We Asked A.I. to Create the Joker. It Generated a Copyrighted Image.::Artists and researchers are exposing copyrighted material hidden within A.I. tools, raising fresh legal questions.

  • @dragontamer
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    111 months ago

    You ever try to do a public performance of a copyrighted work, like “Happy Birthday to You” ??

    You get sued. Even if its from memory. Welcome to copyright law. There’s a reason why every restaraunt had to make up a new “Happy Happy Birthday, from the Birthday Crew” song.

    • @[email protected]
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      011 months ago

      Yeah, but until I perform it without a license for profit, I don’t get sued.

      So it’s up to the user to make sure that if any material that is generated is copyright infringing, it should not be used.

      • @dragontamer
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        111 months ago

        Otakon anime music videos have no profits but they explicitly get a license from RIAA to play songs in public.

        • @[email protected]
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          011 months ago

          So? I’m not saying those are fair terms, I would also prefer if that were not the case, but AI isn’t performing in public any more having a guitar with you in public is ripping off Metallica.

          • @dragontamer
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            11 months ago

            You don’t need to perform “for profit” to get sued for copyright infringement.

            but AI isn’t performing in public any more having a guitar with you in public is ripping off Metallica.

            Is the Joker image in that article derivative or substantially similar to a copyrighted work? Is the query available to anyone who uses Midjourney? Are the training weights being copied from server-to-server behind the scenes? Were the training weights derived from copyrighted data?

            • @[email protected]
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              011 months ago

              Yes and none of that matters in the slightest. By that logic the Library of Babel is also copyright infringement. By that logic my memory of the movie is copyright infringing even if I don’t do anything with it.

              • @dragontamer
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                111 months ago

                You’re taking a fictional work and trying to apply real world laws to it?

                Copyright assumes that Library of Babel would take up so much space as it’d be impossible to create.

                Which is true. Every possible combination of letters, spaces, and characters would never fit on anything in today’s universe (be it a 24 TB Hard Drive, or even a collection of thousands of them).

                Secondly: any computer-generated work is automatically non-copyrighted as per US Law.

                  • @dragontamer
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                    11 months ago

                    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel

                    That is just a website demonstrating the concept of a famous science fiction story. Everything I said above remains true.

                    1. No storage can hold that. Its likely a computer generated system.

                    2. Any computer generated set of text cannot be copyrighted.


                    Finding any particular book in that “library” would require an index that is the same length / entropy as a full length book in any case. So its a stupid thought experiment to any information theorist. (I’m a Comp. Engineer by trade and have been taught numerous theoretical comp. sci. problems from Nyquist Frequencies, theories on communication, entropy and other such concepts. So this is actually well within my wheelhouse, training an expertise).

                    Go search for a book in there that replicates Shakespeare’s Hamlet in its entirety. The only way that website could possibly work is if the link you give me has the same entropy / information space as all of Hamlet to begin with.


                    In the case of copyright law, the Website’s code (including its text generating engine and so forth) is subject to copyright. But the Quadrillion-pages of “text” (most of which is random-gibberish) is not copyrightable.