OpenAI's Viral Studio Ghibli Moment Highlights AI Copyright Concerns (techcrunch.com) 120
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: It's only been a day since ChatGPT's new AI image generator went live, and social media feeds are already flooded with AI-generated memes in the style of Studio Ghibli, the cult-favorite Japanese animation studio behind blockbuster films such as "My Neighbor Totoro" and "Spirited Away." In the last 24 hours, we've seen AI-generated images representing Studio Ghibli versions of Elon Musk, "The Lord of the Rings", and President Donald Trump. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman even seems to have made his new profile picture a Studio Ghibli-style image, presumably made with GPT-4o's native image generator. Users seem to be uploading existing images and pictures into ChatGPT and asking the chatbot to re-create it in new styles.
OpenAI's latest update comes on the heels of Google's release of a similar AI image feature in its Gemini Flash model, which also sparked a viral moment earlier in March when people used it to remove watermarks from images. OpenAI's and Google's latest tools make it easier than ever to re-create the styles of copyrighted works -- simply by typing a text prompt. Together, these new AI image features seem to reignite concerns at the core of several lawsuits against generative AI model developers. If these companies are training on copyrighted works, are they violating copyright law?
According to Evan Brown, an intellectual property lawyer at the law firm Neal & McDevitt, products like GPT-4o's native image generator operate in a legal gray area today. Style is not explicitly protected by copyright, according to Brown, meaning OpenAI does not appear to be breaking the law simply by generating images that look like Studio Ghibli movies. However, Brown says it's plausible that OpenAI achieved this likeness by training its model on millions of frames from Ghibli's films. Even if that was the case, several courts are still deciding whether training AI models on copyrighted works falls under fair use protections. "I think this raises the same question that we've been asking ourselves for a couple years now," said Brown in an interview. "What are the copyright infringement implications of going out, crawling the web, and copying into these databases?"
OpenAI's latest update comes on the heels of Google's release of a similar AI image feature in its Gemini Flash model, which also sparked a viral moment earlier in March when people used it to remove watermarks from images. OpenAI's and Google's latest tools make it easier than ever to re-create the styles of copyrighted works -- simply by typing a text prompt. Together, these new AI image features seem to reignite concerns at the core of several lawsuits against generative AI model developers. If these companies are training on copyrighted works, are they violating copyright law?
According to Evan Brown, an intellectual property lawyer at the law firm Neal & McDevitt, products like GPT-4o's native image generator operate in a legal gray area today. Style is not explicitly protected by copyright, according to Brown, meaning OpenAI does not appear to be breaking the law simply by generating images that look like Studio Ghibli movies. However, Brown says it's plausible that OpenAI achieved this likeness by training its model on millions of frames from Ghibli's films. Even if that was the case, several courts are still deciding whether training AI models on copyrighted works falls under fair use protections. "I think this raises the same question that we've been asking ourselves for a couple years now," said Brown in an interview. "What are the copyright infringement implications of going out, crawling the web, and copying into these databases?"
Humans getting inspiration vs AI getting inspirati (Score:5, Insightful)
If a (human) artist studies the art of some other artist, and then produces new art in the style of the original artist, is that copyright infringement?
If a band writes songs with influences and style of the Beatles, is that infringement?
If a writer reads all the works of an established author and writes a new work in the same writing style as that author, is it infringement?
If a journalist reads and learns the editorial style of the NYT and writes articles in a similar style, is that infringement?
If yes, then AI is also infringing. If no, then AI is not infringing, surely?
Re:Humans getting inspiration vs AI getting inspir (Score:5, Insightful)
If yes, then AI is also infringing. If no, then AI is not infringing, surely?
I get what you're saying, but to quote Joseph Stalin, "quantity has a quality all its own".
Which is to say, having another human being out in the world creating approximations of your style at human speed is one thing, but having thousands of machines running an algorithm that does the same thing might be quite another, at least in terms of its effects on your ability to market your own work.
In the first case, even the most prolific imitator of your work probably wouldn't be able to out-produce you by much; so in most cases you'd still be known as the originator of your style, with the imitator being known (for better or worse) as an imitator.
In the latter case, the machines can not only make imitations of your work, but they can produce thousands of such imitations per day, 24/7/365, with any and every possible thematic or content variation anybody can think of.
