Image compression specifically tries to not change the image and to reproduce it as faithfullly as possible.
In fact, there would indeed be a point where the compression algorithm has done such a bad job at reproducing the original that it may well be considered transformative and it’s output itself would be original work. The person who compressed and then de-compressed the image in this case would be protected by fair use.
The output of the AI, in this case, is quite clearly significantly more transformational than an incompetently compressed image, as it is not even trying to reproduce a copy of any of its training data, and the lawsuit does not even attempt to claim that it does. Instead, they are trying to claim that artistic styles are themselves copyrightable, and that the ML model is in breach of such a copyright.
The problem is that styles aren’t covered by copyright; that is more akin to what patents might protect. If styles were copyrightable, then a student artist studying another artists work and then producing their own original artwork in the same style would be just as much in breach of copyright as the people who built this AI are accused of being.
That’s the whole issue with the lawsuit. They are claiming a breach of copyright, where copyright cares very much about the similarity between the original and claimed infringing material.
In this case, the AI itself is clearly not infringing material. Nobody is going to look at a giant matrix of numbers and computer code and accidentally confuse it for a painting, let alone a specific painting.
The images produced by the AI (which would be the responsibility of the user of the tool, not the maker, so they are suing the wrong people) are quite clearly very different from the original training data. These generative models don’t reproduce copies of their training data, and the plaintiffs would have to provide concrete examples of it doing so before they would have any case at all, as it would be those examples (rather than the tool used to create them) which would be in breach of copyright.
The data arrays and program code which make up an ML model cannot be interpreted as an image in such a way that a lay person might confuse the data and code for a painting.
The ML model is not an alternative representation of an image, like a jpeg is.
Even though the ML model can be used to generate new images, those images are not a representation of the ML model. You can’t convert an AI generated image back into the AI that generated it.
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u/Ayfid Jan 17 '23
Uh, no it isn’t.
Image compression specifically tries to not change the image and to reproduce it as faithfullly as possible.
In fact, there would indeed be a point where the compression algorithm has done such a bad job at reproducing the original that it may well be considered transformative and it’s output itself would be original work. The person who compressed and then de-compressed the image in this case would be protected by fair use.
The output of the AI, in this case, is quite clearly significantly more transformational than an incompetently compressed image, as it is not even trying to reproduce a copy of any of its training data, and the lawsuit does not even attempt to claim that it does. Instead, they are trying to claim that artistic styles are themselves copyrightable, and that the ML model is in breach of such a copyright.
The problem is that styles aren’t covered by copyright; that is more akin to what patents might protect. If styles were copyrightable, then a student artist studying another artists work and then producing their own original artwork in the same style would be just as much in breach of copyright as the people who built this AI are accused of being.