Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.
Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist
7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
view the rest of the comments
Why?
Well, why shouldn't they have to pay artists a license to use their work, especially in ways that could drastically affect the market?
There is a thing called copyright, and the exception to that rule is called fair use.
Artwork is copyrighted by default and, under the law, to use someone else's copyrighted works requires a license (that is usually bought). Whether AI training counts as fair use is the question and ultimately that is the point that will need to be proved/justified.
So again, what makes AI "fair use" and why shouldn't companies have to pay a license for their use of copyrighted artwork?
If you look at a hundred paintings of faces and then make your own painting of a face, you're not expected to pay all the artists that you used to get an understanding of what a face looks like.
Even if AI companies were to pay the artists and had billions of dollars to do it, each individual artist would receive a tiny amount, because these datasets are so large.
Much more realistically, they would just retrain their models using data they can use for free.
Btw, I don't think this is a fair use question, it's really a question of whether the generated images are derivatives of the training data.
I don't really think that's a problem. If a company is generating $X.00 in revenue using AI generated work, some percentage of that revenue should probably be going to the artists whose work was used in training that model, even if it's a fraction of a fraction of a cent per image generated.
The problem is that it's a fraction of a fraction of a cent per image used during training, over the lifetime of the model.
But then you need to factor in that the rights holders would need to agree to that. AI companies don't get to simply decide what peoples work is worth, they need a licensing agreement. (Otherwise they need to successfully argue that what they're doing is fair use.)
And when you add it up and realize that "AI" is a black box based off a training dataset of thousands (if not millions) of pieces of copyrighted artwork, all the sudden you start to see the profit margins on your magical art machine (POOF!) disappear. Oh, won't someone think about the tech venture capitalists?!