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.
There is already a business model for compensating authors: it is called buying the book. If the AI trainers are pirating books, then yeah - sue them.
There are plagiarism and copyright laws to protect the output of these tools: if the output is infringing, then sue them. However, if the output of an AI would not be considered infringing for a human, then it isn’t infringement.
When you sell a book, you don’t get to control how that book is used. You can’t tell me that I can’t quote your book (within fair use restrictions). You can’t tell me that I can’t refer to your book in a blog post. You can’t dictate who may and may not read a book. You can’t tell me that I can’t give a book to a friend. Or an enemy. Or an anarchist.
Folks, this isn’t a new problem, and it doesn’t need new laws.
You know what would solve this? We all collectively agree this fucking tech is too important to be in the hands of a few billionaires, start an actual public free open source fully funded and supported version of it, and use it to fairly compensate every human being on Earth according to what they contribute, in general?
Why the fuck are we still allowing a handful of people to control things like this??
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How can they prove that not some abstract public data has been used to train algorithms, but their particular intellectual property?
Well, if you ask e.g. ChatGPT for the lyrics to a song or page after page of a book, and it spits them out 1:1 correct, you could assume that it must have had access to the original.
Not without some seriously invasive warrants! Ones that will never be granted for an intellectual property case.
Intellectual property is an outdated concept. It used to exist so wealthier outfits couldn’t copy your work at scale and muscle you out of an industry you were championing.
It simply does not work the way it was intended. As technology spreads, the barrier for entry into most industries wherein intellectual property is important has been all but demolished.
i.e. 50 years ago: your song that your band performed is great. I have a recording studio and am gonna steal it muahahaha.
Today: “anyone have an audio interface I can borrow so my band can record, mix, master, and release this track?”
Intellectual property ignores the fact that, idk, Issac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz both independently invented calculus at the same time on opposite ends of a disconnected globe. That is to say, intellectual property doesn’t exist.
Ever opened a post to make a witty comment to find someone else already made the same witty comment? Yeah. It’s like that.
Spoken by someone who has never had something you’ve worked years on, be stolen.
Spoken like someone who is having trouble admitting they’re standing on the shoulders of Giants.
I don’t expect a nuanced response from you, nor will I waste time with folks who can’t be bothered to respond in any form beyond attack, nor do I expect you to watch this
Intellectual property died with the advent of the internet. It’s now just a way for the wealthy to remain wealthy.
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While I am rooting for authors to make sure they get what they deserve, I feel like there is a bit of a parallel to textbooks here. As an engineer if I learn about statics from a text book and then go use that knowledge to he’ll design a bridge that I and my company profit from, the textbook company can’t sue. If my textbook has a detailed example for how to build a new bridge across the Tacoma Narrows, and I use all of the same design parameters for a real Tacoma Narrows bridge, that may have much more of a case.
An AI analyzes the words of a query and generates its response(s) based on word-use probabilities derived from a large corpus of copyrighted texts. This makes its output derivative of those texts in a way that someone applying knowledge learned from the texts is not.
Why, though?
Is it because we can’t explain the causal relationships between the words in the text and the human’s output or actions?
If a very good neuroscientist traced out the engineer’s brain and could prove that, actually, if it wasn’t for the comma on page 73 they wouldn’t have used exactly this kind of bolt in the bridge, now is the human’s output derivative of the text?
Any rule we make here should treat people who are animals and people who are computers the same.
And even regardless of that principle, surely a set of AI weights is either not copyrightable or else a sufficiently transformative use of almost anything that could go into it? If it decides to regurgitate what it read, that output could be infringing, same as for a human. But a mere but-for causal connection between one work and another can’t make text that would be non-infringing if written by a human suddenly infringing because it was generated automatically.
Because word-use probabilities in a text are not the same thing as the information expressed by the text.
Any rule we make here should treat people who are animals and people who are computers the same.
W-what?
In the future, some people might not be human. Or some people might be mostly human, but use computers to do things like fill in for pieces of their brain that got damaged.
Some people can’t regognize faces, for example, but computers are great at that now and Apple has that thing that is Google Glass but better. But a law against doing facial recognition with a computer, and allowing it to only be done with a brain, would prevent that solution from working.
And currently there are a lot of people running around trying to legislate exactly how people’s human bodies are allowed to work inside, over those people’s objections.
I think we should write laws on the principle that anybody could be a human, or a robot, or a river, or a sentient collection of bees in a trench coat, that is 100% their own business.
But the subject under discussion is large language models that exist today.
I think we should write laws on the principle that anybody could be a human, or a robot, or a river, or a sentient collection of bees in a trench coat, that is 100% their own business.
I’m sorry, but that’s ridiculous.
