this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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I'm not so sure that's true, there have been several recent rulings that all reinforce that copyright can only be asserted on the output of actual humans. This even goes back to before the AI stuff, when PETA sued over those monkey selfies. It is quite clear that the output of an AI does not, itself, qualify for copyright protection, because it is not human.
Maybe if a human edits or works with the AI output, the end result might qualify. But then you also have to ask about what went into the AI composition. Here is where it gets less certain. The case of the Monkey Selfie is much clearer: the monkey stole the camera and took its own picture, and that creation was not derived from any other copyrighted work. But these AI are trained on a wide range of copyrighted works, and very few of those works were licensed for that purpose. I doubt that sucking everything into AI will be seen as a fair use of those works. This is different than a search engine, which ultimately steers the user toward the original work. This uses the original work to create something new (and inherently uncopyrightable, since a bot did it), and because of the way AI works it is impossible to credit the original sources.
Congress may have to step in and clarify this, but is probably not interested unless they can use it to harass Hunter Biden.
I was under the impression we were talking about using copyright to prevent a work from being used to train a generative model. There's nothing in copyright that says anything about training anything. I'm not even convinced there should be.
Well, of course there's nothing that can be used to prevent training an AI, just like there's nothing preventing monkeys from stealing cameras and taking pictures. It's what happens next that matters.
The Internet Archive didn't get sued over copyright, even though it had electronic copies of lots and lots of copyrighted works (and even let people "check out" copies), until they changed their distribution model to allow unlimited lending. Nothing about how they gathered their works changed, it was the change in distribution that got them sued.
The article is literally about someone suing to prevent their art from being used for training. That's the topic at hand.
Are you confused, or are you trying to shoehorn a different but related discussion into this one?
It says right in the article that they're suing over the training and the commercial use of the output. Their lawyer obviously felt that it was essential to include both parts of that, and I think it's because simply using a copyrighted work to train AI may not be infringing, but using it and the selling the output is.
I just don't think you can separate how the AI is trained from what the company intends to do with the trained AI. If they intend to sell their output, then I don't think that will be allowed in current copyright law.
You most certainly can. The discussion about whether copyright applies to the output is nuanced but certainly valid, and notably separate from whether copyright allows copyright holders to restrict who or what gets trained on their work after it's released for general consumption.