Artists suing generative artificial intelligence art generators have hit a stumbling block in a first-of-its-kind lawsuit over the uncompensated and unauthorized use of billions of images downloaded from the internet to train AI systems, with a federal judge’s dismissal of most claims.
U.S. District Judge William Orrick on Monday found that copyright infringement claims cannot move forward against Midjourney and DeviantArt, concluding the accusations are “defective in numerous respects.” Among the issues are whether the AI systems they run on actually contain copies of copyrighted images that were used to create infringing works and if the artists can substantiate infringement in the absence of identical material created by the AI tools. Claims against the companies for infringement, right of publicity, unfair competition and breach of contract were dismissed, though they will likely be reasserted. — Read More
Monthly Archives: October 2023
The Next Big Questions in AI Research with Andrew Ng
Introducing EdgeLLama – An Open Standard for Decentralized AI
We, the GPU poor, have come up with a peer-to-peer network design to enable running Mistral7B and other models which will make AI use more free, both as in beer and as in speech. We believe in e/acc, and we want to make AI abundant. This is the moment in time, when we start taking back control from the few powerful AI companies.
Right now, our AI use is a function of expensive monthly subscriptions, rate and usage limits imposed by datacenter-cloud run AI companies. This gives them the power to decide what we can prompt with and how much of AI we even have access to. The immense power they wield also imposes an emotional burden on them, and they are trying to appeal to the government to now impose stifling regulations (a concept called “regulatory capture”, see@bgurley‘s talk).
Well, we, a bunch of AI and open network aficionados, want to make their lives’ easier and take that power away from them. Think BitTorrent from the early 2000s, when you could make your own computer available and effortlessly share files with each other in an open network. The advent of that technology, which was used by over 100 million people running nodes on their home computers, imposed a forcing function on entertainment business models in general. Better user experiences emerged, providing unlimited access to top-tier content for an insanely low fees. — Read More
Sweeping new Biden order aims to alter the AI landscape
The White House is poised to make an all-hands effort to impose national rules on a fast-moving technology, according to a draft executive order.
President Joe Biden will deploy numerous federal agencies to monitor the risks of artificial intelligence and develop new uses for the technology while attempting to protect workers, according to a draft executive order obtained by POLITICO.
The order, expected to be issued as soon as Monday, would streamline high-skilled immigration, create a raft of new government offices and task forces and pave the way for the use of more AI in nearly every facet of life touched by the federal government, from health care to education, trade to housing, and more. — Read More
YouTube has AI creator tools, but creators are too busy battling AI to care
In mid-September, YouTube announced a collection of new artificial intelligence tools coming to the platform. The tools touch basically every part of the content creation process, from generating topics to editing and even generating video footage itself through the Dream Screen feature. But even as AI features have caused an uproar in so many other creative industries, the response to YouTube’s new suite of tools has been muted. Instead, YouTubers are sharing other concerns about the ways generative AI is already affecting the platform.
… [E]xisting creators don’t seem particularly interested one way or the other. “No one’s heard of it yet,” says Jimmy McGee, a YouTuber who recently made a video titled “The AI Revolution is Rotten to the Core.” As the title might suggest, he’s not a huge fan of YouTube’s proposed tools, but he says it’s “strange” how they’ve been received. — Read More
Stephen Woldram: How to Think Computationally about AI, the Universe and Everything
Human language. Mathematics. Logic. These are all ways to formalize the world. And in our century there’s a new and yet more powerful one: computation.
And for nearly 50 years I’ve had the great privilege of building an ever taller tower of science and technology based on that idea of computation. And today I want to tell you some of what that’s led to.
There’s a lot to talk about—so I’m going to go quickly… sometimes with just a sentence summarizing what I’ve written a whole book about. — Read More
RealFill: Reference-Driven Generation for Authentic Image Completion
Recent advances in generative imagery have brought forth outpainting and inpainting models that can produce high-quality, plausible image content in unknown regions, but the content these models hallucinate is necessarily inauthentic, since the models lack sufficient context about the true scene. In this work, we propose RealFill, a novel generative approach for image completion that fills in missing regions of an image with the content that should have been there. RealFill is a generative inpainting model that is personalized using only a few reference images of a scene. These reference images do not have to be aligned with the target image, and can be taken with drastically varying viewpoints, lighting conditions, camera apertures, or image styles. Once personalized, RealFill is able to complete a target image with visually compelling contents that are faithful to the original scene. We evaluate RealFill on a new image completion benchmark that covers a set of diverse and challenging scenarios, and find that it outperforms existing approaches by a large margin. — Read More
Read the Paper
The Beatles: ‘final’ song Now and Then to be released thanks to AI technology
Now and Then, the long-awaited “final” Beatles song featuring all four members, is to be released next week thanks to the same AI technology that was used to enhance the audio on Peter Jackson’s documentary Get Back.
“There it was, John’s voice, crystal clear,” Paul McCartney said in a statement. “It’s quite emotional. And we all play on it, it’s a genuine Beatles recording. In 2023, to still be working on Beatles music, and about to release a new song the public haven’t heard, I think it’s an exciting thing.” — Read More
Video
How AI is being abused to create child sexual abuse imagery
In 2023, the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) has been investigating its first reports of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) generated by artificial intelligence (AI).
Initial investigations uncovered a world of text-to-image technology. In short, you type in what you want to see in online generators and the software generates the image.
The technology is fast and accurate – images usually fit the text description very well. Many images can be generated at once – you are only really limited by the speed of your computer. You can then pick out your favourites; edit them; direct the technology to output exactly what you want.
In total, 20,254 AI-generated images were found to have been posted to one dark web CSAM forum in a one-month period. Of these, 11,108 images were selected for assessment by IWF analysts. These were the images that were judged most likely to be criminal. — Read More
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