#AI copyright issues

[tec-alpha]

🚀 AI Won’t Wait for Hollywood—So Why Are You?

By TEC | The Reality Check Hollywood & The world Doesn’t Want but Needs. Read the CBS News article on Hollywood & AI Hollywood, listen up. You, the 420+ actors who signed that letter about AI and digital likeness rights—you’re missing the point. Not because you’re wrong to be concerned. Not because your image, voice, and art don’t deserve protection. But because you’re already too late. AI…

[14dayswithyou]

Olivia fell asleep in one of the aisles again...

how do you feel about ren being used in an ai chatbot advertisement?

⌞♥⌝ Thank you for bringing this to my attention. I genuinely despise everything about this so much, and if anyone comes across this ad on TikTok (or anywhere else), I'd really appreciate it if you could report the video and not give it any further engagement.

I'm vehemently against the use of AI that negatively impacts artists, writers/authors, developers, creators, etc., and I don't condone the use of my art and IP without my knowledge and explicit consent — especially when it's being used in a paid ad/sponsorship. It's extremely disrespectful and I have no respect for those who do it.

[kachimera]

Tbh i do have *some* thoughts abt genAI but i feel the discourse around it is so polarized you gotta say its satan on earth or go and suck off a data center and starve while you're at it

[klaineka]

Drew this to explain why im not a big fan of the idea of AI in capitalism and yeah ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[the-gayest-show]

my expectations of going in a niche fandom in a03 is actually sick and twisted why do I want an oddly specific fanfic to be made but I dont' want to write it??? I want to see it on ao3 but not make it?? the fact that fandoms be so small we barely get new fics at all is understandable but brain mad. "why no fic" it asks. I need something to read right now. where fanfiction. *agony emoji*

[shyghost]

"AI training off of artists isn't any different from an artist trying to emulate another artists' style!"

i am holding your hand. i am squeezing your wrist. look into my eyes. do you REALLY think that a machine instantly lifting from the art of another person is even remotely the same as another person taking their time futzing around with a style out of passion and admiration?? you truly believe that some corporate entity using AI to emulate a style they know will sell well is the same thing as a living breathing person trying to make their own artwork using references??? you cannot be serious. no, please look at me, you worm. you soulless fuck.

[donuttrymedebil]

Perhaps this is the bipartisan issue we have been looking for? People of all backgrounds giving the finger to AI fetishists and tech bros?

[empress-leo]

AI art from the perspective of someone who's degree was based around AI

I realise not many people are going to read this, but want to talk about this because I both need somewhere to collect my thoughts an somewhere to comment on things.

Firstly I want to say, if your gut reaction to seeing the phrase "AI Art" is to get angry and blurt out "AI art isn't real art" or something to that effect then you really should read this, and I would ask you read all of it before you make a comment like that.

Now I'm not generally prone to sharing personal details online, but just to mention some things about my background. My paternal Grandparents are retired Art teachers and professional artists. My grandad in particular taught me how to draw. My father is a computer scientist and has done a lot of work in the field of AI. Myself, I studied art and computer science up to the end of High-School, and for my undergraduate degree I did Computer Science and AI. My entire family is either in the field of Art (My cousins run a firm of lawyers for artists and own a gallery) or computer science (My Uncle worked with banking systems mergers before he retired). It is because of these interactions with Art and Computer science all my life that I consider my opinion on AI to hold a slight bit more weight to it than the layman's.

First off, AI's are tools, no more or less than the paintbrush or digital pen, and just as you cannot ask paintbrushes or digital pens to be responsible for the art they create, nor do I think you can blame the AI. Now what I do think is that you can absolutely blame the user creating Art with the AI. If a user puts a prompt into the AI and selects an image to upload to a social media and pretends they drew it themselves, that is unethical at best. It takes no more skill to do that than a toddler scribbling lines on a paper with crayons. However technically, both are still art as the art (AI creation/Crayon Scribble) was made by someone (User/Toddler) with a medium (AI program/Crayons). Calling AI Art 'not real art' will have major implications for the abstractionists or surrealists, fields which are still considered to be art despite the amount of physical effort that goes into them. Of course the debate about what makes something 'art' is centuries old at best, and if you're not careful with your definitions then people who you didn't intend to be caught up in your campaigns will be. I would posit that rather than calling AI art 'not real art' it should be called 'low-effort Art' instead.

