That was your implied argument regardless of intent.
I decide what my argument is, thank you very much. Your interpretation of it is outside of my control, and while I might try to avoid it from going astray, I cannot stop it from doing so, that’s on you.
Completely wrong, which invalidates the point you want to make. “Analysis” and “as is” have no place in the definition of copyright infringement. A derivative work can be very different from the original material, and how you created the derivative work, including whether you performed whatever you think “analysis” means, is generally irrelevant.
I wasn’t giving a definition of copyright infringement, since that depends on the jurisdiction, and since you and I aren’t in the same one most likely, that’s nothing I would argue for to begin with. In the most basic form of plagiarism, people do so to avoid doing the effort of transformation. More complex forms of plagiarism might involve some transformation, but still try to capture the expression of the original, instead of the ideas. Analysis is definitely relevant, since to create a work that does not infringe on copyright, you generally can take ideas from a copyrighted work, but not the expression of those ideas. If a new work is based on just those ideas (and preferably mixes it with new ideas), it generally doesn’t infringe on copyright. It’s why there are so many copycat products of everything you can think of, that aren’t copyright infringing.
No it detects patterns. You already said it correctly above. And the problem is that some patterns can be copyrighted. That’s exactly the problem highlighted here and here. For copyright law, it doesn’t matter if, for example, that particular image of Mario is copied verbatim from the training data.
While depending on your definition Mario could be a sufficiently complex pattern, that’s not the definition I’m using. Mario isn’t a pattern, it’s an expression of multiple patterns. Patterns like “an italian man”, “a big moustache”, “a red rounded hat with the letter ‘M’ in a white circle”, “overalls”. You can use any of those patterns in a new non-infringing work, Nintendo has no copyright on any of those patterns. But bring them all together in one place again without adding new patterns, and you will have infringed on the expression of Mario. If you give many images of Mario to the AI it might be able to understand that those patterns together are some sort of “Mario-ness” pattern, but it can still separate them from each other since you aren’t just showing it Mario, but also other images that have these same patterns in different expressions.
Mario’s likeness isn’t in the model, but it’s patterns are. And if an unethical user of the AI wants to prompt it for those specific patterns to be surprised they get Mario, or something close enough to be substantially similar, that’s on them, and it will be infringing just like drawing and selling a copy of Mario without Nintendo’s approval is now.
The character likeness, which is encoded in the model because it is in fact a discernible pattern, is an infringement.
You have absolutely no legal basis to claim they are infringement, as these things simply have not been settled in court. You can be of the opinion that they are infringement, but your opinion isn’t the same as law. The articles you showed are also simply reporting and speculating on the lawsuits that are pending.
Plagiarism is not the same as copyright infringement. Why you think people probably plagiarize is doubly irrelevant then.
Analysis is definitely relevant, since to create a work that does not infringe on copyright
Show me literally any example of the defendant’s use of “analysis” having any impact whatsoever in a copyright infringement case or a law that explicitly talks about it, or just stop repeating that it is in any way relevant to copyright.
But bring them all together in one place again without adding new patterns
Wrong. The “all together” and “without adding new patterns” are not legal requirements. You are constantly trying to push the definition of copyright infringement to be more extreme to make it easier for you to argue.
you generally can take ideas from a copyrighted work, but not the expression of those ideas
Unfortunately, an AI has no concept of ideas, and it simply encodes patterns, whatever they might happen to be. Again, you’re morphing the discussion to make an argument.
Mario’s likeness isn’t in the model, but it’s patterns are.
Mario’s likeness has to be encoded into the model in some way. Otherwise, this would not have been the image generated for “draw an italian plumber from a video game”. There is absolutely nothing in the prompt to push GPT-4 to combine those elements. There are also no “new” patterns, as you put it. That’s exactly the point of the article. As they put it:
Clearly, these models did not just learn abstract facts about plumbers—for example, that they wear overalls and carry wrenches. They learned facts about a specific fictional Italian plumber who wears white gloves, blue overalls with yellow buttons, and a red hat with an “M” on the front.
These are not facts about the world that lie beyond the reach of copyright. Rather, the creative choices that define Mario are likely covered by copyrights held by Nintendo.
