!localllama@sh.itjust.works

You’re moving the goalposts. Your original reply made no mention of co-authorship by a human, it was just one sweeping statement.

AI art is not protected by copyright, yes. That isn’t a “should” but rather how it actually works in nearly all countries but a few, certainly including the US.

But they do, explicitly:

Many popular AI platforms offer tools that encourage users to select, edit, and adapt AI- generated content in an iterative fashion. Midjourney, for instance, offers what it calls “Vary Region and Remix Prompting,” which allow users to select and regenerate regions of an image with a modified prompt. In the “Getting Started” section of its website, Midjourney provides the following images to demonstrate how these tools work.¹³⁶

Unlike prompts alone, these tools can enable the user to control the selection and placement of individual creative elements. Whether such modifications rise to the minimum standard of originality required under Feist will depend on a case-by-case determination.¹³⁸ In those cases where they do, the output should be copyrightable. Similarly, the inclusion of elements of AI-generated content in a larger human-authored work does not affect the copyrightability of the larger human-authored work as a whole.¹³⁹ For example, a film that includes AI-generated special effects or background artwork is copyrightable, even if the AI effects and artwork separately are not.

This isn’t true. You should read the latest guidance by the United States Copyright Office.

I see it as a time capsule, capturing a moment in time in the medium’s evolution. I mean, check out the first ever AI-generated image that sold for $432,500 USD back in 2018:

Fuck that guy.

Jesus fucking christ. Only four more years. I hope.

Fair use isn’t a loophole, it is copyright law.

I have a feeling this experiment would sooner get the axe than have ads injected. There was initially a waiting list, but just a few days in it was completely open to the public.

Sometimes they just do research. Like when their employees made transformers and nothing came of them until Open AI capitalized on it.

There are ads in them now? I didn’t encounter any when using it a few days ago.

I just generated one and didn’t hear any ads.

Have you read this article by Cory Doctorow yet?

Yeah, I’m fine with a coalition being formed as long as there are no people like Sam Altman in it.

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This isn’t undermining artists, it’s expanding access and knowledge, enabling individuals to take control of their own destinies. Open-source AI will empower artists, existing artists and newly active or returning artists who give this new medium a shot, by giving them the new tools that will push the frontiers of self-expression and redefine creativity this decade.

100 years ago photographers and filmmakers significantly disrupted the careers of most illustrators, story tellers, and theater companies of the time. Despite this, storytelling and image making exploded, entering a new golden age. Musicians panicked over the use of synthesizers in the 80s too often refusing to work with people involved with synthesizers. As a result, there are fewer drummers today than in 1970, but out of that came hip hop and house. Suppressing that tool would have been a huge cultural loss. Generative art hasn’t found its Marley Marl or Frankie Knuckles yet, but they’re out there, and they’re going to do stuff that will blow our minds. Cutting edge tools and techniques have always propelled art and artists forward. Every advancement a leap forward, leaving behind constraints and enabling more people to pursue their creative aspirations.

That reminds me of a presentation I saw a little while back.

If you want to fight against people’s right to freely communicate and express themselves, be my guest, but it’s not a fight you can win.

Giving all people a tool to help them more effectively communicate, express themselves, learn, and come together is something everyone should get behind.

I firmly believe in the public’s right to access and use information, while acknowledging artists should retain specific rights over their creations. I also accept that the rights they don’t retain have always enabled ethical self-expression and productive dialogue.

Imagine if copyright owners had the power to simply remove whatever wasn’t profitable for them from existence. We’d be hindering critical functions such as critique, investigation, reverse engineering, and even the simple cataloging of knowledge. In place of all that good, we’d have an ideal world for those with money, tyrants, and all those who seek control, and the undermining of the free exchange of ideas.

Taking artists’ work without consent or compensation goes against the spirit of open source, though, doesn’t it?

It doesn’t. Making observations about others’ works is a well-established tool for any researchers, reviewers, and people inventing new works. A concept which work perfectly within the open source framework. That’s all these models are, original analysis of its training set in comparison with one another. Because it’s a step one must necessarily take when doing anything, doing this doesn’t require anyone’s permission and is itself a right we all have.

I’m not fighting for the extremely wealthy, I’m fighting for the existence of competitive open source models. Something that can’t happen with what you’ve proposed. That would just hand corporations a monopoly of a public technology by making it prohibitively expensive to for regular people to keep up with the megacorporations that already own vast troves of data and can afford to buy even more.

This article by Katherine Klosek, the director of information policy and federal relations at the Association of Research Libraries does a good job of explaining what I’m talking about.

I don’t think they have to, the point is to fight against regression of public rights for the benefit of the few.

So the question that comes to mind is exactly how, on a practical level, it would work to make sure that when a company scrapes data, trains and AI, and then makes billions of dollars, the thousands or millions of people who created the data all get a cut after the fact. Because particularly in the creative sector, a lot of people are freelancers who don’t have a specific employer they can go after. From a purely practical perspective, paying artists before the data is used makes sure all those freelancers get paid. Waiting until the company makes a profit, taxing it out of them, and then distributing it to artists doesn’t seem practical to me.

This isn’t labor law.