Post by redonihunter in Are AI Assets Controversial on Itch io?

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You misunderstood me there a bit.

The likening to a photographer or photoshop wizard goes more in the direction of what an AI user actually does, giving importance that it still is a person using an advanced tool. And those activities and their results are established and not stigmatized nor banned for the tools used.

And the discussion if and what kind of consent is necessary to use material to train an AI with, is not finished*. Especially because the discussion about AI bans and stigmas will flame up anew, if tools emerge that indeed only were trained with training material that was ethically aquired. Also, if you ban those, you would have to ban a lot of other stuff for similar ethical reasons. It is a can of worms. The only thing quite clear is, that it is not ok to use those tools for plagiarization and defamation and similar. But this is because of what you do, and not how you did it. It is not ok to create such works with photoshop either.

So my point is what I wrote. It is necessary to wait for actual legal stuff and not perceived ethical reasons. Ethics are quite fuzzy and subject to change a lot and are very, very arbitrary. For example, it is unethical in my opinion to outsource jobs into other countries and exploit work conditions there. Same for several and most tax evasion maneuvers and lots of other despicable stuff that Harvard would be proud to teach students. Do you boycott and ban any and all companies that engage in such unethical activities? Yet here you call for ban of things for ethical reasons. I say, ethics is not enough.

But rest assured, AI games already have stigma. There are enough haters, and haters they are, that downvote such games. And I do not believe for a second, that those haters will upvote games that used ethical AI stuff.

* My current stance would be, that if it is ok to look at a thing, it would be ok to train an AI with it, if the AI does not copy the thing, but extract the essence. Or in other words: learn. Quite like a person would learn from being "trained" by studying other peoples art. Just look at google image search. That pattern recognition system is an AI in my book. It is used more to recognize and find things, not to randomly create things, but effectifly it was trained by stuff without giving consent for AI training.

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robertgoodwin001 year ago (3 edits)

Yes, ethics are fuzzy and the law can never perfectly represent them. That's all the more reason for platforms and individual persons to take their own stance. Legislators can be bought. Industries can be captured. Practicalities can also get in the way (such as how well a law can enforced). I'm not at all certain that artists, which are a disparate group lacking power compared to large tech companies, will see the law come down in their favor. But I don't need them to in order to make up my own mind.

I would hope we could agree on what is one of the main tenets of legal positivism, that there is not necessarily any connection between how the law is and how it ought to be.

Why can't one boycott and ban any and all companies that engage in an activities one deems unethical? If you believe a company is behaving unethically then of course you can. You can and you should. I've been personally boycotting the entire meat and dairy industries for years.

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redonihunter1 year ago

Of course you can boycott whomever you want. But calling others to boycott stuff by your standards is another thing entirely.

And to make matters worse, your test for ethicality is not the result, but the method used.

Also, there is not a way the law ought to be, there is only a way you think the law ought to be by your standards. If you convince enough people that your standards are necessary, this will be implemented, at least in the democratic jurisdictions. This is at the bottom of my view that indeed waiting for legal discussion should be done and not merely because some people are offended and call it unethical.

I have not heard good arguments yet, to be convinced.

If I understood correctly, you think it is unethical because permission was not asked in creation of the tool used, and thus, the works made with said tool should be banned.

But there is another situation, where the whole creation is based on other people's ip and permission is not asked either. All those fan games and even remakes of popular games. So if the unethicality of not asking permission is enough, all those stuff should be banned as well, should it not?

To me it is more important what you make, to call it unethical. So unless the AI is used to plagiarize, why should I care.

On another note, if I use a paint brush made from animal hair to create art for my game, would a vegan gamer want to boycott me? ;-)

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robertgoodwin001 year ago (1 edit)

Firstly, that's correct that we have to persuade those other than ourselves of what's ethical in order to get those other than ourselves to act upon it. That's why I take part in discussions like this. If I called for banning too quickly it was because it seemed as clear as day to me that the scraping of massive amounts of copyrighted data on the internet isn't ethical, but we can talk about it more....

"If I understood correctly, you think it is unethical because permission was not asked in creation of the tool used, and thus, the works made with said tool should be banned."

Not exactly what I said but close. It is unethical because it assumes it is okay to use authored works in a way not explicitly permitted by the authors. Were there a way for artists to opt-out of having their works scraped, then there would be no issue in my mind. There would be no need to assume. Would you agree clear opt-in/opt-outs would be preferable to the current situation?

