The new version of midjourney has a real overfitting problem. The way it was done if I remember correctly is that someone found out v6 was trained partially with Stockbase images pairs, so they went to Stockbase and found some images and used those exact tags in the prompts. The output from that greatly resembled the training data, and that's what ignited this whole thing.

Edit: I found the image I saw a few days ago. They need to go back and retrain their model, IMO. When the output is this close to the training, it has to be hurting the creativity of the model. This should only happen with images that haven't been de-duped in the training set, so I don't know what's going on here.

They’ll do anything to slow the progress of publically accessible power.

Fight them tooth and nail. Self governance over interference from ignorant, decrepit politicians.

Also stop using copyrighted materials when training. You put in the extra mile now, and you’ll be able to make your own (automated) copyright material.

I'm sorry to tell you but fanart is subjected to copyright, as are all derivative works that aren't sufficiently transformative, even if they aren't used commercially. It's a subjective measure but I doubt any judge would say those top images are completely distinct from the Minions or Simpsons. What happens is that usually the rights owners don't chase every single infringement, out of goodwill or simply because it would be too expensive to litigate every unauthorized use.

To be fair personally I think that's excessive. But I believe so especially because it makes artists lives more difficult. However AI isn't making it any easier either...

That Tree God on the bottom right looks really neat, and a worthy addition to the "Villain with legitimate grievances that murders for no good reason" club

Thank you for saying this way better than I would have, and saving me the effort too! Agreed! I am getting tired of this shit too.

Be careful, Steamboat Willie may be public domain, but I don't know if Steamboat MscMahion Ysarai is.

"But we made the AI explicitly to obfuscate the fact that we used copyrighted images! Er ahem. I mean... YOU CAN'T PROVE ANYTHING!"

This is literally it it’s really not that complicated. Training a Data set is not (currently) an infringement of any of the rights conferred by copyright. Generating copyright infringing content is still possible, but only when the work would otherwise be infringing. The involvement of not of AI in the workflow is not some black pill that automatically makes infringement, but it is still possible to make a work substantially similar to a copyrighted work.

Meanwhile as we speak websites like Civitai and others started to paywall these models and outputs. It's going to get ugly for some of them.

The users did not access copyright protected data, they can reasonably argue a lack of knowledge of similarities as a defence.

In music that gives you a free pass because a lot of music is similar.

Ed Sheeran made similar music to Marvin Gaye through essentially cultural osmosis of ideas. Robin Thick deliberately took a Marvin Gaye reference and directly copied it.

The legal and moral differences relied on knowledge.

The liability has to fall on who fed the model the data in the first place. The model might be Robin Thick or Ed Sheeran, but given the model has been programmed with the specific intention to create similar work from a collection of references. That puts it plainly in the Robin Thick camp to me.

The AI's intent is programmed and if a human followed that programmed objective, with copyright owned material, that human would be infringing on copyright unless they paid royalties.

Isn't OpenAI selling it though?

There's a weird line here because I'm pretty sure the restriction is "commercial use" rather than outright selling. So even if they're including these AI products as "value-add" bundles or including them in i.e. Bing, they'd be tied the (ad, etc) revenue of the underlying product. There's also a difference between commercial entities and "personal use".

You might not be selling me a picture of Homer Simpson, but if you're providing it via a tool on a page with ads etc there's still a tie-in to a revenue stream and commercial activity

They need to die. Not be selectively enforced for everyone except those with a multi billion dollar computational model.

Everyone will have the same copyright laws except Microsoft and Google at this rate. That's worse than where we are now.

Do human artists not take any influence from art they've seen before? I could name you the photographer, Serge Ramelli, that has influenced me the most and if you compare our photos it's quite apparent. Is my art just a hoax?

It doesn't "contain the original work" in the way it sounds. That sounds like there's literally a stolen picture, sitting in the network, ready to be copy/pasted into the derivative work.

If you examined the network, you won't see anything like the "stolen image". It's an entire latent space of many dimensions, where a point in the space is a concept.

A good metaphor might be a recipe for bread, or worded instructions on how to draw Mickey mouse.

It's just that a computer is so good at following those instructions verbatim, it can draw Mickey mouse with uncanny ability.

Is "draw a circle at 100,200 of diameter ∅40 color hex 0xBEEFE5, draw a line from..." the same as Mickey Mouse? If I got the detail 100% and following those instructions gives Mickey mouse, am I distributing copyrighted work ?