Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Some Thoughts on AI Art, published by abramdemski on January 25, 2023 on LessWrong.

I was recently talking with a Daniel Kokotajlo about AI art. It turned out that he and I initially disagreed about ethical questions, but by the end of the conversation, I had somewhat won him over to my position.

I have the vague impression that a lot of people (on the technology side) haven't thought through these issues so much, or (like me) have only recently thought these issues through (as a result of artists making a lot of noise about it!).

So I thought I would write a post. Maybe it will be persuasive to some readers.

Is this the most important conversation to be having about AI?

No. Copyright-adjacent issues with AI art are less important than AI-induced unemployment, which is in turn less important than the big questions about the fate of the human race.

However, it's possible that copyright-adjacent issues around intellectual property and AI will be one of the first major issues thrusting AI into the political sphere, in which case this discussion may help to shape public policy around AI for years to come.

The basic issues.

Large language models such as GPT, and AI image generators such as DALL-E, Imagen, Stable Diffusion, etc etc are (very often) trained on copyrighted works without the permission of the copyright holder. This hasn't proven to be a legal problem, yet, but "legal" doesn't mean "ethical".

When models like GPT and DALL-E started coming out, I recall having the thought: oh, it's nice how these models don't really need to worry about copyright, because (I thought) deep learning turns out to generalize quite well, which means deep-learning-based systems aren't liable to regurgitate copyrighted material.

This turns out to be simply false; these systems are in fact quite liable to reproduce, or very nearly reproduce, copyrighted material when prompted in the right way.

Whether or not copyrighted material is precisely reproduced, or nearly reproduced, or not reproduced at all, there is, in any case, an argument to be made that these AI systems (if/when they charge for use) are turning a profit based on copyrighted material in an illegitimate way.

After all: the purpose of copyright law is, to a very large extent, to preserve the livelihood of intellectual property creators, who would otherwise have limited ability to profit from their own works due to the ease of reproducing it once made. Modern AI systems are threatening this, whether or not they technically violate copyright.

But I want to firmly distinguish between a few different issues:

AI systems training on copyrighted data without the consent of the copyright holder. This is the main issue I will discuss.

AI systems being capable of reproducing copyrighted works exactly or almost exactly. This is a consequence of the first bullet point, plus properties of modern ML systems, plus the absence of safeguards specifically preventing this from happening.

AI systems imitating work in a more general sort of way, such as copying the style of specific artists who never consented to their work being used as training data. This is one of the main reasons to think that training on copyrighted work (without permission) has occurred, in cases where there isn't much public information about what data was used to train an AI. It is also one of the main reasons (I have seen) that artists want these systems to stop training on copyrighted works.

AI putting artists and writers out of work. This is not the main topic of the post, but is an obvious underlying reason why people might be upset.

Some initial arguments.

It's not illegal.

Artists who take a position against AI art will sometimes describe the situation as follows: AI programmers steal our art, and use it to train AIs, which can then steal our artistic style, and the...