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Is A.I. The Death of I.P.?

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Re: Is A.I. The Death of I.P.?

#151

Post by visarga »

bobthecowboy wrote: post #106
thot_experiment wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please explain to me how baking all the art into a big tensor and then giving it away to everyone for free to run on any half decent GPU from the past 10 years is somehow anti-commons. Rent-seeking by controlling AI models is anti-commons, the models themselves are not, neither is training them. Don't delude yourself into thinking that Miyazaki didn't study Moebius didn't study Mucha. Even if you got your way and all…

The jist of what you're saying is in the Free Culture movement/philosophy, I think, and it resonates with me as someone who does not like what AI has done with copyrighted works but also dislikes copyright. The "rent-seekers" is the problem. We collectively inherit and own our shared culture, but large corporations have always wanted to sell it back to us. AI companies are arguing they should have no limitations on t…

I think copyright lawsuits against AI companies will force them to develop attribution models. They will do the work of indexing all ideas to their authors. This will also reveal what is common knowledge, and who borrowed from who without attribution.

In order to make attribution models we need text+author+timestamp. We can get that from books, newspaper articles, scientific papers and social network posts. Then we extend to the rest of the training set.

But then we can also make AI models that cleverly avoid infringement while the same strict checking is going to be applied to human made content. Humans are not that good at avoiding pitfalls.

Re: Is A.I. The Death of I.P.?

#152

Post by karmakaze »

mlsu wrote: post #144
rangerelf wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're sowing the seeds to undermine your own arguments, because, literally, everything of social utility is a fiction: money, law, "private property", contracts, and so forth. All of them are needed for society to function, but at the same time all of them are convenient fictions for us to build upon.

My point is that in these discussions, don't make the mistake of considering the artificial thing ("it's copyrightable/it's not copyrightable"). Rather, consider the real thing ("You will pay a licensing fee to use your GPU").

It's only real if you believe it has value. If you choose to say copyright is made up and doesn't have real value then it isn't real to you, but recognize that it's arbitrary as others will believe in the value of copyright so still has value in their eyes. e.g. Taking a copyright from someone (if that were possible) would cost them like taking a fee costs them--losing something they value.

Re: Is A.I. The Death of I.P.?

#153

Post by mindcandy »

teddyh wrote: post #121
mindcandy wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there is no mechanism for attribution. What if there was? What if I hand-painted an image (without AI) and God himself came down from heaven and explained to the world that my painting was derived 10% from my observations of the collected works of Lisa Frank, 3% from looking at Davinci paintings, and 87% a long tail of various sources. And then I sell my painting for $100. OK. Now what?

> OK. Now what? Do I owe Lisa Frank $10? No, because copyright law says that if you hand-paint an image (without AI), then as long as the images isn’t deemed (by a court, if necessary) to be a derivative work, then you, and nobody else, own the copyright. The word of God is not necessarily considered by the law. And even if the court takes the word of God as gospel, a 10% derivative work might not exceed the necessar…

Very good!

Alternatively, if I created a large body of works that were 90% Lisa Frank and brought it to a large market distribution, making significant revenue, then she could sue me for damaging her market and her brand. Which she has done to others in the past and rightly won. Go Lisa Frank!

But, if I used an AI tool in the process of making an image that came out 10% Lisa Frank, she wouldn't have a strong case against me. Nor does she have a case against the million random teenagers hand-copying her style but not making significant revenue from their copies.

Either way, AI doesn't really factor in here. The results are the results and the markets are the markets regardless of AI or paint brushes.

Re: Is A.I. The Death of I.P.?

#154

Post by Dracophoenix »

__loam wrote: post #22
thot_experiment wrote: post #8

No subscription and archive.is is broken on 1.1 but it seems like the conversation is finally moving in a good direction. I'm very very tentatively hopeful that we might see some reduction of IP rights in my lifetime. It's going to be a long hard fight but maybe, just maybe we will see people wake the fuck up and realize how important the building up the fucking commons is to the progress of all humanity.

It's rich to see people talk about the commons like AI models aren't a massive tragedy of the commons.

