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An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip

theaiunderwriter.substack.com

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Re: An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip

#301

Post by Lerc »

pixl97 wrote: post #172
kokanee wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea of open sourcing everything and nullifying patents would benefit corporations like Disney and OpenAI vastly more than it would benefit the people. The first thing that would happen is that BigCorp would eat up every interesting or useful piece of art, technology, and culture that has ever been created and monetize the life out of it. These legal protections are needed by the people. To the Pirate Party's cre…

>The first thing that would happen is that BigCorp would eat up every interesting or useful piece of art, technology, and culture that has ever been created and monetize the life out of it. Wait, I'm still trying to figure out the difference between your imaginary world and the world we live in now?

I think the main difference is if everything were freely available they may attempt to monetize the life out of it, but they will fail if they can't actually provide something people actually want. There's no more "You want a thing so you're going to buy our thing because we are the exclusive providers of it. That means we don't even have to make it very good"

If anyone in the world could make a Star Wars movie, the average Star Wars movie would be much worse, but the best 10 Star Wars movies might be better that what we currently have.

Re: An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip

#302

Post by card_zero »

codedokode wrote: post #262
raspyberr wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. I 100% unironically believe that anyone should be able to use anyone else's work royalty/copyright free after 10-20 years instead of 170 in the UK. Could you please justify why 170 years is in any way a reasonable amount of time?

May I ask why you want to use someone's work instead of creating your own?

I mean, it's fun. Ever listened to the KLF, and things from the era before sampling was heavily sat on, such as the album 1987 (What the Fuck Is Going On?) - ? I don't claim it's very good, but it was definitely fun. And the motivation for using existing works, instead of creating your own, is similar to the motivation for using existing words, instead of creating your own. They're reference points, people recognize them, you can communicate with them instead of having to extract patience from the audience like they have to learn a new language for each work. And of course in practice the rules are fuzzy, so everybody sails close to the wind by imitating others and in this way we share a culture. Stealing their work is just sharing the culture more closely.

Re: An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip

#303

Post by darioush »

tastyface wrote: post #163
mlsu wrote: post #137

I was really hoping that the conversation around AI art would at least be partially centered on the perhaps now dated "2008 pirate party" idea that intellectual property, the royalty system, the draconian copyright laws that we have today are deeply silly, rooted in a fiction, and used over and over again, primarily by the rich and powerful, to stifle original ideas and hold back cultural innovation. Unfortunately, i…

A different way of looking at it: AI, by design, defaults to regurgitating the poppiest of pop culture content. Every whip-wielding archaeologist is now Harrison Ford. Every suave British spy is now Daniel Craig. With the power of AI, creativity is dead and buried.

don't you think it is empowering and aspiring for artists? they can try several drafts of their work instantaneously, checking out various compositions etc before even starting the manual art process.

they could even input/train it on their own work. I don't think someone can use AI to copy your art better than the original artist.

Plus art is about provenance. If we could find a scrap piece of paper with some scribbles from Picasso, it would be art.

Re: An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip

#304

Post by dcow »

slg wrote: post #295
tastyface wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A different way of looking at it: AI, by design, defaults to regurgitating the poppiest of pop culture content. Every whip-wielding archaeologist is now Harrison Ford. Every suave British spy is now Daniel Craig. With the power of AI, creativity is dead and buried.

This is what was often missed in the previous round of AI discourse that criticized these companies for forcing diversity into their systems after the fact. Every suave spy being Daniel Craig is just the apolitical version of every nurse being a woman or every criminal being Black. Converging everything to the internet's most popular result represents an inaccurate and a dumped down version of the world. You don't ha…

It’s only a flaw insofar as it’s used in ways in which the property of the tool is problematic. Stereotypes are use for good and bad all the time, let’s not pretend that we have to attack every problem with a funky shaped hammer because we can’t admit that it’s okay to have specialized tools in the tool belt.

Re: An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip

#305

Post by munificent »

dcow wrote: post #300
munificent wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SGTM. Honestly, seriously. Imagine some weird Thanos showed up, snapped his fingers and every single bit of generative AI software/models/papers/etc. were wiped from the Earth forever. Would that world be measurably worse in any way in terms of meaningful satisfying lives for people? Yes, you might have to hand draw (poorly) your D&D character. But if you wanted to read a story, or look at an image, you'd have to act…

Obviously the former status quo wasn’t that bad . But the opposite is also true, AI democratizes access to pop culture. So now when I connect with a human it’s not to share memes, it’s higher order. IOW we can spend more time playing D&D because we didn't have to draw our characters.

> AI democratizes access to pop culture.

Pop culture was already democratized. That's literally what makes it popular culture.

> So now when I connect with a human it’s not to share memes, it’s higher order.

I suspect that improving the image quality of the memes does not measurably improve the quality of the human connection here.

> IOW we can spend more time playing D&D because we didn't have to draw our characters.

You never had to draw your characters. You can just play and use your imagination. Why would we let LLMs do our dreaming for us?

