Apparently, stealing other people’s work to create product for money is now “fair use” as according to OpenAI because they are “innovating” (stealing). Yeah. Move fast and break things, huh?
“Because copyright today covers virtually every sort of human expression—including blogposts, photographs, forum posts, scraps of software code, and government documents—it would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials,” wrote OpenAI in the House of Lords submission.
OpenAI claimed that the authors in that lawsuit “misconceive[d] the scope of copyright, failing to take into account the limitations and exceptions (including fair use) that properly leave room for innovations like the large language models now at the forefront of artificial intelligence.”
I will repeat what I have proffered before:
If OpenAI stated that it is impossible to train leading AI models without using copyrighted material, then, unpopular as it may be, the preemptive pragmatic solution should be pretty obvious, enter into commercial arrangements for access to said copyrighted material.
Claiming a failure to do so in circumstances where the subsequent commercial product directly competes in a market seems disingenuous at best, given what I assume is the purpose of copyrighted material, that being to set the terms under which public facing material can be used. Particularly if regurgitation of copyrighted material seems to exist in products inadequately developed to prevent such a simple and foreseeable situation.
Yes I am aware of the USA concept of fair use, but the test of that should be manifestly reciprocal, for example would Meta allow what it did to MySpace, hack and allow easy user transfer, or Google with scraping Youtube.
To me it seems Big Tech wants its cake and to eat it, where investor $$$ are used to corrupt open markets and undermine both fundamental democratic State social institutions, manipulate legal processes, and undermine basic consumer rights.
Agreed.
There is nothing “fair” about the way Open AI steals other people’s work. ChatGPT is being monetized all over the world and the large number of people whose work has not been compensated will never see a cent of that money.
At the same time the LLM will be used to replace (at least some of ) the people who created those works in the first place.
Tech bros are disgusting.
That’s not even getting into the fraternity behavior at work, hyper-reactionary politics and, er, concerning age preferences.
Yup. I said it in another discussion before but think its relevant here.
Tech bros are more dangerous than Russian oligarchs. Oligarchs understand the people hate them so they mostly stay low and enjoy their money.
Tech bros think they are the savior of the world while destroying millions of people’s livelihood, as well as destroying democracy with their right wing libertarian politics.
Maybe if you had any skills that couldn’t be replaced by glorified autocomplete you wouldn’t feel so irrationally threatened by it?
Were you trying to help them out by providing an example of their point? Or are you just hurt and defensive?
Nah they’re just a kbin nazi.
Wow, that word literally has lost all meaning if my my starting fediverse server is enough for you to pull it out
This right here is the core of the moral issue when it comes down to it, as far as I’m concerned. These text and image models are already killing jobs and applying downward pressure on salaries. I’ve seen it happen multiple times now, not just anecdotally from some rando on an internet comment section.
These people losing jobs and getting pay cuts are who created the content these models are siphoning up. People are not going to like how this pans out.
Any company replacing humans with AI is going to regret it. AI just isn’t that good and probably won’t ever be, at least in it’s current form. It’s all an illusion and is destined to go the way of Bitcoin, which is to say it will shoot up meteorically and seem like the answer to all kinds of problems, and then the reality will sink in and it will slowly fade to obscurity and irrelevance. That doesn’t help anyone affected today, of course.
I mostly disagree (especially on the long term), but hope you’re right
It’s garbage for programming. A useful tool but not one that can be used by a non-expert. And I’ve already had to have a conversation with one of my coworkers when they tried to submit absolutely garbage code.
This isn’t even the first attempt at a smart system that enables non-programmers to write code. They’ve all been garbage. So, too, will the next one be but every generation has to try it for themselves. AGI might have some potential some day, but that’s a long long way off. Might as well be science fiction.
Other disciplines are affected differently, but I constantly play with image and text generation and they are all some flavor of garbage. There are some areas where AI can excel but they are mostly professional tools and not profession replacements.
OpenAi, please generate your own source code but optimized and improved in all possible ways.
not how programming works, but tech illiterate people seem to think so
It was of no use whatsoever to programming or image generation or writing a few years ago. This thing has developed very quickly and will continue to. Give it 5 years and I think things will look very differently.
Yet it still is an incredible force multiplier for the ones that can leverage it effectively.
Yea you have to know how to code and proper coding standards to know what parts are garbage to change or not use, but for those who can it gives a significant competitive advantage.
