Just a guy jumping from a hot mess into more prosperous waters.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • That’s fine, but not the primary issue.

    At some point these companies will need to get licenses for any copyrighted work that was part of the training data, or start over with public domain works only. The art may be data, but that data has legal owners whose rights grant control over it’s use.

    Another way to think about is proprietary code. You can see it and learn from it at your leisure. But to use it commercially requires a license, one that clearly defines what can and cannot be done with it, as well as fair compensation.


  • The short version is that it’s a licensing issue. All art is free to view, but the moment you try to integrate it into a commercial product/service you’ll owe someone money unless the artist is given fair compensation in some other form.

    For example, artists agree to provide a usage license to popular art sites to host and display their works. That license does not transfer to the guy/company scraping portfolios to fuel their AI. Unfortunately, as we can see from the article, AI may be able to generate but it still lacks imagination and inspiration; traits fundamental to creating truly derivative works. When money exchanges hands that denies the artist compensation because the work was never licensed and they are excluded from their portion of the sale.

    Another example: I am a photographer uploading my images to a stock image site. As part of ToS I agree to provide a license to host, display, and relicense to buyers on my behalf. The stock site now offers an AI that create new images based on its portfolio. The catch is that all attributed works result in a monetary payment to the artists. When buyers license AI generated works based on my images I get a percentage of the sale. The stock site is legally compliant because it has a license to use my work, and I receive fair compensation when the images are used. The cycle is complete.

    It gets trickier in practice, but licensing and compensation is the crux of the matter.







  • If we apply the current ruling of the US Copyright Office then the prompt writer cannot copyright if AI is the majority of the final product. AI itself is software and ineligible for copyright; we can debate sentience when we get there. The researchers are also out as they simply produce the tool–unless you’re keen on giving companies like Canon and Adobe spontaneous ownership of the media their equipment and software has created.

    As for the artists the AI output is based upon, we already have legal precedent for this situation. Sampling has been a common aspect of the music industry for decades now. Whenever an musician samples work from others they are required to get a license and pay royalties, by an agreed percentage/amount based on performance metrics. Photographers and film makers are also required to have releases (rights of a person’s image, the likeness of a building) and also pay royalties. Actors are also entitled to royalties by licensing out their likeness. This has been the framework that allowed artists to continue benefiting from their contributions as companies min-maxed markets.

    Hence Shutterstock’s terms for copyright on AI images is both building upon legal precedent, and could be the first step in getting AI work copyright protection: obtaining the rights to legally use the dataset. The second would be determining how to pay out royalties based on how the AI called and used images from the dataset. The system isn’t broken by any means, its the public’s misunderstanding of the system that makes the situation confusing.