If this was a farm of sweatshop Photoshopers in 2010, who download all images from the internet and provide a service of combining them on your request, this would escalate pretty quickly.
Question: with copyright and authorship dead wrt AI, how do I make (at least) new content protected?
Anecdotal: I had a hobby of doing photos in quite rare style and lived in a place where you'd get quite a few pictures of. When I asked gpt to generate a picture of that are in that style, it returned highly modified, but recognizable copy of a photo I've published years ago.
Air gap. If you don’t want content to be used without your permission, it never leaves your computer. This is the only protection that works.
If you want others to see your content, however, you have to accept some degree of trade off with it being misappropriated. Blatant cases can be addressed the same as they always were, but a model overfitting to your original work poses an interesting question for which I’m not aware of any legal precedents having been set yet.
Big IP holders will go nuclear on IP licensing to an extent we've never seen before.
Right now, there are thousands of images and videos of Star Wars, Pokemon, Superman, Sonic, etc. being posted across social media. All it takes is for the biggest IP conglomerates to turn into linear tv and sports networks of the past and treat social media like cable.
Disney: "Gee {Google,Meta,Reddit,TikTok}, we see you have a lot of Star Wars and Marvel content. We think that's a violation of our rights. If you want your users to continue to be able to post our media, you need to pay us $5B/yr."
I would not be surprised if this happens now that every user on the internet can soon create high-fidelity content.
This could be a new $20-30B/yr business for Disney. Nintendo, WBD, and lots of other giant IP holders could easily follow suit.
The next step is to take this beyond AI generations and to license rights to characters and IP on social media directly.
The next salvo will be where YouTube has to take down all major IP-related content if they don't pay a licensing fee. Regardless of how it was created. Movie reviews, fan animations, video game let's plays.
I've got a strong feeling that day is coming soon.
That seems unlikely to me. One side is made up of lots and lots of entrenched interests with sympathetic figures like authors and artists on their side, and the other is “big tech,” dominated by the rather unsympathetic OpenAI and Google.
Using references is a standard industry practice for digital art and VFX. The main difference is that you are unable to accidentally copy a reference too close, while with AI it’s possible.
I guess some kind of hard (repetitive) steganography where the private key signature of the original photo is somehow encoded lots of times; also watermarking everything and asking the reader for some kind of verification if they want their non-watermarked copy.
There seems to be no other way (apart from air-gapping everything, as others say).
my question to your anecdotal: who cares? not being fecicious, but who cares if someone reproduced your stuff and millions of people see your stuff? is the money that you want? is it the fame? because fame you will get, maybe not money... but couldn't there be another way?
People have values that go beyond wealth and fame. Some people care about things like personal agency, respect and deference, etc.
If someone were on vacation and came home to learn that their neighbor had allowed some friends stay in the empty house, we would often expect some kind of outrage regardless of whether there had been specific damage or wear to the home.
Culturally, people have deeply set ideas about what's theirs, and feel like they deserve some say over how their things are used and by whom. Even those that are very generous and want their things be widely shared usually want to have have some voice in making that come to be.
If I were a creative I would avoid seeing any work I am not legally allowed to get inspired by, why install furniture into my brain I can't sit on? I see this kind of IP protection as poisoned grounds, can't do anything on top of it.
To clarify my question - I do not want anything I create to be fed into their training data. That photo is just an example that I caught and it became personal. But in general I don't want anymore to open source my code, write articles and put any effort into improving training data set.
As a professional cinematographer/photographer I am incredibly uncomfortable with people using my art without my permission for unknown ends. Doubly so when it’s venture backed private companies stealing from millions of people like me as they make vague promises about the capabilities of their software trained on my work. It doesn’t take much to understand why that makes me uncomfortable and why I feel I am entitled to saying “no.” Legally I am entitled to that in so many cases, yet for some reason Altman et al get to skip that hurdle. Why?
How do you feel about entities taking your face off of your personal website and plastering it on billboards smiling happily next to their product? What if it’s for a gun? Or condoms? Or a candidate for a party you don’t support? Pick your own example if none of those bother you. I’m sure there are things you do not want to be associated with/don’t want to contribute to.
