- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
AI companies have all kinds of arguments against paying for copyrighted content::The companies building generative AI tools like ChatGPT say updated copyright laws could interfere with their ability to train capable AI models. Here are comments from OpenAI, StabilityAI, Meta, Google, Microsoft and more.
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As I’ve said before: Sure, go ahead, train on copyrighted material, but anything AI generates shouldn’t be copyrightable either - it wasn’t created by a human.
Problem is that small modifications already make it copyrightable again.
This thread is interesting reading. Normally, people here complain about capitalism left and right. But when an actual policy choice comes up, the opinions become firmly pro-capitalist. I wonder how that works.
Human beings are funny characters. They only care when it starts to affect them personally otherwise they say all kinda shit.
Everyone’s always up for changing things until it comes to making the actual sacrifices necessary to enact the changes
That’s the thing. I don’t see how there is sacrifice involved in this. I would guess that the average user here has personally more to lose than to gain from expanded copyrights.
Most of these companies are just arguing that they shouldn’t have to license the works they’re using because that would be hard and inconvenient, which isn’t terribly compelling to me. But Adobe actually has a novel take I hadn’t heard before: they equate AI development to reverse engineering software, which also involves copying things you don’t own in order to create a compatible thing you do own. They even cited a related legal case, which is unusual in this pile of sour grapes. I don’t know that I’m convinced by Adobe’s argument, I still think the artists should have a say in whether their works go into an AI and a chance to get paid for it, but it’s the first argument I’ve seen for a long while that’s actually given me something to think about.
Yeah the difference is that a software company still makes money if you use their working code to improve your own shit. You’re not allowed to just copy paste Oracle’s entire repo and then sell it as your own original code.
Here is what deliberative experts way smarter and more knowledgeable than I am are saying ( on TechDirt )
TLDR: Letting AI be freely trained on human-made artistic content may be dangerous. We may decide to stop it so long as capitalists control who eats and lives. But copyright is not the means to legally stop it. This is a separate issue to how IP law is way, way broken. And precedents stopping software from training on copyrighted work will be used to stop humans from training on copyrighted work. And that’s bad.
Agree, it’s not much different from a human learning from all these sources and then applying said knowledge
Scale matters. For example
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A bunch of random shops having security cameras, where their employees can review footage
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Every business in a country having a camera connected to a central surveillance network with facial recognition and search capabilities
Those two things are not the same, even though you could say they’re “not much different” - it’s just a bunch of cameras after all.
Also, the similarity between human learning and AI training is highly debatable.
Both of your examples are governed by the same set of privacy laws, which talk about consent, purpose and necessity, but not about scale. Legislating around scale open up the inevitable legal quagmires of “what scale is acceptable” and “should activity x be counted the same as activity y to meet the scale-level defined in the law”.
Scale makes a difference, but it shouldn’t make a legal difference w.r.t. the legality of the activity.
Scale makes a difference, but it shouldn’t make a legal difference w.r.t. the legality of the activity.
What do you think the difference between normal internet traffic and a ddos attack is?
Intent is part of it as well. If you have too many people who want to use your service, you’re not being attacked, you have an actual shortage of ability to service requests and need to adjust accordingly.
In this context I meant that it was the same person doing a “normal” thing at such a scale that it becomes illegal. Scale absolutely is something that can turn something from legal to illegal.
But isn’t the intent and not the scale that makes it illegal? Scale only evidence for the intent.
Lack of consent and the intent to cause harm.
Ok, then how about automated cold calling vs “live” cold calling?
Falls under unwanted calls, you should be able to opt out of both (though I believe both are currently legal in the US).
Legally no difference
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The way I see it, if training on copyrighted content is forbidden, then that should apply universally.
Since all people mix together ideas they’ve learned from their own input to create new things, just like AI does, then all people-produced content should also be inherently uncopyrightable, unless produced by a person who has never been exposed to copyrighted content.
Oh, also all copyrighted content should lose its copyright. The only copyrighted content should be the original cave paintings by the first cavemen to develop art, since all art since then uses its influence.
And if this sounds ridiculous, then it’s no less so than arguments that AI shouldn’t be allowed to learn.
Copyright is broken, but that’s not an argument to let these companies do whatever they want. They’re functionally arguing that copyright should remain broken but also they should be exempt. That’s the worst of both worlds.
Since all people mix together ideas they’ve learned from their own input to create new things, just like AI does, then all people-produced content should also be inherently uncopyrightable, unless produced by a person who has never been exposed to copyrighted content.
