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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

#661

Post by kevindamm »

livinginfear wrote: post #638
lovecg wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the world would be completely fine without a copyrighted C3PO or Robocop. George Lucas didn’t have billions of merchandising revenue in mind when working on his wild and thought unlikely to be successful science fiction movie in the 70s. Robocop was also a labor of love. We don’t really need Nth Star Wars sequel powered by those extra profits. The art form could be healthier overall.

> George Lucas didn’t have billions of merchandising revenue in mind... Doesn't copyright stop other people from making billions in merchandising revenue off of George Lucas' ideas without his consent? > We don’t really need Nth Star Wars sequel powered by those extra profits. Without a copyrighted C3PO, he could start turning up in just about anyone's derivative works. There could be horrible Star wars sequels forev…

"As a protocol droid, I cannot actually recommend the best smelling cleaning product, but these are the most purchased cleaning products:"

...followed by a semi-hallucinated list containing at least a few being marketed by C3PO.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#662

Post by troupo »

d6e wrote: post #654
jerf wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Who truly owns the tales of Snow White and Cinderella?" If you want to make your point, you need to choose something that isn't already public domain. Disney already only owns their own interpretations, and, arguably, whatever penumbric emanation they can convince a court is stealing from them, but it still certainly isn't the entire space of Snow White and Cinderella stories. There is some fairly recent stuff being…

Am I not allowed to draw Mario? I don't really see the difference in me drawing mario or an AI drawing mario.

> Am I not allowed to draw Mario

Probably not for anything commercial, not for any exhibitions or public viewing etc. You'd have to check the actual trademarks etc.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#663

Post by idopmstuff »

d6e wrote: post #654
jerf wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Who truly owns the tales of Snow White and Cinderella?" If you want to make your point, you need to choose something that isn't already public domain. Disney already only owns their own interpretations, and, arguably, whatever penumbric emanation they can convince a court is stealing from them, but it still certainly isn't the entire space of Snow White and Cinderella stories. There is some fairly recent stuff being…

Am I not allowed to draw Mario? I don't really see the difference in me drawing mario or an AI drawing mario.

This has always felt like the important-but-ignored distinction to me. You can definitely draw Mario! Copyright doesn't protect against you doing so. You can also use tools to recreate copyrighted materials. For example, you can use Word to type out the text of a copyrighted book. Perhaps more relevant to the AI discussion, you can use a scanner and printer to reprint copyrighted text.

What you can't do is use those recreations for commercials purposes. You can't sell your paintings of Mario. You can't decorate your business with Mario drawings.

That's why I've always felt like the idea that AI should be blocked from creating these things is generally not the right place to look at copyright. Rather, the issue should be if someone uses AI to create a picture of Mario and then does something commercial with it, you should be able to go after the person engaging in the commercial behavior with the copyrighted image.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#664

Post by Levitz »

ledauphin wrote: post #385
jawngee wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument is nonsense. The junior artist in your hypothetical would have as much liability, if not more.

but would they have liability if they submitted their "output" to a senior artist, who immediately shot it down as obviously infringing? Surely not. It's not illegal to draw Mario - just illegal to make money off your drawing. I think the real question is whether OpenAI should be allowed to charge for generating infringing content. Even though the unit cost of the Mario drawing is negligible, the sum total of their i…

>I think the real question is whether OpenAI should be allowed to charge for generating infringing content.

Well, are they really doing that?

If I rent a server to host a minecraft instance, is the company "charging for a minecraft server"? It is not clear to me that by charging users for AI usage they are complicit for whatever is generated. We don't require Adobe to prevent people from drawing Mickey either.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#665

Post by kromem »

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.

Star Citizen could release and immediately be pirated and never sell a single copy from release onwards and likely still have ended up profitable.

Maybe the business models around creation need to be revisited such that interested parties pay for the creation of a product and not distribution of a product.

Where periodically at each stage of that creation you are getting continued buy in that what you are creating has a market demand that will fund its continued creation.

