OpenAI declares AI race “over” if training on copyrighted works isn’t fair use
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Technological advances are supposed to improve peoples lives. Allow them to work less and enjoy things more often.
It's why we invented a wheel. It's why we invented better weapons to hunt with.
"Tech for techs sake" is enjoying the technology and ignoring its impact on people's lives.
When a society creates a massive sum of information accessible to all, trains new technology on data created by that society, and then a small subset of that society steals and uses that data to profit themselves and themselves alone; I don't know what else you call that but exploitation.
Advances in AI should make our lives better. Not worse. Because of our economic model we have decided that technological advances no longer benefit everyone, but hurt a majority of the population for the profits of a few.
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Interesting. I hope you don’t mind me distilling that into a few bullet points.
- you don’t like anyone opening your creation up to interpretation.
If Da Vinci felt that the Mona Lisa was a happy painting, would he have a right to stop others from finding her fascinating because her expression is somewhat ambiguous?
If that’s a bit too Minority Report, what about writing about her being sad, like a lot of journalists and critics have?
What about when they earn income by writing about it?
- You don’t think derivative works should compete with the original
Fifty Shades of Grey was born on Twilight fan fiction forums. Erika Mitchell/E.L. James originally used the names Edward and Bella before editing and publishing work was done. There’s a lot of reader overlap—should she be allowed to earn money on this work without Stephanie Meyers’s consent?
This also offers a second example of reinterpreting characters. What right does she have to change Edward from a protective to an openly exploitative individual? Is it okay because she changed the names?
A quote:
I am ok with others making thoughtful stories that don't mess with my characters and some world aspects
If you believe you should have rights in perpetuity to this work and protection from ideas that damage your work’s image, what happens when someone purchases those rights from you, like how musical artists sell the rights to their musical catalogs?
Do those rights still last in perpetuity?
May the individual of corporation who purchased those rights interpret and rule out damaging ideas as they see fit? May they rule out things previously seen as acceptable use by the creator?
If you don’t approve of sales of rights, what about inheritance by estate? What about their rights to further interpretation?
Another quote:
I often independently come to conclusions other logical people may also come to. I wouldn't know whether they have tho because I forge my own path.
If you independently dream up a scientist who creates a humanoid being out of various body parts, brings it to life, and is then horrified by its appearance and the responsibilities he has toward it, doesn’t Mary Shelley still have the rights to the idea? Can’t she shoot down your right to publish, or your right to recognition? What would be your method of proving it was an independent idea?
Does it matter? Should you receive praise for an idea you had that someone else has previously had (200+ years ago!)?
Along the same vein, my use of a smiley face last comment was clearly derivative and meant to imitate you in this moment, but I’m much older than you, and I wrote that way far earlier than you ever did, so can you still claim it was an imitation of your writing style?
Are you familiar with the Library of Babel as a story? As a concept? An author was inspired by Borges and made a website in 2015 that generates random combinations of letters and punctuation on command. You can “search” through the library and it will find places where the algorithm generates, at random and without intention, exactly what you wrote. People can bookmark their best finds. You can find the first page of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone here.
Now, if JK Rowling said she no longer wished for her works to be published, may we use this website to generate her works anew?
And in that vein, what rights would she have to withhold the material? I’m sure she does not like me because I’m not a TERF. But I enjoyed reading the books anyway. She has created a cultural keepsake. What right do we have to continue to enjoy her works despite her? For our children to imagine new adventures?
- You actually do write fanfiction, and use AI to generate content in the style of the original work
That’s just amusing. No notes.
I think the da vinci stuff is a different discussion entirely as it has to do with comments about art and not someone publishing someone else's work for profit without consent while doing whatever they see fit to it. And generally that bullet seems slightly different from what I typed as my topic was theft of an artwork; not interpretation variation of viewers.
I like the 50 shades of grey example and approve of her changing it to be it's own thing rather than either lose the effort put in to the fanfic or try to state it as twilight cannon without consent. Everything stated in that example feels good to me without triggering my immorality sensors.
Sale of rights is nothing I have comments on at this current time.
The babel program is an exotic 'independently coming to something'.
I personally don't write fan fiction at all and it is easy to distinguish my written fiction from things ai's generate (at least with what ai is at this current time).
I believe the key topic you hit is 'independently coming to things' and that that should be encouraged and is moral while using expired copyright law to take someone else's work without their consent is immoral. I do not profess to yet have an ideal system for this in mind; I would focus here though as it has potential to replace the immoral parts of the system with moral parts. So yes independently coming to something actually should receive positive feedback in comparison to purposely copying something the creator does not want copied.
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It will never be over. We will either be the ones dominant in this area, or it won't be us. If it's not us, well, the consequences could be dire.
I fail to see the significance of not being dominant in bullshit generation, which is OpenAIs specialty.
Non-LLM machine learning is more interesting, but "write me a poem about how you're my loving ai waifu" is just not a strategic resource.
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The reason copyright exists is for the same reason patents do: to protect the little guy.
