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Notes -
Is this in reference to AI art vs. the garden-variety online art theft done by t-shirt stores?
I'm also curious about this, I feel like I should know what you mean, but I can't parse it entirely:
This is also about AI art, right?
The argument applies there too, but I think the stronger case are matters like "Amazon sale of badly-designed equipment results in fire": the stakes are higher, there's a clear line of ownership and action and impact, and it's completely separate from any of the novel questions produced by ML or AI or online tech or even commercial speech. And yet liability for Amazon itself is inconsistent (compare success to failure); liability to the original sellers is difficult and seldom valuable, and liability to overseas original designers is nearly impossible.
And dropshipping and its problems are universal in online sales these days. I bring Amazon simply because it's the overt and obvious case, just as fires are the severe version. But fake products that are effectively outside of useful copyright protection or lemon laws, lesser dangerous or falsely marketed products, so on, as endemic.
It applies there, too: StableDiffusion's watermark process was a single line to comment-out, but Midjourney's watermarking has probably been defeated, and some non-ML projects have started encoding ML watermarks as a misguided anti-theft concept. There have been some efforts to try and 'watermark' GPT-generated text, or to produce some tool that can coherently predict if an image was generated (sometimes trying to ID model or prompt), and they don't work either. But there's a stronger argument where there's a far smaller userbase, the stakes are even lower, and the impact is trivial, and they're still losing the Red Queen's race.
One of the many many problems for online art or 'art' vendors is that it's trivial to sign up, scrape a site, and then repost that full scrape (and, for less ethical users, chargeback). There's a lot of broad communities that do nothing but that, or share already-copied content. Because most of the communities are public, if you know the sites for a particular interest fandom, you can pretty easily find a place where your work may be reposted. Some vendors just try to takedown notice those sites (when in jurisdictions that respond to takedown notices; see the first problem), but as an alternative some vendors have posted specific watermarks customized to individual customer accounts; if the vendor catches your account ID in an upload, they can now act against the individual actors (usually just by banning them).
PrimeLeap is an example of this technology; I don't know if it's the biggest or best-known. It's also been successfully defeated in a variety of ways that had little impact on image quality. Now, that's a low-stress environment on both sides of the aisle: just as the reposters are seldom the most technically adept, PrimeLeap doesn't exactly have a huge team of cryptographics PhDs. But it still seems like a useful metaphor.
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