapwing changed the offer to a flat-fee-of-$50,000-a-year-plus-per-image-fee they'd find 99% of artists on there changed their minds. As with most things, people feel strongly about their rights all the way up until the price is right.

[maplethorpe]

It's interesting you interpret the consumer's response as a desire for the expansion of IP laws. As an artist whose work exists in many of these training sets, I'm of a different opinion: IP laws can stay the same, but they should have purchased a license to use my art before including it in their training data.

Since the didn't, they should go to jail. The same way I would have gone to jail if I built Sora in my basement and sold it to the public.

[JAlexoid]

As an artist your license didn't ban learning from your work. Unless your content was acquired without a license at all - you absolutely gave them permission to use it in training sets.

That is the gap in the legal landscape.

[maplethorpe]

No I didn't. It's use in a software product without my permission. That's never been allowed.

Just because you obfuscate what's happening by calling it "learning" and pretending your model is actually just looking at pictures the same as a human, doesn't make it true.

[JAlexoid]

Unfortunately you did grant that permission. Once you granted the permission for someone to hold a copy, they have the permission to process it.

I can assure you, that you didn't grant a license with an exclusive list of operations that can be performed on your work of art. At best you may have had something like "no commercial use" clause and general broad terms.

[visarga]

I thought it was at most a monetary fine, do people go to jail for copyright infringement? But you seem to want to own all the air around your work, the ground beneath it too. Nothing can exist around it, so a creative person would do better to avert their eyes rather than loading useless ideas. Why should I install in my brain your "furniture" when I am not allowed to sit on it? In these cases I think authors provide a net negative to society by creating more works that further forbid others from creating in the same space.

Here, for example, any comment is open to read and respond to. On ArXiv any paper can be downloaded, read and cited. Wikipedia contains text from many thousands of editors, building on each other. We like collaboration more than asserting our exclusivity rights. That is why these places provide better quality than work for direct profit or, God forbid, ad revenue, that is where the slop starts flowing.

[protocolture]

>IP laws can stay the same, but they should have purchased a license to use my art before including it in their training data.

But including your art in the training data is fair use (or otherwise exempt) by most standards, as no reproduction occurs. You are advocating for a change to IP law to make it more restrictive.

[JoshTriplett]

> But including your art in the training data is fair use

The four factors of fair use in the US:

> the purpose and character of your use

Commercial, for-profit. Not scholarship, not research, not commentary, not parody, etc.

> the nature of the copyrighted work

Absolutely everything. Artistic, creative, not purely factual.

> the amount and substantiality of the portion taken, and

All of it, from everyone.

> the effect of the use upon the potential market.

Directly competing with those whose data was copied.

[rcxdude]

3 and 4 are what that argument is based on, I believe. 3) on the basis that the output is not _reproduced_, and 4) on similar grounds that output that's just not at all the same as the input data isn't affecting the market for the original image (I think this is the more debatable one, but in general the existing cases have struggled at the early stages because the plaintiffs have not been able to actually point to output that is a copy of their part of the input, and this does actually matter).

[protocolture]

>Directly competing with those whose data was copied.

An LLM doesnt compete with Art the same way that Photoshop doesnt compete with Art.

>All of it, from everyone.

With the result that anything produced by the LLM does not reproduce any single source in its entirety (and where compelled if they are able to do that is a bug not a feature)

Fair use is too specific tbh, rather than ruling it fair use (which seems to be where things are going) it should just be ruled "use". There's nothing wrong with building a mathematical model using available data.

[JoshTriplett]

> An LLM doesnt compete with Art the same way that Photoshop doesnt compete with Art.

Yes, it does. Many people are using AI-generated works in places where they originally would have either paid an artist, programmer, or other creative professional, or done without. Many companies are claiming to reduce staff because of AI (whether that's true or an excuse). There is plenty of evidence that AI is directly competing with various individuals, businesses, and industries.

> With the result that anything produced by the LLM does not reproduce any single source in its entirety

You do not have to reproduce sources in their entirety to produce derivative works.

