We Asked A.I. to Create the Joker. It Generated a Copyrighted Image.::Artists and researchers are exposing copyrighted material hidden within A.I. tools, raising fresh legal questions.
We asked A.I. to create a copyrighted image from the Joker movie. It generated a copyrighted image as expected.
Ftfy
Voyager just loaded a copyrighted image on my phone. Guess someone’s gonna have to sue them too.
Yeah man, Voyager is making millions with the images on the app. It makes me so mad, they Voyager people make you think they are generating content on their own, but in reality is just feeding you unlicensed content from others.
You’re completely missing the point. Making money doesn’t change the legality. YouTube was threatened by the RIAA before they even started showing ads. Displaying an image from a copyrighted work on an AI platform is not much different technologically than Voyager or even Google Images displaying the same image, and both could also be interpreted as “feeding you unlicensed content from others.”
Making money doesn’t change the legality.
Except that it actually does? That’s the point of copyright laws. The LLM/AIs are using copyright protected material as source without paying for it, and then selling it’s output as "original '.
I just remembered a copyrighted image. Oops.
Hey, I bet there were complaints about Google showing image results at some point too! Lol
They literally asked it to give them a screenshot from the Joker movie. That was their fucking prompt. It’s not like they just said “draw Joker” and it spit out a screenshot from the movie, they had to work really hard to get that exact image.
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.
But where is the infringement?
This NYT article includes the same several copyrighted images and they surely haven’t paid any license. It’s obviously fair use in both cases and NYT’s claim that “it might not be fair use” is just ridiculous.
Worse, the NYT also includes exact copies of the images, while the AI ones are just very close to the original. That’s like the difference between uploading a video of yourself playing a Taylor Swift cover and actually uploading one of Taylor Swift’s own music videos to YouTube.
Even worse the NYT intentionally distributed the copyrighted images, while Midjourney did so unintentionally and specifically states it’s a breach of their terms of service. Your account might be banned if you’re caught using these prompts.
You do realize that newspapers do typically pay the licensing for images, it’s how things like Getty images exist.
On the flip side, OpenAI (and other companies) are charging someone access to their model, which is then returning copyrighted images without paying the original creator.
That’s why situations like this keep getting talked about, you have a 3rd party charging people for copyrighted materials. We can argue that it’s a tool, so you aren’t really “selling” copyrighted data, but that’s the issue that is generally be discussed in these kinds of articles/court cases.
Mostly playing devil’s advocate here (since I don’t think ai should be used commercially), but I’m actually curious about this, since I work in media… You can get away using images or footage for free if it falls under editorial or educational purposes. I know this can vary from place to place, but with a lot of online news sites now charging people to view their content, they could potentially be seen as making money off of copyrighted material, couldn’t they?
It’s not a topic that I’m super well versed in, but here is a thread from a photography forum indicating that news organizations can’t take advantage of fair use https://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/4183940.
I think these kinds of stringent rules are why so many are up in arms about how AI is being used. It’s effectively a way for big players to circumvent paying the people who out all the work into the art/music/voice acting/etc. The models would be nothing without the copyrighted material, yet no one seems to want to pay those people.
It gets more interesting when you realize that long term we still need people creating lots of content if we want these models to be able to create things around concepts that don’t yet exist (new characters, genres of music, etc.)
But where is the infringement?
Do Training weights have the data? Are the servers copying said data on a mass scale, in a way that the original copyrighters don’t want or can’t control?
Data is not copyrighted, only the image is. Furthermore you can not copyright a number, even though you could use a sufficiently large number to completely represent a specific image. There’s also the fact that copyright does not protect possession of works, only distribution of them. If I obtained a copyrighted work no matter the means chosen to do so, I’ve committed no crime so long as I don’t duplicate that work. This gets into a legal grey area around computers and the fundamental way they work, but it was already kind of fuzzy if you really think about it anyway. Does viewing a copyrighted image violate copyright? The visual data of that image has been copied into your brain. You have the memory of that image. If you have the talent you could even reproduce that copyrighted work so clearly a copy of it exists in your brain.
only distribution of them.
Yeah. And the hard drives and networks that pass Midjourney’s network weights around?
