430
We Asked A.I. to Create the Joker. It Generated a Copyrighted Image.
(www.nytimes.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2024
430 points (83.1% liked)
Technology
59161 readers
2217 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Because this proves that the "AI", at some level, is storing the data of the Joker movie screenshot somewhere inside of its training set.
Likely because the "AI" was trained upon this image at some point. This has repercussions with regards to copyright law. It means the training set contains copyrighted data and the use of said training set could be argued as piracy.
Legal discussions on how to talk about generative-AI are only happening now, now that people can experiment with the technology. But its not like our laws have changed, copyright infringement is copyright infringement. If the training data is obviously copyright infringement, then the data must be retrained in a more appropriate manner.
I mean anyone can use copyrighted material as inspiration for their work and it’s fair use and not a concern at all.
Is Ai only bad since it can do what a human does better/faster? If that’s that case, than they don’t actually have an issue with the fact it’s copyrighted, or I wouldn’t be able to use it for inspiration either.
Legally speaking, AI is not anything. Its just a computer program. What you're asking is completely a red-herring.
The question here is if the training-weights constitute copyright infringement. Now look at any clip-art set. Most clip-art is so called "royalty free", as in you can copy it from computer-to-computer without any copyright issues, because the author specifically said that its royalty free.
But if you have a copyrighted font, then even copying that font from one computer to another constitutes copyright infringement. (IE: Literally, you aren't allowed to copy this unless you have the permission of the author).
So, when you download Midjourney's training weights, does that act in of itself constitute a copy that violate's the authors of "Joker" movie? As far as I can tell, yes. Because the training weights clearly contain Joker images.
Hows it a red herring to point out we are allowed to use copyrighted materials already? Its not the concern here, yet its what they are using as the concern for their arguments against it.
Because copyright law is clear in that computers can't own a copyright.
The humans at play are:
The artist who created the original work.
The computer IT team who are copying the data behind the scenes between servers.
You who uses Midjourney to recreate "Joker" movie artwork, likely using the data in #2 which falls under copyright infringement.
It doesn't matter how #2 works. It doesn't matter if its H.265 or MPEG2 or from VHS tapes, or if its a Neural Network using the latest-and-greatest training weights from a GPU-based datasystem. Its just a computer. The ones doing the copyright infringement are the people copying data from place to place.
The AI model is not a copy of the set of data used to train it, it's a derivative work. As such copyright as it currently stands does not apply. It's possible, likely even, that copyright will be modified in some way soon to account for this, but the situation today says nope, not copyright infringement.
They're really trying so hard cuz they absolutely want this to be infringement but it simply isnt on any legal level.