from Hacker News

Artists score major win in copyright case against AI art generators

by KZerda on 8/15/24, 6:43 PM with 135 comments

• by throwup238 on 8/15/24, 7:09 PM

  > The court declined to dismiss copyright infringement claims against the AI companies.

  That "major win" being allowed to proceed with the case at all. All they've done is clear the first hurdle meant to kill frivolous lawsuits before they get to discovery. Their other claims were dismissed:

  > Claims against the companies for breach of contract and unjust enrichment, plus violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act for removal of information identifying intellectual property, were dismissed. The case will move forward to discovery, where the artists could uncover information related to the way in which the AI firms harvested copyrighted materials that were then used to train large language models.

• by Ajedi32 on 8/15/24, 7:14 PM

  Here's the PDF of the court order: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.40...

  (The "major win" in this case is that the court partially denied the defendants' motions to dismiss, so the case can now proceed to discovery.)

• by davexunit on 8/15/24, 9:13 PM

  It's so obvious to me that machine learning models are derivative works of their training set. If they weren't, then why would these companies fight so hard to say otherwise? They need that training data to make their product, so they should pay the licensing fees for it! 10 years ago, when I worked on a machine learning model for my employer, it was unthinkable to train on data we did not have the rights to use. But now it's all fair game because OpenAI executives would make a little less money otherwise? They certainly aren't giving up any of their own copyright in return. It's a very transparent transfer of power and money from regular people to the bosses.

• by aabajian on 8/15/24, 8:58 PM

  IANAL. Is it legal to create derivatives of copyright work and then post them on public online forums? For example, I can certainly write, "Mickey Mouse got food poisoning from his Big Mac." But, if I ask an AI generator to "Make a picture of Mickey Mouse getting food poison at McDonald's", could I post the resulting picture?

• by reactor on 8/15/24, 8:43 PM

  Humans acquire a significant amount of knowledge (or get trained on) by learning from the work of others. If companies can face legal repercussions for training models on materials from elsewhere, a similar argument could be made for individuals.

• by segasaturn on 8/15/24, 7:52 PM

  The plaintiffs are claiming that their art-style is copyrighted intellectual property and that they can sue image generators for damages if it creates an output that resembles theirs. Regardless of what you think about AI art, the precedent of this case will be a huge expansion of the power of IP and copyright law in the US mainly to the benefit of corporations - imagine Disney copyrighting the look of their 3D animated Pixar movies and suing anybody who tries to make a cartoony 3D animated movie for IP theft.

• by 0cf8612b2e1e on 8/15/24, 9:02 PM

  So…which is the best art generator I can download and run locally today?

  Or are there a few top ones specific to art style(photorealistic, scenery, pixel art, vectors, etc)?

• by Paradigma11 on 8/16/24, 6:59 AM

  I doubt the artists really thought this through. If they "win" this AI would be driven into illegality in the west and the global south would not care one bit about those laws and will happily outcompete those very same western artists on very uneven ground.

• by artninja1988 on 8/15/24, 8:47 PM

  Definitely concerning and I hope model trainers win. If push comes to shove developers can always go to jurisdictions with more forward looking copyright exemptions regarding text and data mining like Israel and Japan though.

• by doctorpangloss on 8/15/24, 7:06 PM

  There are no clean image models. Zero. Using today's model architectures, the problem of using non-expressly-permitted data for training is insurmountable. I welcome anyone more knowledgeable on the matter to go ahead and comment about a counterexample before downvoting.

  So if the artists prevail, image generators are donezo. Open source, proprietary, whatever. People saying otherwise just don't know enough about how they work.

  You have heard of Adobe's Firefly. It is not clean. Adobe uses CLIP, T5, or something for text conditioning. None of those things were trained on expressly permitted content. Go ahead and ask them.

  Maybe you have heard of Open Model Initiative. They are going going to use CLIP or T5. They have no alternative.

  There are not enough license bureau images to train a CLIP model, not enough expressly licensed text content to train T5. A CLIP model needs 2 billion images to perform well, not the 600m Adobe claims they have access to. It's right in the paper.

  Good luck training a valuable language model on only expressly permissioned content. You'd become a billionaire if you could keep such an architecture secret. And then when it does exist, such as with some translation models, well they underperform, so who uses them?

  What do people want? I don't really care about IP, I care about, who is allowed to make money? Is only Apple, who controls the devices and accounts, and therefore can really enforce anti-piracy, permitted to make money? Only parties with good legal representation? It's not so black and white, not so cut and dried, who the good guys and bad guys are. We already live with a huge glut of content and raised interest rates, which have been 100x more impactful to the bottom line - financial and creative - of working artists. Why aren't these artists demanding that the Fed drops rates, or that back catalog media be delisted to boost demand for new media? It's not that simple either! Presumably a lot of people using these image and video generators are narrative creators of a kind too, like video game developers, music video makers, etc. Are they also bad guys?

  There's no broad solution here, the legal victory here is definitely pyrrhic, but one thing's for sure: Apple, NVIDIA, Meta and Google will still be printing cash. The artists are advocating for a position that boils down to, "The only moral creative-economic status quo is my status quo."

• by throwaway4837 on 8/15/24, 8:47 PM

  You can have a kid, that kid can grow up to be a musician inspired by Taylor Swift, likely with some of their musical output having depended on Taylor's input. That's perfectly legal. But in a possible future, you could produce an AGI that isn't allowed to listen to Taylor Swift, never allowed to be inspired by anything from Taylor's songs?

• by warkdarrior on 8/15/24, 7:32 PM

  If these AI companies get punished, this will be a great win for open-source model training. Looking forward to train models at home, maybe over a distributed, P2P network of open-source enthusiasts, using images off the Internet. Harder to sue and punish a decentralized ML-training coop!