Warning: Some posts on this platform may contain adult material intended for mature audiences only. Viewer discretion is advised. By clicking ‘Continue’, you confirm that you are 18 years or older and consent to viewing explicit content.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t believe voices can be copyrighted. After all, if a human can replicate someone else’s voice, they get booked as professional impersonators rather than sued into oblivion.
The difference here is that the voice replication happens though AI now. Would we see the same outrage if the voices in these mods were just people that sounded like the original voice actors?
Copyright law needs to be fortified or a lot of voice actors are about to get screwed over big time. AI voice replication by modders is only the beginning, once big companies find the output acceptable these people may very well lose their jobs.
That’s a decent theoretical legal basis, but the voice lines are property of the game company rather than the voice actors.
If this interpretation of copyright law on AI models will be the outcome of the two (three?) big AI lawsuits related to stable diffusion, most AI companies will be completely fucked. Everything from Stable Diffusion to ChatGPT 4 will instantly be in trouble.
The problem with that approach is that the resulting AI doesn’t contain any identifiable “copies” of the material that was used to train it. No copying, no copyright. The AI model is not a legally recognizable derivative work.
If the future output of the model that happens to sound very similar to the original voice actor counts as a copyright violation, then human sound-alikes and impersonators would also be in violation and things become a huge mess.
The problem with that approach is that the resulting AI doesn’t contain any identifiable “copies” of the material that was used to train it. No copying, no copyright. The AI model is not a legally recognizable derivative work.
That’s a HUGE assumption you’ve made, and certainly not something that has been tested in court, let alone found to be true.
In the context of existing legal precedent, there’s an argument to be made that the resulting model is itself a derivative work of the copyright-protected works, even if it does not literally contain an identifiable copy, as it is a derivative of the work in the common meaning of the term.
If the future output of the model that happens to sound very similar to the original voice actor counts as a copyright violation, then human sound-alikes and impersonators would also be in violation and things become a huge mess.
A key distinction here is that a human brain is not a work, and in that sense, a human brain learning things is not a derivative work.
No, I know how these neural nets are trained and how they’re structured. They really don’t contain any identifiable copies of the material used to train it.
and certainly not something that has been tested in court
Sure, this is brand new tech. It takes time for the court cases to churn their way through the system. If that’s going to be the ultimate arbiter, though, then what’s to discuss in the meantime?
Also, neural network weights are just a bunch of numbers, and I’m pretty sure data can’t be copyrighted. And yes, images and sounds and video stored on a computer are numbers too, but those can be played back or viewed by a human in a meaningful way, and as such represent a work.
Also, neural network weights are just a bunch of numbers, and I’m pretty sure data can’t be copyrighted.
Just being “a bunch of numbers” doesn’t stop it from being a work, it doesn’t stop it from being a derivative work, and you absolutely can copyright data – all digitally encoded works are “just data”.
A trained AI is not a measurement of the natural world. It is a thing that has been created from the processing of other things – in the common sense of it the word, it is derivative of those works. What remains, IMO, is the question of if it would be a work, or something else, and if that something else would be distinct enough from being a work to matter.
Just being “a bunch of numbers” doesn’t stop it from being a work, it doesn’t stop it from being a derivative work
I suggest reading my entire comment.
A trained AI is not a measurement of the natural world. It is a thing that has been created from the processing of other things – in the common sense of it the word, it is derivative of those works. What remains, IMO, is the question of if it would be a work, or something else, and if that something else would be distinct enough from being a work to matter.
It’s only a work if your brain is a work. We agree that in a digitized picture, those numbers represent the picture itself and thus constitute a work (which you would have known if you read beyond the first sentence of my comment). The weights that make up a neural network represent encodings into neurons, and as such should be treated the same way as neural encodings in a brain.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t believe voices can be copyrighted. After all, if a human can replicate someone else’s voice, they get booked as professional impersonators rather than sued into oblivion.
The difference here is that the voice replication happens though AI now. Would we see the same outrage if the voices in these mods were just people that sounded like the original voice actors?
Copyright law needs to be fortified or a lot of voice actors are about to get screwed over big time. AI voice replication by modders is only the beginning, once big companies find the output acceptable these people may very well lose their jobs.
The legal grounds are that the AI is trained using voice lines that can indeed be copyrighted material. Not the voice itself, but the delivered lines.
That’s a decent theoretical legal basis, but the voice lines are property of the game company rather than the voice actors.
If this interpretation of copyright law on AI models will be the outcome of the two (three?) big AI lawsuits related to stable diffusion, most AI companies will be completely fucked. Everything from Stable Diffusion to ChatGPT 4 will instantly be in trouble.
The problem with that approach is that the resulting AI doesn’t contain any identifiable “copies” of the material that was used to train it. No copying, no copyright. The AI model is not a legally recognizable derivative work.
If the future output of the model that happens to sound very similar to the original voice actor counts as a copyright violation, then human sound-alikes and impersonators would also be in violation and things become a huge mess.
That’s a HUGE assumption you’ve made, and certainly not something that has been tested in court, let alone found to be true.
In the context of existing legal precedent, there’s an argument to be made that the resulting model is itself a derivative work of the copyright-protected works, even if it does not literally contain an identifiable copy, as it is a derivative of the work in the common meaning of the term.
A key distinction here is that a human brain is not a work, and in that sense, a human brain learning things is not a derivative work.
In that case all work would be derivative.
No, I know how these neural nets are trained and how they’re structured. They really don’t contain any identifiable copies of the material used to train it.
Sure, this is brand new tech. It takes time for the court cases to churn their way through the system. If that’s going to be the ultimate arbiter, though, then what’s to discuss in the meantime?
Also, neural network weights are just a bunch of numbers, and I’m pretty sure data can’t be copyrighted. And yes, images and sounds and video stored on a computer are numbers too, but those can be played back or viewed by a human in a meaningful way, and as such represent a work.
Just being “a bunch of numbers” doesn’t stop it from being a work, it doesn’t stop it from being a derivative work, and you absolutely can copyright data – all digitally encoded works are “just data”.
A trained AI is not a measurement of the natural world. It is a thing that has been created from the processing of other things – in the common sense of it the word, it is derivative of those works. What remains, IMO, is the question of if it would be a work, or something else, and if that something else would be distinct enough from being a work to matter.
I suggest reading my entire comment.
It’s only a work if your brain is a work. We agree that in a digitized picture, those numbers represent the picture itself and thus constitute a work (which you would have known if you read beyond the first sentence of my comment). The weights that make up a neural network represent encodings into neurons, and as such should be treated the same way as neural encodings in a brain.