On the topic of computer-generated Mondrians, in 1966 a researcher at Bell Labs used a computer to produce a semi-random version of Mondrian's "Composition With Lines" (1917). Interestingly, he found that only 28% of people could correctly identify the computer-generated picture and 59% preferred the computer-generated picture.
The researcher points out that "Both patterns were conceived by humans, although certain features of the computer-generated picture were decided by a programmed random algorithm. The computer functioned only as a medium performing its operations under the complete control of the computer program written by the programmer-artist."
The analogy is reduced to the point of irrelevancy.
OpenAI isn't trying to produce art. They are trying to replace human creation with artificial creation, but an artificial creation whose entire input was the human creation.
Kawano was not trying to replace Mondrian. And Mondrian was dead.
Personally I'm happy to restrict copyright expiry and AI input to the work of dead people. Right now copyright is too long and AI is happy to ignore entirely. Let's allow AI and humans to both reproduce the work of dead people but leave the living to their benefits of their creation so long as they are alive.
roughly · 2h ago
> OpenAI isn't trying to produce art. They are trying to replace human creation with artificial creation, but an artificial creation whose entire input was the human creation.
And they’re trying to build a business off it as well. There are a whole lot of things we generally excuse when they’re noncommercial (morally, even if not strictly legally), but OpenAI is a business, not a hobby. Similarly, we cast a gentler eye towards someone working towards self-improvement or personal discovery - artists are known to duplicate the work of other artists to hone their techniques, and Kawano was copying Mondrian’s style to understand the use of new technology for making art. OpenAI is doing none of that - the point of their system is to skip all the hard work of learning and self improvement.
parpfish · 37m ago
I think you could argue that openAI isn’t in the business of making art — it’s their users that make AI art that are in the business of making art.
There are plenty of reasons for a model to ingest the art that are not directly related to creating new derivatives of that art. If you want the model to be able to recognize famous paintings or discuss styles/genres, it needs to get those examples.
bloak · 2h ago
For a number of reasons, I don't like the duration of copyright depending on how long the author lives.
* It's age discrimination against older people.
* If the copyright ends up being owned by some corporation (or effectively owned: some corporation has exclusive rights), which is what usually happens for any valuable copyright, it seems weird that the duration should be based on the lifetime of the author.
* It creates problems later when it's not obvious who the author was or when the author died.
* It could easily be abused by authors adding their grandchildren as co-authors. (I'm a bit wary of mentioning this in case I give anyone ideas. It has happened already, but so far not very often, as far as I can tell.)
TheOtherHobbes · 1h ago
If you're going to make these arguments about IP, you can also make them about property rights in general.
What is it about creative IP that makes it different to other kinds of family inheritance, or other kinds of rentier ownership?
Why does the argument that "Ownership rights should expire as soon as possible for the common good" not apply to huge land and property holdings, some of which have been passed down for centuries, with far more obvious economic and political effects than - say - Tolkien's descendants not needing a day job?
aesch · 1h ago
It is unfortunate and confusing that copyright and patents are described as intellectual "property" because intellectual property is fundamentally different than other property rights. Property laws as originally formulated applied to rivalrous goods where consumption by one consumer prevents consumption by others. Copyright and patents apply to non-rivalrous goods.
Rivalrous goods are relatively easier to protect and monetize without the assistance of the state. Non-rivalrous goods are pretty much impossible to protect/monetize without the assistance of a state.
tough · 1h ago
Thanks I never had learned non-rivalrous goods and its'a. great way to explain the IP != property
you wouldn't steal a car, err i mean download, right!
zajio1am · 1h ago
> If you're going to make these arguments about IP, you can also make them about property rights in general.
No, physical property are both excludable and rivalrous goods [1], for them ownership is a natural right.
OTOH, IP are naturally non-rivalrous, and only semi-excludable through establishment of copyright law. IP ownership is just societal construct trying to fit market mechanisms to them.
> If you're going to make these arguments about IP, you can also make them about property rights in general.
In general, property rights don't end when someone dies, they're just transferred to someone else. People can even take advantage of the fact that property rights endure by selling the right to take possession after their death.
zzzeek · 1h ago
Sudden uptick in mysterious artist deaths still unexplained
wslh · 58m ago
> but leave the living to their benefits of their creation so long as they are alive.