The upshot of that is: by the time you (as a new artist) finish your second major piece of art, the public might already be completely sick of your style of artwork ("it's so cliche, I see it everywhere!") and never want to see it again. They might not even realize that style is your work, instead they just see it as "AI slop" and think you're dumb for copying what the AIs do. Then what do you do, go back to art school for a few months/years and learn a whole different style, and hope that it will catch on... but if it does, the whole process happens again?
It makes it really difficult to stand out and succeed as an artist if anything good you produce is immediately snapped up and worked to death by others -- you bear all the creative costs and take all the risks of failure, but when you succeed, they mine most of the profit.
Re:Humans getting inspiration vs AI getting inspir (Score:5, Insightful)
Fair use is only for the slow and imperfect!
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Mod parent up - this is actually what the whole "fair use" debate is about - and has been about, even before the advent of AI. This is the "fair" in fair use.
Re: Humans getting inspiration vs AI getting inspi (Score:2)
Re:Humans getting inspiration vs AI getting inspir (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is to say, having another human being out in the world creating approximations of your style at human speed is one thing, but having thousands of machines running an algorithm that does the same thing might be quite another/quote>
There are 16x as many humans on the planet now as there were when Davinci painted the Sistine Chapel. Assuming an equal proportion of them are still artists, at what arbitrary point do we decide humanity is producing work at a rate that we throw out copyright law?
My point is: Speed has nothing to do with copyright.
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So.. how many monkeys with typewriters will it take to produce a work of William Shakespeare? :-)
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Do you want many monkeys, or do you have a lot of time? It's kinda a #moneys*time thing.
Re: Humans getting inspiration vs AI getting inspi (Score:2)
Re: Humans getting inspiration vs AI getting insp (Score:4, Insightful)
If I had 1 billion dollars and contacted every single individual, in any given country, that produced art by commission and asked them, for a generous amount, to produce art in a specific style would that be infringement?
If the answer is no, then AI isn't infringing either. A particular work could potentially infringe, if it were too much like another work, but the overall collection would not be infringing.
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You are talking conceptually. You can't do that. You have neither 1 billion dollars nor the ability to contact millions of people vs. OpenAI is DOING this now.
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I think that in reality only very successful artists will suffer from this. The argument that a second major piece of art will already have a large number of imitations doesn't seem realistic to me.
Also, AI isn't competing at all with Studio Ghibli in this case. Images don't compete with movies. To make a movie in the style of Studio Ghibli will require a lot more than what current AI can produce. Also, these images are meme images. They don't provide real artistic value, and the only reason people enjoy th
Not yet [Re:Humans getting inspiration vs AI g...] (Score:2)
Also, AI isn't competing at all with Studio Ghibli
yet.
in this case. Images don't compete with movies. To make a movie in the style of Studio Ghibli will require a lot more than what current AI can produce.
"current AI" is the operational phrase in this sentence.
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More like "won't"
The nuance in using AI to clone an art style, is that the art style must be unique. Like ever notice how all the crappy AI generated art tends to fall into two categories?
"Plastic sheen"
and
"Anime smudgeon"
AI has no ability to reason, think or create. It does nothing unprompted. If you told it to make an episode or a film of an anime, it literately has no flipping idea how to do it because it does not have the human experience to know how a film fits together. The best you can get is maybe a
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And because it can't do it today, means we shouldn't think about the ramifications...?
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I get that you're raising concerns that a lot of people share—but I think your argument veers dangerously close to defeatism. While you stop short of outright trolling, your framing edges toward alarmism, constructing a worst-case scenario where the artist is always the victim and AI is always the villain. That kind of thinking misrepresents what AI actually is—a tool. And like all tools, its impact depends on how we wield it.
I get what you're saying, but to quote Joseph Stalin, "quantity has a quality all its own".
Opening with a Stalin quote to frame a conversation about creative too
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I get what you're saying, but to quote Joseph Stalin, "quantity has a quality all its own".
I think this is a wider point that's often ignored, almost perversely so by techies. Just because act X doesn't cause significant problems when done by individuals, doesn't mean act X causes no problems when automated and done at vast scale.
Re:Humans getting inspiration vs AI getting inspir (Score:5, Insightful)
You're reasoning by analogy. That can be useful, but it also can mislead you. Training an AI model on existing art is similar in certain respects to a human studying existing art, but it's also unlike it in other ways.
The human artist presumably had the legal right to look at that art, listen to those songs, etc. In a lot of cases the companies training AI models illegally pirate content to train their models on.
