VLC

Exceptions are possible. Money isn’t everything for everyone.

Honestly, Zoom just has a hilariously high frequency of vulnerabilities being discovered.

There are sandwich artists and sanitation engineers. Everyone knows they get paid like crap.

Unfortunately “prompt engineers” seem to be getting paid small fortunes when their job is essentially using a massive amount of computing power to commit various levels of intellectual property theft they hope no one will notice.

The problem is artists often make their actual living doing basic boiler plate stuff that gets forgotten quickly.

In graphics it’s Company logos, advertising, basic graphics for businesses.

In writing it’s copy for websites, it’s short articles, it’s basic stuff.

Very few artists want to do these things, they want to create the original work that might not make money at all. That work potentially being a winning lottery ticket but most often being an act of expressing themselves that doesn’t turn into a payday.

Unfortunately AI is taking work away from artists. It can’t seem to make very good art yet but it can prevent artists who could make good art getting to the point of making it.

It’s starving out the top end of the creative market by limiting the easy work artists could previously rely on to pay the bills whilst working on the big ideas.

I’m sticking with relevance. A >25% rise is what we’re talking about.

A 0.001 difference on a 0.004 total would be worth showing.

No it doesn’t.

It’s meant to illustrate a change and it does so perfectly fine. It’s not a scientific paper.

It’s a 32-34% increase looking at the graph. That’s significant enough to shout about.

Imagine any change you could make surprising competition by 25% in any market. That’s huge.

During setup there is a keyboard shortcut to get to command prompt.

Then a command you can use.

Then the machine restarts and you can setup without a Microsoft account.

(For reference I’m on my dual booting Linux phase. I’d like to ditch it altogether but Wayland isn’t quite there yet and x never will be.)

Framework 13 has a fingerprint reader in the power button.

No headphone jack means fairphone now encourage Bluetooth earbuds and electronic waste.

They’re dead to me.

“The Joker” is a generic description of a character. Going back to medieval courts.

If the result is a copyrighted version of that character that’s not the promoters fault.

That’s the fault of the ones who compile the training data.

So you’re saying if it’s easy to accidentally get copyright images out of this AI by prompting ordinary worlds. Then the AI designers have some questions to answer.

If you try to bread with an autonomous knife and the knife kills you by stabbing you in the head. Is it solely your fault?

Machines aren’t culpable in law.

There is more than one human involved in creating and operating the machine.

The debate is, which humans are culpable?

The programmers, trainers, or prompters?

Then who created this image in your view?

Copyright law is incredibly far reaching and only enforced up to a point. This is a bad thing overall.

When you actually learn what companies could do with copyright law, you realise what a mess it is.

In the UK for example you need permission from a composer to rearrange a piece of music for another ensemble. Without that permission it’s illegal to write the music down. Even just the melody as a single line.

In the US it’s standard practice to first write the arrangement and then ask the composer to licence it. Then you sell it and both collect and pay royalties.

If you want to arrange a piece of music in the UK by a composer with an American publisher, you essentially start by breaking the law.

This all gives massive power to corporations over individual artists. It becomes a legal fight the corporation can always win due to costs.

Corporations get the power of selective enforcement. Whenever they think they will get a profit.

AI is creating an image based on someone else’s property. The difference is it’s owned by a corporation.

It’s not legitimate to claim the creation is solely that of the one giving the instructions. Those instructions are not in themselves creating the work.

The act of creating this work includes building the model, training the model, maintaining the model, and giving it that instruction.

So everyone involved in that process is liable for the results to differing amounts.

Ultimately the most infringing part of the process is the input of the original image in the first place.

So we now get to see if a massive corporation or two can claim an AI can be trained on and output anything publicly available (not just public domain)without infringing copyright. An individual human can’t.

I suspect the work of training a model solely on public domain will be complete about the time all these cases get settled in a few years.

Then controls will be put on training data.

Then barriers to entry to AI will get higher.

Then corporations will be able to own intellectual property and AI models.

The other way this can go is AI being allowed to break copyright, which then leads to a precedent that breaks a lot of copyright and the corporations lose a lot of power and control.

The only reason we see this as a fight is because corporations are fighting each other.

If AI needs data and can’t simply take it publicly from published works, the value of licensing that data becomes a value boost for the copyright holder.

The New York Times has a lot to gain.

There are explicit exceptions limited to copyright law. Education being one. Academia and research another.

All hinge into infringement the moment it becomes commercial.

AI being educated and trained isn’t infringement until someone gains from published works or prevents the copyright holder from gaining from it.

This is why writers are at the forefront. Writing is the first area where AI can successfully undermine the need to read the New York Times directly. Reducing the income from the intellectual property it’s been trained on.

The point is to prove that copyrighted material has been used as training data. As a reference.

If a human being gets asked to draw the joker, gets a still from the film, then copies it to the best of their ability. They can’t sell that image. Technically speaking they’ve broken the law already by making a copy. Lots of fan art is illegal, it’s just not worth going after (unless you’re Disney or Nintendo).

As a subscription service that’s what AI is doing. Selling the output.

Held to the same standards as a human artist, this is illegal.

If AI is allowed to copy art under copyright, there’s no reason a human shouldn’t be allowed to do the same thing.

Proving the reference is all important.

If an AI or human only ever saw public domain artwork and was asked to draw the joker, they might come up with a similar character. But it would be their own creation. There are copyright cases that hinge on proving the reference material. (See Blurred Lines by Robin Thick)

The New York Times is proving that AI is referencing an image under copyright because it comes out precisely the same. There are no significant changes at all.

In fact even if you come up with a character with no references. If it’s identical to a pre-existing character the first creator gets to hold copyright on it.

This is undefendable.

Even if that AI is a black box we can’t see inside. That black box is definitely breaking the law. There’s just a different way of proving it when the black box is a brain and when the black box is an AI.