A bipartisan group of senators introduced a new bill to make it easier to authenticate and detect artificial intelligence-generated content and protect journalists and artists from having their work gobbled up by AI models without their permission.
The Content Origin Protection and Integrity from Edited and Deepfaked Media Act (COPIED Act) would direct the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to create standards and guidelines that help prove the origin of content and detect synthetic content, like through watermarking. It also directs the agency to create security measures to prevent tampering and requires AI tools for creative or journalistic content to let users attach information about their origin and prohibit that information from being removed. Under the bill, such content also could not be used to train AI models.
Content owners, including broadcasters, artists, and newspapers, could sue companies they believe used their materials without permission or tampered with authentication markers. State attorneys general and the Federal Trade Commission could also enforce the bill, which its backers say prohibits anyone from “removing, disabling, or tampering with content provenance information” outside of an exception for some security research purposes.
(A copy of the bill is in he article, here is the important part imo:
Prohibits the use of “covered content” (digital representations of copyrighted works) with content provenance to either train an AI- /algorithm-based system or create synthetic content without the express, informed consent and adherence to the terms of use of such content, including compensation)
How would this even work when you sometimes can just remove the watermark by photoshoping?
This is essentially regulatory capture. The article is very lax on calling it what it is.
A few things to consider:
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Laws can’t be applied retroactively, this would essentially close the door behind Openai, Google and Microsoft. Openai with sora in conjunction with the big Hollywood companies will be the only ones able to do proper video generation.
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Individuals will not be getting paid, databrokers will.
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They can easily pay pennies to a third world artist to build them a dataset copying a style. Styles are not copyrightable.
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The open source scene is completely dead in the water and so is fine tuning for individuals.
Edit: This isn’t entirely true, there is more leeway for non commercial models, see comments below.
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AI isn’t going away, all this does is force us and the economy into a subscription model.
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Companies like Disney, Getty and Adobe reap everything.
In a perfect world, this bill would be aiming to make all models copyleft instead but sadly, no one is lobbying for that in Washington and money talks.
Yup, I fucking knew it. I knew this is what would happen with everyone bitching about copyright this and that. I knew any legislation that came as a result was going be bastardized and dressed up to make it look like it’s for everyone when in reality it’s going to mostly benefit big corps that can afford licensing fees and teams of lawyers.
People could not/would not understand how these AI models actually processes images/text or the concept of “If you post publicly, expect it to be used publicly” and here we are…
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So the rich have already scalped what they could. Now it can be made illegal
Yeah it is really messed up that Disney made untold tens of billions of dollars on public domain stories, effectively cut us off from our own culture, then extended the duration to indefinite. I wonder why near everyone was silent about this issue for multiple decades until it became cliche to pretend to care about furry porn creators.
Creatives have always been screwed, we are the first civilization to not only screw them but screw the general public. As shit as it was in the past you could just copy a freaken scroll.
Anyway you guys have fun defending some of the worst assholes in human history while acting like you care about people you weren’t even willing to give a buck a month to on patreon.
If you put something on the Internet you are giving up ownership of it. This is reality and companies taking advantage of this for AI have already proven this is true.
You are not going to be able to put the cat back in the bag. The whole concept of ownership over art, ideas, and our very culture was always ridiculous.
It is past time to do away with the joke of the legal framework we call IP law. It is merely a tool for monied interests to extract more obscene profit from our culture at this point.
There is only one way forward and that is sweeping privacy protections. No more data collection, no more targeted advertising, no more dark patterns. The problem is corporations are not going to let that happen without a fight.
I posted this in a thread, but Im gonna make it a parent comment for those who support this bill.
Consider youtube poop, Im serious. Every clip in them is sourced from preexisting audio and video, and mixed or distorted in a comedic format. You could make an AI to make youtube poops using those same clips and other “poops” as training data. What it outputs might be of lower quality (less funny), but in a technical sense it would be made in an identical fashion. And, to the chagrin of Disney, Nintendo, and Viacom, these are considered legally distinct entities; because I dont watch Frying Nemo in place of Finding Nemo. So why would it be any different when an AI makes it?
