bioemerl

But the site I linked to above is selling this service and it’s telling me I can use the images in any way I want

Then the site is wrong to tell you that you can use the images in any way you want.

Or you are wrong for assuming you can intentionally violate copyright and trademark by using the AI tool to generate Micky mouse and then get all offended that “but the site told me I can use the pictures, it’s their fault”.

what happens when the output is extremely similar to a character I’ve never

Nobody knows yet. For the most part it hasn’t happened. Big services like DallE will assume all legal liability for you. Small services? It’s on you to make sure the image is clean.

The end result is that the copyright of everything not widely recognizable is practically meaningless if we accept this practice

You seem to have forgotten a small detail here.

This is already how it works. Every character has thousands and thousands of fan works, often supported by artists with donations and patreons. The status quo is that none of them get caught and sued until they get big enough, and that anyone who tries to sue these people are assholes abusing copyright law even they’re legally correct.

This is not a magical device that can “draw anything”,

Straw man?

Reading comprehension. This is an argument-by-comparion. It shows how your point is absurd and doesn’t work by comparing it against a magical machine that doesn’t yet exist. It shows how your idea of how copyright should work here is regressive, harmful, and dangerous by pointing out that you seem to believe that just because something could violate copyright that it should be prevented from existing, being used, or being sold.

This is a mundane device whose sole function is to try to copy patterns from its input set

You don’t own a copyright on a pattern or a brushstroke. You own copyright on works of art.

If you want to prove me wrong, make your own model without a single image of Micky Mouse or a tag with his name, then try to get it to draw him like I did before

Are you suggesting it will be impossible to do this? Because this will be quickly proven wrong and there will be a day and a description specific enough to produce Micky mouse from a machine that’s never seen it.

The mere fact that it will happen one day is enough. I don’t have to literally go invent it today.

There are many ways this could be done ethically

It’s already being done ethically.

Would it be transformative if I sold you a database of base64 encoded images? What about if they were encrypted

No.

Also no.

There is a long history of examples set by court cases on what does or doesn’t count as transformative. Law is very good at handling exceptions like this and it’s been handling them for decades.

An encoding is not transformative. It’s just the same information sent a different way. Same with encryption.

Hell, you can hire me to paint based on prompts you give me. That’s the exact same service an AI provides, no? I’m going to study copyrighted materials to get better at my service.

All perfectly legal and commonly done.

So you give me the prompt “Mickey Mouse” and I draw this. This is “custom art”. You think you can use that commercially?

No. Not for you and not with AI generated art either.

Copyright controls your ability to copy and distribute creative works. You can learn to draw Micky mouse, you can even draw Micky mouse, but anyone who tries to sell or distribute that copy can and probably will quickly get sued for it.

And if you realize that you can’t, why do you think I should be able to legally sell you this service?

If AI companies were predominantly advertising themselves as “we make your pictures of Micky mouse” you’d have a valid point.

But at this point you’re basically arguing that it should be impossible to sell a magical machine that can draw anything you ask from it because it could be asked to draw copyright images.

Courts will see that argument, realize it’s absurd, and shut it down.

Seems like a petty technicality to me.

They are selling access to the AI model which draws pictures. Not the original pictures, nor clones of those pictures. A machine to which you can input a prompt that is basically anything and get custom art back as a result.

Also there are companies like stability AI which is providing direct access to the model itself, and I’m sure you’re against them as well.

An AI trained on a single image would also probably be fine if it was somehow a generalist AI that didn’t overfit on that single image. The quantity really doesn’t matter.

The product is a service that writes code or draws pictures. It is literally the exact same as the input

Pictures and things that draw pictures aren’t the same thing.

The fact it’s a tool that makes art and completes with you has nothing to do with copyright. That would only apply if this was some convoluted scheme to make actual copies of works, which it isn’t. People just pirate for that. If I wanted to read this person’s books I’d go to pirate Bay, not chat GPT.

It’s not illegal for someone to read your books and start writing similar things. That’s not copyright theft, that’s a genre.

The internet where people make information free and for the benefits of the common good died a long time ago.

It’s very much alive and kicking.

All of the “silos” literally depend on it continuing to happen and exist only by nature of the fact that they’re still open and easily browsed by individuals. If Reddit turns off access to the average person, Reddit eventually disappears.

Notably, you can still get to Twitter though nitter.

You can still get to Reddit through various open source front ends.

You can still get to YouTube through newpipe.

