Generative AI Has a Visual Plagiarism Problem::Experiments with Midjourney and DALL-E 3 show a copyright minefield

  • grue@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    No shit, Sherlock. Literally everything an AI makes is a derivative work of everything in the training dataset. It’s completely 100% impossible for any AI to create anything that isn’t copyright infringement unless every single thing in the data set is licensed in a way that is both (a) mutually-compatible and (b) allows derivative works to be made. In other words, if the dataset includes even a single copyleft thing then the resulting output had better be copyleft, if the dataset includes even a single proprietary thing then the owner of the resulting output had better comply with the terms of that proprietary license, and if the dataset contains both then you might as well delete the trained model and start over because legal use of the output is impossible.

    • Critical_Insight@feddit.uk
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      10 months ago

      Do human artists not take any influence from art they’ve seen before? I could name you the photographer, Serge Ramelli, that has influenced me the most and if you compare our photos it’s quite apparent. Is my art just a hoax?

    • piecat@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      It doesn’t “contain the original work” in the way it sounds. That sounds like there’s literally a stolen picture, sitting in the network, ready to be copy/pasted into the derivative work.

      If you examined the network, you won’t see anything like the “stolen image”. It’s an entire latent space of many dimensions, where a point in the space is a concept.

      A good metaphor might be a recipe for bread, or worded instructions on how to draw Mickey mouse.

      It’s just that a computer is so good at following those instructions verbatim, it can draw Mickey mouse with uncanny ability.

      Is “draw a circle at 100,200 of diameter ∅40 color hex 0xBEEFE5, draw a line from…” the same as Mickey Mouse? If I got the detail 100% and following those instructions gives Mickey mouse, am I distributing copyrighted work ?

      • Ross_audio@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        The chemical brothers were successfully sued for using a sample they no longer recognised and an AI recognised decades later.

        It was mathematically altered so much a human couldn’t recognise the input, and still can’t.

        Legally they did nothing different to an AI taking a massive input and outputting a mathematical dissimilar result.

        The chemical brothers did that to a sample with plugins, additions, stretches and were still held liable for the original sample royalty.

        AI should be no different.

        • piecat@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          Listen at 2:00, https://youtu.be/q0AcZkR_LUs?si=L-dbJasU5YRseIvD

          I wouldn’t call that “unrecognizable”, it’s pretty obvious what was sampled.

          AI should be no different

          I agree

          The chemical brothers were sued for this one song that had recognizable infringement. And despite that instance of copying/sampling, and presumably listening to many many copyrighted works in their lifetime, that doesn’t invalidate any of their other works.

          Artists/musicians can also “accidentally” plagiarize, meaning they “came up with” a beat or lick, not recognizing that it is from something they’ve heard previously until someone says “hey isn’t that xyz”.

          Either an output is or isn’t infringing.

          • Ross_audio@lemmy.world
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            10 months ago

            Different court case. Galvanize was not discovered by an AI.

            Honestly there are so many successful and failed cases against them I can’t find it right now. But I remember an AI discovered sample being subject of a court case just after one of them died.

            • piecat@lemmy.world
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              10 months ago

              Uhhhh the chemical brothers are alive. And I can’t find anything about this online.

              • Ross_audio@lemmy.world
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                10 months ago

                It’s happened, like I say I can’t find it either now. It might have been the copyright owner who died. But fans use AI to find samples in old songs now. You can do it yourself.

                Unfortunately copyright claims get buried as they don’t look good for either party.

                In principle though, do you consider an unrecognisable sample copyright infringement. Because I get the feeling of I put the effort in to dig and cite examples for you, you’d then just move on to claiming it’s still somehow different if AI does it.

                • piecat@lemmy.world
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                  10 months ago

                  Nope, I do not consider an unrecognized sample as copyright infringement. Or, I don’t believe it should be ruled as such by the courts.

                  If you can’t reasonably recognize the source material, and it’s so different that only AI looking at bits could identify similarities, that doesn’t cross the threshold in my opinion.

                  I actually don’t think most sampling should be considered infringement, assuming the new song is actually a new work.

                  It’s all about how transformative the work is.