Style cannot be copyrighted.
And if somehow copyright laws were changed so that it could be copyrighted it would be a creative apocalypse.
Yes, but I would have to buy the blu-rays as an artist, if I wanted to study them, meanwhile these corporations can get away with paying nothing.
I think you’re right about style. As a software developer myself, I keep thinking back to early commercial / business software terms that listed all of the exhaustive ways you could not add their work to any “information retrieval system.” And I think, ultimately, computers cannot process style. They can process something, and style feels like the closest thing our brains can come up with.
This feels trite at first, but computers process data. They don’t have a sense of style. They don’t have independent thought, even if you call it a “<think> tag”. Any work product created by a computer from copyrighted information is a derivative work, in the same way a machine-translated version of a popular fiction book is.
This act of mass corporate disobedience, putting distillate made from our collective human works behind a paywall needs to be punished.
. . .
But it won’t be. That bugs me to no end.
(I feel like my tone became a bit odd, so if it felt like the I was yelling at the poster I replied to, I apologize. The topic bugs me, but what you said is true and you’re also correct.)
Music would be gone forever lol
This is already a copyright apocalypse though isn’t it? If there is nothing wrong with this then where is the line? Is it okay for Disney to make a movie using an AI trained on some poor sap on Deviant Art’s work? This feels like copyright laundering. I fail to see how we aren’t just handing the keys of human creativity to only those with the ability to afford a server farm and teams of lawyers.
Not style. But they had to train that AI on ghibli stuff. So… Did they have the right to do that?
Training doesn’t involve copying anything, so I don’t see why they wouldn’t. You need to copy something to violate copyright.
There is an argument that training actually is a type of (lossy) compression. You can actually build (bad) language models by using standard compression algorithms to ”train”.
By that argument, any model contains lossy and unstructured copies of all data it was trained on. If you download a 480p low quality h264-encoded Bluray rip of a Ghibli movie, it’s not legal, despite the fact that you aren’t downloading the same bits that were on the Bluray.
Besides, even if we consider the model itself to be fine, they did not buy all the media they trained the model on. The action of downloading media, regardless of purpose, is piracy. At least, that has been the interpretation for normal people sailing the seas, large companies are of course exempt from filthy things like laws.
Stable Diffusion was trained on the LIAON-5B image dataset, which as the name implies has around 5 billion images in it. The resulting model was around 3 gigabytes. If this is indeed a “compression” algorithm then it’s the most magical and physics-defying ever, as it manages to compress images to less than one byte each.
Besides, even if we consider the model itself to be fine, they did not buy all the media they trained the model on.
That is a completely separate issue. You can sue them for copyright violation regarding the actual acts of copyright violation. If an artist steals a bunch of art books to study then sue him for stealing the art books, but you can’t extend that to say that anything he drew based on that learning is also a copyright violation or that the knowledge inside his head is a copyright violation.
You assume a uniform distribution. I’m guessing that it’s not. The question isn’t ”Does the model contain compressed representations of all works it was trained on”. Enough information on any single image is enough to be a copyright issue.
Besides, the situation isn’t as obviously flawed with image models, when compared to LLMs. LLMs are just broken in this regard, because it only takes a handful of bytes being retained in order to violate copyright.
I think there will be a ”find out” stage fairly soon. Currently, the US projects lots and lots of soft power on the rest of the world to enforce copyright terms favourable to Disney and friends. Accepting copyright violations for AI will erode that power internationally over time.
Personally, I do think we need to rework copyright anyway, so I’m not complaining that much. Change the law, go ahead and make the high seas legal. But set against current copyright laws, most large datasets and most models constitute copyright violations. Just imagine the shitshow if OpenAI was an European company training on material from Disney.
I hate lawyer speak with a passion
Everyone knows what we’re talking about here, what we mean, and so do you
And yet if one wishes to ask:
Did they have the right to do that?
That is inherently the realm of lawyer speak because you’re asking what the law says about something.
The alternative is vigilantism and “mob justice.” That’s not a good thing.
Yeah I think you know very well what I meant. I’m talking about the lawyer sprak where people know that they are obviously wrong, yet act as if they did nothing wrong by using extremely border technicalities as arguments
It depends on where they did it, but probably yes. They had the right to do it in Japan, for example.
I’m not sure pissing off Miyazaki is a great move. He’s an old Japanese man who is famously so bitter that when he chain smokes he gives the cigarettes cancer, communicates largely in contemplative one-liners, and is known to own precisely one sword. And he has a beard. We’ve all seen this movie; we know how that kind of thing ends.
Is it possible to try this Giblification locally?
