Thousands of authors demand payment from AI companies for use of copyrighted works::Thousands of published authors are requesting payment from tech companies for the use of their copyrighted works in training artificial intelligence tools, marking the latest intellectual property critique to target AI development.
How can they prove that not some abstract public data has been used to train algorithms, but their particular intellectual property?
there are a lot of possible ways to audit an AI for copyrighted works, several of which have been proposed in the comments here, but what this could lead to is laws requiring an accounting log of all material that has been used to train an AI as well as all copyrights and compensation, etc.
Not without some seriously invasive warrants! Ones that will never be granted for an intellectual property case.
Intellectual property is an outdated concept. It used to exist so wealthier outfits couldn’t copy your work at scale and muscle you out of an industry you were championing.
It simply does not work the way it was intended. As technology spreads, the barrier for entry into most industries wherein intellectual property is important has been all but demolished.
i.e. 50 years ago: your song that your band performed is great. I have a recording studio and am gonna steal it muahahaha.
Today: “anyone have an audio interface I can borrow so my band can record, mix, master, and release this track?”
Intellectual property ignores the fact that, idk, Issac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz both independently invented calculus at the same time on opposite ends of a disconnected globe. That is to say, intellectual property doesn’t exist.
Ever opened a post to make a witty comment to find someone else already made the same witty comment? Yeah. It’s like that.
Spoken by someone who has never had something you’ve worked years on, be stolen.
What was “stolen” from you and how?
Spoken like someone who is having trouble admitting they’re standing on the shoulders of Giants.
I don’t expect a nuanced response from you, nor will I waste time with folks who can’t be bothered to respond in any form beyond attack, nor do I expect you to watch this
Intellectual property died with the advent of the internet. It’s now just a way for the wealthy to remain wealthy.
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Personally speaking, I’ve generated some stupid images like different cities covered in baked beans and have had crude watermarks generate with them where they were decipherable enough that I could find some of the source images used to train the ai. When it comes to photo realistic image generation, if all the ai does is mildly tweak the watermark then it’s not too hard to trace back.
All but a very small few generative AI programs use completely destructive methods to create their models. There is no way to recover the training images outside of infantesimally small random chance.
What you are seeing is the AI recognising that images of the sort you are asking for generally include watermarks, and creating one of its own.
Do you have examples? It should only happen in case of overfitting, i.e. too many identical image for the same subject
Here’s one I generated and an image from the photographer. Prompt was Charleston SC covered in baked beans lol
Out of curiosity what model did you use?
I think that to protect creators they either need to be transparent about all content used to train the AI (highly unlikely) or have a disclaimer of liability, wherein if original content has been used is training of AI then the Original Content creator who have standing for legal action.
The only other alternative would be to insure that the AI specifically avoid copyright or trademarked content going back to a certain date.
Why a certain date? That feels arbitrary
At a certain age some media becomes public domain
Then it is no longer copywrited
I’d think that given the nature of the language models and how the whole AI thing tends to work, an author can pluck a unique sentence from one of their works, ask AI to write something about that, and if AI somehow ‘magically’ writes out an entire paragraph or even chapter of the author’s original work, well tada, AI ripped them off.
You know what would solve this? We all collectively agree this fucking tech is too important to be in the hands of a few billionaires, start an actual public free open source fully funded and supported version of it, and use it to fairly compensate every human being on Earth according to what they contribute, in general?
Why the fuck are we still allowing a handful of people to control things like this??
Because the tech behind it isn’t cheap and money does not fall from trees.
No entity on the planet has more money than our governments. It’d be more efficient for a government to fund this than any private company.
The government and efficiency don’t go together
That’s a lazy generalization.
Plenty of research shows that each dollar into government programs gets much more returns than private companies. This literally a neolib propaganda talking point.
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Actually many bills are more of a fabric material now than an actual paper product. Many bills in Europe now are polymer based. Both of which add to the difficulty of counterfeiting
Actually most of the money are just 1‘s and 0‘s in a computer, coming into existence from nothing and vanishing into nothing. Fiat money backed by “trust”. As Henry Ford once said:
It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.This comment is excellent. You now have ten trillion LemBux.
Because we shy away from responsibility.
I think the longer response to this is more accurate. It’s more “because capitalism” than anything else.
And capitalism over the course of the 20th century made very successful attempts of alienating completely the working class and destroying all class consciousness or material awareness.
So people keep thinking that the problems is we as individuals are doing capitalism wrong. Not capitalism.
You think it is so simple you can just download it and run it on your laptop?
You kind of can though? The bigger models aren’t really more complicated, just bigger. If you can cram enough ram or swap into a laptop,
lamma.cppwill get there eventually.
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There is already a business model for compensating authors: it is called buying the book. If the AI trainers are pirating books, then yeah - sue them.
There are plagiarism and copyright laws to protect the output of these tools: if the output is infringing, then sue them. However, if the output of an AI would not be considered infringing for a human, then it isn’t infringement.
When you sell a book, you don’t get to control how that book is used. You can’t tell me that I can’t quote your book (within fair use restrictions). You can’t tell me that I can’t refer to your book in a blog post. You can’t dictate who may and may not read a book. You can’t tell me that I can’t give a book to a friend. Or an enemy. Or an anarchist.
Folks, this isn’t a new problem, and it doesn’t need new laws.
It’s 100% a new problem. There’s established precedent for things costing different amounts depending on their intended use.
