Technology

I will repeat what I have proffered before:

If OpenAI stated that it is impossible to train leading AI models without using copyrighted material, then, unpopular as it may be, the preemptive pragmatic solution should be pretty obvious, enter into commercial arrangements for access to said copyrighted material.

Claiming a failure to do so in circumstances where the subsequent commercial product directly competes in a market seems disingenuous at best, given what I assume is the purpose of copyrighted material, that being to set the terms under which public facing material can be used. Particularly if regurgitation of copyrighted material seems to exist in products inadequately developed to prevent such a simple and foreseeable situation.

Yes I am aware of the USA concept of fair use, but the test of that should be manifestly reciprocal, for example would Meta allow what it did to MySpace, hack and allow easy user transfer, or Google with scraping Youtube.

To me it seems Big Tech wants its cake and to eat it, where investor $$$ are used to corrupt open markets and undermine both fundamental democratic State social institutions, manipulate legal processes, and undermine basic consumer rights.

The problem is not the use of copyrighted material. The problem is doing so without permission and without paying for it.

https://petapixel.com/2024/01/03/court-docs-reveal-midjourney-wanted-to-copy-the-style-of-these-photographers/

What's stopping AI companies from paying royalties to artists they ripped off?

Also, lol at accounts created within few hours just to reply in this thread.

The moment their works are the one that got stolen by big companies and driven out of business, watch their tune change.

Edit: I remember when Reddit did that shitshow, and all the sudden a lot of sock / bot accounts appeared. I wasn't expecting it to happen here, but I guess election cycle is near.

Some relevant comments from Ars:

leighno5

The absolute hubris required for OpenAI here to come right out and say, 'Yeah, we have no choice but to build our product off the exploitation of the work others have already performed' is stunning. It's about as perfect a representation of the tech bro mindset that there can ever be. They didn't even try to approach content creators in order to do this, they just took what they needed because they wanted to. I really don't think it's hyperbolic to compare this to modern day colonization, or worker exploitation. 'You've been working pretty hard for a very long time to create and host content, pay for the development of that content, and build your business off of that, but we need it to make money for this thing we're building, so we're just going to fucking take it and do what we need to do.'

The entitlement is just...it's incredible.

4qu4rius

20 years ago, high school kids were sued for millions & years in jail for downloading a single Metalica album (if I remember correctly minimum damage in the US was something like 500k$ per song).

All of a sudden, just because they are the dominant ones doing the infringment, they should be allowed to scrap the entire (digital) human knowledge ? Funny (or not) how the law always benefits the rich.

1. This is not REALLY about copyright - this is an attack on free and open AI models, which would be IMPOSSIBLE if copyright was extended to cover the case of using the works for training.
2. It's not stealing. There is literally no resemblance between the training works and the model. IP rights have been continuously strengthened due to lobbying over the last century and are already absurdly strong, I don't understand why people on here want so much to strengthen them ever further.

It's crazy how everyone is suddenly in favour of IP law.

Having read through these comments, I wonder if we've reached the logical conclusion of copyright itself.

Any reasonable person can reach the conclusion that something is wrong here.

What I'm not seeing a lot of acknowledgement of is who really gets hurt by copyright infringement under the current U.S. scheme. (The quote is obviously directed toward the UK, but I'm reasonably certain a similar situation exists there.)

Hint: It's rarely the creators, who usually get paid once while their work continues to make money for others.

Let's say the New York Times wins its lawsuit. Do you really think the reporters who wrote the infringed-upon material will be getting royalty checks to be made whole?

This is not OpenAI vs creatives. OK, on a basic level it is, but expecting no one to scrape blogs and forum posts rather goes against the idea of the open internet in the first place. We've all learned by now that what goes on the internet stays there, with attribution totally optional unless you have a legal department. What's novel here is the scale of scraping, but I see some merit to the "transformational" fair-use defense given that the ingested content is not being reposted verbatim.

This is corporations vs corporations. Framing it as millions of people missing out on what they'd have otherwise rightfully gotten is disingenuous.

Well in that case maybe chat gpt should just fuck off it doesn’t seem to be doing anything particularly useful, and now it’s creator has admitted it doesn’t work without stealing things to feed it. Un fucking believable. Hacks gonna hack I guess.

As with many things, the golden rule applies. They who have the gold, make the rules.

...so stop doing it!

This explains what Valve was until recently not so cavalier about AI: They didn't want to hold the bag on copyright matters outside of their domain.

It's also "impossible" to have multiple terabytes of media on my homeserver without copyright infringement, so piracy is ok, right!?

O no, wait it actually is possible, it's just more expensive and more work to do it legally (and leaves a lot of plastic trash in form of Blurays and DVDs), just like with AI. But laws are just for poor people, I guess.

Then shutdown your goddamn company until you find a better way.

I stand by my opinion that AI will be the worst thing humans ever created, and that means it ranks just a bit above religion.

If it is impossible, either shut down operations or find a way to pay for it.

The real issue is money. How much and how (un)distributed.

Why is it fair/ok that one company can use all this material and make a lot of money off it without paying or even acknowledging others work?

On the flip side AI model could be useful. Maybe the models/weights should be made free just like the content they are trained on. Instead of paying for the model, we should pay for the hosting of the inference (aka. the API)

Or, or, or, hear me out:

Maybe their particular approach to making an AI is flawed.

Its like people do not know that there are many different kinds of ways that attempt to do AI.

Many of them do not rely on basically a training set that is the cumulative sum of all human generated content of every imaginable kind.

Then pay for the material like everyone else who can't do things without someone else's copyrighted materials.

All the AI race has done is surface the long standing issue of how broken copyright is for the online internet era. Artists should be compensated but trying to do that using the traditional model which was originally designed with physical, non infinitely copyable goods in mind is just asinine.

One such model could be to make the copyright owner automatically assigned by first upload on any platform that supports the API. An API provided and enforced by the US copyright office. A percentage of the end use case can be paid back as royalties. I haven't really thought out this model much further than this.

Machine learning is here to say and is a useful tool that can be used for good and evil things alike.

Wait, so if the way I make money is illegal now, it's the system's fault, isn't it? That means I can keep going because I believe I'm justified, right? Right?

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Of course it is. About 50 years ago we went to a regime where everything is copywrited rather then just things that were marked and registered. Not sure where.I stand on that. One could argue we are in a crazy over copyright era now anyway.