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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   15573 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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Begun, the Butlerian Jihad has:

/r/dune is not accepting AI-generated art.

This applies to images created using services such as DALL-E, Midjourney, StarryAI, WOMBO Dream, and others. Our team has been removing said content for a number of months on a post-by-post basis, but given its continued popularity across Reddit we felt that a public announcement was justified.

We acknowledge that many of these pieces are neat to look at, and the technology sure is fascinating, but it does technically qualify as low-effort content—especially when compared to original, "human-made" art, which we would like to prioritize going forward.

Ok, the Dune one's a little funny given the in-universe history, but a pretty wide breadth of art-focused hosts have banned AI-generated art (to the extent they can detect it) or have sometime-onerous restrictions on what AI-genned art can be used. Some sites that still allow AI art, such as ArtStation or DeviantArt, have had no small amount of internal controversy as a result. Nor is this limited to art: StackOverflow's ban on ChatGPT-generated responses makes a lot of sense given ChatGPT's low interest in accuracy, but Google considers all AI-generated text spam as a category for downranking purposes, to whatever extent they care to detect it. And a lot of mainstream political position seems about what you'd expect.

Most of these are just funny, in no small part because alternatives remain (uh... maaaaaybe excepting Google?). This is a little more interesting:

We are writing in response to your correspondence of October 28, 2022 as counsel to Kristina Kashtanova. Kashtanova was recently granted copyright registration no. VAu001480196 for her work “Zarya of the Dawn” (the “Work”).

Subsequent to Kashtanova’s successful registration of the Work, the Office initiated cancellation of her registration on the basis that “the information in [her] application was incorrect or, at a minimum, substantively incomplete” due to Kashtanova’s use of an artificial intelligence generative tool (“the Midjourney service”) as part of her creative process. The concern of the Office appears to be that the Work does not have human authorship, or alternatively that Kashtanova’s claim of authorship was not limited to exclude elements with potential non-human authorship. We are writing to affirm Kashtanova’s authorship of the entirety of the Work, despite her use of Midjourney’s image generation service as part of her creative process.

Zarya of the Dawn isn't actually a good piece -- and not just for the gender Culture War reasons; its MidJourney use isn't exactly masterful and probably just an attempt to cash in on Being First -- but most art isn't good. Quality isn't the standard used by the Copyright Office or copyright law more broadly.

The standard is complicated, not least of all because copyright itself is complicated. Sometimes that's in goofy ways, like in Naruto v. David Slater et al. (better known as the Ape Selfie case), whether an animal had the ability to bring a copyright suit for a picture taken by that animal. While Naruto fell on statutory standing questions in an unregistered copyright suit, the Copyright Office issues a regularly-updated compendium of practices for those seeking registration that seems to reference it or a similar case, among other pieces:

As discussed in Section 306, the Copyright Act protects “original works of authorship.” 17 U.S.C. § 102(a) (emphasis added). To qualify as a work of “authorship” a work must be created by a human being. See Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co., 111 U.S. at 58. Works that do not satisfy this requirement are not copyrightable.

The U.S. Copyright Office will not register works produced by nature, animals, or plants. Likewise, the Office cannot register a work purportedly created by divine or supernatural beings, although the Office may register a work where the application or the deposit copy(ies) state that the work was inspired by a divine spirit. Examples:

  • A photograph taken by a monkey

But while animal pictures or naturally-formed rocks are one example left outside of the scope of "authorship", it's not the only one:

Similarly, the Office will not register works produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author. The crucial question is “whether the ‘work’ is basically one of human authorship, with the computer [or other device] merely being an assisting instrument, or whether the traditional elements of authorship in the work (literary, artistic, or musical expression or elements of selection, arrangement, etc.) were actually conceived and executed not by man but by a machine.”

Most of these examples are trivial : size changes, manufacturing requirements, simple changes to a song's key, or direct output of diagnostic equipment. The most complex currently listed example is "A claim based on a mechanical weaving process that randomly produces irregular shapes in the fabric without any discernible pattern", which is the sort of highly specific thing that makes you sure someone's tried it.

It'll be interesting to see if the next update has text on AI-generation, and if so, if the Office tries to separate different levels of human interaction (or, worse, the models themselves).

