I agree heartily with this. A lot of the 3rd party apps (like Apollo) serve the (user-generated) content without the ads that are present on the official app and on the website if you don’t use a combination of adblockers and web hacks (such as some tweaks you can get by using TamperMonkey to install site-specific scripts). The “He Gets Us” ad campaign is absolutely spamming the site. Clicking the button to say that you’re not interested does not stop that ad from being served to you, and you can no longer block the ad-buyer’s usernames to not see their ads.
So, you have content that is provided by users for free, which is moderated by volunteer mods for free (I have read that the native reddit support for moderator functions are severely lacking compared to 3rd party applications as well).
Another interesting thing that I don’t see mentioned much (and that makes me think even more that this is being done to consolidate for advertising purposes) is that even if the 3rd party app makers were to pay the incredibly high rates (in the Apollo app, the charge would have been $20million a month, with less than 30 days notice) Reddit is also making it so that no NSFW materials will be allowed to accessed through API calls. I can’t help but think that NSFW subreddits are very popular browsing and the folks in advertising would like to have their eyes.
Unfortunately, not everything that is marked NSFW on reddit is straight-up sexual in nature. I frequent several women’s subs there and a lot of the very worthwhile discussion topics in those are marked NSFW because they deal with heavy and potentially triggering topics like sexual discrimination in the workplace or discussion of a confrontation or assault.
We’ll have to see how it shakes out, but I find myself back here after many years specifically because Reddit admins accused the maker of the Apollo app of attempting to extort them for money/threatening them, probably assuming that it would be a word against word fight on it. Luckily the developer is in a one-party province and had the foresight to record the calls that he had with them. I really don’t like liars.
If you enter the right prompt NIs will plagiarize word for word as well. NIs have to be instructed to avoid plagiarizing, and will actively do so even after receiving specific non-plagiarism instructions. It’s such a problem with the NI community, we find that receivers of text written by NIs frequently have to pass it through a plagiarism detector before accepting it as original work.
NIs have also been found to steal images online and present them as their own work. In fact, Getty has to alter their publicly available images due to rampant theft by NIs.
I guess? But, in the cited instance, it wasn’t doing anything you can’t do with Photoshop and isn’t really what people are thinking about when they think of AI generated content. And isn’t an example of that art being trained anyway since IMG2IMG isn’t training. You’re just using an image as your prompt instead of text – it has nothing to do with what images are trained into the model.
Doesn’t seem like a great example (much like how “Oh no, they used an AI book cover” is nominally about AI but not really the core of the issue)
If someone plagiarizes or rips off someone else’s work, does it matter, legally and morally, what “AI”, or Photoshop plugin, or whatever, they used? If anyone defended blatant plagiarism by blaming it on some AI model, that would be ridiculous.
That is an example of someone saying. “Take this image, and modify it a bit”. Then getting upset because the modified image looks like the image it was modified from. Absolutely ridiculous. You might as well have posted a picture and then the same picture after going through a Photoshop filter, then getting upset because the output looks like the same photo except put through a Photoshop filter.
Whether it’s plagiarim or not depends on what is done with the output, not what tool was used to make it.
I challenge you to pick a photo that you know is in the training database, then try to get an AI to recreate it by describing what to draw. See if you can get anythging that looks remotely like the original image.
Your example of the Getty watermark is not what you think it is. The AI doesn’t have chunks of the image stored and reproduces it complete with watermark. What is actually happening is that so many images have that watermark that the AI simply thinks those shapes belong in any image of that kind, to some degree. So it adds some of that. The fact that the watermark is never fully reproduced and the bits that show up are always different and in different places should clue you in that there’s no cutting and pasting of copywritten content going on there. The AI just thinks the image looks better with some gray markings on it, because so many images it trained on had them.
As an analogy, imagine if you trained an AI only on images which were taken in the rain. Then you ask the AI to draw you a sunny day. You wind up getting a day with sun and kids playing in the park, maybe, except the image is also full of rain. The AI would have no way of knowing that there shouldn’t be rain, because it hasn’t seen images without it. But it’s not cutting and pasting rain from one image to another.
There is - the SD boards went pay, and unfortunately at the time I didn’t have the $20? $25? a year that it was going to be. I eventually settled on the SomethingAwful forums ($10 one-time-fee, more affordable for a poor like me) before the goons there got very bad with brigading and such. When it became yucky there, I moved to Reddit. And now I’m looking for a new home again because they’re being more unfair than usual to “little” people.
…Northern Ireland? National Insurance? National Instruments? Not Interested? Network Interface?
Yes, if Northern Ireland have been found to steal Getty images online then Getty image have every right to go after them for infringement.
Yes: legally this is a problem. Especially, in the context of the particular discussion we were having, we are talking about Facebook ignoring their terms of service to pretend that “material once digested has been re-worked and re-ordered such that that it no longer contains the copyrighted material in original form” in order to get around what the user has agreed to just to allow Facebook to sell an AI app.
