AI Art Seething General

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However I have yet to see any AI that really captures me or enthralls me like alot of my favorite hand-made art does
Thing is you're comparing your favourites to non favourites. If I went and organised my download folder so there was one folder of my absolute favourite images from over the years then yea nothing would come close, not even high quality human art. Especially if you're talking about things with actual meaning that belong in an art gallery instead of twitter fanart but even as someone who will sing the praises of AI stuff, even the best of the best is far from art gallery quality. If you're not following quality ai posters then you will probably never see anything good, you'll probably only ever see dogshit shared to laugh at it. Honestly if I didn't say anything you probably wouldn't even be able to tell it's ai. I've posted a fair few shitposts on reddit in like autism fuel games and half the time people say like 'ewwww someone really spent their spare time drawing this'.

But personally that emotional bridge got crossed a few months ago. In the same week someone posted a lora for something I've tried and failed to make for years now, and I remade one of my old loras but on IL instead of sd1.5. The things I can make now do genuinely bring me that same feeling that twitter fanart does. Most days seeing the output of the ai generators is simply just better than anything on twitter. And there are seldom few posts I see on twitter that bring the same emotional response as the ai stuff does (when it works at least) much less specifically the same happiness of seeing my favourite character. The only thing nowadays that could make me feel happier than the ai output is if my absolute favourite artist started posting again, especially as she's a personal friend I kinda miss but I highly doubt that will happen unfortunately.
 
I have another trolling idea if anyone can be fucked.

You know these super generic twitter karmafarm tier posts of people screenshotting a single person calling their art AI generated, or the ones where they retweet AI stuff and say 'wow this looks bad I make art with my hands and art supplies from the art store I bought with my art commission money'. I saw this.
ebfrhefr - Copy.webp

And yea no I can see where the person is coming from, on first glance it does look kinda AI generated. Thing is nowadays the detectors are so dogshit that they can't even be fucked to do the most basic of tests. I have put images into detectors with the fucking prompt and AI generator website in the metadata in plaintext for anyone to see, yet most of the detectors will tell me that it's almost certainly human made. I reckon you could post something like this, claim someone falsely accused you of using AI and gaslight a shit load of people into believing AI stuff is real, maybe even get a nice following off of it.
 
Warning: long sperg essay ahead. I feel like matters of copyright and fair use affect KF rather deeply and wanted to give this issue the attention it deserves.

The US Copyright Office has waded into the AI/fair use legal battle and ignited some controversy in the process. Their latest conclusions could have far-reaching impact on AI development, and more broadly how fair use is interpreted.

The USCO has been gradually developing a series of reports on the subject of AI and how they are planning to treat it moving forward. They've released three of them:

Part 1 - Where they stress the need for regulation regarding unauthorized replicas and deepfakes, but acknowledge that style cannot be copyrighted: https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyri...telligence-Part-1-Digital-Replicas-Report.pdf (archive)

Part 2 - Where they find that raw AI prompting likely doesn't rise to the level of copyrightability, but even minor edits that show human authorship like inpainting are often enough to to make an AI work copyrightable, and to date, the USCO has already granted over 1000 copyrights to AI works: https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyri...telligence-Part-2-Copyrightability-Report.pdf (archive)

Part 3 (Pre-publication) - Where they declare that AI training is likely not fair use: https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyri...I-Training-Report-Pre-Publication-Version.pdf (archive)

It is this third report which has understandably generated a lot of hubbub and controversy.

It was published on May 9th as a "pre-publication" version. Copyright Lately (a) notes that it is not standard practice to release such reports this way. The same day, the Trump administration fired the Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, and on the following day the head of the Copyright Office, Shira Perlmutter, was also fired. There is rampant speculation that their firings are due to this report. You'll find many confident declarations of this on social media and comments sections, though there is no official statement confirming this.

The Register (a) speculates that the timing of this firing might just be coincidental:

There’s another possible explanation for Perlmutter’s ousting: The Copyright Office is a department of the Library of Congress, whose leader was last week fired on grounds of “quite concerning things that she had done … in the pursuit of DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] and putting inappropriate books in the library for children," according to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.

So maybe this is just the Trump administration enacting its policy on diversity without regard to the report’s possible impact on donors or Elon Musk.

