August has been "AI" awareness month on the blog. Lots of posts here will be added to the monthly sidebar for easy access. Here are some links for articles that were shared online by artists.
Tomshardware.com
“Google wants AI scraping to be “Fair Use”
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/google-ai-scraping-as-fair-use?fbclid=
Excerpt:
A primer on "Fair Use"...
“Fair
use, which is called Fair dealing in Australia and the UK, is a doctrine that
allows limited use of copyrighted materials without permission for the purpose
of criticism, commentary, news reporting, or research. Fair use is not an
absolute right, but an affirmative defense for someone who is facing a
copyright infringement lawsuit. The U.S. Copyright Office lists four criteria
American courts use to determine whether a use is fair:
Purpose
of the work: Is the goal of the use research, reporting, or commentary? Is the
use “transformative,” in that it adds something new or changes the character of
the work?
Nature
of the original work: Forms of creative expression – novels, songs, movies –
have more protection than those based on facts. Facts are not protected but the
expression of them is.
Amount
of the work reproduced: Did you use more of the original content than you
needed to?
Effect
upon the market for the original work: Does your material compete with the
original or make it less likely that people will purchase it? If so, that’s a
strike against fair use.
There’s
a lot of room for debate about whether using copyrighted material as training
data is “fair use” as a matter of law. The answer to the question may vary
based on whether the work Google takes is creative or factual. Journalistic
publications such as Tom’s Hardware deal primarily in facts, so we likely have
less protection than someone who wrote a novel. “
Also this excerpt on consent from the same article..
…
““Consent is very important,” Matthew Butterick, a lawyer who is involved in
several AI-related lawsuits, told me in an interview. “I don’t feel it should
be an opt out because it just puts the burden on the artist to basically be in
the mode of how are they going to possibly chase around all of these AI models
and all of these AI companies. It doesn’t make sense and it’s not actually
consistent with copyright. The idea of copyright is ‘I made it. It’s mine for this
duration of time; that’s what the law says and if you wanna use it, you’ve
gotta come deal with me. That’s the deal. It’s opt in. Opt out, I think, really
inverts the whole policy of U.S. copyright law.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Guardian
“the Professor’s great fear about AI? That it becomes the boss from
hell…”
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AP News
“Visual
artists fight back against AI companies for repurposing their work” by Jocelyn
Noveck and Matt O’Brien 8.31.23
Excerpt:
The case awaits a decision from a San Francisco federal judge, who has voiced some doubt about whether AI companies are infringing on copyrights when they analyze billions of images and spit out something different.
“We’re David against Goliath here,” (Kelly) McKernan says. “At the end of the day, someone’s profiting from my work. I had rent due yesterday, and I’m $200 short. That’s how desperate things are right now. And it just doesn’t feel right.”
The lawsuit may serve as an early bellwether of how hard it will be for all kinds of creators — Hollywood actors, novelists, musicians and computer programmers — to stop AI developers from profiting off what humans have made.
….. “In a few years, everyone can generate anything — video, images, text. Anything that you can describe, you can generate it in such a way that no human can tell the difference between AI-generated content and professional human-generated content,” Schuhmann said in an interview.
The idea that such a development is inevitable — that it is, essentially, the future — was at the heart of a U.S. Senate hearing in July in which Ben Brooks, head of public policy for Stability AI, acknowledged that artists are not paid for their images.
“There is no arrangement in place,” Brooks said, at which point Hawaii Democratic Sen. Mazie Hirono asked (Karla) Ortiz whether she had ever been compensated by AI makers.
“I have never been asked. I have never been credited. I have never been compensated one penny, and that’s for the use of almost the entirety of my work, both personal and commercial, senator,” she replied.
You could hear the fury in the voice of Ortiz, also 37, of San Francisco, a concept artist and illustrator in the entertainment industry. Her work has been used in movies including “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3,” “Loki,” “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” “Jurassic World” and “Doctor Strange.” In the latter, she was responsible for the design of Doctor Strange’s costume.
“We’re kind of the blue-collar workers within the art world,” Ortiz said in an interview. “We provide visuals for movies or games. We’re the first people to take a stab at, what does a visual look like? And that provides a blueprint for the rest of the production.”….
…. And if the technology is this good now, she adds, what will it be like in a few years?
“My fear is that our industry will be diminished to such a point that very few of us can make a living,” Ortiz says, anticipating that artists will be tasked with simply editing AI-generated images, rather than creating. “The fun parts of my job, the things that make artists live and breathe — all of that is outsourced to a machine.”
McKernan, too, fears what is yet to come: “Will I even have work a year from now?”
For now, both artists are throwing themselves into the legal fight — a fight that centers on preserving what makes people human, says McKernan, whose Instagram profile reads: “Advocating for human artists.”
“I
mean, that’s what makes me want to be alive,” says the artist, referring to the
process of artistic creation. The battle is worth fighting “because that’s what
being human is to me.”
--------------------------------------------
Hollywood
Reporter
“Scraping
or Stealing? A Legal Reckoning Over AI Loom” By Winston Cho 8.22.23
Excerpt: "For nearly 20 years, Karla Ortiz has worked as a concept artist, bringing to life an entire universe of characters in projects like Black Panther, Avengers: Infinity War and Thor: Ragnarok. She’s credited with coming up with the main character design for Doctor Strange in her own blend of impressionist and magic realism styles honed by decades of practice.
She
was horrified to learn last year that her work at the forefront of
multibillion-dollar franchises is being used to train generative artificial
intelligence systems without her knowledge or consent. Imitations of her work
are now floating all across the web. Her name has been fed into Midjourney, an
AI art generator, more than 2,500 times to create art that looks like hers.
She’s been paid nothing.
“You work your entire life to do what you do as a creative, and for a company to profit off that — literally take your work to train a model that’s attempting to replicate you — it makes me sick,” Ortiz tells The Hollywood Reporter.
Ortiz is one of three artists suing AI art generators Stability AI, Midjourney and DeviantArt for using their work to train generative AI systems. The first-of-its-kind suit will test the boundaries of copyright law and could be one of a few cases that decide the legality of the way large language models are trained…..
…. Engineers build AI art generators by feeding AI systems, known as large language models, voluminous databases of images downloaded from the internet without licenses. The artists’ suit revolves around the argument that the practice of feeding these systems copyrighted works constitutes intellectual property theft. A finding of infringement in the case may upend how most AI systems are built in the absence of regulation placing guardrails around the industry. If the AI firms are found to have infringed on any copyrights, they may be forced to destroy datasets that have been trained on copyrighted works. They also face stiff penalties of up to $150,000 for each infringement.
AI companies maintain that their conduct is protected by fair use, which allows for the utilization of copyrighted works without permission as long as that use is transformative. The doctrine permits unlicensed use of copyrighted works under limited circumstances. The factors that determine whether a work qualifies include the purpose of the use, the degree of similarity, and the impact of the derivative work on the market for the original. Central to the artists’ case is winning the argument that the AI systems don’t create works of “transformative use,” defined as when the purpose of the copyrighted work is altered to create something with a new meaning or message.
Responding
to the proposed class action from artists, Stability AI countered in a
statement that “anyone that believes that this isn’t fair use does not
understand the technology and misunderstands the law.”
Update 9.18.23 -- You Tube video "AI art is going to have consequences" from channel TB Skyen circa March 2023.
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