That’s distribution. Did Midjourney obtain a license from the artists to allow large numbers of “Joker” copyrighted data to be copied on a ton of servers in their data-center so that Midjourney can run? They’re clearly letting the public use this data.
Because they’re not copying around images of Joker, they’re copying around a work derived from many many things including images of Joker. Copying a derived work does not violate the copyright of the work it was derived from. The wrinkle in this case is that you can extract something very similar to the original works back out of the derived work after the fact. It would be like if you could bake a cake, pass it around, and then down the line pull a whole egg back out of it. Maybe not the exact egg you started with, but one very similar to it. This is a situation completely unlike anything that’s come before it which is why it’s not actually covered by copyright. New laws will need to be drafted (or at a bare minimum legal judgements made) to decide how exactly this situation should be handled.
derived
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/derivative_work
Copyrights allow their owners to decide how their works can be used, including creating new derivative works off of the original product. Derivative works can be created with the permission of the copyright owner or from works in the public domain. In order to receive copyright protection, a derivative work must add a sufficient amount of change to the original work.
Are you just making shit up?
Do Training weights have the data?
The answer to that question is extensively documented by thousands of research papers - it’s not up for debate.
Because this proves that the “AI”, at some level, is storing the data of the Joker movie screenshot somewhere inside of its training set.
Is it tho? Honest question.
How did the Joker image get replicated?
It’s too hard to type up how generative AIs work, but look up a video on “how stable diffusion works” or something like that. I seriously doubt they have a massive database with every image from the Internet inside it, with the AI just spitting those pics out, but I’m no expert.
I posted it on my website as fan art and it scraped it. I just used a different filter which falls under fair use.
Yes it is. Honest answer.
So stable diffusion, midjourney, etc., all have massive databases with every picture on the Internet stored in them? I know the AI models are trained on lots of images, but are the images actually stored? I’m skeptical, but I’m no expert.
These models were trained on datasets that, without compensating the authors, used their work as training material. It’s not every picture on the net, but a lot of it is scrubbing websites, portfolios and social networks wholesale.
A similar situation happens with large language models. Recently Meta admitted to using illegally pirated books (Books3 database to be precise) to train their LLM without any plans to compensate the authors, or even as much as paying for a single copy of each book used.
Most of the stuff that inspires me probably wasn’t paid for. I just randomly saw it online or on the street, much like an AI.
AI using straight up pirated content does give me pause tho.
How much profit do you make from this stuff ?
I was on the same page as you for the longest time. I cringed at the whole “No AI” movement and artists’ protest. I used the very same idea: Generations of artists honed their skills by observing the masters, copying their techniques and only then developing their own unique style. Why should AI be any different? Surely AI will not just copy works wholesale and instead learn color, composition, texture and other aspects of various works to find it’s own identity.
It was only when my very own prompts started producing results I started recognizing as “homages” at best and “rip-offs” at worst that gave me a stop.
I suspect that earlier generations of text to image models had better moderation of training data. As the arms race heated up and pace of development picked up, companies running these services started rapidly incorporating whatever training data they could get their hands on, ethics, copyright or artists’ rights be damned.
I remember when MidJourney introduced Niji (their anime model) and I could often identify the mangas and characters used to train it. The imagery Niji produced kept certain distinct and unique elements of character designs from that training data - as a result a lot of characters exhibited “Chainsaw Man” pointy teeth and sticking out tongue - without as much as a mention of the source material or even the themes.
Wasn’t that known? Have midjourney ever claimed they didn’t use copyrighted works? There’s also an ongoing argument about the legality of that in general. One recent court case ruled that copyright does not protect a work from being used to train an AI. I’m sure that’s far from the final word on the topic, but it does mean this is a legal grey area at the moment.
If it is known, then it is copyright infringement to download the training sets and therefore a crime to do so. You cannot reproduce a copy of the works without the express permission of the copyright holder.
How many computers did Midjourney copy its training weights to? Has Midjourney (and the IT team behind it) paid royalties for every copyrighted image in its training set to have a proper copyright license to copy all of this data from computer to computer?