For example, buying a consumer copy of song doesn’t give you the right to play that song in a stadium or a restaurant.
Training an entire AI to make potentially an infinite number of derived works from your work is 100% worthy of requiring a special agreement. This even goes beyond simple payment to consent; a climate expert might not want their work in an AI which might severely mischatacterize the conclusions, or might want to require that certain queries are regularly checked by a human, etc
Well, fine, and I can’t fault new published material having a “no AI” clause in its term of service. But that doesn’t mean we get to dream this clause into being retroactively for all the works ChatGPT was trained on. Even the most reasonable law in the world can’t be enforced on someone who broke it 6 months before it was legislated.
Fortunately the “horses out the barn” effect here is maybe not so bad. Imagine the FOMO and user frustration when ToS & legislation catch up and now ChatGPT has no access to the latest books, music, news, research, everything. Just stuff from before authors knew to include the “hands off” clause - basically like the knowledge cutoff, but forever. It’s untenable, OpenAI will be forced to cave and pay up.
OpenAI and such being forced to pay a share seems far from the worst scenario I can imagine. I think it would be much worse if artists, writers, scientists, open source developers and so on were forced to stop making their works freely available because they don’t want their creations to be used by others for commercial purposes. That could really mean that large parts of humanity would be cut off from knowledge.
I can well imagine copyleft gaining importance in this context. But this form of licencing seems pretty worthless to me if you don’t have the time or resources to sue for your rights - or even to deal with the various forms of licencing you need to know about to do so.
I think it would be much worse if artists, writers, scientists, open source developers and so on were forced to stop making their works freely available because they don’t want their creations to be used by others for commercial purposes.
None of them are forced to stop making their works freely available. If they want to voluntarily stop making their works freely available to prevent commercial interests from using them, that’s on them.
Besides, that’s not so bad to me. The rest of us who want to share with humanity will keep sharing with humanity. The worst case imo is that artists, writers, scientists, and open source developers cannot take full advantage of the latest advancements in tech to make more and better art, writing, science, and software. We cannot let humanity’s creative potential be held hostage by anyone.
That could really mean that large parts of humanity would be cut off from knowledge.
On the contrary, AI is making knowledge more accessible than ever before to large parts of humanity. The only comparible other technologies that have done this in recent times are the internet and search engines. Thank goodness the internet enables piracy that allows anyone to download troves of ebooks for free. I look forward to AI doing the same on an even greater scale.
Shouldn’t there be a way to freely share your works without having to expect an AI to train on them and then be able to spit them back out elsewhere without attribution?
No, there shouldn’t because that would imply restricting what I can do with the information I have access to. I am in favor of maintaining the sort of unrestricted general computing that we already have access to.
The rest of us who want to share with humanity will keep sharing with humanity. The worst case imo is that artists, writers, scientists, and open source developers cannot take full advantage of the latest advancements in tech to make more and better art, writing, science, and software. We cannot let humanity’s creative potential be held hostage by anyone.
You’re not talking about sharing it with humanity, you’re talking about feeding it into an AI. How is this holding back the creative potential of humanity? Again, you’re talking about feeding and training a computer with this material.
Even the most reasonable law in the world can’t be enforced on someone who broke it 6 months before it was legislated.
Sure it can. Just because it is a new law doesn’t mean they get to continue benefiting from IP ‘theft’ forever into the future.
Imagine the FOMO and user frustration when ToS & legislation catch up and now ChatGPT has no access to the latest books, music, news, research, everything. Just stuff from before authors knew to include the “hands off” clause
How is this an issue for the IP holders? Just because you build something cool or useful doesn’t mean you get a pass to do what you want.
basically like the knowledge cutoff, but forever. It’s untenable,
Untenable for ChatGPT maybe, but it’s not as if it’s the end of ‘knowledge’ or the end of AI. It’s just a single company product.
My point is that the restrictions can’t go on the input, it has to go on the output - and we already have laws that govern such derivative works (or reuse / rebroadcast).
When you sell a book, you don’t get to control how that book is used.
This is demonstrably wrong. You cannot buy a book, and then go use it to print your own copies for sale. You cannot use it as a script for a commercial movie. You cannot go publish a sequel to it.
Now please just try to tell me that AI training is specifically covered by fair use and satire case law. Spoiler: you can’t.
This is a novel (pun intended) problem space and deserves to be discussed and decided, like everything else. So yeah, your cavalier dismissal is cavalierly dismissed.
No, you misunderstand. Yes, they can control how the content in the book is used - that’s what copyright is. But they can’t control what I do with the book - I can read it, I can burn it, I can memorize it, I can throw it up on my roof.
My argument is that the is nothing wrong with training an AI with a book - that’s input for the AI, and that is indistinguishable from a human reading it.
Now what the AI does with the content - if it plagiarizes, violates fair use, plagiarizes- that’s a problem, but those problems are already covered by copyright laws. They have no more business saying what can or cannot be input into an AI than they can restrict what I can read (and learn from). They can absolutely enforce their copyright on the output of the AI just like they can if I print copies of their book.
My objection is strictly on the input side, and the output is already restricted.
Makes sense. I would love to hear how anyone can disagree with this. Just because an AI learned or trained from a book doesn’t automatically mean it violated any copyrights.
