NB: The fundamental question raised by all of the arguments below
concerns the "training" of an AI (program at present, although soon not
to be just software or firmware, but actual neurosynaptic hardware,
e.g., "Terminator") versus the education or training of a human being.
Although some writers, artists, software engineers (program designers)
and programmers (convert the design into actual software) are
spontaneous without formal courses or consultation of textbooks/manuals,
the overwhelming majority are not. It is not considered a copyright
violation when, without an actual quote or direct copy, a "new" work
appears from a human who was familiar with ("studied") an existing work.
This fundamentally is how an AI works -- trained on existing work, but
not duplicating it per se. The argument must be mechanistic unless
religion is invoked (in many supernatural belief systems, there is a
supernatural essence/entity imbibed into the mechanistic biological
body, e.g., a "soul", that differentiates the human from all other life
or constructs, and typically ignores the facts of biological evolution
-- Pan is a dumb soulless animal, whereas Homo has the
supernaturally-given "soul"). However, in a secular pluralist society,
religion is not acceptable as an argument (the USA is not ruled by an
Ayatollah, the Taliban, nor the various USA theocratic groups -- yet).
https://www.rangefinderonline.com/news-features/industry-news/creators-of-generative-artificial-intelligence-programs-sue-for-copyright-infringement/
Getty, Artists Suing Creators of Generative AI Programs for Copyright
Infringement
January 19, 2023
By Hillary K. Grigon
As generative art algorithms expand in popularity, artists and
photographers have voiced concerns over how artificial intelligence
programs are designed. Is it legal (or ethical) to train a software
program by using millions of copyrighted images? The question will soon
be debated in legal proceedings in both London and the U.S. On January
13, a trio of artists filed a complaint in California’s Northern
District Court against Stability AI LTD., Stability AI Inc., Midjourney,
Inc., and DeviantArt, Inc. over the use of copyrighted images in the
training datasets. Just a few days later, stock image powerhouse Getty
began legal proceedings in London against Stability AI. Both proceedings
claim that the respective AI companies infringed on artists’ copyright
when training the software.
In California, three artists—Sarah Anderson, Kelly McKernan, and Karla
Ortiz—filed suit against the creators of Stable Diffusion and
Midjourney, as well as DeviantArt for its new AI generator DreamUp. The
complaint lists numerous questions for the courts to decide, including
whether companies violated copyright law when downloading and storing
copies of works and whether copyright was violated when using the
defendants images “to create Fakes.” The complaint also names the Right
to Publicity, questioning if the AI software’s ability to create images
in the style of a named artist violates that right. The complaint also
lists unfair competition laws.
“Having copied the five billion images—without the consent of the
original artists—Stable Diffusion relies on a mathematical
process called diffusion to store compressed copies of these
training images, which in turn are recombined to derive other images,”
wrote Matthew Butterick, counsel for the Plaintiffs in the California
District Court case. “It is, in short, a 21st-century collage tool.”
This week, Getty also announced a lawsuit against Stability AI, the
company behind Stable Diffusion, an AI-based tool that creates images
based on text prompts. “It is Getty Images’ position that Stability AI
unlawfully copied and processed millions of images protected by
copyright and the associated metadata owned or represented by Getty
Images absent a license to benefit Stability AI’s commercial interests
and to the detriment of the content creators,” Getty wrote in a statement.
Some users have found that the AI program reproduced the Getty watermark
on generated images, suggesting a large number of photos with that
watermark were used to train the software. In its statement, Getty also
noted that it offers a specific license for training AI software.
“Stability AI did not seek any such license from Getty Images and
instead, we believe, chose to ignore viable licensing options and
long‑standing legal protections in pursuit of their stand‑alone
commercial interests,” the company wrote.
Since Stable Diffusion’s launch and subsequent popularity last year,
artists have questioned the legality of using copyrighted works to train
software without the owners permission or knowledge. But, as a new
technology, the law has little precedence to help answer the questions
that AI-generated art poises. The court cases filed this month could
change that, allowing the courts to address those questions.
The companies behind generative AI have previously argued that the use
of crawling the web for training images falls under Fair Use in the U.S.
The way generative AI works is also often misunderstood. For example,
generative AI doesn’t store forms of the actual training images used,
but code related to the patterns in those images.
The legal proceedings initiated by Getty and the three artists aren’t
the first to question how
artificial intelligence programs use existing data. Last fall,
Micosoft’s GitHub CoPilot was part of a class action lawsuit claiming
that the AI-based coding assistant contained chunks of code from
existing copyrighted programs. The lawsuit filed in federal court claims
that CoPilot contains the code of 11 open-source programs but fails to
follow the attribution required by the license. Butterick is also one of
the lawyers on that case.
