It’s not just a question of automation eliminating skilled work. Deep learning uses the work of artists in a significant sense. There is a patchwork of law and social norms in place to protect artists, EG, the practice of explicitly naming major inspirations for a work. This has worked OK up to now, because all creative re-working of other art has either gone through relatively simple manipulation like copy/paste/caption/filter, or thru the specific route of the human mind taking media in and then producing new media output which takes greater or smaller amounts of inspiration from media consumed.
AI which learns from large amounts of human-generated content, is legitimately a new category here. It’s not obvious what should be legal vs illegal, or accepted vs frowned upon by the artistic community.
Is it more like applying a filter to someone else’s artwork and calling it your own? Or is it more like taking artistic inspiration from someone else’s work? What kinds of credit are due?
It seems to me that the only thing that seems possible is to treat it like a human that took inspiration from many sources. In the vast majority of cases, the sources of the artwork are not obvious to any viewer (and the algorithm cannot tell you one). Moreover, any given created piece is really the combination of the millions of pieces of the art that the AI has seen, just like how a human takes inspiration from all of the pieces that it has seen. So it seems most similar to the human category, not the simple manipulations (because it isn’t a simple manipulation of any given image or set of images).
I believe that you can get the AI to output an image that is similar to an existing one, but a human being can also create artwork that is similar to existing art. Ultimately, I think the only solution to rights protection must be handling it at that same individual level.
Another element that needs to be considered is that AI generated art will likely be entirely anonymous before long. Right now, anyone can go to http://notarealhuman.com/ and share the generated face to Reddit. Once that’s freely available with DALL-E 2 level art and better (and I don’t think that’s avoidable at this point), I don’t think any social norms can hinder it.
The other option to social norms is to outlaw it. I don’t think that a limited regulation would be possible, so the only possibility would be a complete ban. However, I don’t think all the relevant governments will have the willpower to do that. Even if the USA bans creating image generation AIs like this (and they’d need to do so in the next year or two to stop it from already being widely spread), people in China and Russia will surely develop them within a decade.
Determining that the provenance of an artwork is a human rather than an AI seems impossible. Even if we added tracing to all digital art tools, it would still be possible to create an image with an AI, print and scan it, and then claim that you made it yourself. In some cases, you actually could trace the AI-generated art, which still involves some effort but not nearly as much.
I agree that this is a plausible outcome, but I don’t think society should treat it as a settled question right now. It seems to me like the sort of technology question which a society should sit down and think about.
It is most similar to the human category, yes absolutely, but it enables different things than the human category. The consequences are dramatically different. So it’s not obvious a priori that it should be treated legally the same.
You argue against a complete ban by pointing out that not all relevant governments would cooperate. I don’t think all governments have to come to the same decision here. Copyright enforcement is already not equal across countries. I’m not saying I think there should be a complete ban, but again, I don’t think it’s totally obvious either, and I think artists calling for a ban should have a voice in the decision process.
But I also don’t agree with your argument that the only two options are a complete ban or treating it exactly like human-generated art. I don’t agree with your argument that a requirement to display the closest images from the training data would be useless. I agree that it is easily circumvented, but it does make it much easier to avoid accidental infringement by putting in prompts which happen to be good at pulling out exact duplicates of some datapoint, unbeknownst to you.
I also think it would be within the realm of reasonable possibility to simply apply different legal standards for infringement in the two cases. Perhaps it’s fine for human artists to copy a style, but because it’s so easy to do it with an AI, it is considered a form of infringement to copy a style that way. IDK, possibly that is a terrible idea, but my point is that it’s not clear to me that there are no options at all.
It’s not just a question of automation eliminating skilled work. Deep learning uses the work of artists in a significant sense. There is a patchwork of law and social norms in place to protect artists, EG, the practice of explicitly naming major inspirations for a work. This has worked OK up to now, because all creative re-working of other art has either gone through relatively simple manipulation like copy/paste/caption/filter, or thru the specific route of the human mind taking media in and then producing new media output which takes greater or smaller amounts of inspiration from media consumed.
AI which learns from large amounts of human-generated content, is legitimately a new category here. It’s not obvious what should be legal vs illegal, or accepted vs frowned upon by the artistic community.
Is it more like applying a filter to someone else’s artwork and calling it your own? Or is it more like taking artistic inspiration from someone else’s work? What kinds of credit are due?
It seems to me that the only thing that seems possible is to treat it like a human that took inspiration from many sources. In the vast majority of cases, the sources of the artwork are not obvious to any viewer (and the algorithm cannot tell you one). Moreover, any given created piece is really the combination of the millions of pieces of the art that the AI has seen, just like how a human takes inspiration from all of the pieces that it has seen. So it seems most similar to the human category, not the simple manipulations (because it isn’t a simple manipulation of any given image or set of images).
I believe that you can get the AI to output an image that is similar to an existing one, but a human being can also create artwork that is similar to existing art. Ultimately, I think the only solution to rights protection must be handling it at that same individual level.
Another element that needs to be considered is that AI generated art will likely be entirely anonymous before long. Right now, anyone can go to http://notarealhuman.com/ and share the generated face to Reddit. Once that’s freely available with DALL-E 2 level art and better (and I don’t think that’s avoidable at this point), I don’t think any social norms can hinder it.
The other option to social norms is to outlaw it. I don’t think that a limited regulation would be possible, so the only possibility would be a complete ban. However, I don’t think all the relevant governments will have the willpower to do that. Even if the USA bans creating image generation AIs like this (and they’d need to do so in the next year or two to stop it from already being widely spread), people in China and Russia will surely develop them within a decade.
Determining that the provenance of an artwork is a human rather than an AI seems impossible. Even if we added tracing to all digital art tools, it would still be possible to create an image with an AI, print and scan it, and then claim that you made it yourself. In some cases, you actually could trace the AI-generated art, which still involves some effort but not nearly as much.
I agree that this is a plausible outcome, but I don’t think society should treat it as a settled question right now. It seems to me like the sort of technology question which a society should sit down and think about.
It is most similar to the human category, yes absolutely, but it enables different things than the human category. The consequences are dramatically different. So it’s not obvious a priori that it should be treated legally the same.
You argue against a complete ban by pointing out that not all relevant governments would cooperate. I don’t think all governments have to come to the same decision here. Copyright enforcement is already not equal across countries. I’m not saying I think there should be a complete ban, but again, I don’t think it’s totally obvious either, and I think artists calling for a ban should have a voice in the decision process.
But I also don’t agree with your argument that the only two options are a complete ban or treating it exactly like human-generated art. I don’t agree with your argument that a requirement to display the closest images from the training data would be useless. I agree that it is easily circumvented, but it does make it much easier to avoid accidental infringement by putting in prompts which happen to be good at pulling out exact duplicates of some datapoint, unbeknownst to you.
I also think it would be within the realm of reasonable possibility to simply apply different legal standards for infringement in the two cases. Perhaps it’s fine for human artists to copy a style, but because it’s so easy to do it with an AI, it is considered a form of infringement to copy a style that way. IDK, possibly that is a terrible idea, but my point is that it’s not clear to me that there are no options at all.