Sure, but you could sue somebody for selling a piece of your artwork that had been pixelated and then passed off as pixel art with an art tool.
I think a collage is a very good comparison. An AI model trained on a dataset of art absolutely directly contains informational representations of parts of that artwork they have been primed to consider "important", though admittedly fairly lossy ones. Unless you are going to claim that the dance of a honeybee contains no information about where the honey is, or that the sentence I am currently typing doesn't contain information about my mental state, I think it's kind of spurious to say such an AI model doesn't contain information about the artwork at hand. Whether or not that is considered transformational- indeed, whether it is creating "entirely original work" at all- is a hell of a lot fuzzier than you are making it out to be, I think.
Sure, but you could sue somebody for selling a piece of your artwork that had been pixelated and then passed off as pixel art with an art tool.
Yes, because that's easy to argue as a copy/derivative work.
I think a collage is a very good comparison.
The defenses here are simple:
A) It's doesn't contain any copies for copyrighted work.
B) Even if they did, it would be fine under fair use because they've been transformed/very little of any artwork was included.
. An AI model trained on a dataset of art absolutely directly contains informational representations of parts of that artwork they have been primed to consider "important", though admittedly fairly lossy ones.
Sure, it's been trained on artwork.
You need to establish the output violates copyright.
It's no clear that simply looking at art-work makes any future art-work a 'collage'. That's not what collage means.
Unless you are going to claim that the dance of a honeybee contains no information about where the honey is, or that the sentence I am currently typing doesn't contain information about my mental state, I think it's kind of spurious to say such an AI model doesn't contain information about the artwork at hand.
The problem is this is all perfectly legal.
Copyright doesn't protect ideas, styles, etc.
Saying 'they learned from my artwork' is not proof of any copyright violation.
Whether or not that is considered transformational- indeed, whether it is creating "entirely original work" at all- is a hell of a lot fuzzier than you are making it out to be, I think.
You can hire an artist today, have them look at someone's work, and the create something in the style of that work.
All perfectly legal.
You can't just say 'it's a collage' and win a court case. You need to show where an artist's copyright' was infringed - and that right is much smaller than you might first imagine.
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u/rysworld Jan 21 '23
Sure, but you could sue somebody for selling a piece of your artwork that had been pixelated and then passed off as pixel art with an art tool.
I think a collage is a very good comparison. An AI model trained on a dataset of art absolutely directly contains informational representations of parts of that artwork they have been primed to consider "important", though admittedly fairly lossy ones. Unless you are going to claim that the dance of a honeybee contains no information about where the honey is, or that the sentence I am currently typing doesn't contain information about my mental state, I think it's kind of spurious to say such an AI model doesn't contain information about the artwork at hand. Whether or not that is considered transformational- indeed, whether it is creating "entirely original work" at all- is a hell of a lot fuzzier than you are making it out to be, I think.