‘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
‘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
That’s a rebuttal on the level of “if a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it”. Legally, theoretically, you should need permission just as much, but nobody is going to sue you over something nobody else sees.
Copyright addresses reproduction and distribution, paid or not, including derivative works. There are exemptions for journalism and education, AI advanced a lot by using copyrighted materials under the reasoning that it was technological research, but as it spun off into commercial use, its reliance on copyrighted materials for training has become much more questionable.
Copyright law only works because most violations are not feasible to prosecute. A world where copyright laws are fully enforced would be an authoritarian dystopia where all art and science is owned by wealthy corporations.
Copyright law is inherently authoritarian. The conversation we should have been having for the last 100 years isn’t about how much we’ll tolerate technical violations of copyright law; it’s how much we’ll tolerate the chilling effect of copyright law on sharing for the sake of promoting new creative works.
Absolutely and I’m with you on that. I think Copyright is excessively long and overly restrictive.
But that is another conversation.
The conversation we are having now is how to protect and compensate human creators that need their livelihoods to keep creating in our society as it is, when these new AI tools, trained on their works, are used to deliberately replace them.
There are many issues with copyright as it is right now, but it is literally the only resort that artists have left in this situation. It’s not a given that opposing copyright hinders corporations. In this particular case there are many corporations salivating at the opportunity to replace human creators with AI, to get faster work, cheaper, to appropriate distinctive styles without needing to hire the people who developed them.
There is a chilling effect on its own happening here. There are writers and artists today that are seeing their jobs handed to AI, which decide creative works are not a feasible career to have anymore. Not only this is tragic by virtue of human interest alone, since AI relies on human creators to be trained, it’s very possible that they will spiral into recursive derivativeness and become increasingly stale, devoid of fresh ideas and styles.