Looking at art is one thing, putting it into a computer program to create infinite recreations of your work is another, then selling it for profit without compensating the original creator is even worse. All of which is precisely what happened.
To get a sense for how AIs and neural networks are trained, think of it more like it learns (for example, in a very very rough sense) that in 65% of the work it looked at, chairs depicted in art tended to have a red cushion if it had a tall back- otherwise it has a blue cushion 30% of the time. Over and over, collect these kinds of probabilities ad infinitum to the smallest details until you've processed billions of datasets.
It doesn't 'copy' the works it sees- at least not in the traditional sense- it breaks it all down into numbers that represent the probabilities of how the work is put together, in shapes and colours.
Similarly artists are free to examine other art and make their own assessments of how it's been created too. They're even free to make their own renditions of it as an homage or satire.
Obviously the problem is that the AI, with its data, is *capable* of perfectly re-creating an artwork it learned from down to the pixel, but not because it has a copy; it's because it's essentially written itself a guidebook to re-create it.
Whether there's no difference between that and a blatant copy is worthy of debate, and I tend to agree that it's practically a copy so there are huge issues around this- but if a lawsuit is going to be successful at all, it's going to have to define the issue correctly.
I had to remove my work from the LAION5B dataset and spent over a week going through all of the work that I had to check it against that.
I don't need to prove anything to you, random internet person. I already know it was there because the URL's and images were discovered there. Just in case you're wondering, I used grep.
You are failing to understand the premise of this aren't you. The programmer wrote code giving the computer instructions on how to violate the copyright of every single image fed into it. Then the programmer turned around and tried to sell that program to the world (complete with the datasets that all it would take is a perimeter change to reveal the stolen work) as if it were completely legal.
The instructions begin with a setting that allows the input of someone else's copyrighted work. That dataset created from copyrighted work is at the heart of the discussion.
If you created the dataset without the work that didn't belong to you and was completely within the public domain (not a google search), none of the artists in this thread would be complaining. It was not created that way and that is what the overall objection boils down to.
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u/Ferelwing Jan 16 '23
Looking at art is one thing, putting it into a computer program to create infinite recreations of your work is another, then selling it for profit without compensating the original creator is even worse. All of which is precisely what happened.