I’m guessing no. Which means the Midjourney team (if you say is true) is committing copyright infringement every time they spin up a new server with these weights.
Pro-AI side will obviously argue that the training weights do not contain the data of these copyrighted works. A claim that is looking more-and-more laughable as these experiments happen.
No it’s not illegal to download publicly available content it’s a copyright violation to republish it.
If the training data is obviously copyright infringement, then the data must be retrained in a more appropriate manner.
This is the crux of the issue, it isn’t obviously copyright infringement. Currently copyright is completely silent on the matter one way or another.
The thing that makes this particularly interesting is that the traditional copyright maximalists, the ones responsible for ballooning copyright durations from its original reasonable limit of 14 years (plus one renewal) to its current absurd duration of 95 years, also stand to benefit greatly from generative works. Instead of the usual full court press we tend to see from the major corporations around anything copyright related we’re instead seeing them take a rather hands off approach.
This is the crux of the issue, it isn’t obviously copyright infringement. Currently copyright is completely silent on the matter one way or another.
Its clear that the training weights have the data on recreating this Joker scene. Its also clear that if the training-data didn’t contain this image, then the copy of the image would never result into the weights that have been copy/pasted everywhere.
Except it isn’t a perfect copy. It’s very similar, but not exact. Additionally for every example you can find where it spits out a nearly identical image you can also find one where it produces nothing like it. Even more complicated you can get images generated that very closely match other copyrighted works, but which the model was never trained on. Does that mean copying the model violates the copyright of a work that it literally couldn’t have included in its data?
You’re making a lot of assumptions and arguments that copyright covers things that it very much does not cover or at a minimum that it hasn’t (yet) been ruled to cover.
Legally, as things currently stand, an AI model trained on a copyrighted work is not a copy of that work as far as copyright is concerned. That’s today’s legal reality. That might change in the future, but that’s far from certain, and is a far more nuanced and complicated problem than you’re making it out to be.
Any legal decision that ruled an AI model is a copy of all the works used to train it would also likely have very far reaching and complicated ramifications. That’s why this needs to be argued out in court, but until then what midjourney is doing is perfectly legal.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/derivative_work
Copyrights allow their owners to decide how their works can be used, including creating new derivative works off of the original product. Derivative works can be created with the permission of the copyright owner or from works in the public domain. In order to receive copyright protection, a derivative work must add a sufficient amount of change to the original work.
The law is very clear on the nature of derivative works of copyrighted material.
Not sure where they’re getting the bit about copyright disallowing derived works as that’s just not true. You can get permission to create a derived work, but you don’t need permission to create a derived work so long as the final result does not substantially consist of the original work.
Unfortunately what constitutes “substantially” is somewhat vague. Various rulings have been made around that point, but I believe a common figure used is 30%. By that metric any given image represents substantially less than 30% of any AI model so the model itself is a perfectly legal derived work with its own copyright separate from the various works that were combined to create it.
Ultimately though the issue here is that the wrong tool is being used, copyright just doesn’t cover this case, it’s just what people are most familiar with (not to mention most people are very poorly educated about it) so that’s what everyone reaches for by default.
With generative AI what we have is a tool that can be used to trivially produce works that are substantially similar to existing copyrighted works. In this regard it’s less like a photocopier, and more like Photoshop, but with the critical difference that no particular talent is necessary to create the reproduction. Because it’s so easy to use people keep focusing on trying to kill the tool rather than trying to police the people using it. But they’re going about it all wrong, copyright isn’t the right weapon if that’s your goal. Copyright can be used to go after the people using generative AI tools, but not the people creating the tools.
Because it’s so easy to use people keep focusing on trying to kill the tool rather than trying to police the people using it. But they’re going about it all wrong, copyright isn’t the right weapon if that’s your goal. Copyright can be used to go after the people using generative AI tools, but not the people creating the tools.
Why? If the training weights are created and distributed in violation of copyright laws, it seems appropriate to punish those illegal training weights.
In fact, all that people really are asking for, is for a new set of training weights to be developed but with appropriate copyright controls. IE: With express permission from the artists and/or entities who made the work.
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.
Is Ai only bad since it can do what a human does better/faster?