If you are an indie game developer maybe that means making a demo which gets enough interest to fund you spending the time and resources to make a full game, with no expectations for further revenue post-creation, but with its success meaning your next project is even easier to fund the development of and a comfortable lifestyle rinse and repeating.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#666

Post by strix_varius »

idopmstuff wrote: post #663
d6e wrote: post #654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I not allowed to draw Mario? I don't really see the difference in me drawing mario or an AI drawing mario.

This has always felt like the important-but-ignored distinction to me. You can definitely draw Mario! Copyright doesn't protect against you doing so. You can also use tools to recreate copyrighted materials. For example, you can use Word to type out the text of a copyrighted book. Perhaps more relevant to the AI discussion, you can use a scanner and printer to reprint copyrighted text. What you can't do is use those…

> That's why I've always felt like the idea that AI should be blocked from creating these things is generally not the right place to look at copyright. Rather, the issue should be if someone uses AI to create a picture of Mario and then does something commercial with it, you should be able to go after the person engaging in the commercial behavior with the copyrighted image.

With you until here for several reasons:

1. It's not possible for you as an individual consumer to know whether or not the AI result is a violation, given an AI that has been trained on copyrighted works.

2. Before you, the AI consumer, uses the generated result, a company (in this case OpenAI) is already charging for it. I'm currently paying OpenAI. That AI is currently able and willing to sell me copyrighted images as part of my subscription. Frankly that should be illegal, full stop.

I look forward to AI enhanced workflows and I'm experimenting with them today. But it's morally indefensible to enable giant corporate AIs to slurp up copyrighted images/code/writing and then vomit it back out for profit.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#667

Post by CatWChainsaw »

rolisz wrote: post #64
Lorak_ wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read the article? It shows a lot of examples when no specific names are mentioned, or even with very generic prompts producing copyrighted material.

Oh c'mon, those prompts were not generic. Italian plumbers? How many other Italian plumbers do you know? What's the most popular soda in a red can?

"futuristic robot"?

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#668

Post by kromem »

BlackJack wrote: post #46
Aerroon wrote: post #24

Aren't some of the examples basically asking for that content? Ask someone about two Italian brothers in a video game with a red and green hat that have M and L on them. What do you think you would get? If I describe "imagine a comic book duck that swims in a sea of gold in his vault" you would immediately think of Scrooge McDuck, no?

disclaimer: I work on GenAI at google, but views are my own The question is, how did the model create Mario&Luigi or Scrooge McDuck without training on copyrighted data? It can't just crawl Wikipedia because Fair Use in Wikipedia doesn't constitute Fair use for a commercial AI model. One possible outcome is more transparency on what datasets were used to train the models.

Training is probably going to turn out to be fair use as the suits settle:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/how-we-think-about-cop...

It's the usage and not the training that needs to be policed, and the answer there is going to be that Google or OpenAI or whoever is going to make bank by creating a fine tuned model which can detect copyright infringements and providing access to it to companies to double check gen AI outputs for exact or "similar enough" infringements.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#669

Post by ricardobeat »

naet wrote: post #651
koliber wrote: post #286

The responsibility for ensuring that copyrights were not violated fall on the person publishing the work. Whether they drew something themselves, hired an apprentice artists with no legal training to draw something, took a photograph of something, or used AI to create an image should not matter. Why does anyone assume that ChatGPT or other tools would NOT produce previously-copyrighted content? I can see a naive assu…

OpenAI is selling access to their GPT models, and those models are outputting copyright material for me to consume... isn't that just as much of a violation?

Is AWS violating copyright if you use their servers to transcode pirated content?

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#670

Post by haskellandchill »

troupo wrote: post #662
d6e wrote: post #654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I not allowed to draw Mario? I don't really see the difference in me drawing mario or an AI drawing mario.

> Am I not allowed to draw Mario Probably not for anything commercial, not for any exhibitions or public viewing etc. You'd have to check the actual trademarks etc.

Hasn't pop art already been there done that?
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