The base assumption of those with that argument is that an AI is incapable of being original, so it is “stealing” anything it is trained on. The problem with that logic is that’s exactly how humans work - everything they say or do is derivative from their experiences. We combine pieces of information from different sources, and connect them in a way that is original - at least from our perspective. And not surprisingly, that’s what we’ve programmed AI to do.
Yes, AI can produce copyright violations. They should be programmed not to. They should cite their sources when appropriate. AI needs to “learn” the same lessons we learned about not copy-pasting Wikipedia into a term paper.
It’s specifically distribution of the work or derivatives that copyright prevents.
So you could make an argument that an LLM that’s memorized the book and can reproduce (parts of) it upon request is infringing. But one that’s merely trained on the book, but hasn’t memorized it, should be fine.
But by their very nature the LLM simply redistribute the material they’ve been trained on. They may disguise it assiduously, but there is no person at the center of the thing adding creative stokes. It’s copyrighted material in, copyrighted material out, so the plaintiffs allege.
They don’t redistribute. They learn information about the material they’ve been trained on - not there natural itself*, and can use it to generate material they’ve never seen.
- Bigger models seem to memorize some of the material and can infringe, but that’s not really the goal.
I asked Bing Chat for the 10th paragraph of the first Harry Potter book, and it gave me this:
“He couldn’t know that at this very moment, people meeting in secret all over the country were holding up their glasses and saying in hushed voices: ‘To Harry Potter – the boy who lived!’”
It looks like technically I might be able to obtain the entire book (eventually) by asking Bing the right questions?
Then this is a copyright violation - it violates any standard for such, and the AI should be altered to account for that.
What I’m seeing is people complaining about content being fed into AI, and I can’t see why that should be a problem (assuming it was legally acquired or publicly available). Only the output can be problematic.
I think it’s not just the output. I can buy an image on any stock Plattform, print it on a T-Shirt, wear it myself or gift it to somebody. But if I want to sell T-Shirts using that image I need a commercial licence - even if I alter the original image extensivly or combine it with other assets to create something new. It’s not exactly the same thing but openAI and other companies certainly use copyrighted material to create and improve commercial products. So this doesn’t seem the same kind of usage an avarage joe buys a book for.
No, the AI should be shut down and the owner should first be paying the statutory damages for each use of registered works of copyright (assuming all parties in the USA)
If they have a company left after that, then they can fix the AI.
Again, my point is that the output is what can violate the law, not the input. And we already have laws that govern fair use, rebroadcast, etc.
This is a little off, when you quote a book you put the name of the book you’re quoting. When you refer to a book, you, um, refer to the book?
I think the gist of these authors complaints is that a sort of “technology laundered plagiarism” is occurring.
Copyright 100% applies to the output of an AI, and it is subject to all the rules of fair use and attribution that entails.
That is very different than saying that you can’t feed legally acquired content into an AI.
However, if the output of an AI would not be considered infringing for a human, then it isn’t infringement.
It’s an algorithm that’s been trained on numerous pieces of media by a company looking to make money of it. I see no reason to give them a pass on fairly paying for that media.
You can see this if you reverse the comparison, and consider what a human would do to accomplish the task in a professional setting. That’s all an algorithm is. An execution of programmed tasks.
If I gave a worker a pirated link to several books and scientific papers in the field, and asked them to synthesize an overview/summary of what they read and publish it, I’d get my ass sued. I have to buy the books and the scientific papers. STEM companies regularly pay for access to papers and codes and standards. Why shouldn’t an AI have to do the same?
Someone should AGPL their novel and force the AI company to open source their entire neural network.
This is a good debate about copyright/ownership. On one hand, yes, the authors works went into ‘training’ the AI…but we would need a scale to then grade how well a source piece is good at being absorbed by the AI’s learning. for example. did the AI learn more from the MAD magazine i just fed it or did it learn more from Moby Dick? who gets to determine that grading system. Sadly musicians know this struggle. there are just so many notes and so many words. eventually overlap and similiarities occur. but did that musician steal a riff or did both musicians come to a similar riff seperately? Authors dont own words or letters so a computer that just copies those words and then uses an algo to write up something else is no more different than you or i being influenced by our favorite heroes or i formation we have been given. do i pay the author for reading his book? or do i just pay the store to buy it?
Copyright laws are really out of control at this point. Their periods are far too long and, like you said, how can anyone claim to truly be original at this point? A dedicated lawyer can find reasonable prior art for pretty much anything nowadays. The only reason old sources look original is because no records exist of the sources they used.
While I am rooting for authors to make sure they get what they deserve, I feel like there is a bit of a parallel to textbooks here. As an engineer if I learn about statics from a text book and then go use that knowledge to he’ll design a bridge that I and my company profit from, the textbook company can’t sue. If my textbook has a detailed example for how to build a new bridge across the Tacoma Narrows, and I use all of the same design parameters for a real Tacoma Narrows bridge, that may have much more of a case.
I think that these are fiction writers. The maths you’d use to design that bridge is fact and the book company merely decided how to display facts. They do not own that information, whereas the Handmaid’s Tale was the creation of Margaret Atwood and was an original work.
But you paid for the textbook
Libraries exist
Plagiarism filters frequently trigger on chatgpt written books and articles.
You have a point but there’s a pretty big difference between something like a statistics textbook and the novel “Dune” for instance. One was specifically written to teach mostly pre-existing ideas and the other was created as entertainment to sell to a wide an audience as possible.
An AI analyzes the words of a query and generates its response(s) based on word-use probabilities derived from a large corpus of copyrighted texts. This makes its output derivative of those texts in a way that someone applying knowledge learned from the texts is not.