As for fan works and creations based off of existing ip, I would say it depends on how the original author feels about it. Though it may not be legal, I would guess (but could be wrong) that most are tolerant of fan works as long as it doesn't negatively affect their profitability. I mean, if you are receiving cease and desist orders then you know you are going too far...but if someone made a fan work of one of my ips, far from upset I would be flattered as long as it was in good faith.

Let's consider the reason why we even care about plagiarism and copyright in the first place. Tell me if you disagree, but is it not about preserving incentives? If someone can plagiarize an artist's work then the incentive to create original work dissipates. Everyone loses. That is the point of ip, isn't it?

It's why the wishes of the artists matter. Person A says "Go ahead and use my work in your training sets" I take that to mean, "My incentive to create original work won't be affected if you do that." Person B says "Don't use my work in your training sets". I take that to mean, "My incentive to create original work would be hurt if you do that." So why not listen to them? I don't understand the argument *against* considering the wishes of artists. Educate me. There is a way to go about this that balances the interests of both sides, for the technology to proceed along without stepping hard on (literally, because scraping is indiscriminate) everyone's toes. But I'm not seeing in what you've written indication that you are concerned about preserving the incentive for artists to create, which is the reason copyright and ip exists in the first place, am I wrong?

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redonihunter1 year ago(+1)

Copyright was not a concept hundreds of years ago. And thousands of years ago people even made use of known names to publish their own work or teachers published their pupils work with their name. This is seen in old bible texts and philosophical greek works till the great canvas portrait painters.

Only the printing press made copying an issue. If a painter painted, the painting was the work, the creation. Not the act of creating the idea of the painting.

Later with audio recording, a similar issue came to be. Singing in a tin can is still singing and people were paid to sing, not for the idea of what they sang, or the memory of it.

In English all this is quite obvious in the word "copy" as a noun. You call stuff you bought a copy. Get your copy now.

The reason copyright exists is not to pay the creators better, but to monopolize the coping stuff. It protects one book press from another book press printing the same thing. There was even discussion in music a hundred years ago, if musicians should be paid, after all, they did not make the recording, they just made music. Oh and artists in general are not paid, just becaue they create things and have copyright on those things. You need a commission and that turns the precious art into mere work. Like a street caricaturist, an old fashioned portait painter or a newer portrait photographer. Creating stuff and hoping people will buy it or buy the copyright, nah. You need to be famous for that. I do not see this incentive you described. You are not wrong, either, but I think that while for some artists it might be a feel good thing intheory, it is not a driving incentive for them to create art. Doing art for a living was always hard. And modern self publishing put a lot of "artists" out there, that never ever would have been published.

Now, is all those things applicable for AI training? One could argue that it is transforming your idea into a new medium. Like making an audio recording of a written book. Undoubtedly this new thing has its own copyright and permission has to be asked, because such action is hidden in that phrase all rights reserved.

But what about an audio description of a painting? Would that qualify for a thing that needs permission and is a right you can reserve? Or simpler, what about a text description? With a complete movie, obviously there is a point where your description is no longer a description, but a transformation into a new media.

People tried to abuse copyright to censor critiques that talked about their works. Because if you talk about things, you, well, have to talk about it. And this makes it necessary to include ideas, concepts and even excerpts from that original work.

Ideas are very hard to protect and this brings me to what actually happens in AI training. The neural net learns what an idea looks like and connects it with words. If later prompted with words, it can recreate similar things.

You can attack this on three basic portions.

1. The finished product. This is easiest. Plagiarizing is forbidden, if you do it with a pencil, photoshop or an AI. Does not matter. Same for those fan games. Either they fall under fair use, or not.

2. Cheaply made products and thus competition. This is annoying, but the way of technology and outsourcing. Also has nothing to do with AI.If you lose commissions to sweat shops or to an AI, you still lose those commissions. Or, gasp, some of those basterds who put their art out for free.

3. The training method of the AI.

Even if 3 would be considered a valid and legal obvious and ethical concern, it is shortsighted, because one could and will just train new databases with ethically and legally aquired material. What then? This has happened in software several times. People just build things from scratch and put you out of business into oblivion anyways.

I remember courts that are technological illiterate and even considered the retaining in memory of a browser viewing content as a copyright violation. So I were careful to be hasty about ethical and judical decisions about all this. It might even need completely new laws.

Anyways, one could claim that the database contains a copy of the original work, wich could be forbidden. And you could claim that training an AI is a form of derivative work that needs approval, like having a translation into machine language or a transformation from one medium to another.

