Comment on ‘Mass theft’: Thousands of artists call for AI art auction to be cancelled
InevitableList@beehaw.org 5 days agoWhen someone makes use of a service and doesn’t pay afterwards that is considered to be theft even if the provider hasn’t been deprived on anything. For example, if I snuk into an art gallery without paying I won’t remove anything tangible since the gallery’s overheads and running costs were fixed long before I arrived.
A better word would be copyright infringement if the AI is making use of other works without a license or other permission. Based on my reading of the article it appears those involved only fed the AI works in the public sector or works that they had created themselves. The letter of complaint appears to be signed by artists who are unaware of these circumstances.
FatCrab@lemmy.one 5 days ago
Even in your latter paragraph, it wouldn’t be an infringement. Assuming the art was lawfully accessed in the first place, like by clicking a link to a publicly shared portfolio, no copy is being encoded into the model. There is currently no intellectual property right invoked merely by training a model-- if people want there to be, and it isn’t an unreasonable thing to want (though I don’t agree it’s good policy), then a new type of intellectual property right will need to be created.
What’s actually baffling to me is that these pieces presumably are all effectively public domain as they’re authored by AI. And they’re clearly digital in nature, so wtf are people actually buying?
InevitableList@beehaw.org 4 days ago
There are cases progressing through the courts. If the courts rule that copyright has been violated by the AIs under current laws then we won’t need to create a new offense or expand IP laws currently on the books.
A unique work of art I guess since it’s unlikely anyone would be able to replicate the prompt in order to get the same results.
FatCrab@lemmy.one 4 days ago
It could of course go up to the scotus and effectively a new right be legislated from the bench, but it is unlikely and the nature of these models in combination with what is considered a copy under the rubric copyright in the US has operated effectively forever means that merely training and deploying a model is almost certainly not copyright infringement. This is pretty common consensus among IP attorneys.
That said, a lot of other very obvious infringement in coming out in discovery in many of these cases. Like torrenting all the training data. THAT is absolutely an infringement but is effectively unrelated to the question of whether lawfully accessed content being used as training data retroactively makes its access unlawful (it really almost certainly doesn’t).