The AI-focused COPIED Act would make removing digital watermarks illegal (as well as training any kind of AI on copyrighted content)

This is essentially regulatory capture. The article is very lax on calling it what it is.
A few things to consider:
Laws can't be applied retroactively, this would essentially close the door behind Openai, Google and Microsoft. Openai with sora in conjunction with the big Hollywood companies will be the only ones able to do proper video generation.
Individuals will not be getting paid, databrokers will.
They can easily pay pennies to a third world artist to build them a dataset copying a style. Styles are not copyrightable.
The open source scene is completely dead in the water and so is fine tuning for individuals.
Edit: This isn't entirely true, there is more leeway for non commercial models, see comments below.
AI isn't going away, all this does is force us and the economy into a subscription model.
Companies like Disney, Getty and Adobe reap everything.
In a perfect world, this bill would be aiming to make all models copyleft instead but sadly, no one is lobbying for that in Washington and money talks.
- Yup, I fucking knew it. I knew this is what would happen with everyone bitching about copyright this and that. I knew any legislation that came as a result was going be bastardized and dressed up to make it look like it's for everyone when in reality it's going to mostly benefit big corps that can afford licensing fees and teams of lawyers.
  People could not/would not understand how these AI models actually processes images/text or the concept of "If you post publicly, expect it to be used publicly" and here we are....
  
  As always, the anprims/luddites/ecofashies (who downvoted me) are like an anvil to left-wing ideas of progress, we're too busy arguing amongst ourselves to make a stand to protect open source AI from regulation.
  Honestly I blame Hbomberguy personally. People were a lot more open-minded before he tacked on that shitty little AI snark at the end of his plagiarism video.
- The open source scene is completely dead in the water and so is fine tuning for individuals.
  Why do you think that? The existing data sets won’t be going anywhere. Fine tuning doesn’t require nearly the same amount of training images and it’s not infeasible to get them from individual artists.
  Not that that actually matters to open source developers, though, as the developer obligations only apply if you’re making the product available for a commercial purpose, so they’re not relevant to developers of gratis solutions - and most libre developers are also gratis developers. If your platform is not commercial and doesn’t have at least 25 Million monthly active users, you don’t need to allow users to add content provenance information in the first place. If it’s not for a commercial purpose, you aren’t prohibited from training on content containing content provenance information, or from removing it and training on it.
  
  I'll be honest, I read it too fast and didn't see the "for commercial use part". I still think this is problematic because a lot of fine tuners and some companies putting out models either have a Patreon or offer their model for individual use but not to host on generating services without compensation (a good example of this is pony for fine tuners or codestal(I think) for general model providers). It also means any one building models can't then commercialize models on their end while still offering it for free to the community, it puts them in a tough position. I don't know how Metas llama could survive this or Google's gemma. I'm also curious how this affects huggingface since I'm not sure if they are making it available like it says in the bill by hosting it.
  It does put the bill in a better light though and I will edit my comment.

This is a brutally dystopian law. Forget the AI angle and turn on your brain.
Any information will get a label saying who owns it and what can be done with it. Tampering with these labels becomes a crime. This is the infrastructure for the complete control of the flow of all information.
- Exactly, this isn't about any sort of AI, this is the old playbook of trying to digitally track images, just with the current label slapped on. Regardless of your opinion on AI, this is a terrible way to solve this.
- It's like applying DRM law to all media ever. And we know the problems with DRM already, as exemplified 2 decades ago by Cory Doctorow in his talk at Microsoft to convince them not to endorse and use it.
- Maybe I'm missing something, but my read is that it creates a mechanism/standard for labeling content. If content is labeled under this standard, it is illegal to remove the labeling or use it in a way the labeling prohibits. But I don't see a requirement to label content with this mechanism.
  If that's the case I don't see a problem. Now, if all the content is required to be labeled, then yes it's a privacy nightmare. But my interpretation was that this is a mechanism to prevent AI companies from gobbling up content without consent and saying, "What? There's nothing saying I couldn't use it."
  