Re: An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip

#306

Post by wsintra2022 »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #176
fragmede wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's self indulgent wankery. If I, as writer and an artist, have just the most absolutely brilliant thoughts, and write them down into a book or draw the most beautiful artwork, I can earn money off that well into my afterlife with copyright. Meanwhile the carpenter who is no less bright, can only sell the chair he's built once. In order to make money off of it, he must labor to produce a second or even a thi…

The only people making chairs by hand today are exceptionally well-paid artisanal craft carpenters and/or designers/studios. It's not at all unusual for popular/iconic furniture designs to be copyrighted. Reality is people who invent truly original, useful, desirable things are the most important human beings on the planet. Nothing that makes civilisation what it is has happened without original inventiveness and cre…

Nah I made a beautiful bench just the other week. I’m not well-paid artisanal craft carpenters and/or designers/studios.just a regular fella who has a dab hand at carpentry

Re: An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip

#307

Post by fragmede »

codedokode wrote: post #297
fragmede wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JK Rowling never has to work again in her life because she wrote a couple of books that were exceedingly popular. Because she doesn't have to work, she's not been forced to come up with new stuff. How is that not stifling?

You pick one example and ignore thousands of writers who didn't even return costs after publishing a book. Also, as another example, a great Russian 19th century poet and writer Alexander Pushkin left lot of debt after his death. He supported publishing other writers but it turned out to be a commercial failure. Maybe this fact will make you less unhappy about supposedly unclouded lazy writer's career.

I'm not ignoring that, I'm saying that a differently organized society would have everybody working 40 weeks a year instead of the ridiculous inequality we face today.

Re: An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip

#308

Post by photonthug »

ryandamm wrote: post #235
masfuerte wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really care. Either enforce the current copyright regime and sue the AI companies to dust. Or abolish copyright and let us all go hog wild. But this halfway house where you can ignore the law as long as you've got enough money is disgusting.

This may not be a particularly popular opinion, but current copyright laws in the US are pretty clearly in favor of training an AI as a transformative act, and covered by fair use. (I did confirm this belief in conversation with an IP attorney earlier this week, by the way, though I myself am not a lawyer.) The best-positioned lawsuits to win, like NYTimes vs. OpenAI/MS, is actually based on violating terms of use, r…

> The best-positioned lawsuits to win, like NYTimes vs. OpenAI/MS, is actually based on violating terms of use, rather than infringing at training time.

I agree with this, but it's worth noting this does not conflict with and kind of reinforces the GP's comment about hypocrisy and "[ignoring] the law as long as you've got enough money".

The terms of use angle is better than copyright, but most likely we'll never see any precedent created that allows this argument to succeed on a large scale. If it were allowed then every ToS would simply begin to say Humans Only, Robots not Welcome or if you're a newspaper then "reading this you agree that you're a human or a search engine but will never use content for generative AI". If github could enforce site terms and conditions like that, then they could prevent everyone else from scraping regardless of individual repository software licenses, etc.

While the courts are setting up precedent for this kind of thing, they will be pressured to maintain a situation where terms and conditions are useful for corporations to punish people. Meanwhile, corporations won't be able to punish corporations for the most part, regardless of the difference in size. But larger corporations can ignore whatever rules they want, to the possible detriment of smaller ones. All of which is more or less status quo

Re: An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip

#309

Post by singleshot_ »

dcow wrote: post #287
kokanee wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea of open sourcing everything and nullifying patents would benefit corporations like Disney and OpenAI vastly more than it would benefit the people. The first thing that would happen is that BigCorp would eat up every interesting or useful piece of art, technology, and culture that has ever been created and monetize the life out of it. These legal protections are needed by the people. To the Pirate Party's cre…

How do restaurants work, then? You can’t copyright a recipe. Instructions can’t generally be copyrighted, otherwise someone would own the fastest route from A to B and charge every person who used it. The whole idea of intellectual property gets really weird when you try to pinpoint what exactly is being owned. I do not agree with your conjecture that big corps would win by default. Ask why would people need protecti…

It’s more reasonable to say that the idea of intellectual property is challenging for nonlawyers because of the difficulty in understanding ownership not as one thing, but as a bundle of various elements of control, exclusion, obligation, or entitlement, even some of which spring into existence out of nowhere.

In other words, the challenge is not to understand “what exactly is being owned,” and instead, to understand “what exactly being owned is.”

Re: An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip

#310

Post by dcow »

munificent wrote: post #305
dcow wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously the former status quo wasn’t that bad . But the opposite is also true, AI democratizes access to pop culture. So now when I connect with a human it’s not to share memes, it’s higher order. IOW we can spend more time playing D&D because we didn't have to draw our characters.

> AI democratizes access to pop culture. Pop culture was already democratized. That's literally what makes it popular culture. > So now when I connect with a human it’s not to share memes, it’s higher order. I suspect that improving the image quality of the memes does not measurably improve the quality of the human connection here. > IOW we can spend more time playing D&D because we didn't have to draw our characters…

It's a rhetorical example. Suppose you need to create an avatar of your character. Why does it follow that it's not beneficial to have an AI help generate the avatar?

You're responding to the specific example, not the general argument. Unless your counter is that whatever humanity is doing that AI is helping is probably stupid and shouldn't be done anyway.

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