This is contradictory to how you present it as “taking ideas”.
You have absolutely no legal basis to claim they are infringement
You’re mixing up different things. I’m saying that the image contains infringing material, which is hopefully not something you have to be convinced about. The production of an obviously infringing image, without the infringing elements having been provided in the prompt, is used to show how this information is encoded inside the model in some form. Whether this copyright-protected material exists in some form inside the model is not an equivalent question to whether this is copyright infringement. You are right that the courts have not decided on the latter, but we have been talking about the former. I repeat your position which I was directly responding to before:
What it detects are empirical, factual observations about the material it is shown, which cannot be copyrighted.
I decide what my argument is, thank you very much. Your interpretation of it is outside of my control, and while I might try to avoid it from going astray, I cannot stop it from doing so, that’s on you.
I wasn’t giving a definition of copyright infringement, since that depends on the jurisdiction, and since you and I aren’t in the same one most likely, that’s nothing I would argue for to begin with. In the most basic form of plagiarism, people do so to avoid doing the effort of transformation. More complex forms of plagiarism might involve some transformation, but still try to capture the expression of the original, instead of the ideas. Analysis is definitely relevant, since to create a work that does not infringe on copyright, you generally can take ideas from a copyrighted work, but not the expression of those ideas. If a new work is based on just those ideas (and preferably mixes it with new ideas), it generally doesn’t infringe on copyright. It’s why there are so many copycat products of everything you can think of, that aren’t copyright infringing.
While depending on your definition Mario could be a sufficiently complex pattern, that’s not the definition I’m using. Mario isn’t a pattern, it’s an expression of multiple patterns. Patterns like “an italian man”, “a big moustache”, “a red rounded hat with the letter ‘M’ in a white circle”, “overalls”. You can use any of those patterns in a new non-infringing work, Nintendo has no copyright on any of those patterns. But bring them all together in one place again without adding new patterns, and you will have infringed on the expression of Mario. If you give many images of Mario to the AI it might be able to understand that those patterns together are some sort of “Mario-ness” pattern, but it can still separate them from each other since you aren’t just showing it Mario, but also other images that have these same patterns in different expressions.
Mario’s likeness isn’t in the model, but it’s patterns are. And if an unethical user of the AI wants to prompt it for those specific patterns to be surprised they get Mario, or something close enough to be substantially similar, that’s on them, and it will be infringing just like drawing and selling a copy of Mario without Nintendo’s approval is now.
You have absolutely no legal basis to claim they are infringement, as these things simply have not been settled in court. You can be of the opinion that they are infringement, but your opinion isn’t the same as law. The articles you showed are also simply reporting and speculating on the lawsuits that are pending.
Plagiarism is not the same as copyright infringement. Why you think people probably plagiarize is doubly irrelevant then.
Show me literally any example of the defendant’s use of “analysis” having any impact whatsoever in a copyright infringement case or a law that explicitly talks about it, or just stop repeating that it is in any way relevant to copyright.
Wrong. The “all together” and “without adding new patterns” are not legal requirements. You are constantly trying to push the definition of copyright infringement to be more extreme to make it easier for you to argue.
Unfortunately, an AI has no concept of ideas, and it simply encodes patterns, whatever they might happen to be. Again, you’re morphing the discussion to make an argument.
Mario’s likeness has to be encoded into the model in some way. Otherwise, this would not have been the image generated for “draw an italian plumber from a video game”. There is absolutely nothing in the prompt to push GPT-4 to combine those elements. There are also no “new” patterns, as you put it. That’s exactly the point of the article. As they put it:
This is contradictory to how you present it as “taking ideas”.
You’re mixing up different things. I’m saying that the image contains infringing material, which is hopefully not something you have to be convinced about. The production of an obviously infringing image, without the infringing elements having been provided in the prompt, is used to show how this information is encoded inside the model in some form. Whether this copyright-protected material exists in some form inside the model is not an equivalent question to whether this is copyright infringement. You are right that the courts have not decided on the latter, but we have been talking about the former. I repeat your position which I was directly responding to before: