Too be honest, I hope they win. While I my passion is technology, I am not a fan of artificial intelligence at all! Decision-making is best left up to the human being. I can see where AI has its place like in gaming or some other things but to mainstream it and use it to decide who's resume is going to be viewed and/or who will be hired; hell no.
this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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I got a degree with a sub focus in AI and I hate where this has gone extremely fast. It’s not exciting anymore, it’s just depressing. I’m trying to get out of tech sooner rather than later and go live off the grid somewhere.
AI will kill society long before it’ll save it
I'm not against artificial intelligence, it could be a very valuable tool, but that's nowhere near a valid reason to break laws as OpenAI has done, that's why I too hope authors win.
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Can’t reply directly to @OldGreyTroll@kbin.social because of that “language” bug, as well. This is an interesting argument. I would imagine that the AI does not have the ability to follow plagiarism rules. Does it even credit sources? I've seen plenty of complaints from students getting in trouble because anti cheating software flags their original work as plagiarism. More importantly I really believe we need to take a firm stance on what is ethical to feed into chat gpt. Right now it's the wild west.
Good, hope they win.
The only question I have to content creators of any kind who are worried a out AI...do you go after any human who consumed your content when they create anything remotely connected to your work?
I feel like we have a bias towards humans, that unless you're actively trying to steal someone's idea or concepts we ignore the fact that your content is distilled into some neurons in their brain and a part of what they create from that point forward. Would someone with an eidetic memory be forbidden from consuming your work as they could internally reference your material when creating their own?
The problem with AI as it currently stands is that it has no actual comprehension of the prompt, or ability to make leaps of logic, nor does it have the ability to extend and build upon existing work to legitimately transform it, except by using other works already fed into its model. All it can do is blend a bunch of shit together to make something that meets a set of criteria. There's little actual fundamental difference between what ChatGPT does and what a procedurally generated game like most roguelikes do--the only real difference is that ChatGPT uses a prompt while a roguelike uses a RNG seed. In both cases, though, the resulting product is limited solely to the assets available to it, and if I made a roguelike that used assets ripped straight from Mario, Zelda, Mass Effect, Crash Bandicoot, Resident Evil, and Undertale, I'd be slapped with a cease and desist fast enough to make my head spin.
The fact that OpenAI stole content from everybody in order to make its model doesn't make it less infringing.
The fact that OpenAI stole content from everybody in order to make its model doesn’t make it less infringing.
Totally in agreement with you here. They did something wrong and should have to deal with that.
But my question is more about...
The problem with AI as it currently stands is that it has no actual comprehension of the prompt, or ability to make leaps of logic, nor does it have the ability to extend and build upon existing work to legitimately transform it, except by using other works already fed into its model
Is comprehension necessary for breaking copyright infringement? Is it really about a creator being able to be logical or to extend concepts?
I think we have a definition problem with exactly what the issue is. This may be a little too philosophical but what part of you isn't processing your historical experiences and generating derivative works? When I saw "dog" the thing that pops into your head is an amalgamation of your past experiences and visuals of dogs. Is the only difference between you and a computer the fact that you had experiences with non created works while the AI is explicitly fed created content?
AI could be created with a bit of randomness added in to make what it generates "creative" instead of derivative but I'm wondering what level of pure noise needs to be added to be considered created by AI? Can any of us truly create something that isn't in some part derivative?
There’s little actual fundamental difference between what ChatGPT does and what a procedurally generated game like most roguelikes do
Agreed. I think at this point we are in a strange place because most people think ChatGPT is a far bigger leap in technology than it truly is. It's biggest achievement was being able to process synthesized data fast enough to make it feel conversational.
What worries me is that we will set laws and legal precedent based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what the technology does. I fear that had all the sample data been acquired legally people would still have the same argument think their creations exist inside the AI in some full context when it's really just synthesized down to what is necessary to answer the question posed "what's the statically most likely next word of this sentence?"
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By nature of a human creating something "connected" to another work, then the work is transformative. Copyright law places some value on human creativity modifying a work in a way that transforms it into something new.
