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)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
LOL
So I take your photo, remove your watermark, put my own watermark on it, and then I sue you for removing my watermark.
Don’t be a fool. Of course, content corporations like Disney or the NYT are able to prove just when something was made.
Don’t be a fool either.
Of course I am going to do this to you, not to Disney etc. because I am way better at creating proof than you are.
And of course Disney etc. are going to do this to you and me, because they are even better at creating proof than you and me are.
That’s how foolish this law is.
So what you’re saying is that this is a law designed to extend corporate control over information and culture even further?
This bill reads like it was written by Adobe.
This provenance labelling scheme already exists. Adobe was a major force behind it. (see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Authenticity_Initiative ). This bill would make it so that further development will be tax-funded through organizations like DARPA.
Of course, they are also against fair use. They pay license fees for AI training. For them, it means more cash flow.
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.
This sounds like a way to get media companies and tech companies to fight.
Unfortunately I expect that they will both somehow win and individuals will be worse off. This is the U-S-A god damn it.
There will be no fight. Some fat stacks of cheddar will change hands and this will fail at the voting stage.
Don’t see an issue with this. People who scrape copyrighted content should pay for it.
Closing the door behind the ones that already did it means only the current groups that have the data will make money of it.
Downvote all you want. If your entire business or personal model includes stealing content from other people, then you need to rethink that.
“stealing” implies the owner does not have it anymore… It is large studio speak.
And I get what you are trying so say, I just think the copyright system is so broken that this shows it is in need of reform. Because if the qualm is with people doing immoral shit as a business model, there are long lists of corporations that will ask you to hold their beer.
And the fact that the training of the models already occurred on these materials means that the owners of the current models are probably training on generated datasets meaning that by the time this actually hits court, the datasets with original copyrighted materials will be obsolete.
Regarding obsolete models, that’s only partially true. There’s loads of content that are effectively “finished” and won’t be changing, and will grow obsolete at a fairly slow pace. Meaning they’ll be useful in the models once trained for years.
Obviously new technology and similar ideas/content that didn’t exist when the model was created won’t be there, but the amount that changes and or is new is relatively small each year compared to all the historical content.
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Well that’s a well articulated reply.
I don’t understand why you would take this position. Because the small artists will never be able to avoid Beiing included in training sets, and if they are what are they going to do against a VC backed corpnlike OpenAI. All the while the big copyright “owners” will be excluded. Meaning this only cements the position of the mega corps.
Stealing: depriving you of what you own
Copying: taking a picture of what you made.
Stealing is not copying. You still have whatever you started with.
Is it Copyright content?
This regulation (and similar being proposed in California) would not be applied retroactively.
Never mentioned any sort of retroactive measures.
Yes it is perfectly appropriate for someone who burned a backup copy of a DVD they paid for to go to prison for ten years
Anyone supporting this better be against right of repair and jail time for anyone discussing a sporting event without written permission
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.
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…
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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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
