- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
GenAI tools ‘could not exist’ if firms are made to pay copyright::undefined
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So they’re admitting that their entire business model requires them to break the law. Sounds like they shouldn’t exist.
Reproduction of copyrighted material would be breaking the law. Studying it and using it as reference when creating original content is not.
humans studying it, is fair use.
So if a tool is involved, it’s no longer ok? So, people with glasses cannot consume copyrighted material?
No. A tool already makes it unnatural. /S
I don’t agree. The publisher of the material does not get to dictate what it is used for. What are we protecting at the end of the day and why?
In the case of a textbook, someone worked hard to explain certain materials in a certain way to make the material easily digestible. They produced examples to explain concepts. Reproducing and disseminating that material would be unfair to the author who worked hard to produce it.
But the author does not have jurisdiction over the knowledge gained. They cannot tell the reader that they are forbidden from using the knowledge gained to tutor another person in calculus. That would be absurd.
IP law protects the works of the creator. The author of a calculus textbook did not invent calculus. As such, copyright law does not apply.
What’s the difference? Humans are just the intent suppliers, the rest of the art is mostly made possible by software, whether photoshop or stable diffusion.
It doesn’t break the law at all. The courts have already ruled that copyrighted material can be fed into AI/ML models for training:
This ruling only applies to the 2nd Circuit and SCOTUS has yet to take up a case. As soon as there’s a good fact pattern for the Supreme Court of a circuit split, you’ll get nationwide information. You’ll also note that the decision is deliberately written to provide an extremely narrow precedent and is likely restricted to Google Books and near-identical sources of information.
You might want to read this post from one of the EFF’s senior lawyers on the topic who has previously litigated IP cases:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/how-we-think-about-copyright-and-ai-art-0
I guess I can’t read anything and learn from it.
i don’t think it’s need rules against the law…
I do love how AI has gotten Corporate Giants to start attacking the Copyright System they’ve used to beat down the little man for generations
Maybe because it’s not the same corporations? We might be seeing a giant powershift from IP hoarders to makers.
you know what? I like this argument. Software/Streaming services are “too complex and costly to work in practice” therefore my viewership/participation “could not exist” if I were forced to pay for them.
Hey if they want to set that precedent, so be it.
Oh, no no no.
Rules for thee, not for me.
That’s the other edge of this sword.
Not that I am a fan of the current implementation of copyright in the US, but I know if I was planning on building my business around something that couldn’t exist without violating copyright I would surely thought of that fairly early on.
“My profits from fencing your wallet could not exist if stealing your wallet were punished.”
“Ah, you’re right, how silly of me, carry on.”
I keep thinking how great it would be if the federal government made a central server system to access digital content for free via taxes.
All public domain and publicly funded research and content, all in one place. Could also host owned content for people/entities and pay out royalties automatically based on consumption.
There are ways to make this fairly affordable to everyone via taxes, but maybe the big opportunity is it could also allow companies to train AI on all the data for a fat, but fair subscription. The value of that could easily pay for enough to shrink any tax costs for the public.
In general, if the US government were smart (and not currently tearing itself apart) it would be creating a generative AI public service like the postal service, potentially even relying on public government documents and the library system for training.
Offer it at effectively cost for the public to use. Would drive innovation and development, nothing produced by it would be copyrightable, and it would put pressure on private options to compete against it.
We can still have the FedEx or DHL of gen AI out there, but they would need to contend with the public option being cheaper and more widely available for use.
In addition to the US government actually needing to do work, the senators would need to understand how to turn a computer on and off.
Yeah, but the attempts to kill off the USPS have been surprisingly bi-partisan
I literally don’t think the US will ever see a new socialized industry ever happen
Edited for clarity, to make it more obvious I’m not blaming just one party for this
if the US government was smart
So… This may be an unpopular question. Almost every time AI is discussed, a staggering number of posts support very right-wing positions. EG on topics like this one: Unearned money for capital owners. It’s all Ayn Rand and not Karl Marx. Posters seem to be unaware of that, though.
Is that the “neoliberal Zeitgeist” or what you may call it?
I’m worried about what this may mean for the future.
ETA: 7 downvotes after 1 hour with 0 explanation. About what I expected.
I’d say the main reason is companies are profiting off the work of others. It’s not some grand positive motive for society, but taking the work of others, from other companies, sure, but also from small time artists, writers, etc.
Then selling access to the information they took from others.
I wouldn’t call it a right wing position.