Or pay somehow in the future for the use of them?
scarmig · 2h ago
What does Mondrian's estate owe to Oliver Byrne's estate, since he basically stole Byrne's color scheme and style from his version of Euclid's Elements? (And what does Byrne's estate owe to Euclid's estate?)
IP law is a purely practical matter: what most incentivizes intellectual production? If a culture errs too far toward restriction, that country ultimately falls behind. The US itself jumpstarted its industry by mass IP theft and industrial espionage to steal the hard work of British inventors and entrepreneurs; its entire publishing industry got its start by copying British works wholesale in what was then the world's most flagrant IP violation. As an angry sputtering Dickens wrote:
> You take the uncompleted books of living authors, fresh from their hands, wet from the press, cut, hack and carve them... all this without permission, and against his will; and then, to crown the whole proceeding, publish in some mean pamphlet, an unmeaning farrago of garbled extracts from his work, to which your name as author, with the honourable distinction annexed, of having perpetrated a hundred other outrages of the same description.
Americans mostly shrugged, or attacked him as a mercenary scoundrel, before proceeding to build the world's largest publishing industry.
The US needs to make laws governing how copyright applies to generative AI; when it does, those laws should grant expansive fair use rights. Otherwise, the US will be left behind.
riskable · 2h ago
From a copyright perspective the only question that matters is this: Do we treat AI models like (Xerox) copiers or do we treat them like artists?
If we treat it like a copier it's the end user that's responsible when they tell it to produce something that infringes on someone else's copyrighted work. No different than if someone walked up to a machine and copied an entire book.
Furthermore, if the end user never even distributes the result of a prompt the question is moot anyway: Copyright only matters when something gets distributed. No distribution == No violation of copyright.
If we treat AI like an artist it is the owner/creator of the AI model that's responsible when it produces something that violates another's copyright. Since it is literally impossible to maintain a database of all copyrighted works that exist (in order to check if something violates copyright or not) this option is untenable. It's not possible to implement unless we go back to requiring all copyrights be registered (and provide that database to anyone that asks—thus, distributing all those copyrighted works which would defeat the purpose).
I very strongly believe that the courts will ultimately settle on treating AI like a copier. It's a tool/machine and should be treated as such by copyright law.
pona-a · 33m ago
We treat them as models. We allowed them to be fitted on copyrighted data, arguing the research is a inherently public good. But now that these companies are directly competing with that material's copyright holders, it makes sense to reevaluate that assumption.
A good first step would be to mandate AI labs share their weights and methodology before commercial release or lose that privilege. This would spare universities and non-profits, while requiring commercial labs to contribute something back, be it in licensing fees or usable research.
altruios · 1h ago
A good argument. however to compare an AI model to a Xerox machine is reductive and not a sound metaphor...
It can not be treated just as a Xerox machine, but it can be treated as a Xerox machine that has within it all the copywritten works (that a user can inventively request combinations there within) which it has trained on (and saved in the form of weights/bias). In this case the AI model itself is the distribution of works under copyright. Encrypting/transforming copywritten works and transmitting it is a violation of copyright (afaik; ianal).
This is all to say, copyright - as it stands - needs heavy reform. I'm rather copyleft. Because all of this is vestigial nonsense from an age where printers from the 1800's setting the rules, and our thinking hasn't updated yet.
parpfish · 32m ago
What would happen if you made a lossy image compression format derived from tons of scraped, copyrighted images.
There’s no generative ability, but anytime you compress/decompress your image the model uses weights and biases learned from copyrighted works.
Is that a violation?
Hilift · 2h ago
"The Baroness Kidron amendment would require companies to provide a log of all of the URLs their models were trained on, and keep this up-to-date every month."
MPs rejected that amendment and sent the Bill back to the Lords.
"Kidron's amendment will not provide certainty of anything except for certainty of more uncertainty, of continuous regulations stacked one upon another in a pile of instruments...
"Jumping the gun on one issue will hamstring us in reaching the best outcome on all the others and especially because this is a global issue and we cannot ringfence the UK away from the rest of the world."
However, Kidron said her amendment "does not challenge the primacy of the Commons" and pushed ahead.
