https://spectrum.ieee.org/midjourney-copyright
Summary
It seems all but certain that generative AI developers like OpenAI
and Midjourney have trained their image-generation systems on
copyrighted materials. Neither company has been transparent about
this; Midjourney went so far as to ban us three times for
investigating the nature of their training materials.
Both OpenAI and Midjourney are fully capable of producing
materials that appear to infringe on copyright and trademarks.
These systems do not inform users when they do so. They do not
provide any information about the provenance of the images they
produce. Users may not know, when they produce an image, whether
they are infringing.
Unless and until someone comes up with a technical solution that
will either accurately report provenance or automatically filter
out the vast majority of copyright violations, the only ethical
solution is for generative AI systems to limit their training to
data they have properly licensed. Image-generating systems should
be required to license the art used for training, just as
streaming services are required to license their music and video.
We hope that our findings (and similar findings from others who
have begun to test related scenarios) will lead generative AI
developers to document their data sources more carefully, to
restrict themselves to data that is properly licensed, to include
artists in the training data only if they consent, and to
compensate artists for their work. In the long run, we hope that
software will be developed that has great power as an artistic
tool, but that doesn’t exploit the art of nonconsenting artists.
Although we have not gone into it here, we fully expect that
similar issues will arise as generative AI is applied to other
fields, such as music generation.
Following up on the New York Times lawsuit, our results suggest
that generative AI systems may regularly produce plagiaristic
outputs, both written and visual, without transparency or
compensation, in ways that put undue burdens on users and content
creators. We believe that the potential for litigation may be
vast, and that the foundations of the entire enterprise may be
built on ethically shaky ground.