Lawsuits Challenging "AI"-Generated Work

[Friendly Frog]

That is fortunate. The funny thing is that I'm such a lazy procrastinator, I usually don't get anything done. Except my website. I'm pretty good about keeping that updated with my latest paintings. And that's where they scraped my art (I've never been on DeviantArt or any other art site).

They scraped your own website?! That's even worse!

It would be interesting to know what algorithm they use to determine which artworks are scraped. The only thing I've heard is that they have a preference for images that have metadata describing the image, because that helps train the AI.

I hadn't thought about that, and yes, I reckon that would be very interesting indeed.

Perhaps the veil will be lifted somewhat if it comes to trial. I imagine the judge will need to know quite a bit about how the scraped art is used.

 

[ElaineA]

If all you upload is stick-figures, you're not going to get a Van Gogh roll out the other end.

Of course not. You'll get a Miró.

 

[PastyAlien]

They scraped your own website?! That's even worse!

Right? They scraped most of my paintings--included portraits I painted of my family members--without my knowledge or consent from my own personal website. The subjects of those paintings didn't give consent to have their likeness dumped into an AI dataset either. One subject only reluctantly agreed to allow me to upload her portrait to my site (this was years ago, before AI), as long as I didn't post it to social media. What am I gonna tell her now? Sorry, but your likeness is now accessible by every AI generator on the planet and oh and by the way it can potentially be used to make porn now?


In other news, the "AI Artists/Prompt Engineers" (OMFG if my eyes rolled any farther back in my head I'd be staring at my frontal lobe) are worried about THEIR art being stolen.

What’s the copyright?​

I’ll be honest, that part is unclear because most AI-generated art still falls under the public domain. But leave that to Adobe to defend your interests.

In fact, uploading to Adobe Stock may be a great way to ensure your images are not stolen, as they could issue DMCAs. The Adobe watermark is powerful.

I’d also suggest making your work transformative. That means editing it, modifying it, and adding to it. Put your personal flair on your image. Not only will this improve it, but it may also give it some measure of protection (from the artists whose original work was ingested by the AI, and copycats).

They want Adobe Stock (the only stock image site that allows AI art, AFAIK), to protect "their" images under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. And they want protection from the very people they stole --oh, sorry, "ingested" the images from. And protection from people who might copy their stuff, because, yanno, that's bad.

JFC, you cannot make this shit up.

 

[ElaineA]

In other news, the "AI Artists/Prompt Engineers" (OMFG if my eyes rolled any farther back in my head I'd be staring at my frontal lobe) are worried about THEIR art being stolen.


They want Adobe Stock (the only stock image site that allows AI art, AFAIK), to protect "their" images under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. And they want protection from the very people they stole --oh, sorry, "ingested" the images from. And protection from people who might copy their stuff, because, yanno, that's bad.

JFC, you cannot make this shit up.

What...and I cannot possibly stress this enough...THE FπCK?????

 

[Alessandra Kelley]

In other news, the "AI Artists/Prompt Engineers" (OMFG if my eyes rolled any farther back in my head I'd be staring at my frontal lobe) are worried about THEIR art being stolen.


They want Adobe Stock (the only stock image site that allows AI art, AFAIK), to protect "their" images under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. And they want protection from the very people they stole --oh, sorry, "ingested" the images from. And protection from people who might copy their stuff, because, yanno, that's bad.

JFC, you cannot make this shit up.

The US Copyright Office has already ruled that AI-generated art is not and will not be protected by copyright.

 

[Friendly Frog]

Adobe... oh right, I remember those guys, they were the ones I needed to get that aweful out-dated DRM off my legally bought e-books to get them on my legally bought e-reader. (A fact they nicely hid in all information before I got that e-reader and the shop-account. )

And then those [expletive] [expletive] allowed themselves to be hacked and have hackers take my email. And then they were too chicken to alert me of that fact, even if the law stipulated they had to and I had to find out a year after the fact, wondering where all that phishing spam came from.

Yeah, those fuckers.

How am I not surprised they pull this crap?

