Why don't people get that AI copyright fuzzing is bad?
Speaking as a creative who also has gotten paid for creative work, I'm a bit flustered at how brazenly people just wax poetic about the need for copyright law, especially when the creator or artist them selves are never really considered in the first place.
It's not like yee olde piracy, which can even be ethical (like videogames being unpublished and almost erased from history), but a new form whereby small companies get to join large publishers in screwing over the standalone creator - except this time it isn't by way of predatory contracts, but by sidestepping the creator and farming data from the creator to recreate the same style and form, which could've taken years - even decades to develop.
There's also this idea that "all work is derivative anyways, nothing is original", but that sidesteps the points of having worked to form a style over nigh decades and making a living off it when someone can just come along and undo all that with a press of a button.
If you're libertarian and anarchist, be honest about that. Seems like there are a ton of tech bros who are libertarian and subversive about it to feel smort (the GPL is important btw). But at the end of the day the hidden agenda is clear: someone wants to benifit from somebody else's work without paying them and find the mental and emotional justification to do so. This is bad, because they then justify taking food out of somebody's mouth, which is par for the course in the current economic system.
It's just more proof in the pudding that the capitalist system doesn't work and will always screw the labourer in some way. It's quite possible that only the most famous of artists will be making money directly off their work in the future, similarly to musicians.
As an aside, Jay-Z and Taylor Swift complaining about not getting enough money from Spotify is tone-deaf, because they know they get the bulk of that money anyways, even the money of some account that only plays the same small bands all the time, because of the payout model of Spotify. So the big ones will always, always be more "legitimate" than small artists and in that case they've probably already paid writers and such, but maybe not.. looking at you, Jay-Z.
If the copyright cases get overwritten by the letigous lot known as corporate lawyers and they manage to finger holes into legislation that benifits both IP farmers and corporate interests, by way of models that train AI to be "far enough" away from the source material, we might see a lot of people loose their livelihoods.
Make it make sense, Beehaw =(
So.. first things first. I'm a happy Midjourney user and post quite a bit of stuff over at one of the other Lemmy communities (same name, different account). But, I only use the AI for fun and never for profit. I can give tons of justifications but in the end it comes down to this: I'm a crappy artist and I have a vivid imagination. AI gives me an outlet to visualize the things in my head and the rush of seeing them in real is really nice.
That being said. One of the things I don't do, is write prompts like "in the style of ....". Specifically because I don't want it to be a copy of someone's work, even if it is for personal use. It feels (and obviously is) wrong.
Maybe not a perfect solution, but they should remove all the artist names (those alive or less than 50(?) years dead) from the current models. If your name isn't in it, then it'll be a lot harder to recreate your style.
In the longer run, a register of what prompt and which model were used for AI generated images might help with copyright claims? The EU is already busy with legislation for registering AI models. This might be a logical follow-up?
I'm just throwing out ideas at this point. I'm not an expert in any of these fields (AI, legal, copyright, etc.) All I know is that it would definitely be a net loss for society if small artists are no longer able to make a living practicing their profession.
Harder, but not imposible. There are already prompt dictionaries out there, and if you check some mobile apps that offer AI art generation, you can see how they offer "styles" that clearly append some behind the scenes settings to the prompt. Some also carry prompt dictionaries directly.
Midjourney is also just a centralized version of stable diffusion, you can run the software on your own, with whatever LoRA modifiers you want, including one "in the style of [...]".
Too bad.. I was hoping this could be a temporary fix. At least to weed out the laziest copy cats.
Well, sure, it could weed out the laziest... just not the barely less lazy.
For example, the other day someone commented they'd draw a "sexy nurse Napoleon" if they knew how... so just out of curiosity, I checked out some stable diffusion apps and websites. Some would ban the word "sexy"... but with minimal effort, I found one that not only accepted the word, but seemed to go waaay overboard in its interpretation, to the point that it overwhelmed the "Napoleon" part. To tame it down, the best I managed was an "anime Napoleon in a sexy pose, wearing a nurse hat"... which happened to look very similar to "cool Napoleon with nurse hat" in the one that banned "sexy". If I went offline and ran some more detailed prompts directly on stable diffusion with the right LoRAs, I bet I could make it spit out anything imaginable.