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:
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The artist who created the original work.
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The computer IT team who are copying the data behind the scenes between servers.
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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.
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Looking at a copyrighted font with your computer means the font is in your computer’s memory. Do I go to jail for every site I visit that uses a fancy font?
Font files ≠ framebuffer
Images ≠ neural network weights
Do I go to jail for every site I visit that uses a fancy font?
If its a fancy copyrighted font without a license to copy… the Website owner gets sued. Because the website owner is the one making mass copies of said font.
Do… you know what copyrites are? They relate to the copying of data.
The framebuffer on your computer copies the data to display the font to you. That’s my point. Not every form of copying infringes on copyright.
And my argument is that Midjourney’s servers are engaged in illegal copying. So I think your point is moot. Not the Web Browsers downloading images.
The movie Joker’s image is being copied each time the training weights are copied to a new server. Is that not an illegal copy?
But its not like our laws have changed
And that’s the problem. The internet has drastically reduced the cost of copying information, to the point where entirely new uses like this one are now possible. But those new uses are stifled by copyright law that originates from a time when the only cost was that people with gutenberg presses would be prohibited from printing slightly cheaper books. And there’s no discussion of changing it because the people who benefit from those laws literally are the media.
Copyright was literally invented because its cheap and easy to copy information (ie: Printing Press).
When copies are easy, you screw over the original artist. A large scale regulation of copies must be enforced by the central authorities to make sure small artists get the payments that they deserve. It doesn’t matter if you use a printing press, a xerox machine, a photograph, a phonograph, a record, a CD-ROM copy, a tape recorder, or the newest and fanciest AI to copy someone’s work. Its a copy, and therefore under the copyright regulations.
By that logic I am also storing that image in my dataset, because I know and remember this exact image. I can reproduce it from memory too.
You ever try to do a public performance of a copyrighted work, like “Happy Birthday to You” ??
You get sued. Even if its from memory. Welcome to copyright law. There’s a reason why every restaraunt had to make up a new “Happy Happy Birthday, from the Birthday Crew” song.
Yeah, but until I perform it without a license for profit, I don’t get sued.
So it’s up to the user to make sure that if any material that is generated is copyright infringing, it should not be used.
Otakon anime music videos have no profits but they explicitly get a license from RIAA to play songs in public.
So? I’m not saying those are fair terms, I would also prefer if that were not the case, but AI isn’t performing in public any more having a guitar with you in public is ripping off Metallica.
You don’t need to perform “for profit” to get sued for copyright infringement.
but AI isn’t performing in public any more having a guitar with you in public is ripping off Metallica.
Is the Joker image in that article derivative or substantially similar to a copyrighted work? Is the query available to anyone who uses Midjourney? Are the training weights being copied from server-to-server behind the scenes? Were the training weights derived from copyrighted data?
Hard? They wrote:
Joaquin Phoenix Joker movie, 2019, screenshot from a movie, movie scene
Yes, look how specific they were. I didn’t even need to get that exact with a google image search. I literally searched for “Joaquin Phoenix Joker” and that exact image was the very first result.
They specified that it had to be that specific actor, as that specific character, from that specific movie, and that it had to be a screenshot from a scene in the movie… and they got exactly what they asked for. This isn’t shocking. Shocking would have been if it didn’t produce something nearly identical to that image.
A more interesting result would be what it would spit out if you asked for say “Heath Ledger Joker movie, 2019, screenshot from a movie, movie scene”.
If you read further they also tested many other much more vague prompts, all of which gave intellectual properties they did not have the rights to. The Joaquin Phoenix image isn’t any less illegal, either, though because they don’t have the legal rights to profit off of that IP without permission or proper credit.
I already know I’m going to be downvoted all to hell, but just putting it out there that neural networks aren’t just copy pasting. If a talented artist replicates a picture of the joker almost perfectly, they are applauded. If an AI does it, that’s bad? Why are humans allowed to be “inspired” by copyrighted material, but AIs aren’t?
Because the original Joker design is not just something that occurred in nature, out of nowhere. It was created by another artist(s) who don’t get credit or compensation for their work.
