Generative AI Has a Visual Plagiarism Problem::Experiments with Midjourney and DALL-E 3 show a copyright minefield

  • Ross_audio@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    10 months ago

    The chemical brothers were successfully sued for using a sample they no longer recognised and an AI recognised decades later.

    It was mathematically altered so much a human couldn’t recognise the input, and still can’t.

    Legally they did nothing different to an AI taking a massive input and outputting a mathematical dissimilar result.

    The chemical brothers did that to a sample with plugins, additions, stretches and were still held liable for the original sample royalty.

    AI should be no different.

    • piecat@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      10 months ago

      Listen at 2:00, https://youtu.be/q0AcZkR_LUs?si=L-dbJasU5YRseIvD

      I wouldn’t call that “unrecognizable”, it’s pretty obvious what was sampled.

      AI should be no different

      I agree

      The chemical brothers were sued for this one song that had recognizable infringement. And despite that instance of copying/sampling, and presumably listening to many many copyrighted works in their lifetime, that doesn’t invalidate any of their other works.

      Artists/musicians can also “accidentally” plagiarize, meaning they “came up with” a beat or lick, not recognizing that it is from something they’ve heard previously until someone says “hey isn’t that xyz”.

      Either an output is or isn’t infringing.

      • Ross_audio@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        10 months ago

        Different court case. Galvanize was not discovered by an AI.

        Honestly there are so many successful and failed cases against them I can’t find it right now. But I remember an AI discovered sample being subject of a court case just after one of them died.

        • piecat@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          10 months ago

          Uhhhh the chemical brothers are alive. And I can’t find anything about this online.

          • Ross_audio@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            10 months ago

            It’s happened, like I say I can’t find it either now. It might have been the copyright owner who died. But fans use AI to find samples in old songs now. You can do it yourself.

            Unfortunately copyright claims get buried as they don’t look good for either party.

            In principle though, do you consider an unrecognisable sample copyright infringement. Because I get the feeling of I put the effort in to dig and cite examples for you, you’d then just move on to claiming it’s still somehow different if AI does it.

            • piecat@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              10 months ago

              Nope, I do not consider an unrecognized sample as copyright infringement. Or, I don’t believe it should be ruled as such by the courts.

              If you can’t reasonably recognize the source material, and it’s so different that only AI looking at bits could identify similarities, that doesn’t cross the threshold in my opinion.

              I actually don’t think most sampling should be considered infringement, assuming the new song is actually a new work.

              It’s all about how transformative the work is.