To my legal and technical understanding, there are some AI that do retain copies in their database. But this might be splitting a hair, like those browser problems.

But I currently consider the training of an AI not a derivative work. I consider it machine learning. And since you can't forbid a human to learn from viewing your art, and even create works inspired by your ideas, I need good arguments to forbid machines to do it.

An obvious one might be a paywall. Paying for a movie ticket does not entitle you to bring your camera and make a recording. But on the other hand, I could make a similar movie after seeing it.

Software is easier, because it has licenses. You can forbid commercial usage for example. Actually, one could license art, but can you license the idea of art? You can protect the copy of the actual art, but not the idea. The three wolves moon t-shirt comes to mind.

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

I could not reprint that image on a mug and sell it without permission. But do I need a permission to make a t-shirt with a couple wolves and a celestial body? I would say, nah, that can't be protected. Or can it? Should it?

I think the easiest legal way would be to include the permission of usage for AI training in those rights reserved. But this circes back to the point, if this permission is needed. It would be needed, if we dogmatically require it, just because.

But would it be required by current laws? I say, no. Because it would be trying to copyright ideas.

You can protect a specific thing, but in those cases that you do be able to protect an "idea" (see patents in software and other nefarious things), it would only protect against the creation of a similar idea (a blatant plagiarism), and this would be indipendant of the method used.

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robertgoodwin001 year ago (1 edit)

Yes, we need not only new laws, but probably new terminology. Artists sometimes refer to their works being used in machine learning as "stealing" and "theft", which of course isn't accurate, yet there is a sense that something is being infringed upon that goes against the spirit of intellectual property that they are grasping to convey, which we perhaps need new words for.

You make plenty of valid points (I certainly agree that copyright claims can be abused), but it seems like you were avoiding mine. I asked us to consider what the reason copyright exists in the first place might be. Just now I tried googling "why do we need copyright" and this is literally the first link that came up (if you read other explanations they are similar):

https://iadt.libguides.com/copyright

Why is copyright important?

"The importance of copyright is an essential component of the modern educational experience. Copyright is important as it helps to protect the value of an author/academic/researchers work, by giving the originator of the work the ability to protect it from unlicensed or uncredited usage. This leads to the prevention of their work being copied to the degree where they cannot sell it effectively or receive credit for it. In this way, copyright fosters intellectual creativity as it provides an incentive for a creator to work freely, allowing them to gain recognition for their work as well as protecting their livelihood."

There it is. It IS about incentives. If we didn't care about preserving incentives then why would we even have copyright or ip? We wouldn't.

I still think that in the future, a clear standard for opting in or out of having a work consumed by training models is probably going to be the best way to address the interests of all. Sure, it's not going to stop the models from getting better and better. Slow them down for a short spell maybe, but it is important that we do this the right way.

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redonihunter1 year ago

what the reason copyright exists in the first place might be.

I told you the reason. People wanted monopoly to print books. It is literally the right to copy. It is not called the right of being the creator and having complete control over the creation or the ideas represented in the creation.

Consider the fairy tales back then. No one even had a concept that it was not ok to retell a story they heard. Quite to the contrary. So what type of copyright did the Brothers Grimm aquire when writing them up and making a book out of it?

Or do you think any scribe asked permission when copying a book? That was not a concept, till the monopolies in book printing. And giving monopolies for certain items was common practice back in the day,

The history and hence the reason why this exists is neatly described in the wiki article about the thing

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

What you cited about the importance of copyright is an opinion piece. And it is badly worded.

The importance of copyright is an essential component of the modern educational experience.

So, the copyright is not the component, but the importance of copyright is the component. And it is only a part of the expericence, whatever is meant by experience.

Copyright is important as it helps to protect the value of an author/academic/researchers work, by giving the originator of the work the ability to protect it from unlicensed or uncredited usage. This leads to the prevention of their work being copied to the degree where they cannot sell it effectively or receive credit for it.

Why does it protect the value? It resctricts copies. That can also devalue your work, because no one might bother experiencing it. This type of value protection is probably meant like the shortening of a market, but the type of works we are talking about are not a item that can be short in supply, like sculptures. Also why qualify the prevention with, to sell it effectifly. And it works only by deterring, because practiacally, it prevents nothing, only gives means to legally retaliate.

(1) In this way, (2) copyright fosters intellectual creativity (3) as it provides an incentive for a creator to work freely, (4) allowing them to gain recognition for their work as well as protecting their livelihood."

Oh boy. What a convoluted conclusion/claim.

