Midjourney Copyright Law: What AI Artists Need to Know

thousands of artists are rallying together to sue mid journey and other AI art generators in the last month a secret list of the exact artists use to train mid Journey has been leaked online this has led to fervent Discord amongst the artists used to train the database so what does this hold for the future of AI art in this video we're going to explore the list we're going to look at the views of different artists and we're going to speculate about what they means for the future of AI art this month a artist at Riot games John lamb released screenshots and a list of all of the artists used to train mid Journey now this includes screenshots from the actual Discord servers used by the mid Journey team and you can see in these conversations that they have openly alluded to the 4,000 artist names used on on one of the earlier versions of mid Journey David Holtz who is the CEO of mid Journey said I should be clear it's not just genres it's also artist names it's mostly artist names 4,000 artist names now John lamb the man who shared this information said mid-journey developers caught discussing laundering and creating a database of artists who have been dehumanized to styles to train mid journey of off this has been submitted in evidence for the lawsuit prompt Engineers your skills are not yours here John Lam is alluding to the fact that AI artists like you and me are not actually deriving any skills from their ability to prompt he is taking a very clear view that this is not a creative act at all now one of the particularly interesting exchanges inside of these leaked conversations uh two of the developers exploring the potential implications of copyright law on the way that they have trained the mid Journey algorithm So Daniel says that we just need to launder it through a fine-tune codex this is essentially making it impossible to trace what is a der derivative work in the eyes of copyright that it is hiding the origin of the information contained within the data set and this is one of the concepts that's important to understand an AI art algorithm like mid Journey can create hundreds of imitation works of an artist and then it can train itself on the 100 imitation works of an artist and remove the original art from the database and this is the point that this individual is making Joel it really becomes impossible to trace what's a derivative work in the eyes of copyright and somebody else goes on to say this one has been blurred out so I'm not sure who this is all you have to do is just use those scraped data sets and then conveniently forget what you use to train the model boom loal problems solved forever this is exactly what I'm explaining and what is likely to happen so the issue that many of these artists are taking to the courts in different countries is going to be a tricky one to decipher it is likely that it will take many many years and by the time that there is any meaningful solution to this in the legal processes it will already be far too late so if you are interested in the actual list there is a video showing pages from it that you can see and you can pause this video and read through a few of the names and you'll likely to recognize famous artists now if you actually want to have a look through the list yourself it is possible and there is a leaked version that you can find online and I will leave the link to that in the description below in this list there are more than 4,000 names and you can search through this to find different artists you can look for famous people like Pablo Picasso or more specific artists like Daman Hurst who is a British Artist and you can see here that this is a piece of AI art created by mid Journey inspired by one of the artists inside of the datase Damen Hurst now right back at the start of this development of the technology a piece of art won a art fair the Colorado state competition and this was created entirely using mid Journey now you can look at it and even now just a year later it appears that we have hugely evolved in the quality of art that is possible to be created this looks quite dated even by AI art standards but it set off a roller coaster of cultural reflection on whether this is allowed there's also been a photography competition that was won by a piece of AI generated art and now this is even more interesting because it's pertaining to be a photograph it's not pertaining to be something that is painted or created it is pertaining to be a photorealistic image now this is going to lead to a very complex nature of proving the provence of different artistic Works how much of it has been created by Ai and how much of it has been created by a human and drawing that line is an impossible task as it is a spectrum and actually defining and clear attributable language is going to be a terribly difficult exercise futile you might even say and even more recently there is a Japanese literature prize that was awarded to an author who admitted that more than 5% of the book was written word for word by chat GPT now this means that a lot more of the book was probably written with Chad gbt but only in some point it's only that 5% of it was actually written with her not making any changes at all now there has been a process of legal proceedings being taken in the US courts and there is a deadline on the 8th of February that Tech firms have to respond and this class action lawsuit is being brought against mid Journey stability AI Runway and Deviant Art now the essential matter that the artist s are defining in their lawsuit is the AI art generators like to describe their AI image products in lofty terms the reality is grubbier and nastier AI image products are primarily valued as copyright laundering devices promising customers the benefits of art without the cost of artists here it is arguing that art has scapegoated artists that it has bypassed the valuing of artists and created a piece of software that gives people people the experience and outcomes of art without actually having to Value the artists who were fundamental to creating these programs the promise of AI is that it will generate the image in your imagination if you can describe it yet this promise is limited by whether or not someone else has already created part of the image you imagined artists have discovered that mid Journey will generate an image that is very similar to their original Works which they believe amounts to copying now this brings up a very interesting debate many artists over the years have explored the notion of copying I particularly want to draw your attention to a few interesting quotes Salvador Dary said those who do not want to imitate anything produce nothing and this alludes to the fact that imitation is fundamental to creating anything that we in my eyes we only create by amalgamating imitations of things that we have seen and certainly this is what is in effect happening in these AI art generators now another phrasing of this that I particularly Admire from the great Mark Twain is there's no such thing as a new idea it is impossible we simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental caleidoscope we give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations we keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely but they are all the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all of the ages now it is important to be open and honest about the impact and influence of imitation inspiration and taking great ideas from other sources and reinterpreting them on our own terms I imagine that there's going to be quite a lot of further in the comments below a video such as this as it is a tety topic and many people have often told