311–320 of 957 posts
Art has been democratized. It's not going back in the bottle. A kid with a laptop anywhere on the planet will be able to compete with the largest Hollywood studio in the near future.
> But I can't even get cartoons to most people for free now, without doing unpaid work for the profit-making companies who own the most use channels of communication This is the sticking point for me. OpenAI isn't a profit-making company, but it's certainly a valuable company. A valuable company that is built from the work of content others created without transferring any value back to them. Regardless of legalities…
It would be good to see how much it changes if you only include work that is public domain.
I don't see why Disney or Universal would be more legitimate than OpenAI to profit from stuff made from now dead authors 60 years ago. Both seems as legitimate.
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I'm not as interested in making a technical/legal argument, as I'm just sharing my feelings on the topic (and eventually, what I think the law should be), but during training copies are made of copyrighted material, even if the model doesn't contain exact copies of work. Crawling, downloading, storing (temporarily) for training all involve making copies, and thus are subject to copyright law. Maybe those copies are f…
Assume I agree that copyright holders should be compensated for their works (because I do in some sense). How would this compensation work? Let's say a portion of profits from LLMs that were trained on copyrighted work should be sent to the copyright holders. How would we allocate which portion of the profits go to which creators? The only "fair" way here would be if we could trace how much a specific work influenced…
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That's a matter of perspective. AI's do not make a copy of the source material. It very much just adjusts their internal weights, which from a broadminded perspective, can be seen as simple inspiration, and not copying. Of course, just like a human artist, it could probably closely approximate the source material if it wanted to, but it would still be its own approximation, not an exact duplicate. As for plagiarism,…
Based on the comment you replied to, it seems they are indeed producing verbatim copies.
Well i'll leave it to the legal system to decide if that's true.
But in any case, that's no different from a human with a photographic memory doing the same thing after reading a paragraph. We don't blame them for their superior memory, or being inspired by the knowledge. We don't claim they've violated copyright because their memory contains an exact copy of what they read.
We may still demand that they avoid reproducing the exact words they've read, even though they are capable of it -- which is fine. We can demand the same of AI's. All I object to, is the idea that a smart AI, with a great memory is guilty of something just by reading or viewing content that was willingingly shared online.
Those of you who are desperately trying to soften the blow - "they're talking about facebook, not OpenAI", "it's fair use, the license terms are irrelevant", "nothing has been taken from them" - you need to allow yourself to think the thought that maybe your AI startup's business model is only valuable because of theft. You need to let yourself entertain the idea that maybe you are only getting paid a cushy tech sala…
And those who are getting paid those great tech salaries, should be willing to send 100% of their paychecks to artists while they code for free. Because . . . they're not creating value with their code. It took them years to learn how to code well. All that effort should be contributed to the world for free.
I mean, there is a plethora of open source work that is actually contributed to the world for free, right?
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Of course this all depends on jurisdiction, but e.g. in the US for example fair use does not show up [oops, see note] in the limitations and exceptions in the copyright definition (like e.g. government use does), but relies on case law, the "fair use doctrine". This means quite literally it is a framework for understanding the defence of a particular use based on precedent: the defendant(s) argued it. It's a bit of a…
I think it makes a difference, because it shifts the burden of proof. If fair use is a kind of infringement, then it’s up to the “infringer” to prove fair use. I think that’s ethically and legally backwards: the copyright holder should have to prove that the use was not fair.
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>> If you think OpenAI is less valuable because it can't use copyrighted content, then it should give some of that value back to the content. But we are allowed to use copyrighted content. We are not allowed to copy copyrighted content. We are allowed to view and consume it, to be influenced by it, and under many circumstances even outright copy it. If one doesn't want anyone to see/consume or be influenced by one's…
The artist in the article clearly states that his work was free to use only if it was not used to make a profit, those were the terms of their license. In the artist's opinion, OpenAI violated that license by training their tool on their work and then selling that tool. This artist doesn't complain about work similar to their own being generated, and their artwork is very clearly not clothing.
Replace "use" with "copy". No one may copy the work to make a profit. Fair Use has long been an exemption to copyright, with Learning an example of Fair Use. But no one expected AIs to learn so quickly. I don't think it is clear either way, and will end up in SCOTUS.
Free and redistribute the material
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>> If you think OpenAI is less valuable because it can't use copyrighted content, then it should give some of that value back to the content. But we are allowed to use copyrighted content. We are not allowed to copy copyrighted content. We are allowed to view and consume it, to be influenced by it, and under many circumstances even outright copy it. If one doesn't want anyone to see/consume or be influenced by one's…
Does copyright law say you can ingest copyrighted work at very large scale and sell derivates of those works to gain massive profit / massive market capitalizations? Honestly wondering. This seems to be the crux issue here.
Entire industries exist dedicated to such things. News aggregators. TV parody shows. Standup comedians. Fan fiction. Biography writers. Art critics. Movie critics. Sometimes the derivative work even outsells the original, especially when the original was horrible or unappreciated. I have never played Among Us or the new Call of Duty, but I do enjoy watching NeebsGaming do their youtube parodies of them.
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Fair use. Licenses like that are enforced under copyright, if the use is not subject to copyright, the license terms are irrelevant.
I don't think its fair use. https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/what-is-fair-... There are complications, but google can use thumbnails because essentailly they are used to "review" the website. Has google sampled and hosted the whole image on their own website and made more iamges in the style of say mickey mouse, they would have been taken to town by the owners. This is why there are no commercial movies…
One only needs to read the Supreme Court decision in Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith. In this case, it was found to not be fair use, but with a forceful dissent from Elena Kagan. And this is just a straight-up use of a photograph / art-piece. Add technology to the mix and things get really messy quickly.
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Because we are humans and our capability of abusing those rights is limited. The scale and speed at which LLMs can abuse copyrighted work to threaten the livelihoods of the authors of those works is reason enough to consider it unethical.
"abusing those rights" is a subjective phrase. What about it is "abuse"? If I learned how to draw cartoon characters from copying Family Guy and released a cartoon where the characters are drawn in a similar style, would that be abuse (assuming my show takes some of Family Guy's viewership)? Is your ethical hangup with the fact it's wrong to use the data of others to influence one's work (which could potentially be a…
Intellectual property law does presently restrict the development of cancer treatments and demands in many cases exorbitant royalties from patients and practitioners, so I'm not convinced that this is accurate. If people believed that the loss of opportunities would constrain innovation in the field of cancer research, I think they'd expect the AI users to pay royalties as well.