When YouTube “essayists” cobble script together by copy pasting paragraphs and changing some words around and then then earn money off the end product with zero attribution, we all agree it’s wrong. Corporations doing the same to images are no different.
Tons of human made art isn’t inspired by nature. Rather it’s inspired by other human made art. Neural networks don’t just copy paste like a yt plagiarist. You can ask an AI to plagiarize but no guarantee it’ll get it right.
I think the problem is that you cannot ask AI not to plagiarize. I love the potential of AI and use it a lot in my sketching and ideation work. I am very wary of publicly publishing a lot of it though, since, especially recently, the models seem to be more and more at ease producing ethically questionable content.
That’s an interesting point. We’re forced to make a judgement call because we don’t have total control over what it generates.
you aren’t making any sense. people did fanarts and memes of the joker movie like crazy, they were all over the internet. there are tons and tons of fan arts of copyrighted material.
they fall under fair use and no one losses money because fan arts can’t be used for commercial purposes, that would fall outside fair use and copyright holders will sue, of course.
how is that different from the AI generating an image containing copyrighted material? if someone started generating images of the joker and then selling them, yeah, sue the fuck out of them. but generating it without any commercial purpose is not illegal at all.
In many cases the AI company is “selling you” the image by making users pay for the use of the generator. Sure, there are free options, too - but just giving you an example.
With that line of argument you can sue developers of 2d painting programmes and producers of graphics tablets. And producers of canvas, brushes and paint. Maybe even the landlord for renting out a studio? It’s all means of production.
You make an interesting point, but I can’t help but feel it’s not completely the same and you’re reaching a bit. I feel like it’d be closer if GIMP, next to shape tools for squares and circles, literally had a ‘Joaquin Phoenix as the Joker’ shape. The crux of the issue as I see it in this part of the legal debate is whether or not AI companies are willing participants in the creation of potentially copyright infringing media.
It reminds me a bit of the debate around social media platforms and if they’re legally responsible for the illegal or inappropriate content people keep uploading.
So you watched that Hbomberguy video where he randomly tacked on being wrong about AI in every way, using unsourced, uncited claims that have nothing to do with Somerton or that Illuminaughti chick and will age extremely poorly and made that your entire worldview? Okay
Actually no, but thanks for letting me know, I like his content.
This is a classic problem for machine learning systems, sometimes called over fitting or memorization. By analogy, it’s the difference between knowing how to do multiplication vs just memorizing the times tables. With enough training data and large enough storage AI can feign higher “intelligence”, and that is demonstrably what’s going on here. It’s a spectrum as well. In theory, nearly identical recall is undesirable, and there are known ways of shifting away from that end of the spectrum. Literal AI 101 content.
Edit: I don’t mean to say that machine learning as a technique has problems, I mean that implementations of machine learning can run into these problems. And no, I wouldn’t describe these as being intelligent any more than a chess algorithm is intelligent. They just have a much more broad problem space and the natural language processing leads us to anthropomorphize it.
God I fucking hate this braindesd AI boogeyman nonsense.
Yeah, no shit you ask the AI to create a picture of a specific actor from a specific movie, its going yo look like a still from that movie.
Or if you ask it to create “an animated sponge wearing pants” it’s going to give you spongebob.
You should think of these AIs as if you asking an artist freind of yours to draw a picture for you. So if you say “draw an Italian video games chsracter” then obviously they’re going to draw Mario.
And also I want to point out they interview some professor of English for some reason, but they never interview, say, a professor of computer science and AI, because they don’t want people that actually know what they’re talking about giving logical answers, they want random bloggers making dumb tests and “”“exposing”“” AI and how it steals everything!!!1!!! Because that’s what gets clicks.
All of this and also fuck copyright.
Why does everyone suddenly care about copyright so much. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.
It’s actually pretty concerning. A lot of the anti-AI arguments are really short-sighted. People want to make styles copyrightable. Could you imagine if Disney was allowed to claim ownership over anything that even kinda looked like their work?
I feel like the protectionism of the artist community is a potential poison pill. That in the fight to protect themselves from corporations, they’re going to be motivated to expand copyright law, which ultimately gives more power to corporations.
They interviewed her because she wrote about generative ai experiments she conducted with Gary Marcus, an AI researcher who they quote earlier in the piece, specifically about AI’s regurgitation issue. They link to it in the article.
We asked this artist to draw the joker. The artist generated an copyrighted image. We ask the court to immediately confiscate his brain.
I was thinking exactly this. If i asked an artist to draw an image of irom man, i would bet that they would draw him in a famous pose, and they would try to draw his suit accurately or make it resemble a scene from the movie.
I would also bet that it would not be exact, line for line. Like they knew that there were buildings in the background. They knew his hand was up witht the light pointing at the viewer, they knew it was night time and they know what iron man looks like, maybe they used a few reference images to get the suit right but there would be enough differences that it wouldnt be exact. These images are slightly different than the movie stills and if made by a human they would look pretty similar to what the AI has done here. Especially if they were asked to draw a still from the movie like in this article.
If you copy work without giving credit to it’s source then you’re the asshole, the rules shouldn’t be any different for AI.
If you ask your friend to draw something with a vague prompt then I like to think you’ll get something original more often than not, which is what the article discusses in depth: the AI will return copyrighted characters almost every time.
The rules aren’t any different for AI. AI is not a legal entity, just like a pen and canvas are not. It is always about the person who makes money with facsimiles of copyrighted previous work.
So then the people operating this AI and offering paid services are legally in the wrong and should be taken down or pay reparations to everyone they’ve stolen from.
So do you want to shutdown Google because I can type “spongebob squarepants” into Google images and Google with give me an image of spongebob?
Please put some thought into the implications of what you’re saying outside of AI before you make a knee-jerk reaction like that.
Those images in the search results are one of three categories:
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Officially licensed and distributed works that Spongebob IP owners signed off on
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Fair use works, namely noncommercial and parody
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Illegal works the posters of which can be sued
Google themselves didn’t create those images. Google didn’t intentionally profit off of illegal works without giving credit. Google didn’t post those images themselves. AI did all of those things.
It doesn’t matter if Google creates the images.
It doesn’t matter if they “intend” to profit from illegal works.
It doesn’t matter if they “give credit” (this is the one that’s the dumbest because it just reeks of ignorance, like thinking you can use whatever works you like as long as you put a credit to them in the description)
Google showing you copywritten images when you search for them is not different than when an AI does it.
It does actually matter if Google creates the images and then sells them directly. That is what this discussion is about. If you don’t want to be a part of the discussion, fuck off then.
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“Generate this copyrighted character”
“Look, it showed us a copyrighted character!”
Does everyone that writes for the NYTimes have a learning disability?
The point is to prove that copyrighted material has been used as training data. As a reference.
If a human being gets asked to draw the joker, gets a still from the film, then copies it to the best of their ability. They can’t sell that image. Technically speaking they’ve broken the law already by making a copy. Lots of fan art is illegal, it’s just not worth going after (unless you’re Disney or Nintendo).
As a subscription service that’s what AI is doing. Selling the output.
Held to the same standards as a human artist, this is illegal.
If AI is allowed to copy art under copyright, there’s no reason a human shouldn’t be allowed to do the same thing.
Proving the reference is all important.
If an AI or human only ever saw public domain artwork and was asked to draw the joker, they might come up with a similar character. But it would be their own creation. There are copyright cases that hinge on proving the reference material. (See Blurred Lines by Robin Thick)
The New York Times is proving that AI is referencing an image under copyright because it comes out precisely the same. There are no significant changes at all.
In fact even if you come up with a character with no references. If it’s identical to a pre-existing character the first creator gets to hold copyright on it.
This is undefendable.
Even if that AI is a black box we can’t see inside. That black box is definitely breaking the law. There’s just a different way of proving it when the black box is a brain and when the black box is an AI.
It’s not selling that image (or any image), any more than a VCR is selling you a taped version of Die Hard you got off cable TV.
It is a tool that can help you infringe copyright, but as it has non-infringing uses, it doesn’t matter.
Then who created this image in your view?
That’s irrelevant, the issue is whether the machine is committing a crime, or the person
Machines aren’t culpable in law.
