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‘Impossible’ to create AI tools like ChatGPT without copyrighted material, OpenAI says
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2024
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Out of curiosity, how far do you extend this logic?
Let's say I'm an artist who does fractal art, and I do a line of images where I take jpegs of copywrite protected art and use the data as a seed to my fractal generation function.
Have I have then, in that instance, taken a copywritten work and simply applied some static algorithm to it and passed it off as my own work, or have I done something truly transformative?
The final image I'm displaying as my own art has no meaningful visual cues to the original image, as it's just lines and colors generated using the image as a seed, but I've also not applied any "human artistry" to it, as I've just run it through an algorithm.
Should I have to pay the original copywrite holder?
If so, what makes that fundamentally different from me looking at the copywritten image and drawing something that it inspired me to draw?
If not, what makes that fundamentally different from AI images?
Because you can be inspired, and a machine cannot? We don't give copyrights to monkeys, let alone fancy calculators.
I feel like you latched on to one sentence in my post and didn't engage with the rest of it at all.
That sentence, in your defense, was my most poorly articulated, but I feel like you responded devoid of any context.
Am I to take it, from your response, that you think that a fractal image that uses a copywritten image as a seed to it's random number generator would be copyright infringement?
If so, how much do I, as the creator, have to "transform" that base binary string to make it "fair use" in your mind? Are random but flips sufficient?
If so, how is me doing that different than having the machine do that as a tool? If not, how is that different than me editing the bits using a graphical tool?
That's only because I thought your last sentence was the biggest difference -- everything else is all stuff you did (or theoretically would do), which is the clincher.
(And besides, on Lemmy, comments with effort are sometimes disincentivized 😉)
Art can include buying a toilet and turning it on its side and calling it a fountain. And I imagine, in your scenario, that you could process an entire comic book by flipping just one pixel on each page, print it out, arrange it in a massive mural, and get it featured in the Louvre with the title "is this fair use?" But if you started printing out comic books en masse with the intent to simply resell them in their slightly changed form, you might get in trouble, and probably rightly so. But that's a question of fair use, isn't it?
Fair on all counts. I guess my counter then would be, what is AI art other than running a bunch of pieces of other art through a computer system, then adding some "stuff you did" (to use your phrase) via a prompt, and then submitting the output as your own art.
That's nearly identical to my fractal example, which I think you're saying would actually be fair use?
As far as I know, courts have basically decided that things need to be created by a person first and foremost, not by, say, a monkey (and yes there was an attempt to copyright a monkey selfie). In the flipped pixel example I personally classified as art, there was a lot more transformation than simply flipping a pixel, to the point where it hopefully transformed the original into having a new and unique intent.
You could theoretically make a piece of art where generative AI in a similar way, but it's the human element of composition that would make it art (or, at the very least, something novel and not just regurgitated). In theory, you could pull all of the works of a single comic artist, input it into generative AI and do the exact same thing, making a mural of This Is Not Wally Wood or something.
But hopping onto a generative AI that's been trained with the works of countless artists (and by no other AI networks, because AI degenerates when it trains itself) and simply typing in a phrase... Well, at that point it's closer to pushing a button on a machine that flicks paint onto a canvas, and you didn't make the machine, and it's used by thousands of other people everyday. Only so much paint flicking can be done before it's not particularly interesting or unique.
I think somebody made a relatively short (to me) video about whether AI art is even art...
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