Regardless, this latest report is deeply flawed, seemingly partisan, and attempts to reinterpret fair use in concerning ways. Even though the USCO aren't lawmakers, the report could have a troubling impact on ongoing and future court cases regarding AI, the idea of fair use, and the scope of where the Copyright Office is allowed to poke their nose into ongoing litigation.

Here's a copyright law professor's take on the report:

https://chatgptiseatingtheworld.com...s-flawed-both-procedurally-and-substantively/ (archive)

Advising Congress is one thing. But making rulings on each factor of fair use based in part on comments submitted from some of the parties on both sides in the 36 copyright lawsuits being litigated in courts is quite another.

Indeed, I cannot think of any novel legal issue related to fair use in the pending 36 copyright lawsuits–from transformative purpose in AI training, use of pirated books datasets, deployment of AI in RAG search, and a new and untested theory of market dilution–that the Copyright Office didn’t rule on.

And by “rule on,” I mean the Office took a legal position, favoring one side or even party in the litigation.

Section 701 of the Copyright Act does not authorize the Copyright Office to hold its own shadow proceeding ruling on legal issues being raised by parties in active litigation. To do so usurps the province of the federal courts, especially given that fair use is a quintessentially judge-made doctrine. It’s for the courts, not the Copyright Office, to embark on “uncharted territory” in fair use. If the Office wanted to give its opinions on live controversies involving fair use, the proper procedure for the Office to use is filing an amicus brief in the pending litigation, which comports with due process and gives the opponent a chance to respond to the Office’s views. Indeed, the Copyright Office’s Report is itself unprecedented. To my knowledge, the Office has not ever issued a Report taking the side of one party in active litigation on novel issues of copyright law.

I am not a lawyer. I am just a retard on the Internet. But it isn't difficult to read parts of this report and question how their claims make any sense if applied to other examples of what's considered fair use.

I'm going to focus on one specific section which I see as particularly ridiculous: their take on fair use factor three, "the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole." While no one factor of fair use is necessarily more important than the others, their examination of this point at least highlights some of the flaws in their judgement.

The USCO's commentary on "the amount used" is on page 55. In a 113 page report, this factor is glossed over in only two paragraphs:

The Supreme Court has said that courts assessing the amount and substantiality must consider both the quantity of material used and its quality and importance. Copying even a small portion of a work may weigh against fair use where it is the “heart” of the work. In general, “[t]he larger the amount, or the more important the part, of the original that is copied, the greater the likelihood that the secondary work might serve as an effectively competing substitute for the original, and might therefore diminish the original rights holder's sales and profits.”

Downloading works, curating them into a training dataset, and training on that dataset generally involve using all or substantially all of those works. Such wholesale taking ordinarily weighs against fair use.

Where to even start.

Downloading and organizing works prior to publishing anything with them is not considered "use" at that point. An artist might download hundreds of pose references in order to draw a character which isn't substantially similar to any of those references. That doesn't mean their drawing "used" all of those works, since they're not present anywhere in the final drawing. If downloading those works was piracy or illegal for some reason, that would be its own separate matter...and in general, web scraping of publicly available data has been established as a legal practice in the US. Fair use is about how the work you used is present in the final result you share with the world, there isn't a "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine where the works you reference during the creation process get you into trouble.

To say that training AI involves using "all" of the work is laughable. A completed AI model does not store any of the works it trained on. There's a pervasive myth that AI "chops up" pictures into smaller chunks and copies and pastes them together, but that's not how generative AI works. AI is a complex field and difficult to explain, but gen AI models are a series of mathematical weights and vectors that help the model diffuse an image from noise. It gets hardly any information from an individual image. Models are trained on billions of images but the finished product is only a few gigabytes. If it was somehow compressing the images it trained on, it would be the most impossibly mindblowing compression known to man. It's true that some images end up getting memorized by the model, but these are errors in the training process, instances where one image made its way into the dataset thousands of times and was trained on repeatedly. In general, every image should only be looked at once, and this won't be enough to reproduce any of it substantially.

For most modern diffusion models, when AI trains on an image, it looks at it and "learns" somewhere from two to five bytes from it, and those bytes don't even really represent the image. It's baffling to claim that "all" of the image is in those two to five bytes. That's fucking nothing. It's barely even enough data to write one word.

Compare this to other longstanding examples of fair use.

