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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

#281

Post by saulpw »

_ph_ wrote: post #249
areoform wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Theft from whom and how? Are you telling me that our culture should be deprived of the idea of Indiana Jones and the feelings that character inspires in all of us forever just because a corporation owns the asset? Indiana Jones is 44 years old. When are we allowed to remix, recreate and expand on this like humanity has done since humans first started sitting down next to a fire and telling stories? edit: this reminds…

Not forever. But 75 years after the death of the creator by current international agreement. I definitely think that the exact terms of copyright should be revisited - a lot of usages should be allowed like 50 years of publishing a piece of work. But that needs to be agreed upon and converted into law. Till then, one should expect everyone, especially large corporations, to stick to the law.

When Mickey Mouse was created (1928), copyright was 28 years that could be reupped once for an additional 28 years. So according to those terms, Mickey Mouse would have ascended to the public domain in 1984.

IMO any change to copyright law should not be applied retroactively. Make copyright law to be what is best for society and creators as a whole, not for lobbyists representing already copyrighted material.

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

#282

Post by jkhdigital »

card_zero wrote: post #259
WhyOhWhyQ wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're about to witness a fundamental shift in the human experience. Some time in the near future there will not be a single act of creation you can do that isn't trivial compared to the result of typing "make cool thing please now" into the computer. And your position is to add to the problem because with your policy anything I create should get chucked into the LLM grinder by any and everybody. How do I get my human…

I don't know, that sounds like the basic argument for copyright: "I created a cool thing, therefore I should be able to milk it for the rest of my life". Without this perk, creatives are less motivated. Would that be bad? I guess an extreme version would be a world where you can only publish anonymously and with no tangible reward.

I hate to paint with such a broad brush, but I’d venture that “creatives” are not primarily motivated by profit. It is almost a truism that money corrupts the creative endeavour.

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

#283

Post by Kim_Bruning »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #147
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…

I can't speak for everyone obviously, but my anti-AI sentiment in this regard is not that IP law is flawless and beyond reproach, far from it. I'm merely saying that as long as we're all required to put up with it, that OpenAI and company should also have to put up with it. It's incredibly disingenuous the way these companies have taken advantage of publicly available material on an industrial scale, used said materi…

Beware of pushing for rules that you don't personally believe in. You just might succeed a little too well, and have to live with the consequences.

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

#284

Post by janalsncm »

jMyles wrote: post #169
janalsncm wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's true of all the best artists ever. Just to play Devil’s advocate for a moment, why should we require human artists to be held to the same standards as automated software? We can make whatever rules we want to. A human might implicitly copy, but they are not infinitely scalable. If I draw a picture that in some way resembles Buzz Lightyear I am much less of a threat to Disney than an always-available computer…

> why should we require human artists to be held to the same standards as automated software? Isn't this the same question as, "why should we allow general purpose computing?" If the technology of our age is our birthright, don't we have the right to engage whatever mathematics we find inspiring with its aid? > If I draw a picture that in some way resembles Buzz Lightyear I am much less of a threat to Disney than an…

> Isn't this the same question as, "why should we allow general purpose computing?"

I don’t think so? It’s not illegal to call random people on your phone, but if you do it millions of times per day with a computer it can be illegal.

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

#285

Post by echelon »

kokanee wrote: post #158
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…

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 original claim is false,

> intellectual property [...] used over and over again, primarily by the rich and powerful, to stifle original ideas and hold back cultural innovation.

There's nothing about IP which prevents you from creating your own. There are, in fact, a near infinite number of things you can create. More things than there exist stars in our galaxy.

The problem with ideas is that they have to be good. They have to be refined. They have to hit the cultural zeitgeist, solve a particular problem, or just be useful. That's the hard part that takes the investment of time and money.

In the old world before Gen AI, this was the hard thing that kept companies in power. That world is going away fast, and now creation will be (relatively) easy. More taste makers will be slinging content and we'll wind up in a land of abundance. We won't need Disney to give us their opinion on Star Wars - we can make our own.

The new problem is distributing that content.

> 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.

Unless the masses can create and share on equal footing, you're 100% right.

If it turns out, however, that we don't need Google, OpenAI, or big tech to make our own sci-fi epics, share them with a ton of people, and interact with friends and audiences, then the corporations won't be able to profit off of it.

If social networks were replaced with common carriers and protocols.

If Gen AI could run at the edge without proprietary models or expensive compute.

If the data of YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, Instagram didn't require hyperscaler infra to store, search, and serve.

Unfortunately, there are too many technical reasons why the giants will win. And network effects will favor the few versus many. Unless those parameters change, we'll be stuck with big tech distribution.

Even if the laws around IP change, the hard tech challenges keep the gatekeepers in power. The power accrues to those who can dominate creation (if creation is unilateral), or even more so, to the distributors of that content.

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

#286

Post by munificent »

r3trohack3r wrote: post #246
eaglelamp wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we are going to have a general discussion about copyright reform at a national level, I'm all for it. If we are going to let billion dollar corporations break the law to make even more money and invent legal fictions after the fact to protect them, I'm completely against it. Training a model is not equivalent to training a human. Freedom of information for a mountain of graphics cards in a privately owned data cen…

You’re setting court precedent that will apply equally to OpenAI as it does to the llama.cpp and stable diffusion models running on your own graphics card.

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 actually connect with a human who made that thing. That human would in turn have an audience for people to experience the thing they made.

Was that world so bad?

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

#287

Post by dcow »

kokanee wrote: post #158
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…

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 protection from having their work stolen when the only ones welding weaponized copyright are the corporations. People need the freedom to wield culture without restriction, not protection from someone having the same idea as them and manifesting it.

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

#289

Post by wsintra2022 »

codedokode wrote: post #248
chimpanzee wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Essentially: “information wants to be free”. I agree. But this must include the dissolution of patents. Otherwise corporations and the owners of the infrastructure will simply control everything , including the easily replicable works of individuals.

I am against dissolution of patents if the technology took lot of research. In this case the patent protects from others copying the result of research. However, obvious patents like "a computer system with a display displaying a product and a button to order it" should not be allowed. Also, software patents should not exist (copyright is enough).

What if all that research led to some incredible world changing for the better idea/concept/product in an open society that would benefit everyone, in the closed society only those allowed to use the patent benefit

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

#290

Post by card_zero »

raspyberr wrote: post #252
r0s wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not baffling in the least. No matter the extent you believe in the freedom of information, few believe anyone should then be free to profit from someone else's work without attribution. You seem to think it would be okay for disney to market and charge for my own personal original characters and art, claiming them as their own original idea. Why is that?

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?

The copyright last 70 years after the death of the author, so 170 years would be rare (indeed 190 years would be possible). This was an implementation of a 1993 EU directive:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Duration_Directive

That itself was based on the 1886 Berne Convention. "The original goal of the Berne Convention was to protect works for two generations after the death of the author". 50 years, originally. But why? Apparently Victor Hugo (he of Les Miserables) is to blame. But why was he bothered?

Edit: it seems the extension beyond the death of the author was not what Hugo wanted. "any work of art has two authors: the people who confusingly feel something, a creator who translates these feelings, and the people again who consecrate his vision of that feeling. When one of the authors dies, the rights should totally be granted back to the other, the people." So I'm still trying to figure out who came up with it, and why.

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