Comment by mathieu4v
3 months ago
I found this bit very revealing:
> Since the output would only be generated as a result of user inputs known as prompts, it was not the defendants, but the respective user who would be liable for it, OpenAI had argued.
Another glimpse into the "mind" of a tech corporation allowing itself full freedom to profit from the vast body of human work available online, while explicitly declining any societal responsibility at all. It's the user's fault, he wrote an illegal prompt! We're only providing the "technology"!
This is largely how it works for nearly all coprightable work. I can draw Mickey Mouse but legally I'm not doing anything wrong until I try to sell it. It certainly doesn't put Crayola or Adobe at legal risk for me to do so.
But you are not the one drawing Mickey Mouse in this scenario, are you? You are instructing the AI company to draw something or more close to the original post you are prompting to generate lyrics for song X.
Your prompt may be asking something for illegal (i.e. reproducing the lyrics), but the one reproducing the lyrics is the AI company, not you yourself.
In your example you are asking Adobe to draw Mickey Mouse and Adobe happily draws a perfect rendition of Mickey Mouse for you and you have to pay Adobe for that image.
This keeps coming up, and I am not a lawyer, but as far as I can tell none of that matters. I can pay someone to draw Mickey Mouse for me and hang it up in my house. If I invite people to visit my Mickey Mouse House and charge them for the privilege, I'm in violation. Maybe the artist I paid to draw the mouse is also in some smaller violation but it all comes back to distribution and impact. I don't think it devalues Mickey Mouse in any way if I have a slot machine that spits out pictures of Mickey Mouse. If it does devalue it, maybe it doesn't have much value to begin with.
Reproduction (again, IANAL) seems to consist of a lot more than "I made it", it consists of how you use it and whether that usage constitutes infringement.
EDIT: To add, genuine question, what does "asking" come down to? I can ask Photoshop to draw Mickey Mouse through a series of clever Mickey-Mouse-shaped brush strokes. I can ask Microsoft Word to reproduce lyrics by typing them in. At what gradient between those actions and text prompting am I (or OpenAI, or Adobe) committing copyright infringement?
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Not really, if I ask an artist to draw me a Mickey Mouse (for money) who is committing copyright infringement?
It's an interesting observation that the big AI corps very much argue that learning "is the same that humans do", so fair use. But then when it comes to using that learning they argue the other way, i.e. "this is just a machine, it's the person asking who is doing the infringement".
Companies care about material damages in practice. I'm not a lawyer but my understanding is that in that case, the artist drawing and selling the work is infringing (to a degree, because this seems to be a case Disney et al doesn't care about) but that if you take their work and publish and promote it and sell it, YOU become Disney's problem. If the wind and rain and erosion and time and God managed to produce a perfect post-Steamboat-Willie Mickey Mouse in the desert sand, visible from space, that wouldn't be infringement until you monetized it, called it Mickey Mouse and charged people to see it. A lot of the entities trying to get their piece of Infringement Pie seem to think their authority and their works are in the first position here instead; that my newfound capability to generate a Mickey Mouse from scratch on a whim affects their pockets, when in fact we're back to a variant of the classic piracy argument - I was not ever going to pay for it under any condition. If I decide this weekend to have one of the robots help me publish To Kill a Mockingbird Part 2, then sue me into the ground.