  Most everyone from corporations to tumblr artists will be opting into that. While it doesnt guarantee an information dystopia, it does enable it
  I download images from the internet and remove watermarks to edit them in youtube videos as visual aid. I add a credit to the description because Im not a cunt, I just do it to make the video look better. I dont monetize content. Utterly and totally harmless, and would be illegal with such a label
  
  It's rather more than that. In the very least, it is a DRM system, meant to curtail fair use. We're not just talking about AI training. The AutoTLDR bot here would also be affected. Manually copy/pasting articles while removing the metadata becomes illegal. Platforms have a legal duty to stop copyright infringement. In practice, they will probably have to use the metadata label to stop reposts and re-uploads of images and articles.
  This bill was obviously written by lobbyists for major corpos like Adobe. This wants to make the C2PA standard legally binding. They have been working on this for the last couple years. OpenAI already uses it.
  In the very least, this bill will entrench the monopolies of the corporations behind it; at the expense of the rights of ordinary people.
  I don't think it'll stop there. Look at age verification laws in various red states and around the world. Once you have this system in place, it would be obvious to demand mandatory content warnings in the metadata. We're not just talking about erotic images but also about articles on LGBTQ matters.
  More control over the flow of information is the way we are going anyway. From age-verification to copyright enforcement, it's all about making sure that only the right people can access certain information. Copyright used to be about what businesses can print a book. Now it's about what you can do at home with your own computer. We're moving in this dystopian direction, anyway, and this bill is a big step.
  The bill talks about "provenance". The ambition is literally a system to track where information comes from and how it is processed. If this was merely DRM, that would be bad enough. But this is an intentionally dystopian overreach.
  EG you have cameras that automatically add the tracking data to all photos and then photoshop adds data about all post-processing. Obviously, this can't be secure. (NB: This is real and not hypothetical. More)
  The thing is, a door lock isn't secure either. It takes seconds to break down a door, or to break a window instead. The secret ingredient is surveillance and punishment. Someone hears or sees something and calls the police. To make the ambition work, you need something at the hardware level in any device that can process and store data. You also need a lot of surveillance to crack down on people who deal in illegal hardware.
  I'm afraid, this is not as crazy as it sounds. You may have heard about the recent "Chat Control" debate in the EU. That is a proposal, with a lot of support, that would let police scan the files on a phone to look for "child porn" (mind that this includes sexy selfies that 17-year-olds exchange with their friends). Mandatory watermarking, that let the government trace a photo to the camera and its owner, is mild by comparison.
  The bill wants government agencies like DARPA to help in the development of better tracking systems. Nice for the corpos that they get some of that tax money. But it also creates a dynamic in the government that will make it much more likely that we continue on a dystopian path. For agencies, funding will be on the line; plus there are egos. Meanwhile, you still have the content industry lobbying for more control over its intellectual "property".

They did it. They're passing the worst version of the AI law. Thats the end for open source AI! If this passes, all AI will be closed source, and only from giant tech companies. Im sure they will find a way to steal your stuff "legally".
- To the cheer of so-called progressives who never understood the tech and continue to be wilfully ignorant of it the corporations win again.
- This is exactly what OpenAI etc. wanted to achieve with all the “AI safety” bullshit doomer talk. I really hope this doesn’t pass
- Did you read the documents? It's not as bad as what you're saying.
  It looks like the prohibited acts (section 6) specifically mention for commercial purposes where attribution markers are separated from the content. So, commercial AI software that doesn't retain these markers or copyright marker removal done to mislead or affect in a commercial way would be against the law in 2 years.
  I don't see how this affects anything open source related. The way I understand it is that this will just force commercial applications to adapt to this and move on.
  
  oh cool, nevermind then. However, most open source AI is done for commercial purposes, so it will still cripple the ecosystem.
- No open source plagiarism machine :(
  
  Dw artbros and other corporation defenders will get curbstomped by the closed-source ones instead, not only will you be out of employment, but you will be unemployable without a ChatGPT subscription, and Altman/Musk/whoever will be worth trillions as a result. But at least it won't be "plagiarism" because the lobbyists will ensure that it's all nice and legal.
  And the worst part is you honestly deserve it for not listening to us.
  Also, this is you:

A bit late now, isn't it?
All the big corporations have already trained most of their current ai, so all this does is put the up and comers at a disadvantage.
- It could halt the progress of improving their models and stagnate the whole technology.
  That being said, it only halts progress for American companies. Other countries will happily ignore this law and grow beyond our capabilities. I'm not sure if that's better or worse than the current situation.
  
  Reminds me of Russia before WWI began. They realized they had fallen horribly behind the rest of the world in terms of military technology, so they called an arms limitation treaty conference where they pushed for basically every country in the world to agree to stop inventing any new weapons of any kind.
  