The result was a decisive defeat for the Government, with 287 votes in favour of Kidron's amendment and 118 against - a majority of 169 - and the Bill will now be sent back to the Commons.
niemandhier · 1h ago
I live in walking distance from the place the brothers Grimm sourced their version of Snow White.
Ai image generator frequently refuse to create illustrations featuring the character, everybody is afraid of Disney.
Similar, Disney’s Winnie the Puh just looks like Magarete Steiffs plush bear with a red shirt.
Very often those who claim to have created an original work themselves just produced derivatives, at least those should not be protected to the detriment of humankind.
2snakes · 14m ago
Pooh. Winnie the Pooh. <3
parpfish · 1h ago
Something I keep thinking about is that nobody would think twice if some young musician gave an interview that said "{older artist} was a huge inspiration. their songs were fundamental in shaping how i think about the artform", nobody would be up in arms claiming that they have stolen from the elder artist. it's art inspiring other artists the way it always has.
so why does it feel different when LLM ingests some music to "fundamentally shape how it 'thinks' of the artform"?
i can create loads of speculation about what that difference is, but to be honest it all feels pretty post-hoc and hand-wavy.
jazzyjackson · 1h ago
Because an LLM is not an artist, an artist is working to improve themselves and putting something new into the world that aligns with some desire or vision they have.
The LLM lacks all desire and vision, it is a machine that can produce a trillion variations of something that sounds like Miles Davis, for example, without an ounce of intention to what it wants to do, what art it wants to make.
Fundamentally the LLM is not a living thing that interacts with other living things and has an idea of how it wants to influence itself and others. it is just a printing press capable of flooding the marketplace with lookalikes and slop.
[Despite my tone, I appreciate the prompt, it's a subject I'd like to write on at more length than an HN comment]
bell-cot · 1h ago
> so why does it feel different when LLM ingests ...
Most-ish people are biased in favor of both "the little guy", and in favor of "artists" (whether authors, musicians, painters, or whatever).
samanbb · 2h ago
I don't think existing copywright law matters with respect to AI. AI generated art is unprecedented and I'd argue there is a moral imperative to distribute the wealth generated by AI to those whose creative work enabled the technology even if we don't have a legal (or technical) framework for doing this in place yet.
kelseyfrog · 1h ago
Copyright exists to formulate art[1] as capital.
Let's take a step back and recognize this for what it is - juridification - the replacement of social relations with legally enforced economic relations. It assumes, incorrectly, that everything made by people is subject to exchange. It's not, and for the most part, that's not how artists themselves conceive of art.
The artist community mostly operates on attribution. That is, influences are appropriately stated and attribution is the social currency. Unattributed works violate social norms. The problem is when these social relations are codified as economic relations. It's weird, like when Milton Friedman argued that children owe their parents for raising them[3].
As much as some people believe that this would imply the creation of rights, it misses the point. Freedom to choose does not include freedom from having to choose. The infinite variety of rich human relations are flattened into one dimension - economic. That erases what's most important to the human experience.
1. Insomuch as art is literary, musical, or artistic work
there is enough capital circulating now among certain groups such that there is no practical driver to change anything about the current economics.. "let them eat cake" basically? Appearing to look cultured while arguing for the effective economic demise of the artisan, at scale, is the hot take today here
TheOtherHobbes · 1h ago
It's not even a hot take. This is the straight neoliberal party line. There's some original research here, but no original thought - down to the debunked "Don't tax rich people or they'll leave" line, which even economists will tell you is objectively untrue.
Ultimately it's about freedom and values - not the capitalist take on freedom, which is all about property rights and the "freedom" to consume and pick one of a number of performative lifestyles, some of which are labelled dissenting, but the freedom of imagination to reinvent culture and technology in completely original ways.
You might think the AI companies are doing that, but they're doing the opposite. They're automating privilege - reinforcing and amplifying the existing system of economic disenfranchisement, value enclosure, and diminishing accountability.
zzzeek · 1h ago
I'm not ripping off your song / photo / artwork. No, I'm democratizing it. You should thank me !
The researcher points out that "Both patterns were conceived by humans, although certain features of the computer-generated picture were decided by a programmed random algorithm. The computer functioned only as a medium performing its operations under the complete control of the computer program written by the programmer-artist."