The tragedy of the commons relates to deletable resources, such as grass feed for livestock. How's that relevant to ML models that create content/resources about as fast as most can think? What's being depleted?

Re: Is A.I. The Death of I.P.?

#155

Post by somewhereoutth »

chmod600 wrote: post #136
somewhereoutth wrote: post #31

Depending on the outcome of the NYT case, I.P. may in fact be the death of (profitable) AI. One problem with AI (vs e.g. Google search) is that there is no mechanism for attribution. So it is impossible for rights holders to understand whether their works are being monetised (unlike, say, Spotify). Should NYT win, then either AI services will have to pay into a (very large) common pot for rights holders, which likely…

Are there other examples where the law crushed fundamental technological shifts? (Not just delayed briefly by starving investment or something.)

That assumes that the current crop of LLMs are a fundamental technological shift.

Furthermore, rights holders did it for file sharing, why not AI too?

Re: Is A.I. The Death of I.P.?

#156

Post by eimrine »

efsavage wrote: post #89
mlsu wrote: post #43

Copyright is not a real thing. It's a fiction. Subverting copyright law is not like subverting the laws of physics. What happens when you subvert copyright law is some guys with guns, in either an overt way or a subtle one, force a trade of your imaginary resource (copyright) for the real resource (money), through licensing or fines. Debate about what AI means for copyright is really a debate about what we choose to…

In the sense of Sapiens†, yes, copyright is a fiction, but so is money, or any law or contract or agreement. In as much as it affects people's lives and societies and economies it is "real". The question of the article isn't about realness, it's whether it can evolve or survive this latest shift. † https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapiens:_A_Brief_History_of_Hu...

The obelisk symbol after Sapiens word put in the manner it is being put after the names of dead people emparrassed me a little.

Re: Is A.I. The Death of I.P.?

#157

Post by BobaFloutist »

neonsunset wrote: post #51
dandellion wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was no other outcome possible from the moment we invented a technology that allowed everybody to create infinite copies of digital content at almost zero cost. If tomorrow we discovered a source of infinite free energy, oil and energy companies could try anything they wanted, their current business model would end up obsolete sooner or later.

Just look at what happened to nuclear energy :)

Nuclear power plants have a dramatically higher upfront cost than personal computers. You can't really ignore the capital cost and call the energy free.

A better example is solar power, which is slowly but surely whittling away at fossil fuels.

Re: Is A.I. The Death of I.P.?

#158

Post by visarga »

mplewis wrote: post #104
thot_experiment wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please explain to me how baking all the art into a big tensor and then giving it away to everyone for free to run on any half decent GPU from the past 10 years is somehow anti-commons. Rent-seeking by controlling AI models is anti-commons, the models themselves are not, neither is training them. Don't delude yourself into thinking that Miyazaki didn't study Moebius didn't study Mucha. Even if you got your way and all…

We all know that an artist studying the masters to make something original isn't the same as an autocomplete API picking the color of the next pixel. Come on, man.

> studying the masters to make something original

original or "original"? maybe AI companies need to hire people to make "original" content for AI.

Re: Is A.I. The Death of I.P.?

#159

Post by arrosenberg »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #120
arrosenberg wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's hard to believe we've come this far, and it's only going to keep climbing in capability. Or we hit the top of the sigmoid curve and just have fancy autocomplete.

I don't understand why the autocomplete meme is so compelling to people. How is drawing a picture, which modern AI systems are already capable of, "autocomplete"?

(1) I was responding to the actual thing OP said (70% code completion in Rust).

(2) It literally is autocompleting - it draws each pixel because it statistically determines that is the best fit given the prompt and the prior pixels it drew. It's a more advanced robot, but it's still a robot.

Re: Is A.I. The Death of I.P.?

#160

Post by silveira »

I find it revealing that some decades ago when teenagers were copying mp3s in their rooms for their own enjoyment it was piracy, crime, reprehensible, police, prisons, etc. When corporations are doing mass copyright infringement, we are talking about death of IP or changing the copyright laws to accommodate them.
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