The US Copyright Office's determinations do not control court interpretation of the Copyright Act, so it's possible that prohibitions on registering ai-generated or ai-assisted art or text would still leave some ownership rights. But it's unlikely, and registration is required before someone can get statutory damages. Now most people aren't going to care much about the legal exactidues of copyright for their Original Character Donut Steel 8-Fingers to start with. Because all copyright claims are federal or international law, and there is no federal small claims court (and no meaningful international court), these protections are fairly minimal for hobbyist or end-users even when present and when the user cares, anyway.

But it isn't too hard to think of problems that could come about, anyway. There's already a small industry of pirates that scrape public spheres for artwork and creations to repeat (cw: badly drawn cartoon butts). To what limited extent these have been kept in check, that's because traditional retailers are at least worried about the outlier case where someone's willing and obnoxious enough to prove a point, or at least unsure they're at far enough distance for tort and PR purposes. And this is a signal, if a weak signal, for other matters like whether the business would care for liability if their USB cable burns down your house, or you demand a return for the clothing that fell apart seconds after you put it on, or a thousand other minor things.

It's... not clear how long that lasts, if AI-gen is outside of copyright, categorically, but also hard for humans to detect (and filtered for AI-art humans find hard to detect). I was cautiously hopeful that tools like StableDiffusion could end up a helpful tool for artists, but a lot of artists are concerned enough about the concept to be willing to burn down the field and join hands with Disney to do it. I don't think people are going to like what happens when the groups optimized for a copyright-free existence become hard to distinguish from their own sphere, and able to happily intervene within it.

And, from a deeper level, it's not hard to miss some writing on the wall for the broader concept. StableDiffusion 2.0 has released a few weeks ago, closely followed by 2.1, with some nice new features and also a couple somewhat noticable subtractions: the new tokenizer has removed tags related to celebrities and almost all living or recently-living artists, along with anything that triggered the NSFW filter. The upcoming StableDiffusion 3.0 plans to allow a manual opt-out for artists from the training side.

The stated reasons for these changes are condensed here, but the less overt reason is probably public controversy and things like this. I reallllllly don't want to get into the legal questions of the state actor doctrine, but I would like to suggest that there's legal spaces around this discussion that might be weighing heavily on his mind..

Now, in theory, there's some technical advantages to this approach, not just the bizarre legal ones. Furry Diffusion trainers have already found many problems in tuning 1.x-variants due to the often-overloaded nature of common terms, and the broad concept of encouraging models more specifically focused for the interests and desires of specific people makes a good deal more sense than the limits and flaws of post-generation filtering.

But in turn, that personally-optimized tuning is hard and energy-intensive, and currently not available for a lot of people, even as GPU prices have dropped a bit.

Or it might be reasonable to argue that these excluded spaces not that important, were we not also having thousands of culture war battles to the teeth over everything else remotely related to sex, or spending tremendous amounts of (tbf, unuseful) attention on celebrities, or near-worshipping some of the excluded artists. And it's hard to see why all three are uniquely reasonable to set-aside.

And accepting these limitations at the OpenAI initial training level risks anyone trying to uncollar a locally-tuned version being stigmatized and viewed as interested solely in the very bad acts that OpenAI fears being tarred with themselves. That Eshoo letter, after all, is just as pissed about locally-generated 'bad' art as that made on a server.

Perhaps coincidentally, attempts to fund a porn-friendly version just got kicked off Kickstarter, on the tail end of this rather vague post.

I'm somewhat skeptical that the only pressures being applied are the public ones.

I'm somewhat skeptical that the only pressures being applied are the public ones.

Who do you think is applying non-public pressure, and how?

By definition, I don't know, and may never know, or even know what I suspect didn't happen. For some patterns I've seen elsewhere...

At the most likely and least objectionable side, I'd be very surprised if a variety of internet safety guardians have not been sending parades of horribles and warnings about how machine learning could undermine all of their good work and result in horrible abuse and probably make puppies cry, of varying levels of accuracy or honesty. Above that, slightly, I'd be only slightly surprised if congressional discussions weren't also happening in the background, starting at the 'my staff would like to hear how this works and you better have a good answer' to the 'I would invite your staff before X event occurs, and thankfully no subpoenas will be issued'.

