Disney sues Midjourney

[Blue]

It is an interesting question. Generative AI is an unambiguously powerful and useful technology. But it requires a huge amount of data to train. So, how do we (as a society, I mean) build it ethically?

They've trained AIs on the huge amount of weather data we have, and found that except for novel weather cases that it had a very high accuracy in predictions, and it used a lot less compute cycles (read: time and electricity) than the big weather prediction models.

There's a robotics company that was training humanoid (or maybe "torso"-oid) robots to do human tasks. They literally hired people and filmed them doing things like folding laundry.

 

[Blue]

There’s another solution as well. Amend ‘fair use doctrine by judicial interpretation to include all content used to train AI and put the onus on the users of AI to not reproduce copyrighted works with it’.

While I don't support this personally, I do find in interesting and worthy of discussion.

Why would the onus be on the end-user? They aren't the one who collected the training material, nor are they in possession of the training material to make sure it is not doing something like reproducing paragraphs or copyrighted but little known characters or art.

Basically, if it doesn't target those collecting the material, there's no value in it as a deterrent.

There's also an issue with counterfitting someone's distinctive style, which is most seen in art. Like the Studio Ghibli makeovers from a few months ago that would also need to be accounted for.

Maybe there needs to be a way to make and train models such that they can't reproduce the training material. But the cat's already out of the bag with that, and with how clever the community is I don't see a technological solution. For example, with generative AI art it wasn't the big companies that came up with LoRAs, which allowed duplication of specific characters or other features with a much smaller training set and footprint that was applied as well as the main model.

 

[Blue]

Determining how royalties would work would be equally complex: what portion of the training data from any given source contributed to any given output is a hard question.

This isn't quite the question, because training the models and using the models are completely separate activities, often not even done by the same legal entities.

It would have to be a royalty for collecting the data as part of the training data, including entities saying "no". Like Disney could say "no" you can't use The Mouse anywhere in your training data.

But then it's interesting, should a end entity who wants to duplicate copyrighted works also have to pay a royalty. Perhaps for commercial use. But just using data trained on it without replicating it shouldn't have to.

(I use "entity" even though it's awkward because it could be a corporation, a person, etc.)

 

[Umbran]

They've trained AIs on the huge amount of weather data we have, and found that except for novel weather cases that it had a very high accuracy in predictions, and it used a lot less compute cycles (read: time and electricity) than the big weather prediction models.

The big weather prediction models have truly massive computational requirements - historically, IIRC, development of each generation of the most super of supercomputers was driven specifically by weather modeling needs. The value of those predictions are immense.

But, be careful. Generative AI power use scales more poorly than most other computational approaches, for just about any form of simulation. Gen AI correctness is basically a statistical process - so in order to cut the error in output in half, you have to basically quadruple the training data, and add nodes and layers to the AI to suit, which pumps up the computational burden.

There is a very basic limitation for generative AI simulation - real data is finite. We only have so much historical weather data, and its comprehensiveness and precision drops rapidly as you go back in time. Once your AI has been fed all the data extant, there is no further way to improve other than to wait, and as you go each data-based improvement takes longer and longer, due to the data requirements mentioned above.

There's a robotics company that was training humanoid (or maybe "torso"-oid) robots to do human tasks. They literally hired people and filmed them doing things like folding laundry.

Humanoid robots are not entirely generative AI based, though.

 

[Bohandas]

I mean, even Karl Marx asserted in the first edition of Capital "The right of translation is reserved." So even the socialist exerted his copyrights.

Personally I like to lump Marx together with his supposed opposites. Whether it's an obsession with workers or an obsession with corporate profits it's still an obsession with the supply side of the economy, and the conceit that the supply side of the econony has value independent of the demand side. Personally I believe that the consumer is the be-all and end-all of the economy.

EDIT:
I dream of a world where everything is so dirt cheap that it doesn't matter whether you have money. It's happened with various things or types of things before. It happened with sugar, it happened with aluminum, those used to be luxury substances and now even poor people can afford to drink large amounts of Coca-Cola* and I think that's beautiful. I want everything to be like that^★★

*(albeit slightly less so now because of greedflation and shrinkflation)
^★★And going back to the original point, AI is currently doing that with bespoke images, which previously cost like 50 dollars a pop^★★★, but from the AI cost mere cents
^★★★Although potentially as low as ten if you searched around for someone really cheap, but that's still more than I can afford to do regularly on my meager salary. After taxes and deductions I only take home like 350 dollars a week and most of that has to go towards gas, groceries, and other expenses.

