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AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

heathermeeker.com

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Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#261
post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> scale commonly matters in law I am not a lawyer, so the following is only my opinion. Scale matters, but so does the legality of the thing that scales. Reading two dozen books by other authors, or studying hundreds of artworks, or visiting the museum of awesome statues every week, in order to get inspired for ones own novel/painting/scuplture, isn't illegal. So a lawsuit will have a really hard time argueing that i…

You make it sound like we should assume that getting inspiration from a few hundred or thousand art works that are very famous and highly public is the same as training over nearly every available public piece of art. I see no reason why that should be our null hypothesis. Humans either learn art by being natural art geniuses, or by receiving instruction and learning through an iterative process (where, again, they m…

1. An AI has a training set of one image and produces an exact replica.

2. An AI has a training set of every image in the world and produces an entirely unique work.

Which do you have more of a problem with?

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that the justice system is so inefficient that it doesn't serve people with less than a lawyers salary of money to waste isn't important to the conversation of whether it's fair or not for someone to ignore licensing and repackage your code as an "AI". If you want to talk about the big picture here, it's about privatizing gains and socializing losses, the goal of every bigcorp, which is just more reason to d…

Of course it’s material to the conversation whether people have resources in practice to use the tools of the justice system. It’s why small claims court is a powerful tool compared to a wrongful termination suit. What you’re asking for is going to only benefit corporations. They’re the sole entities that will be able to afford the regulation you’re proposing. It’s not even a hypothetical concern. Much of my notabili…

It should be up to the rights-holders what they allow their works to be used for. That way, I can say, "no, Microsoft, you can't pay me enough to allow your bot to train on my works" and at the same time allow you to train books3, thus taking power away from MS. If the rights-holders have no say, the barrier to entry is having big stacks of computers, and big corps win by default already.

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#263
post #177
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “Do you ask for permission when you train your mind on copyrighted books?” I’m not able to read billions of books in less than an hour. Even if we agree that machine learning is like human learning, scale commonly matters in law.

I’m not able to read billions of books in less than an hour. I think you underestimate the sheer volume of data + conclusions the brain ingests and processes on a daily basis, primarily through unconscious experience.

Not not mention the millions of years building our nervous system.

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it’s material to the conversation whether people have resources in practice to use the tools of the justice system. It’s why small claims court is a powerful tool compared to a wrongful termination suit. What you’re asking for is going to only benefit corporations. They’re the sole entities that will be able to afford the regulation you’re proposing. It’s not even a hypothetical concern. Much of my notabili…

It should be up to the rights-holders what they allow their works to be used for. That way, I can say, "no, Microsoft, you can't pay me enough to allow your bot to train on my works" and at the same time allow you to train books3, thus taking power away from MS. If the rights-holders have no say, the barrier to entry is having big stacks of computers, and big corps win by default already.

For what it’s worth, it was shockingly easy to get access to big stacks of computers, as someone who had very few resources. I hardly had money for IVF, let alone a supercomputer.

TRC (TPU research cloud) makes supercomputers freely available to anyone who will put them to good use. Like, literally you. You don’t even have to have a clear research goal for general access.

It was one of the big surprises of getting into AI. I didn’t expect that at all.

Even without TRC, compute is only getting exponentially cheaper. A 1.5B ChatGPT may sound puny, but I’ve seen how powerful the non-chat variants are.

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then do it! I swear when I see this argument because it makes me angry. You’re right, but they didnt , because they were too lazy and cheap to do it that way. …and that’s why people are angry, and rightly so. Fully licensed models are the future, and it’s both irritating and disappointing that we are where we are right now because the people training these models were too lazy to assemble a training dataset that wasn…

> but clearly from the lawsuits it isn’t ok Well, a lawsuit isn't a decision, we will have to wait for the courts to decide wheter it's legally okay or not.

Ultimately it doesn’t matter.

Reputation damage has been done.

Undoing that is going to take time and effort which, could be spent on more productive things.

I’m disappointed in where we are right now. It was entirely avoidable.

Lazy. Cheap.

/me shakes head…

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On what basis?

Human nature. We haven't changed that much in the past 50k years or so. Some people are very altruistic and giving, others not so much. An artist might club you over the head for stealing his techniques and ideas and copying them into a new portion of the cave or rock wall, others would have taught you and approved of your work.

I'm not so sure about that. If I listen to old blues artists from the 20s-60s then everyone seemed to be copying everything from everyone else.

Do you get angry if someone "steals" your programming techniques and ideas, and copies them into a new portion of the codebase?

I think all of this is very cultural.

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#270
post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you ask for permission when you train your mind on copyrighted books? I pay the books directly (cash, credit) or indirectly (school books via taxes). I do pay the louvre to observe the painting. I also pay to listen music in ads (YouTube) or via subscription (YT Music and Spotify).

But the datasets these tools are using are available to view for free. The AI isn't stealing physical books or paintings, it's viewing the same data that you or I can by sending an HTTP request, for free.

Could an AI view you for free in a street or even through a window? Does that imply it can use that view data to create advertising using your modified likeness, for example? Just because you can view something for free doesn't mean you can use it anyway you want.
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