OpenAI Says It’s "Over" If It Can’t Steal All Your Copyrighted Work
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Whatever it is, it isn't theft
Also true. It’s scraping.
In the words of Cory Doctorow:
Web-scraping is good, actually.
Scraping against the wishes of the scraped is good, actually.
Scraping when the scrapee suffers as a result of your scraping is good, actually.
Scraping to train machine-learning models is good, actually.
Scraping to violate the public’s privacy is bad, actually.
Scraping to alienate creative workers’ labor is bad, actually.
We absolutely can have the benefits of scraping without letting AI companies destroy our jobs and our privacy. We just have to stop letting them define the debate.
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If It Can’t Steal All Your Copyrighted Work
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Copying_Is_Not_Theft.webm
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No it's not.
It can be problematic behaviour, you can make it illegal if you want, but at a fundamental level, making a copy of something is not the same thing as stealing something.
it uses the result of your labor without compensation. it's not theft of the copyrighted material. it's theft of the payment.
it's different from piracy in that piracy doesn't equate to lost sales. someone who pirates a song or game probably does so because they wouldn't buy it otherwise. either they can't afford or they don't find it worth doing so. so if th they couldn't pirate it, they still wouldn't buy it.
but this is a company using labor without paying you, something that they otherwise definitely have to do. he literally says it would be over if it didn't get this.
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Piracy is not theft.
Yeah but I don't sell ripped dvds and copies of other peoples art.
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If It Can’t Steal All Your Copyrighted Work
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Copying_Is_Not_Theft.webm
Of course it is if you copy to monetise which is what they do.
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But when China steals all their (arguably not copywrite-able) work...
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Also true. It’s scraping.
In the words of Cory Doctorow:
Web-scraping is good, actually.
Scraping against the wishes of the scraped is good, actually.
Scraping when the scrapee suffers as a result of your scraping is good, actually.
Scraping to train machine-learning models is good, actually.
Scraping to violate the public’s privacy is bad, actually.
Scraping to alienate creative workers’ labor is bad, actually.
We absolutely can have the benefits of scraping without letting AI companies destroy our jobs and our privacy. We just have to stop letting them define the debate.
Our privacy was long gone well before AI companies were even founded, if people cared about their privacy then none of the largest tech companies would exist because they all spy on you wholesale.
The ship has sailed on generating digital assets. This isn't a technology that can be invented. Digital artists will have to adapt.
Technology often disrupts jobs, you can't fix that by fighting the technology. It's already invented. You fight the disruption by ensuring that your country takes care of people who lose their jobs by providing them with support and resources to adapt to the new job landscape.
For example, we didn't stop electronic computers to save the job of Computer (a large field of highly trained humans who did calculations) and CAD destroyed the drafting profession. Digital artists are not the first to experience this and they won't be the last.
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Of course it is if you copy to monetise which is what they do.
They monetize it, erase authorship and bastardize the work.
Like if copyright was to protect against anything, it would be this.
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it uses the result of your labor without compensation. it's not theft of the copyrighted material. it's theft of the payment.
it's different from piracy in that piracy doesn't equate to lost sales. someone who pirates a song or game probably does so because they wouldn't buy it otherwise. either they can't afford or they don't find it worth doing so. so if th they couldn't pirate it, they still wouldn't buy it.
but this is a company using labor without paying you, something that they otherwise definitely have to do. he literally says it would be over if it didn't get this.
That information is published freely online.
Do companies have to avoid hiring people who read and were influenced by copyrighted material?
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Our privacy was long gone well before AI companies were even founded, if people cared about their privacy then none of the largest tech companies would exist because they all spy on you wholesale.
The ship has sailed on generating digital assets. This isn't a technology that can be invented. Digital artists will have to adapt.
Technology often disrupts jobs, you can't fix that by fighting the technology. It's already invented. You fight the disruption by ensuring that your country takes care of people who lose their jobs by providing them with support and resources to adapt to the new job landscape.
For example, we didn't stop electronic computers to save the job of Computer (a large field of highly trained humans who did calculations) and CAD destroyed the drafting profession. Digital artists are not the first to experience this and they won't be the last.
Our privacy was long gone well before AI companies were even founded, if people cared about their privacy then none of the largest tech companies would exist because they all spy on you wholesale.
