this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2024
407 points (96.1% liked)
Technology
59415 readers
3859 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Generally you're correct, but copyright law does concern itself with learning. Fair use exemptions require consideration of the purpose character of use, explicitly mentioning nonprofit educational purposes. It also mentions the effect on the potential market for the original work. (There are other factors required but they're less relevant here.)
So yeah, tracing a comic book to learn drawing is totally fine, as long as that's what you're doing it for. Tracing a comic to reproduce and sell is totally not fine, and that's basically what OpenAI is doing here: slurping up whole works to improve their saleable product, which can generate new works to compete with the originals.
What about the case where you're tracing a comic to learn how to draw with the intent of using the new skills to compete with who you learned from?
Point of the question being, they're not processing the images to make exact duplicates like tracing would.
It's significantly closer to copying a style, which you can't own.
Still a copyright violation, especially if you make it publicly available and claim the work as your own for commercial purposes. At the very minimum, tracing without fully attributing the original work is considered to be in poor enough taste that most art sites will permaban you for doing it, no questions asked.
In the analogy being developed though, they're not making it available.
The initial argument was that tracing something to practice and learn was fine.
Which is why I said, what if you trace to practice, and then draw something independent to try to compete?
To remove the analogy: most generative AI systems don't actually directly reproduce works unless you jump through some very specific and questionable hoops. (If and when they do, that's a problem and needs to not happen).
A lot of the copyright arguments boil down to "it's wrong for you to look at this picture for the wrong reasons", or to wanting to build a protectionist system for creators.
It's totally legit to want to build a protectionist system, but it feels disingenuous to argue that our current system restricts how freely distributed content is used beyond restrictions on making copies or redistribution.
I meant "learning" in the strict sense, not institutional education.
I think you are simply mistaken about what AI is typically doing. You can test your "tracing" analogy by making an image with Stable Diffusion. It's trained only on images from the public internet, so if the generated image is similar to one in the training data, then a reverse image search should turn it up.