Quoting: KimyrielleThe most laughable thing is the statement by Valve (supported by you) asking people to prove that you have copyright/usage-rights for your AI generated content, when the US Copyright Office clarified multiple times that such content is not copyrightable in the first place. How do you prove ownership over images that legally cannot have an owner, anyway?

You've made some good points, but that's just a grammatical error on your part. Nobody's asking them to prove copyright of the AI generated images themselves. Rightly or wrongly, as far as I can tell people are asking them to prove sufficient rights over whatever the source material was, not over the results.

In the end I think the existence of these things represents a huge challenge to our whole model of copyright, both in itself and perhaps particularly the way in recent decades we have brought it as much as certain interests could into the model of property. That latter bit isn't so much a problem legally in itself, it's a conceptual problem.

So, let's not forget what copyright is, originally: It is a legal intervention in the world for the purposes of making our economic model viable in the realm of literary production (as far as I know, it was originally all about publishing books, not about art, for instance). And that is what its original justification was--making things work, not any inherent rights that anyone might have. As a side note, it was created mainly for the benefit of publishers, not writers.

As things like copyright became more important and at the same time there was ever greater potential for ordinary people to interact with it, such as by making mix tapes on cassettes, copies of videos, and then all the things the internet lets you do, corporations elaborated a rationale for making copyright more powerful and giving it greater moral force in people's minds--the idea of "intellectual property", which brings the whole capitalist, Lockean property schtick in. And so here we are, arguing about whether people's inherent rights to their "property" are being violated by the uses these "AI" programs are making of them.

And the thing is, quite likely not, but they could still break all intellectual production. As an instrumental, practical matter, "AI" could break the original rationale for copyright, by making it impossible for artists and writers to produce and get paid. At which point we're gonna need a law to stop it, whether the damage is relevant to people's so-called "intellectual property" or not. Whatever we end up with that we still call copyright, would have to be different and appeal to a different rationale--either a different ethical basis, or a spirit more in keeping with early copyright, of just saying we have to have a law so as not to break the economy of intellectual production.

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Quoting: Eike

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: Eike

Quoting: hardpenguinYes, this is good. Gotta get rid of the AI generated images (it is difficult to call it art).

It's obvious that this will not happen, right?

I do understand - and share - such feelings, but in the end, it's like trying to get rid of photos in the early stages of photography because they're "not art".

People said similar things about music sharing--where did it go?

Erm, I got no idea which similarity you're pointing at here. (Music sharing, like with Napster?)

Yeah. Not so much a conceptual similarity, just a similarity in, people sometimes think something is too basic or unstoppable to be regulated or outlawed, and then they regulate or outlaw it.

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Well, it looks creepy and kind of interesting, but . . . I don't see a Beholder. :wink:

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Quoting: CyrilReading your answer, I'm wondering if we speak about the same thing. :huh:

I'm just making the point that not everyone wants to get into this stuff, and that that is not a moral failing as computer people so often seem to imagine when they, say, stick out their tongues at people who do not share their tinkering interests.

And for practical purposes, I generally do not find myself needing to do this. If I do find myself needing to do this, for software I actually have a significant need for, yes, I consider that a failure. The ideal is "just works" not "have to faff around". Is that fair? Maybe, maybe not, but that's life in the big city; it's the expectation casual computer users are gonna have.

Just to be clear, I started using Linux back around 2000, and in those days I did have to learn how to do some command line stuff, most of which is no longer relevant (I used rpm-based then) or I have forgotten. But I was not happy about it; I used Linux despite having to muck around with it. If Linux had stayed until now the way it was back then, I would have given up on it.

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Quoting: Kimyrielle

Quoting: Purple Library GuyYeah, but the point is everything an AI produces is somebody's Yoda or Harry--maybe two or three somebodies mixed together if you're lucky.

This is widespread, but still false assumption. A good approximation to 100% of all characters generative AI will draw have never been drawn by anyone before.

That's a strong statement. How do you know?

