Not related to this lawsuit, but related to AI art and copyright in general. What do any HN lawyers make of this?
https://twitter.com/heyBarsee/status/1621411036426280961Basically it's an AI tool that takes a copyrighted photo, and produces an AI-produced photo that is "conceptually identical" but not actually identical.
That is, given a photo of "an asian man lying in a grass field surrounded by a semicircle of driftwood and crows", it would produce a photo that had all of the same concepts, but just slightly different execution on each of them.
The man's face is still asian but clearly a different person. The driftwood is still in a semicircle, but the individual pieces are all different. The crows are still there, but arranged slightly differently. The grass is still grass, but no blades are the same.
So it's essentially cloning the idea/concept/vibes of the target image, but none of the actual "implementation details".
Does anyone have any intuition of the legal outlook on this?
On one hand, nothing is stopping me from seeing the copyrighted photo and then recruiting a similar looking model, setting up a photoshoot in a field with some stuffed crows, etc. I could replicate what the AI is doing. It would be work, but I could do it. The AI is just automating this.
On the other hand, the actual stated intention of this tool is to get around copyright. Seems sketchy.
Basically it's an AI tool that takes a copyrighted photo, and produces an AI-produced photo that is "conceptually identical" but not actually identical.
That is, given a photo of "an asian man lying in a grass field surrounded by a semicircle of driftwood and crows", it would produce a photo that had all of the same concepts, but just slightly different execution on each of them.
The man's face is still asian but clearly a different person. The driftwood is still in a semicircle, but the individual pieces are all different. The crows are still there, but arranged slightly differently. The grass is still grass, but no blades are the same.
So it's essentially cloning the idea/concept/vibes of the target image, but none of the actual "implementation details".
Does anyone have any intuition of the legal outlook on this?
On one hand, nothing is stopping me from seeing the copyrighted photo and then recruiting a similar looking model, setting up a photoshoot in a field with some stuffed crows, etc. I could replicate what the AI is doing. It would be work, but I could do it. The AI is just automating this.
On the other hand, the actual stated intention of this tool is to get around copyright. Seems sketchy.