GenAI tools ‘could not exist’ if firms are made to pay copyright
GenAI tools ‘could not exist’ if firms are made to pay copyright | Computer Weekly
GenAI tools ‘could not exist’ if firms are made to pay copyright::undefined
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."
You should check out this article by Kit Walsh, a senior staff attorney at the EFF, and this one by Katherine Klosek, the director of information policy and federal relations at the Association of Research Libraries.
The LCA principles also make the careful and critical distinction between input to train an LLM, and output—which could potentially be infringing if it is substantially similar to an original expressive work.
from your second link. I don't often see this brought up in discussions. The problem of models trained on copyrighted info is definitely different than what you do with that model/output from it. If you're making money from infringing, the fair use arguments are historically less successful. I have less of an issue with the general training of a model vs. commercial infringing use.
Another reason why copyright should be shortened... Society has changed massively in the last 100 years, but every expression of our modern society is locked behind copyright.
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.
So the government gets to ignore copyright, but nobody else?
No thanks.
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
Then they shouldn't exist.
Too late
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.
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 think it's a conflation of the ideas of what copyright should be and actually is. I don't tend to see many people who believe copyright should be abolished in its entirety, and if people write a book or a song they should have some kind of control over that work. But there's a lot of contention over the fact that copyright as it exists now is a bit of a farce, constantly traded and sold and lasting an aeon after the person who created the original work dies.
It seems fairly morally constant to think that something old and part of the zeitgeist should not be under copyright, but that the system needs an overhaul when companies are using your live journal to make a robot call center.
Lemmy seems left-wing on economics in other threads. But on AI, it's private property all the way, without regard for the consequences on society. The view on intellectual property is that of Ayn Rand. Economically, it does not get further to the right than that.
My interpretation is that people go by gut feeling and never think of the consequences. The question is, why does their gut give them a far-right answer? One answer is that somehow our culture, at present, fosters such reactions; that it is the zeitgeist. If that's the truth (and this reflects a wider trend) then inequality will continue to increase as a result of voter's demands.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah...it's pretty weird. Feels like some folks have really dived into LLMs regardless of ethics and will do any amount of hand waving to avoid criticism of a for-profit company openly attacking creatives' livelihood with their own uncompensated works. In an ideal world where it wasn't a case of "earn or die cold and alone in the streets", sure, but this is just robbing those workers of the fruits of their labor and burning the ladder while
I think the "neoliberal zeitgeist" thought may be correct as neoliberal ideology devalues anything and everything that is not solely profit-driven, including just about everything that humans have historically found to make life meaningful.
As an aside, when I browse TheGatewayPundit comments on AI articles, it is a lot more open, against legislation, and woke than I would expect!
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.
So because corps abuse copyright, that means I should be fine with AI companies taking whatever I write--all the journal entries, short stories, blog posts, tweets, comments, etc.--and putting it through their model without being asked, and with no ability to opt out? My artist friends should be fine with their art galleries being used to train the AI models that are actively being used to deprive them of their livelihood without any ability to say "I don't want the fruits of my labor to be used in this way?"
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.
Fine. Shut them down.
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.
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
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).
That's how it should be, but public domain has been crippled by Disney and co.
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'
Of course they will exist. China will own them all.
Huh. You'd think in a situation where copyright is threatened by a lack of AI regulation, Disney would be all over this. Oh wait. They're trying to use generative AI to make movies cheaper. Nevermind.
How about we drop copyright terms to 30 years?
10... And that may be too long.
Sounds good.
Stop threatening me with a good time!
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.
The copyrighted material has no business being used for AI training anyways. Like why train AI to write books or make art when you could feed it documentation and teach it data entry instead like stuff that would actually work well for this and wouldn't require copyrighted works.
Scanning documents, recognizing text and populating a form is already a feature for document scanning. It's not labeled as ai, because it's already commercially viable.
I mean feed it documentation for software so if you need to do something obscure in like the Outlook server you can ask for a step by step guide. They need to fix the hallucination thing for that though, nonsense responses to technical questions are far too common for me to trust it currently.
Slaves "could not exist" if firms are made to pay wages.
writing software that does things for us is the only purpose of computers. LLMs are far from "true" AI but still they are useful for a bunch of tasks.
ban their use in creative works, of course nobody wants to read a book written by an AI. but let me have a LLM to use as a tool.
I never said anything about ban it, I was just making a joke about that title.
Ooooh no! We might, like, get to keep our jobs and homes.
and how exactly will the untold millions and millions of rights holders be identified?
So they're admitting that their entire business model requires them to break the law. Sounds like they shouldn't exist.
It likely doesn't break the law. You should check out this article by Kit Walsh, a senior staff attorney at the EFF, and this one by Katherine Klosek, the director of information policy and federal relations at the Association of Research Libraries.
Headlines like these let people assume that it's illegal, rather than educate people on their rights.
The Kit Walsh article purposefully handwaves around a couple of issues that could present larger issues as law suits in this arena continue.
I think some of the points he makes are valid, but they're making a lot of assumptions about what is actually going on in these models which we either don't know for certain or have evidence to the contrary.
I didn't read Katherine's article so maybe there is something more there.
Reproduction of copyrighted material would be breaking the law. Studying it and using it as reference when creating original content is not.
I’m curious why we think otherwise when it is a student obtaining an unauthorized copy of a textbook to study, or researchers getting papers from sci-hub. Probably because it benefits corporations and they say so?
humans studying it, is fair use.
The model itself is a derivative work. It's existence is what is under dispute. It's not about using the model to produce further works
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
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:
https://towardsdatascience.com/the-most-important-supreme-court-decision-for-data-science-and-machine-learning-44cfc1c1bcaf
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.
I guess I can’t read anything and learn from it.
i don’t think it’s need rules against the law…