Why, though?
Is it because we can’t explain the causal relationships between the words in the text and the human’s output or actions?
If a very good neuroscientist traced out the engineer’s brain and could prove that, actually, if it wasn’t for the comma on page 73 they wouldn’t have used exactly this kind of bolt in the bridge, now is the human’s output derivative of the text?
Any rule we make here should treat people who are animals and people who are computers the same.
And even regardless of that principle, surely a set of AI weights is either not copyrightable or else a sufficiently transformative use of almost anything that could go into it? If it decides to regurgitate what it read, that output could be infringing, same as for a human. But a mere but-for causal connection between one work and another can’t make text that would be non-infringing if written by a human suddenly infringing because it was generated automatically.
Because word-use probabilities in a text are not the same thing as the information expressed by the text.
Any rule we make here should treat people who are animals and people who are computers the same.
W-what?
In the future, some people might not be human. Or some people might be mostly human, but use computers to do things like fill in for pieces of their brain that got damaged.
Some people can’t regognize faces, for example, but computers are great at that now and Apple has that thing that is Google Glass but better. But a law against doing facial recognition with a computer, and allowing it to only be done with a brain, would prevent that solution from working.
And currently there are a lot of people running around trying to legislate exactly how people’s human bodies are allowed to work inside, over those people’s objections.
I think we should write laws on the principle that anybody could be a human, or a robot, or a river, or a sentient collection of bees in a trench coat, that is 100% their own business.
But the subject under discussion is large language models that exist today.
I think we should write laws on the principle that anybody could be a human, or a robot, or a river, or a sentient collection of bees in a trench coat, that is 100% their own business.
I’m sorry, but that’s ridiculous.
I have indeed made a list of ridiculous and heretofore unobserved things somebody could be. I’m trying to gesture at a principle here.
If you can’t make your own hormones, store bought should be fine. If you are bad at writing, you should be allowed to use a computer to make you good at writing now. If you don’t have legs, you should get to roll, and people should stop expecting you to have legs. None of these differences between people, or in the ways that people choose to do things, should really be important.
Is there a word for that idea? Is it just what happens to your brain when you try to read the Office of Consensus Maintenance Analog Simulation System?
The issue under discussion is whether or not LLM companies should pay royalties on the training data, not the personhood of hypothetical future AGIs.
I think what he meant was that we should an AI the same way we treat people - if a person making a derivative work can be copyright striked, then so should an AI making a derivative work. The same rule should apply to all creators*, regardless of whether they are an AI or not.
So what’s the difference between a person reading their books and using the information within to write something and an ai doing it?
Because AIs aren’t inspired by anything and they don’t learn anything
Language models actually do learn things in the sense that: the information encoded in the training model isn’t usually* taken directly from the training data; instead, it’s information that describes the training data, but is new. That’s why it can generate text that’s never appeared in the data.
- the bigger models seem to remember some of the data and can reproduce it verbatim; but that’s not really the goal.
What does inspiration have to do with anything? And to be honest, humans being inspired has led to far more blatant copyright infringement.
As for learning, they do learn. No different than us, except we learn silly abstractions to make sense of things while AI learns from trial and error. Ask any artist if they’ve ever looked at someone else’s work to figure out how to draw something, even if they’re not explicitly looking up a picture, if they’ve ever seen a depiction of it, they recall and use that. Why is it wrong if an AI does the same?
the person bought the book before reading it
not if i checked it out from a library. a WORLD of knowledge at your fingertips and it’s all free to me, the consumer. So who’s to say the people training the ai didn’t check it out from a library, or even buy the books they are using to train the ai with? would you feel better about it had they purchased their copy?
Large language models can only calculate the probability that words should go together based on existing texts.
Isn’t this correct? What’s missing?
Let’s ask chatGPT3.5:
Mostly accurate. Large language models like me can generate text based on patterns learned from existing texts, but we don’t “calculate probabilities” in the traditional sense. Instead, we use statistical methods to predict the likelihood of certain word sequences based on the training data.
“Mostly accurate” is pretty good for an anonymous internet post.
I don’t see how “calculate the probability” and “predict the likelihood” are different. Seems perfectly accurate to me.
I thought so too so I’m still confused about the votes. Oh well
A person is human and capable of artistry and creativity, computers aren’t. Even questioning this just means dehumanizing artists and art in general.
Not being allowed to question things is a really shitty precedent, don’t you think?
Do you think a hammer and a nail could do anything on their own, without a hand picking them up guiding them? Because that’s what a computer is. Nothing wrong with using a computer to paint or write or record songs or create something, but it has to be YOU creating it, using the machine as a tool. It’s also in the actual definition of the word: art is made by humans. Which explicitly excludes machines. Period. Like I’m fine with AI when it SUPPORTS an artist (although sometimes it’s an obstacle because sometimes I don’t want to be autocorrected, I want the thing I write to be written exactly as I wrote it, for whatever reason). But REPLACING an artist? Fuck no. There is no excuse for making a machine do the work and then to take the credit just to make a quick easy buck on the backs of actual artists who were used WITHOUT THEIR CONSENT to train a THING to replace them. Nah fuck off my guy. I can clearly see you never did anything creative in your whole life, otherwise you’d get it.
Nah fuck off my guy. I can clearly see you never did anything creative in your whole life, otherwise you’d get it.
