I realize I had already looked in some detail into the lawsuits against generative AI since January. By May, it is clear that generative AI’s business model relies on copyright infringement. One way to cure this is to join one of the emerging class action lawsuits, in case your artwork has been used to train AI and you weren’t paid royalties or fair compensation for it, another is to make your own centralized AI model and control 100% of the end product and its market viability. If an artist voice has been used to train an AI model, it should be clear that the artist must retain full ownership of the code and decide whether a work integrating samples from that particular AI model should ever see the day. In this case it is only normal to have a centralized model because it allows you to trace and sue the users of the tech who publish content without your consent. On the other end of the spectrum, where artists are used without retaining control over the AI model, anything called “open source” that operates as a centralized model appears as a form of misrepresentation or commercial fraud.
My point is that human artists should be the only true owners of AI art generated through their works. Those artists whose work has been used to train AI models without compensation should be entitled to unlimited and instant takedowns of works they suspect of infringement. I expect the courts to adjudicate serious damages against Generative AI art companies who pretend to be open-source for the purpose to infringe copyrighted content and collect data on their users.
As of now, the biggest AI players, including Chat GPT are not open source models. It is impossible to verify their code or to contribute to it. All we know for sure is that they have used billions of images and trillions of words of written text to come to existence and they haven’t paid any royalties to writers and artists. This is not just a case of copyright infringement, but probably the biggest fraud in history.