Wanting to abolish the IRS is a right-wing policy that will benefit the rich. That doesn’t change when some marketing genius talks about how the IRS takes money from small time artists, writers, etc. Same thing. It’s about substance and not manipulative framing.
That isn’t remotely similar…
The IRS takes a portion of income. This is taking away someone’s income, then charging access to it.
Like it or not, these people need money to survive. Calling it right wing to think these individuals deserve to be paid for someone taking their work, then using it for a product they sell access to, is absolutely insane to me.
I don’t know how this is supposed to make sense.
One is a percentage of income that everyone pays into.
The other is stealing someone’s work then using that person’s work for profit.
Recognizing that stealing someone’s work is not a right-wing position.
How is this complicated?
I see. Thanks for explaining.
This view of property rights as absolute is what right-libertarians, anarcho-capitalists, etc… espouse. Usually the cries of “theft” come when it gets to taxes, though. Is it supposed to be not right because it’s about intellectual property?
Property rights are not necessarily right-wing (communism notwithstanding). What is definitely right-wing is (heritable) privilege and that’s implied in these views of property.
ETA: Just to make sure that I really understand what you are saying: When you say “stealing someone’s work” you do mean the unauthorized copying of copyrighted expression, yes? Do you actually understand that copyright is intellectual property and that property is not usually called work? Labor and capital are traditionally considered opposites, of a sort, particularly among the left.
So… You think their art or writing was created by what then? Magic? Do you think no time was expended in the creation of books, research, drawings, painted canvases, etc?
Do you think they should starve because we currently live in a world driven entirely around money?
I don’t get your point even remotely.
It’s interesting as it’s many of the MPAA/RIAA attitudes towards Napster/BitTorrent but now towards gen AI.
I think it reflects the generational shift in who considers themselves content creators. Tech allowed for the long tail to become profitable content producers, so now there’s a large public audience that sees this from what’s historically been a corporate perspective.
Of course, they are making the same mistakes because they don’t know their own history and thus are doomed to repeat it.
They are largely unaware that the MPAA/RIAA fighting against online sharing of media meant they ceded the inevitable tech to other companies like Apple and Netflix that developed platforms that navigated the legality alongside the tech.
So for example right now voice actors are largely opposing gen AI rather than realizing they should probably have their union develop or partner for their own owned offering which maximizes member revenues off of usage and can dictate fair terms.
In fact, the only way many of today’s mass content creators have platforms to create content is because the corporate fights to hold onto IP status quo failed with platforms like YouTube, etc.
Gen AI should exist in a social construct such that it is limited in being able to produce copyrighted content. But policing training/education of anything (human or otherwise) doesn’t serve us and will hold back developments that are going to have much more public good than most people seem to realize.
Also, it’s unfortunate that we’ve effectively self propagandized for nearly a century around ‘AI’ being the bad guy and at odds with humanity, misaligned with our interests, an existential threat, etc. There’s such an incredible priming bias right now that it’s effectively become the Boogeyman rather than correctly being identified as a tool that - like every other tool in human history - is going to be able to be used for good or bad depending on the wielder (though unlike past tools this one may actually have a slight inherent and unavoidable bias towards good as Musk and Gab recently found out with their AI efforts on release denouncing their own personally held beliefs).
That was a novel perspective for me. Thanks.
Every single poster here has relied on disruptive technologies in their life. They don’t even realize that they couldn’t even make these arguments here if it was not for people before them pushing the envelope.
They don’t know the history of their technology nor corporate law. If they did they would just roll their eyes every time an entrenched economic interest started saber rattling about the next disruptive technology that is going to steal their profits.
The posters here are the people who complained about horsewhip manufactures that were going out of business because of cars. They are ignorant and act like the few sound bytes they heard make them an expert.
It’s important to recognize that IP is conceptually fucky to begin with. They’re seeing what it’s claimed to be (creator ‘ownership’ of their creations) rather than what it really is (corporations using the government to enact violence on non-violent people).
It means nothing interesting. The position they feel they’re taking is “corporation bad” which is in line, they just haven’t analyzed how IP works in the real world.
I see way too many people advocating for copyright. I understand in this case it benefits big companies rather than consumers, but if you disagree with copyright, as I do, you should be consistent.
Copyright law should benefit humans, not machines, not corporations. And no, corporations are not people. Anthony Kennedy can get bent.
