Silicon Luxembourg asked me to do a talk about generative models a few weeks ago, and it has given me the opportunity to develop my thinking about the societal consequences of all this.
The blooming of generative models such as Midjourney seems, at current capacity, to cover any illustrative need that can be done and used out of any context : media illustration, album cover, book cover, concept art. It is not a mere remote possibility for tech enthusiasts, it is a fact.
It is hard to not feel sympathy for the misfortunes of some artists. Without having a luddite attitude every illustrator has received an unrequested preview of their potential obsolescence. If they previously had shared some of their work they even enabled their own dismay. Many of them are going through the stages of griefs, including denial as some even seem to be daydreaming about putting the toothpaste back in the tube: we would collectively decide to put the technology offline and never talk about it again.
Challenging intellectual property is a way to rationally try to do this. Those models are trained on copyrighted data and one could believe that this is enough, yet, as far as I know, indexing content publicly available online is probably not the biggest concern.
The real question is to know whether their output should be considered as an adaptation of the training material.
If the reader wishes more details about the class action happening in California, this video covers the matter properly.
There are a ton of practical, interesting and challenging questions around that: if you assume that generated art is derivative art, how can you trace back to the original work? If a work is derivative from many, who owns the copyright? How do you demonstrate that an art piece is represented in a model?
But all this does not get the intellectual crunchiness of thinking about the consequences.
Let us assume for a second that generated art would be considered derivative art? So that original copyright owners would retain copyright on it? Would that be a great victory for the artists in the sense of preventing a cheap and fast access to their digital competitor?
Or would it be serving a new way to make cash cows out of the biggest entertainment portfolios on the planet? Disney and its counterparts would have an exclusive right to retain all profits for such an innovation with probably little to no benefit to the artists originating the content.
