this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
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Machine Learning
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Machine learning (ML) is a field devoted to understanding and building methods that let machines "learn" – that is, methods that leverage data to improve computer performance on some set of tasks. Machine learning algorithms build a model based on sample data, known as training data, in order to make predictions or decisions without being explicitly programmed to do so. Machine learning algorithms are used in a wide variety of applications, such as in medicine, email filtering, speech recognition, agriculture, and computer vision, where it is difficult or unfeasible to develop conventional algorithms to perform the needed tasks.
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The neural networks did not spring from the ether. And they are not naive neuron grids so simple as to be trivial. There are multiple layers with multiple purposes that have different designed functions.
And there are relatively few people who design the image sensors for cameras compared the the number of people using a camera to take pictures. They're still designed as a tool by a person.
Trained the same way you learn with the wetwear neural network in your brain. And even if you're not convinced that these networks "learn" the same way we do, the resulting network weights are entirely transformational, which is perfectly allowed by copyright law. With 5 billion image/text pairs for training into 960 million parameters in the diffusion and text encoding networks of stable diffusion, for example, that is 0.2 parameters (or about 6 bits), per image in the resulting product. The image, as such, is almost entirely discarded.
I fundamentally disagree with you and I do not think we'll come to an agreement on this. There is a lot I find morally and philosophically wrong with our copyright law, and the current findings of the courts regarding AI works is just a fraction of that.
A camera's image sensor is just as deterministic as the neural network weights. The human work comes from the judgement used when conjuring a prompt to feed into the tool, just like a photographer decides what light reflecting source to point his camera at.
I'm not convinced the lines are either clear or agreed upon by the majority. This is a really complex set of circumstances and there's a reason we're still battling it out in the courts and in online forum comment sections. ;)
I'm not the most familiar with copyright law, but IIRC you're certainly able to violate copyright while taking a photo. If you take a photo of a copyrighted work (i.e. parts of a book or something) without artistic intent, I don't believe that's considered transformative.
I suspect the courts will end up having to deal with many of these issues on a case-by-case basis, just like they already do with fair use.