Look at Wikipedia's plot summaries of movies and books. Does it make any sense to say that a summary of The Avengers used "all" of the movie because the wiki editor had to watch the entire movie in order to write their summary of it? Or does it use basically nothing of the movie, because that text summary doesn't contain any screenshots, music, sound, or lines of dialogue?

If you summarize the broad points covered by Nick Rekieta during an unhinged rant on stream, did you use all of the stream because you had to watch it in order to know those points?

Here's a random case where the court ruled in favor of fair use: https://www.arl.org/blog/celebrating-fair-use-in-films/ (archive)
Documentary filmmakers have relied heavily on the doctrine of fair use, which makes a lot of sense. If documentary filmmakers constantly had to rely on permission and licenses—which would also mean that a rightholder could refuse to grant permission—the result could be that these documentaries lacked proper historical references and context. In a 1996 case, the Southern District of New York refused to grant Turner Broadcasting’s motion for injunctive relief, finding that the clips of a boxing match film involving Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in a documentary about Muhammad Ali was likely a fair use. In Monster Communications, Inc. v. Turner Broadcasting Systems, the court noted that only a small portion of the total film—just 41 seconds—was taken and that the documentary used it for informational purposes.

Ah, but did the court consider that the documentarians had to watch the entire film in order to find the 41 seconds they ended up using? The USCO would say that they used all of it.

That's the pants-on-head retardation we're talking about here.

There's a substantial footnote below the Copyright Office's declaration that AI training uses all of the works it trains on. I wonder where they got this idea that looking at something means you used all of it.

See NMPA Initial Comments at 10 (“When a pre-existing work is used to train an AI model, it is analyzed in its entirety. For some models, developers will compress each training example into a compact representation and then cause the developing model to predictively reconstruct it.“); Karla Ortiz Initial Comments (“I found that almost the entire body of my work, the work of almost every artist I know, and the work of hundreds of thousands of other artists, was taken without our consent, credit or compensation to train these for-profit technologies.”); Katherine Lee et al. Initial Comments at 100. Some have argued that generative AI training in fact uses little of the training data. See Meta Initial Comments at 15 (stating the process “meant to extract, relatively speaking, a miniscule amount of information from each piece of training data.”); Oren Bracha, The Work of Copyright in the Age of Machine Production, UNIV. OF TEXAS LAW 1, 25 (last updated Feb. 16, 2024), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4581738 (arguing that what developers take in the training process is not protectible expression at all but a form of “meta information” about the works). As discussed above, however, the Office finds that the training process regularly uses expressive elements of the underlying works. See supra text accompanying notes 268–71.

Oh, it's based on the word of plaintiff litigants who want to stop AI training. Lovely. When the National Music Publishers' Association tells you that AI uses every bit of the works it trains on, don't you just find that to be completely trustworthy?

The fact that they cite Karla Ortiz of all people, as if she was some kind of expert on these matters...Karla is a metaphorically blue-haired sperg who was one of the first artists to fly into a rage and sue every AI company under the sun before knowing anything about it, and as a result had the majority of her case thrown out. (a) Most embarrassingly, she was trying to sue for copyright infringement on her works without even having registered them with the Copyright Office. Her quote above about how the entire body of her work was taken was from 2022, at a time when she would've had no way of knowing or proving whether any of her works had been trained on by AI. And beyond that, this quote has nothing to do with whether or not the technical process of training AI uses all of a work in training. She knows nothing about generative AI and has no capacity to speak on whether or not training uses all or most of a work, so why is the Copyright Office treating her like an authority on the subject?

"The Office finds that the training process regularly uses expressive elements of the underlying works." Really? Which works are infringed upon? Because it doesn't collect enough information from one image to possess any of its expressive elements. It's true that after examining many works you can create something that seems expressive in a way that those works share in common, something like a common pose or a way of framing a car in an advertisement, but no individual work had its expressive elements taken. It's not physically possible with the amount of data we're talking about.

The whole thing is a shitshow, and I hope Perlmutter WAS fired for this report. It would threaten the very idea of fair use if it had any legal bearing whatsoever, which it still might, if it ends up cited by any judges in their upcoming rulings.
 
There's a pervasive myth that AI "chops up" pictures into smaller chunks and copies and pastes them together, but that's not how generative AI works.
The irony is that this is used as an argument as to why AI isnt fair use, but there are entire mediums of art like collage that literally works like this which do count as fair use. It's a counterintuitive argument.
 