I see this argument a lot as a defense for AI art and I see a couple major flaws in this line of thinking.
First, it’s treating the AI art as somehow the same as a dirivitive (or parody) work made by an actual person. These two things are not the same and should not be argued like they are.
AI art isn’t just dirivitive. It’s a Frankenstein’s Monster of a bunch of different pieces of art stitched together in a procedural way that doesn’t credit and in fact obfuscates the original works. This is problematic at best and flat out dishonest thievery at worst. Whereas a work made by a person that is dirivitive or parody has actual work and thought put into it by an actual person. And would typically at least credit the original works being riffed on. This involves actual creative thought and human touch. Even if it is dirivitive it’s unique in some way simply by virtue of being made by a person.
AI art cannot and will not ever be unique, at least not when used to just create a work wholesale. Because it’s not being creative. It’s calculating and nothing more. (at least if we’re talking about current tachnology. A possible future General AI could flout this argument. But that would get into an AI personhood conversation not really relevant to our current machine learning tech).
Secondly, no one is worried that some hypothetical shitty AI video is going to somehow usurp the work that it’s stealing from. What people are worried about is that AI art is going to be used in place of hiring actual artists for bigger projects. And the fact that this AI art exists solely because it’s scraped the internet of art from those same artists now losing their livelihoods makes the tech incredibly fucked up.
Now don’t get me wrong though. I do believe machine learning has its place in society. And we’ve already been using it for a long time to help with large tasks that would be incredibly difficult if not impossible for people to do on their own in a bunch of different industries. Things like medicine research in the pharmaceutical sector and fraud monitoring in the banking sector come to mind.
Also, there is an argument to be had that machine learning algorithms could be used as tools in creating art. I don’t really have a problem with those use cases. Things that come to mind are a bunch of different tools that exist in music production right now that in my opinion help in allowing artists to fulfill their vision. Watch some There I Ruined It videos on YouTube to see what I mean. Yeah that guy is using AI to make himself sound like other musicians. But that guy also had to be a really solid singer and impressionist in the first place for those songs to be any good at all.
It’s a Frankenstein’s Monster of a bunch of different pieces of art stitched together in a procedural way that doesn’t credit and in fact obfuscates the original works
What you described is collage and is completely legal. How image generation works is much more complicated but in any case, both it and collage clearly fall under transformative use.
My best guess would be intent, which I think is an important component of fair use. The intent of youtube poop creators could be considered parody and while someone could use AI to create parody, the intent of creating the AI model itself is not parody (at least not for these massive AI models that most people use).
Transformation is in itself fair use is the thing. Ytp doesnt need to be parody or critique or anything else, because its fundamentally no longer the same product as whatever the source was as a direct result of editing
Still, the AI model itself is not transformative, it is merely incorporating that data into its training set.
But what it outputs IS transformative, which- of course- is the e primary use
If I include an image of mickey mouse (ripped straight from disney) in my application in a proprietary compression format, then the application decompresses that image and changes the hue (or whatever other kind of modification), then these are technically “transformations” but they’re not transformative.
The law being violated there is trademark, not copyright
No it isn’t. The image of mickey mouse was literally copied (hence copyright, literally right to copy). Regardless, that’s still IP law being violated so I don’t know how that helps your case.
There’s absolutely no way to enforce this.
No? You don’t think the courts would approve of a fishing expedition for forth amendment violation access to your computer?
As if a law could prevent anything of that. They simply demand “Pigs Must Fly”, and don’t waste a thought on how utterly unrealistic this is.
As if a law could prevent anything of that.
Generating legal liability goes a long way towards curbing how businesses behave, particularly when they can be picked on by rival mega-firms.