If you actually believe this is still true, I've got a bridge to sell ya'.
This hasn't been true since the '70s, at the latest.
So you believe there is no protection for creators at all and removing copyright will help them?
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If not, AI is dead in the US
Technically, everything you write is copyrighted
You don't need to say anything else, I'm already happy with that outcome
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Oh so like the music industry where every artist retains full rights to their work and the only 3 big publishers definitely don't force them to sell all their rights leaving musicians with basically nothing but touring revenue? Protecting the little guy like that you mean?
Or maybe protecting the little guy like how 5 tech companies own all the key patents required for networking, 3d graphics, and digital audio? And how those same companies control social media so if you are any kind of artist you are forced to hustle nonstop on their platforms for any hope if reaching an audience with your work? I'm sure all those YouTube creators feel very protected.
Those are problems with the shitty enforcement, and allowing corporations to run rampant.
It needs to be refined, not removed.
Without copyright, you could write a novel, and any corp or person could just start publishing it without paying you a dime.
Just because something isn't protecting well enough doesn't mean you get rid of it.
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The original 14-year duration w/ an optional renewal is pretty fair IMO. That's long enough that the work has likely lost popularity, but not so long that it's irrelevant. Renewals should be approved based on need (i.e. I'm currently living off the royalties).
The current copyright term in the US is utterly atrocious.
Oh, we should also consider copyright null and void once it's no longer available commercially for a "reasonable" price. As in, if I can't go buy the book or movie today for a similar price to the original launch (or less), then you should lose copyright protections.
Absolutely. Finally a reply with some sense. This would work well, or at least better.
The "copyright doesn't protect anyone so let's remove it" people are just playing into the hands of big corporations.
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Oh no, how horrible... AI is dead in the US? How shall we live?
/sarcasm -
Well, then we should see their want to change copyright in this way as a good thing. People complain when YouTubers get copyright struck even if their content is fair use or transformative of something else, but then suddenly become all about copyright when AI is mentioned.
The toothpaste is out of the tube. We can either develop it here and outpace our international and ideological competitors, or we can stifle ourselves and fall behind.
The future comes whether you want it to or not.
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The billionaires are the ones with the resources to develop this tech. We could nationalize it, but then people would complain about that too for different reasons.
Billionaires control our government so nationalizing it is no different.
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You sound like an old man yelling about the TV. LLMs are NOT unhelpful. You'd know this if you actually used them.
I've used them and have yet to get a fully correct result on anything I've asked beyond the absolute basics. I always have to go in and correct some aspect of whatever it shits out. Scraping every bit of data they can get their hands on is only making the problem worse.
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It's called paying for the content
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Open can suck some dick.
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It's copyright, not copywrite---you know, the right to copy. Copywriting is what ad people do. And what does this have to do with the PATRIOT Act?
This is how you know I'm not an AI but instead an idiot that uses AI
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Depends on if you consider teaching "cheating." Current AI is just learning material, similar to a human but at much faster rates and with a larger brain. Someone IS going to develop this tech. If you pay attention to the space at all, you'd know how rapidly it is developing and how much the competition in the space is heating up internationally. The East tends to have much more of a feeling of responsibility to the state, so if the state uses "their stuff" to train this extraordinarily powerful technology then they are going to be ok with that because it enhances their state in the world. The West seems to have more of an issue with this, and if you force the West to pay billions or trillions of dollars for everything to teach this system, then it simply either won't get done or will get done at a pace that puts the West at a severe disadvantage.
In my view, knowledge belongs to everyone. But I also don't want people more closely aligned with my ideals to be hobbled in the area of building these ultimate knowledge databases and tools. It could even be a major national security threat to not let these technologies develop in the way they need to.
If the rules are "You gotta pay for the book" and they don't pay for the book, they broke the rules, that's what I consider cheating. I don't necessarily agree with the rule, I disagree with cheating. This is, of course, relative, as truth and morality in general are.
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Man, what if we abolished copyright, but also banned gen AI completely. I think that would be the funniest answer.
We don't make laws. They do and they won't abolish something that's set up for them. But we have a choice to listen for now. What if we do whatever we wanted and we didn't make it easy for them to enforce rules that don't benefit us. I remember underground comics back in the day that said fuck Disney and drew Mickey smoking crack because fuck Disney. I remember downloading some of the best music on Napster because it was not really protected songs yet that some kid remixes into a whole new song. Like Slipknot and Britney Spears.
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Why training openai with literally millions of copyrighted works is fair use, but me downloading an episode of a series not available in any platform means years of prison?
Have you thought about incorporating yourself into a company? Apparently that solves all legal problems.
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I have conflicting feelings about this whole thing. If you are selling the result of training like OpenAI does (and every other company), then I feel like it’s absolutely and clearly not fair use. It’s just theft with extra steps.
On the other hand, what about open source projects and individuals who aren’t selling or competing with the owners of the training material? I feel like that would be fair use.