Something like Tabby providing code autocomplete will set developers who can overcome its flaws apart.
I believe the same thing will happen with creative jobs. Artists who can leverage ai to make deeper and more complex works will leave ones who can’t in the dust.
And the whole copyright angle is a red herring made by already rich people who want to fight over money. Once people get used to the technology and start to understand how it can enhance their work, instead of replacing them, all of this moral panic over liberal arts graduates will die down.
Because honestly? The starving artist was always a trope, and the only money that will exchange hands here will be between the elites who certainly don’t need more.
The flip side of this is that many artists who simply copy very popular art styles are now functionally irrelevant, as it is now just literally proven that this kind of basically plagiarism AI is entirely capable of reproducing established styles to a high degree of basically fidelity.
While many aspects of this whole situation are very bad for very many reasons, I am actually glad that many artists will be pressured to actually be more creative than an algorithm, though I admit this comes from basically a personally petty standpoint of having known many, many, many mediocre artists who themselves and their fans treat like gods because they can emulate some other established style.
Literally every artist copies, it’s how we all learn. The difference is that every artist out there does not have an enterprise-class-data-center-powerd-super-human ability to absorb <ALL THE ART> and then be able to spit out anything instantly. It still takes time and hard work and dedication. And through the years of hard work people put into learning how their heroes do X, Y, and Z, they develop a style of their own.
It’s how artists cut their teeth and work their way into the profession. What you’re welcoming in is a situation where nobody can find any success whatsoever until they are absolutely original and of course that is an impossible moving target when every original ideal and design and image can just be instantly siphoned back up into the AI model.
Nobody could survive that way. Nobody can break into the artistic industry that way. Except for the wealthy. All the low level work people get earlier in their careers that helps keep them afloat while they learn is gone now. You have to be independently wealthy to become a high level artist capable of creating truly original work. Because there’s no other way to subsidize the time and dedication that takes when all the work for people honing their craft has been hoovered up by machines.
No, I am not welcoming an artist apocalypse, that would obviously be bad.
I am noting that I find it amusing to me on a level I already acknowledged was petty and personal that many, many mediocre artists who are absolutely awful to other people socially would have their little cults of fandom dampened by the fact that a machine can more or less to what they do, and their cult leader status is utterly unwarranted.
I do not have a nice and neat solution to the problem you bring up.
I do believe you are being somewhat hyperbolic, but, so was I.
Yep, being an artist in a capitalist hellscape world with modern AI algorithms is not a very reliable way to earn a good living and you are not likely to be have such a society produce many artists who do not have either a lot of free time or money, or you get really lucky.
At this point we are talking about completely reorganizing society in fairly large and comprehensive ways to achieve significant change on this front.
Also this problem applies to far, far more people than just artists. One friend of mine wanted her dream job as running a little bakery! Had to set her prices too high, couldn’t afford a good location, supply chain problems, taxes, didn’t work out.
Maybe someone’s passion is teaching! Welp, that situation is all fucked too.
My point here is: Ok, does anyone have an actual plan that can actually transform the world into somewhere that allow the average person to be far more likely to be able to live the life they want?
Would that plan have more to do with the minutiae of regulating a specific kind of ever advancing and ever changing technology in some kind of way that will be irrelevant when the next disruptive tech proliferates in a few years, or maybe more like an actual total overhaul of our entire society from the ground up?
With your logic all artists will have to pay copyright fees just to learn how to draw. All musicians will have to pay copyright fees just to learn their instrument.
I guess I should clarify by saying I’m a professional musician.
Do musicians not buy the music that they want to listen to? Should they be allowed to torrent any MP3 they want just because they say it’s for their instrument learning?
I mean I’d be all for it, but that’s not what these very same corporations (including Microsoft when it comes to software) wanted back during Napster times. Now they want a separate set of rules just for themselves. No! They get to follow the same laws they force down our throats.
Everything you said was completely irrelevant to what I mentioned and just plain ignorant.
Since when do you buy all the music you have ever listened to?
I suspect the US government will allow OpenAI to continue doing as it please to keep their competitive advantage in AI over China (which don’t have problem with using copyrighted materials to train their models). They already limit selling AI-related hardware to keep their competitive advantage, so why stop there? Might as well allow OpenAI to continue using copyrighted materials to keep the competitive advantage.
Yep, completely agree.
