Thousands of authors demand payment from AI companies for use of copyrighted works | CNN Business
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Thousands of published authors are requesting payment from tech companies for the use of their copyrighted works in training artificial intelligence tools, marking the latest intellectual property critique to target AI development.

Thousands of authors demand payment from AI companies for use of copyrighted works::Thousands of published authors are requesting payment from tech companies for the use of their copyrighted works in training artificial intelligence tools, marking the latest intellectual property critique to target AI development.

  • Square Singer@feddit.deEnglish
    21·
    1 year ago

    Well, Shakespeare has beed dead for a few years now, there’s no copyright to speak of.

    And if you make a book based on an existing one, then you totally need permission from the author. You can’t just e.g. make a Harry Potter 8.

    But AIs are more than happy to do exacly that. Or to even reproduce copyrighted works 1:1, or only with a few mistakes.

    • Phlogiston@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      If a person writes a fanfic harry potter 8 it isn’t a problem until they try to sell it or distribute it widely. I think where the legal issues get sticky here are who caused a particular AI generated Harry Potter 8 to be written.

      If the AI model attempts to block this behavior. With contract stipulations and guardrails. And if it isn’t advertised as “a harry potter generator” but instead as a general purpose tool… then reasonably the legal liability might be on the user that decides to do this or not. Vs the tool that makes such behavior possible.

      Hypothetically what if an AI was trained up that never read Harry Potter. But its pretty darn capable and I feed into it the entire Harry Potter novel(s) as context in my prompt and then ask it to generate an eighth story — is the tool at fault or am I?

    • jecxjo@midwest.socialEnglish
      11·
      1 year ago

      It seems like people are afraid that AI can do it when i can do it too. But their reason for freaking out is…??? It’s not like AI is calling up publishers trying to get Harry Potter 8 published. If i ask it to create Harry Potter 1 but change his name to Gary Trotter it’s not the AI that is doing something bad, it’s me.

      That was my point. I can memorize text and its only when I play it off as my own that it’s wrong. No one cares that I memorized the first chapter and can recite it if I’m not trying to steal it.

      • Square Singer@feddit.deEnglish
        01·
        1 year ago

        That’s not correct. The issue is not whether you play it off as your own, but how much the damages are that you can be sued for. If you recite something that you memorized in front of a handful of friends, the damages are non-existant and hence there is no point in sueing you.

        But if you give a large commercial concert and perform a cover song without permission, you will get sued, no matter if you say “This song is from <insert original artist> and not from me”, because it’s not about giving credit, it’s about money.

        And regarding getting something published: This is not so much about big name art like Harry Potter, but more about people doing smaller work. For example, voice actors (both for movie translations and smaller things like announcements in public transport) are now routinely replaced by AI that was trained on their own voices without their permission.

        Similar story with e.g. people who write texts for homepages and ad material. Stuff like that. And that has real-world consequences already now.