But this isn’t like photography and portrait artistry. This is more like a wealthy person stealing your entire art catalog, laundering it in some fancy way, and then claiming they are the original creator. Stable Diffusion has literally been used to create new art by screenshotting someone’s live-streamed art creation process as the seed. While creating derivative work has always been considered art(such as deletion poetry and collage), it’s extremely uncommon and blasé to never attribute the original(s).
> This is more like a wealthy person stealing your entire art catalog, laundering it in some fancy way, and then claiming they are the original creator.
If I take a song, cut it up, and sing over it, my release is valid. If I parody your work, that's my work. If you paint a picture of a building and I go to that spot and take a photograph of that building it is my work.
I can derive all sorts of things, things that I own, from things that others have made.
As for talking about the originals, would an artist credit every piece of inspiration they have ever encountered over a lifetime? Publishing a seed seems fine as a nice thing to do, but pointing at the billion pictures that went into the drawing seems silly.
Fair use is an affirmative defense. Others can still sue you for copying, and you will have to hope a judge agrees with your defense. How do you think Google v. Oracle would have turned out if Google's defense was "no your honor, we didn't copy the Java sources. We just used those sources as input to our creative algorithms, and this is what they independently produced"?
If I take a song, cut it up, and sing over it, my release is valid
"valid", how? You still have to pay royalties to the copyright holder of the original song, and you don't get to claim it as your own.
If you sing over a song you’re adding your own voice. If you photograph a building that’s your own photograph, where decisions like lighting and framing are creative choices. If you paint a picture of a building that’s your own picture.
An artist should credit when they are directly taking from another artist. Erasure poems don’t quite work if the poet runs around claiming they created the poem that was being erased.
But more importantly SD allows you to take and use existing copyright works and funny-launder them and pass them off as your own, even though you don’t own the rights to that work. This would be more akin to I take a photograph you made and sell it on a t shirt on red bubble. I don’t actually own the IP to do that with.
Do you know what's different about the photograph or the recording?
They are still their own separate works!
If a painter paints a person for commission, and then that person also commissions a photographer to take a picture of them, is the photographer infringing on the copyright of the painter? Absolutely not; the works are separate.
If a recording artist records a public domain song that another artist performs live, is the recording artist infringing on the live artist? Heavens, no; the works are separate.
On the other hand, these "AI's" are taking existing works and reusing them.
Say I write a song, and in that song, I use one stanza from the chorus of one of your songs. Verbatim. Would you have a copyright claim against me for that? Of course, you would!
That's what these AI's do; they copy portions and mix them. Sometimes they are not substantial portions. Sometimes, they are, with verbatim comments (code), identical structure (also code), watermarks (images), composition (also images), lyrics (songs), or motifs (also songs).
In the reverse of your painter and photographer example, we saw US courts hand down judgment against an artist who blatantly copied a photograph. [1]
Anyway, that's the difference between the tools of photography (creates a new thing) and sound recording (creates a new thing) versus AI (mixes existing things).
And yes, sound mixing can easily stray into copyright infringement. So can other copying of various copyrightable things. I'm not saying humans don't infringe; I'm saying that AI does by construction.
I'm not sure sure that originality is that different between a human and a neural network. That is to say that what a human artist is doing has always involved a lot of mixing of existing creations. Art needs to have a certain level of familiarity in order to be understood by an audience. I didn't invent 4/4 time or a I-IV-V progression and I certainly wasn't the first person to tackle the rhyme schemes or subject matter of my songs. I wouldn't be surprised if there were fragments from other songs in my lyrics or melodies, either from something I heard a long time ago or perhaps just out of coincidence. There's only so much you can do with a folk song to begin with!
BTW, what happened after the photograph is that there were less portrait artists. And after the recording there were less live musicians. There are certainly no less artists nor musicians, though!
> I'm not sure sure that originality is that different between a human and a neural network. That is to say that what a human artist is doing has always involved a lot of mixing of existing creations.
I disagree, but this is a debate worth having.
This is why I disagree: humans don't copy just copyrighted material.
I am in the middle of developing and writing a romance short story. Why? Because my writing has a glaring weakness: characters, and romance stands or falls on characters. It's a good exercise to strengthen that weakness.
Anyway, both of the two people in the (eventual) couple developed from my real life, and not from any copyrighted material. For instance, the man will basically be a less autistic and less selfish version of myself. The woman will basically be the kind of person that annoys me the most in real life: bright, bubbly, always touching people, etc.
There is no copyrighted material I am getting these characters from.
In addition, their situation is not typical of such stories, but it does have connections to my life. They will (eventually) end up in a ballroom dance competition. Why that? So the male character hates it. I hate ballroom dance during a three-week ballroom dancing course in 6th grade, the girls made me hate ballroom dancing. I won't say how, but they did.
That's the difference between humans and machines: machines can only copyright and mix other copyrightable material; humans can copy real life. In other words, machines can only copy a representation; humans can copy the real thing.
Oh, and the other difference is emotion. I've heard that people without the emotional center of their brains can take six hours to choose between blue and black pens. There is something about emotions that drives decision-making, and it's decision-making that drives art.
When you consider that brain chemistry, which is a function of genetics and previous choices, is a big part of emotions, then it's obvious that those two things, genetics and previous choices, are also inputs to the creative process. Machines don't have those inputs.
Those are the non-religious reasons why I think humans have more originality than machines, including neural networks.
Imagine telling someone who wanted to learn a sport to watch it. I define someone that writes as a writer. It is the act of writing that enables you to then read and learn from others.
An example: a dyslexic friend and a dyslexic family member: their writing communication skills of both is now fine in part because their jobs required it from them (and in part because technology helps). I also had one illiterate friend, who has taught himself to read and write as an adult (basic written communication), due to the needs of his job. Learn by doing, and add observation of others as an adjunct to help you. Even better if you can get good coaching (which requires effort at your craft or sport).
Disclaimer: never a writer. Projecting from my other crafts/sports. Terribly written comment!
> I'm not sure sure that originality is that different between a human and a neural network.
It is, yes. For example, a neural network can't invent a new art style on its own, or at least existing models can't, they can only copy existing art styles, invented by humans.
The recording destroyed the occupation of being a live musician. People still do it for what amounts to tip money, but it used to be a real job that people could make a living off of. If you had a business and wanted to differentiate it by having music, you had to pay people to play it live. It was the only way.
> What did the photograph do to the portrait artist?
It completely destroyed the jobs of photo realistic portrait artists. You only have stylised portrait painting now and now that is going to be ripped off too.
It also gave birth to the photographic portrait artist. It certainly did not get rid of portrait artists in general.
This was of course a leading question. The point was to get you to think about what artists did in response to the photograph. They changed the way they paint.
I'm positive that machine learning will also change the way that people create are and I am positive that it will only add to the rich tapestry of creative possibilities. There are still realistic portrait painters, after all, they're just not as numerous.
What did the photograph do to the portrait artist? What did the recording do to the live musician?
Here’s some highfalutin art theory on the matter, from almost a hundred years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_...
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