Oh, right. So I guess my 20+ year Graphic Design career doesn’t fit YOUR idea of creative. You sure have a narrow life view. I don’t like AI art at all. I think it’s a bad idea. you’re a bit too worked up about this to try to discuss anything. Not to excited about getting told to fuck off about an opinion. This place is no better than reddit ever was.
Of course I’m worked up. I love art, I love doing art, i have multiple friends and family members who work with art, and art is the last genuine thing that’s left in this economy. So yeah, obviously I’m angry at people who don’t get it and celebrate this bullshit just because they are too lazy to pick up a pencil, get good and draw their own shit, or alternatively commission what they wanna see from a real artist. Art was already PERFECT as it was, I have a right to be angry that tech bros are trying to completely ruin it after turning their nose up at art all their lives. They don’t care about why art is good? Ok cool, they can keep doing their graphs and shit and just leave art alone.
I don’t know how I feel about this honestly. AI took a look at the book and added the statistics of all of its words into its giant statistic database. It doesn’t have a copy of the book. It’s not capable of rewriting the book word for word.
This is basically what humans do. A person reads 10 books on a subject, studies become somewhat of a subject matter expert and writes their own book.
Artists use reference art all the time. As long as they don’t get too close to the original reference nobody calls any flags.
These people are scared for their viability in their user space and they should be, but I don’t think trying to put this genie back in the bottle or extra charging people for reading their stuff for reference is going to make much difference.
All this copyright/AI stuff is so silly and a transparent money grab.
They’re not worried that people are going to ask the LLM to spit out their book; they’re worried that they will no longer be needed because a LLM can write a book for free. (I’m not sure this is feasible right now, but maybe one day?) They’re trying to strangle the technology in the courts to protect their income. That is never going to work.
Notably, there is no “right to control who gets trained on the work” aspect of copyright law. Obviously.
There is nothing silly about that. It’s a fundamental question about using content of any kind to train artificial intelligence that affects way more than just writers.
I seriously doubt Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI because she’s worried ChatGPT will one day be funnier than she is. She just doesn’t want it ripping off her work.
What do you mean when you say “ripping off her work”? What do you think an LLM does, exactly?
In her case, taking elements of her book and regurgitating them back to her. Which sounds a lot like they could be pirating her book for training purposes to me.
How do you know they didn’t just buy the book?
Again, that’s not relevant.
Quoting someone’s book is not “ripping off” the work.
How is it able to quote the book? Magic?
So you’re saying that as long as they buy 1 copy of the book, it’s all good?
No, I’m not saying that. If she’s right and it can spit out any part of her book when asked (and someone else showed that it does that with Harry Potter), it’s plagiarism. They are profiting off of her book without compensating her. Which is a form of ripping someone off. I’m not sure what the confusion here is. If I buy someone’s book, that doesn’t give me the right to put it all online for free.
Designing and marketing a system to plagiarize works en masse? That’s the cash grab.
Can you elaborate on this concept of a LLM “plagiarizing”? What do you mean when you say that?
What I mean is that it is a statistical model used to generate things by combining parts of extant works. Everything that it “creates” is a piece of something that already exists, often without the author’s consent. Just because it is done at a massive scale doesn’t make it less so. It’s basically just a tracer.
Not saying that the tech isn’t amazing or likely a component of future AI but, it’s really just being used commercially to rip people off and worsen the human condition for profit.
Everything that it “creates” is a piece of something that already exists, often without the author’s consent
This describes all art. Nothing is created in a vacuum.
No, it really doesn’t, nor does it function like human cognition. Take this example:
I, personally, to decide that I wanted to make a sci-fi show. I don’t want to come up with ideas so, I want to try to do something that works. I take the scripts of every Star Trek: The Search for Spock, Alien, and Earth Girls Are Easy and feed them into a database, seperating words into individual data entries with some grammatical classification. Then, using this database, I generate a script, averaging the length of the films, with every word based upon its occurrence in the films or randomized, if it’s a tie. I go straight into production with “Star Alien: The Girls Are Spock”. I am immediately sued by Disney, Lionsgate, and Paramount for trademark and copyright infringement, even though I basically just used a small LLM.
You are right that nothing is created in a vacuum. However, plagiarism is still plagiarism, even if it is using a technically sophisticated LLM plagiarism engine.
ChatGPT doesn’t have direct access to the material it’s trained on. Go ask it to quote a book to you.
That really doesn’t make an appreciable difference. It doesn’t need direct access to source data, if it’s already been transferred into statistical data.
I think this is more about frustration experienced by artists in our society at being given so little compensation.
The answer is staring us in the face. UBI goes hand in hand with developments in AI. Give artists a basic salary from the government so they can afford to live well. This isn’t a AI problem this is a broken society problem. I support artists advocating for themselves, but the fact that they aren’t asking for UBI really speaks to how hopeless our society feels right now.
What incentive is there at all to work with UBI? Why would anyone try hard at anything if you’re not rewarded?
There will always be people who seek to challenge themselves.
Others will want more money than is included with their UBI. What on earth would be wrong with people having a little more, as opposed to so many struggling, needing roommates, and so on? I imagine with an extra 1k-2k in their pocket monthly, a lot more people would buy or build housing, and a lot of service industries would boom with all the additional potentially disposable income.
Or how about people being able to retire, like actually retire, without stress. We could lower the retirement age, or people could retire independently from government assistance, leading to more available jobs for younger people as more roles transition away due to automation.