  From what I understand the next rounds of ai are being trained on further refined versions of the same datasets and supplemented with synthetic data.
  The damage to existing copyrighted content is already done.
  Source: I'm a random internet user
- Seeing as laws can't be applied retroactively, what would have been the alternative?
- People's attention spans are 5 seconds long, and art/culture change constantly.
  If you prohibit them from training on new content, the models will age super poorly, and they'll fall into disuse.
  
  It wouldn't be prohibited. It would just mean that the likes of Reddit or Facebook can charge more for "consent" to train on their content.
  
  you could use the models to train the models to get better at making new things.

I don't like AI but I hate intellectual property. And the people that want to restrict AI don't seem to understand the implications that has. I am ok with copying as I think copyright is a load of bullocks. But they aren't even reproducing the content verbatim are they? They're 'taking inspiration' if you will, transforming it into something completely different. Seems like fair use to me. It's just that people hate AI, and hate the companies behind it, and don't get me wrong, rightfully so, but that shouldn't get us all to stop thinking critically about intellectual property laws.
- I'm the opposite, actually. I like generative AI. But as a creator who shares his work with the public for their (non-commercial) enjoyment, I am not okay with a billionaire industry training their models on my content without my permission, and then use those models as a money machine.
  
  This law will ensure only giant tech company have this power. Hobbyists and home players will be prevented.
- Just because intellectual property laws currently can be exploited doesnt mean there is no place for it at all.
  
  That's an opinion you can have, but I can just as well hold mine, which is that restricting any form of copying is unnatural and harmful to society.
  
  True but you people have had hundreds of years to fix the system and have not.
- They’re ‘taking inspiration’ if you will, transforming it into something completely different.
  That is not at all what takes place with A.I.
  An A.I. doesn't "learn" like a human does. It aggregates multiple chunks from multiple sources. It's just really really tiny chunks so it's hard to tell sometimes.
  That's why you can ask two AI's to write a story based on the same prompt and some of their lines will be exactly the same. Because it's not taking inspiration from, it's literally copying bits and pieces of other works and it happens that they both chose that particular bit.
  If you do that when writing a paper in university it's called plagerism.
  Get the fuck out of here with your "A.I. takes inspiration.." it copies nothing more. It doesn't add anything new to the sum total of the creative zeitgeist because it's just remixes of things that already exist.
  
  it copies nothing more
  it's just remixes of things that already exist.
  So it does do more than copying? Because as you said - it remixes.
  It sounds like the line you're trying to draw is not only arbitrary, but you yourself can't even stick with it for more than one sentence.
  Everything new is some unique combination of things that already exist, the elements it draws from are called sources and influences, and rules according to which they're remixed are called techniques/structures e.g. most movies are three acts, and many feature specific techniques like J-cuts.
  Heck even re-arranging elements of just one thing is a unique and different thing, or is your favourite song and a remix of it literally the same? Or does the remix not have artistic value, even though someone out there probably likes the remix, but not the original?
  I think your confusion stems from the fact you're a top shelf, grade-A Moron.
  You're an organic, locally sourced and ethically produced idiot, and you need to learn how basic ML works, what "new" is, and glance at some basic epistemology and metaphysics before you lead us to ruin because you don't even understand what "new" entails, before your reactionary rhetoric leads us all down straight to cyberpunk dystopias.
  
  Consider youtube poop, Im serious. Everyclip in them is sourced from preexisting audio and video, and mixed or distorted in a comedic format. You could make an AI to make youtube poops using those same clips and other "poops" as training data. What it outputs might be of lower quality, but in a technical sense it would be made in an identical fashion. And, to the chagrin of Disney, Nintendo, and Viacom, these are considered legally distinct entities; because I dont watch Frying Nemo in place of Finding Nemo. So why would it be any different when an AI makes it?
  
  You just reiterate what other anti-ML extremists have said like a sad little parrot. No, LLMs don't just copy. They network information and associations and can output entirely new combinations of them. To do this, they make use of neural networks, which are computational concepts analogous to the way your brain works. If, according to you, LLMs just copy, then that's all that you do as well.
  
