Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

There's a notion, which seems to have taken off among creators who are paranoid about AI eating their livelihoods (which it might eat a chunk of) that copyright prevents people from doing anything with works they [legally] acquired other than personally read, listen, or watch it.

That's not how copyright, as it has existed in the past, works. You can do all the algorithmic processing of your ebook collection that you want. You might be able to display small portions of a book to others, depending on the situation.

Quoting one or two paragraphs out of an entire book seems like reasonably safe fair use, but that won't stop a copyright-maximalist creator (or their publisher) from suing you, and won't stop some copyright-maximalist judge from ruling against you, so it's probably best to minimize the amount of content from a book that you redisplay directly. But you can do all the analysis and statistics generation you want, and display those results to others.

It remains to be seen what judges will do with AI generation of works based on ingesting gigantic amounts of copyrighted work. The entire framework of copyright is going to be broken, and until Congress steps in and changes it, judges are going to go every which way. There's no bright line for 4-factor analysis; it's always been a gut-level "is this a reasonable use that doesn't impact commercial sales too much". There's no possible rational way to draw a line. AI models can generate a painting of a new subject only loosely in the style of a contemporary painter, which would not be copyright infringement, or it can generate a near-clone of an existing work with the right prompting, and depending on how clever the prompter is, a lot of intermediate stages of likeness. Who decides how close to an existing work is too close?

> scanned and analyzed a whole bunch of books and would let you call up really useful data on books. [...] Frankly, all of that sounds amazing. And amazingly useful. Even more amazing is that he built it, and it worked. It would produce useful analysis of books.

> This is all quite interesting. It’s also the kind of thing that data scientists do on all kinds of work for useful purposes. Smith built Prosecraft into Shaxpir, again, making it a more useful tool.

Author's general illiteracy aside, he's really giving the game away here. I can't even think about the ethical implications of the project, because why would I care to count the number of adverbs and passive voice in all books ever, and why would you need a state of the art LLM-powered AI to do it?

Easy: humans are not machines. "X does it all the time, so I should be able to do it" is never a valid conclusion. It depends on the situation.

> In fact it's a terribly useful tool, and once the mob cools off it'll likely return.

Maybe this tool in particular does not "abuse" the books. Maybe this tool in particular is terribly useful. But you can't blame authors and artists for taking a stance against those new algorithms that provably have the potential to automatically "steal" from their work. You can believe that asking ChatGPT to "write a novel in the style of X" is not abusing the copyright, that's fine. And the authors can answer that they fear it has the potential to break their source of revenue to a point where they won't want to publish anything anymore. And they are entitled to it. And maybe someday we come up with licenses that prevent the use as training data (how in the world could one conclude today that "it is most definitely fair use", given that this is a very new way of using IP material?).

If an AI tool was killed, I consider it a victory. That's because even if there are some small useful applications of AI, AI on the whole will certainly put most creatives out of business.

Instead, I propose the following: anyone who is interested in preventing AI from taking over their craft should join me in a coalition of ban AI from their own business. By placing a notice that your work is "100% AI FREE", you are doing something akin to the fair-trade/sustainably sourced sticker on chocolate or other food products: you are letting consumers know that your work was made by a human, so that they can support you.

If enough people get in on this, and pledge to support only those creators who don't use AI, then we can make AI an unprofitable venture and hopefully kill it forever!

I already put a 100% AI FREE badge on my YouTube channel, which means that I will never use AI for writing scripts, editing videos, producing images, etc. Moreover, I also pledge to support other creators who pledge never to use AI, by buying their products over others!