Comment by fennecfoxy
6 days ago
I don't think most artists would be any less angry & scared if AI was trained on licensed work. The rhetoric would just shift from mostly "they're breashing copyright!" to more of the "machine art is soulless and lacks true human creativity!" line.
I have a lot of artist friends but I still appreciate that diffusion models are (and will be with further refinement) incredibly useful tools.
What we're seeing is just the commoditisation of an industry in the same way that we have many, many times before through the industrial era, etc.
It actually doesn't matter how would they feel. In currently accepted copyright framework if the works were licensed they couldn't do much about it. But right now they can be upset because suddenly new normal is massive copyright violation. It's very clear that without the massive amount of unlicensed work the LLMs simply wouldn't work well. The AI industry is just trying to run with it hoping nobody will notice.
It isn’t clear at all that there’s any infringement going on at all, except in cases where AI output reproduces copyrighted content or content that is sufficiently close to copyrighted content to constitute a derivative work. For example, if you told an LLM to write a Harry Potter fanfic, that would be infringement - fanfics are actually infringing derivative works that usually get a pass because nobody wants to sue their fanbase.
It’s very unlikely simply training an LLM on “unlicensed” work constitutes infringement. It could possibly be that the model itself, when published, would represent a derivative work, but it’s unlikely that most output would be unless specifically prompted to be.
I am not sure why you would think so. AFAIK we will see more what courts think later in 2025 but judging from what was ruled in Delaware in feb... it is actually very likely that LLMs use of material is not "fair use" because besides "how transformed" work is one important part of "fair use" is that the output does not compete with the initial work. LLMs not only compete... they are specifically sold as replacement of the work they have been trained on.
This is why all the lobby now pushes the govs to not allow any regulation of AI even if courts disagree.
IMHO what will happen anyway is that at some point the companies will "solve" the licensing by training models purely on older synthetic LLM output that will be "public research" (which of course will have the "human" weights but they will claim it doesnt matter).
5 replies →
I'm interpreting what you described as a derivative work to be something like:
"Create a video of a girl running through a field in the style of Studio Ghibli."
There, someone has specifically prompted the AI to create something visually similar to X.
But would you still consider it a derivative work if you replaced the words "Studio Ghibli" with a few sentences describing their style that ultimately produces the same output?
1 reply →