me that I am not an artist I am stealing other people's work and that I should go under a rock I have thought about this quite a lot because there is another data set that has been used to train stable diffusion and it's possible to explore through this set and upon doing so I came across a number of my own works from my life as an artist and designer these were taken from my online portfolios on be Huns and dribble and across Pinterest and other visual sharing sites when I first graduated art school I had some skills in graphic design the whole course was related around print design this was the focus everything that you learned was for Designing proch shures and posters however at this time there is this huge explosion of software and it is software that is making billions of dollars this is the largest growing market and at this time designers have a huge wealth and experience of Designing for print but there is a limited availability of people who are specialized in digital design in user interface design and for me this was an obvious and strategic Trend that the focus for a lucrative career in design right now is focused on digital design and so at that point it was very easy for me to find a job because there was such a demand for uiux designers now of course that evolves 10 years later the economy has caught up the Learning Cycle has evolved and so there is now a lot more designers and developers available for these roles and this has changed obviously the competitive nature of the industry and also even the amount that you can get paid so let's pass this through the current context the current conceptual language of what is happening in society related to the development of skills what are the skills that are important well certainly on The Meta side there is the skill of adaptability the ability to learn new skills is a fundamental skill beyond that the ability to recognize what are valuable skills so not only being able to learn skills but able to recognize what are new skills and what are the skills that one can look at so one important skill that I see is the ability to synthesize which is to be able to learn quickly from different disciplines and apply learnings and Concepts from one area of life to another for example learning to use AI art generators rests upon the Notions of taste I mean taste is still there you can create thousands of images an AI art generator but it's the ability to take these and evolve them into more complex Works which is now allowing yourself to be set apart because anyone can create a single beautiful image but the ability to take this and turn it into a more meaningful concept that communicates ideas sto story and emotions is is still there and these are the fundamental Core Concepts of creating work that moves people now I think there are a couple of examples of artists embracing this very effectively that I would like to show as examples one is Sarah Shaquille she for a long time was creating these beautiful Sparkle core inspired images and she created a lot of these using the digital art app procreate she's created the same style of her is in Ai and you can see that she has been able to create a lot more works and she is now selling these so she has embraced the development of technology and it's important to recognize that a step before this she was also embracing the new artistic opportunities that were presented with digital drawing on the iPad through procreate now it's also interesting to recognize how softwares can evolve in this space too because procreate has most recently released an animation app all I can see is that procreate is fading away that it is missing its opportunity to be part of the AI Revolution instead of creating a tool related to AI is trying to do what it did before so for me the question is many of these artists are up in arms about their livelyhood being taken away and this is stealing and copyright but my attitude is very much about recognizing that this is the fundamental process of humanity to evolve to change and to develop new technology that makes old technology obsolete this is a process that will not change even if I ideologically disagreed with it it's not going to fundamentally affect the nature of human evolution of society's evolution of technological Evolution and so for me the practice is to recognize how can I be a part of evolving the technology furthering the knowledge and spread of this and applying it in ways that are creative is the most interesting opportunity that I think there are two options here you can sit in the corner shout and rail against the creation of this technology which is undoubtedly having far-reaching implications there is a recent study that shows that more than 40% of jobs are likely to be impacted by the development of generative Ai and I would propose that that is a vast underestimation I believe there's not a single role that cannot be transformed and improved in the world with the use of generative Ai and that's why I believe that these AI art companies will not be afraid of these lawsuits they will recognize the greater good and potential for Humanity so open AI is calling for copyright exemption to save chat GPT the maker of chat gbt has warned that a ban on using news and books to train chat Bots would Doom the development of artificial intelligence goes on to say that it has told its peers it would be impossible to create such Services as chat GPT if it were prevented from relying on copyrighted works as it seeks to influence potential laws on the topic now this is because open AI is consequently also facing its own lawsuits a number of book publishers are threatening to sue chat gbt so essentially the argument is that to fulfill the future evolution of Technology we have to forgo some of the rights of existing copyright and is that something that we are willing to give up AI is not going anywhere and it's likely that governments will Buckle to the potential economic gain and technological development that generative AI is presenting and this can only lead to more complex discussions around the very nature of copyright however I see the fundamental concept is what we imagine to be human is becoming much less clear skillshare is the world's largest online learning community and it offers a whole host of courses on everything from design to entrepreneurship and I've got a special deal for viewers of my channel the first 500 people to click the link in the description below get a one-month free trial of skillshare now one thing that I particularly like about skillshare are its learning tracks where it's combined a number of different courses that build on each other to take you towards a specific goal one that I particularly like is is the track on notion notion is a tool that's indispensable to my life and the only problem with it is that it's very complicated and it's very hard to know what to do with it but that's where skillshare comes in with its innovative learning tracks you can get the most out of your own brain in this new year the best investment that you can make is an investment in yourself and that's where skillshare comes in invest in your own mind in your own learning and your own powers give yourself the gift of education and that is skillshare most of all thank you very much for watching it's been a pleasure to have you here and I look forward to seeing you in the next video

Channel: Samson - Delightful Design

Views: 20,011

Keywords: ai, samson vowles, legal eagle, ai lawsuits, ai copyright, law, copyright, ai copyright law, ai lawsuit art, ai lawsuit news, ai copyright lawsuit, ai law, ai news, news

Id: EMcTnaRebAw

Length: 17min 7sec (1027 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 08 2024