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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.?

#251

Post by mlsu »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #150
mlsu wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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").

I'm still confused. Sure, a GPU is a real, physical thing. But licenses and fees are no more or less fiction than copyright. A license says "I have permission from the company makers to use this product", similar to how copyright is "you must get permission from me to use my product". But for the sake of this discussion: I don't think anyone can assume those permissions when using a tool to generate the base image. I…

Sigh.

I know that everyone is chomping at the bit to logically own me in this thread, and that's fine -- have your fun. There are a dozen comments informing me that "IP law around AI" and "fiat currency" are both made-up, and that's obviously true.

Right now "fiat currency" or "contracts" is settled. We are not radically redefining what those are (despite the web3 crowd's insistence). The story around IP with regards to AI is quite different. We are at a fork in the road. It is actually up to us to decide what AI fundamentally is, as it relates to IP. It's genuinely up in the air, and gives us an opportunity to re-examine some aspects of how we treat ownership of information. In my opinion, this is a good thing and an exercise worth doing. A chance to re-do some of what the internet failed at. Remember Aaron Swartz?

Personally, I'm quite cynical: I think the existing social power structure will win and absorb AI into its IP regime. AI will be locked down even faster than the internet was, because value can so obviously captured. The winners will be Disney, Sony, Warner, Elsevier... we'll all be poorer for it. But yeah! Good thing people can't make images of Spider Man?

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

#252

Post by johnnyanmac »

foobiekr wrote: post #39
jprete wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think AGI is desirable?

Humans are too stupid to collectively govern themselves. Just look at the US election cycle that is starting. There is a genuine messianistic cult at work.

Isn't this the premise of like, half of all cyberpunk works?

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

#253

Post by johnnyanmac »

amelius wrote: post #6
midasuni wrote: 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.

Cool, sounds like the 20X0's version of "we'll just outsource the engineers".

Of course, they have relatively little to lose and can just reverse course in a few years, likely undercutting the market despite talent being more efficient and self sufficient and able to generate more funds for the company (if I take the charitable end road for this AI stuff).

I guess history really does rhyme.

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

#254

Post by mewpmewp2 »

sam0x17 wrote: post #180
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.

Sure, you can make a slippery slope argument, but there is something substantially more "fictional" / artificial / unnatural about copyright/IP than currencies and other social constructs you are equivocating with. Storytelling is as old as language itself and might even be older than our particular species, and is basically copyright infringement. The same goes for tool-making, which is thought to be one of the spar…

I think your point is, that copyright is whatever we decide it to be, as with other things we use in society, but we should decide by what is most useful for the society as a whole, in this case it might be that, we have to not care about it, because it might be societal danger to block AI evolvement as competitors who don't care will get ahead. This might override the usual benefit of protecting people's output so they would be more incentivised to share and create their output in the first place.

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

#255

Post by mewpmewp2 »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #62
tilwidnk wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Copyright is not a real thing. It's a fiction. Now, I don't have a college degree, but with my 60+ years life experience I can say, yes, copyright is a real thing, it protects people who create, from assholes and AI.

It's not real beyond what the parent post described, which is an expectation that the state will use guns and cages in reaction to certain behaviors

But they won't if it's going to threaten their military capability vs other actors like China, Russia or otherwise.

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

#256

Post by mlsu »

ricardo81 wrote: post #66
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…

>What happens when you subvert copyright law is some guys with guns, in either an overt way or a subtle one That just seems like a sociopathic argument to circumvent perfectly clear laws intended to protect people who expend energy into offering new ideas and also trying to diminish what is already delineated as right and wrong. In the blatant sense. I'm not sure how your gun analogy funnels along to fair use. As wit…

You can find all the code I've ever written on Github, licensed MIT. I only wish I could do the same for the code I've written for pay. I cannot release that, because people more powerful than me have decided that I don't own it.

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

#257

Post by mlsu »

kopecs wrote: post #68
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…

Do you not believe that societal constructs are real? What makes (fiat) money a real resource and copyright an imaginary one? What about this logic: Debt is not a real thing. It's a fiction. Subverting contract law is not like subverting the laws of physics. Simply don't pay your bills! What happens when you subvert contract law is some guys with guns, in either an overt way or a subtle one, force a trade of your ima…

I do not believe any of these social constructs are real. Map vs territory.

The map: debt.

The territory: guys who come to your house and kick you out for not paying your debt.

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

#258

Post by johnnyanmac »

reb wrote: post #168
silveira wrote: post #160

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.

This is the right take — whatever your position on the future of this technology or its costs and benefits for humanity, the hypocrisy mentioned here shouldn't go unacknowledged.

In a vacuum this shouldn't be an issue at all. We make stuff, we honor and benefit the creators, we share as needed and progress humanity as a whole. So I can understand the more optimistic approaches to AI as a tech revolution.

But in reality, everytime small entrepreneurs always thnk this will be the tech that let them usurp the big boys, and they end up selling out (not necessarily blaming them. I'd do it too). They have more resources, can scale up faster, produce more, and hire more people. It's a hopelessly risky gambit to think you can topple such advantage. And if you get an edge in, they just take it in for themselves and you're back at square one.

But you may not even get that far. They try to make use of this new commons and the Big Boys will litigate the gates back closed for them specifically. They got their value, made the next iteration, and then decided not to give back to the commons (a tragedy, if you will). They may even seem benevolent at first, but time goes on, priorities or leaders change, and the focus on market capture eclipses any public goodwill.

The same players as yester-decade are at the helm, so I don't know why anyone would want to trust them after giving decades of scrutiny as they gradually unmasked themselves. I don't necessarily fear the tech per se, I fear the same "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" playbook happening all over again, maybe in such a way to make the new gap insurmountable.

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

#259

Post by johnnyanmac »

mcmoor wrote: post #243
reb wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the right take — whatever your position on the future of this technology or its costs and benefits for humanity, the hypocrisy mentioned here shouldn't go unacknowledged.

I see the exact hypocrisy from the opposite side too. Praising pirating while treating AI as crime against humanity.

Depends on your lens. If you view it as "crime", sure. If you view it as "obtaining quality content", you can see why and where these users' priorities are. The web is already this riddled SEO optimized spam-Festa that makes it hard to find what you want or desire, now AI comes in and increases the spam tenfold.

AI for those people just make their jobs of seeking what's worth pirating that much harder. Especially for those that can now fire half their staff and put most of that remaining money into said SEO optimization for their spam.

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

#260

Post by carlosjobim »

robertlagrant wrote: post #98
thot_experiment wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it costs zero to produce a copy of a novel is the moral choice to create artificial scarcity to preserve it's value in our current system of value assignment, or is the moral choice to fight to change and improve the system to more align with the reality that novels exist in a post-scarcity world? Do we really want to deny people something that costs nothing in order to preserve the status quo? Perhaps it's the…

Does that mean novel writing would only be for those who are already independently wealthy? How would that actually work?

That's the basic argument that hackers make. Creativity shouldn't be a way to make a living, but a cool hobby for people who are already employed with comfortable salaries and their real estate paid off. Trying to sell your creativity is grifting. In fact, the novel writer should pay the hacker if the hacker pleases to read the novel, because the novel writer is using the hacker's valuable attention. Or at least I've heard around here that attention is very valuable.
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