You may not remember this, but there have been many attempts to silo the Internet. It always falls as the company that does so stagnates and users eventually abandon ship.

The few companies with the hundreds of millions of fuck-you money to train an AI will gain more control while also locking down access to their content.

And you want to give them the monetary incentive and make this future literally inevitable by locking data out of the hands of anyone who can’t pay.

this will be the end of the open internet. Expect login walls and subscriptions everywhere.

Rising interest rates are doing that, not AI.

The open Internet is based on a fundamental principal that people like you forget over and over.

Information should be free and plentiful, and making it free and plentiful benefits the common person. Data and scraping are essential parts of that common good.

The Internet will survive. The one you think exists - where you get to mooch and demand payment - never existed.

A basic fundamental of copyright law and fair use is if the result is transformative. People literally do stuff like make collages with copyright works and it’s fine in many cases.

Turning pictures into an AI model (and that’s being really generous in my phrasing as if the pictures have anything to do with the math) is just about one of the most transformative things you can do with a picture.

This is like copyright 101 and if you’re shocked you don’t understand what you’re talking about in regards to copyright.

Do you want AI to exclusively be in the hands of big companies and the government?

Do you want the future of technology locked behind pay walls and censored so that you can’t use it to do anything they don’t want you to do?

If you think AI regulation comes in the form of making sure big companies can’t do bad things to you, you haven’t been paying attention.

Big AI regulation fan.

I’d say good riddance but the replacement is worse

It doesn’t really matter whether the original data is present in the model

Yeah it does. One of the arguments people make is that AI models are just a form of compression, and as a result distributing the model is akin to distributing all the component parts. This fact invalidates that argument.

This isn’t a slam dunk argument that there’s nothing wrong with what an AI does even if we grant it is transformative. It may also simply be proving that the copyright law we have fails to protect artists in the new era of AI.

If we change the law to make it illegal it’s illegal.

Over fitting is an issue for the images that were overfit. But note in that article that those images mostly appeared many times in the data set.

People who own the rights to one of those images have a valid argument. Everyone else doesn’t.

It is illegal to use copyrighted material period outside of fair use, and this is most certainly not.

Yeah it is. Even assuming fair use applied, fair use is largely a question of how much a work is transformed and (a billion images) -> AI model is just about the most transformative use case out there.

And this assumes this matters when they’re literally not copying the original work (barring over fitting). It’s a public internet download. The “copy” is made by Facebook or whoever you uploaded the image to.

The model doesn’t contain the original artwork or parts of it. Stable diffusion literally has one byte per image of training data.

They use a ton of data as reference points. It’s literally in the name of the technology.

Reference is the wrong word.

They learn the patterns that exist in data and are able to predict future patterns.

They don’t actually reference the source material during generation (barring over itting which can happen and is roughly akin to a human memorizing something and reproducing it).

RVC is the most popular tool I’m aware of

https://github.com/RVC-Project/Retrieval-based-Voice-Conversion-WebUI

Vim absolutely chews through anything you throw at it. Lots of times we need data formated or lots of SQL queries and I’m the go to guy because I understand vim macros.

Especially if you have any form of RSI.

I wonder if it would be possible to make a user accessable way to expose similar power to the common user.

Those features aren’t enabled nor integrated. They’re added to Vim at its extensibility points.

And that has to be just about one of the pettiest to distinctions known to man.

It’s still built to write code. Yes text is code, but vim is not a text editor in general,. It’s made for programmers, nobody else is crazy enough to learn such obtuse syntax or want to have a developer with a scripting language built into it.

The features are in the editor. They are integrated with the editor. Yes, it’s through plugins, but they’re still part of the editor instead of part of some different program.

The word integrated literally just means you don’t go into some other program to run your build.

It’s an integrated environment for development.

It’s an IDE!

It has debuggers.

It has syntax highlighting

It has compiling.

Even if you have to install them as plugins, it’s designed to be doing all of those things.

Vim isn’t designed to facilitate the use of vimscript, vimscript is just an extensibility feature of Vim.

Vim is designed to edit code, by the people who were doing it back in the 70s and all of its features are there to enable better, faster, and more efficient editing.

It has scripts for the sake of those scripts enabling integrated developer features. Because they’re part of vim they’re in the environment and the program is used predominantly for development.

In that case every IDE is “just a text editor” because basically every IDE is built around modularity in this same way. This is just nitpicking over what is preinstalled.