A frequent objection is that the AI learns from human authors, and is thereby violating their copyrights… well, maybe not according to the current laws, but then those laws should be updated to reflect the new reality. The (updated) copyright laws will hopefully stop the AI from making the artists obsolete. From now on, each artist will have to provide pictures of their work-in-progress, to make sure that their work is not generated by an AI.
Let’s ignore the fact that if this becomes the norm, soon you will have a lot of “work-in-progress” samples, so the next generation of the AI will be able to produce the final art along with corresponding work-in-progress pictures. Let’s imagine an inconvenient world with universal surveillance, where you can easily distinguish human-made and machine-made pictures, and every copyright violation is punished.
We already have a legal solution for this, in form of public domain and copyleft. If the AI learns from legally available and modifiable images, no one’s copyright will be violated. Artists who support the AI can give up the copyright for their images. Companies that support the AI can offer to the artists deals like “I will pay you for making this specific image, but only if you give up the copyright”; some artists will accept the deal. Gradually, the AI will become better at what it does even if it only learns from the free resources; at some moment possibly as good as it is now. Then, there will be no legal argument against the AI art. (Unless you explicitly ban the AI, or the concepts of public domain and copyleft. Which would be obviously unfair.)
Actually, a stronger argument can be made: unless we invent immortality first, it is just a question of a few decades until all things that are copyrighted today will have their copyrights expired.
If the copyright law is actually modified to ban training from copyrighted images, people will start using non-copyrighted training sets. Actually, someone should already try it now.
A frequent objection is that the AI learns from human authors, and is thereby violating their copyrights… well, maybe not according to the current laws, but then those laws should be updated to reflect the new reality. The (updated) copyright laws will hopefully stop the AI from making the artists obsolete. From now on, each artist will have to provide pictures of their work-in-progress, to make sure that their work is not generated by an AI.
Let’s ignore the fact that if this becomes the norm, soon you will have a lot of “work-in-progress” samples, so the next generation of the AI will be able to produce the final art along with corresponding work-in-progress pictures. Let’s imagine an inconvenient world with universal surveillance, where you can easily distinguish human-made and machine-made pictures, and every copyright violation is punished.
We already have a legal solution for this, in form of public domain and copyleft. If the AI learns from legally available and modifiable images, no one’s copyright will be violated. Artists who support the AI can give up the copyright for their images. Companies that support the AI can offer to the artists deals like “I will pay you for making this specific image, but only if you give up the copyright”; some artists will accept the deal. Gradually, the AI will become better at what it does even if it only learns from the free resources; at some moment possibly as good as it is now. Then, there will be no legal argument against the AI art. (Unless you explicitly ban the AI, or the concepts of public domain and copyleft. Which would be obviously unfair.)
Actually, a stronger argument can be made: unless we invent immortality first, it is just a question of a few decades until all things that are copyrighted today will have their copyrights expired.
If the copyright law is actually modified to ban training from copyrighted images, people will start using non-copyrighted training sets. Actually, someone should already try it now.