  You can do the same thing with the Hardy Boys. You can find the same page word for word in different books. You can also do that with the Bible. The authors were plagiarizing each other.
  It doesn’t add anything new to the sum total of the creative zeitgeist because it’s just remixes of things that already exist.
  Do yourself a favor and never ever go into design of infrastructure equipment or eat at a Pizza Hut or get a drink from Starbucks or work for an American car company or be connected to Boeing.
  Everyone has this super impressive view of human creativity and I am waiting to see any of it. As far as I can tell the less creative you are the more success you will have. But let me guess you ride a Segway, wear those shoes with toes, have gone through every recipe of Julia Childs, and compose novels that look like Finnegan's Wake got into a car crash with EE Cummings and Gravity's Rainbow.
  Now leave me alone with I eat the same burger as everyone else and watch reruns of Family Guy in my house that looks like all the other ones on the street

If this passes, this would have the perverse effect of making China (and maybe to a lesser extent the Middle East) the leading suppliers of open source / open weight AI models...
- China would be the world leader in making AI model trained on copyrighted content
  
  And as the vast majority of content is not licensed for AI model training, they would have an immensely larger dataset to train on.
  
  Well, there is also Europe ✌🏻

There's absolutely no way to enforce this.
- No? You don't think the courts would approve of a fishing expedition for forth amendment violation access to your computer?

So the rich have already scalped what they could. Now it can be made illegal
- Yeah it is really messed up that Disney made untold tens of billions of dollars on public domain stories, effectively cut us off from our own culture, then extended the duration to indefinite. I wonder why near everyone was silent about this issue for multiple decades until it became cliche to pretend to care about furry porn creators.
  Creatives have always been screwed, we are the first civilization to not only screw them but screw the general public. As shit as it was in the past you could just copy a freaken scroll.
  Anyway you guys have fun defending some of the worst assholes in human history while acting like you care about people you weren't even willing to give a buck a month to on patreon.
- Because even when some of the water has gotten out, you still go plug the dam.
  The best moment was earlier. The second best moment is now.
  
  This is more akin to diverting a public river into private land so the landowner can charge everyone what they were getting for free.
  The river cannot be dammed and this bill doesn't aim to even try.
  A better solution would be to make all models copyleft, so even if corporations dip their cup in the water, whatever they produce has to be thrown back in.

This sounds exactly like existing copyright law and DRM.
- It's strengthening copyright laws by negating the transformative clause when dealing with AI
  
  Hopefully the next step: force every platform that deals in user generated content to give users the choice to exploit that content for a fraction of the profit, or to exclude their content from processing.
  It's amazing how many people don't realize that they themselves also hold copyright over their content, and that laws like these protect them as well.

As if a law could prevent anything of that. They simply demand "Pigs Must Fly", and don't waste a thought on how utterly unrealistic this is.
- As if a law could prevent anything of that.
  Generating legal liability goes a long way towards curbing how businesses behave, particularly when they can be picked on by rival mega-firms.
  But because we've made class action lawsuits increasingly difficult, particularly after Comcast Corp. v. Behrend, the idea that individual claimants can effectively prosecute a case against an interstate or international entity is increasingly farcical. You're either going to need big state agencies (the EU seems increasingly invested in cracking down on American tech companies for anti-competitive practices) or rivalrous business interests (MPAA/RIAA going after Big Tech backed AI firms) to leverage this kind of liability. It's still going to be open season on everyone using DeviantArt or Pinterest or whatever.

If you put something on the Internet you are giving up ownership of it. This is reality and companies taking advantage of this for AI have already proven this is true.
You are not going to be able to put the cat back in the bag. The whole concept of ownership over art, ideas, and our very culture was always ridiculous.
It is past time to do away with the joke of the legal framework we call IP law. It is merely a tool for monied interests to extract more obscene profit from our culture at this point.
There is only one way forward and that is sweeping privacy protections. No more data collection, no more targeted advertising, no more dark patterns. The problem is corporations are not going to let that happen without a fight.
- Incredibly well-put. IP is just land for the wannabe landlords of information and culture.
  They are just attempting to squeeze the working class dry, take the last freedoms we have so we have to use their corporate products.
- There are plenty of internet culture outside Western that still respect ownership, people don't just take random things on internet without permission. Western internet culture =/= entire internet.
  Which cultures are you referring to?
  
  Yeah in theory but in practice that isn't happening. In theory the laws could be structured such that creatives are being paid fairly and distributors make some money and that the general public knows the stuff will be public domain in a relatively short period of time.
  No one is doing it and they had hundreds of years to figure out how to do it. You are asking us to take it on faith and I personally will not.

