Multimodal Art
I wonder how long until people and organizations start trying to file copyright claims, etc. against people and organizations who generate AI images (still on the fence about calling this kind of thing &quot;art&quot;) using data sets that include their IP.<p>I confess my understanding of these tools is, at best, rudimentary, but they remind me a bit of sampling in music. In both cases, the source material may be radically distorted to arrive at the final product, but that hasn&#x27;t mattered in the music biz—if you use it, you need to get it cleared, or you cannot monetize it.<p>Take the image of the dog with the red ball on this website. What if, in the data the AI was trained on, there was a usage-restricted image of a caramel dog in a grass field with a green ball in his mouth? Would the AI just use that image and change the color of the ball? Would it ignore that easy match and instead generate its own using however many other related images, resulting in something quite visually different from the restricted source image? Does it matter? If the AI-generated image is virtually identical to the source photo, or contains some piece of it fully copied and integrated into the new image (sampled), is that new image legally owned by the person who used the AI?<p>Can I train an AI on a data set consisting of a single image with a description of it, request an image of that exact description from the AI, and then publish and license the output as my own? If not, how big does a data set have to be before I can claim the output is novel and proprietary? Do a few blurry pixels or lossy compression artifacts prove an image has been sufficiently altered for new commercial use?