- cross-posted to:
- fuck_ai@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- fuck_ai@lemmy.world
- Disney and NBCUniversal have teamed up to sue Midjourney.
- The companies allege that the platform used its copyright protected material to train its model and that users can generate content that infringes on Disney and Universal’s copyrighted material.
- The scathing lawsuit requests that Midjourney be made to pay up for the damage it has caused the two companies.
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Oh so when Big companies do it, it’s OK. But it’s stealing when an OpenSource AI gives that same power back to the people.
Midjourney isn’t opensource, I can’t run it on my PC, contrary to stable diffusion.
That’s part of the strategy. First, go after the small project that can’t defend itself. Use that to set a precedent that is harder for the bigger targets to overturn.
I would expect the bigger players to get themselves involved in the defense for exactly that reason.
There is no logic in mans lust for power. The most self serving will do whatever it takes to achieve wealth, status, and control. The world made so much more sense once I realized that.
I say this as a massive AI critic: Disney does not have a legitimate grievance here.
AI training data is scraping. Scraping is — and must continue to be — fair use. As Cory Doctorow (fellow AI critic) says: Scraping against the wishes of the scraped is good, actually.
I want generative AI firms to get taken down. But I want them to be taken down for the right reasons.
Their products are toxic to communication and collaboration.
They are the embodiment of a pathology that sees humanity — what they might call inefficiency, disagreement, incoherence, emotionality, bias, chaos, disobedience — as a problem, and technology as the answer.
Dismantle them on the basis of what their poison does to public discourse, shared knowledge, connection to each other, mental well-being, fair competition, privacy, labor dignity, and personal identity.
Not because they didn’t pay the fucking Mickey Mouse toll.
You did not read your source. Some quotes you apparently missed:
Scraping to violate the public’s privacy is bad, actually.
Scraping to alienate creative workers’ labor is bad, actually.
Please read your source before posting it and claiming it says something it doesn’t actually say.
Now why does Doctrow distinguish between good scraping and bad scraping, and even between good LLM training and bad LLM training in his post?
Because the good applications are actually covered by fair use while the bad parts aren’t.
Because fair use isn’t actually about what is done (scraping, LLM training, …) but about who does it (researchers, non-profit vs. companies, for-profit) and for what purpose (research, critique, teaching, news reporting vs. making a profit by putting original copyright owners out of work).
That’s the whole point of fair use. It’s even in the name. It’s about the use, and the use needs to be fair. It’s not called “Allowed techniques, don’t care if it’s fair”.
Note that Disney and Universal pirate other people’s stuff whenever they want.
Note also that all the Generative AI services are very protective of their big cistern of web-crawled data, say when China borrows it for DeepSeek.
Content, content everywhere and not a drop of principle.
oooooo do openAI next!
Bite each others dicks off
requests that Midjourney be made to pay up for the damage it has caused the two companies.
good luck proving and putting an accurate number to that perceived ‘damage’?
Easy, ten gajillion dollars. Payable in stock.
No problem, how much is “everything” in USD?
“Piracy” isn’t piracy.
Removes sunglasses …“Let them fight”
The worst person you know just made a great point
Remember when stealing on sea was piracy? Always has been.
Copyright infringement is different.
I dunno were I stand on this one. I can see Disneys argument and agree with it on first glance, but at the same time, is the artists doing fan art infringing copyright then?
Artists doing fan art are infringing copyright, yes. If the fan art meets the fair use criteria then they are not Infringing.
Companies usually overlook the infringement from fan artists because it’s free advertising and the public backlash is not worth going after lone artists. They usually will go after fan art of people that profit off it.
Yes I under that, but is Midjourney profiting off these characters? Ie are people paying for these services just so they can create images of these specific characters ? I think that’s the question that needs to be answered here.
I mean you’re not paying piecemeal as you would for an artist to create your commission of Shrek getting railed by Donkey, you pay for the service which in turns creates anything you tell it to.
