this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2024
430 points (83.1% liked)
Technology
59211 readers
3008 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Why? If the training weights are created and distributed in violation of copyright laws, it seems appropriate to punish those illegal training weights.
In fact, all that people really are asking for, is for a new set of training weights to be developed but with appropriate copyright controls. IE: With express permission from the artists and/or entities who made the work.
Because they aren't illegal and they don't violate copyright. People keep wanting them to be against copyright, but that's just not how copyright works. There either needs to be amendments to copyright law in order to cover this case, but those changes would need to be very carefully tailored. It would be way too easy to make something that's either overly broad and applies to a bunch of situations it wasn't intended to, or way too narrow allowing for easy circumventing.
While that might appease some people, it wouldn't appease everyone. There are a lot of workers in the creative fields that are feeling incredibly threatened by generative AI right now. Some of these fears are certainly overblown, but it's also true corporations are going to be as shitty as possible and so some regulation is probably in order. That said, once again, copyright just doesn't seem to be the right tool for the job here.
Because they are legal and they do violate copyright? People keep wanting them to be copyright free, but that's not how copyright works. There don't need to be amendments to copyright law in order to cover this case.
I mean, its obviously heading to the courts one way or the other, but I don't think just making assertions like that are very good kind of arguing. The training weights here have clearly been proven to contain copyrighted data as per this article. I'm not sure if you're making any kind of serious case that shows otherwise, but are instead just making a bunch of assertions that I could easily reverse.
It varies somewhat from country to country, but at least in the US there is ample case law that says it's legal. The relevant ruling is typically based on the work being transformative and therefore a fair use for a derivative work. This is E.G. how Google can get away with creating thumbnails of websites to show on their search pages without needing to worry about copyright of anything contained on that website.
This article proved absolutely nothing except that you can use generative AI to create images that would most likely be ruled to violate copyright. Once again though, the model and training weights do not violate copyright, they're a protected derivative work. The generated image on the other hand very likely does violate copyright.