this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2025
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The biggest problem with AI is that they're illegally harvesting everything they can possibly get their hands on to feed it, they're forcing it into places where people have explicitly said they don't want it, and they're sucking up massive amounts of energy AMD water to create it, undoing everyone else's progress in reducing energy use, and raising prices for everyone else at the same time.
Oh, and it also hallucinates.
They're not illegally harvesting anything. Copyright law is all about distribution. As much as everyone loves to think that when you copy something without permission you're breaking the law the truth is that you're not. It's only when you distribute said copy that you're breaking the law (aka violating copyright).
All those old school notices (e.g. "FBI Warning") are 100% bullshit. Same for the warning the NFL spits out before games. You absolutely can record it! You just can't share it (or show it to more than a handful of people but that's a different set of laws regarding broadcasting).
I download AI (image generation) models all the time. They range in size from 2GB to 12GB. You cannot fit the petabytes of data they used to train the model into that space. No compression algorithm is that good.
The same is true for LLM, RVC (audio models) and similar models/checkpoints. I mean, think about it: If AI is illegally distributing millions of copyrighted works to end users they'd have to be including it all in those files somehow.
Instead of thinking of an AI model like a collection of copyrighted works think of it more like a rough sketch of a mashup of copyrighted works. Like if you asked a person to make a Godzilla-themed My Little Pony and what you got was that person's interpretation of what Godzilla combined with MLP would look like. Every artist would draw it differently. Every author would describe it differently. Every voice actor would voice it differently.
Those differences are the equivalent of the random seed provided to AI models. If you throw something at a random number generator enough times you could--in theory--get the works of Shakespeare. Especially if you ask it to write something just like Shakespeare. However, that doesn't meant the AI model literally copied his works. It's just doing it's best guess (it's literally guessing! That's how work!).
This is an interesting argument that I've never heard before. Isn't the question more about whether ai generated art counts as a "derivative work" though? I don't use AI at all but from what I've read, they can generate work that includes watermarks from the source data, would that not strongly imply that these are derivative works?
If you studied loads of classic art then started making your own would that be a derivative work? Because that's how AI works.
The presence of watermarks in output images is just a side effect of the prompt and its similarity to training data. If you ask for a picture of an Olympic swimmer wearing a purple bathing suit and it turns out that only a hundred or so images in the training match that sort of image--and most of them included a watermark--you can end up with a kinda-sorta similar watermark in the output.
It is absolutely 100% evidence that they used watermarked images in their training. Is that a problem, though? I wouldn't think so since they're not distributing those exact images. Just images that are "kinda sorta" similar.
If you try to get an AI to output an image that matches someone else's image nearly exactly... is that the fault of the AI or the end user, specifically asking for something that would violate another's copyright (with a derivative work)?
Sounds like a load of techbro nonsense.
By that logic mirroring an image would suffice to count as derivative work since it's "kinda sorta similar". It's not the original, and 0% of pixels match the source.
"And the machine, it learned to flip the image by itself! Like a human!"
It's a predictive keyboard on steroids, let's not pretent that it can create anything but noise with no input.