It’s like I’m still not convinced that training AI with copyrighted material is infringement, because in my mind is not any different than me seeing Arthas when I was kid, thinking he was cool as fuck and then deciding to make my own OC inspired by him. Was I infringing on Blizzard’s copyrighted character for taking inspiration from its design? Was Mike Pondsmith infringing on William Gibson’s copyright when he invented Cyberpunk?
Yes, your fan art infringed on Blizzards copyright. Blizzard lets it slide, because there’s nothing to gain from it apart from a massive PR desaster.
Now if you sold your Arthas images on a large enough scale then Blizzard will clearly come after you. Copyright is not only about the damages occured by people not buying Blizzards stuff, but also the license fees they didn’t get from you.
That’s the real big difference: if Midjourney was a little hobby project of some guy in his basement that never saw the the light of day, there wouldn’t be a problem. But Midjourney is a for-profit tool with the express purpose of allowing people to make images without paying an artist and the way it does that is by using copyrighted works to do so.
I mean if you paid for a copy of wc3 to find out about Arthas then no, if you downloaded the game illegally then yes. These companies are often torrenting content just like we would just instead of consuming it directly they’re feeding it to their slop printers to train them. I’m all for piracy, including in this context, but if copyright is a going to be a thing and going to be enforced against individuals pirating treats to consume then it sure as shit should be enforced against the corporations pirating huge amounts of content to train their energy sucking crap factories lol
Piracy to me is not the same thing, I’m actually not in favor of piracy, because the way I see it if you want access to a content, and the creator says that you need to pay for that content then you will pay for it. If not then you don’t really want access to it, or you in fact simply did not want to pay for it in which case it’s very similar to stealing. None of the pro piracy arguments convince me, except the ones in which it’s about consuming the content in the format that you want. Ie I buy books from Amazon, but only because I want the writer to get their cut, but I will either remove the DRM off the book or pirate it. So yes if the AI was trained using for example a book whose content is not freely available and ChatGPT simply pirates the content of the book to train their models, then they are in the wrong.
But here’s the thing about my argument regarding AI training data. I never played Warcraft3 nor World of Warcraft! I only saw the cool art that was displayed on GameStop, online and on shirts on hot topic. I never paid Blizzard for access to Arthas, the design of Arthas was publicly accessible to me by virtue of Blizzard trying to promote their game. So I guess what I’m saying is if the content they trained a model is publicly accessible to people without payment, then there’s no reason AI cannot be trained on it.
As far as the ethics of piracy, my stance is that The current model where we are essentially paying for someone to hit copy and paste is inherently broken and we need to move to a model based on commissions/grants etc where the artists are being paid to make the works, ideally through public funds.
As far as the current reality around the AI companies, that Arthas stand was one gamestop had a license to display in their store provided by Blizzard to promote their game. The copyrighted material you “trained on” was provided for piblic access. These companies aren’t training off of publicly available information, as I was saying, they’re torrenting the full copyrighted material in the exact same way a traditional pirate would, The only difference is what they’re doing with it afterwards.
Edit: I don’t know if there’s evidence of Midjourney’s developers doing it specifically but Meta absolutely has so it’s a pretty safe assumption.
Terrible idea man. Can you imagine Trump being in charge of funding all of the arts? I don’t want any government with that sort of power over creative endeavor.
The current system works. You’re not paying for someone to hit copy paste, you’re paying for access to the idea that is physically embodied in the content if that makes sense. The creator decides whether you pay for that or not, and how much to pay. But many pirates don’t want to pay, don’t want to watch ad; in summary they simply believe that they are entitled to the work of the creative, which to me is absurd and outrageous.
But yeah that’s what I meant about AI training. If there are Shrek images out there that Disney willingly published and I trained an AI on it there should be no issue because it would be no different than me looking at Shrek and then making a drawing of it.
Yes but looking at publicly available shrek images is not what’s happening here, this is downloading every shrek movie
Stupid lawsuit because anyone can do Ai now.
that’s a shit take.
anyone can do AI now, but everyone can’t profit from it like they can. that’s why the lawsuit.
The biggest pirates in the world should know.
Too big to fail!
:D