I posted this in a thread, but Im gonna make it a parent comment for those who support this bill.
Consider youtube poop, Im serious. Every clip in them is sourced from preexisting audio and video, and mixed or distorted in a comedic format. You could make an AI to make youtube poops using those same clips and other "poops" as training data. What it outputs might be of lower quality (less funny), but in a technical sense it would be made in an identical fashion. And, to the chagrin of Disney, Nintendo, and Viacom, these are considered legally distinct entities; because I dont watch Frying Nemo in place of Finding Nemo. So why would it be any different when an AI makes it?
- I see this argument a lot as a defense for AI art and I see a couple major flaws in this line of thinking.
  First, it's treating the AI art as somehow the same as a dirivitive (or parody) work made by an actual person. These two things are not the same and should not be argued like they are.
  AI art isn't just dirivitive. It's a Frankenstein's Monster of a bunch of different pieces of art stitched together in a procedural way that doesn't credit and in fact obfuscates the original works. This is problematic at best and flat out dishonest thievery at worst. Whereas a work made by a person that is dirivitive or parody has actual work and thought put into it by an actual person. And would typically at least credit the original works being riffed on. This involves actual creative thought and human touch. Even if it is dirivitive it's unique in some way simply by virtue of being made by a person.
  AI art cannot and will not ever be unique, at least not when used to just create a work wholesale. Because it's not being creative. It's calculating and nothing more. (at least if we're talking about current tachnology. A possible future General AI could flout this argument. But that would get into an AI personhood conversation not really relevant to our current machine learning tech).
  Secondly, no one is worried that some hypothetical shitty AI video is going to somehow usurp the work that it's stealing from. What people are worried about is that AI art is going to be used in place of hiring actual artists for bigger projects. And the fact that this AI art exists solely because it's scraped the internet of art from those same artists now losing their livelihoods makes the tech incredibly fucked up.
  Now don't get me wrong though. I do believe machine learning has its place in society. And we've already been using it for a long time to help with large tasks that would be incredibly difficult if not impossible for people to do on their own in a bunch of different industries. Things like medicine research in the pharmaceutical sector and fraud monitoring in the banking sector come to mind.
  Also, there is an argument to be had that machine learning algorithms could be used as tools in creating art. I don't really have a problem with those use cases. Things that come to mind are a bunch of different tools that exist in music production right now that in my opinion help in allowing artists to fulfill their vision. Watch some There I Ruined It videos on YouTube to see what I mean. Yeah that guy is using AI to make himself sound like other musicians. But that guy also had to be a really solid singer and impressionist in the first place for those songs to be any good at all.
  
  It's a Frankenstein's Monster of a bunch of different pieces of art stitched together in a procedural way that doesn't credit and in fact obfuscates the original works
  What you described is collage and is completely legal. How image generation works is much more complicated but in any case, both it and collage clearly fall under transformative use.
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_use
  
  This is problematic at best and flat out dishonest thievery at worst.
  You could say that about literally all art - no artist can name and attribute every single influence that played even the smallest effect on the work created. Say I commissioned an image of an anime man in a french maid uniform in a 4 panel pop art style. In creating it at some level you are going to draw on every anime image you've seen, every picture of a french maid uniform, every 4 panel pop art image and create something that's a synthesis of all those things. You can't name and attribute every single example of all of those things you have ever seen, as well as anything else that might have influenced you.
  Whereas a work made by a person that is dirivitive or parody has actual work and thought put into it by an actual person.
  ...and this is the crux of it - it's not anything related to the actual content of the image, it's simple protectionism for a class of worker. Basically creatives are seeing the possibility of some of their jobs being automated away and are freaking out because losing jobs to automation is something that's only supposed to effect manufacturing workers.
  Even if it is dirivitive it’s unique in some way simply by virtue of being made by a person.
  Again, the argument is it's nothing to do with the actual result, but with it being done by an actual human as opposed to a mere machine. A pixel for pixel identical image create by a human would be "art" by virtue of it being a human that put each pixel there?
- My best guess would be intent, which I think is an important component of fair use. The intent of youtube poop creators could be considered parody and while someone could use AI to create parody, the intent of creating the AI model itself is not parody (at least not for these massive AI models that most people use).
  
  Transformation is in itself fair use is the thing. Ytp doesnt need to be parody or critique or anything else, because its fundamentally no longer the same product as whatever the source was as a direct result of editing

LOL
So I take your photo, remove your watermark, put my own watermark on it, and then I sue you for removing my watermark.
- Don't be a fool. Of course, content corporations like Disney or the NYT are able to prove just when something was made.
  