Depending on your point of view, it's possible to argue that machine learning lacks the capacity for transformative work. It is all derivative of its source material, and therefore is infringing on that source material's copyright. This is especially true when learning models like ChatGPT reproduce their training material whole-cloth like is mentioned elsewhere in the thread.
I'd argue that all human work is derivative as well. Not from the legal stance of copyright law but from a fundamental stance of how our brains work. The only difference is that humans have source material outside that which is created. You have seen an apple on a tree before, not all of your apple experiences are pictures someone drew, photos someone took or a poem someone wrote. At what point would you consider enough personal experience to qualify as being able to generate transformative work? If I were to put a camera in my head and record my life and donate it as public domain would that be enough data to allow an AI to be considered able to create transformative works? Or must the AI have genuine personal experiences?
Our brains can do some level of randomness but it's current state is based on its previous state and the inputs it received. I wonder when trying to come up with something unique, what portion of our brains dive into memories versus pure noise generation. That's easily done on a computer.
As for whole cloth reproduction...I memorized many poems in school. Does that mean I can never generate something unique?
Don't get me wrong, they used stolen material, that's wrong. But had it been legally obtained I see less of an issue.
But derivative and transformative are legal terms with legal meanings. Arguing how you feel the word derivative applies to our brain chemistry is entirely irrelevant.
You've memorized poems, and (assuming the poem is not in the public domain) if you reproduce that poem housed in a collection of poems without any license from the copyright owner you've infringed on that copyright. It is not any different when ChatGPT reproduces a poem in it's output.
I think it's very relevant because those laws were created at a time when there was no machine generated material. The law makes the assumption that one human being is creating material and another human being is stealing some material. In no part of these laws do they dictate rules on creating a non-human third party that would do the actual copying. There were specific rules added for things like photocopy machines and faxes where attempts are made to create exact facsimiles. But ChatGPT isn't doing what a photocopier does.
The current lawsuits, at least the one's I've read over, have not been explicitly about outputting copyright material. While ChatGPT could output the material just as i could recite a poem, the issues being brought up is that the training materials were copyright and that the AI system then "contains" said material. That is why i asked my initial question. My brain could contain your poem and as long as i dont write it down as my own, what violation is occuring? OpenAI could go to the library, rent every book and scan them in and all would be ok, right? At least from the recent lawsuits.
The current (at least in the US) laws do cover work that isn't created by a human. It's well-tread legal ground. The highest profile case of it was a monkey taking a photograph: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute
Non-human third parties cannot hold copyright. They are not afforded protections by copyright. They cannot claim fair use of copyrighted material.
I meant in the opposite direction. If I teach an elephant to paint and then show him a Picasso and he paints something like it am I the one violating copyright law? I think currently there is no explicit laws about this type of situation but if there was a case to be made MY intent would be the major factor.
The 3rd party copying we see laws around are human driven intent to make exact replicas. Photocopy machines, Cassette/VHS/DVD duplication software/hardware, Faxes, etc. We have personal private fair use laws but all of this about humans using tools to make near exact replicas.
The law needs to catch up to the concept of a human creating something that then goes out and makes non replica output triggered by someone other than the tool's creator. I see at least 3 parties in this whole process:
- AI developer creating the system
- AI teacher feeding it learning data
- AI consumer creating the prompt
If the data fed to the AI was all gathered by legal means, lets say scanned library books, who is in violation if the content output were to violate copyright laws?
These are questions that, again, are tread pretty well in the copyright space. ChatGPT in this case acts more like a platform than a tool, because it hosts and can reproduce material that it is given. Again, US only perspective, and perspective of a non-lawyer, the DMCA outlines requirements for platforms to be protected from being sued for hosting and reproducing copyrighted works. But part of the problem is that the owners of the platforms are the parties that are uploading, via training the MLL, copyrighted works. That automatically disqualifies a platform from any sort of safe harbor protections, and so the owners of the ChatGPT platform would be in violation.
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I don't really understand why people are so upset by this. Except for people who train networks based on someone's stolen art style, people shouldn't be getting mad at this. OpenAI has practically the entire internet as its source, so GPT is going to have so much information that any specific author barely has an effect on the output. OpenAI isn't stealing peoples art because they are not copying the artwork, they are using it to train models. imagine getting sued for looking at reference artwork before creating artwork.
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