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Things are about to get worse for generative AI

garymarcus.substack.com

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Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#11

This perspective on regulation was interesting: https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/12/28/how-to-regulate-... "Congress should declare that big-data AI models do not infringe copyright, but are inherently in the public domain. Congress should declare that use of AI tools will be an aggravating rather than mitigating factor in determinations of civil and criminal liability."

OpenAI and others: AI should be regulated!

Governments starting regulation and companies filinig cipyright lawsuits...

OpenAI: NOT LIKE THAT

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#15

> My guess is that none of this can easily be fixed. Systems like DALL-E and ChatGPT are essentially black boxes. GenAI systems don’t give attribution to source materials because at least as constituted now, they can’t. Is it necessary to fix in the model itself? It seems a gate in the post processing pipeline that checks for copyright infringement could work, provided they can create another model that identifies co…

Exactly; there is no need to do this in the model, you just need well understood token retrieval methods for identifying copyright infringement that ChatGPT's competitors already have.

You will get into some murky definitions of what is exactly required for copyright infringement vs fair use, etc, but we already do this for ContentId for YouTube and text is far simpler.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#17
This feels like another area where piracy will surely be superior in case things like this land on the disallowed side of regulation. The model trained on all data will outperform the model trained on a legal subset of data. Whether or not you use it to produce potentially infringing content is another point. Performance will likely improve from having references to copyrighted material and people capable of doing so, myself included, would probably prefer to interact with the non limited model. Perhaps time to update the laws or at least move liability from the creator of the model to the user. No one is going after pencil makers but I can draw a pretty good Mickey Mouse with access to one. Feels like me generating C3P0 and claiming ownership is my problem, not OpenAIs.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#18

I imagine the argument might be like this: I hire a session musician to play on my new single, paying him $100. I record the whole session. I ask him to play the opening to "Stairway to Heaven" and he does so. "Well, I can't use that as a sample without paying" "Ok play something like Jimmy Page" "Hmm, still sounds like Stairway to Heaven" "Ok, try and sound less like Stairway to Heaven but in that style" "Great, I'l…

In your example, there are missing details. Who owns the output? The way you've described it, that would typically mean that the guitarist is creating a "work for hire" so the ownership transfers to you, but that's a contract detail that would need to be resolved.

For whoever owns the output also owns the liability of the output. You yourself might separately be able to pursue a claim against the guitarist for breech of contract. In the process of that, it might get discovered that you deliberately instructed the guitarist to copy the work, or they copied despite your instructions not to.

But that doesn't change the fact that the final work is infringing. It just allows you to pursue damages that could potentially offset any damages you're liable for from the infringement.

But this also isn't exactly the same situation as OpenAI. OpenAI isn't an individual creator working on contact for you. Even if their ToS ultimately assigns copyright of output to you, there is a matter of scale involved that I think changes things. It's one thing if your guitarist damages you by doing shoddy work, it's another of the guitarist systematizes and scales their shoddy work to damage large numbers of people. Perhaps that would then become a class action issue.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#19
This for me does not make sense as a copyright violation. It’s like saying that Adobe is in trouble because you drew something infringing in Photoshop. If you prompt the model with the intention of creating something infringing by mentioning the name of the characters and the work, and you get something infringing out, then it’s you who have infringed the copyright, not the maker of the tool.
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