this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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There isn't any open source solution possible if AI models are beholden to copyright laws.
This is advocating for a world where only a handful of companies would be able to train AI models, and the rest of us would become their pets as we move towards an AI driven society.
The artist and writers already lost, there is no going back. Now we see if we all win together or if only google, openai, shutterstock, Adobe, stack overflow, github and reddit win since they are the only ones with the data or able to pay for it.
Except that copyright doesn't work that way.
It is perfectly legal for a human artist to view McKernan's paintings, and decide to adopt a similar style, or even to take an image and use it as a component of their art, provided it is different enough. So there's no provision of copyright law that prevents robots from doing the same.
No one owns a style, and painters classically practice by replicating the paintings of othersm and not necessarily limited to those in thr public domain. In commercial art, an artist is commonly hired and given the instruction, make something that looks like this picture or paint our product in this guy's style.
The problem is that we depend on work to live and any job automated is someone else not earning a living. But that is always a consideration with automation.
I think what people imagine is that the AI artist can be had for cheaper, or can produce more consistent results than the professional painter when, for now, it's yet another artist's tool that requires practice and skill. Managers looking get an office clerk to whip up some spectacular art are going to find themselves choosing from dozens of NSFL images.
The way I see it, the software can be open source, but you'd have to train it yourself.
Kind of like how you're free to reverse engineer a console, and write an open source emulator, but you can't supply the firmware itself (ex scph1000.bin for ps1) or roms of commercial games.
The pretrained part is just someone running the software on their dataset for you. You are free to do the same yourself, and getting the data for the training set legally is an exercise for you. Is it affordable for most people? Not really, because you need gargantuan amounts of data and compute power. But the software itself is yours to modify and run. I see that as an indication of the technology being a dead end, in the long run. As in, they are not getting much better, but they are becoming much larger and much less feasible to train.