I have indeed made a list of ridiculous and heretofore unobserved things somebody could be. I’m trying to gesture at a principle here.
If you can’t make your own hormones, store bought should be fine. If you are bad at writing, you should be allowed to use a computer to make you good at writing now. If you don’t have legs, you should get to roll, and people should stop expecting you to have legs. None of these differences between people, or in the ways that people choose to do things, should really be important.
Is there a word for that idea? Is it just what happens to your brain when you try to read the Office of Consensus Maintenance Analog Simulation System?
The issue under discussion is whether or not LLM companies should pay royalties on the training data, not the personhood of hypothetical future AGIs.
All this copyright/AI stuff is so silly and a transparent money grab.
They’re not worried that people are going to ask the LLM to spit out their book; they’re worried that they will no longer be needed because a LLM can write a book for free. (I’m not sure this is feasible right now, but maybe one day?) They’re trying to strangle the technology in the courts to protect their income. That is never going to work.
Notably, there is no “right to control who gets trained on the work” aspect of copyright law. Obviously.
Designing and marketing a system to plagiarize works en masse? That’s the cash grab.
Can you elaborate on this concept of a LLM “plagiarizing”? What do you mean when you say that?
What I mean is that it is a statistical model used to generate things by combining parts of extant works. Everything that it “creates” is a piece of something that already exists, often without the author’s consent. Just because it is done at a massive scale doesn’t make it less so. It’s basically just a tracer.
Not saying that the tech isn’t amazing or likely a component of future AI but, it’s really just being used commercially to rip people off and worsen the human condition for profit.
Everything that it “creates” is a piece of something that already exists, often without the author’s consent
This describes all art. Nothing is created in a vacuum.
No, it really doesn’t, nor does it function like human cognition. Take this example:
I, personally, to decide that I wanted to make a sci-fi show. I don’t want to come up with ideas so, I want to try to do something that works. I take the scripts of every Star Trek: The Search for Spock, Alien, and Earth Girls Are Easy and feed them into a database, seperating words into individual data entries with some grammatical classification. Then, using this database, I generate a script, averaging the length of the films, with every word based upon its occurrence in the films or randomized, if it’s a tie. I go straight into production with “Star Alien: The Girls Are Spock”. I am immediately sued by Disney, Lionsgate, and Paramount for trademark and copyright infringement, even though I basically just used a small LLM.
You are right that nothing is created in a vacuum. However, plagiarism is still plagiarism, even if it is using a technically sophisticated LLM plagiarism engine.
ChatGPT doesn’t have direct access to the material it’s trained on. Go ask it to quote a book to you.
That really doesn’t make an appreciable difference. It doesn’t need direct access to source data, if it’s already been transferred into statistical data.
So what’s the difference between a person reading their books and using the information within to write something and an ai doing it?
A person is human and capable of artistry and creativity, computers aren’t. Even questioning this just means dehumanizing artists and art in general.
Not being allowed to question things is a really shitty precedent, don’t you think?
Do you think a hammer and a nail could do anything on their own, without a hand picking them up guiding them? Because that’s what a computer is. Nothing wrong with using a computer to paint or write or record songs or create something, but it has to be YOU creating it, using the machine as a tool. It’s also in the actual definition of the word: art is made by humans. Which explicitly excludes machines. Period. Like I’m fine with AI when it SUPPORTS an artist (although sometimes it’s an obstacle because sometimes I don’t want to be autocorrected, I want the thing I write to be written exactly as I wrote it, for whatever reason). But REPLACING an artist? Fuck no. There is no excuse for making a machine do the work and then to take the credit just to make a quick easy buck on the backs of actual artists who were used WITHOUT THEIR CONSENT to train a THING to replace them. Nah fuck off my guy. I can clearly see you never did anything creative in your whole life, otherwise you’d get it.
Nah fuck off my guy. I can clearly see you never did anything creative in your whole life, otherwise you’d get it.
Oh, right. So I guess my 20+ year Graphic Design career doesn’t fit YOUR idea of creative. You sure have a narrow life view. I don’t like AI art at all. I think it’s a bad idea. you’re a bit too worked up about this to try to discuss anything. Not to excited about getting told to fuck off about an opinion. This place is no better than reddit ever was.
Of course I’m worked up. I love art, I love doing art, i have multiple friends and family members who work with art, and art is the last genuine thing that’s left in this economy. So yeah, obviously I’m angry at people who don’t get it and celebrate this bullshit just because they are too lazy to pick up a pencil, get good and draw their own shit, or alternatively commission what they wanna see from a real artist. Art was already PERFECT as it was, I have a right to be angry that tech bros are trying to completely ruin it after turning their nose up at art all their lives. They don’t care about why art is good? Ok cool, they can keep doing their graphs and shit and just leave art alone.