Case in point: Steam has recently clarified their policies of using such Ai generated material that draws on essentially billions of both copyrighted and non copyrighted text and images.
To publish a game on Steam that uses AI gen content, you now have to verify that you as a developer are legally authorized to use all training material for the AI model for commercial purposes.
This also applies to code and code snippets generated by AI tools that function similarly, such as CoPilot.
So yeah, sorry, either gotta use MIT liscensed open source code or write your own, and you gotta do your own art.
I imagine this would also prevent you from using AI generated voice lines where you trained the model on basically anyone who did not explicitly consent to this as well, but voice gen software that doesnt use the ‘train the model on human speakers’ approach would probably be fine assuming you have the relevant legal rights to use such software commercially.
Not 100% sure this is Steam’s policy on voice gen stuff, they focused mainly on art dialogue and code in their latest policy update, but the logic seems to work out to this conclusion.
Well that’s a battle steam is going to lose, not even counting the difficulty in enforcing such a policy, as well as the chilling effect it has on people disclosing they’re using ai in the first place. The copilot part is particularly dumb. Do they auto trash any emails that used autocomplete and spell-check as well?
I am absolutely baffled as to how you think this is a battle steam is going to lose.
Please explain to me how the worlds most successful and widely used online game store for PCs is going to be impacted in any way that is at all negative for its user base (people who buy and play games) by having policies that legally protect Valve from being sued for knowingly distributing material that potentially violates copyright law in any legal system anywhere in the world they sell products in.
Chilling effect? Of having to disclose things to publish a game? Anyone who sells their game on steam already has to go through a lengthy review and disclosure process to ensure the product meets various guidelines, is correctly labelled if it has content that may be restricted in some places or to some age groups, etc etc.
Chilling Effect? This is a term usually used to describe the effect on freedom of expression. It would be a chilling effect if steam suddenly did not allow any games that feature gay characters, or if steam messenger suddenly blacklisted all phrases relating to say the Armenian genocide.
Are you saying that having to disclose and confirm that you are not violating the copyrights of source material you have used in production of a game, an industry and market well known for being litigious about copyrights, that this is a freedom of speech or artistic freedom issue?
Are you saying that using a plagiarism AI to generate synthetic dialogue, art or code… constitutes speech, in the legal sense? Its… you are not even the one coming up with the speech. This seems highly legally dubious to me at least from a US law perspective.
The CoPilot part is actually probably the most obvious and straight forward. Its extremely common for code om the internet to not actually be licensed to be able to be freely used for the purposes of profiting off of, and CoPilot often just copies such code verbatim.
This is fine in a non commercial context, for your own private use on a little program just for you, but the moment you are profiting off of code in software that isn’t either MIT licensed, as well as I think now a few other open source licenses, you are completely legally fucked if anyone ever finds out.
Further, is there some huge demographic of players of some wildly popular game or set of games that are very dependent on plagiarism AIs, sufficient to cause massive backlash in a way that would drive steam users and their favorite game devs to other platforms?
Again I am frankly baffled by what you have said.
So why is so much information (data) freely available on the internet? How do you expect a human artist to learn drawing, if not looking at tutorials and improving their skills through emulating what they see?
Copyright protects the original artist, for a limited time and in limited circumstances, against others copying and, distributing the original work, or creating derivative works. Copyright does not protect against a particular entity consuming the work. Limitation on consumption is antithetical to copyright law.
The fundamental purpose of copyright is to promote the progress of science and the useful arts. To expand the collective body of knowledge. Consumption of intellectual works is not restricted by copyright. Even if you know that the particular copy of a book was produced by a pirate in violation of the author’s copyright, your consumption of that work is not an infringement.
Knowing that the 13th word of the Gettysburg Address is “continent”, and that the preceding and following words are “this” and “a” does not constitute copying, distribution, or creation of a derivative work. Knowledge of the underlying work is not an infringement.
Quite the contrary, the specific purpose of intellectual property laws is to promote the progress of sciences and useful arts. To expand society’s collective body of knowledge. “Fair Use” is not an exemption. “Fair Use” is the purpose. The temporary and natrow limitations on free use are the means by which the law encourages writers and inventors to publish.
If AI is considered a “progress in the sciences and useful arts”, then, unpopular as it may be, the preemptive, pragmatic solution should be pretty obvious: clarify that Fair Use Doctrine explicitly protects this activity.