That isn’t going to happen. If Facebook wants to use uploaded content to sell an AI app to a third party they would change the TOS first. They would need to ensure the uploader had ownership of the uploaded content.
In many, if not most cases, the content that the AI has been trained on was done without the permission of the creator of that content. So if a user in good faith enters a prompt that unintentionally plagiarizes content outside of the bounds of what one would consider transformative, I have no problems putting the blame for that on the people that used people content without their permission in the first place. It isn’t the fault of the AI. Its the fault of the tech-bros who have decided to monetize other people’s content without their permission.
Once again: I’m talking specifically about the legal minefield Facebook would be stepping into if they decided to ignore their own TOS to use uploaded content to build an AI app that they would sell to third parties. I’m talking about that specific scenario. It would (justified or not) open them up to the very same lawsuits and accusations that are flying around at the moment.
A problem for the app maker or the user or depending on the use?
If I take a photo of Joe Biden and run it through some “Anime Me” app, is the app maker legally in trouble? Am I? Am I in trouble because I fed it a photo I didn’t own or am I in trouble if I do something commercial with the results? If I take the end result and make it the cover of my manga comic, should the app maker suffer legal penalties?
Because that’s what was happening in your Twitter example. Someone fed a JPG into the IMG2IMG function and got a similar output with some changes made to it; enough to make it look different but not enough to make it unrecognizable from the original.
The answer, as with all of these cases, is it depends.
Feel free to disregard this example then if you wish. My point still stands. Facebook won’t violate its own TOS to build an AI app to sell to third parties. That isn’t going to happen. Its a legal minefield.
Even when that is the case, it wouldn’t change my position. If they think it’s better not to put up a defense, then that still doesn’t mean that I need to put up a defense for them. I’d still only be making things up that might not be true. If they want to wait until “the issue goes away,” then the most I should do in their defense is to let them do that.
That said, this was clearly not Reddit’s strategy. They did not remain silent at all. And, honestly, I don’t think it would have worked. They weren’t dealing with people who disliked them. They were dealing with the people who provide the labor that they wanted to monetize.
It only became a problem when they lied. They said they would work with the third party developers so that they wouldn’t have to shut down. But then they didn’t do that. The owner of the largest such app is given a price that he tells them he cannot handle, that would result in him having to shut down. They couldn’t even slow walk it so that he could have time to increase prices so he could pay for it.
And then, when the guy they mistreated dares speak out, only detailing what happened, they sure went on the attack, trying to paint him as the bad guy. The obvious thing to do would be to show that what he said was wrong. But they didn’t. You engage in personal attacks when you can’t prove it with facts.
No company who was listening to their PR would think it’s a good idea to personally attack someone who people do respect, who was providing a service that the company itself either refused to do or was too incompetent to handle.
There shouldn’t be third party apps that are better than the main app. Any smart company would have just bought the better app, the one that had the features they had promised. They clearly don’t think $20 million is a large amount of money, and they could have purchased the app for half of that.
They put themselves in this situation, and I don’t see any purpose in defending them from their own folly.
@Banquet_Bear I’m pretty sure NI stands for Normal Intelligence or something similar. AI will have problems. They aren’t new problems and will not stop AI any more than they stop NI.
Mostly what AI is going to do is put together responses derived from a broad knowledge base, and is no more going to infringe copyright than any non-AI writer who does research then writes an article or similar. The more AI develops the more this is going to be true and it will only be widely used if it is capable of such originality.
If what AI is going to do is find existing stuff and present it to you, it is just google and we can stop talking about it as it’s old hat. That’s not what is going to happen though.
There will be edge cases where AI presents material that is too close to digested copyright material. But it isn’t going to be a major issue, or if it is, not for long.
I don’t know enough about the specifics to discuss the rest of your post. However I don’t agree with this principle - I think I should stand up for people who are in a difficult position when it comes to defending themselves.
I suspect you would too - what you are really saying is you don’t like what they are doing so you aren’t going to consider whether their actions are defensible. It’s not how I do things but it is common enough.
I was going for Natural Intelligence. If Getty going after them for infringement is the appropriate response to stealing IP, why isn’t it the same for Artificial Intelligences?
By that I mean, why the need to single out AI as being capable of plagiarism? All Intelligences, Natural and Artificial, are capable of plagiarism, and will gravitate towards plagiarism without anyone prompting them to do so.
We have laws and courts to deal with plagiarism and the theft of IP, the existence of AI doesn’t change that.
…Getty are going after Stabiltiy AI because they claim they " 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."
Which…seems fair enough to me.
They aren’t.
Which is why Getty are taking them to court.
The infringement under discussion here is the processing and monetization of content without the permission of the rights holder.
The issue is that AI doesn’t work unless it has something to train on, and most of the content it has been trained on was done without the permission or compensation to the copyright holders.
Maybe Getty should be working on their cybersecurity if millions of their images can be copied from them without permission. One might think that Getty lets just anyone look at their pictures at any time, without a license, permission, or anything.
All Intelligences need something to train on, they all build on what was done before, and none of them have ever paid the artist for the right to look at their work.