Maybe the way to go is to do pre-training on copyrighted data, then to thoroughly shake things up so that hopefully only some useful abstract structure of world knowledge remains and then train that on carefully selected licensed data.
Things are about to get worse for generative AI
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Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI
#72These don't seem all that difficult to fix to me. Most of the examples are not really generic, but are shorthand descriptions of well-known entities. "Video game plumber" is practically synonymous with "Mario" and anyone that has the slightest familiarity with the character knows this. Likewise, how difficult is it to just use descriptive tools to describe Mario-like images [1] and then remove these results from anyo…
It's going to be hard to remove every single "shorthand descriptions of well-known entities" or other prompts that can be used to generate copyrighted or trademarked content. Sure, if you're not deliberately trying to generate infringing content, you can probably remove or discard those results, the trouble is the people who will try to trick the AI to generate this content, blocking those people is going to be impossible, without excluding any copyrighted or trademarked training material.
Another issue for generative AI is mentioned in the article: "Systems like DALL-E and ChatGPT are essentially black boxes." What happens when an AI is used to make decisions where the user/victim is entitled to know exactly why the AI did what it did? From a business and legal perspective I think the current AI solutions are dangerous and should be used very sparsely, exactly because even the creators can't point to the exact pieces of information that caused the AI to make the choices it did.
Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI
#73If any of those results would be deemed infringing we can bid farewell to all fanart ever. Likewise, to all fanfiction. Or any original work that was merely heavily inspired by previous works. Like a lot of modern fantasy is basically Tolkien fan fiction. Or is Gandalf close enough to Merlin to claim prior art that is in public domain?
Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI
#74Or... 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.
The EU is already salivating over the idea
Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI
#75How is this different to Googling “robot cop” or “video game plumber” and being served copyrighted material? Is it because Google will link to the image source? Or does the infringement begin when I use the image for gain, or claim it as my own? Perhaps it is because Google was allowed to crawl the page with the original image, so presenting them with a link is fine?
Looking at a copyrighted image posted by an author is not infringement. Printing that image onto a shirt and selling it is infringement.
That’s what OpenAI is doing.
Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI
#76The article kind of amplified my regrets/anxiety for not getting a copy of books3 and the likes while it was easy. I didn't have an immediate use case, and I don't now, thought I'd wait until actually need it, but it feels like a window is closing here.
Don’t worry there are many people out there who have copies of it all, there is no way they manage to get the cat back in the bag even if all governments work together on this.
But yea get your own copies whenever possible
Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI
#77I might be a bit idealistic, but I've always believed that the core purpose of art and publishing should be to influence culture and society, not just to make a heap of money. That's why I feel original work needs its protection, but it should enter the public domain much sooner to fuel creativity and inspiration. We should be thinking in terms of a few years for this transition, not decades.
Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do. If the incentive to actually create is gone.
creation should happen for its own sake. You don't see GMs stopping chess because bots are that much better.
creation competition.
I agree with your premise but the chess analogy falls flat.
We might, legitimately, see an enormous dropoff in people creating original works of literary, musical, and visual art (without AI).
Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI
#79These don't seem all that difficult to fix to me. Most of the examples are not really generic, but are shorthand descriptions of well-known entities. "Video game plumber" is practically synonymous with "Mario" and anyone that has the slightest familiarity with the character knows this. Likewise, how difficult is it to just use descriptive tools to describe Mario-like images [1] and then remove these results from anyo…
The thing is that those are really trivial or extreme examples. What we should take from this: 1. Generative AI systems are fully capable of producing materials that infringe on copyright. 2. They do not inform users when they do so. So potentially any output could be infringing copyright source material, even from some obscure but still protected corner of the web, and anyone using that output could be exposed to la…
But how is that any different from creating an image from scratch? If I make a logo and use it for my business, but it turns out to be very similar to one already being used by another company, it’s the same situation.
I think the main concern here is with the top 1,000 or so brands/copyrights which seem fairly straightforward to deal with using the method I described.
Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI
#80The solution could be great. I really don't like the way culture always goes to the same tropes, calling any potential innovation "out of Star Trek" (with attendant distorted expectations), right down to expecting an interface based on literal hand-waving in Minority Report. If copyright held works ("USS Enterprise") could be removed, yet the actual essential concepts (space ship, naming things) retained, it would be a tremendous breakthrough.
I think what NYT &c want is for large companies like Apple to pay them for access to their works. This to me is the wrong path, just leading to more silos and walled gardens, special access for the elite.
An alternative is base models trained on Wikipedia and public domain (science journals, etc). Foundations could support high quality, well rounded current events reporting. Wikimedia provides a good model for this, with referenced summaries that I don't think can be said to reasonably violate copyright. The models would need to be improved to support references, or RAG attribution would have to be widely used when bringing in works that have a current copyright.