A human artist can only produce art, music, etc. at a very limited rate. An AI model can be deployed on a massive scale and then used to generate millions of "works" per minute. The effects are very different, so the rules governing it likely should be different too.
An AI model can learn far more quickly and have far more memory than any human. In just a few weeks or months it can ingest more content than a human would view in their whole life, and then have near photographic recall of it.
A human artist develops a style of their own. It may be influenced by other artists, but it's not the same. The AI model has no style of its own. It can generate output that directly copies the style of anything it has ever seen.
So the answer to your last question is, not surely at all. Being analogous in certain ways does not make it the same.
Re:Humans getting inspiration vs AI getting inspir (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with this is that it is only illegal if we decide that it is illegal.
And fuck adding anything to the broken copyright system until the copyright terms are a fair 5 years.
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Ahh. Two wrongs make a right model.
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It really helps to conceptualize the model as what it actually represents: A highdimensional space of images.
Let's say you have a huge (but finite) library of images. You can choose a section for a motive, you can choose a a corridor featuring shelves with certain styles. They are also arranged that they slowly morph from one into another and you get the impression like everything you'll ever need is in there ... somewhere. If actually pixels would be encoded everything would be there, but the images actual
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If it doesn't got clear: Most images in the library are ugly and showing nonsense. So the algorithm guiding you to what you are looking for is crucial, just as you have to paint an image if you represent it in pixel space instead of model space, as random generation rarely leads to a masterpiece.
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Wow, that's a really good description of the concept. Thanks for the link!
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Bud is the act of human telling computer to kick up the 4d3d3d3 a creative process? With AI its more of a human pressing Play on a VCR with a reaaaly big tape.
That's for right now (Score:2)
It will not be long before the central ideas, themes, narratives, plots for the art or stories can be generated by the AIs alone.
Agentive AI just needs to be turned on the problem of creating art that is likely to be interesting or fascinating to humans, and it will generate itself a todo list of how to accomplish that, then it will study the relevant art and art criticism background from its knowledge base, and get going generating orig
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In a lot of cases the companies training AI models illegally pirate content to train their models on.
There is precisely one case pending where this is the case and it has nothing to do with image creation.
A human artist can only produce art, music, etc. at a very limited rate.
How many humans? We have 16x more humans now than when the Sistine Chapel was painted. At what arbitrary population will we reach the arbitrary rate where you think we should throw out copyright fair use simply because styles will be mimicked too quickly?
The AI model has no style of its own.
That is very much false. AI style is developed in much the same way as human style: a mixture of a variety of inputs we see. It's one of the reasons AI i
AI makes Bigmacs, not fine meals (Score:2)
Generally speaking AI makes bigmacs and not fine dining experiences. Especially when it comes to something that is more than a snapshot.
And it will always struggle with this because of its very nature. Its training models are designed to homogenize to the highest score for a thing (aka the middle).
Good artists/authors need not fear AI, just always make stuff that's better than it.
Artist/Authors who make bigmacs—they're the ones who need to be afraid.
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There's another factor which is skill. There is art (paintings, drawings, sculptures, music, you name it) that has been created that only an extremely, extremely tiny fraction of humanity could possibly reproduce, no matter how much time or effort they exerted. To AI it's just pixels, so it could easily mimic things humans have created in a way that few other humans can.
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That depends on whether you're talking about a moral problem or a legal one.
So the answer is actually 'no' to your whole line of rationalization.
Dutch Master's Paintings (Score:2)
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These are all the default answers. If you intend to answer No to any of these questions the onus is on you to actually show that "in the style" doesn't make actual substantial use of actual elements of actual works. It is almost always the case that for a "style" to be clearly recognized by a customer there must be so many essential elements copied that copyright infringement is clearly involved. If some Twitter user looks at a picture and says "Oh is that from Studio Ghibli?" then
Re: Humans getting inspiration vs AI getting inspi (Score:2)
"It is almost always the case that for a "style" to be clearly recognized by a customer there must be so many essential elements copied that copyright infringement is clearly involved."
This assertion is false.
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The image generator only "knows" what a style is by virtue of the training data being tagged as such, and while it's obvious that copyrighted material is included in this, you could theoretically have a set of source images based entirely on human-produced style imitators. For example, there is more than enough fan-made South Park or Simpsons style content on the internet that you could conceivably train a model to produce an adequate "South Park style" or "Simpsons style" image without anything that infrin
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modded as Flamebait. Lol?