In the US. The EU has proven that you can have perfectly functional privacy laws.
If your reasoning is based o the US not regulating their companies and so that makes it impossible to regulate them, then your reasoning is bad.
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Also true. It’s scraping.
In the words of Cory Doctorow:
Web-scraping is good, actually.
Scraping against the wishes of the scraped is good, actually.
Scraping when the scrapee suffers as a result of your scraping is good, actually.
Scraping to train machine-learning models is good, actually.
Scraping to violate the public’s privacy is bad, actually.
Scraping to alienate creative workers’ labor is bad, actually.
We absolutely can have the benefits of scraping without letting AI companies destroy our jobs and our privacy. We just have to stop letting them define the debate.
Creators who are justifiably furious over the way their bosses want to use AI are allowing themselves to be tricked by this argument. They’ve been duped into taking up arms against scraping and training, rather than unfair labor practices.
That's a great article. Isn't this kind of exactly what is going on here? Wouldn't bolstering copyright laws make training unaffordable for everyone except a handful of companies. Then these companies, because of their monopoly, could easily make the highest level models only affordable by the owner class.
People are mad at AI because it will be used to exploit them instead of the ones who exploit them every chance they get. Even worse, the legislation they shout for will make that exploitation even easier.
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Obligatory: I'm anti-AI, mostly anti-technology
That said, I can't say that I mind LLMs using copyrighted materials that it accesses legally/appropriately (lots of copyrighted content may be freely available to some extent, like news articles or song lyrics)
I'm open to arguments correcting me. I'd prefer to have another reason to be against this technology, not arguing on the side of frauds like Sam Altman. Here's my take:
All content created by humans follows consumption of other content. If I read lots of Vonnegut, I should be able to churn out prose that roughly (or precisely) includes his idiosyncrasies as a writer. We read more than one author; we read dozens or hundreds over our lifetimes. Likewise musicians, film directors, etc etc.
If an LLM consumes the same copyrighted content and learns how to copy its various characteristics, how is it meaningfully different from me doing it and becoming a successful writer?
and learns how to copy its various characteristics
Because you are a human. Not an immortal corporation.
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Our privacy was long gone well before AI companies were even founded, if people cared about their privacy then none of the largest tech companies would exist because they all spy on you wholesale.
In the US. The EU has proven that you can have perfectly functional privacy laws.
If your reasoning is based o the US not regulating their companies and so that makes it impossible to regulate them, then your reasoning is bad.
My reasoning is based upon observing the current Internet from the perspective of working in cyber security and dealing with privacy issues for global clients.
The GDPR is a step in the right direction, but it doesn't guarantee your digital privacy. It's more of a framework to regulate the trading and collecting of your personal data, not to prevent it.
No matter who or where you are, your data is collected and collated into profiles which are traded between data brokers. Anonymized data is a myth, it's easily deanonymized by data brokers and data retention limits do essentially nothing.
AI didn't steal your privacy. Advertisers and other data consuming entities have structured the entire digital and consumer electronics ecosystem to spy on you decades before transformers or even deep networks were ever used.
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Fuck Sam Altmann, the fartsniffer who convinced himself & a few other dumb people that his company really has the leverage to make such demands.
Fartsniffer
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If this passes, piracy websites can rebrand as AI training material websites and we can all run a crappy model locally to train on pirated material.
Fuck it. I'm training my home AI will the world's TV, Movies and Books.
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gosh Ed Zitron is such an anodyne voice to hear, I felt like I was losing my mind until I listened to some of his stuff
Yeah, he has the ability to articulate what I was already thinking about LLMs and bring in hard data to back up his thesis that it’s all bullshit. Dangerous and expensive bullshit, but bullshit nonetheless.
It’s really sad that his willingness to say the tech industry is full of shit is such an unusual attribute in the tech journalism world.
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Yeah but I don't sell ripped dvds and copies of other peoples art.
What if I run a filter over it. Transformative works are fine.
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But when China steals all their (arguably not copywrite-able) work...
Sam Altman hasn't complained surprisingly, he just said there's competition and it will be harder for OpenAI to compete with open source. I think their small lead is essentially gone, and their plan is now to suckle Microsoft's teet.
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OpenAI can open their asses and go fuck themselves!