  Don't be a fool either.
  Of course I am going to do this to you, not to Disney etc. because I am way better at creating proof than you are.
  And of course Disney etc. are going to do this to you and me, because they are even better at creating proof than you and me are.
  That's how foolish this law is.
  
  So what you're saying is that this is a law designed to extend corporate control over information and culture even further?
- It's pretty cheap to just time stamp everything.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, before you stands 8-year-old Billy Smith. He stands accused of training on copyrighted material. We actually have live video of him looking and reading books from the library. He he trained on the contents of over 100 books this year.
We ask you to enforce the maximum penalty and send his parents to prison.
- I get what you're saying, but there's something of a difference between someone studying something for months or years then writing about it, and a language model ran by one of the tech giants scraping media and immediately generating stuff from it, for commercial use, for the profit of the company that owns it.
  It's kinda like how plagiarising somebody's book word for word never used to be a crime when it was a painstaking process of manually writing it back out for every copy. When the printing press came out, though? It allowed dodgy businesses to large-scale fuck over authors, and the law had to play catch-up.
  I don't actually think this proposal is that well thought out, but I also don't think we should think of AI models or corporations as being people - they aren't people, and they shouldn't necessarily have the same rights and privileges that we do.
  
  What of the images random people generate from software like dall e? Those are made from the same training data, and what this poicy does to them is make media creation more inaccessible even though the technology exists. Also, copying a book word for word by hand isnt/wasnt plagarism, its unlicensed duplication. Plagarism would be changing just the proper nouns and pretending like its a completely seperate book
  
  There's a lot of private people training models (Lora, Dora's etc) / fine-tuning checkpoints and what have you
  Training models is not just giant tech corps anymore
- No matter how much you'd like for it to be the case, proprietary algorithms owned by big corporations are not remotely comparable to children.
  
  proprietary algorithms owned by big corporations
  tell that to civitai users lol
- Your machine learning algorithms are not people. No amount of calling it Alex or giving it a voice stolen from a well-known actress will change that fact.
  If I traced an artwork or copied GPL licensed code into an non-GPL one, my ass would be beaten by others on the internet.
  So far, the main usecase of this generative technology is scamming, intentionally creating distrust in the artist community, and an even worse and scummier form of plagiarism, but it doesn't matter because some shitpost that goes hard, "what if a content creator needs a stock photo?", and "what if it could be used to resurrect your favorite artist?".
  Power imbalance. There's a difference a young creator not having money to buy a training material and a big corporation wanting to destroy their profession.
  
  If I traced an artwork or copied GPL licensed code into an non-GPL one, my ass would be beaten by others on the internet.
  If I gave you an arbitrary image from Midjourney and all of the training data from it, I doubt you could match it to the "source art." AI images are usually transformative.
  
  Thanks chatgpt

Anyone supporting this better be against right of repair and jail time for anyone discussing a sporting event without written permission

How would this even work when you sometimes can just remove the watermark by photoshoping?
- In the same way that the law doesn't prevent you from murdering someone, but just makes it illegal to do so.
  
  Wow so much freedom. You can't even alter a picture that you own.

Doesn't this infringe on fair use? e.g. if i'm making a parody of something and I mimic the original even by using a portion of the original's text word for word.
Everyone is so obsessed with having a monopoly over everything, it's not what is best for 8 billion people.

This sounds like a way to get media companies and tech companies to fight.
Unfortunately I expect that they will both somehow win and individuals will be worse off. This is the U-S-A god damn it.
- There will be no fight. Some fat stacks of cheddar will change hands and this will fail at the voting stage.

Why do these acts always have such stupid acronyms

Introducing Chat-Stupid! It just like Chat-GPT but it wishes for any conversation with humans so it can legally learn....don't disclose company secrets or it will legally learn those too.

For those who are saying just photoshop.
https://methodshop.com/photoshop-money/
Obviously you can just use other software but PS is the main choice for image editing. What they need to do is put legislation in place and it will make the biggest players implement this form of drm.
- The main goal is cementing the position of the giants, creating a bureaucratic mote around them to keep small players economically unviable.
  
  People keep saying that, all the while ignoring that this bill is granting rights to small time creators to decide if they want their works used for machine learning.
  Yes, this gives a head start to companies that have been abusing the system while it was still allowed. But stopping that behaviour too late is still better than not stopping it at all.

