‘Impossible’ to create AI tools like ChatGPT without copyrighted material, OpenAI says::Pressure grows on artificial intelligence firms over the content used to train their products
OK, so pay for it.
Pretty simple really.
Or let’s use this opportunity to make copyright much less draconian.
¿Porque no los dos?
I don’t understand why people are defending AI companies sucking up all human knowledge by saying “well, yeah, copyrights are too long anyway”.
Even if we went back to the pre-1976 term of 28 years, renewable once for a total of 56 years, there’s still a ton of recent works that AI are using without any compensation to their creators.
I think it’s because people are taking this “intelligence” metaphor a bit too far and think if we restrict how the AI uses copyrighted works, that would restrict how humans use them too. But AI isn’t human, it’s just a glorified search engine. At least all standard search engines do is return a link to the actual content. These AI models chew up the content and spit out something based on it. It simply makes sense that this new process should be licensed separately, and I don’t care if it makes some AI companies go bankrupt. Maybe they can work adequate payment for content into their business model going forward.
It shouldn’t be cheap to absorb and regurgitate the works of humans the world over in an effort to replace those humans and subsequently enrich a handful of silicon valley people.
Like, I don’t care what you think about copyright law and how corporations abuse it, AI itself is corporate abuse.
And unlike copyright, which does serve its intended purpose of helping small time creators as much as it helps Disney, the true benefits of AI are overwhelmingly for corporations and investors. If our draconian copyright system is the best tool we have to combat that, good. It’s absolutely the lesser of the two evils.
Do you believe it’s reasonable, in general, to develop technology that has the potential to replace some human labor?
Do you believe compensating copyright holders would benefit the individuals whose livelihood is at risk?
the true benefits of AI are overwhelmingly for corporations and investors
“True” is doing a lot of work here, I think. From my perspective the main beneficiaries of technology like LLMs and stable diffusion are people trying to do their work more efficiently, people paying around, and small-time creators who suddenly have custom graphics to illustrate their videos, articles, etc. Maybe you’re talking about something different, like deep fakes? The downside of using a vague term like “AI” is that it’s too easy to accidently conflate things that have little in common.
There’s 2 general groups when it comes to AI in my mind: Those whose work would benefit from the increased efficiency AI in various forms can bring, and those who want the rewards of work without putting in the effort of working.
The former include people like artists who could do stuff like creating iterations of concept sketches before choosing one to use for a piece to make that part of their job easier/faster.
Much of the opposition of AI comes from people worrying about/who have been harmed by the latter group. And it all comes down the way that the data sets are sourced.
These are people who want to use the hard work of others for their own benefit, without giving them compensation; and the corporations fall pretty squarely into this group. As does your comment about “small-time creators who suddenly have custom graphics to illustrate their videos, articles, etc.” Before AI, they were free to hire an artist to do that for them. MidJourney, for example, falls into this same category - the developers were caught discussing various artists that they “launder through a fine tuned Codex” (their words, not mine, here for source) for prompts. If these sorts of generators were using opt-in data sets, paying licensing fees to the creators, or some other way to get permission to use their work, this tech could have tons of wonderful uses, like for those small-time creators. This is how music works. There are entire businesses that run on licensing copyright free music out to small-time creators for their videos and stuff, but they don’t go out recording bands and then splicing their songs up to create synthesizers to sell. They pay musicians to create those songs.
Instead of doing what the guy behind IKEA did when he thought “people besides the rich deserve to be able to have furniture”, they’re cutting up Bob Ross paintings to sell as part of their collages to people who want to make art without having to actually learn how to make it or pay somebody to turn their idea into reality. Artists already struggle in a world that devalues creativity (I could make an entire rant on that, but the short is that the starving artist stereotype exists for a reason), and the way companies want to use AI like this is to turn the act of creating art into a commodity even more; to further divest the inherently human part of art from it. They don’t want to give people more time to create and think and enjoy life; they merely want to wring even more value out of them more efficiently. They want to take the writings of their journalists and use them to train the AI that they’re going to replace them with, like a video game journalism company did last fall with all of the writers they had on staff in their subsidiary companies. They think, “why keep 20 writers on staff when we can have a computer churn out articles for our 10 subsidiaries?” Last year, some guy took a screenshot of a piece of art that one of the artists for Genshin Impact was working on while livestreaming, ran it through some form of image generator, and then came back threatening to sue the artist for stealing his work.