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If a (human) artist studies the art of some other artist, and then produces new art in the style of the original artist, is that copyright infringement?
If you copy it close enough, it can be. Also when you straight up use someone else's face, trademarks, or likeness there can be other laws in effect.
So, if we equate computers and humans: If you (without license) just make thousands of copies of works, distribute them to thousands of workers and ask them to make similar works, you are certainly in breach of various laws including copyright. Why would it be any different when you replace 'workers' with computers?
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With a human, most artists will understand that ripping off others is an issue both legally and morally. The scale of it is also much smaller, where as with AI it can be mass produced.
It's a bit like how there wasn't much need for copyright laws before the invention of the printing press, because the only way to copy a book was to write it out by hand. It was possible but laborious.
Re: Humans getting inspiration vs AI getting inspi (Score:2)
Artistic styles are routinely duplicated and copied without considering it infringement.
If you wish that to change you need to propose a law codifying it.
I'm aware of several communities which would be happy about that, however I personally believe it would result in artistic stagnation.
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It's not that simple. There was a case in the UK where a photographer took a photo of a bus in London, and successfully claimed copyright infringement when someone else went to the same spot and waited for a similar bus to make a very similar photo. The court found that his copyright included the composition of the photo.
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There was a case in the UK where a photographer took a photo of a bus in London, and successfully claimed copyright infringement when someone else went to the same spot and waited for a similar bus to make a very similar photo.
Which is more of an example of a court getting something wrong than what copyright is supposed to be. Popular landmarks are frequently photographed by multiple photographers, resulting in similar photos, so clearly the court did not consider the greater implications of their verdict.
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I forget the exact details but I think they tipped their hand by asking the original photographer for a licence, and decided it wasn't worth the cost if they could make their own.
For AI it's the equivalent of the prompt being "... in the style of Studio Ghibli".
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Ironically, Taylor Swift signed away the rights to her master recordings earlier in her career, and similarly to your photographer, she'd expressed interest in buying them back. When negotiations broke down, she decided to re-record her older songs.
Of course, in Swift's situation, since she retained ownership of the lyrics and melody of her songs, it was only the specific instances of her previous recorded masters that she no longer had the rights to. Although, when it comes to a photograph of a bus in wh
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AI's probably closer to someone getting surgical implants to look and sound the same as you, then setting up gigs in stadiums claiming to be you, but not paying you a penny. They're not exactly the same as you, and smart people can spot the difference, but they're close enough, and their gig tickets are waaay cheaper than yours, and they're touring all the time, where you seem to need to take quite a few breaks.
The Led Zeppelin argument (Score:5, Interesting)
Led Zeppelin came up with some really great original songs. However, they also stole a lot of work from other musicians, and were twice sued successfully by other artists for copyright infringement (one settled out of court).
AI is like the Led Zeppelin of the art world - while not exactly copying the works in question, their recordings were far more successful commercially than their influences.
Several decades after first hearing Led Zeppelin's Bring It On Home, I heard a different Sonny Boy Williamson song, and immediately recognized that Led Zeppelin had copied from him, even though I didn't know at the time that he had performed the song originally.
AI is like that. It's better than the original by enough to matter commercially. Why would anyone - let alone corporations - pay an artist for work in a particular style, when AI can be trained on the work of emergent artists, and reproduce the avante-garde style without paying the pioneering artist anything at all?
How many 21st century portrait artists can you name? After the invention of the camera, paying artists to paint portraits has become a thing of the past. Now imagine that every home decorator, instead of buying paint on canvas, will instead order AI generated prints. How will artists make any money at all? If they publish their work online, AI will copy it. If they don't publish, they can't sell except through word of mouth.
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How will artists make any money at all?
The same way those out-of-work portrait artists you'd mentioned now make a living: by finding some other means of gainful employment.
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If yes, then AI is also infringing. If no, then AI is not infringing, surely?
No. Because human effort is what is being promoted and protected by copyright. You can see this by asking yourself the same questions, but with a "work" that is created by an algorithm. None of that machine generated stuff would be copyrightable, because a human didn't labor to create it.
Now as to humans copying other human works, this is sometimes allowable and sometimes not. There's a fuzzy and somewhat arbitrary line you must cross between that takes you from "mere" copying and creating a "transforma
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Really appreciate your use of the Socratic method here—these are exactly the kinds of questions we should be asking as we sort out how AI fits into our existing frameworks for creativity and copyright. Point by point:
If a (human) artist studies the art of some other artist, and then produces new art in the style of the original artist, is that copyright infringement?