The paper with images: http://noll.uscannenberg.org/Art%20Papers/Mondrian.pdf
OpenAI isn't trying to produce art. They are trying to replace human creation with artificial creation, but an artificial creation whose entire input was the human creation.
Kawano was not trying to replace Mondrian. And Mondrian was dead.
Personally I'm happy to restrict copyright expiry and AI input to the work of dead people. Right now copyright is too long and AI is happy to ignore entirely. Let's allow AI and humans to both reproduce the work of dead people but leave the living to their benefits of their creation so long as they are alive.
And they’re trying to build a business off it as well. There are a whole lot of things we generally excuse when they’re noncommercial (morally, even if not strictly legally), but OpenAI is a business, not a hobby. Similarly, we cast a gentler eye towards someone working towards self-improvement or personal discovery - artists are known to duplicate the work of other artists to hone their techniques, and Kawano was copying Mondrian’s style to understand the use of new technology for making art. OpenAI is doing none of that - the point of their system is to skip all the hard work of learning and self improvement.
There are plenty of reasons for a model to ingest the art that are not directly related to creating new derivatives of that art. If you want the model to be able to recognize famous paintings or discuss styles/genres, it needs to get those examples.
* It's age discrimination against older people.
* If the copyright ends up being owned by some corporation (or effectively owned: some corporation has exclusive rights), which is what usually happens for any valuable copyright, it seems weird that the duration should be based on the lifetime of the author.
* It creates problems later when it's not obvious who the author was or when the author died.
* It could easily be abused by authors adding their grandchildren as co-authors. (I'm a bit wary of mentioning this in case I give anyone ideas. It has happened already, but so far not very often, as far as I can tell.)
What is it about creative IP that makes it different to other kinds of family inheritance, or other kinds of rentier ownership?
Why does the argument that "Ownership rights should expire as soon as possible for the common good" not apply to huge land and property holdings, some of which have been passed down for centuries, with far more obvious economic and political effects than - say - Tolkien's descendants not needing a day job?
Rivalrous goods are relatively easier to protect and monetize without the assistance of the state. Non-rivalrous goods are pretty much impossible to protect/monetize without the assistance of a state.
you wouldn't steal a car, err i mean download, right!
No, physical property are both excludable and rivalrous goods [1], for them ownership is a natural right.
OTOH, IP are naturally non-rivalrous, and only semi-excludable through establishment of copyright law. IP ownership is just societal construct trying to fit market mechanisms to them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goods
In general, property rights don't end when someone dies, they're just transferred to someone else. People can even take advantage of the fact that property rights endure by selling the right to take possession after their death.
Or pay somehow in the future for the use of them?
IP law is a purely practical matter: what most incentivizes intellectual production? If a culture errs too far toward restriction, that country ultimately falls behind. The US itself jumpstarted its industry by mass IP theft and industrial espionage to steal the hard work of British inventors and entrepreneurs; its entire publishing industry got its start by copying British works wholesale in what was then the world's most flagrant IP violation. As an angry sputtering Dickens wrote:
> You take the uncompleted books of living authors, fresh from their hands, wet from the press, cut, hack and carve them... all this without permission, and against his will; and then, to crown the whole proceeding, publish in some mean pamphlet, an unmeaning farrago of garbled extracts from his work, to which your name as author, with the honourable distinction annexed, of having perpetrated a hundred other outrages of the same description.
Americans mostly shrugged, or attacked him as a mercenary scoundrel, before proceeding to build the world's largest publishing industry.
The US needs to make laws governing how copyright applies to generative AI; when it does, those laws should grant expansive fair use rights. Otherwise, the US will be left behind.
If we treat it like a copier it's the end user that's responsible when they tell it to produce something that infringes on someone else's copyrighted work. No different than if someone walked up to a machine and copied an entire book.
Furthermore, if the end user never even distributes the result of a prompt the question is moot anyway: Copyright only matters when something gets distributed. No distribution == No violation of copyright.