Copyright laws don’t favor the small guy, but they do help them protect their work as a byproduct of working for corporate interests. In the case of the Genshin artist, the fact that they were livestreaming their work and had undeniable, recorded proof that the work was theirs and not some rando in their stream meant that copyright law would’ve been on their side if it had actually gone anywhere rather than some asshole just being an asshole. Trademark isn’t quite the same, but I always love telling the story of the time my dad got a cease and desist letter from a company in another state for the name of a product his small business made. So he did some research, found out that they didn’t have the trademark for it in that state, got the trademark himself, and then sent them back their own letter with the names cut out and pasted in the opposite spots. He never heard from them again!
I don’t understand why people are defending AI companies sucking up all human knowledge by saying “well, yeah, copyrights are too long anyway”.
Would you characterize projects like wikipedia or the internet archive as “sucking up all human knowledge”?
Does Wikipedia ever have issues with copyright? If you don’t cite your sources or use a copyrighted image, it will get removed
In Wikipedia’s case, the text is (well, at least so far), written by actual humans. And no matter what you think about the ethics of Wikipedia editors, they are humans also. Human oversight is required for Wikipedia to function properly. If Wikipedia were to go to a model where some AI crawls the web for knowledge and writes articles based on that with limited human involvement, then it would be similar. But that’s not what they are doing.
The Internet Archive is on a bit less steady legal ground (see the resent legal actions), but in its favor it is only storing information for archival and lending purposes, and not using that information to generate derivative works which it is then selling. (And it is the lending that is getting it into trouble right now, not the archiving).
Wikipedia is free to the public. OpenAI is more than welcome to use whatever they want if they become free to the public too.
I don’t understand why people are defending AI companies
Because it’s not just big companies that are affected; it’s the technology itself. People saying you can’t train a model on copyrighted works are essentially saying nobody can develop those kinds of models at all. A lot of people here are naturally opposed to the idea that the development of any useful technology should be effectively illegal.
This is frankly very simple.
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If the AI is trained on copyrighted material and doesn’t pay for it, then the model should be freely available for everyone to use.
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If the AI is trained on copyrighted material and pays a license for it, then the company can charge people for using the model.
If information should be free and copyright is stifling, then OpenAI shouldn’t be able to charge for access. If information is valuable and should be paid for, then OpenAI should have paid for the training material.
OpenAI is trying to have it both ways. They don’t want to pay for information, but they want to charge for information. They can’t have one without the either.
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I am not saying you can’t train on copyrighted works at all, I am saying you can’t train on copyrighted works without permission. There are fair use exemptions for copyright, but training AI shouldn’t apply. AI companies will have to acknowledge this and get permission (probably by paying money) before incorporating content into their models. They’ll be able to afford it.
What if I do it myself? Do I still need to get permission? And if so, why should I?
I don’t believe the legality of doing something should depend on who’s doing it.
Yes you would need permission. Just because you’re a hobbyist doesn’t mean you’re exempt from needing to follow the rules.
As soon as it goes beyond a completely offline, personal, non-replicatible project, it should be subject to the same copyright laws.
If you purely create a data agnostic AI model and share the code, there’s no problem, as you’re not profiting off of the training data. If you create an AI model that’s available for others to use, then you’d need to have the licensing rights to all of the training data.
You can make these models just fine using licensed data. So can any hobbyist.
You just can’t steal other people’s creations to make your models.
Of course it sounds bad when you using the word “steal”, but I’m far from convinced that training is theft, and using inflammatory language just makes me less inclined to listen to what you have to say.
Training is theft imo. You have to scrape and store the training data, which amounts to copyright violation based on replication. It’s an incredibly simple concept. The model isn’t the problem here, the training data is.
Training is theft imo.
Then it appears we have nothing to discuss.
I’m no fan of the current copyright law - the Statute of Anne was much better - but let’s not kid ourselves that some of the richest companies in the world have any desire what so ever to change it.
My brother in Christ I’m begging you to look just a little bit into the history of copyright expansion.
I am well aware.
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I only discuss copyright on posts about AI copyright issues. Yes, brilliant observation. I also talk about privacy y issues on privacy relevant posts, labor issues on worker rights related articles and environmental justice on global warming pieces. Truly a brilliant and skewering observation. Youre a true internet private eye.
Fair use and pushing back against (corporate serving) copyright maximalism is an issue I am passionate about and engage in. Is that a problem for you?