No, it is not. Style itself is not protected by copyright. Copyright covers specific expressions, not the broader aesthetics or techniques that define a "style." This is well-established in both case law and creative practice.
If a band writes songs with influences and style of the Beatles, is that infringement?
No, so long as they do not copy specific melodies, lyrics, or a
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The true legal gray area lies in how the AI is trained, not what it outputs. The question courts are grappling with is whether ingesting copyrighted content during training is akin to fair use or a form of mass duplication.
a company taking copyrighted works for their own purposes diminishes the value of the artist to be able to make their own AI with their own works. there's no universe where this constitutes fair use.
All of the other analogies to infringement, etc are useless distractions. the training data is the only question, and the works belong to the artist for their use only.
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the difference is, a computer consumes and stores (briefly) that information *exactly*, whereas a human does not.
and analogies between humans and machines are idiotic in the first place.
The value... (Score:2)
...of images and videos will drop to zero
They will be created effortlessly for fun
Some will be good, others awful, but the career of professional image maker will disappear
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The boring work will disappear. The interesting part an artist does is having a vision. Of course I can prompt "A smiling woman" but I won't get the Mona Lisa. Yes, an image generator may create a very aesthetic image of a smiling woman and people may like it. So stock photography will take a hit and cheap images to hang into your living room are getting cheaper as well. But as an artist, my actual point is to put the images in my head onto paper (or your screen). And there the tool does not matter.
You can
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>I won't get the Mona Lisa
>do not try the Mona Lisa itself, most image generators overfitted on the original
make up your mind
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The first mention is about you having the concept of Mona Lisa in mind, without Mona Lisa existing yet. Then it takes you a lot of work to get your mental image into an AI image. The second mention is about not using that work for trying out what I explained, because that work already exists. Imagine another smiling woman. Be creative, think of your own ideas what makes your image unique. And now start to create that image using AI, without moving the goal post, don't just take what the AI generates on the
WHO PUSHES THE BUTTON? (Score:1)
There's no "grey area" here and the lawyers are just trying to milk their money out of nothing.
- OpenAI makes software. Microsoft makes a spellchecker. I can "strikethrough text" on the web. In all of these cases the PROVIDER OF THE TOOL only allowed me to fix my text. I CHOSE which software to use, WHAT to do with it, and PUSHED the button. And then I MAY HAVE PUBLISHED that result on the web, on a paper, on a dissertation, on my resume, etc.
- Nobody is responsible for when I press the BRAKE PEDAL or
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That stops being true when you stop imagining that applications and services come into existence fully formed.
In reality, companies sue each other over methodologies all the time and crimes exist based on certain types of business methodologies, and people sue companies for negligence when 3rd parties misuse their products, or when they're incidentally hurt by the processes. Corporations are not automatically indemnified just because they're not directly involved.
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Your argument would be valid if a company were selling a tool like a tape recorder with blank tapes.
However, AI tools are like tape recorders that come pre-loaded with a giant tape containing most of the audio ever published, but in an obfuscated form. By sending queries, you can create new derived works based on what was mechanically recorded into the tape.
The infringing part was the AI company creating and redistributing that tape, not just you using it.
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To be honest I think the infringement is more with the fact that those companies have to copy whole swaths of the (copyrighted) internet and (copyrighted) movies and (copyrighted) books and (copyrighted) audio to train their LLM to output something interesting.
When we put stuff online we expect "fair use" of it - namely, for it to be seen, read or heard by other individual humans, and crawled by bots who give us some added value in return (such as a search engine making our content more accessible to more u
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They are selling a tool like an image editor. It creates what you create with it. The generator (kind of) contains all images (with the most being ugly and showing nothing recogizable), but in a way like photoshop contains all images because you can paint all images with it, if you set the right pixels. It is still you, who place the pixels and without you the image does not exist.
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but in a way like photoshop contains all images because you can paint all images with
False. You can't ask Photoshop* to create image in the "style" of some artist because Photoshop doesn't actually have encoded copies of all that artists' work. The AI does.
It's the fact that they copied the works into the AI tool that is the issue. Photoshop simply didn't do this.
* At older versions. I wouldn't be surprised if they have "AI" features in Photoshop now, too.
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No, there is no copy of the works inside. That's a common misconception about how image AI works.
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If the information from the scanned works is not encoded in some way in the AI model, how the hell does it know how to produce an image in a given style?