At the end of the day it’s very gross when we are exploited without our knowledge or permission so rich groups can get richer. I don’t care if my visual work is only partially contributing to some mashed up final image. I don’t want to be a part of it.
The day after I first heard about the Internet, back in 1990-whatever, it occurred to me that I probably shouldn't upload anything to the Internet that I didn't want to see on the front page of tomorrow's newspaper.
Apart from the 'newspaper' anachronism, that's pretty much still my take.
Sorry, but you'll just have to deal with it and get over it.
I get access to inspiration from everybody's art, and so do you. Seems like a good deal to me.
Meanwhile, the next generation of great artists is already at work down the street from you. Some kids you've never heard of, playing around in a basement or garage you've probably driven past a hundred times. They're learning to make the most of the tools at hand, just like the old masters did. Except the tools at hand this time are little short of godlike.
It's an exciting time. If you wanted things to stay the same, you shouldn't have gone into technology or art.
Inspiring artists =/= involuntarily training privately owned LLM’s that charge for access.
Agreed there, which is why it's important to work for open access to the results. The resulting regime won't look much like present-day copyright law, but if we do it right, it will be better for us all.
In other words, instead of insisting that "No one can have this," or "Only a few can have this," which (again) will not be options for works that you release commercially, it's better IMHO to insist that "Everyone can have this."
> In other words, instead of insisting that "No one can have this," or "Only a few can have this,
Please show me where I ever said anything remotely like that. You’re painting my stance as very all or nothing, which is inaccurate.
You’re trying to make me into some caricature that you can grind your axe against, when I’m somebody who doesn’t even agree with modern copyright law. I think we’re past the point of productivity, so I’ll just leave it there. Have a good one
> How do you feel about entities taking your face off of your personal website and plastering it on billboards smiling happily next to their product?
That would be misrepresentation. Even Stallman isn't OK with that. You can take one of his opinion pieces and publish it as your own. Or you can attach his name to it.
However, if you're editing it and releasing it under his name, clearly you're simply lying, and nobody is OK with that. People have the right to be recognized as authors of things they did author (if they so desire) and they have a right to NOT be associated with things they didn't.
> At the end of the day it’s very gross when we are exploited without our knowledge or permission so rich groups can get richer.
The second part is the entirety of the problem. If I'm "exploited" in a way where I can't even notice it, and I'm not worse off for it, how is it even exploitation? But people amassing great power is a problem no matter if they do it with "legitimate" means or not.
If somebody is stealing from your bank account every week and you just don’t notice it, are you not being stolen from? Has nobody stolen your credit card and used it until the moment you notice the charges. I don’t really think we can go “if a tree fall in the forest and nobody is around to hear it…” about this.
Stallman has his opinions on software, I have my opinions on my visual work. I don’t get really how that applies here or why that settles this matter.
If someone steals from my bank account I certainly CAN notice it even if I don't immediately, and I'm certainly worse off.
That's such a bad straw man I wonder if you're really supporting the position you claim to be supporting. Maybe you're just trying to give it a bad name.
Your opinion isn't on visual work, but visual property. You don't demand to be paid for your work - your labor. Rather you traded that for the dream of being paid rent on a capital object, in perpetuity (or close enough). Artists lost to the power-mongers when we bit at that bait.
Copyright has overstepped its initial purpose by leaps and bounds because corporations make the law. If you're not cynical about how Copyright currently works you probably haven't been paying attention. And it doesn't take much to go from cynical to nihilist in this case.
There's definitely a case of miscommunication at play if you didn't read cynicism into my original post. I broadly agree with you, but I'll leave it at that to prevent further fruitless arguing about specifics.
(to clarify, OpenAI stops refining the image if a classifier detects your image as potentially violating certain copyrights. Although the gulf in resolution is not caused by that.)
The people building the tech are extremely fussy about their work being cited and extremely protective of their models files so they themselves have massive issues with their work being used or replicated non-consensually.
Question: with copyright and authorship dead wrt AI, how do I make (at least) new content protected?
Anecdotal: I had a hobby of doing photos in quite rare style and lived in a place where you'd get quite a few pictures of. When I asked gpt to generate a picture of that are in that style, it returned highly modified, but recognizable copy of a photo I've published years ago.