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As long as capitalism exist in society, just being able go yoink and taking everyone’s art will never be a practical rule set.
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How hard it is doesn’t matter. If you can’t compensate people for using their work, or excluding work people don’t want users, you just don’t get that data.
There’s plenty of stuff in the public domain.
Sounds like a OpenAI problem and not an us problem.
I never said it was going to be easy - and clearly that is why OpenAI didn’t bother.
If they want to advocate for changes to copyright law then I’m all ears, but let’s not pretend they actually have any interest in that.
I can guarantee you that you’re going to have a pretty hard time finding a dataset with diverse data containing things like napkin doodles or bathroom stall writing that’s compiled with permission of every copyright holder involved.
You make this sound like a bad thing.
And why is that a bad thing?
Why are you entitled to other peoples work, just because “it’s hard to find data”?
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Wow! You’re telling me that onerous and crony copyright laws stifle innovation and creativity? Thanks for solving the mystery guys, we never knew that!
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I guess the lesson here is pirate everything under the sun and as long as you establish a company and train a bot everything is a-ok. I wish we knew this when everyone was getting dinged for torrenting The Hurt Locker back when.
Remember when the RIAA got caught with pirated mp3s and nothing happened?
What a stupid timeline.
if it’s impossible for you to have something without breaking the law you have to do without it
if it’s impossible for the artistocrat class to have something without breaking the law, we change or ignore the law
Copyright law is mostly bullshit, though.
Oh sure. But why is it only the massive AI push that allows the large companies owning the models full of stolen materials that make basic forgeries of the stolen items the ones that can ignore the bullshit copyright laws?
It wouldn’t be because it is super profitable for multiple large industries right?
Let’s wait until everyone is laid off and it’s ‘impossible’ to get by without mass looting then, shall we?
Its almost like we had a thing where copyrighted things used to end up but they extended the dates because money
I was literally about to come in here and say it would be an interesting tangential conversation to talk about how FUCKED copyright laws are, and how relevant to the discussion it would be.
More upvote for you!
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The main difference between the two in your analogy, that has great bearing on this particular problem, is that the machine learning model is a product that is to be monetized.
And ultimately replace the humans it learned from.
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Also an “AI” is not human, and should not be regulated as such
And real children aren’t in a capitalist society?
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Sounds like a solution would be to force, for any AI, to either share the source code or proof that it’s not trained on copyrighted data
Naive
The difference here is that a child can’t absorb and suddenly use massive amounts of data.
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I really don’t understand this whole “learning” thing that everybody claims these models are doing.
A Markov chain algorithm with different inputs of text and the output of the next predicted word isn’t colloquially called “learning”, yet it’s fundamentally the same process, just less sophisticated.
They take input, apply a statistical model to it, generate output derived from the input. Humans have creativity, lateral thinking and the ability to understand context and meaning. Most importantly, with art and creative writing, they’re trying to express something.
“AI” has none of these things, just a probability for which token goes next considering which tokens are there already.
I don’t think “learning” is a word reserved only for high-minded creativeness. Just rote memorization and repetition is sometimes called learning. And there are many intermediate states between them.
Humans have creativity, lateral thinking and the ability to understand context and meaning
What evidence do you have that those aren’t just sophisticated, recursive versions of the same statistical process?
Out of curiosity, how far do you extend this logic?
Let’s say I’m an artist who does fractal art, and I do a line of images where I take jpegs of copywrite protected art and use the data as a seed to my fractal generation function.
Have I have then, in that instance, taken a copywritten work and simply applied some static algorithm to it and passed it off as my own work, or have I done something truly transformative?
The final image I’m displaying as my own art has no meaningful visual cues to the original image, as it’s just lines and colors generated using the image as a seed, but I’ve also not applied any “human artistry” to it, as I’ve just run it through an algorithm.
Should I have to pay the original copywrite holder?
If so, what makes that fundamentally different from me looking at the copywritten image and drawing something that it inspired me to draw?
If not, what makes that fundamentally different from AI images?deleted
I feel like you latched on to one sentence in my post and didn’t engage with the rest of it at all.
That sentence, in your defense, was my most poorly articulated, but I feel like you responded devoid of any context.
Am I to take it, from your response, that you think that a fractal image that uses a copywritten image as a seed to it’s random number generator would be copyright infringement?
If so, how much do I, as the creator, have to “transform” that base binary string to make it “fair use” in your mind? Are random but flips sufficient?
