@ms_zwiebel In addition to what @davidrevoy said, NOAI is a problem because it's an opt-out: Anyone not using it is presumed opted-in.
Accepting a NOAI tag means conceding that literally everything that *doesn't* have the tag is fair game for the scrapers. And it's not fair to artists, especially ones with huge bodies of work, to make them go and tag each and every work with a new NO[whatever] every time a new exploitative technology comes out.
@Linebyline @ms_zwiebel @davidrevoy There is some flaw in your reasoning. Not opting-out does not mean you opted-in. That would be very weird.
Normally opt-out is really shitty since companies love to to assume you consented to something. Bad practice in software in general, also why for example the EU stepped in with GDPR. To make clear that “no assuming consent is not good enough or allowed” (within reason there is a lot to the GDPR so please excuse this gros simplification here)
Copyright works on a different basis. It is opt-out by default but here it works in favor of creatives. It is generally assumed in copyright that unless stated otherwise you keep all the right to your creation to yourself and no one is allowed to use it in any capacity* without your explicit consent (the famous “all rights reserved”)
Now copyright is a highly legislated field but I am pretty sure this general assumption is still the norm to this day.
There is obvs. the big elephant in the room here called “ fair use”. Its a whole can of worms which is very complicated tbh. The general terms would be this (in the US):
“the fair use of a copyrighted work, […] for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.”
But if AI meets any of these critieria is a legislative question. Also AI-Use will involve IP-law as well.
So no I don’t think the addition of an “No AI” would make it a free-for-all to use any images that don’t have the tag for AI. Copyright itself is so much opt-out its the reason why creative-commons even exists.
without CC I would need to assume that every image I see on the internet is considered “all rights reserved” and if I can’t claim fair use I would need to message the artist and ask for permission first. Gets tiring fast.
Creative Commons is a legal framework where artists can license a broad set conditions to x-people with a common license.
So generally I think it is a good Idea that CC adds more signals to its system just so its easier for artists to express their will in a legally binding and legally-approved way. There shall be discussion on what that entails.
Also there is the technical aspect. How do I tell AI this. Its not reading the webpage like a human would looking for license info. So you would need to find a way to tag the image with say CC-NOAI in machine readable form and make it in a way its very parasitic and cannot be stripped from the image without making it useless. I would then still scrape all images but toss-out these that have such tags. But that assumes no ill-intent on the side of the creator of the AI. Which was shown we cannot trust on. But how to enforce this.
CC cannot really help you out here since its the individuals matter to protect their copyright in court. CC could only maybe collect such cases and make some sort of combined legal case…
@stefan @davidrevoy @Linebyline @ms_zwiebel "How do I tell AI this. Its not reading the webpage like a human would looking for license info."
Okay now can we take a step back and look what happened here. This is a complete backwards view of responsibility and a massive power shift. Why should the artist be responsible for making AI behave according to law? If the AI is not reading the license, it has to be illegal, period. It cannot legally use any material that it can't determine the license of.
This is the fight that artists and copyright holders need to fight. If AI training is deemed fair use, then all licensing ceases to matter. If it exists, it can and will be scraped. If you don't make it your hill to die on that AI is responsible for respecting licenses, then the battle is lost.
@skaphle Right!? Of course we've been over this already with patent law: Doing something that's obviously unpatentable with a computer doesn't suddenly make it patentable. and yet, there are so many patents for obviously unpatentable things just because they use a computer.
Sadly, the way the whole system works, in both cases, depends on someone being able to sue. So in practice whoever has the most money to spend on lawyers is usually "right." :P
@stefan Not sure what you mean. Maybe the opt-in/opt-out language is tripping us up, so let's call it default-allow/default-deny.
Under a theoretical US copyright law that wasn't weighted in favor of whoever had the most expensive lawyers, copyright is a default-deny system. Copyright reserves certain rights to (usually, initially) creators, and those rights are *denied* to everyone else unless the copyright holder explicitly *allows* it. (1/2)
@stefan NOAI flips that on its head. If we accept that AI scrapers can use anything that doesn't have NOAI, that means copyright is now default-allow for any use that has a NO[whatever] tag.
And the existence of NOAI implies that. If I use NOAI only for new work, scrapers can argue that's implicit permission because why would I say no to some if I mean no to all? And if it becomes a standard, they can argue that anyone not using the standard deny implicitly want to allow. (2/2)
@stefan Public Domain is not a license. It is the absence of copyright. Were you thinking of CC0?
NOAI is not "fuck AI in general," it's "I am explicitly not giving AI permission to use this work."
You're ignoring the concept of implied licenses. The specifics vary by jurisdiction even within the US but if AI bros can convince a court that my conduct (e.g. by marking some other works NOAI but not *this* one) implies a license, I might not be protected. (3/2)
@stefan Moreover, if NOAI becomes a de facto industry standard, then if I never use it, the AI companies could easily persuade a judge that my participation in a space where AI scraping permission is normally expressly denied, but not denying it, I am implicitly granting that permission.
This isn't about what the statute says. It's about precedent. (As you know, statutes don't mean what they say. They mean what the courts *say* they mean.) (4/2)
Its atleast a bit less shitty here. @stefan Agreed, I think if we go further we're just going to be shouting past each other.
Just, do me a favor: Pester your politicians to keep an eye on us and not repeat our mistakes.
Have a good one!
Linebyline
stefan
skaphle
binchicken
David Revoy