And frankly, I honestly don’t see anything wrong with some portion of the populace just living on UBI and enjoying life if that’s how they want to do things. Nothing wrong with people being happier, less stressed, and potentially mentally and/or physically healthier for it.
Also I think it’s funny that we can bail out large companies on repeat, but bailing out people is a show stopper. It’s backwards. The economy is supposed to serve us, not the other way around.
Good question. I’ll admit that I like UBI, but I haven’t done any serious reading into it. I have a break from work this month so maybe I’ll try and find a book so I can answer this type of question better in the future. I don’t think it’s so much an issue for good jobs, but the real shit jobs might be an issue, but maybe not, and UBI in the beginning wouldn’t just be for everyone it would be for selected groups.
A brief search gave this: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/2/19/21112570/universal-basic-income-ubi-map
Some gains:
- lower crime
- increased fertility (maybe a good thing idk?)
- decrease or eliminate extreme poverty
- improves education
I don’t think anyone is thinking of the broader implications of this, they rather downvote opposing opinions. If UBI starts, where’s the money come from? Higher taxes, in turn higher product cost, which just completes the cycle, making ubi not enough to live on, making an increase needed. They already tried this with minimum wage, it’s still what $7? Full time work won’t even pay for your apartment, let alone 80 hour weeks
couple options include taking profits gained through AI/automation that have historically gone to shareholders. The other is VAT tax targeting the wealthy. We don’t need UBI for everyone all at once, so funding would be incremental. I don’t think it’s the largest challenge to UBI, the main one being people who oppose it for any number of reasons.
I don’t think either of us should try to assume an advanced knowledge of economics. We don’t know what will happen to the cycle, but the idea of UBI wouldn’t be proposed at all unless that were also a consideration already answered.
Big surprise, people do things despite not being paid for them!
Also a UBI should be just enough to live (afford food and shelter) wherever you live. Then you can work for more.
UBI is about freeing people from having to work multiple dead end jobs just to survive and enables them to have an actual pursuit of happiness. Not everyone will want to work harder, but the option opens to those who do.
Currently if you’re struggling just to pay for food and shelter, it’s incredibly hard to spend time developing skills needed to make more.
To answer you seriously (and these are out of date figures from memory) that in Australia all it would take to give everyone UBI is to tax every dollar outside of that people make starting at 30%. (Currently its 19% after your first 18k. goes to 32% over 45k and 37% over 120k and 45% after that)
The positives are that
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People can retire younger, meaning upward job mobility is greatly improved.
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The cost of means testing, managing welfare and aged pensions and combating fraud of those systems effectively vanishes.
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Students could afford to study full time and work only part time or not at all AND pay their rent meaning a better educated population.
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It effectively combats the minimum wage being too low. Its ok for part time baristas to make the minimum when the govt is making sure that people are already at “survival”.
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It indirectly funds the arts. Lets be real, how many great musicians had to stop chasing their dreams because it was "practice or go to work and eat.
For example. Some guy making 100k a year and paying about $25k in tax currently. Under the 30% arrangement would pay 30k in tax, but the ubi would pay about $20k a year. So still $15k in front. I’m no accountant but I think for you to be worse off you have to be on about $200k a year or more.
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This is tough. I believe there is a lot of unfair wealth concentration in our society, especially in the tech companies. On the other hand, I don’t want AI to be stifled by bad laws.
If we try to stop AI, it will only take it away from the public. The military will still secretly use it, companies might still secretly use it. Other countries will use it and their populations will benefit while we languish.
Our only hope for a happy ending is to let this technology be free and let it go into the hands of many companies and many individuals (there are already decent models you can run on your own computer).
So, in your “only hope for a happy ending” scenario, how do the artists get paid? Or will we no longer need them after AI runs everything ;)
I don’t know. I only believe that things will be worse if individuals cannot control these AIs.
Maybe these AI have reached a peak (at least for now), and so they aren’t good enough to write a compelling novel. In that case, writers who produce good novels and get lucky will still get paid, because people will want to buy their work and read it.
Or maybe AI will quickly surpass all humans in writing ability, in which case, there’s not much we can do. If the AI produces books that are better, then people will want AI produced books. They might have to get those from other countries, or they might have to get them from a secret AI someone is running on a beefy computer in their basement. If AI surpasses humans then that’s not a happy day for writers, no way around it. Still, an AI that surpasses humans might help people in other ways, but only if we allow everyone to have and control their own AI.
As the industrial revolution threatened to swallow society Carl Marx wrote about how important it was that regular people be able to control “the means of production”. At least that part of his philosophy has always resonated with me, because I want to be empowered as an individual, I want the power to create and compete in our society. It’s the same now, AI threatens to swallow society and I want to be able to control my own AI for my own purposes.
If strong AI is coming, it’s coming. If AI is going to be the source of power in society then I want regular people to have access to that power. It’s not yet clear whether this is the case, but if strong AI is coming it’s going to be big, and writers complaining about pay isn’t going to stop it.
All that said, I believe we do a terrible job of caring for individuals in our society. We need more social safety nets, we need to change to provide people better and happier lives. So I’m not saying “forget the writers, let them stave”.
I agree with most of the things you are saying, but without some kind of policy to either give artist more power or money during the transition it sounds a lot like the “Some of you may die, but it’s a sacrifice I am willing to make” meme.
