In its submission to the Australian government’s review of the regulatory framework around AI, Google said that copyright law should be altered to allow for generative AI systems to scrape the internet.
In its submission to the Australian government’s review of the regulatory framework around AI, Google said that copyright law should be altered to allow for generative AI systems to scrape the internet.
Nah. You’re missing the forest for the trees. Let’s get abstract:
Person A makes a living by making product X and selling it.
Person B makes a living by making product Y and selling it.
Both A and B are in the same industry.
Person C uses a machine to extract the essence of product X and Y and blend them. Person C then claims authorship and sells it as product Z, which they sell in competition to X and Y.
Person C has not created anything. Their machine does not have value in the absence of products X and Y, yet received no permission, offers no credit nor compensation. In addition, they are competing for the same customers and harming the livelihoods of A and B. Person C is acting in a purely parasitic manner that cannot be seen as ethical in any widely accepted definition of the word.
Removed by mod
First, feeding something into a machine is not the same as looking at it. Person C literally creates nothing. They are a parasite. There’s far more to creating than using statistical modeling algorithms. One cannot claim that that’s what people studying a style and then creating someone are doing because it is empirically false.
Second, the scope of the discussion is not just “can someone legally get in trouble”.
Removed by mod
In that aspect, we are absolutely in agreement. We are meat computers in meat cages containing necessary support systems. That statement was, perhaps, an oversimplification.
Things like LLMs are attempts to model how the human brain works but are not identical, nor are LLMs, by themselves, capable of intelligence. If one argues contrarily that feeding data into an LLM and using it to produce something is the same, then the one using the LLM is clearly not the author and claiming so is plagiarism of the work of either the creator of the LLM or the LLM itself.
The argument that, legally, IP owners cannot specify that their works may not be used as feedstock for competing commercial products is rather absurd itself and would invalidate all but the most permissive open-source licenses as well as proprietary licenses. As pointed out elsewhere, this line of thought would allow one to steal leaked source code and use it to effectively clone existing software. Use of the source in this manner would be infringing on the owner’s IP rights.
Perhaps a good way to think about LLMs is as automated reverse engineering. They take data and statistically model it in order to characterize it. There is substantial case law there and the EFF has a great FAQ on the topic: https://www.eff.org/issues/coders/reverse-engineering-faq
The scope here is not limited to “can someone legally get in trouble under current law” (which, seems likely but is still working its way through courts). The discussion is specifically discussing ethics. Person C has created nothing. They should have no product to sell, if not for persons A and B. Their competition with those that their product is derived from is a parasitic relationship, plain and simple. They are performing an act of exploitation with measurable harm both to persons A and B but also to further development of their craft by destroying any incentive to continue it.
Now, in some sort of alternate economic system, where one’s livelihood is not tied to their vocation, sure, it’s possibly not problematic because the economic harm is removed. However, in current capitalist systems that are in place where LLMs are heavily hyped, it’s an ethically bankrupt action to take.
ETA: No amount of mental gymnastics can change the fact that use of others’ works without their consent to train a model, then claiming authorship and competing IS plainly theft of the labor that went into creating the original works.
That’s not too say that LLMs and they like don’t have value or often require effort to produce something worthwhile. Just that they need to be used in an ethical manner that improves the human condition, not as another tool to rob others of the fruit of their labors.
Removed by mod
I feel that you’re being deliberately obtuse here in order to avoid the ethics dilemma.
A design is a “thing”, software is a “thing” even if it is physically intangible. Designing automation systems requires more than just looking at existing processes or algorthmic modeling. It requires synthetic and abstract thought. Nor is it a parasitic process; the automation has value by itself nor is it dependent upon the outputs of those whose tasks it automates. Automation, in theory, also improves the human condition by reducing amount of labor required by a given individual (though this particular good has largely been stolen since the 80s).