The US Copyright Office has waded into the AI/fair use legal battle and ignited some controversy in the process. Their latest conclusions could have far-reaching impact on AI development, and more broadly how fair use is interpreted.
I wish every copyright lawyer a very happy death from kidney stone induced urethral bleeding.
 
Bottom line is that you can't declare that AI training is copyright infringement without directly criminalizing inspiration and the use of reference material. These anti-AI dipshit retards can't see the five feet in front of their faces necessary to realize that they are walking into a minefield going the way they insist.
 
These anti-AI dipshit retards can't see the five feet in front of their faces necessary to realize that they are walking into a minefield going the way they insist.
You're talking about people who forced copyright protections to be 10x as long as they were originally intended because despite being coke addicts and paedophiles the big men in charge of hollywood didn't want their precious mouse to do something as disgusting as say a fuck word because that's just one step too far. Are you surprised that the jews just want more money and protection instead of actually giving a shit about logic or any of those silly concepts?
 
So-called training very obviously isn't fair use. So-called generative AI right now is nothing more than copyright laundering. I don't want to live in a world with copyright, but I want to live in a world where only corporations have copyright even less.
It gets hardly any information from an individual image.
That's another way of saying it gets information from every individual image. If each image were truly so unimportant, then they shouldn't be used.
It's true that some images end up getting memorized by the model, but these are errors in the training process
Right, errors.
Look at Wikipedia's plot summaries of movies and books. Does it make any sense to say that a summary of The Avengers used "all" of the movie because the wiki editor had to watch the entire movie in order to write their summary of it? Or does it use basically nothing of the movie, because that text summary doesn't contain any screenshots, music, sound, or lines of dialogue?
There's a difference when a machine does something and when a human does something. Video surveillance is one good example.

My work has wound up in these models too, and there are many examples of the coding models just copying work in a way that would be illegal were MicroSoft not the culprit.
 
The Register (a) speculates that the timing of this firing might just be coincidental:
I'm not sure if it's coincidental or not but considering the timing, anyone who supervised the process that led to this "report," which almost reads like the Copyright Office thinks it's actually a court, probably should be fired.
 
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criminalizing inspiration and the use of reference material.
It should be said admitting to being influenced in a copyright case can work against claims of fair use.


There's a difference when a machine does something and when a human does something. Video surveillance is one good example.
How is that a good example? Is it any better if a human was intruding on my privacy compared to an unthinking unfeeling cold machine? If anything I rather not want a Reddit moderator or a Karen looking through my activities just as much as I don't want it being done with an AI system. The mechanism of the surveillance is irrelevant, accuracy or efficiency be damned, I rather there be limited or no surveillance, period.
 
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How is that a good example? Is it any better if a human was intruding on my privacy compared to an unthinking unfeeling cold machine?
Yes, because there aren't hundreds of millions of humans who watch constantly and have perfect memories.
The mechanism of the surveillance is irrelevant, accuracy or efficiency be damned, I rather there be limited or no surveillance, period.
Efficiency is my point.
 
There's a difference when a machine does something and when a human does something. Video surveillance is one good example.
Mostly unrelated but every time I see it I have to force myself to remember that the 'dumb' reaction is a bin with the lid next to it instead of a man putting his hand out as if he's saying 'stop'; it looks like a hand with the palm facing towards you and the lines of the bin are the spaces between your fingers and the bin is a curled thumb.
 
That's another way of saying it gets information from every individual image.
If you watch a trailer for the Minecraft movie on Youtube and then you write in your diary "dear diary, today I watched a trailer for blocks movie and saw Jack Black and I clapped," is that an infringing use of the material? You couldn't have written that sentence if you hadn't watched the trailer and absorbed information from it.

That sentence contains more information than the AI model gets from training on one image in isolation.

If each image were truly so unimportant, then they shouldn't be used.
Why? If it's not infringing and not illegal they can do as they like with it. It's entirely unimportant for you to write the above entry in your diary, but you're legally allowed to do so.

Placing one brick on the ground is pointless. Stacking thousands of bricks builds a house. Each brick individually is not of crucial importance and could possibly be replaced by other types of bricks, but if it's legal to build a house with them, why not use the bricks available to you?

