I'm so torn. On one hand, what you suggest seems to be a nearly ideal balance between advancing scientific progress and legal liability. By placing the legal burden to publish generated works on the person actually trying to publish, it allows for a more nuanced legal approach (i.e. the difference between "there are similarities to this work, but it's murky" or "you %100 stole that work").
On the other hand, is the company running the model themselves not already publishing all of that work and profiting from it? It seems unfair that their bottom line gets to be bolstered because they can produce work based on any artist, whereas the consumers of that work may need to end up walking on egg shells in order to publish them.
Like I said, I'm torn as far as how it "should be". I know how I want it to be though. I would love if AI continued training unabated. The results have been amazing, and I believe it would be a shame if the effort was slowed down by legislation.
> is the company running the model themselves not already publishing all of that work and profiting from it?
no, because the model is transformative enough that it cannot be said to be a derivative works of the training set.
The model is in essence a form of distilled information, extracted from the training set. Information cannot be copyrighted - only expressions can.
Therefore, a model producer should have the right to use any pre-existing work, in the same way a person can, to study and internally memorize and extract information.
The reproduction of any of the training set data constitutes a copyright violation, but this is not done by the owner of the model, but by an end user of the model.
My point is that if a court finds that a generated image is indeed similar enough to constitute an infringement when a subscriber of for instance MidJourney attempts to publish it, has that work not already been "published" to the subscriber? And has MidJourney not profited by gaining a subscriber based on the work of others?
On the other hand, is the company running the model themselves not already publishing all of that work and profiting from it? It seems unfair that their bottom line gets to be bolstered because they can produce work based on any artist, whereas the consumers of that work may need to end up walking on egg shells in order to publish them.
Like I said, I'm torn as far as how it "should be". I know how I want it to be though. I would love if AI continued training unabated. The results have been amazing, and I believe it would be a shame if the effort was slowed down by legislation.