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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.?

#12
post #4
post #3

For context, I.P. here = Intelectual Property and not Internet Protocol address. You can save a click today.

Is the answer “yes” or “no”? I suspect the actual answer is “those with wealth will continue to amass it and those without will struggle more”

A: No [1]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

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

#14
I think so. Not just because of copyrights as the article covers, because the people who want to abuse copyright for A.I. and the people who own copyrights are basically the same people. They will simply cross-license and lock normal people out of using the products of A.I. by wielding that licensing against individuals.

The real reason is that anybody can do A.I. and it can't be very patent-encumbered, being a number of abstract mathematical techniques. If it becomes an absurdly productive technology, you won't easily be able to keep people from using it in private. Maybe the real Butlerian Jihad will be the government Office of A.I. Copyright Royalties sending agents and their silicon-sniffing dogs to kick in people's doors following rumors of Aggravated Infringement.

Maybe it will be what finally gets general purpose computers banned?

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

#15
No, it will result in a strengthening. It raises the value of things previous unprotectable, and thus will raise the incentive to get them protected. The Wild West of the AI world today will rapidly get captured because by the time you've amassed the resources to put up a credible AI, you're already a fairly large corporation. The scale of time necessary to get new protections passed is roughly comparable to the scale of time it will take for these companies to become owned one way or another by existing interests.

The good news is that this probably still won't much affect your personal projects or anything. Anything you can already self-host and do today isn't going anywhere and you've probably got at least another two or three generations in this fast-moving space before the law clamps down. It is likely that many of the referenced AI aspects will be essentially "solved" before then, such as voice cloning. They aren't going to go after every last little AI user for every last thing because that's squeezing blood from a stone and not cost-effective. But don't plan on building a multi-million-subscriber YouTube channel out of it.

And if you are interested in the freedom to do things the copyright owners don't want you to do, be sure to self-host and archive as much as possible. The ability to do this on platforms others host is going to disappear rapidly, if it isn't already.

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

#16
post #6
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the answer “yes” or “no”? I suspect the actual answer is “those with wealth will continue to amass it and those without will struggle more”

Traditionally, rich people paid poor artists to obtain new artworks. In the future, they just click a button.

This is actually not necessarily only a rich thing. There are numerous artists that will accept commissions and create something for you, unique to you, and it's not thousands of dollars.

But your statement brings up (or at least makes me think of) what I think is an interesting point: there's the notion of mass media, which started when broadcasting became a thing. Play 1 recording via a method where potentially millions can hear or see it. It was after the development of broadcast technology that copyright maximalism took hold. IMHO the current IP regime is for that purpose, and cracks are showing in it because media is becoming more fragmented and more personalized. Would mass media ever become a thing of the past?

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

#17

Intellectual property isn't.

The problem is that our society has no other viable widespread mechanism to support the many millions of people who do intellectual work, and lots of intellectual work is really important for our society-- far more important than would make sense to relegate to hobbyists and volunteers. And this is coming from someone who's contributed well over 10k coding hours to FOSS software.

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

#18
It's been dead a while because of big tech. YouTube, Google, Facebook, Twitter - they have no way of effectively managing IP and so you basically see people's stolen content and they monetise it, so

TBF Napster and torrents are another and earlier angle.

Purely IMO, big tech normalised the taking of other people's content, and it's getting to the point where content creators (as in, ones that are capable of producing unique content, not wealthy YouTubers per se) have simply had enough. The idea of authorities and primary sources is rapidly diminished with the hodge podge we have to navigate through in information discovery.

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

#19

I think so. Not just because of copyrights as the article covers, because the people who want to abuse copyright for A.I. and the people who own copyrights are basically the same people. They will simply cross-license and lock normal people out of using the products of A.I. by wielding that licensing against individuals. The real reason is that anybody can do A.I. and it can't be very patent-encumbered, being a numbe…

In a world where general purpose computers are banned, would there be some kind of underground speakeasy type computer labs?

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

#20

It's been dead a while because of big tech. YouTube, Google, Facebook, Twitter - they have no way of effectively managing IP and so you basically see people's stolen content and they monetise it, so TBF Napster and torrents are another and earlier angle. Purely IMO, big tech normalised the taking of other people's content, and it's getting to the point where content creators (as in, ones that are capable of producing…

> big tech normalised the taking of other people's content

This was normalized by large media companies long before big tech.

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