AI/LLMs AI art bans are going to ruin small 3rd party creators

[VHawkwinter]

So I ask, in AI ‘art’ or whatever you want to call it, who or what is the creator of the unique image that gets produced?

IIRC the courts ruled such an image is public domain. Only the parts made by a person get copyright. So if you ai an image and then touch it up in digital painting software, only your human changes are copyrighted, the rest is public domain.

 

[FrogReaver]

IIRC the courts ruled such an image is public domain. Only the parts made by a person get copyright. So if you ai an image and then touch it up in digital painting software, only your human changes are copyrighted, the rest is public domain.

Which doesn’t answer the question. Every public domain image had some creator.

 

[VHawkwinter]

What about the programmers and engineers that created the LLM and algorithm it uses to process the prompt?

Conventionally software does not confer IP rights to the people who made the software. Its like how a paintbrush company doesn't own your painting. I remember it being a point if contention when Blizzard released the Warcraft 3 "Remaster" (worse than the original) with an editor ToS where you forfeit your IP rights to Blizzard back in 2018 or 2019.

 

[FrogReaver]

Conventionally software does not confer IP rights to the people who made the software. Its like how a paintbrush company doesn't own your painting. I remember it being a point if contention when Blizzard released the Warcraft 3 "Remaster" (worse than the original) with an editor ToS where you forfeit your IP rights to Blizzard back in 2018 or 2019.

I’m not asking about IP rights.

 

[VHawkwinter]

Which doesn’t answer the question. Every public domain image had some creator.

In this case they ruled the creator is the software itself, and since software cannot own a copyright, no one does. Not a lawyer, but that's what I understood when I read the ruling.

I’m not even sure the initial scraping the internet to train even on copyrighted material was unethical, but if not it was right at the edge. There’s a notion of fair use for transformative and/or educational works.

IIRC Anthropic got in hot water because they pirated training material and the court ruled that was a massive copyright infringement for which they can be sued. Basically they were not expected to get permission because transformative, but they were expected to purchase the books. Again, not a lawyer, but that's my understanding of the ruling.

 

[VHawkwinter]

I’m not asking about IP rights.

Alright. You're just trying to determine who contributed to the piece? Then sure. Everyone in the dataset, the prompter, and the software developers who designed the diffusion model calibration from the dataset and "trained" it all contributed to to the piece.

 

[Staffan]

Sounds reasonable enough.

I agree here but ai images arent just the ai pulling out an existing image from a repository of already existing images.

It sort of is, though. Or rather, it assembles the image from bits and pieces of those already existing images – to the point where you can occasionally see artist's signatures on the resulting image.

 

[Mecheon]

There was no gaslighting dude. Mecheon took FrogReaver's quote out of context and then responded with a competely inappropriate response. The sentence immediately preceding the one taken out of context shows that the context is, "When does pixelated art become art?" Then the next sentence was @FrogReaver's position on when that happens. He did not, because of that context that was deliberately omitted, exclude all of those other forms of art from being art.

His post didn't have any notation about it being digital art only. I hardly took it out of context, it was worded far too generically.

Frankly I think it still a valid point as the definition does exclude music which is the obvious one (and music is a bit of a hot button topic with AI generated channels pumping stuff out) but also would mean regular video game play, which involves a lot of changing pixels any time you play due to camera movements, is 'art', while deliberately creating something in it (the actual part most would say is art) isn't. Even if I still find it very funny, this clip of me launching some poor person off a bridge in Warcraft involves a lot of pixel changing, but sure isn't art, especially the part I wonder where the heck my wasp has gotten to

A cinematic WoW pvp compilation can be art. The random one-off kills in that time aren't

 

[Lanefan]

Yep. As I am often on the record for saying, ideas have no value. I have 20 ideas a day. Whoops! I just had another one! And another! Ideas are easy. They're so abandant that they're worthless. What's hard is the the work needed to turn an idea into reality.

Ideas are the creative part, along with refining those ideas later. If you're rocking 20 original ideas a day you're a creative soul indeed!

The work of turning those ideas into reality, however, is mostly just work; which is what causes most ideas - good and bad - to never get far if anywhere beyond the thought process.

 

[Lanefan]

You may think that putting ideas into implementation is machine-like tedium (I disagree),

For me, it almost always is. I'll have an original idea, refine it, then have to do all the tedious stuff to put it into physical (or digital, I suppose) form.

Even something as simple as writing lyrics - I can think far faster than I can write, and many's the time I've come up with a good line in my head while writing something else but have forgotten that good line before I can write it down. Something more time-consuming like properly mapping out a dungeon complex - yeah, once I've done the creative bit of figuring out what goes where, that process very quickly becomes pure drudge-work.

Which means that if there's a machine that'll do even some of that tedious stuff for me, I'm a happier boy; and even happier if it does so for free.

but gen AI doesn't even support that premise, considering the amount of energy that is wasted just to produce variable subpar garbage that doesn't represent your idea any better than just --- even crudely --- doing it yourself,

Some of the images in that AI art thread in the D&D forum are light-years above the "subpar garbage" threshold and are IMO actually really good; way better than anything I could ever produce on my own (disclaimer: I posted no images in that thread).