Edit: haven't followed the law in a while, but you could definitely copy, digitalize and scan documents for yourself and your friends (copia privada).
There is a reason why we call it styles, because it’s a recognizable pattern someone came up with maybe after decades of work.
You don't even need to have a legally acquired source material to produce work in a certain style.
The new reality allows for original creators to actually track the chain, so we're in this situation.
If one or two people take an apple from your tree it’s not a big deal, if a machine takes 10,000 it is.
So if scan a book you are making a copy. In some copyright jurisdictions this is allowed for individuals under a private copying exception - a copyright opt out, if you like - but the important thing is private use. In some jurisdictions there is also a fair use exception, which allows you to exploit the rights protected by copyright under certain circumstances, but fair use is quite specific and one big issue with fair use is that the rights you are exploiting cannot result in something that competes with the original work.
Other acts restricted by copyright include distribution, adaptation, performance, communication and rental.
So if you copy a book, digitize it, and write a program to analyze the word frequencies it contains you may, in some jurisdictions but not all, be allowed to do this.
If you’re doing it locally on your own machine you are simply copying it. If you do it in the cloud you are copying it and communicating the copy. If you copy it, analyze it and train an AI model on it that could be considered fair use in certain jurisdictions. Whether the outputs are adaptations of the training data is a matter of debate in the copyright community.
But importantly if you commercialise that model and the resulting outputs compete with the copyright protected material you used to train, your fair use argument may fail.
So when you buy a book you are actually party to what is effectively a licence granted by the copyright holder, albeit it to the publisher. But as the end user of the book you are still restricted in what you can do with that copyright protected work, through a universal end user licence encoded in law.
And I think same could happen to LLM. If it took all the fossil fuel on Earth just to barely able to drive a car to a car wash, there's more things wrong with the car than in the oil price.
Where did you get that idea. Global economy is ~200T/year PPP. 0.1% of that split across every artist you want the training data from would be insanely difficult for the vast majority of them to turn down. Which makes sense as art isn’t that big a percentage of the global economy compared to say housing, food, medical care, infrastructure, military spending etc.
Obviously the incentive to take without compensation is far more appealing, but that doesn’t mean it was impossible to make a reasonable offer.
That's kind of an interesting concept: "since the scale of my transgression was so big, I should get away with it scot-free."
To a degree it is protected, but not by copyright. Design patents are a thing and companies have sued each other over them (Apple vs Samsung during the "smartphone wars" comes to mind)
Kapwing is specifically designed for artists to share IP with other people in an IP-friendly and financially profitable way. A 'consumer' on Kapwing is not the same as an ordinary person browsing for AI generated art, and the fact that people who make money from selling their IP on there are in favour of expanding IP law shouldn't be a surprise.
All this really tells us is that Kapwing's artist community believe protecting their individual art style is more valuable to them than any money they'd earn from licensing it on a per-image basis to Kapwing's AI tool. I'd be willing to bet that if Kapwing changed the offer to a flat-fee-of-$50,000-a-year-plus-per-image-fee they'd find 99% of artists on there changed their minds. As with most things, people feel strongly about their rights all the way up until the price is right.
I'm staunchly against expansion of IP laws. But I personally think that when a corporate machine gobbles up an artist's works so that people like me who can't draw can generate silly memes for a few bucks a month, the artist should be compensated. The company is profiting off of other people's work! That's not right.
The mechanism by which compensation is calculated appears to be an unsolved problem currently though.
What's wrong with it?
We live in an interconnected world. Every company or individual who profits off anything does so, in very large part, thanks to work left behind by others that they don't directly compensate each other for.
Stated differently, if we look at the other side of the coin, it's one thing to create value, and another thing to capture value. If you are a business (and artists seeking profit are businesses), you create value then try to capture that value. Creating value and trying to capture (in the form of profit) is the entire name of the game. But no business captures 100% the value they create. If you make a product/artwork/service/whatever and release it to the public, lots of people may use it, view it, be inspired by it, learn from it, and ultimately profit off it in their own way without you necessarily being able to capture some part of it. And what's wrong with that?
Do we really want the entire world to be endlessly full of cookie-licking rent seekers who demand profit every time anyone does anything? Because they failed to capture the value they created, and thus demand a piece of the pie from those who are better at capturing value?