Secondly, I would like to address the 'AI art is stealing' complaint (this section will get a bit philosophical). Now whilst it's true that an AI model is built on hundreds of thousands of sample images (some of the modern ones use millions) the more images get sampled, the harder it is to recognise who the artists that were sampled were. My question to you would be where is the line drawn between an AI sampling hundreds of thousands of images to produce a piece of work, and an artist training themselves on previous artists works and references until they can confidently produce their own work? In the 19th Century the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, the most prestigious art school in the world at the time, had a curriculum which involved copying drawings and paintings from other artists. The students were taught to copy the master's methods of producing light and shading and other techniques. Can it not be argued that this is a more streamlined version of what AI art is doing? And remember, many artists are able to be described as being 'influenced' by certain other artists, because the hallmarks and styles of one artist can clearly be seen in the other's works. One of the biggest complaints with AI art is that it doesn't reference the artists it's sourced from, but under plagiarism law, if you cannot identify any particular part of the work the was expressly copied from your art, then you cannot sue someone for plagiarism. Plagiarism law is doubly complicated in the realm of fine art, as copying a work but labelling it as a copy doesn't necessarily count as plagiarism in most cases, whereas copying an artist's style but not any specific piece then labelling it as theirs and selling it does count as stealing/fraud in most cases. (The specifics vary and I don't have time to get into all the nuances of Art Law here, but it should give you some idea of the difficulty in regulating it.) Now obviously there's a difference when you can clearly tell that the AI art was 'inspired' by some human artist's work. I see this most often in programs that are designed to take a 2D image and make a 3D model out of it. In those situations yes, the AI artist (especially if they're trying to pass it off as their own work) should be called out for their scumbaggery, though again, whether or not it really counts as stealing is dubious.

Regarding copyright, I don't think art produced solely through the medium of AI should count for copyright. Now whilst I acknowledge the existence of the Naruto case, I don't think it's the best long-term solution for copyright law. (specifically because classifying all art done as human or non-human with non-humans not being able to hold copyright will have serious implications for transhumanists and any theoretically sentient aliens that might have developed their own cultures) In my opinion a better solution would be to say that unless a piece of art is reproducible by the artist, then copyright should be withheld until an artist can reproduce the image (with about 5% tolerance). Of course the implication this has is for photographers. If you're taking a photograph of something like a thunderstorm then it's nearly impossible to recreate that image exactly. I admit I don't have a perfect solution for this, though one thing I can imagine is if the photographer takes two photos, then the metadata will show that the two photographs are technically different, but still look the same. Of course this wouldn't work for non-digital photographs, which is why I said it's not a perfect solution.

I would also like to propose two hypothetical situations, and whether or not the AI art would be considered unethical in those contexts.

A community of artists get together and produce enough works of art that they are able to create an AI art Generator based solely on their works. No works from outside the community are ever used in the AI training and every artist in the community agrees to let their works be used for the AI training. Any time a piece of art is created with the AI, part of the metadata includes a list of every artist in the community. Is producing art with this specific AI program still unethical?

You have trained an AI program to produce art based purely off your own work. No other artist has influenced the AI program. Now, anytime you get asked for a commission you simply ask the AI program to create the art for you. Is this unethical?

Now these hypotheticals may be unrealistic, but that's the point of hypotheticals. And frankly I don't think they're that unrealistic.

Lastly, I would like to remind people that the creators of these AI systems did not intend to create this problem. The reason these AI systems were created in the first place (not counting Midjourney and programs like that) was either to test theories about computing, to see if we could create AI that could recognise things we couldn't, and frankly just to see if we could. I can 100% promise you that no-one working on these projects wanted to harm you or your livelihood. To show an example of this let me share with you a short story about one of my friends and classmates who now works for a company that produces system to create AI art.

He initially joined the company right out of university. He didn't apply for the job, a member of the recruiting team came around to see his end of year project during a fair and after a short talk, hired him on the spot (unusual but not unheard of). The company he then went to work for was building AIs for medical imaging, hoping to create an AI that could recognise cancers and other abnormalities faster/better than humans could. He was doing this for 5 years and they were getting fairly far with the prototypes. It had been successfully used to detect cancer that a doctor had missed. They were working on creating a streamlined interface and controls so it could be used with minimal training and (hopefully) minimal understanding of the English language. They were hoping that by supplying this product to third-world countries that have less skilled doctors, they could dramatically increase the detection rate of cancers and thus survivability. They were being funded by a few wealthy backers plus some research grants. Then COVID hit. In order to just keep their staff employed the CEO made the descision to make the company go public. Within days, 51% of their stock had been purchased by a 'serial entrepreneur' and started to make changes. He cancelled the medical detection technology, and instead forced the company to start work on generative systems. (AI Art, AI writing, etc.) He was planning on selling it as a service to mega-corps like Disney so they could cut back on writing staff. However it was taking too long to implement and so in order to recoup the costs hey dismantled the company, selling off computers and data and laying off all the staff. My friend is okay with this. He hated working for the tech bro and hated working on generative systems. (He's currently trying to rebuild the medical detection system with the data he has at the moment).

