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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

#321

Post by Arainach »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #272
2716057 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially true if that child or its mother has a huge market capitalization, large profit margins, highly-paid employees and shareholders eager to reap some more $$. If the public starts to see LLMs as highly sophisticated copyright laundromats it would most likely hamper further investment & development in that field.

> Especially true if that child or its mother has a huge market capitalization, large profit margins, highly-paid employees and shareholders eager to reap some more $$. This is the bit I don’t get from the “feed everything to machine” LLM-maximalists. Do they think courts don’t take context into account, do they think all actions happen in a vacuum and that they can just skip along and ignore laws at their pleasure b…

>This is the bit I don’t get from the “feed everything to machine” LLM-maximalists. Do they think courts don’t take context into account, do they think all actions happen in a vacuum and that they can just skip along and ignore laws at their pleasure

An entire generation of unicorn startups believed that (Uber, AirBnB, etc.). We see in the news every day that once you have enough money laws don't apply to you (most things Elon Musk does, the fact that Trump can defy court orders repeatedly and not go to jail, etc.) so yes, this seems entirely plausible.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#322

Post by layer8 »

WhiteNoiz3 wrote: post #281

As I understood it, the legal precedent for generative AI is the same one that allows google to scrape websites in order to index them for search for the common good. Google also can display cached versions of websites which is the original content of those sites. No one is going to say that google is copyright infringement just because it is showing content from other websites verbatim. So I think this is a weak arg…

The ability to provide a reference to the source is the crucial difference here.

I agree that it should be possible to implement that for generative AI, although the training may become significantly more expensive in order to maintain that information, and the AI companies have little interest in doing so. They’ll probably rather try to heuristically assess possible copyright issues after the fact in a post-processing step.

The more interesting question is if copyright holders can claim unauthorized use of their works beyond the case of near-verbatim reproduction, because the works collectively inform the AI in a more general manner.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#323

Post by ausbah »

_xnmw wrote: post #256
Havoc wrote: post #55

To me that’s the wrong question. Everyone knew it was trained on copyrighted material and capable of eerily similar outputs. But it’s already done. At scale. Large corps committing fully. There is no chance of that toothpaste going back in the tube. It’s a bit like when big tech built on aggressive user data harvesting. Whether it’s right, ethical or even legal is academic at this stage. They just did it - effectivel…

So you're saying this is a fait accompli. Like many great innovations in tech, break the law because the law is silly; remember when Uber and AirBnB were illegal in most major cities and achieved market dominance anyway? I say, good riddance. I never believed in any such thing as "intellectual property" anyway, I say, get rid of it all, patents, copyright, and the whole pile of imaginary "rights". More than half the…

this comment has already aged poorly because cities are starting to push airbnbs out and taxi usage is at least somewhat up

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#324

Post by hahajk »

> And a whole universe of potential trademark infringements with this single two-word prompt: animated toys

If you flood the market and dominate children's culture with toys from your TV shows, you absolutely cannot complain when your toys are considered iconic enough to be the generic "animated toy". These images don't replace or substitute the things they are depicting.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#325

Post by RyEgswuCsn »

jncfhnb wrote: post #284
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the child / author then regurgitates entire paragraphs or sections verbatim in his own works and someone notices, you bet there will be a plagiarism lawsuit coming his way.

Agreed. Fortunately, AI does not have “own works”

You will have to define "own works". How can you measure how "owning" some work is?

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#326

Post by kayodelycaon »

asylteltine wrote: post #278
clbrmbr wrote: post #147

Am I the only one believing that copyright has long outlived its usefulness? After all, copyright is not some natural law or mathematical consequence, but rather a social convention that made sense in the era of the printing press.

And how are you supposed to make money from something you invent? Let’s say you make a hit video game. Without copyright people can pirate your game, steal the art, make unauthorized derivative works, etc. it’s just theft.

My personal observation is people who are against copyright in absolute terms have never or rarely needed their protection. (Or never considered the implications.)

I’m not making a dig at people here. This is just human nature. It’s difficult to see the value in something that you only see as an obstacle.

Open source software is rather unusual. It’s a commune on a massive scale and it gets its value from the generosity of others. in my opinion, it is possibly one of the greatest achievements in the history and future of computing.

However, it heavily depends on copyright to exist. GPL has encouraged (or forced) many companies to contribute to the community when they wouldn’t have otherwise.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#327

Post by RyEgswuCsn »

pier25 wrote: post #235
squidbeak wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a child is instructed to read a copyrighted work at school, which later becomes a factor in his own derivative works, he won't be in breach of copyright. Why should other intelligent entities be prevented from reading copyrighted works and gaining whatever there is to gain from those works the way any human might?

LLMs are not intelligent entities.

Until they are.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#328

Post by drubio »

WhiteNoiz3 wrote: post #281

As I understood it, the legal precedent for generative AI is the same one that allows google to scrape websites in order to index them for search for the common good. Google also can display cached versions of websites which is the original content of those sites. No one is going to say that google is copyright infringement just because it is showing content from other websites verbatim. So I think this is a weak arg…

> * I don't think generative AI is sustainable in the long term if it ends up killing all the websites/artists that created the original material. *

This is the elephant in the room. Every tech wave has had its way of cajoling creators into investing time & money to make original material, then the rules changed.

Google, promised reach and new markets for content, it worked. Then they introduced snippets, ads and whole lot of other things to keep visitors on their freeway, while avoiding sending visitors to the original site.

Reddit, Stack Overflow and others, started with gamification (points, badges) & community to incentivize users to contribute original content.

Now AI is shaking up all these approaches. But with each one, the incentive to create original material appears to dwindle, since the returns are becoming less and less.

Like what's the incentive for any professional now, if AI is going to regurgitate their original content, without any upside (i.e. no potential for reach, no gamification, no community, no recognition, etc).

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#329

Post by madamelic »

Intox wrote: post #12

Or... things are about to get worse for copyright holders. I don't see any developped country pressing the brake on AGI in the near future to protect a few copyright holders from getting "stolen" in hypothetic scenarios.

Copyright should be the problem of the person using the works and not the problem of the AI generating it.

Unless Nintendo plans on busting down the doors of every person who tries to draw Mario or preventing little Timmy from making a parody of Coca-Cola, making it where AI cannot generated copyrighted works is insane imo.

Those brands should be proud to be such a big part of the cultural fabric that it is difficult to get away from their branding. Plus it's not infringement to my knowledge until you use it for commercial purposes so as long as no one as creating Lario and Muigi to sell or otherwise use in business, it's no different than drawing it yourself.

If the AI is completely unable to generate non-infringing works even if you are _trying_ to get away from it (which the author very much doesn't seem they are, they are purposefully making and show prompts that infringe), that's the problem of the AI creator then.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#330

Post by jprete »

DonsDiscountGas wrote: post #237
dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a few copyright holders By which you mean every copyright holder. > AGI in the near future Something that is purely speculative, undefined, and has been promised in the near future for 50+ years. I don't see copyright holders lying down for someone else's benefit and I don't see governments gutting copyright, contract law, and several other avenues of protection that copyright holders can deploy in the name of some…

The examples given are all billion-dollar, decades old characters. The volume of material directly/indirectly referencing those characters in a random internet crawl will be fairly large. Most copyrighted works won't have that issue. If anything it means they only infringe on archetypal works and not the other 99.9%. If I write a story involving robots and spaceships (of which there are many, before and since Star Wa…

I'm opposed to my (fairly minor) copyrighted works being used in GenAI datasets as well. I just have no practical way to stop it, and there aren't clear enough damages to sue. That doesn't make it legal.
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