this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2023
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I pay OpenAI for a chat and image generation service. If I make Mario or something random, I pay them the same amount. If I go sell those pictures of Mario that I made with the service then I am liable for infringement, not OpenAI. OpenAI is not charging me more for making Mario or anything else.
Same as if I draw Mario to keep privately or draw him and sell the images. Adobe is never mentioned as a liability even though I used that software to infringe and paid Adobe for the ability to do so.
Please tell me how it’s different. Don’t tell me scale because they don’t care if it’s one or 1 million Marios. If someone was making money on a million Marios they would be sued independently, whether or not they used AI.
The short version is that it's a licensing issue. All art is free to view, but the moment you try to integrate it into a commercial product/service you'll owe someone money unless the artist is given fair compensation in some other form.
For example, artists agree to provide a usage license to popular art sites to host and display their works. That license does not transfer to the guy/company scraping portfolios to fuel their AI. Unfortunately, as we can see from the article, AI may be able to generate but it still lacks imagination and inspiration; traits fundamental to creating truly derivative works. When money exchanges hands that denies the artist compensation because the work was never licensed and they are excluded from their portion of the sale.
Another example: I am a photographer uploading my images to a stock image site. As part of ToS I agree to provide a license to host, display, and relicense to buyers on my behalf. The stock site now offers an AI that create new images based on its portfolio. The catch is that all attributed works result in a monetary payment to the artists. When buyers license AI generated works based on my images I get a percentage of the sale. The stock site is legally compliant because it has a license to use my work, and I receive fair compensation when the images are used. The cycle is complete.
It gets trickier in practice, but licensing and compensation is the crux of the matter.
That seems easy enough to put into a disclaimer to put into the tools: "Don't use this to make money off copywrited characters"
That's fine, but not the primary issue.
At some point these companies will need to get licenses for any copyrighted work that was part of the training data, or start over with public domain works only. The art may be data, but that data has legal owners whose rights grant control over it's use.
Another way to think about is proprietary code. You can see it and learn from it at your leisure. But to use it commercially requires a license, one that clearly defines what can and cannot be done with it, as well as fair compensation.