I like the way Thomas Jefferson put it:
> If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea.
The starving artists I know would be extremely happy to get even one cookie to lick. I know an artist prodogy that paints on canvas and has work in a sizable gallery, at least one institution patron, and is constantly hosting paid workshop events. He architected and built his own custom 40ft ceiling pine art house covered in beautful stained wood and arches, with large metal cuttings and engravings of wild horses on the railings. This artistic prodigy is still starving and works as a handyman/construction worker part-time. He is strongly opposed to AI, by the way.
Most artists are "starving artists"; there are extremely few artists that can support themselves by their creations alone. Many artists make no money at all, and many artists seem to work or create alone as individuals, meaning that they almost always lack the funds or community resources to protect their creative work.
No, far better that we have four rent-seekers who gobble up everything that anyone is naive enough to share with the world, then turn around to demand profit in order to keep up with the new pace of the world that they’ve created.
PS: I categorically disagree that AI developers are rent-seekers, unless they require rent for the products their models generate
It's not. This total depends on how you ask it.
Q: Do you think artists deserved payment?
A: YES.
Q: Will you pay for art?
A: MAYBE.
Q: Do you think people should go to jail not paying for art
A: NO.
Since the didn't, they should go to jail. The same way I would have gone to jail if I built Sora in my basement and sold it to the public.
That is the gap in the legal landscape.
Just because you obfuscate what's happening by calling it "learning" and pretending your model is actually just looking at pictures the same as a human, doesn't make it true.
I can assure you, that you didn't grant a license with an exclusive list of operations that can be performed on your work of art. At best you may have had something like "no commercial use" clause and general broad terms.
Here, for example, any comment is open to read and respond to. On ArXiv any paper can be downloaded, read and cited. Wikipedia contains text from many thousands of editors, building on each other. We like collaboration more than asserting our exclusivity rights. That is why these places provide better quality than work for direct profit or, God forbid, ad revenue, that is where the slop starts flowing.
But including your art in the training data is fair use (or otherwise exempt) by most standards, as no reproduction occurs. You are advocating for a change to IP law to make it more restrictive.
The four factors of fair use in the US:
> the purpose and character of your use
Commercial, for-profit. Not scholarship, not research, not commentary, not parody, etc.
> the nature of the copyrighted work
Absolutely everything. Artistic, creative, not purely factual.
> the amount and substantiality of the portion taken, and
All of it, from everyone.
> the effect of the use upon the potential market.
Directly competing with those whose data was copied.
> All of it, from everyone.
Yea I'd like to see how drawing two circles violates the copyright of drawing one circle!
In addition, the idea that you need to pay rent on *your observation* of someone else's work is absurd. No one pays Newton's descendants for making lifts or hosting bungee jump sport activities.
So would the model work if it only trained on the top 10% of pixels in every image? Or do they in fact need the entire image before they begin processing it, and therefore use the entire image?
> In addition, the idea that you need to pay rent on your observation of someone else's work is absurd.
I agree that's absurd. But training a model is no more "observing images" than an F1 car is "walking" down a race track. Just because a race car uses kinetic energy, gravity, and friction to propel itself, the same way a human does, doesn't mean it's doing the same thing as a human. That comparison you're making is the real absurdity.
Or a more realistic scenario: what if I translate it to Spanish without license from the author? That's not allowed, and yet I have "transformed" the work in the same way that an LLM does.
> Is it transformative if I take all the pages in Hanya Yanagiharas A Little Life and use a thesaurus to change every second word?
If you meant it literally.. I'd think that such a version would be a sort of parody. It'd be up to lawyers doing their cross-examinations to prove the work was intended for such a purpose though..
> Or a more realistic scenario: what if I translate it to Spanish without license from the author? That's not allowed, and yet I have "transformed" the work in the same way that an LLM does.
Probably a lawyer would answer this better than me, but the 'content' is the same and would violate copyright. There's also other factors, like if it was translated/distributed for free.
Besides that I regard that LLMs to hold mathematical observations in contrast to a translated work. So long as the user ensures the output isn't close to what's already available imo it fits the transformative criteria.
It shouldn't be!
Don't forget how polling works. Change the wording of the question and you get a different answer.
Try asking them if they think Comcast or Sony should be able to sue individuals for posting memes that don't even contain any copyrighted material.