1 refers to the sentences before, wich I do not quite understand the flow of logic.

2 No, it does not. The creative mind does not need the knowledge that it's work is protected to be creative in the first place. You are not faced with the decision: should I be creative today or not, after all, my work would be protected by copyright. Might give it a try...

3 What incentive would that be? Freely as in unburdened, I assume. Because freely as in free lunch is what copyright tries prevent from happening. Is this like a safe space argument? Lack thereof never prevented true artists in the past, so which artists need that kind of incentive? It might hamper certain methods of publishing, but claiming an incentive to be creative is a bold claim. So if you are concerened with bootlegs you might not release your work in a certain country. That kind of thing.

4 Ahahahaaa. Sorry. But gaining recognition is not what copyright helps you with. It does the opposite. Unless you have big publisher pouring big money into advertising, no one will recognize you, just because your work is protected. And for small time self publishers, the quality of their work and the free advertising of the unauthorized distribution of parts or even the full work is what gives them recognition.

As for protection the livelihood, that is more a publisher thing. If art or writing is your livelihood and you have no employer (like a professional publisher), how would that work? You write texts and want to sell them? To whom? Well, maybe that opinion piece is a bit specific to the university context it was written for. If you are a researcher and someone publishes your work under their name, they might get the research funding.

Do not get me wrong. A thing like copyright is needed. Falsly attributing the creator is problematic. But I do not think, being the creator of something should give complete control , like companies are trying to do with those software patents (because they could not copyright the idea behind the code). And concepts like fair use or the control over the purchased copy in my own home are examples where copyright should end.

But I wholeheartedly disagree with the notion that copyright is an incentive to be creative.

I concede that existence or lack of copyright is an incentive to chose certain methods of publishing. Just like those artists wanting to opt out of having their art used for ai training. It is a bit arrogant I think, to believe your art is important and good enough to set the standards of what an ai would think of concepts. On the other hand, if your art is that good, it is a bit sad, that you do not wish your art to be part of what future generations (of ai) will think how those concepts would look like. Imagine the inventor of an art style forbidding art students to imitate his style.

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robertgoodwin001 year ago

You have not supplied a reason for why we should have copyright. To say "Copyright exists because it gives the right to copy" or "Copyright exists to monopolize copying things." is begging the question. It doesn't tell us why recognizing such a concept is desirable. Best you said is, "A thing like copyright is needed. Falsely attributing the creator is problematic" which is a good start and only that.

And this is really about intellectual property, which copyright is one type of. "Copyright is valuable because it restricts copies" is not a particularly useful observation in the age where authored works can be digital. The history of book printing can only guide us so far. Why should intellectual property be protected?

Yes, any answer to that question WILL be an opinion. There is no avoiding that. It is fine to shoot down others' opinions but can you give your own?

Why should society care if false attribution is going on? That's just the author being arrogant enough to think their work is important enough to be setting standards, right? Why should society care if someone is upset that their ip is being used against their consent? Until you can answer that, you are still avoiding the question.

Or should we abolish intellectual property? Would it be a better world if everywhere was like China?

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redonihunter1 year ago

You have not supplied a reason for why we should have copyright. To say "Copyright exists because it gives the right to copy" or "Copyright exists to monopolize copying things." is begging the question.

I did not say this to my best understanding of English. You asked why there is copyright, I told you why. Because book press companies cried for monopoly to their rulers. That is why. It came into exstence and no one abolished it.

Then I disected the article you linked.

And then I said, I agree in principle that something like a copyright should exist. If you wanna know why I think this, it is because we are a society and have concepts like ownership and rules around it. I also mentioned examples where this copyright thing has gone too far and is misused.

So the question would be, if whatever rule of ownership of an idea or orginal work should cover the right to refuse to have this thing be used to influence other things. The thing in question being an algorithm learning from it. Because an outright copy would already be covered by existing copyright.

I could argue that including this right of refusal would represent an extension of copyright to also be a patent of the idea behind the original work. So no one else could learn enough of the idea of the work to make a similar work or a work based on similar principles.

So my current opinion is, that no permission would be needed, as it could not be given. Legally speaking. Just as a person would not need a permission to learn from that other work and get inspiration. But that person would also get strife for creating plagiarisms. So basically, I put more weight on the usage and less weight on the creation of those AI tools.

I am also of the opinion that it is shortsighted to put emphasis on the creation of the tools. Especially big companies would have no problems to aquire training material by other means and do AI anyways, but it now would not include the collective influence of all those people that opted out.

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