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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.?

#91
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…

I agree but I would word it a bit differently: Copyright isn't some fixed, timeless thing. It has been continuously modified to suit the times and to adapt to technological change.

Rather than try to reason about how existing copyright law applies to AI models, we should be focused on changing copyright law to work well in a world with AI.

We can balance the incentives of content creators with the incentives of the users and creators of AI models. I'm confident we can do it because we've done it every time in the past when technology has changed, and AI models will be no different.

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

#92
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> TBF Napster and torrents are another and earlier angle. Napster didn't kill the music industry, torrents didn't kill the movie industry because people still want to see movies on a big screen experience. And so, actors, directors, VFX artists, cutters, riggers, lighting staff, costume/mask people, they all continue to have jobs. But now, with AI being already able to do very realistic photos, and in a few years lik…

> torrents didn't kill the movie industry because people still want to see movies on a big screen experience Given you believe the reason torrents didn't kill the movie industry is because people weren't satisfied with smaller screens: would you be satisfied with content that is stuck in "2020-2030 forever" and can never produce anything "entirely new"? Personally I think novelty in art thrives when the entry barrier…

> Given you believe the reason torrents didn't kill the movie industry is because people weren't satisfied with smaller screens: would you be satisfied with content that is stuck in "2020-2030 forever" and can never produce anything "entirely new"?

I fear the enshittification of movies - similar to, say, the situation in video games or residential ISPs: when everyone has silently agreed to a common level of base bullshit, customers won't move (because why move from a pile of cow dung to a pile of dog dung? it's all dung in the end), and everyone can keep fleecing the customers.

> Personally I think novelty in art thrives when the entry barrier is low and experimentation is possible without a huge budget - which AI can help achieve.

Oh even now even utter novices and two-three person teams can produce hours of high quality content, youtube is enough proof of that. Experimentation is not the problem, the problem is all the marketing to get people to sit in the cinema. For a lot of modern movies, music and video games the cost of production is at least on the same order of magnitude as the cost of marketing - even a blockbuster movie like Avengers Endgame [1] reportedly had 356 M$ of production cost vs 200 M$ of marketing cost, and of the production cost at least 100 M$ were compensation for the star actors.

[1] https://collider.com/avengers-endgame-box-office-budget/

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

#93
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…

This is not a solid argument because it suggests every single social contract involved in human society is not worthwhile, important, or "real".

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

#94

It's been dead a while because of big tech. YouTube, Google, Facebook, Twitter - they have no way of effectively managing IP and so you basically see people's stolen content and they monetise it, so TBF Napster and torrents are another and earlier angle. Purely IMO, big tech normalised the taking of other people's content, and it's getting to the point where content creators (as in, ones that are capable of producing…

> TBF Napster and torrents are another and earlier angle. Napster didn't kill the music industry, torrents didn't kill the movie industry because people still want to see movies on a big screen experience. And so, actors, directors, VFX artists, cutters, riggers, lighting staff, costume/mask people, they all continue to have jobs. But now, with AI being already able to do very realistic photos, and in a few years lik…

>capitalism will not offer any incentive to feed the AI with new, creative things.

Disney is already following that thesis without AI, yet it's never looked so vulnerable to the whims of the free market.

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

#95

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.

Am I the only one that loves a blunt and honest comment? Funny how advocates against property rights have no issue with corporations protecting their own. That’s fine. What they want is to legally steal from the average joe.

Are you stealing from your lord, serf? Perhaps you should be churning the butter, not thinking for yourself. (I kid, I kid!)

It's going to be just as easy to make a movie or a song as it was to write this comment. I'm working and researching at the edge, and I promise you that the entire world will be in awe of these next 12 months. Go play with Suno for a taste.

I'm a senior engineer, and now I'm tab completing Rust code 70% of the time. It's hard to believe we've come this far, and it's only going to keep climbing in capability.

You're watching breakneck progress, and the genie isn't going back.

More art will be created per month than the entire human history to this point. Gen alpha is growing up on this stuff and using it to great effect to communicate amongst their peers. The things they build will be incredible.

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

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that from the perspective of a reader of novels or a writer of novels? Readers love free stuff.

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…

Novels don't exist in a post scarcity world because their writers still need money to live.

I'm not necessarily opposed to moving to a post scarcity model without IP, but we need to actually be post scarcity first.

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

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that from the perspective of a reader of novels or a writer of novels? Readers love free stuff.

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?

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

#99
post #86
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…

This is funny, the moment the absence of IP can benefit large companies it's just a fiction, a made up concept, not too serious at all. Of course you go onto the OpenAI corporate pitch page and it will proudly say "respects your IP by not training from it!", that's not the part we are looking to get rid of apparently? That's very real?

This is a clever trick, making out corporations to be the beneficiary - who is the real beneficiary? The one who prompts, because they can use the output of the model to solve their problems. In the meantime AI developers make cents on 100K tokens and are mostly in the red.

Why not put the issue where it is - it's a debate about public empowerment with AI vs incumbents protecting their copyrights. Especially for open source models - this situation is not about corporations. Yes, corporations are the ones with deep pockets and easier to sue, but that's just how lawsuits go, you don't waste money suing someone who can't pay up.

What is more important in the next decades - public empowerment or extending copyright to block training AI models? Can we agree to limit copyright to exact reproductions or should it cover all content generated from a model, even if when it looks different from all training examples?

I think going the copyright maximalist way will indirectly hurt creatives because all their works will be checked with the same tools we use to check AI. Anyone could be secretly using generative models. The AI attribution methods will reveal all sorts of things we don't like to see.

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

#100
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…

The "gun analogy" is the parent saying the the government (who is supposed to be the only entity able to use force) is supposed to protect IP. You're saying the same thing.

You shouldn't say anything to anyone who doesn't respect copyright laws - or, rather, you shouldn't have to. Your tax dollars, and the entity that you authorize to be the one to use force where you live, should be able to say whatever you, as the governed citizen, want to say to the person who doesn't respect copyright.

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