We Asked A.I. to Create the Joker. It Generated a Copyrighted Image.::Artists and researchers are exposing copyrighted material hidden within A.I. tools, raising fresh legal questions.
We Asked A.I. to Create the Joker. It Generated a Copyrighted Image.::Artists and researchers are exposing copyrighted material hidden within A.I. tools, raising fresh legal questions.
“Generate this copyrighted character”
“Look, it showed us a copyrighted character!”
Does everyone that writes for the NYTimes have a learning disability?
The point is to prove that copyrighted material has been used as training data. As a reference.
If a human being gets asked to draw the joker, gets a still from the film, then copies it to the best of their ability. They can’t sell that image. Technically speaking they’ve broken the law already by making a copy. Lots of fan art is illegal, it’s just not worth going after (unless you’re Disney or Nintendo).
As a subscription service that’s what AI is doing. Selling the output.
Held to the same standards as a human artist, this is illegal.
If AI is allowed to copy art under copyright, there’s no reason a human shouldn’t be allowed to do the same thing.
Proving the reference is all important.
If an AI or human only ever saw public domain artwork and was asked to draw the joker, they might come up with a similar character. But it would be their own creation. There are copyright cases that hinge on proving the reference material. (See Blurred Lines by Robin Thick)
The New York Times is proving that AI is referencing an image under copyright because it comes out precisely the same. There are no significant changes at all.
In fact even if you come up with a character with no references. If it’s identical to a pre-existing character the first creator gets to hold copyright on it.
This is undefendable.
Even if that AI is a black box we can’t see inside. That black box is definitely breaking the law. There’s just a different way of proving it when the black box is a brain and when the black box is an AI.
It’s not selling that image (or any image), any more than a VCR is selling you a taped version of Die Hard you got off cable TV.
It is a tool that can help you infringe copyright, but as it has non-infringing uses, it doesn’t matter.
Then who created this image in your view?
That’s irrelevant, the issue is whether the machine is committing a crime, or the person
Machines aren’t culpable in law.
There is more than one human involved in creating and operating the machine.
The debate is, which humans are culpable?
The programmers, trainers, or prompters?
The prompters. That is easy enough. If I cut butter with a knife it’s okay, if I cut a person with a knife - much less so. Knife makers can’t be held responsible for that, it’s just nonsense.
If you try to bread with an autonomous knife and the knife kills you by stabbing you in the head. Is it solely your fault?
That depends on whether the autonomous knife is designed dangerously and it’s a common occurrence, or whether I was being a moron and essentially rigged it to stab me, akin to asking for copyright material from an AI and getting it (scene from a movie, characters part of intellectual property etc)
If someone copies a picture from a cartoon who created it?
What point do you think youre making? The answer to this question supports their point.
VCR makers do not claim to create original programming.
Why does that matter?
Because they aren’t doing anything to violate copyright themselves. You might, but that’s different. AI art is created by the software. Supposedly it’s original art. This article shows it is not.
It is original art, even the images in question have differences, but it’s ultimately on the user to ensure they do not use copyrighted material commercially, same as with fanart.
If I draw a very close picture to a screenshot of a Mickey Mouse cartoon and try to pass it off as original art because there are a handful of differences, I don’t think most people would buy it.
What relevance does this have to AI?
Is this really true? Breaking the law implies contravening some legislation which in the case of simply drawing a copyrighted character, you wouldn’t be in most jurisdictions. It’s a civil issue in that if some company has the rights to a character and some artist starts selling images of that character then whoever owns the rights might sue that artist for loss of income or unauthorised use of their intellectual property.
Regardless, all human artists have learned from images of characters which are the intellectual property of some company.
If I hired a human as an employee, and asked them to draw me a picture of the joker from some movie, there’s no contravention of any law I’m aware of, and the rights holder wouldn’t have much of a claim against me.
As a layperson, who hasn’t put much thought into this, the outcome of a claim against these image generators is unclear. IMO, it will come down to whether or not a model’s abilities are significantly derived from a specific category of works.
For example, if a model learned to draw super heros exclusively from watching marvel movies then that’s probably a copyright infringement. OTOH if it learned to draw super heroes from a wide variety of published works then IMO it’s much more difficult to make a case that the model is undermining the right’s holder’s revenue.
Copyright law is incredibly far reaching and only enforced up to a point. This is a bad thing overall.
When you actually learn what companies could do with copyright law, you realise what a mess it is.
In the UK for example you need permission from a composer to rearrange a piece of music for another ensemble. Without that permission it’s illegal to write the music down. Even just the melody as a single line.
In the US it’s standard practice to first write the arrangement and then ask the composer to licence it. Then you sell it and both collect and pay royalties.
If you want to arrange a piece of music in the UK by a composer with an American publisher, you essentially start by breaking the law.
This all gives massive power to corporations over individual artists. It becomes a legal fight the corporation can always win due to costs.
Corporations get the power of selective enforcement. Whenever they think they will get a profit.
AI is creating an image based on someone else’s property. The difference is it’s owned by a corporation.
It’s not legitimate to claim the creation is solely that of the one giving the instructions. Those instructions are not in themselves creating the work.
The act of creating this work includes building the model, training the model, maintaining the model, and giving it that instruction.
So everyone involved in that process is liable for the results to differing amounts.
Ultimately the most infringing part of the process is the input of the original image in the first place.
So we now get to see if a massive corporation or two can claim an AI can be trained on and output anything publicly available (not just public domain)without infringing copyright. An individual human can’t.
I suspect the work of training a model solely on public domain will be complete about the time all these cases get settled in a few years.
Then controls will be put on training data.
Then barriers to entry to AI will get higher.
Then corporations will be able to own intellectual property and AI models.
The other way this can go is AI being allowed to break copyright, which then leads to a precedent that breaks a lot of copyright and the corporations lose a lot of power and control.
The only reason we see this as a fight is because corporations are fighting each other.
If AI needs data and can’t simply take it publicly from published works, the value of licensing that data becomes a value boost for the copyright holder.
The New York Times has a lot to gain.
There are explicit exceptions limited to copyright law. Education being one. Academia and research another.
All hinge into infringement the moment it becomes commercial.
AI being educated and trained isn’t infringement until someone gains from published works or prevents the copyright holder from gaining from it.
This is why writers are at the forefront. Writing is the first area where AI can successfully undermine the need to read the New York Times directly. Reducing the income from the intellectual property it’s been trained on.
This isn’t the issue. The copyright infringement is the creation of the model using the copywrite work as training data.
All NYT is doing is demonstrating that the model must have been created using copywrite works, and hence infringement has taken place. They are not stating that the model is committing an infringement itself.
That’s called fair use. It’s a non-issue.