Hint: It can't. There is no possible way.
The information is stored in the model. Just because it's highly compressed and obfuscated, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Don't tell me that I don't know how it works.
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The model contains information about the data, not the data. It "learned" something. That is different from producing a copy. And if you knew how it worked, you wouldn't claim otherwise.
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It's storing and producing a derived works. That is still copyright infringement. You don't need a verbatim copy.
When a LLM "learns" something, it stores a bunch of numbers in a network. This is no different from any other computer storage scheme. It's not some kind of inscrutable mystery.
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There is no derived work in the process.
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There is derived work in the process.
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Have a nice day, I think we're done here. No need to keep repeating.
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They pushed the buttons to copy the registered works into the training set, without a license, from an illegal torrent.
Did they copy? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Or we should use this as a chance to junk the existing copyright system, and bring back fair copyright terms.
Re: Did they copy? (Score:2)
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I don't think it's a bad thing to defend copyright per se - after all free software is based on it.
I'm not sure why defending copyright, in the sense of defending fair use of works put on the internet, and not unfair use such as LLM training, equates to "siding with the cartels".
It should give us a clue that the said "cartels" are very silent about this whole AI issue. Why is it so? Maybe they're currently calculating how much money they can earn with replacing artists and authors with AI? The cartels are n
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Free software needs it licenses, because others are not required to give their derivative works back without the license. If one would be required to distribute the source with every binary, people would not need free licenses to make sure that users need to give back. Free licenses are a defense against people copyrighting your work, that is required because of how copyright is used.
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If so, they did *copyright* infringement, because only Studio Ghibli have the right to decide who can do that copy and under what terms.
False. Copyright is not absolute and there's whole books of legalese written about when copyright can or can't apply.
Do not reply to this post. I did not give you permission to look at these words nor did I give you permission to copy them into the RAM on your machine or commit them to memory. Any attempt to counter the point I made will be considered an infringement of these terms under the legal doctorine of peppepz.
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Re: Did they copy? (Score:3)
Define derived work.
It amuses me you missed the point entirely.
There are derivations which would be infringing, there are derivations that would not be infringing and there are derivations which would not be considered derivations in a court of law.
Re: Did they copy? (Score:2)
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"Copying" and "training" are not the same thing. AI training doesn't "copy" work anymore than you are "copying" these words into your brain.
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Re:Did they copy? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a bit more of a grey area in Japan because "doujinshi", unofficial fan works based on copyright protected works, are not only tolerated, but encouraged and engaged with. For example, famously zealous defender of copyright Nintendo engaged with fans who were producing Bowsette (female Bowser) artwork, by revealing that they considered having such a character in one of their games and showing off the artwork they did for her.
The other issue is that the law in Japan only allows for claiming damages amounting to your losses, so to sue to copyright infringement you need to show with reasonable certainly that you lost a particular amount of yen. Awards tend to be low, so unless the infringer made some significant income from the infringement, it's not worth suing them.
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Did they *copy* even one byte of a Studio Ghibli work into one of their computers' memory in order to train their model? If so, they did *copyright* infringement
Copying data into memory for display isn't illegal, because you can't make use of the data without doing that. That's not the copyright infringement. Producing an unlicensed derivative work is the potential copyright infringement.
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Check the case of the Internet Archive, IIRC some time ago they lost a lawsuit over digital lending even though they had gone to great lengths to ensure that, at any given time, only a copy of the book that they were lending existed inside the memory of their servers. The judge wasn't convinced.
Copyright law gives an author a monopoly over his or her work. You can only copy that work either with th
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The IA got into trouble because they dropped the requirement of only one copy being lent during Corona times. They argued people need something to do in quarantine and just allowed more copies. It already sounded like a dangerous idea back then and I thought maybe the play 4D chess, but it looks like it indeed backfired.
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The case was considered clear-cut when big corporations were suing moms for millions because their children had downloaded a couple of songs over bittorrent.
They were sued because of the bidirectional nature of P2P filesharing. When you participate in the network and "download" a file, the filesharing software also makes your copy available to others to download from your machine. Because of this, you're also facilitating in the distribution of copyrighted materials, a right reserved for the copyright holder.
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OpenAI flopping (Score:2)
Regardless of how you feel about how this affects artists I think the real story here is that OpenAI is running out of steam. There's already hundreds of similar image generation models, most are completely uncensored, allowing to generate explicit Nazi orgies or any other taboo you can imagine. Why would you pay for this feature when you can do it on your desktop with any NVidia GPU released in the last 5 years?
