Comment by earthnail 18 hours ago
Here’s the argument:
The output of her translations had no copyright. Language developed independently of translators.
The output of artists has copyright. Artists shape the space in which they’re generating output.
The fear now is that if we no longer have a market where people generate novel arts, that space will stagnate.
That makes no sense, neither legally nor philosophically.
> Language developed independently of translators.
And it also developed independently of writers and poets.
> Artists shape the space in which they’re generating output.
Not writers and poets, apparently. And so maybe not even artists, who typically mostly painted book references. Color perception and symbolism developed independently of professional artists, too. Moreover, all of the things you mention predate copyright.
> The fear now is that if we no longer have a market where people generate novel arts, that space will stagnate.
But that will never happen; it's near-impossible to stop humans from generating novel arts. They just do it as a matter of course - and the more accessible the tools are, the more people participate.
Yes, memes are a form of art, too.
What's a real threat is lack of shared consumption of art. This has been happening for the past couple decades now, first with books, then with visual arts. AI will make this problem worse by both further increasing volume of "novel arts" and by enabling personalization. The real value we're using is the role of art as social objects - the ability to relate to each other by means of experiencing the same works of art, and thus being able to discuss and reference it. If no two people ever experienced the same works of art, there's not much about art they can talk about; if there's no shared set of art seen by most people in a society, there's a social baseline lost. That problem does worry me.
> The output of artists has copyright.
Copyright is a very messy and divisive topic. How exactly can an artist claim ownership of a thought or an image? It is often difficult to ascertain whether a piece of art infringes on the copyright of another. There are grey areas like "fair use", which complicate this further. In many cases copyright is also abused by holders to censor art that they don't like for a myriad of unrelated reasons. And there's the argument that copyright stunts innovation. There are entire art movements and music genres that wouldn't exist if copyright was strictly enforced on art.
> Artists shape the space in which they’re generating output.
Art created by humans is not entirely original. Artists are inspired by each other, they follow trends and movements, and often tiptoe the line between copyright infringement and inspiration. Groundbreaking artists are rare, and if we consider that machines can create a practically infinite number of permutations based on their source data, it's not unthinkable that they could also create art that humans consider unique and novel, if nothing else because we're not able to trace the output to all of its source inputs. Then again, those human groundbreaking artists are also inspired by others in ways we often can't perceive. Art is never created in a vacuum. "Good artists copy; great artists steal", etc.
So I guess my point is: it doesn't make sense to apply copyright to art, but there's nothing stopping us from doing the same for machine-generated art, if we wanted to make our laws even more insane. And machine-generated art can also set trends and shape the space they're generated in.
The thing is that technology advances far more rapidly than laws do. AI is raising many questions that we'll have to answer eventually, but it will take a long time to get there. And on that path it's worth rethinking traditional laws like copyright, and considering whether we can implement a new framework that's fair towards creators without the drawbacks of the current system.
Ambiguities are not a good argument against laws that still have positive outcomes.
There are very few laws that are not giant ambiguities. Where is the line between murder, self-defense and accident? There are no lines in reality.
(A law about spectrum use, or registered real estate borders, etc. can be clear. But a large amount of law isn’t.)
Something must change regarding copyright and AI model training.
But it doesn’t have to be the law, it could be technological. Perhaps some of both, but I wouldn’t rule out a technical way to avoid the implicit or explicit incorporation of copyrighted material into models yet.
> There are very few laws that are not giant ambiguities. Where is the line between murder, self-defense and accident? There are no lines in reality.
These things are very well and precisely defined in just about every jurisdiction. The "ambiguities" arise from ascertaining facts of the matter, and whatever some facts fits within a specific set of set rules.
> Something must change regarding copyright and AI model training.
Yes, but this problem is not specific to AI, it is the question of what constitutes a derivative, and that is a rather subjective matter in the light of the good ol' axiom of "nothing is new under the sun".
>Art created by humans is not entirely original.
The catch here is that a human can use single sample as input, but AI needs a torrent of training data. Also when AI generates permutations of samples, does their statistic match training data?
No human could use a single sample if it was literally the first piece of art they had ever seen.
Humans have that torrent of training data baked in from years of lived experience. That’s why people who go to art school or otherwise study art are generally (not always of course) better artists.
I don't think the claim that the value of art school simply being more exposure to art holds water.
A skilled artist can imitate a single art style or draw a specific object from a single reference. But becoming a skilled artist takes years of training. As a society we like to pretend some humans are randomly gifted with the ability to draw, but in reality it's 5% talent and 95% spending countless hours practising the craft. And if you count the years worth of visual data the average human has experienced by the time they can recreate a van Gogh then humans take magnitudes more training data than state of the art ML models
In case of an ML model either a very good description or that single reference could be added to the context.
I don't think the Berne Convention on Copyright was meant as a complete list of things where humans have valuable input. Translators do shape the space in which they generate output. Their space isn't any single language bit rather the connecting space between languages.
Most translation work is simple just as the day-to-day of many creative professions is rather uncreative. But translating a book, comic or movie requires creative decisions on how to best convey the original meaning in the idioms and cultural context of a different language. The difference between a good and a bag translation can be stark
You are wrong. Translations have copyright. That is why a new translation of for example an ancient book has copyright and you are now allowed to reproduce it without permission.
Piracy is promotion, look at all the fanfiction.
Also in case of graphic and voice artists unique style looks more valuable than output itself, but style isn't protected by copyright.
A translation is absolutely under copyright. It is a creative process after all.
This means a book can be in public domain for the original text, because it's very old, but not the translation because it's newer.
For example Julius Caesar's "Gallic War" in the original latin is clearly not subject to copyright, but a recent English translation will be.