Critique, parody, and even collage-as-art are all explicit carveouts for fair use. Remixing and remuxing artists, being broke, cannot afford the lawyers to effectively apply this, so they pay off the "owners" of that existing IP.

The AI bros might have a serious point within the law, and that should scare actual artists. It should also scare studios like Disney that hold a fuck ton of "intellectual property".

Using it to train an AI? Takes meeting that "transformational" requirement for fair use to newly undisputed heights, so long as safeguards are in place to remove the possibility to use it as a vector for direct replication.

[–] p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

When they can argue its for “transformative use” or whatever the magic words are? Thats technically fair use in US law.

Well, considering they transformed its use to about 250GB of weights, that would qualify. That's at least thousands of times less than the size of the books they downloaded, so you can't really claim "they downloaded the books and put it into the model unaltered".

It's not like you can ask one of the models for page 156 of the second Harry Potter book, unless it's cheating and attached to a search engine to try to find the result. There is no compression technique that can take something to a thousandth of its size without an substantial loss. You can, however, ask it to summarize what happened in the second Harry Potter book, including what the actual title is, without it trying to look it up on its own.

The AI bros might have a serious point within the law, and that should scare actual artists. It should also scare studios like Disney that hold a fuck ton of “intellectual property”.

Actual artists have been fucked over by copyright since its invention. Copyright, patents, and intellectual rights were created under the false pretense that it "protects the little person", but these are lies told by the rich and powerful to keep themselves rich and powerful. Time and time again, we have seen how broken the patent system is, how it is impossible to not step on musical copyright, how Mark Twain, Sonny Bono, and Disney has extended copyrights to forever, and how the megacorporations have way more money than everybody else to defend those copyrights and patents. These people are not your friend, and their legal protections are not for you.

If the rich end up dismantling their own IP shield that has existed to enrich themselves for centuries in the name of AI progress, I'm going to call that a win.