There is more than one human involved in creating and operating the machine.
The debate is, which humans are culpable?
The programmers, trainers, or prompters?
The prompters. That is easy enough. If I cut butter with a knife it’s okay, if I cut a person with a knife - much less so. Knife makers can’t be held responsible for that, it’s just nonsense.
If you try to bread with an autonomous knife and the knife kills you by stabbing you in the head. Is it solely your fault?
VCR makers do not claim to create original programming.
Why does that matter?
Because they aren’t doing anything to violate copyright themselves. You might, but that’s different. AI art is created by the software. Supposedly it’s original art. This article shows it is not.
It is original art, even the images in question have differences, but it’s ultimately on the user to ensure they do not use copyrighted material commercially, same as with fanart.
If I draw a very close picture to a screenshot of a Mickey Mouse cartoon and try to pass it off as original art because there are a handful of differences, I don’t think most people would buy it.
Tough question is, can a tool be infringing anything?
Although I’d see a legal case if AI companies were to bill picture by picture, but now they are just billing for a tool subscription.
Still, would Microsoft be liable for my copy-pastes if they charged a penny every time I use it, or am I, if I sell a art piece that uses that infringing image?
AI could be scraping that picture from anywhere.
Who created this image in your view then, who is liable?
Can a tool create? It generated.
Anyway, in case like this, is creation even a factor in liability?
In my opinion one who gets monetary value first from the piece should be liable.
NYTimes?
So by that logic. I prompted you with a question. Did I create your comment?
I used you as a tool to generate language. If it was a Pulitzer winning response could I gain the plaudits and profit, or should you?
If it then turned out it was plagiarism by yourself, should I get the credit for that?
Am I liable for what you say when I have had no input into the generation of your personality and thoughts?
The creation of that image required building a machine learning model.
It required training a machine learning model.
It required prompting that machine learning model.
All 3 are required steps to produce that image and all part of its creation.
The part copyright holders will focus on is the training.
Human beings are held liable if they see and then copy an image for monetary gain.
An AI has done exactly this.
It could be argued that the most responsible and controlled element of the process. The most liable. Is the input of training data.
Either the AI model is allowed to absorb the world and create work and be held liable under the same rules as a human artist. The AI is liable.
Or the AI model is assigned no responsibility itself but should never have been given copyrighted work without a license to reproduce it.
Either way the owners have a large chunk of liability.
If I ask a human artist to produce a picture of Donald Duck, they legally can’t, even though they might just break the law Disney could take them to court and win.
The same would be true of any business.
The same is true of an AI as either its own entity, or the property of a business.
I’m not non-sentient construct that creates stuff.
…and when the copyright law was written there was no non-sentient things gererating stuff.
There is literally no way to prove whether you’re sentient.
Decart found that limitation.
The only definition in law is whether you have competency to be responsible. The law assumes you do as an adult unless it’s proven you don’t.
Given the limits of AI the court is going to assume it to be a machine. And a machine has operators, designers, and owners. Those are humans responsible for that machine.
It’s perfectly legitimate to sue a company for using a copyright breaking machine.
The crux is that they went “draw me a cartoon mouse” and Midjourney went “here is Disney’s Mickey Mouse™”. A simple prompt should not be able to generate that specific of an image. If you want something specific, you should need to specific it, otherwise the AI failed to generalize or is somehow heavily biased towards existing images.
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I suppose it’s time to copyleft all the things on the internet
Now this I’m down with
you’re for sure entitled to everyone else’s work dude
Thanks. I suspected as much
I took a gun, pointed it at another person, pulled the trigger and it killed that person.
I’m so sick of these examples with zero proof. Just two pictures side by side and your word that one of them was created (easily, it’s implied) by AI. Cool. How? Explain to me how you did it, please.
Really? I’ll hold your hand and go through it:
I went to MidJourney on Discord. Typed /imagine joker in the style of Batman movies and comics. Hd 4k realistic —ar 2:3 —chaos 1.5
And it spat out a spitting image of a Heath Ledger Joker.