If we treat AI like an artist it is the owner/creator of the AI model that's responsible when it produces something that violates another's copyright. Since it is literally impossible to maintain a database of all copyrighted works that exist (in order to check if something violates copyright or not) this option is untenable. It's not possible to implement unless we go back to requiring all copyrights be registered (and provide that database to anyone that asks—thus, distributing all those copyrighted works which would defeat the purpose).
I very strongly believe that the courts will ultimately settle on treating AI like a copier. It's a tool/machine and should be treated as such by copyright law.
A good first step would be to mandate AI labs share their weights and methodology before commercial release or lose that privilege. This would spare universities and non-profits, while requiring commercial labs to contribute something back, be it in licensing fees or usable research.
It can not be treated just as a Xerox machine, but it can be treated as a Xerox machine that has within it all the copywritten works (that a user can inventively request combinations there within) which it has trained on (and saved in the form of weights/bias). In this case the AI model itself is the distribution of works under copyright. Encrypting/transforming copywritten works and transmitting it is a violation of copyright (afaik; ianal).
This is all to say, copyright - as it stands - needs heavy reform. I'm rather copyleft. Because all of this is vestigial nonsense from an age where printers from the 1800's setting the rules, and our thinking hasn't updated yet.
There’s no generative ability, but anytime you compress/decompress your image the model uses weights and biases learned from copyrighted works.
Is that a violation?
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c39xj284e14o
MPs rejected that amendment and sent the Bill back to the Lords.
"Kidron's amendment will not provide certainty of anything except for certainty of more uncertainty, of continuous regulations stacked one upon another in a pile of instruments...
"Jumping the gun on one issue will hamstring us in reaching the best outcome on all the others and especially because this is a global issue and we cannot ringfence the UK away from the rest of the world."
However, Kidron said her amendment "does not challenge the primacy of the Commons" and pushed ahead.
The result was a decisive defeat for the Government, with 287 votes in favour of Kidron's amendment and 118 against - a majority of 169 - and the Bill will now be sent back to the Commons.
Ai image generator frequently refuse to create illustrations featuring the character, everybody is afraid of Disney.
Similar, Disney’s Winnie the Puh just looks like Magarete Steiffs plush bear with a red shirt.
Very often those who claim to have created an original work themselves just produced derivatives, at least those should not be protected to the detriment of humankind.
so why does it feel different when LLM ingests some music to "fundamentally shape how it 'thinks' of the artform"?
i can create loads of speculation about what that difference is, but to be honest it all feels pretty post-hoc and hand-wavy.
The LLM lacks all desire and vision, it is a machine that can produce a trillion variations of something that sounds like Miles Davis, for example, without an ounce of intention to what it wants to do, what art it wants to make.
Fundamentally the LLM is not a living thing that interacts with other living things and has an idea of how it wants to influence itself and others. it is just a printing press capable of flooding the marketplace with lookalikes and slop.
[Despite my tone, I appreciate the prompt, it's a subject I'd like to write on at more length than an HN comment]
Most-ish people are biased in favor of both "the little guy", and in favor of "artists" (whether authors, musicians, painters, or whatever).
Let's take a step back and recognize this for what it is - juridification - the replacement of social relations with legally enforced economic relations. It assumes, incorrectly, that everything made by people is subject to exchange. It's not, and for the most part, that's not how artists themselves conceive of art.
The artist community mostly operates on attribution. That is, influences are appropriately stated and attribution is the social currency. Unattributed works violate social norms. The problem is when these social relations are codified as economic relations. It's weird, like when Milton Friedman argued that children owe their parents for raising them[3].
As much as some people believe that this would imply the creation of rights, it misses the point. Freedom to choose does not include freedom from having to choose. The infinite variety of rich human relations are flattened into one dimension - economic. That erases what's most important to the human experience.
1. Insomuch as art is literary, musical, or artistic work
2. https://www.sv.uio.no/arena/english/research/publications/ar...
3. https://periferiaactiva.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/201...
Ultimately it's about freedom and values - not the capitalist take on freedom, which is all about property rights and the "freedom" to consume and pick one of a number of performative lifestyles, some of which are labelled dissenting, but the freedom of imagination to reinvent culture and technology in completely original ways.
You might think the AI companies are doing that, but they're doing the opposite. They're automating privilege - reinforcing and amplifying the existing system of economic disenfranchisement, value enclosure, and diminishing accountability.