At the intermediate, most of these ML training groups are dependent on datacenter resources and other materials which they don't actually own. This could range from 'pay us the full rates that no one pays in bulk' to 'do you want us looking at your data buckets' to completely being booted. And the datacenter resources in turn could be getting calls or letters. So on for banks, and the whole 'build your own' stack.

At the less-likely and more-objectionable end, you start to have someone in or adjacent to law enforcement (uh, including those safety guardians) sending the equivalent of 'I don't want a messy court case, and you don't want a messy court case, and your business and everyone you employed don't want a messy court case, so how about we have a meeting of minds?' Or the 'we've got a bill in planning with your businesses name on it'.

EDIT: and there's weirder stuff. SoFurry changed its policy on ageplay and adjacent written material recently, and one of the motivations involved threats related to the site owner's international business travel. Or gelbooru and google pressure.

Again, I don't know that any of this is happening, nor would there be a way to prove it isn't. So I don't really want to poke too much at it. But Defense Distributed is (and remains) instructive.

Hang on, I'm confused, haven't you officially said you're in favor of censoring problematic art that people draw? Like, several times you've brought up Problematic Furry Artists needing to be forced to stop drawing problematic things. Surely this pressure is no different than furaffinity banning things.

Again, mu?

You've talked about several artists by name. I believe zaush(?) was one, but if you really want to make me dig I can find it for you. Just thought you'd be willing to come out and say it because you were so forthright about it before.

For Adam Wan/Zaush specifically, my complaint about his content was that he'd posted stuff on a (few) sites that prohibited that content, while not tagging it with any of the many widely-recognized terms used by people who really strongly objected to seeing that content, denied it was anywhere close while being even less believable than the typical 'she's really a thousand-year-old dragon', and which he mostly got away with because of his social connections and popularity. Which, to be fair, he's since gotten a lot better about, albeit as much because no one was buying it after some tweet oopsies.

I've generally been vague on the specifics for this matter outside of PM because the specifics aren't as interesting as the more general problem of how rules squish, but I do think it a useful case because it's one most people would expect social and legal rules to be much stricter.

I recognize that tagging has some coercive nature to it, but I don't think it's on the same scale as... almost anything else, and it is a pretty important social norm for the fandom. I'll admit I'm tempted to make an unprincipled exception for the specific content for that case because I dislike it to an extent I do few if any other kinks, but it remains useful even for matters like m/m, m/f, f/f or kinks that I do like.

I'm not sure what other artists. The only other person I can remember mentioning in that sorta context is (the author) KyellGold, but then only to contrast with the largely positive coverage that 'mainstream' indie works like Blue Is The Warmest Colour (and it's a far more marginal case than that work). And... uh, I found that offputting enough to skip over Aquifiers, but I've recommended a number of KyellGold's other works.

But I may be forgetting other stuff.

At the broader object level, there probably was (and is) some underlying pressure campaign behind FurAffinity banning the stuff to start with, especially given SoFurry's recorded legal pressures and the Google pressures applied against Gelbooru (and probably e621?), and I've not posted on it where I've done so for AI art restrictions here (albeit for much more than one site) or even smaller examples like the short VioletBlue delisting. Some of the reason's the above unprincipled exception, I'll admit, but some of that's because there was not (to my knowledge) anything as glaring and public as the Eshoo letter, and some's just that FurAffinity in specific made the change predating the Culture War Roundup and either predated or was pretty early in SSC-reddit's life.

I don't think places focused on the stuff (or just widely permissive for it) should be banned, could be banned, or should suffer several coercive or economic pressures; art isn't life. I've openly praised ArchiveOfOurOwn for resisting censorship, for example. And at a pragmatic level, as much as I dislike this class of content, it does seem better that outlets exist and are well-demarcated, both for the trivial benefit of letting people not see it, and for the more serious and important goal of keeping people focused on it in a sphere that can work to protect minors from adults rather than 'protect' people from content (contrast eg Discord, where official bans also unintentionally make it hard to block predators or their potential victims, or... everything going with Twitter's old safety policies).

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