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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   38270 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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It seems in line with how people treat trade dress. The underlying justification was to prevent customer confusion where someone buys a product they did not intend because the branding was so similar. That has been expanded into the look-and-feel standard in the digital age. It's not that far of a logical leap to apply that to a case of training an AI on a specific artist. Take a test case of a programmer with no art skills training an AI on a particular artist they like to produce an app or a game and profiting off the similarity and you've got a precedent for that sort of thing. I don't think that's the correct way to handle things but I can see something like that happening.

If one artist learns another artist's style, should they be prevented from selling work in that style? Under current law or any previous laws I'm aware of, absolutely not. So where does this idea of protecting artistic style come from? Certainly "trade dress" or "look and feel" have never been applicable before, so why should they be applicable now? And if they are applied, why are they not applied for human artists as well?

The ease of copying is the difference. Every artist that wants to copy artist X's style has to learn it themselves and it's "bodybuilding hard". It doesn't really scale. With art AIs anyone can teach it to draw in any style you have enough copies of, you just need some gigaflopses, and then the training weights can be duplicated infinitely.

Romm Art Creations Ltd. v. Simcha Int'l., Inc. seems applicable to me but I'm just some rando on the internet. Typical plaintiff work compared to a defendant work that was enjoined in that case.

I think the decision in question was simply wrong, and do not think judges actually deliver such decisions on anything approaching a regular basis.

compare this and this.

That's two different artists, with the former intentionally getting as close to the latter's art style as possible, and then using it for his own profit. No one pretends that this is even slightly objectionable.

It is, but that decision is crazy sauce and apparently wasn't pursued after the preliminary injunction.

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