So I’ve been producing so many images in Midjourney. I’ve been posting the best ones (or at least the ones I decide to post) in the Twitters; you can see basically all of them there (apologies if that link’s annoying to use for non-Twitterers). And an amazing friend has volunteered to curate a display of some of them in the virtual worlds (woot!), which is inexpressibly awesome.
Lots of people use “in the style of” or even “by” with an artist’s name in their Midjourney prompts. I’ve done it occasionally, mostly with Moebius because his style is so cool and recognizable. It did imho an amazing job with this “Big Sale at the Mall, by Moebius”:
It captures the coloration and flatness characteristic of the artist, and also the feeling of isolation in huge impersonal spaces that his stuff often features. Luck? Coolness?
While this doesn’t particularly bother me for artists who are no longer living (although perhaps it should), it seems questionable for artists who are still living and producing, and perhaps whose works have been used without their permission and without compensation in training the AI. There was this interesting exchange on Twitter, for instance:
The Midjourney folks replied (as you can I hope see in the thread) that they didn’t think any of this particular artist’s works were in the training set, and that experimentally adding their name to a prompt didn’t seem to do anything to speak of; but what if it had? Does an artist have the right to say that their works which have been publicly posted, but are still under copyright of one kind or another, cannot be used to train AIs? Does this differ between jurisdictions? Where they do have such a right, do they have any means of monitoring or enforcing it?
Here’s another thread, about a new image-generating AI (it’s called “Stable Diffusion” or “Stability AI”, and you can look it up yourself; it’s in closed beta apparently and the cherrypicked images sure do look amazing!) which seems to offer an explicit list of artists, many still living and working, that it can forge, um, I mean, create in the style of:
So what’s the law?
That’s a good question! I posted a few guesses on that thread (apologies again if Twitter links are annoying). In particular (as a bulleted list for some reason):
- One could argue that every work produced by an AI like this, is a derivative work of every copyrighted image that it was trained on.
- An obvious counterargument would be that we don’t say that every work produced by a human artist is a derivative work of every image they’ve studied.
- A human artist of course has many other inputs (life experience),
- But arguably so does the AI, if only in the form of the not-currently-copyrighted works that it was also trained on (as well as the word associations and so on in the text part of the AI, perhaps).
- One could argue that training a neural network on a corpus that includes a given work constitutes making a copy of that work; I can imagine a horrible tangle of technically wince-inducing arguments that reflect the “loading a web page on your computer constitutes making a copy!” arguments from the early days of the web. Could get messy!
- Perhaps relatedly, the courts have found that people possess creativity / “authorship” that AIs don’t, in at least one imho badly-brought case on the subject: here. (I say “badly-brought” just because my impression is that the case was phrased as “this work is entirely computer generated and I want to copyright it as such”, rather than just “here is a work that I, a human, made with the help of a computer, and I want to assert / register my copyright”, which really wouldn’t even have required a lawsuit imho; but there may be more going on here than that.)
- The simplest thing for a court to decide would be that an AI-produced work should be evaluated for violating copyright (as a derivative work) in the same way a human-produced work is: an expert looks at it, and decides whether it’s just too obviously close a knock-off.
- A similar finding would be that an AI-produced work is judged that way, but under the assumption that AI-produced work cannot be “transformative” in the sense of adding or changing meaning or insights or expression or like that, because computers aren’t creative enough to do that. So it would be the same standard, but with one of the usual arguments for transformativity ruled out in advance for AI-produced works. I can easily see the courts finding that way, as it lets them use an existing (if still somewhat vague) standard, but without granting that computer programs can have creativity.
- Would there be something illegal about a product whose sole or primary or a major purpose was to produce copyright-infringing derivative works? The DMCA might possibly have something to say about that, but as it’s mostly about bypassing protections (and there really aren’t any involved here), it’s more likely that rules for I dunno photocopiers or something would apply.
So whew! Having read some of the posts by working artists and illustrators bothered that their and their colleagues’ works are being used for profit in a way that might actively harm them (and having defended that side of the argument against one rather rude and rabid “it’s stupid to be concerned” person on the Twitter), I’m now feeling some more concrete qualms about the specific ability of these things to mimic current artists (and maybe non-current artists whose estates are still active).
It should be very interesting to watch the legal landscape develop in this area, especially given how glacially slowly it moves compared to the technology. I hope the result doesn’t let Big AI run entirely roughshod over the rights of individual creators; that would be bad for everyone.
But I’m still rather addicted to using the technology to make strange surreal stuff all over th’ place. :)
ceoln 