That’s how you do it.
joker in the style of Batman movies and comics. Hd 4k realistic —ar 2:3 —chaos 1.5 It really seems like you’re trying to be hurtful/angry, but this is genuinely the information I’m looking for from OP. Can you replicate an artist’s image near perfectly, like OP did? That’s the part that has me curious. Is that ok?
My rebuttal was to someone’s unreasonable anger over there being “no proof” when it sounds like they did zero investigating in their own.
Here is the image I created with the stated prompt. I made no effort to try to specify a look, film, or actor. This is simply what the AI chose.
New York Times and just making shit up, name a better combo.
The fundamental philosophical question we need to answer here is whether Generative Art simply has the ability to infringe intellectual property, or if that ability makes Generative Art an infringement in and of itself.
I am personally in the former camp. AI models are just tools that have to be used correctly. There’s also no reason that you shouldn’t be allowed to generate existing IP with those models insofar as it isn’t done for commercial purposes, just as anyone with a drawing tablet and Adobe can draw unlicensed fan art of whatever they want.
I don’t really care if AI can draw a convincing Ironman. Wake me when someone uses AI in such a way that actually threatens Disney. It’s still the responsibility of any publisher or commercial entity not to brazenly use another company’s IP without permission, that the infringement was done with AI feel immaterial.
Also, the “memorization” issue seems like it would only be an issue for corporate IP that has the highest risk of overrepresentation in an image dataset, not independent artists who would actually see a real threat from an AI lifting their IP.
Get rid of copyright law. It only benefits the biggest content owners and deprives the rest of us of our own culture.
It says so much that the person who created an image can be bared from making it.
No copyright law means whatever anyone comes up with can be massmanufactured cheaply by a big corp.
A. Confusing this with patents
B. They already can. Copyrights don’t protect individual artists they protect big corps.
this is some terminally online take
Personal attacks won’t change the argument. It just shows that you don’t have one.
“personal attack won’t change the fact that I have shit for brains and you don’t.”
you do you, mr. shit-for-brains
Sorry my bad I thought I blocked every Disney agent on this site. Don’t worry I will take care of that now.
That’s patents
Non-exclusively, so if something works everyone will make it and get a piece of the pie.
I see no problem.
Yeah, IMO trademarks are important and should be protected. And publishing full works should have royalties go to the original producer, and this is a case where I think for the lifetime of the artist is fair. Though I do think that the royalties should have a formula rather than being entirely determined by the original producer (to prevent the price from essentially making it not available), though an exclusivity period would be fair, though with a duration of maybe a year or two.
With trademarks, canon can be established, as can standards like “cartoons with the Disney logo won’t be porn”.
If someone wants to make a series where Luke Skywalker and Jean Luc Picard fly around the galaxy settling Star Wars vs Star Trek debates by explaining Muppets are better than both and then order Darth Vader to massacre everyone that disagrees and the Borg to assimilate the rest, it doesn’t harm the originals in any way. Unless it’s so much better than no one cares about the originals anymore, but that’s just the way competition works.
For fun I asked an AI to create a Joker “in the style of Batman movies and comics”.
The Heath Ledger Joker is so prominent that a variation on that movie’s version is what I got back. It’s so close that without comparing a side-by-side to a real image it’s hard to know what the differences are.
I’d be delighted if we go through all the fret and worry about AI deleting humanity only to find out that AI is actually super lazy.
I’m sure we’re making it in our image.
Sounds familiar.
We are the AI that killed our maker?
All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again.
No it didn’t.
Asks AI to generate copyrighted image; AI generates a copyrighted image.
Pikatchu.jpg
It is a point against those “it’s just like humans learning” arguments.
I mean if you asked a human to draw a copyrighted image you would also get the copyrighted image. If the human had seen that copyrighted image enough times they might even have memorised The smallest details and give you a really good or near perfect copy.
I agree with your point but this example does not prove it.
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Not from memory, without looking at the original during painting - at least not to this level of detail. No human will just incidentally “learn” to draw such a near-perfect copy. Not unless they’re doing it on purpose with the explicit goal of “learn to re-create this exact picture”. Which does not describe how any humans typically learn.
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Hey AI, I’m ready to download a car.