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Quoting: Grogan

Quoting: Purple Library GuyYeah, but the point is everything an AI produces is somebody's Yoda or Harry--maybe two or three somebodies mixed together if you're lucky.

Everything everybody creates has elements of something somebody else has created. It's how humans progress, by building on the work of others.

Right now AI is rudimentary, but soon it will be doing much more than mixing and matching samples it has learned.

Your first point, yeah, true enough. One of the most "creative", out there, poems ever written, "Kubla Khan", a guy wrote a book dissecting everything Samuel Taylor Coleridge had been reading over the previous few years to find the sources of all the elements that went into the poem. But he understood what those sources were, and did intentional, thoughtful things (and unconscious, stewing in the background of his mind things) to them when he brought them into his poem. I think there's a difference between that and what these art programs do.

On your second point, I'm not sure it will. The stuff they're calling "AI" right now isn't the result of some conceptual breakthrough or anything. It's just autocomplete on a whole lot of steroids. If you look at the output of ChatGPT, there are "tells" every so often that it doesn't actually understand what it's saying--or rather, that there isn't really an "it" to do any understanding. It'll say things that any fool can tell make no sense together, things that contradict each other and stuff. And the scale of the datasets is so large now that I think they've pretty much reached the limits of the "get a bigger hammer" approach--there isn't much more data to get.

Don't get me wrong, the results are impressive. It's quite surprising what ChatGPT can pull off. But we assume it will continue to get a lot better because we think of it as "artificial intelligence" that just isn't very smart yet. If that were so, it would have lots of potential to improve, it would just be a matter of learning to understand better. Problem is, it isn't artificial intelligence, it's just software, and software tends to plateau in its capabilities at a certain point. How much better have word processors or spreadsheets gotten in the last dozen years? The current art and chat oriented "AI" programs are not the product of a brand new concept; the ideas behind them have been maturing for some time, and getting trained on larger and larger datasets for quite a few years. They may not have a whole lot better to get. To get very much better, they would have to actually understand what the words mean that they're putting out--and they don't, and that would be a completely different kind of breakthrough that nobody currently has a handle on.

The hype would be quite a bit smaller if they weren't calling it "artificial intelligence", which it really isn't.

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Quoting: EikeWhat devs likely would - and will - do is e.g. generating backgrounds instead of painting them. I've already seen this in point and click announcements. Looks very nice on first sight, on second you see some stuff is wrong. If When AI learns, and doesn't paint some nonsense, well, that's easily done and looks nice. And shouldn't infringe anything.

This will probably be a technique that will be used some, but I wonder if it will turn out to work any better than other computer techniques people already use for landscapes that don't call themselves "artificial intelligence", whether it's procedural generation or just hitting real landscapes with filters.

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Quoting: EikeDid you actually try image making AI? I gave it an attempt, and while of course I don't know all the art out there, I'm confident this wasn't just something slightly morphed.

There's a lot of weird stuff on DeviantArt. I wouldn't want to bet too hard if I were you. Certainly when a couple of my friends were fiddling with AI art, they found that when they did variants on some pretty odd requests, there were strong patterns in what they got. Some definitely looked like the same picture was being warped in somewhat different ways.
When I think of it, probably the more "normal" a request, the less of this phenomenon you're likely to see, because there will be more source material and the results will be a blend of more sources.

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Quoting: Eike

Quoting: FSE

Quoting: EikeThey could Paint Yoda and Harry already.

Painting Yoda or Harry is IP infringement unless one can prove fair use.

You missunderstood what I tried to say: They can paint Yoda and Harry already, and thus infringe copyright, just like they can with AI. So I see nothing new with regards to Yoda and Harry.

Yeah, but the point is everything an AI produces is somebody's Yoda or Harry--maybe two or three somebodies mixed together if you're lucky.

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Quoting: Eike

Quoting: hardpenguinYes, this is good. Gotta get rid of the AI generated images (it is difficult to call it art).

It's obvious that this will not happen, right?

I do understand - and share - such feelings, but in the end, it's like trying to get rid of photos in the early stages of photography because they're "not art".

People said similar things about music sharing--where did it go?

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