While copyright and IP law at present is massively broken, this is a very poor interpretation of the core argument at play.
Let me break it down:
- Yes, all human created art takes significant influence - purposefully, and accidently - from work which has come before it
- To have been influenced by that piece, legally, the human will have had to pay the copyright holder to; go to the cinema, buy the bluray, see the performance, go to the gallery, etc. Works out of copyright obviously don’t apply here.
- To be trained in a discipline, the human likely pays for teaching by others, and those others have also paid copyright holders to view the media that influenced them aswell
- Even thought the vast majority of art is influenced by all other art, humans are capable of novel invention- ie things which have not come before - but GenAI fundamentally isn’t.
Separately, but related, see the arguments the Pirate Parties used to make about personal piracy being OK, which were fundamentally down to an argument of scale:
- A teenager pirating some films to watch cos they are interested in cinema, and being inspired to go to film school is very limited in scope. Even if they pirate hundreds of films, it can’t be argued that it’s 100 lost sales because the person may have never bought them anyway.
- A GenAI company consuming literally all artistic output of humanity, with no payment to the artists what so ever, “learning” to create “new” art, without paying for teaching, and spitting out whatever is asked of it, is massive copyright infringement on the consumption side, and an existential threat to the arts on the generation side
That’s the reason people are complaining, cos they aren’t being paid today, and they won’t be paid tomorrow.
- To have been influenced by that piece, legally, the human will have had to pay the copyright holder to; go to the cinema, buy the bluray, see the performance, go to the gallery, etc. Works out of copyright obviously don’t apply here.
- To be trained in a discipline, the human likely pays for teaching by others, and those others have also paid copyright holders to view the media that influenced them aswell
Neither of these are necessarily true, and the first one is even demonstrably false given the amount of copyrighted content that can be freely accessed online.
- Even thought the vast majority of art is influenced by all other art, humans are capable of novel invention- ie things which have not come before - but GenAI fundamentally isn’t.
That depends highly on your definition of “novel invention”. Given that GenAI can be given randomised noise as input to create something from, it’s highly debatable if GenAI is truly “incapable” of novel invention. And even then, it’s possible to provide prompts describing a novel style (e.g. “oil painting with thick, vibrant streaks of colour” or something), so a human + GenAI together may well be capable of novel invention. I don’t recall the last time a human was able to create something that could not be expressed in previously existing words at all. You can describe Van Gogh without using his name, or describe a Picasso without using named art styles. Yet we consider their works novel, no?
That’s the reason people are complaining, cos they aren’t being paid today, and they won’t be paid tomorrow.
Even if AI only trained on non-copyrighted art, this would still be true. It might set the AI companies back a year or two, but AI art generation is here to stay and will threaten artists’ incomes. These lawsuits are only really stalling tactics to delay the inevitable.
I can’t predict if they’re going to win their lawsuit or not, nor do I know if they should. But the artists’ salvation won’t lie in copyright law, I know that much.
I don’t recall the last time a human was able to create something that could not be expressed in previously existing words at all.
It’s called outsider art.
Even if AI only trained on non-copyrighted art, this would still be true. It might set the AI companies back a year or two
If this is true then they have no excuse to continue to consume copywritten content. Given the extreme pushback from the companies involved, I think is clear that this isn’t true.
Outsider art can be explained using words. It’s certainly strange art, but not necessarily something that’s “unpromptable”.
AI companies mostly push back because dealing with copyright is very expensive, not because it would necessarily take a very long time. Google and Microsoft likely already have a sizeable library of copyright-free art they could use, but using everything is just more efficient and much, much cheaper.
Tough tits. Imagine all the books, movies and games that could have been made if copyright didn’t exist. Nobody else gets to ignore the rules just because it’s inconvenient.
Tables turned
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The US Copyright Office is taking public comment on potential new rules around generative AI’s use of copyrighted materials, and the biggest AI companies in the world had plenty to say.
We’ve collected the arguments from Meta, Google, Microsoft, Adobe, Hugging Face, StabilityAI, and Anthropic below, as well as a response from Apple that focused on copyrighting AI-written code.
There are some differences in their approaches, but the overall message for most is the same: They don’t think they should have to pay to train AI models on copyrighted work.
The Copyright Office opened the comment period on August 30th, with an October 18th due date for written comments regarding changes it was considering around the use of copyrighted data for AI model training, whether AI-generated material can be copyrighted without human involvement, and AI copyright liability.
There’s been no shortage of copyright lawsuits in the last year, with artists, authors, developers, and companies alike alleging violations in different cases.
Here are some snippets from each company’s response.
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