 

[Umbran]

Personally I like to lump Marx together with his supposed opposites.

Mod Note:
WHich I suppose is fine, except for the fact that these boards have a rule against real-world political discussion, sucht hat continuing in tis line is inappropriate.

Let Marx drop, unless he's Zeppo, folks.

 

[Bohandas]

For whatever was on their forums... lost to obscurity as far as I am concerned. It is almost as if the reach of your art may depend on having a reason to advertise its existence.

And pursuing a greater reach impacts artistic value how? Because I can only think of negatives. The wider an audience that one seeks, the more generic and bowdlerized one needs to make one's work. A work that a handful of people love is better than one that everyone on Earth agrees is ok.

And that feeds back into the positives of AI. It shows me what I ask it for, not what somebody else thought would sell.

As an aside, don't you all think that nerd culture was better before it was mainstream? For those of you who are old enough to remember, don't you all think that the internet itself was better before it was mainstream? When it was wild and free and random and not just an mess of rules and businesses and mass market schlock?

Without Copyright, there are no rights to sell. It is just whoever has the most money capturing our shared culture through driving everybody else out of business. Before copyright that is what happened.

Without copyright a company takes your idea and uses it* but at least you can still use it yourself. With copyright, as often as not a company tricks you into signing something under bad terms, keeps all the money because of the fine print, and you can't even do anything with the idea yourself. Or else you do make money off of it but you have to spend it all on lawyers.

*although god only knows how they make money from it in this scenario since without copyright the consumer can just copy it themself.

 

[Staffan]

Look dude, I used to be a member of the Swedish Pirate Party back when we had MEPs, but even we never argued for the complete abolition of copyright, only lowering its duration to something reasonable, a wider definition of fair use, and not prioritizing copyright enforcement over all other legal concerns. Copyright serves a useful purpose by providing a means by which artists can sell their works without others undercutting them. And artists that can sell their work can, if they're lucky, become professional artists and thus focus on improving their craft instead of doing their art in off hours.

Now, would it be nice if people didn't have to sell their labor in order to get money to buy food and shelter and other things? Sure! I'm all for fully automated luxury space communism. But that is not the society we have, and it doesn't seem like a society we are heading toward, and pulling out the rug below artists trying to make a buck is not the right place to start smashing capitalism.

 

[trappedslider]

Look dude, I used to be a member of the Swedish Pirate Party back when we had MEPs,

I will never get over the irony of the generation of limewire now caring about copyright and paying artist. (Yes I'm aware folks grow up and become the old people they made fun of)

 

[Umbran]

And pursuing a greater reach impacts artistic value how?

Value is subjective. If I don't ever get to experience an artwork, it is of no value to me.

Because I can only think of negatives. The wider an audience that one seeks, the more generic and bowdlerized one needs to make one's work. A work that a handful of people love is better than one that everyone on Earth agrees is ok.

You ignore the power of "and" - the work that a handful of people love AND that everyone else on Earth agrees is okay, AND that some people find horrible...

If someone said that if there was NO financial motive for art, there would be no art, you'd tell them they were being silly - some people will make art without any financial motive. And you'd be correct.

But you seem to be saying that as soon as one gets any recompense for art, all their art becomes of no value, made for the lowest common denominator - and that's just as silly, for exactly the same reason. Ergo, financial motives are not a death knell for art, in general.

For our purposes, financial support from art increases the opportunities to create art. If artistic creation means the artist doesn't have to spend their days sorting recycling, that means they can make more art! And, until we are in a post-scarcity world, the way to keep the artist from sorting bottles and cans is to pay them for their art.

And that feeds back into the positives of AI. It shows me what I ask it for, not what somebody else thought would sell.

Well, it rehashes prior works to give what it has been trained is associated with what you input. Whether that resutl is actually "what you asked for" is another question, especially when those who actually own the AIs get to skew the models to give the results they want.

And suddenly all your dragons have Pepsi product placement in them, or follow Elon Musk's art direction guidelines for what is "acceptable"...