But because we’ve made class action lawsuits increasingly difficult, particularly after Comcast Corp. v. Behrend, the idea that individual claimants can effectively prosecute a case against an interstate or international entity is increasingly farcical. You’re either going to need big state agencies (the EU seems increasingly invested in cracking down on American tech companies for anti-competitive practices) or rivalrous business interests (MPAA/RIAA going after Big Tech backed AI firms) to leverage this kind of liability. It’s still going to be open season on everyone using DeviantArt or Pinterest or whatever.
This is a brutally dystopian law. Forget the AI angle and turn on your brain.
Any information will get a label saying who owns it and what can be done with it. Tampering with these labels becomes a crime. This is the infrastructure for the complete control of the flow of all information.
Maybe I’m missing something, but my read is that it creates a mechanism/standard for labeling content. If content is labeled under this standard, it is illegal to remove the labeling or use it in a way the labeling prohibits. But I don’t see a requirement to label content with this mechanism.
If that’s the case I don’t see a problem. Now, if all the content is required to be labeled, then yes it’s a privacy nightmare. But my interpretation was that this is a mechanism to prevent AI companies from gobbling up content without consent and saying, “What? There’s nothing saying I couldn’t use it.”
It’s rather more than that. In the very least, it is a DRM system, meant to curtail fair use. We’re not just talking about AI training. The AutoTLDR bot here would also be affected. Manually copy/pasting articles while removing the metadata becomes illegal. Platforms have a legal duty to stop copyright infringement. In practice, they will probably have to use the metadata label to stop reposts and re-uploads of images and articles.
This bill was obviously written by lobbyists for major corpos like Adobe. This wants to make the C2PA standard legally binding. They have been working on this for the last couple years. OpenAI already uses it.
In the very least, this bill will entrench the monopolies of the corporations behind it; at the expense of the rights of ordinary people.
I don’t think it’ll stop there. Look at age verification laws in various red states and around the world. Once you have this system in place, it would be obvious to demand mandatory content warnings in the metadata. We’re not just talking about erotic images but also about articles on LGBTQ matters.
More control over the flow of information is the way we are going anyway. From age-verification to copyright enforcement, it’s all about making sure that only the right people can access certain information. Copyright used to be about what businesses can print a book. Now it’s about what you can do at home with your own computer. We’re moving in this dystopian direction, anyway, and this bill is a big step.
The bill talks about “provenance”. The ambition is literally a system to track where information comes from and how it is processed. If this was merely DRM, that would be bad enough. But this is an intentionally dystopian overreach.
EG you have cameras that automatically add the tracking data to all photos and then photoshop adds data about all post-processing. Obviously, this can’t be secure. (NB: This is real and not hypothetical. More)
The thing is, a door lock isn’t secure either. It takes seconds to break down a door, or to break a window instead. The secret ingredient is surveillance and punishment. Someone hears or sees something and calls the police. To make the ambition work, you need something at the hardware level in any device that can process and store data. You also need a lot of surveillance to crack down on people who deal in illegal hardware.
I’m afraid, this is not as crazy as it sounds. You may have heard about the recent “Chat Control” debate in the EU. That is a proposal, with a lot of support, that would let police scan the files on a phone to look for “child porn” (mind that this includes sexy selfies that 17-year-olds exchange with their friends). Mandatory watermarking, that let the government trace a photo to the camera and its owner, is mild by comparison.
The bill wants government agencies like DARPA to help in the development of better tracking systems. Nice for the corpos that they get some of that tax money. But it also creates a dynamic in the government that will make it much more likely that we continue on a dystopian path. For agencies, funding will be on the line; plus there are egos. Meanwhile, you still have the content industry lobbying for more control over its intellectual “property”.
Most everyone from corporations to tumblr artists will be opting into that. While it doesnt guarantee an information dystopia, it does enable it
I download images from the internet and remove watermarks to edit them in youtube videos as visual aid. I add a credit to the description because Im not a cunt, I just do it to make the video look better. I dont monetize content. Utterly and totally harmless, and would be illegal with such a label
If this passes, this would have the perverse effect of making China (and maybe to a lesser extent the Middle East) the leading suppliers of open source / open weight AI models…
A bit late now, isn’t it?
