Copyright law as it exists today allows one to create transformative works. There is little to suggest that an AI trained on copyrighted works is in any way violating that copyright when inference is run.
Copyright law as it exists allows a creative process to create transformative works.
Computers cannot create copyright. They are not creative. Just because I save your image as webp or jpeg or whatever doesn't mean I have changed the copyright. Just because I zip it up with a hundred other images doesn't mean the zipfile is free of your copyright.
Effectively, computers are executing math, and math by itself does not construct new copyright, since copyright is the result of a creative human process.
As far as I can tell, current AI are fundamentally not too different from wildly complex compression algorithms. You compress a billion images down to a model. The model now can reproduce a fraction or the whole of the copyrighted work with some low probability. Rote and probabilistic compression.
The creator of the AI might own the copyright for what it produces if constructing the AI was suitably creative, i.e. if you construct an AI that trains on random noise and produces images, those are clearly something you, the author of the AI's code, can claim copyright over... But current AI seem like math more than anything else. It's plausible that reinforced learning or some other part of training does imbue creativity into the process, but that doesn't seem obviously true to me.
You’re confusing the training process with inference, you’re confusing the copyright status of a model with the copyright status of the model output, and your confusing compressed data with a compression algorithm.
Argument "it's just math underneath" is flawed. Photoshop also has math underneath - does it mean that if you use Photoshop, you're not doing a creative process?
Also, saying that it's math ergo it's not creative is something that most people on HN would not agree with.
As for "it's just compression" - compression means that you can recover the original data - perhaps with a loss of quality, but still you can. With modern ML you mostly can't.
The human using photoshop is providing the creativity, and thus the human using photoshop owns the copyright, if they do sufficiently creative work (like actually drawing).
However, when using the current image gen AIs, the input you provide is a sentence of text and a couple parameters, a minimal amount of creativity.
This would be akin to opening photoshop and doing minimal work, such as choosing "resize image, apply blur filter".
If you open photoshop and do a few rote transformations, you indeed have not imbued enough creativity to create a new copyrighted work, the work retains its original copyright if you just open it in photoshop and resize it.
'the input you provide is a sentence of text and a couple parameters, a minimal amount of creativity"
Have you tried creating art with AI? Usually it takes hundreds of iterations of text-to-image, image-to-image, inpainting, outpainting using dozens of different models.
"A sentence is all it takes" is like saying all it takes to make a million is crossing some numbers on a grid.
308.2 Creativity
A work of authorship must possess “some minimal degree of creativity” to sustain a
copyright claim. Feist, 499 U.S. at 358, 362 (citation omitted).
“[T]he requisite level of creativity is extremely low.” Even a “slight amount” of creative
expression will suffice. “The vast majority of works make the grade quite easily, as they
possess some creative spark, ‘no matter how crude, humble or obvious it might be.’” Id.
at 346 (citation omitted).
> The model now can reproduce a fraction or the whole of the copyrighted work with some low probability. Rote and probabilistic compression
The VAE can be thought of as a codec, but the denoising process can recover images that are far removed from anything that is in the training data. Nobody has ever created an impressionist painting of Winston Churchill riding a purple lizard through the gates of retrofuturist Constantinople, yet almost infinite variations of that image exist in the latent space. If anything, it can be thought of as an intricate form of collage, which we do give special treatment for copyright purposes.