My point of the story is that it's not always easy to change fields, especially with something as specialised as AI development. I would also like to make it clear (if it wasn't) that the skills needed to build a system to make AI art are the same ones needed to build medical imaging systems, so don't go hating and brigading against anyone involved in AI.

I suppose my overall point would be that AI systems are far more complex and multi-faceted than simply "AI art bad", and anyone trying to get you to rally behind actions based one that one statement alone probably either doesn't know what they're talking about, or are trying to get you to do something much more malicious than simply protect artist's rights. Treat every case you see individually. Some use of AI art is entirely harmless. An artist using it to get a bit of inspiration, or someone sharing some funny images with friends is all completely harmless. Don't just look at the people involved with AI art and immediately hate, that's a horrible way to live and only serves to divide us as a species.

[ozymoron]

question who is ai art even for? like do people genuinely enjoy making it? do they like feel like theyre actually making art or something? do they feel like accomplished after making it like the same way you would feel after actually finishing a drawing? is it just for the thrill of being able to make art with an ai?? i get the money aspect where they just wanna sell ai art which has so many problems and im sure that wont last long but like outside of that whats the point?

[troythecatfish]

[siodymph]

Hollywood's whole idea of using AI to write and make films now makes me so mad. But at the same time I'm morbidly curious to see how it pans out. (Its not gonna turn out well for anyone, not even the studios)

Especially when you consider that most AI's are trained by being shown hours of films and scripts that already exist. So inevitably there will be an AI-produced movie or show that is "too similar" to another studio's project to trigger a whole slew on copyright cases.

Not to mention allegedly the current rule for AI-produced content is that you can't copyright it to begin with.

I just feel in my soul a year from now these studios are gonna be in a huge copyright-war and they'll have no one to blame but themselves.

[comicgeekscomicgeek]

This is close to, but not quite, a net zero information post.

This really makes the Studios costing themselves even more money (and getting more unions involved) by prolonging the strike for the promise of free ai labor even more fucking funny. you dumb fucking bastards lol

[tiredtief]

Millions of author, including me, have had their books/scientific papers/other writing used to train Meta AI and copyright may be the only reason they are able to file a class action lawsuit against Meta for this.

If you want to pirate stuff, please be my guest, I even support it in most cases. But if you want to morally grandstand about how copyright is bad while companies are more than happy to side with you if it lets them farm people's work and livelihood for AI scraping, you can fuck off.

"copyright is good in theory" did you know that you can digitize books and then have infinite copies so in theory every book, every piece of information ever written and published could be shared across the world basically for free but any attempts to actually do this get shut down by copyright lawyers?

[bigcryptiddies]

I’m so sorry to break it to you but the only reason why some of you hate ai so much is because you deify yourselves for making art as if it’s anything more than a hobby. Art makes life worth living and therefore you think you’re inherently more special for the act of making it. Anyone can make art given time, resources, and enough tries, and that includes robots. It’s an issue of ego for you—you could not give less of a fuck about any potential impact on the environment or the fact that it’s just a flimsy excuse to employ fewer people so profits can rise without the burden of having to pay out livable wages it is literally just you being upset that given enough tries anyone can make a pretty picture or write a fun story

[persephoneme]

the thing with using gen ai to write fanfic specifically is like. there’s no profit motive here. authors publishing books on amazon may crank out a dozen romance novels a year because they’re doing this for money, but when you write fic you are quite literally in it for the love of the game. chat gpt creates grammatically correct yet extremely boring art that trends towards the predictable, and crucially, creative writing is one of the things it’s bad at! I guess I just struggle to understand what the point of using gen ai to write your fic is when the fun part of writing fic is…actually writing the fic?

[insightfultake]

Delhi High Court Tackles AI and Copyright: Experts Divided in OpenAI vs. ANI Case

The Delhi High Court is currently hearing a high-stakes copyright infringement lawsuit filed by news agency ANI against OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. This case has sparked widespread interest among legal experts, industry stakeholders, and policymakers, as it delves into whether OpenAI’s use of ANI’s news content to train its AI software violates copyright law. During recent proceedings, court-appointed experts presented conflicting views, underscoring the challenges of applying traditional copyright principles to cutting-edge AI technologies.

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