All the big corporations have already trained most of their current ai, so all this does is put the up and comers at a disadvantage.
It could halt the progress of improving their models and stagnate the whole technology.
That being said, it only halts progress for American companies. Other countries will happily ignore this law and grow beyond our capabilities. I’m not sure if that’s better or worse than the current situation.
Reminds me of Russia before WWI began. They realized they had fallen horribly behind the rest of the world in terms of military technology, so they called an arms limitation treaty conference where they pushed for basically every country in the world to agree to stop inventing any new weapons of any kind.
How’d that work out for them? Answer? Not well. History repeats itself, so here we go!
Introducing Chat-Stupid! It just like Chat-GPT but it wishes for any conversation with humans so it can legally learn…don’t disclose company secrets or it will legally learn those too.
For those who are saying just photoshop.
https://methodshop.com/photoshop-money/
Obviously you can just use other software but PS is the main choice for image editing. What they need to do is put legislation in place and it will make the biggest players implement this form of drm.
The main goal is cementing the position of the giants, creating a bureaucratic mote around them to keep small players economically unviable.
Sure would be fun to expand things to include a section to not let normal people make art of copyrighted material or be an excuse to mess with fair use
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, before you stands 8-year-old Billy Smith. He stands accused of training on copyrighted material. We actually have live video of him looking and reading books from the library. He he trained on the contents of over 100 books this year.
We ask you to enforce the maximum penalty and send his parents to prison.
I get what you’re saying, but there’s something of a difference between someone studying something for months or years then writing about it, and a language model ran by one of the tech giants scraping media and immediately generating stuff from it, for commercial use, for the profit of the company that owns it.
It’s kinda like how plagiarising somebody’s book word for word never used to be a crime when it was a painstaking process of manually writing it back out for every copy. When the printing press came out, though? It allowed dodgy businesses to large-scale fuck over authors, and the law had to play catch-up.
I don’t actually think this proposal is that well thought out, but I also don’t think we should think of AI models or corporations as being people - they aren’t people, and they shouldn’t necessarily have the same rights and privileges that we do.
There’s a lot of private people training models (Lora, Dora’s etc) / fine-tuning checkpoints and what have you
Training models is not just giant tech corps anymore
I know, I have one running locally on my PC, it’s neat.
I still don’t think that changes my point, though - that a large AI model, particularly one that can scrape the whole web of any content it can find, then immediately be used to generate a practically infinite amount of content in seconds is very different to the idea of a little 8 year old in a library reading books then writing something himself.
And I still maintain that companies aren’t people and shouldn’t necessarily have the same rights as a person.
What of the images random people generate from software like dall e? Those are made from the same training data, and what this poicy does to them is make media creation more inaccessible even though the technology exists. Also, copying a book word for word by hand isnt/wasnt plagarism, its unlicensed duplication. Plagarism would be changing just the proper nouns and pretending like its a completely seperate book
- Your machine learning algorithms are not people. No amount of calling it Alex or giving it a voice stolen from a well-known actress will change that fact.
- If I traced an artwork or copied GPL licensed code into an non-GPL one, my ass would be beaten by others on the internet.
- So far, the main usecase of this generative technology is scamming, intentionally creating distrust in the artist community, and an even worse and scummier form of plagiarism, but it doesn’t matter because some shitpost that goes hard, “what if a content creator needs a stock photo?”, and “what if it could be used to resurrect your favorite artist?”.
- Power imbalance. There’s a difference a young creator not having money to buy a training material and a big corporation wanting to destroy their profession.
Thanks chatgpt
Pleased to take part in creating the scarcity free future by letting hustle bros to ruin art communities, and letting terminally online people to create endless followups to Metropolis Pt. II instead of them sending death threats to Dream Theater!
No matter how much you’d like for it to be the case, proprietary algorithms owned by big corporations are not remotely comparable to children.
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Why do these acts always have such stupid acronyms
