GenAI tools ‘could not exist’ if firms are made to pay copyright | Computer Weekly
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Artificial intelligence firm Anthropic hits out at copyright lawsuit filed by music publishing corporations, claiming the content ingested into its models falls under ‘fair use’ and that any licensing regime created to manage its use of copyrighted material in training data would be too complex and costly to work in practice

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) company Anthropic has claimed to a US court that using copyrighted content in large language model (LLM) training data counts as “fair use”, however.

Under US law, “fair use” permits the limited use of copyrighted material without permission, for purposes such as criticism, news reporting, teaching, and research.

In October 2023, a host of music publishers including Concord, Universal Music Group and ABKCO initiated legal action against the Amazon- and Google-backed generative AI firm Anthropic, demanding potentially millions in damages for the allegedly “systematic and widespread infringement of their copyrighted song lyrics”.

  • Moira_Mayhem@beehaw.org
    7·
    11 months ago

    Serious Question: When an artist learns to draw by looking at the drawings of the masters, and practicing the techniques they pioneered, are the art students respecting the intellectual property rights of those masters?

    Are not all of that student’s work derivative of an education based on other people’s work who will never see compensation for that student’s use?

    • Chahk@beehaw.org
      8·
      11 months ago

      I agree with you on principle. However… How long do you think it will be until these very same “AI” companies copyright and patent every piece of content their algorithms spew out? Will they abide by the same carve-outs they want for themselves right now? Somehow I doubt it.

      They want to ignore the laws for themselves, but enforce them onto everyone else. This “Rules for thee but not for me” bullshit can’t be allowed to pass. Let’s then abolish all copyright, and we’ll see how long these companies last when everyone can just grab their stuff “for learning”.

      • Moira_Mayhem@beehaw.org
        2·
        11 months ago

        How long before a self-owned AI company that does every administrative job better than humans because it trained on human behavior for 100 years?

        What do you think an entity like that would be capable of?

        • Chahk@beehaw.org
          4·
          11 months ago

          A bit off-topic, but I’d be fine with that. The more mind-numbingly dumb work that computers can do for us, the less time we have to spend doing it ourselves. Administrative jobs holders disagree with this, but so did every person whose job and livelihood was replaced by automation, ever. UBI (universal basic income) is the only answer that will save all of us from starvation when automation eventually replaces us too.

          • Moira_Mayhem@beehaw.org
            2·
            11 months ago

            I agree with everything in your post but the simple truth is administrative jobs are the modern equivalent of fluff court positions handed out to the 2nd+ born children of nobles and the modern owner class will never give up that eternal source of easy wealth.

            Which is also why they fight so hard to keep anyone not in the owner class out of management.

    • Floon@lemmy.ml
      61·
      11 months ago

      One, let’s accept that there is a public domain, and cribbing freely from the public domain is A-OK. I can reproduce Michaelangelo all I want, and it’s all good. AI can crib from that all it wants.

      AI can’t invent. People can invent: i can have a wholly new idea that no one has ever had. AI does nothing but recombine other existing ideas. It must have seed data, and it won’t create anything for which it has no initial input: feed it photographs only, and it can’t create a pencil drawing image. Feed it only black and white images, and it can’t create color images.

      People do not require cribbing from sources. Give a toddler supplies, and they will create. So, we have established that there is a fundamental difference between the creation process. One is dependent on previous work, and one is not.

      Now, with influences, you can ask, is your new creation dependent on the previous creation directly? If it is so utterly dependent on the prior work, such that your work could not possibly exist without that specific prior art, you might get sued. It will get debated and society’s best approximation of a collective rational mind will determine if you copied or if you created something new that was merely inspired by prior art.

      AI can only create by the direct existence of prior art. It fakes invention. Its work has to come from somewhere else.

      People have shown how dependent it is on its sources with prompts that say things like, “portrait of a patriotic soldier superhero” and it comes back with a goddamned portrait of Chris Evans. The prompt did not include his name, or Captain or America, and it comes back with an MCU movie poster. AI does not create. People create.

    • DdCno1@beehaw.org
      41·
      11 months ago

      I think there is a fundamental difference here. People are not corporations. People have always learned like this and will always learn like this. Do we really want to allow large corporations to take knowledge from people, then commercialize it and put these very same people out of work?

      • Moira_Mayhem@beehaw.org
        3·
        11 months ago

        Your distinction is mostly philosophical. Legally corporations have more protections than people.

        I’m probably one of the most anti-corporate people you’ll meet today, I don’t even think publicly traded companies should exist.