The current rights model needs an update (Score:2)
AI is coming and they can't stop it, only slow it.
The copyright system has benefits but also problems.
The idea of copyright is to help creators, inventors, etc. so bring up the idea, which is one of the most difficult steps is correctly rewarded instead of allowing anyone to just copy the good idea and doing a better implementation sometimes not through a refinement but just better manufacture capabilities, creating a barrier between creators and producers.
BUT, that model runs over premises that are crumbli
Good Artists Copy; Great Artists Steal (Score:2)
Variously attributed to Picasso, Stravinsky and many others [quoteinvestigator.com]
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That was his stance until Google "copied" iOS. After that Android was a stolen product from iOS.
It's fine when he does it from others, not when others do it to him.
Bring back the Look & Feel lawsuit! (Score:2)
It sounds like some people suddenly regret how Apple-vs-Microsoft went, and they'd prefer to rewrite the law so that Apple would have won.
If Studios Cannot Fight AI Stealing, How Will We? (Score:2)
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How would an individual wronged my a bilion-Dollar AI company fair?
It's already pretty difficult to make a living as an independent artist, so I don't think AI really changes the calculus all that much in that regard.
Take the guy who designed the Cybertruck, for example. Do you honestly think without the backing of Tesla, Franz von Holzhausen's crummy idea for a truck ever would've seen the light of day? For any hope of earning a decent living, most creative types have to sell their souls to some corporation or rightsholder.
As an artist I know where this is going. (Score:3)
As an artist, I can copy another artist's style. I have the skill to create not just reproductions of other artist's works, but also the ability to copy their style.
However, there's an unwritten rule among artists that you don't steal someone else's work, or copy another artist's style. The reasons are simple: we don't just think of it as morally wrong, it's also a matter of keeping art valued for its creativity. If the buyers of art don't value creativity, there's little to no point in becoming an artist, because we already have machines (computers) that can make perfect copies of existing works.
AI throws a wrench into the implicit quid pro quo among artists. The use of creative originality as a yardstick to measure the value of art no longer provides a safe haven for human-created works, because AI can now not only copy, but create original works.
The average person can tell if a work is a copy - especially if a work has been widely copied, or is widely known. They know the guy selling Mona Lisas on 5th avenue is selling copies. However, with AI, the average person can't tell if the work was created by a human, or by a machine. An artist such as myself may be able to spot the difference, but the average person isn't likely to know. In fact, there are human artists now who are so good they are accused of using AI.
When the camera became accessible to the masses, portrait painters went out of business. AI has the potential to transform art from a viable career into a hobby for the rich. Within the next decade, jobs for digital illustrators will all but disappear. While we will always have humans creating art, the number of people making a living creating art is going to drop precipitously.
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Are you speaking for artists in all countries, or just in some?
For example, ask an IP lawyer the degree to which IP laws are respected in China. Will they tell you that all countries are the same?
I'm just wondering, because I don't have visibility into who appointed you to speak on the behalf of all artists.
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I'm speaking from experience with the artists I've met personally and those I've heard online. Generally speaking, when artists talk about developing as an artist, at some point the discussion of style comes up. It is generally accepted that copying someone else's works, or their style is acceptable for learning purposes, but selling said works is a professional dead end. Nobody wants to be "just another ${FAMOUS_ARTIST} copy", but instead wants to be the next big thing.
Could we not post the images on X? (Score:4, Insightful)
Many don't carry X accounts. Would be nice if we used a more open platform for the images.
Thank you.
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Brother! I thought I was the only one!
Jokes aside, I can't even view X because my three web browsers tell me, "This browser is no longer supported", "This browser is no longer supported", and "Firefox’s Enhanced Tracking Protection (Strict Mode) is known to cause issues on x.com" (even though I don't have Strict Mode enabled).
Fuck X, and any other site that behaves like a gated community.
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Where am I meant to be seeing these "viral" images? First I'm hearing of them.
That's the thing about viral things on the internet. You have to enjoy spending time on the contagion networks in order to be aware of the viral memes, images, words, whatever. Of course, no one *REFERS* to them as contagion networks, just as no one refers to dog parks as, "Dog Communal Disease Centers" and no one refers to daycare as "Child Infectious Disease Repositories." Doesn't mean that's not what they are, it's just not what we call them.