I see you are saying that you don’t want the artists to starve, but the only things I see you proposing would make them starve. Even if it is for the “greater good”.
Edit: It would help me feel more comfortable with your statements if you were to propose UBI or something like that so the artists have a solid ground to keep making good art and then let the AIs grow from that. Or just let the process happen. Let Artists sue companies, let laws get created that slow down the process of AI development. There is no need to make human sacrifice here. AI will get developed either way.
To be honest, I don’t think AI is going to get good enough to replace human creativity. Sure, some of the things that AI can do is pretty nice, but these things are mostly already solved problems - sure, AI can make passable art, but so can humans - and they can go further than art, they can create logical connections between art pieces, and extrapolate art in new reasonably justified ways, instead of the direction-less, grasping in the dark methods that AI seems to do it in.
Sure, AI can make art a thousand times faster than a person, but if only one in thousand is tolerably good, then what’s the problem?
AI is still very much in its infancy, and seeing the sort of progress that has been made even over the past 12 months, I don’t see how anyone can imagine that it will remain a small and discrete slice of the pie, that it doesn’t have radical transformative power.
My vision - gen z artists will reflexively use AI to enhance their material as artist and AI become entangled to a point where they’re impossible to distinguish. AI art will increase in fidelity, until it exceeds the fidelity that we can create with our tools. It will become immediately responsive to an audience’s needs in a way that human art can’t. What do you want to see? AI will make it for exactly your tastes, or to maybe confront your tastes and expand your mind, if that’s what you’d like. It will virtualize the artistic consciousnesses of Picasso, Goya, Michelangelo, and create new artists with new sensibilities, along with thousands of years of their works, more than a person could hope to view in a lifetime. Pop culture will be cheaper than ever, and have an audience of one - that new x rated final season of Friends you had a passing thought about is waiting for you to watch when you get home from work. Do you want 100 seasons of it? No problem. The whole notion of authorship is radically reformed and dies, drowned in an unfathomable abyss of AI creations. Human creativity becomes like human chess. People still busy themselves with it for fun, knowing full well that it’s anachronistic and inferior in every way.
Donno, just a thought I have sometimes.
So yeah, you like AI because that way you won’t have to commission and pay real artists and you also don’t mind artists losing their jobs and being dehumanized and having to slave in factories. Glad one of you finally said it.
I didn’t say any of that.
You said that actually. In many more words, but the point of what you said is exactly that. If you want an AI to make the show you want and if all of us thought the way you’re thinking, what do you think writers, directors, actors etc would do?
Also, you’re not considering the fact that art is not made for the public. Art is self-expression. The fact that we like movies others have made is that something about them resonates with us, but the reason those movies were made is not that. And only humans can do self-expression. A machine has nothing to say, a machine feels nothing, a machine is artistically nothing. You’re standing up for the “artistic” equivalent of Matrix soup as replacement for real food cooked by real people.
I’m not ‘standing up’ for anything in particular and I don’t mean to express anything here as an outcome that I want, I’m just thinking out loud and wondering where this all goes.
I understand that you really dislike AI, and feel that what AI makes and what humans make will always and forever be categorically different in some important way. I can see where you’re coming from and a fruitful debate could be had there I think. I’m less sure than you are that AI can be tamed or bottled or destroyed. I think it’s something that is here to stay and will continue to develop whether we like the outcomes or not. As open source AI improves and gets into the hands of the average person, I don’t see how it’s possible to put effective limits on this technology. Geriatric politicians won’t do it, this is painfully obvious. Complaining (or advocating, which you could note I have not done here) in a small corner of an obscure comment thread on an obscure platform won’t make a difference either.
I get the sense that you believe there is a moral responsibility for everybody commenting in an online forum to call for the complete destruction of AI, and anything short of that is somehow morally wrong. I don’t understand that view at all. We’re musing into the void here and it has absolutely no effect on what will actually occur in the AI space. I’m open to changing my mind if you have a case to make about there being some moral responsibility to wave the flag that you want to wave, on an online forum, and that wondering aloud is somehow impermissible.
It only becomes a problem if it is “good enough” to replace working artists. Companies have shown time and time again that they would be willing to cut corners for cheaper production costs. Hollywood would happily sell us AI generated stuff if we were willing to buy it. So consumers would really need to care and push back hard against AI art for artists to remain employed. I don’t see it happening.
Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/827/
This is so stupid. If I read a book and get inspired by it and write my own stuff, as long as I’m not using the copyrighted characters, I don’t need to pay anyone anything other than purchasing the book which inspired me originally.
If this were a law, why shouldn’t pretty much each modern day fantasy author not pay Tolkien foundation or any non fiction pay each citation.
There’s a difference between a sapient creature drawing inspiration and a glorified autocomplete using copyrighted text to produce sentences which are only cogent due to substantial reliance upon those copyrighted texts.
All AI creations are derivative and subject to copyright law.
There’s a difference between a sapient creature drawing inspiration and a glorified autocomplete using copyrighted text to produce sentences which are only cogent due to substantial reliance upon those copyrighted texts.
But the AI is looking at thousands, if not millions of books, articles, comments, etc. That’s what humans do as well - they draw inspiration from a variety of sources. So is sentience the distinguishing criteria for copyright? Only a being capable of original thought can create original work, and therefore anything not capable of original thought cannot create copyrighted work?
Also, irrelevant here but calling LLMs a glorified autocomplete is like calling jet engines a “glorified horse”. Technically true but you’re trivialising it.