 

[PastyAlien]

Mastodon.art, the biggest art-based instance, has banned AI art. Yay! One of the things I ADORE about Mastodon is the ability to actually find *real* art and artists! Unlike Instagram, where every search returns a glut of AI images. I hope other instances will adopt this policy.

 

[Introversion]

I refuse to like or boost AI art on Mastodon.

 

[PastyAlien]

I refuse to like or boost AI art on Mastodon.

Same! I also unfollow/block anyone who posts it.

 

[Introversion]

Well, here’s something new I won’t watch on Netflix…

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/netflix-taps-ai-image-synthesis-for-background-art-in-the-dog-and-the-boy/

Over the past year, generative AI has kicked off a wave of existential dread over potential machine-fueled job loss not seen since the advent of the industrial revolution. On Tuesday, Netflix reinvigorated that fear when it debuted a short film called Dog and Boy that utilizes AI image synthesis to help generate its background artwork.

Directed by Ryotaro Makihara, the three-minute animated short follows the story of a boy and his robotic dog through cheerful times, although the story soon takes a dramatic turn toward the post-apocalyptic. Along the way, it includes lush backgrounds apparently created as a collaboration between man and machine, credited to "AI (+Human)" in the end credit sequence.
…
Almost immediately, Twitter users responded with a torrent of negative replies to Netflix's tweet announcing the film, such as, "I know a ton of animators looking for work if you guys are struggling to find them (are you looking very hard?)." Several others quoted legendary Studio Ghibli animator Hayao Miyazaki as saying that AI-powered art "is an insult to life itself."

 

[PastyAlien]

Well, here’s something new I won’t watch on Netflix…

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/netflix-taps-ai-image-synthesis-for-background-art-in-the-dog-and-the-boy/

Unfortunately I think this is only the tip of the iceberg. It's going to be much cheaper for the big studios to use AI than human animators (especially the likes of Disney, who have decades of IP with which to train the generators), so that's what they're gonna do.

BTW, the AI "artists" are starting to refer to themselves as "Art Directors."

 

[Introversion]

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/02/getty-sues-stability-ai-for-copying-12m-photos-and-imitating-famous-watermark/

Getty Images is well-known for its extensive collection of millions of images, including its exclusive archive of historical images and its wider selection of stock images hosted on iStock. On Friday, Getty filed a second lawsuit against Stability AI Inc to prevent the unauthorized use and duplication of its stock images using artificial intelligence.

According to the company's newest lawsuit filed in a US district court in Delaware, “Stability AI has copied more than 12 million photographs from Getty Images’ collection, along with the associated captions and metadata, without permission from or compensation to Getty Images, as part of its efforts to build a competing business.”

 

[ElaineA]

I don't even know where to put stuff anymore, since AI stories are coming at us so fast and furiously, but I suspect this one is going to cause some legal entanglements, so I decided to drop it here.

It's recently been discovered that Findaway Voices, the main audiobook creation competitor to ACX, has a clause in the contract between them and authors that gives a 3rd party, Apple, license to use the audiobook to machine-train its narration AI. Victoria Strauss has a post on Writer Beware that encompasses this recent discovery of a not-exactly-recent contract clause, as well as the other AI issues that have been discussed in this thread already.

I read elsewhere--but damn if I can find it at the moment--that those rights don't even belong to the author. They belong to the voice actor. (If anyone here has experience with audiobook self publishing and has a solid understanding of the rights between narrator and author, feel free to add your expertise.) It also appears there is an opt-out available, so that's worth looking into if you're self-pubbing an ebook, too.

It's not hard to see how this could spin into another truly messy legal situation.

 

[mccardey]

It's gonna be work for copyright lawyers.

ETA: Just to be totally fair, though, because I think looking at things from both sides is an imperative in today's divisive climate, I have to say that copyright lawyers can be dicks. Tim Minchin said as much ten years ago, and I love Tim Minchin.

Warning: he doesn't say it until the very, very end of this Tim Minchin song. Which is (be warned) a Tim Minchin song with all that that entails...