If so, how is me doing that different than having the machine do that as a tool? If not, how is that different than me editing the bits using a graphical tool?deleted
It’s a question of scale. A single child cannot replace literally all artists, for example.
The problem is that a human doesn’t absorb exact copies of what it learns from, and fair use doesn’t include taking entire works, shoving them in a box, and shaking it until something you want comes out.
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Except they literally don’t. Human memory doesn’t retain an exact copy of things. Very good isn’t the same as exactly. And human beings can’t grab everything they see and instantly use it.
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Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
C418 - Haggstrom, but it’s composed by John Williams
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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But our current copyright model is so robust and fair! They will only have to wait 95y after the author died, which is a completely normal period.
If you want to control your creations, you are completely free to NOT publish it. Nowhere it’s stated that to be valuable or beautiful, it has to be shared on the world podium.
We’ll have a very restrictive Copyright for non globally transmitted/published works, and one for where the owner of the copyright DID choose to broadcast those works globally. They have a couple years to cash in, and then after I dunno, 5 years, we can all use the work as we see fit. If you use mass media to broadcast creative works but then become mad when the public transforms or remixes your work, you are part of the problem.
Current copyright is just a tool for folks with power to control that power. It’s what a boomer would make driving their tractor / SUV while chanting to themselves: I have earned this.
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I think it’s pretty amazing when people just run with the dogma that empowers billionaires.
Every creator hopes they’ll be the next taylor swift and that they’ll retain control of their art for those life + 70 years and make enough to create their own little dynasty.
The reality is that long duration copyright is almost exclusively a tool of the already wealthy, not a tool for the not-yet-wealthy. As technology improves it will be easier and easier for wealth to control the system and deny the little guy’s copyright on grounds that you used something from their vast portfolio of copyright/patent/trademark/ipmonopolyrulelegalbullshit. Already civil legal disputes are largely a function of who has the most money.
I don’t have the solution that helps artists earn a living, but it doesn’t seem like copyright is doing them many favors as-is unless they are retired rockstars who have already earned in excess of the typical middle class lifetime earnings by the time they hit 35, or way earlier.
I don’t have the solution that helps artists earn a living, but it doesn’t seem like copyright is doing them many favors as-is unless they are retired rockstars who have already earned in excess of the typical middle class lifetime earnings by the time they hit 35, or way earlier.
Just because copyright helps them less doesn’t mean it doesn’t help them at all. And at the end of the day, I’d prefer to support the retired rockstars over the stealing billionaires.
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Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Them: “Oh yeah I have 10 minutes until my dentist appointment, I’ll check that out.”
First:
I truly believe that they don’t matter as an individual when looking at their creation as a whole. It matters among their loved ones, and for that person itself. Why do you need more… importance? From who? Why do you need to matter in scope of creation? Is it a creation for you? Then why publish it? Is it a creation for others? Then why does your identity matter? It just seems like egotism with extra steps. Using copyright to combat this seems like a red herring argument made by people who have portfolio’s against people who don’t…
You are not only your own person, you carry human culture remnants distilled out of 12000 years of humanity! You plagiarised almost the whole of humanity while creating your ‘unique’ addition to culture. But, because your remixed work is newer and not directly traceable to its direct origins, we’re gonna pretend that you wrote it as a hermit living without humanity on a rock and establish the rules from there on out. If it was fair for all the players in this game, it would already be impossible to not plagiarise.
Funny thing is, human artists work quite similar to AI, in that they take the whole of human art creation, build on ot and create something new (sometimes quite derivative). No art comes out of a vacuum, it builds on previous works. I would not really say AI plagiarizes anything, unless it reproduced pretty much the exact work of someone
IMHO being able to “control your creations” isn’t what copyright was created for; it’s just an idea people came up with by analogy with physical property without really thinking through what purpose is supposed to serve. I believe creators of intellectual “property” have no moral right to control what happens with their creations, and they only have a limited legal right to do so as a side-effect of their legal right to profit from their creations.
I’m dumbfounded that any Lemmy user supports OpenAI in this.
We’re mostly refugees from Reddit, right?
Reddit invited us to make stuff and share it with our peers, and that was great. Some posts were just links to the content’s real home: Youtube, a random Wordpress blog, a Github project, or whatever. The post text, the comments, and the replies only lived on Reddit. That wasn’t a huge problem, because that’s the part that was specific to Reddit. And besides, there were plenty of third-party apps to interact with those bits of content however you wanted to.