I hate the MAGMA companies as much as anyone, but AI such as LLMs, especially the open source stuff Facebook and Stable diffusion is making, is beneficial to us all.
Abolishing copyright in the way that allows for the existence of Gen AI benefits people far more than it does corpos
Well said.
You don’t have to be against copyright, as such. Fair Use is part of copyright law. It exists to prevent copyrights from being abused against the interests of the general public.
But I am against any copyright beyond forcing attribution to the original creator.
I don’t know what you’re on about, the majority of the thread is pro open source AI and anti-capitalist, which is as left a stance as it gets, it’s not called “copyleft” for no reason. No one here wants to see AI banned and the already insane IP laws expanded to the benefit of the few corpos like the NYT at the expense of broader society.
IDK. I have seen a number of pro-corpo copyleft takes. It’s absolutely crazy to me. The pitch is that expansive copyright makes for expansive copyleft. It seems neo-feudal to me. The lords have their castles but the peasants have their commons.
Fair enough, seems like they’re down voting us anyway
I’d be fine with this argument if these generative tools were only being used by non-profits. But they aren’t.
So I think there has to be some compromise here. Some type of licensing fee should be paid by these generative AI tools.
You’re basically arguing for making any free use of them illegal, thereby giving a monopoly to the richest and most powerful capitalists.
Humans won’t be able to compete, and you won’t be able to use the means of generation either.
I’m arguing for free commercial use being illegal, absolutely.
And that fee should scale based on who is using it for commercial purposes. Microsoft and Google should be paying far, far out the ass for their data.
deleted by creator
And who does that serve?
Do you mean the whole thing or something specific like free commercial use being illegal?
I think the answer to both are the people who created the art, text, etc that these generative AI tools are going to make mostly obsolete.
Open source or open use AI will be practically illegal. Research will be practically impossible. It will be exclusively controlled by super rich and powerful corporations.
It won’t benefit the creators. It will only benefit those with the most capital that can buy up the training data needed and then can set the market so they make almost all of the money. For example you’d need to buy all the user content from reddit, facebook and twitter to train an AI. That will cost many millions because it’s a precious commodity (and only they own it). So only a few will control the “means of generation” and they will (have to) use it to make profit for themselves. This will make it practically illegal to make a free or an independent AI because you don’t have access to training data. This sets the rules and will lead to incredibly bad outcomes. For example anti-consumerist thinking or dissent could be suppressed, or other more subtle biases. Anything that reduces profit from advertising or threatens the shareholders. And they can manipulate the training data behind closed doors.
But that is how it’s going to go and it’s going to make the effects of AI generation on our civilization extra bad. We are so fucked :(
Fine. Shut them down.
And what about the open source models? Or the AI companies in countries that have more lax copyright laws? (Japan for example)
This technology exists now. We can’t put the genie back in the bottle. Copyright came out of the printing press, which allowed cheap copies to be made. Now a new technology has emerged so we likely need a new set of rules to replace the role that copyright performed, which was incentivizing artistic creation
Simple – you can’t charge for AI generation
Right? Like…I don’t give a shit. That’s not a threat or a fact that bothers me at all. They are only a tool for amassing more power and money. So what the fuck do I care.
Sounds like a win to me
I’m just trying to think about how refined AI would be if it could only use public domain data.
ChatGPT channels Jane Austin and Shakespeare.
That’s not really how it would work.
If you want that outcome, it’s better to train on as massive a data set as possible initially (which does regress towards the mean but also manages to pick up remarkable capabilities and relationships around abstract concepts), and then use fine tuning to bias it back towards an exceptional result.
If you only trained it on those works, it would suck at pretty much everything except specifically completing those specific works with those specific characters. It wouldn’t model what the concerns of a prince in general were, but instead model that a prince either wants to murder his mother (Macbeth) or fuck her (Oedipus).
If they can’t afford a thing they want, that’s too bad.
The fact that their dream-AI ‘cant exist’ without stealing from everyone there is only one message to bounce back there from the rest of us;
‘good’
How about we drop copyright terms to 30 years?
10… And that may be too long.
Sounds good.
We are about to witness an incredibly power grab. They will be claiming practically the entirety of human intellectual works for example also for contributions made by billions of users on social media. Basically they will monopolize the entire power of GenAI for themselves.
This wil practically make free use of that power illegal. Generative AI will eliminate more and more jobs in the coming decades while we won’t be allowed to use it at all.
Ooooh no! We might, like, get to keep our jobs and homes.
