bioemerl

Not really.

Rob a bank? Thanks to serial numbers they can tell it's you who is using the money.

Steal from your neighbor? Same deal. Someone will notice.

It's all risks and consequences. Most big acts of "evil" still have those risks and consequences even if you can stop time or whatever else. And your ability is going to be worth so much fuck you money to scientific and other use cases that you really won't have reason to steal or whatever.

But the site I linked to above is selling this service and it’s telling me I can use the images in any way I want

Then the site is wrong to tell you that you can use the images in any way you want.

Or you are wrong for assuming you can intentionally violate copyright and trademark by using the AI tool to generate Micky mouse and then get all offended that "but the site told me I can use the pictures, it's their fault".

what happens when the output is extremely similar to a character I’ve never

Nobody knows yet. For the most part it hasn't happened. Big services like DallE will assume all legal liability for you. Small services? It's on you to make sure the image is clean.

The end result is that the copyright of everything not widely recognizable is practically meaningless if we accept this practice

You seem to have forgotten a small detail here.

This is already how it works. Every character has thousands and thousands of fan works, often supported by artists with donations and patreons. The status quo is that none of them get caught and sued until they get big enough, and that anyone who tries to sue these people are assholes abusing copyright law even they're legally correct.

This is not a magical device that can “draw anything”,

Straw man?

Reading comprehension. This is an argument-by-comparion. It shows how your point is absurd and doesn't work by comparing it against a magical machine that doesn't yet exist. It shows how your idea of how copyright should work here is regressive, harmful, and dangerous by pointing out that you seem to believe that just because something could violate copyright that it should be prevented from existing, being used, or being sold.

This is a mundane device whose sole function is to try to copy patterns from its input set

You don't own a copyright on a pattern or a brushstroke. You own copyright on works of art.

If you want to prove me wrong, make your own model without a single image of Micky Mouse or a tag with his name, then try to get it to draw him like I did before

Are you suggesting it will be impossible to do this? Because this will be quickly proven wrong and there will be a day and a description specific enough to produce Micky mouse from a machine that's never seen it.

The mere fact that it will happen one day is enough. I don't have to literally go invent it today.

There are many ways this could be done ethically

It's already being done ethically.

Would it be transformative if I sold you a database of base64 encoded images? What about if they were encrypted

No.

Also no.

There is a long history of examples set by court cases on what does or doesn't count as transformative. Law is very good at handling exceptions like this and it's been handling them for decades.

An encoding is not transformative. It's just the same information sent a different way. Same with encryption.

Hell, you can hire me to paint based on prompts you give me. That’s the exact same service an AI provides, no? I’m going to study copyrighted materials to get better at my service.

All perfectly legal and commonly done.

So you give me the prompt “Mickey Mouse” and I draw this. This is “custom art”. You think you can use that commercially?

No. Not for you and not with AI generated art either.

Copyright controls your ability to copy and distribute creative works. You can learn to draw Micky mouse, you can even draw Micky mouse, but anyone who tries to sell or distribute that copy can and probably will quickly get sued for it.

And if you realize that you can’t, why do you think I should be able to legally sell you this service?

If AI companies were predominantly advertising themselves as "we make your pictures of Micky mouse" you'd have a valid point.

But at this point you're basically arguing that it should be impossible to sell a magical machine that can draw anything you ask from it because it could be asked to draw copyright images.

Courts will see that argument, realize it's absurd, and shut it down.

Seems like a petty technicality to me.

They are selling access to the AI model which draws pictures. Not the original pictures, nor clones of those pictures. A machine to which you can input a prompt that is basically anything and get custom art back as a result.

Also there are companies like stability AI which is providing direct access to the model itself, and I'm sure you're against them as well.

An AI trained on a single image would also probably be fine if it was somehow a generalist AI that didn't overfit on that single image. The quantity really doesn't matter.

The product is a service that writes code or draws pictures. It is literally the exact same as the input

Pictures and things that draw pictures aren't the same thing.

The fact it's a tool that makes art and completes with you has nothing to do with copyright. That would only apply if this was some convoluted scheme to make actual copies of works, which it isn't. People just pirate for that. If I wanted to read this person's books I'd go to pirate Bay, not chat GPT.

It's not illegal for someone to read your books and start writing similar things. That's not copyright theft, that's a genre.

The internet where people make information free and for the benefits of the common good died a long time ago.

It's very much alive and kicking.

All of the "silos" literally depend on it continuing to happen and exist only by nature of the fact that they're still open and easily browsed by individuals. If Reddit turns off access to the average person, Reddit eventually disappears.

Notably, you can still get to Twitter though nitter.

You can still get to Reddit through various open source front ends.

You can still get to YouTube through newpipe.

You may not remember this, but there have been many attempts to silo the Internet. It always falls as the company that does so stagnates and users eventually abandon ship.

The few companies with the hundreds of millions of fuck-you money to train an AI will gain more control while also locking down access to their content.

And you want to give them the monetary incentive and make this future literally inevitable by locking data out of the hands of anyone who can't pay.