Comment by AJ007
3 years ago
The level of claims accompanied by enthusiastic reception from a technically illiterate audience make it sound, smell, and sound like snake oil without much deep investigation.
There is another alternative to the law. Provide your art for private viewing only, and ensure your in person audience does not bring recording devices with them. That may sound absurd, but it's a common practice during activities like having sex.
That doesn't sound like a viable business model. There seems to be a non-trivial bootstrap problem involved -- how do you become well-known enough to attract audiences to private venues in sufficient volume to make a living? -- and would in no way diminish demand for AI-generated artwork which would still continue to draw attention away from you.
The thing is people want the benefits of having their stuff public but not bear the costs. Scraping has been mostly a solved problem especially when it comes to broad crawling. Put it under a login, there, no more AI "stealing" your work.
I don't think that's true at all. Images and text get reposted with or without consent, often without attribution. It wouldn't make it right for the AI companies to scrape when the original author doesn't want that but someone else has ignored their wishes and requirements. Basically, what good is putting your stuff behind login or some other restrictive viewing method if someone just saves the image/text? I think it's still a relatively serious problem for people creating things. And without some form of easy access to viewing, the people creating things don't get the visibility and exposure they need to get an audience/clients.
This is one the AI companies should offer the olive branch on IMO, there must be a way to use stenography to transparently embed a "don't process for AI" code into an image or text or music or any other creative work that won't be noticeable by humans, but the AI would see if it tried to process the content for training. I think it would be a very convenient answer and probably not be detrimental to the AI companies, but I also imagine that the AI companies would not be very eager to spend the resources implementing this. I do think they're the best source for such protections for artists though.
Ideally, without a previous written agreement for a dataset from the original creators, the AI companies probably shouldn't be using it for training at all, but I doubt that will happen -- the system I mention above should be _opt-in_, that is, you must tag such content that is free to be AI trained in order for AI to be trained on it, but I have 0 faith that the AI companies would agree to such a self-limitation.
edit: added mention to music and other creative works in second paragraph 1st sentence
edit 2: Added final paragraph as I do think this should be opt-in, but don't believe AI companies would ever accept this, even though they should by all means in my opinion.
Here are my 2 cents, I think we will need some laws specifying two types of AI models, ones trained with full consent (opt-in) for its training material and ones without. The first one would be like Adobe's firefly model where they allegedly own everything they trained it with, or something where you go around asking for consent for each thing in your training corpus (probably unfeasible for large models). Maybe things in the public domain would be ok to train with. In this case there are no restrictions and the output from such models can even be copyrighted.
Now for the second type, representing models such as Stable Difusion and Chat GPT, it would be required to have their trained model freely available to anyone and any resulting output would not be copyrightable. It may be a more fairer way of allowing anyone to harness the power of AI models that contain essentially the knowledge of all man kind, but without giving any party an unfair monopoly on it.
This should be easily enforceable for big corporations, else it would be too obvious if they are trying to pass one type model as another or even keep the truth about their model from leaking. It might not be as easy to keep small groups or individuals from breaking those rules, but hey, at least it evens the playing field.
Is that login statement strictly true? Unless the login is paid, there's no reason we can't get to (if not already there) the point where the AI scraper can just create a login first.
No, eforcing click-wrap legal agreements is actually possible. With basic KYC the scraper would instantly open up itself for litigation and no internet art piece is frankly worth this sort of trouble.
But then you can rate-limit to a point where scraping everything will take a considerable amount of time.
Of course the workaround would be to have multiple accounts, but that in turn can be made unscalable with a "prove you're human" box.
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This would just create a new market for art paparazzis who would find any and all means to inflitrate such private viewings with futuristic miniature cameras and other sensors and selling it for a premium. Less than 24 hours later the files end up on hundreds or thousands of centralized and decentralized servers.
I'm not defending it. Just acknowledging the reality. The next TMZ for private art gatherings is percolating in someone's garage at the moment.
I find this difficult to believe; no matter how small your camera is, photography is about light. Art reproduction photography is surprisingly hard to do if you care about the quality of the end result. Unless you can surreptitiously smuggle in a studio lighting setup, tripod, and color checker card… sure you can take an image in secret, but not one that is a good representation of the real thing.
You could just build a stabilizer system and stand really still for 1 second. Then expose for a longer time. Photography is Apertrue, ISO, and exposure time. This will gather enough light to do a proper exposure even in a dimm lit venue. Anything darker and every viewer will have a hard time seeing the private art. ANother thing would be to crank up the ISO and denoise it later. Its much more lossy but with this you could get lower exposure times.
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It’s about number of photons and aperture. In principle this could be very hard to detect, especially once people get good at multiple distributed apertures that are coherent with one another.
For comparison, The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls did this and successfully remained hidden for half a century, only failing because it was published somewhere else.
True I can imagine that kind of thing becoming popular.