[oreally]

> the amount and substantiality of the portion taken, and

> All of it, from everyone.

Yea I'd like to see how drawing two circles violates the copyright of drawing one circle!

[abustamam]

Fair use by most standards? Which standards are those? I don't think a standard about training an AI on billions of images exists.

[oreally]

By the same 'transformative' standards that allow satire, reaction and commentary videos to exist. And those take 100% from the source and add context, whereas good generated AI images that aren't wholesale copying take like less than 10% from the original source.

In addition, the idea that you need to pay rent on *your observation* of someone else's work is absurd. No one pays Newton's descendants for making lifts or hosting bungee jump sport activities.

[maplethorpe]

> good generated AI images that aren't wholesale copying take like less than 10% from the original source.

So would the model work if it only trained on the top 10% of pixels in every image? Or do they in fact need the entire image before they begin processing it, and therefore use the entire image?

> In addition, the idea that you need to pay rent on your observation of someone else's work is absurd.

I agree that's absurd. But training a model is no more "observing images" than an F1 car is "walking" down a race track. Just because a race car uses kinetic energy, gravity, and friction to propel itself, the same way a human does, doesn't mean it's doing the same thing as a human. That comparison you're making is the real absurdity.

[oreally]

> So would the model work if it only trained on the top 10% of pixels in every image? Or do they in fact need the entire image before they begin processing it, and therefore use the entire image?

The model works by training on what features humans can make sense out of the image they're presented with, if the image and the observations of the image's feature were clear/observable enough. Then the generation makes use of those observations. I'm just using 10% as an arbitrary number to describe proportions. If the generation were 100% of the observations from the same image, the model would be overfitting, and many would have deemed it to have produced a copy.

> Just because a race car uses kinetic energy, gravity, and friction to propel itself, the same way a human does, doesn't mean it's doing the same thing as a human.

WTF does this even mean? A race car uses concepts from Newton, just as how a human uses gravity to train it's muscles to move be it knowingly or unknowingly. But you don't see them (car makers/humans) paying rent to Newton after he discovered gravity. Come on!

[tovej]

Is it transformative if I take all the pages in Hanya Yanagiharas A Little Life and use a thesaurus to change every second word?

Or a more realistic scenario: what if I translate it to Spanish without license from the author? That's not allowed, and yet I have "transformed" the work in the same way that an LLM does.

[protocolture]

If I buy a book entitled "How to make a table" and then make a table, the author does not own the table I made.

If I buy a book and use it to prop up a table, the author likewise does not own the table, or any works I undertake on that table.

If I buy a book and rip out the pages to make a collage, the US is the only legal jurisdiction where I run even slight risk of civil penalties.

An LLM is downstream of a book. Using a book to make an LLM does not confer any rights or privilges towards the LLM on the original author, just as using a hammer or nails dont permit the hammer or nail manufacturers any royalties on what I make, even if I build a hammer making machine with them. Theres no right to the works of people who build on your work without reproducing your work, at least outside of strict copyleft.

Its like demanding a cut from people who learned how to use photoshop by watching your photoshop tutorial youtube videos.

This is why the most successful cases against LLMs have been on the "Did they purchase the book" side of the fence, and not on the "What did they do with it" outside of the one case, where the legal company tried to use the LLM to 1:1 reproduce the content they had a limited license to, but thats obviously a no go and they should have known better.

[oreally]

These are my opinions ofc.

> Is it transformative if I take all the pages in Hanya Yanagiharas A Little Life and use a thesaurus to change every second word?

If you meant it literally.. I'd think that such a version would be a sort of parody. It'd be up to lawyers doing their cross-examinations to prove the work was intended for such a purpose though..

> Or a more realistic scenario: what if I translate it to Spanish without license from the author? That's not allowed, and yet I have "transformed" the work in the same way that an LLM does.

Probably a lawyer would answer this better than me, but the 'content' is the same and would violate copyright. There's also other factors, like if it was translated/distributed for free.

