Alex Vranas @Alex@vran.as

And, sorry if this is long-winded I just want to get back around to the topic of generative art.

What if you had never seen a cat before (unrealistic, I know). Now imagine that you look at a handful of drawings, paintings, and photographs of cats to learn what one is.

You then draw a picture of a cat, and your only frame of reference is the small selection of other people's works.

Do you owe credit to the artists and photographers who taught you what a cat looks like?

I would also argue that most popular/usable LLMs are trained on such a huge data set, that the odds of it leveraging only a single source of information in a response is basically zero. The pretense of an LLM "using your script to answer a question" isn't very accurate, as it wouldn't even have your script retained in a way that it could reproduce it, even if asked.

That said, there are new LLMs that can cite sources, and referencing other written works has never required licensing/royalties.

Let's say I write a self-help book, and somebody who read my book ends up committing one of my lessons to heart.

They then write a memoir, and then end up paraphrasing something I wrote in my book, but they only credit it as "something I learned from a self-help book years ago", without crediting me.

Would they be infringing on my self-help book, or would it be fair use to re-communicate something I said if they believed in it?

I argue fair use.

And why is it different if an LLM does this?

@greycat I don't think that comparing intellectual property rights to financial securities is a great argument coming from someone who identifies as a communist. Marx was pretty clear about the risk of exchange value superceding use value (commodification).

In your comparison, "stealing from every bank" = "borrowing from every artist". While the former could represent systemic theft or fraud, the latter, IMHO, clearly represents fair use.

@jmaris A little bit off topic, but interactions like ours' are a really good example of why I love the Fediverse. We disagreed, I admittedly got a be terse in response, but we end up still having a meaningful conversation.

This would never happen on X, or Threads, or Bluesky. We'd be tearing each other's heads off.

Just followed you back. I never mind a difference of opinion, and you are ultimately right, opinions on this subject are extremely dependent on personal context.

@jmaris I can accept that. No bad blood here, I am happy you shared your opinion, I was just a little on guard since you opened with a rather confrontational "what you fail to see here" statement that felt more like a scold than a conversation.

@jmaris I agree, being a dogmatist is a bad move, which is why I avoid stating my opinions as fact, and making condescending statements to people I disagree with as if my opinion were the only right one.

@jmaris That is entirely your own opinion. You are free to believe that "AI art has no positive impact", but that isn't a statement of fact. I'm not "failing to see" anything here, I just don't agree with you.

Personally, I see lots of positive impacts generative AI could have. Generative art has been a passion of mine since well before the AI era, and I never devalued it. I don't see the reason to start just because the new tech is especially profound.

But, again, I don't fall for the "All AI art is art theft" argument, because it just doesn't make sense.

If I type "a moonlit beach, painting by [living artist]", It could be argued as infringing on that artist, but If I just type "a moonlight beach, oil painting", who does it infringe on? Every artist the model was trained on?

If a work infringes on every artist at once, it's safe to say that it doesn't infringe on any artist at all.

I also agree that copyright law, as currently interpreted, does not support the copyrighting of AI art. I enjoy playing around with Stable Diffusion, and I would say that I have gotten pretty good at it, but I don't take ownership of the images that I generate, and I don't believe that I should be allowed to legally claim ownership over something that wasn't actually created by me.

But I still find the technology impressive and useful.

Not to say that I don't understand people's arguments. I think that being able to type a living artist's name into a prompt and emulate their style could represent an infringement, but there needs to be a sense of nuance. I don't think that training models on copyrighted materials is infringing at all. The data a model was trained on doesn't exist inside the model, so it doesn't really count as a copy.

And prompts that don't evoke a specific artist don't produce works that infringe on anyone.

I worry that #AI is leading otherwise progressive people to argue against their own principles. Many of the same people that I previously knew to argue against strict Intellectual Property laws are suddenly demanding the expansion of IP protections because of AI. People that I thought would embrace broadly permissive fair use are now arguing against it under the pretense of fighting "art theft".

I'm won't fall for it. I hope Generative AI helps to invalidate IP laws and expand fair use.

@esvrld@octodon.social yes, please!

@timbray You might find this useful: https://opensource.contentauthenticity.org/