Generative AI Has a Visual Plagiarism Problem::Experiments with Midjourney and DALL-E 3 show a copyright minefield
It is In no way illegal to generate copyrighted material. It is illegal to sell that material. You’re more than free to draw or other wise create any pic of bart Simpson you want.
It’s called fair use.
You don’t have to pay them to use stable diffusion or mid journey or dalle, no.
There’s a weird line here because I’m pretty sure the restriction is “commercial use” rather than outright selling. So even if they’re including these AI products as “value-add” bundles or including them in i.e. Bing, they’d be tied the (ad, etc) revenue of the underlying product. There’s also a difference between commercial entities and “personal use”.
You might not be selling me a picture of Homer Simpson, but if you’re providing it via a tool on a page with ads etc there’s still a tie-in to a revenue stream and commercial activity
I would like to show these copyright lawyers one of my original pieces of copyrighted art, then hide it and ask them to describe it in detail. Once they have done so, I’ll use the similarity between their description and my artwork to prove in court that they now have an illegal copy of my copyrighted work in their brain and I would that removed as per my rights. Slam dunk.
Ha, Ho. Steamboat Mickey says fuck your copyright.
(also no shit, AI images are just made from all the training data given to them)
Be careful, Steamboat Willie may be public domain, but I don’t know if Steamboat MscMahion Ysarai is.
You know what I found interesting? The article has both midjourney cherry picked outputs, but also has the original screen caps from the various movies. Neither image was licensed from the creators to produce the content of this website, but they are still allowed to serve this article with “infringing” images far and wide.
This easily falls under fair use.
Under the fair use doctrine of the U.S. copyright statute, it is permissible to use limited portions of a work including quotes, for purposes such as commentary, criticism, news reporting, and scholarly reports.
https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-fairuse.html
This article fulfills pretty much all of those things.
This has been known for a long time. The main point of contention now will be who is liable for infringing outputs. The convenient answer would be to put the responsibility on the users, who would then have to avoid sharing/profiting from infringing images. In my opinion this solution can only apply in cases where the model is being run by the end user.
When a model is served online, locked behind a subscription or api fee, the service provider is potentially selling infringing works straight to the user. Section 230 will likely play a role, but even then there will be issues in the cases where a model outputs protected characters without an explicit request.
The users did not access copyright protected data, they can reasonably argue a lack of knowledge of similarities as a defence.
In music that gives you a free pass because a lot of music is similar.
Ed Sheeran made similar music to Marvin Gaye through essentially cultural osmosis of ideas. Robin Thick deliberately took a Marvin Gaye reference and directly copied it.
The legal and moral differences relied on knowledge.
The liability has to fall on who fed the model the data in the first place. The model might be Robin Thick or Ed Sheeran, but given the model has been programmed with the specific intention to create similar work from a collection of references. That puts it plainly in the Robin Thick camp to me.
The AI’s intent is programmed and if a human followed that programmed objective, with copyright owned material, that human would be infringing on copyright unless they paid royalties.
This is literally it it’s really not that complicated. Training a Data set is not (currently) an infringement of any of the rights conferred by copyright. Generating copyright infringing content is still possible, but only when the work would otherwise be infringing. The involvement of not of AI in the workflow is not some black pill that automatically makes infringement, but it is still possible to make a work substantially similar to a copyrighted work.
Meanwhile as we speak websites like Civitai and others started to paywall these models and outputs. It’s going to get ugly for some of them.
That isn’t happening. They’ve backtracked on that plan and are working with users on a better plan.
