Future Timeline

(TechCrunch) This week, OpenAI granted users of its image-generating AI system, DALL-E 2, the right to use their generations for commercial projects, like illustrations for children’s books and art for newsletters. The move makes sense, given OpenAI’s own commercial aims — the policy change coincided with the launch of the company’s paid plans for DALL-E 2. But it raises questions about the legal implications of AI like DALL-E 2, trained on public images around the web, and their potential to infringe on existing copyrights.

DALL-E 2 “trained” on approximately 650 million image-text pairs scraped from the internet, learning from that dataset the relationships between images and the words used to describe them. But while OpenAI filtered out images for specific content (e.g. pornography and duplicates) and implemented additional filters at the API level, for example for prominent public figures, the company admits that the system can sometimes create works that include trademarked logos or characters. (See linked article for Twitter feed example).

“OpenAI will evaluate different approaches to handle potential copyright and trademark issues, which may include allowing such generations as part of ‘fair use’ or similar concepts, filtering specific types of content, and working directly with copyright [and] trademark owners on these issues,” the company wrote in an analysis published prior to DALL-E 2’s beta release on Wednesday.

It’s not just a DALL-E 2 problem. As the AI community creates open source implementations of DALL-E 2 and its predecessor, DALL-E, both free and paid services are launching atop models trained on less-carefully filtered datasets. One, Pixelz.ai, which rolled out an image-generating app this week powered by a custom DALL-E model, makes it trivially easy to create photos showing various Pokémon and Disney characters from movies like Guardians of the Galaxy and Frozen.

(Pixelz.ai) also said that it plans to add a reporting feature that will allow people to submit images that violate the terms of service to a team of human moderators. But where it concerns intellectual property (IP), Pixelz.ai leaves it to users to exercise “responsibility” in using or distributing the images they generate — grey area or no.

raklian wrote: ↑Sun Aug 14, 2022 6:49 pm