Qfg fan art

[goatmeal]

Hmm ... as I started looking up "Laion 5B", I stumbled upon a website called "Lexica" that allows me to look up images based on whatever I write. (Yes, I know Google Images will do that too, but Lexica seems to have a database of other images ... and I'm sure there are other online tools that do that too).

Any images you "search" for on the Lexica website appear to be images in their database that were previously generated BY Lexica, at least for the few that I reviewed. This is not the same as searching for images on Google, Bing, etc. While those search engines may include AI images in their results, they also include actual photography and artwork created by human artists, not created BY the website FROM user prompts...

My questions are:

Please note, I am not an intellectual property lawyer/attorney/barrister and the following is merely uninformed rambling and speculation...

1. Is this legal?

There are likely no laws governing/regulating this type of activity. Now, it is ethical? That's an entirely different question...

2. What about copyright to the original artists?

So long as the AI generated is NOT a direct copy of a human artists' work -- is sufficiently different, mimicking only the style or design of a topic, and is not a one-for-one duplication/reproduction or merely a slight alteration -- likely no copyright claims can be made.

3. If I pay an artist (say, on Deviant Art) to create a book cover for me, what's there to stop Lexica and other tools from stealing that book cover and using it for whatever they like?

Absolutely nothing, but it is unlikely an AI generating program would synthesize the exact same duplicate image as your book cover... though it might be similar if enough iterations or crucial keywords enhance successive generations, but that gets into #2 above.

[goatmeal]

...Aaaaaaand it looks like Tawmis' video covered a lot of my half-baked speculations.