Yes. Creative work is made by creative people. Writing is creative work. A computer cannot be creative, and thus generative AI is a disgusting perversion of what you wanna call “literature”. Fuck, writing and art have always been primarily about self-expression. Computers can’t express themselves with original thoughts. That’s the whole entire point. And this is why humanistic studies are important, by the way.
I absolutely agree with the second half, guided by Ian Kerr’s paper “Death of the AI Author”; quoting from the abstract:
Claims of AI authorship depend on a romanticized conception of both authorship and AI, and simply do not make sense in terms of the realities of the world in which the problem exists. Those realities should push us past bare doctrinal or utilitarian considerations about what an author must do. Instead, they demand an ontological consideration of what an author must be.
I think the part courts will struggle with is if this ‘thing’ is not an author of the works then it can’t infringe either?
Courts already expressed themselves, and what they said is basically copyright can’t be claimed for the throw up AIs come up with, which means corporations can’t use it to make money or sue anyone for using those products. Which means generated AI products are a whole bowl of nothing legally, and have no identity nor any value. The whole reason commissions are expensive is that someone has spent money, time and effort to make the thing you asked of them, and that’s why corresponding them with money is right.
Also, why can’t AI be used to automatize the shit jobs and allow us to do the creative work? Why are artists and creatives being pushed out of doing the jobs only humans can do? Like this is the thing that makes me furious: that STEM bros are blowing each other in the fields over humans being pushed out of humanity. Without once thinking AI is much more apt at replacing THEIR jobs, but I’m not calling for their jobs to be removed. This is just a dystopic reality we’re barreling towards, and there are people who are HAPPY about humans losing what makes us human and speeding toward pure, total, complete misery. That’s why I’m emotional about this: because art is only, solely made by humans, and people create art to communicate something they have inside. And only humans can do that - and some animals, maybe. Machines have nothing inside. They are nothing, they are only tools. It’s like asking a hammer to write its own poetry, it’s just insane.
The trivialization doesn’t negate the point though, and LLMs aren’t intelligence.
The AI consumed all of that content and I would bet that not a single of the people who created the content were compensated, but the AI strictly on those people to produce anything coherent.
I would argue that yes, generative artificial stupidity doesn’t meet the minimum bar of original thought necessary to create a standard copyrightable work unless every input has consent to be used, and laundering content through multiple generations of an LLM or through multiple distinct LLMs should not impact the need for consent.
Without full consent, it’s just a massive loophole for those with money to exploit the hard work of the masses who generated all of the actual content.
The thing is these models aren’t aiming to re-create the work of any single authors, but merely to put words in the right order. Imo, If we allow authors to copyright the order of their words instead of their whole original creations then we are actually reducing the threshold for copyright protection and (again imo) increasing the number of acts that would be determined to be copyright protected
But for text to be a derivative work of other text, you need to be able to know by looking at the two texts and comparing them.
Training an AI on a copyrighted work might necessarily involve making copies of the work that would be illegal to make without a license. But the output of the AI model is only going to be a for-copyright-purposes derivative work of any of the training inputs when it actually looks like one.
Did the AI regurgitate your book? Derivative work.
Did the AI spit out text that isn’t particularly similar to any existing book? Which, if written by a human, would have qualified as original? Then it can’t be a derivative work. It might not itself be a copyrightable product of authorship, having no real author, but it can’t be secretly a derivative work in a way not detectable from the text itself.
Otherwise we open ourselves up to all sorts of claims along the lines of “That book looks original, but actually it is a derivative work of my book because I say the author actually used an AI model trained on my book to make it! Now I need to subpoena everything they ever did to try and find evidence of this having happened!”
Machine learning algorithms does not get inspired, they replicate. If I tell a MLM to write a scene for a film in the style of Charlie Kaufman, it has to been told who Kaufman is and been fed alot of manuscripts. Then it tries to mimicks the style and guess what words come next.
This is not how we humans get inspired. And if we do, we get accused of stealing. Which it is.
Because a computer can only read the stuff, chew it and throw it up. With no permission. Without needing to practice and create its own personal voice. It’s literally recycled work by other people, because computers cannot be creative. On the other hand, human writers DO develop their own style, find their own voice, and what they write becomes unique because of how they write it and the meaning they give to it. It’s not the same thing, and writers deserve to get repaid for having their art stolen by corporations to make a quick and easy buck. Seriously, you wanna write? Pick up a pen and do it. Practice, practice, practice for weeks months years decades. And only then you may profit. That’s how it always was and it always worked fine that way. Fuck computers.
but to read the book and be inspired by it, you first had to buy the book. That’s the difference.
What did you pay the author of the books and papers published that you used as sources in your own work? Do you pay those authors each time someone buys or reads your work? At most you pay $0-$15 for a book anyway.
In regards to free advertising when your source material is used… if your material is a good source and someone asks say ChatGPT, shouldn’t your work be mentioned if someone asks for a book or paper and you have written something useful for it? Assuming it doesn’t hallucinate.
That’s the “paid in exposure” argument.
And I’m not sure what my company pays, but they purchase access to scientific papers and industrial standards. The market price I’ve seen for them is hundreds of dollars. You either pay an ongoing subscription to access the information, or you pay a larger lump sum to own a copy that cannot legally be reproduced.
Companies pay for this sort of thing. AI shouldn’t get an exception.
Love to see it!