But as Reddit started to dominate Google search results, it displaced results that might have linked to the “real home” of that content. And Reddit realized a tremendous opportunity: They now had a chokehold on not just user comments and text posts, but anything that people dare to promote online.
At the same time, Reddit slowly moved from a place where something may get posted by the author of the original thing to a place where you’ll only see the post if it came from a high-karma user or bot. Mutated or distorted copies of the original instance, reformated to cut through the noise and gain the favor of the algorithm. Re-posts of re-posts, with no reference back to the original, divorced of whatever context or commentary the original creator may have provided. No way for the audience to respond to the author in any meaningful way and start a dialogue.
This is a miniature preview of the future brought to you by LLM vendors. A monetized portal to a dead internet. A one-way street. An incestuous ouroborous of re-posts of re-posts. Automated remixes of automated remixes.
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There are genuine problems with copyright law. Don’t get me wrong. Perhaps the most glaring problem is the fact that many prominent creators don’t even own the copyright to the stuff they make. It was invented to protect creators, but in practice this “protection” gets assigned to a publisher immediately after the protected work comes into being.
And then that copyright – the very same thing that was intended to protect creators – is used as a weapon against the creator and against their audience. Publishers insert a copyright chokepoint in-between the two, and they squeeze as hard as they desire, wringing it of every drop of profit, keeping creators and audiences far away from each other. Creators can’t speak out of turn. Fans can’t remix their favorite content and share it back to the community.
This is a dysfunctional system. Audiences are denied the ability to access information or participate in culture if they can’t pay for admission. Creators are underpaid, and their creative ambitions are redirected to what’s popular. We end up with an auto-tuned culture – insular, uncritical, and predictable. Creativity reduced to a product.
But.
If the problem is that copyright law has severed the connection between creator and audience in order to set up a toll booth along the way, then we won’t solve it by giving OpenAI a free pass to do the exact same thing at massive scale.
And yet, I believe LLMs are a natural evolutionary product of NLP and a powerful tool that is a necessary step forward for humanity. It is already capable of exceptionally quickly scaffolding out basic tasks. In it, I see the assumptions that all human knowledge is for all humans, rudimentary tasks are worth automating, and a truly creative idea is often seeded by information that already exists and thus creativity can be sparked by something that has access to all information.
I am not sure what we are defending by not developing them. Is it a capitalism issue of defending people’s money so they can survive? Then that’s a capitalism problem. Is it that we don’t want to get exactly plagiarized by AI? That’s certainly something companies are and need to continue taking into account. But researchers repeat research and come to the same conclusions all the time, so we’re clearly comfortable with sharing ideas. Even in the Writer’s Guild strikes in the States, both sides agreed that AI is helpful in script-writing, they just didn’t want production companies to use it as leverage to pay them less or not give them credit for their part in the production.
If OpenAI is right (I think they are) one of two things need to happen.
- All AI should be open source and non-profit
- Copywrite law needs to be abolished
For number 1. Good luck for all the reasons we all know. Capitalism must continue to operate.
For number 1. Good luck because those in power are mostly there off the backs of those before them (see Disney, Apple, Microsoft, etc)
Anyways, fun to watch play out.
There’s a third solution you’re overlooking.
3: OpenAI (or other) wins a judgment that AI content is not inherently a violation of copyright regardless of materials it is trained upon.
It’s why AI ultimately will be the death of capitalism, or the dawn of the endless war against the capitalists (literally, and physically).
AI will ultimately replace most jobs, capitalism can’t work without wage slave, or antique capitalism aka feudalism… so yeah. Gonna need to move towards UBI and more utopian, or just a miserable endless bloody awful war against the capitalists.
I have the perfect solution. Shorten the copyright duration.
This situation seems analogous to when air travel started to take off (pun intended) and existing legal notions of property rights had to be adjusted. IIRC, a farmer sued an airline for trespassing because they were flying over his land. The court ruled against the farmer because to do otherwise would have killed the airline industry.
I member
And we did so before then with ‘Mineral Rights’. You can drill for oil on your property but If you find it - it ain’t yours because you only own what you can walk on in many places. Capitalists are gonna capitalize
Burglary is impossible without breaking some doors and locks. So you have to make it legal to break doors and locks now, because otherwise I cannot go on with my profession.
Is this the point where we start UBI and start restructuring society for the future of AI?