There's a difference when a machine does something and when a human does something.
Not legally when it comes to infringement. There is no logical basis to say a human recording a small amount of information is fair use but a machine doing the same is not. Either the owner of the material had their work duplicated, or they did not.

I am incredibly fucking stupid.
Does this mean people can't just AI scrape my family photos and use them to make fake people for profit?
Or can they do that now?
This doesn't mean anything, because the Copyright Office doesn't get to make laws. But this report is written as if they think they should be allowed to. It's an office writing a very strongly worded letter to every judge working on separating fact from fiction in these cases, muddying the waters, because now a very official government body is telling them how they should rule.
 
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If you watch a trailer for the Minecraft movie on Youtube and then you write in your diary "dear diary, today I watched a trailer for blocks movie and saw Jack Black and I clapped," is that an infringing use of the material?
Is that hypothetical diary entry meant to replace the movie? I am an American citizen who has freedom of speech, not a lifeless machine.
That sentence contains more information than the AI model gets from training on one image in isolation.
Well, I'm a person who can make more information like this, unlike these particular machines.
Why? If it's not infringing and not illegal they can do as they like with it.
This thinking is just a version of The Narcissist's Prayer:
It's not in the dataset.
And if it is, it wasn't important.
And if it was, then it didn't contribute much.
And if it did, then that was an error.
And if it wasn't, then I didn't need it.
And if I did, you still deserve nothing.​
It's entirely unimportant for you to write the above entry in your diary, but you're legally allowed to do so.
Again, I'm a human being with more rights than a machine, but apparently not more rights than a corporation.
Not legally when it comes to infringement.
We've yet to see whether the snake oil salesmen will get to bend over the public yet.
There is no logical basis to say a human recording a small amount of information is fair use but a machine doing the same is not.
A human is not a perfect recording device like a machine. A human is liable in ways a machine isn't. We seem to be reaching a society where if I hit somebody with my car then I'm liable, but when a machine driving a car hits somebody then not even the corporation responsible will be liable.
Either the owner of the material had their work duplicated, or they did not.
There's a difference between an individual enjoying one of the many aspects of life, and an unfeeling machine poorly imitating that aspect, millions of times faster for the sole benefit of its owners.
 
Is that hypothetical diary entry meant to replace the movie?
Capitalism allows people to compete with each other as long as the way they compete is within the bounds of law. You're allowed to watch the Minecraft movie, get inspired by its masterful writing, and then make a movie of your own that is intended to compete with it. As long as you don't use anything of substance from the Minecraft movie to make your own, you're golden. And the same applies to AI training.

This thinking is just a version of The Narcissist's Prayer:
It's not in the dataset.
And if it is, it wasn't important.
And if it was, then it didn't contribute much.
And if it did, then that was an error.
And if it wasn't, then I didn't need it.
And if I did, you still deserve nothing.
You stole my artwork!
And if you didn't, you at least infringed on it!
And if you didn't, then the data you gathered was still technically mine!
And if it wasn't, it should have been!
And if it shouldn't have, the laws should still change to fit my whims!
And if not, I'll still continue to stomp my feet and demand payment anyway, because art is all about how much money I can get!

Again, I'm a human being with more rights than a machine, but apparently not more rights than a corporation.
What are you blathering about? AI lawsuits are about what rights people have. And people have the right to gather information from copyrighted works, as long as that info doesn't infringe. It doesn't matter if they use a pencil or a laptop or optical character recognition or any number of automated processes. What matters is if the end result infringes, and in AI training it does not.

A human is not a perfect recording device like a machine.
Yeah, and it turns out that using a perfect recording device like a camera can get you in trouble for infringement, because you're directly making a copy of something in the real world. AI isn't a perfect recording device. It's not even a lossy recording device. It is physically impossible for the models we have now to contain substantial amounts of the material they were trained on. When you train on many works, a model can become more than the sum of its parts, but that still isn't evidence that any one singular image was infringed upon.

There's a difference between an individual enjoying one of the many aspects of life, and an unfeeling machine poorly imitating that aspect, millions of times faster for the sole benefit of its owners.
What about a factory, creating products millions of times faster than a human can? Should we force them to halt production too? We have to stop pressing cartridges for the Nintendo Switch 2, we just make so gosh darn many of them that little Johnny who hand crafts his own circuit boards in his garage can't keep up. Unfair competition, when you do something quickly! We need to litigate that down immediately!
 
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