A.I. Generated Art

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Aiko
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Re: A.I. Generated Art

Postby Aiko » Sun Sep 18, 2022 2:46 pm

Fred588 wrote:If they are using millions of others' images and not searching them for copyright notices they are inviting a class-action suit that will bankrupt them. That they say it is impossible to request permission does not relieve them of the obligation to do so.


If they are using millions of others' images and not searching them for copyright notices they are inviting a class-action suit that will bankrupt them. That they say it is impossible to request permission does not relieve them of the obligation to do so.[/quote]
dlodoski wrote:
ghostofmyeyes wrote: .....Fair use exists as a type of purpose.

Ok, so which exemption category do you think applies here?


I would not be surprised to see this ending up in court case sometime soon. As for fair use exemptions, I read that "transformative use" might apply, because the resulting images are usually very different from any single one in the training set. Another exemption considers how much of the original copyrighted work is found in the disputed work. And here things get really fuzzy, because you could argue that the AI artwork contains only very little input from any one copyrighted source, but on the other hand the AI uses a whole lot of copyrighted sources to generate its output.

So, yes. Interesting times for copyright lawyers.
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Nessie
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Re: A.I. Generated Art

Postby Nessie » Sun Sep 18, 2022 2:58 pm

Aiko wrote:Asking for permission to use each and every one of these images as AI training data is not a task anybody could hope to complete within one's lifetime.


I'm not sure what to tell you. Some of this is a judgment call.

In a sense, our entire lives are derivative. We haven't personally invented our entire environment.

Take the simple football. Who invented it? I don't know. How many images of it are there? Gazillions. Who owns one? Lots of people.

If I draw a football, nothing but the football, based on a professionally-taken, high-resolution photo that I downloaded over the Internet, from an ad that paid the photographer big bucks for the image, unless I was reproductively perfect (copying the work meticulously) it is unlikely that anyone would ever say, "Hey, that's from the photo I took!"

As an artist, I'd be more likely to just look at the photo to reference its shape and texture. This would be fair use. I don't say that because I'm legally sure of it, but since I'm drawing a fictional field of football players, and the football is flying through the air at an angle that doesn't reproduce the photo I borrowed, and all footballs look alike, there's no way anyone would point at my football and shout: "That's MY football!"

Human figures, especially faces, are more problematic since our eyes are well-trained to recognize individuals.

If the result is not detectible by the casual viewer, that's pretty safe.

If the result is not detectible by the artist or the model you used, you're double-safe.

If the original images are stored where they can't be hacked, nobody will ever know. But if they get hacked, and are displayed by the hackers, that might not be okay at all, especially if the photos were originally intended to be private or if they are from pay sites.

All I can tell you is, I'm vicious about takedowns on YouTube, but that is a bit different as I am taking down exact copies.

Nessie

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Aiko
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Re: A.I. Generated Art

Postby Aiko » Sun Sep 18, 2022 3:43 pm

Nessie wrote:
Aiko wrote:Asking for permission to use each and every one of these images as AI training data is not a task anybody could hope to complete within one's lifetime.


I'm not sure what to tell you. Some of this is a judgment call.

In a sense, our entire lives are derivative. We haven't personally invented our entire environment.

Take the simple football. Who invented it? I don't know. How many images of it are there? Gazillions. Who owns one? Lots of people.

If I draw a football, nothing but the football, based on a professionally-taken, high-resolution photo that I downloaded over the Internet, from an ad that paid the photographer big bucks for the image, unless I was reproductively perfect (copying the work meticulously) it is unlikely that anyone would ever say, "Hey, that's from the photo I took!"

But if you are an AI, you have never held a football in your non-existant hands and have no concept of what it actually is. All you know is a number of images that you have been shown and that were annotated to have such a "football" in them. And then somebody asks you to draw one yourself. The result is not an exact replica of any one of these images you saw, but they are still the only input you ever had on that topic. Your image may or may not have recognizable similarities to one or several images in the training set.

Nessie wrote:As an artist, I'd be more likely to just look at the photo to reference its shape and texture. This would be fair use. I don't say that because I'm legally sure of it, but since I'm drawing a fictional field of football players, and the football is flying through the air at an angle that doesn't reproduce the photo I borrowed, and all footballs look alike, there's no way anyone would point at my football and shout: "That's MY football!"

Human figures, especially faces, are more problematic since our eyes are well-trained to recognize individuals.

If the result is not detectible by the casual viewer, that's pretty safe.

If the result is not detectible by the artist or the model you used, you're double-safe.

If the original images are stored where they can't be hacked, nobody will ever know. But if they get hacked, and are displayed by the hackers, that might not be okay at all, especially if the photos were originally intended to be private or if they are from pay sites.

In case of Stable Diffusion AI, its entire training set is public. It includes the URL for each image. Not every AI creators publishes this information though, so it can be hard or even impossible to proof that they used a particular image.

Nessie wrote:All I can tell you is, I'm vicious about takedowns on YouTube, but that is a bit different as I am taking down exact copies.

Nessie


I have just experimented a bit with Stable Diffusion myself. It does produce a "Mona Lisa" that is not merely a copy of the original, but still clearly recognizable. So, if Leonardo was still around, he could make a pretty good case, that the AI rips off his work if instructed to do so. I have however so far not succeeded in getting it to do the same thing for any artwork that has not yet entered public domain.
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Re: A.I. Generated Art

Postby Nessie » Sun Sep 18, 2022 9:46 pm

Aiko wrote:I have just experimented a bit with Stable Diffusion myself. It does produce a "Mona Lisa" that is not merely a copy of the original, but still clearly recognizable. So, if Leonardo was still around, he could make a pretty good case, that the AI rips off his work if instructed to do so.


Stable Diffusion gave me four recognizable Mona Lisas complete with proper wardrobe and similar backgrounds.

One of them is holding a fat furry critter. Another has one left hand and two right hands with three fingers on each.

All I typed in was "Mona Lisa". Yep, Leonardo might not be thrilled.

Nessie

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Duncan Edwards
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Re: A.I. Generated Art

Postby Duncan Edwards » Fri Sep 30, 2022 9:13 pm

If I go to a search engine that I regularly use and do an image search for "girl in quicksand", I was behind the camera on three of the first five images and the percentage holds steady for the remainder. In a few years, or less, AI search engines will be aggregating all of this. A few years after that we will be looking at scenes we didn't create but were created from what we did. Just like our imaginations. It's going to happen.
It's a dirty job but I got to do it for over 20 years. Thank you.


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