Technology

It likely doesn't break the law. You should check out this article by Kit Walsh, a senior staff attorney at the EFF, and this one by Katherine Klosek, the director of information policy and federal relations at the Association of Research Libraries.

Headlines like these let people assume that it's illegal, rather than educate people on their rights.

Reproduction of copyrighted material would be breaking the law. Studying it and using it as reference when creating original content is not.

It doesn't break the law at all. The courts have already ruled that copyrighted material can be fed into AI/ML models for training:

https://towardsdatascience.com/the-most-important-supreme-court-decision-for-data-science-and-machine-learning-44cfc1c1bcaf

You might want to read this post from one of the EFF's senior lawyers on the topic who has previously litigated IP cases:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/how-we-think-about-copyright-and-ai-art-0

Hey if they want to set that precedent, so be it.

That's the other edge of this sword.

Maybe because it's not the same corporations? We might be seeing a giant powershift from IP hoarders to makers.

In general, if the US government were smart (and not currently tearing itself apart) it would be creating a generative AI public service like the postal service, potentially even relying on public government documents and the library system for training.

Offer it at effectively cost for the public to use. Would drive innovation and development, nothing produced by it would be copyrightable, and it would put pressure on private options to compete against it.

We can still have the FedEx or DHL of gen AI out there, but they would need to contend with the public option being cheaper and more widely available for use.

"My profits from fencing your wallet could not exist if stealing your wallet were punished."

"Ah, you're right, how silly of me, carry on."

Too late

You're basically arguing for making any free use of them illegal, thereby giving a monopoly to the richest and most powerful capitalists.

Humans won't be able to compete, and you won't be able to use the means of generation either.

That's not really how it would work.

If you want that outcome, it's better to train on as massive a data set as possible initially (which does regress towards the mean but also manages to pick up remarkable capabilities and relationships around abstract concepts), and then use fine tuning to bias it back towards an exceptional result.

If you only trained it on those works, it would suck at pretty much everything except specifically completing those specific works with those specific characters. It wouldn't model what the concerns of a prince in general were, but instead model that a prince either wants to murder his mother (Macbeth) or fuck her (Oedipus).

That's how it should be, but public domain has been crippled by Disney and co.

I think it's a conflation of the ideas of what copyright should be and actually is. I don't tend to see many people who believe copyright should be abolished in its entirety, and if people write a book or a song they should have some kind of control over that work. But there's a lot of contention over the fact that copyright as it exists now is a bit of a farce, constantly traded and sold and lasting an aeon after the person who created the original work dies.

It seems fairly morally constant to think that something old and part of the zeitgeist should not be under copyright, but that the system needs an overhaul when companies are using your live journal to make a robot call center.

I'd say the main reason is companies are profiting off the work of others. It's not some grand positive motive for society, but taking the work of others, from other companies, sure, but also from small time artists, writers, etc.

Then selling access to the information they took from others.

I wouldn't call it a right wing position.

It's interesting as it's many of the MPAA/RIAA attitudes towards Napster/BitTorrent but now towards gen AI.

I think it reflects the generational shift in who considers themselves content creators. Tech allowed for the long tail to become profitable content producers, so now there's a large public audience that sees this from what's historically been a corporate perspective.

Of course, they are making the same mistakes because they don't know their own history and thus are doomed to repeat it.

They are largely unaware that the MPAA/RIAA fighting against online sharing of media meant they ceded the inevitable tech to other companies like Apple and Netflix that developed platforms that navigated the legality alongside the tech.

So for example right now voice actors are largely opposing gen AI rather than realizing they should probably have their union develop or partner for their own owned offering which maximizes member revenues off of usage and can dictate fair terms.

In fact, the only way many of today's mass content creators have platforms to create content is because the corporate fights to hold onto IP status quo failed with platforms like YouTube, etc.

Gen AI should exist in a social construct such that it is limited in being able to produce copyrighted content. But policing training/education of anything (human or otherwise) doesn't serve us and will hold back developments that are going to have much more public good than most people seem to realize.

Also, it's unfortunate that we've effectively self propagandized for nearly a century around 'AI' being the bad guy and at odds with humanity, misaligned with our interests, an existential threat, etc. There's such an incredible priming bias right now that it's effectively become the Boogeyman rather than correctly being identified as a tool that - like every other tool in human history - is going to be able to be used for good or bad depending on the wielder (though unlike past tools this one may actually have a slight inherent and unavoidable bias towards good as Musk and Gab recently found out with their AI efforts on release denouncing their own personally held beliefs).