This is the best summary I could come up with:
A bipartisan group of senators introduced a new bill to make it easier to authenticate and detect artificial intelligence-generated content and protect journalists and artists from having their work gobbled up by AI models without their permission.
Content owners, including broadcasters, artists, and newspapers, could sue companies they believe used their materials without permission or tampered with authentication markers.
State attorneys general and the Federal Trade Commission could also enforce the bill, which its backers say prohibits anyone from “removing, disabling, or tampering with content provenance information” outside of an exception for some security research purposes.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) led an effort to create an AI roadmap for the chamber, but made clear that new laws would be worked out in individual committees.
“The capacity of AI to produce stunningly accurate digital representations of performers poses a real and present threat to the economic and reputational well-being and self-determination of our members,” SAG-AFTRA national executive director and chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland said in a statement.
“We need a fully transparent and accountable supply chain for generative Artificial Intelligence and the content it creates in order to protect everyone’s basic right to control the use of their face, voice, and persona.”
The original article contains 384 words, the summary contains 203 words. Saved 47%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

This is actually pretty cool for small artists, but how would it handle things like iFunny and such adding watermarks to shit they don't own in the first place?
- cool for small artists
  It's certainly very bad for small artists. Can I ask why you think it would be good?
  To answer why it is bad for small artists: Money for license fees will mainly go to major content owners like Getty, or Disney. Small artists will have to go through platforms like Shutterstock or Adobe, which will keep most of the fees. At the same time, AI tools like generative fill are becoming ever more important. Such licensing regimes make artists' tools more expensive. Major corporations will be able to extract more value.
  Look at Adobe. It has a reputation for abusing its monopoly against small artists, right? Yet Adobe pays license fees for images on its platform, that it used for training its AI tools. Adobe has also created a provenance standard, such as this bill wants to make mandatory. This bill would make Adobe's preferred business model the mandatory standard by law.
  
  Disney won't sell licenses.
  They'll keep their monopoly on 95% of the training data on the market for entertainment content, so they can accelerate their workflows using those tools, and everyone else is now trying to compete with their giant wallet and their extra tooling you're not allowed to compete with.
- I don't think that's the kind of watermark being talked about here, Kol.
  The National Institute of Standards and Technology would be called upon to, quoted from the COPIED ACT Summary, facilitate development of guidelines for voluntary, consensus-based standards and for detection of synthetic content, watermarking and content provenance information, including evaluation, testing and cybersecurity protection. I believe we're talking about the unseen, math-y, certification and (I imagine) cryptography kind of digital watermark, not the crappy visual edits made by iFunny and co.
  In fact, since it also says:
  Prohibits removing, altering, tampering with, or disabling content provenance information, with a limited exception for security research purposes.
  The content in question might reach e.g. iFunny already "signed" and they wouldn't be able to remove that.
  Of course, I'm saying this without actually fully understanding what covered content (digital representations of copyrighted works) means. Does my OC on deviantart count as covered content? I think so, but I couldn't tell you for sure. If anyone could help me understand this, please, that'd be really nice.
  And finally, as was already said by others, I think this does nothing for all the crap companies already did to artists, since the law can't affect them retroactively. Not that cool for small artists, since they'll still be abused, except big tech would have the legal monopoly on abuse.
  I mean no disrespect by this, did you read the article?
  
  covered content?
  That is any digital representation of any copyrighted content. If it's on DeviantArt, it is a digital representation. By creating something, you own the copyright. A notable exception is when you do the work for hire, in which case it probably belongs to your employer. (Or if the work lacks human creativity, in which case it is public domain.)
  Anything on DeviantArt is almost certainly covered content, with the possible exception of AI generated images, or re-uploads of public domain content.
  (5) COVERED CONTENT .—The term ‘‘covered content’’ means a digital representation, such as text, an image, or audio or video content, of any work of authorship described in section 102 of title 17, United States Code.
  For reference: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/102

Sure would be fun to expand things to include a section to not let normal people make art of copyrighted material or be an excuse to mess with fair use

Don't see an issue with this. People who scrape copyrighted content should pay for it.
- Closing the door behind the ones that already did it means only the current groups that have the data will make money of it.
  
  Is it Copyright content?
  
  Downvote all you want. If your entire business or personal model includes stealing content from other people, then you need to rethink that.
- Yes it is perfectly appropriate for someone who burned a backup copy of a DVD they paid for to go to prison for ten years