What keeps me up at night is if training is never fair use, then the natural result is that AI becomes monopolized by big companies with deep pockets who can pay for an infinite amount of random content licensing, and then we are all forever at their mercy for this entire branch of technology.
The practical, socioeconomic, and ethical considerations are really complex, but all I ever see discussed are these hard-line binary stances that would only have awful corporate-empowering consequences, either because they can steal content freely or because they are the only ones that will have the resources to control the technology.
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I think the da vinci stuff is a different discussion entirely as it has to do with comments about art and not someone publishing someone else's work for profit without consent while doing whatever they see fit to it. And generally that bullet seems slightly different from what I typed as my topic was theft of an artwork; not interpretation variation of viewers.
I like the 50 shades of grey example and approve of her changing it to be it's own thing rather than either lose the effort put in to the fanfic or try to state it as twilight cannon without consent. Everything stated in that example feels good to me without triggering my immorality sensors.
Sale of rights is nothing I have comments on at this current time.
The babel program is an exotic 'independently coming to something'.
I personally don't write fan fiction at all and it is easy to distinguish my written fiction from things ai's generate (at least with what ai is at this current time).
I believe the key topic you hit is 'independently coming to things' and that that should be encouraged and is moral while using expired copyright law to take someone else's work without their consent is immoral. I do not profess to yet have an ideal system for this in mind; I would focus here though as it has potential to replace the immoral parts of the system with moral parts. So yes independently coming to something actually should receive positive feedback in comparison to purposely copying something the creator does not want copied.
I don’t think you can separate art and interpretation and critique, but they are often done by different parties. You don’t have to have an opinion on everything. Fair enough. I thought your opinion was that you opposed the misrepresentation of what a piece of art was about, e.g. My Little Pony is about x not y. I merely wanted to know the nature and extent of that opinion.
I agree on the 50 Shades front but am surprised—she took existing characters and wrote a new story around them, which both precludes the original author from ever writing anything in that vein and changes how those characters are seen. The facade of a name change is just that in my opinion.
I’ll admit that I’m confused as to the scenario where you were using MLP AI but it’s not my business! If it was not in a fan fic vein though, I’ll point out that while you take issue with the AI including non-canon material in its MLP training data and thus being non-representative, the owners of the MLP intellectual property would take issue with the use of their material and being too representative. Copyright is not used to preserve sanctity, it is used to monopolize profit opportunity.
The Babel program is merely representative of the actual library of Babel. Read the story. It’s short and it’s thoughtful.
Consent is a valuable concept, not a magical one. If we declare that all creators own rights to their creations for 500 years who cares? Most everything created will be forgotten long before then, people who have never heard of Rachel Ingalls will create countless stories about a mute person meeting a sea creature, and she won’t have a thing to say about it because she’s dead, and she doesn’t seem to have said anything about Del Toro making his movie about the same damn thing. Or perhaps she doesn’t have access to the funds to fight for her claim to the story? Since the other issue is that copyright only protects people and corporations who sue every fractional and imagined impingement upon their property, and it’s not always up to you as the creator what that process looks like. If you get hurt in an accident your insurance company will probably sue whoever hurt you for damages, and likewise if you publish a book through Tantor Media and someone writes a thoughtful continuation you bet Tantor’s not asking for consent.
Look at Star Wars. George Lucas creates a smash hit trilogy. People love it. They write tons of licensed material in-universe. He writes three more movies. They aaaare not a smash hit, but hey. People keep writing more tales in the extended universe. Who does this hurt? Fans get more material, writers make livings, Lucas makes money without having to do more work. But most creators do not make it so easy to create derivative works. Either they create more or their universe and characters die, and for whatever reason, that’s completely up to them. The absurd length of copyright claims ensures the magic their audience found in their work will whither away by the time someone who is willing to fan the flame is legally permitted to do so. Firefly will never resolve. Scavengers Reign is over, and if we catch you trying to finish the story you’ll face jail time. Westworld isn’t just unfinished, it’s functionally gone. It has been taken away. And those works were genuinely gargantuan undertakings and there is no way that was the desire of everyone involved.
- Nothing comes to be something from nothing. Stephen King’s It has many things in common such as the seemingly sentient balloon with Ray Bradbury’s Something This Way Wicked Comes, who took its title from Macbeth, and says he was only really convinced to write it by his friend Gene Kelly—I do not think there is something inherently immoral about this iterative process of inspiration, creation, interpretation, amalgamation and recreation. I do think there is something inherently immoral about taking claiming “the buck stops here” and arguing for the total independence of your own work. It’s all borrowed from our experiences, and our experiences are borrowed from the universe, and when we die no one should really give a shit about whether or not we would consent to something if we were, you know, not dead. Stephen King may have a legal claim to It but it is not his work alone. Maybe a strong case for outsider art being unique could convince me otherwise but I do not believe we can come to a point of finality where, after we and everyone we've learned from and everyone who has fed us, led us, derided and inspired us has worked on something, after we've taken our materials from the planet and our inspiration from nature, we can say “it’s finished, and no one else may touch it.”