Besides that I regard that LLMs to hold mathematical observations in contrast to a translated work. So long as the user ensures the output isn't close to what's already available imo it fits the transformative criteria.

[protocolture]

Google scrapes the entire internet to generate a searchable index of the internet. But the resulting search engine is only infringing where it reproduces entire copies of scraped news articles and images. Both places where they have been put back in their place through legal means.

Like LLM's, it retains the produced index but not the original data.

The big concern is whether producing an LLM is competing with artists directly, but as artists dont make LLMs, this seems to be consistently ruled as non competing.

[abustamam]

I don't quite follow. People don't go on Google and search for midieval history and pretend they wrote the Wikipedia article on it because they found it on Google.

People _do_ use LLMs to make art in someone else's style (knowingly or unknowingly) and claim it as their own creation.

Also, I wouldn't say the creators of LLMs are competing with artists. The users of LLMs are. Arists don't make LLMs, they make art, and people who use midjourney and such make art.

But I'd argue that creators of LLMs are still liable for the harm people cause using their tools. Perhaps not legally, but certainly ethically.

[heavyset_go]

No precedent has been set when it comes to training and fair use

[throwawaysoxjje]

Which case decided that?

[bluefirebrand]

> But including your art in the training data is fair use

It shouldn't be!

[protocolture]

Why? I dont undertand this take at all.

[SpicyLemonZest]

I don't think you can infer consumer positions on IP law from positions on who ought to get paid or how much they should be paid. Many of those same consumers, and indeed many of the artists, feel that fan art of your favorite characters should be legal and unrestricted so long as nobody's making too much money off of it.

[spudlyo]

You're right. It's wrong to think that all of those people are busy writing to congress demanding new laws be enacted. The problem is, the vast majority of people (while possessing a vague sense of right and wrong) do not understand how IP law works, and what the tradeoffs vis-a-vis the public good are. I'm sure many among the supposed consumers in this survey think something akin to "there ought to be a law" -- a sentiment somtimes echoed by readers of this very forum.

[gedy]

Yes this is where I fear big corps leverage hate for AI into adding even more nonsense copyright rules like protecting "style" which has never been under copyright in the US at least. Not defending AI scraping and training! But this will be abused even if no AI is involved.

[j16sdiz]

> It's interesting that "consumers" are generally for the expansion of IP laws.

It's not. This total depends on how you ask it.

Q: Do you think artists deserved payment?

A: YES.

Q: Will you pay for art?

A: MAYBE.

Q: Do you think people should go to jail not paying for art

A: NO.

[fennecfoxy]

Yeah as a furry (exposed to commission scene a lot) the number of commissions available for "Disney" or "Pixar" or whatever style art even before the whole AI era really tells you that they're hypocrites.

[NateEag]

As others have pointed out in this discussion, there's a big difference between some humans producing drawings in a given style and a machine producing millions of illustrations per day in that style.

I have rarely been as disheartened as I am by the transformation of Studio Ghibli's beautiful art style, painstakingly developed over decades, into a heap of slop-trash that actively erases the human connections so artfully depicted in Hayao Miyazaki's work.

All that sorrow and it's not even my style.

So, no - a human who's willing to draw an illustration in a particular style, perhaps one they live and admire, is not necessarily a hypocrite for seeing genAI's ability to produce billions of images in that style.

[fennecfoxy]

I don't think mass production cheapens the handcrafted experience. Just because a factory can pump out cheap shoes doesn't mean it's no longer enjoyable to buy, own and experience a handmade pair of leather shoes; it's only that the reason for buying them becomes different (necessity vs. luxury).

The Ghibli thing is a great example; who's still actually doing that? It was a passing fad.

But let's not pretend that that passing fad has changed the fact that Ghibli's films are absolute masterpieces that will continue being enjoyed by generations to come. Because they are and still are.

[AnthonyMouse]

> It's interesting that "consumers" are generally for the expansion of IP laws.

Don't forget how polling works. Change the wording of the question and you get a different answer.

Try asking them if they think Comcast or Sony should be able to sue individuals for posting memes that don't even contain any copyrighted material.