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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36210 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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Why would I buy AI-generated imagery from Shutterstock when I could just make it myself?

Why does McDonald's exist when you can make a hamburger yourself? People pay for convenience .

Yeah, but worth considering the inconvenience involved in having to track which rights you have purchased to which media, especially if you're a small business using a bunch of them. AI art lacks this issue, since you know nobody has the rights to the image because it's unique.

And people using stock images are people who are, for the most part, running small businesses, not consumers who we might expect to be lazy.

AI art lacks this issue, since you know nobody has the rights to the image because it's unique.

Not necessarily. AI art often involves seed images which may be copyright. Also, the person who produced the AI art my still try to claim copyright.

Ah, an unstated but crucial assumption in the post was that you personally the one who created the image. it's true, AI images grabbed off of a stock website are basically similar to regular stock images in all relevant respects.

There is something of FUD campaign going on with AI art property rights based on the idea of the model and model produced works being derivative from the works they were trained on. You've probably seen some of the comments reason along those lines in earlier threads here. Of course with IP rights, buying a right from someone who may themselves not have that right does not fully protect the purchaser, but that aspect is less well advertised so it may still seem worthwhile to purchase a license from a known entity.

There is something of FUD campaign going on with AI art property rights based on the idea of the model and model produced works being derivative from the works they were trained on.

IANAL, but I don't see that as FUD, I see it as an open legal question.

Ofc judges can decide whatever. But there's no way they're going to side with the artists, destroying AI tech. It'd be just yielding to China.

Ignoring practicalities, it just doesn't make any sense. Why couldn't you train AI on copyrighted works while still able to train your own biological neural network on them?

Have you tried to reproduce a copyrighted photo using only the latent representations stored in your biological network?

While biological networks and computer models have some similarities in abstract, in practice there are crucial differences.

it does seem fair to not want to be the test legal case for AI art

seems fair. I do think there's also a thing where it's not clear yet how suing someone for using ai art works since the way it works for art now is that if you use an image you don't have rights to, the way that shakes out is the person who originally made the image sues you for damages (and they can prove they made the image because they presumably have some timestamped evidence indicating so).

But who would be responsible for noticing and suing somebody who made an image with an AI trained on copyrighted images? How would they know it was AI generated? Sure, subpoena a chain of custody for the image, fine. How are you going to get a judge to agree with you that this piece of art looks like it was generated on copyrighted images if the image itself does not contain those images? Gotta get the judge onboard to get the subpoena.

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