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this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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It's pretty apparent that AI developers are training their applications using stolen images and data.
This was always going to end up in the courts.
A human brain is just the summation of all the content it's ever witnessed, though, both paid and unpaid. There's no such thing as artwork that is completely 100% original, everything is inspired by something else we're already familiar with. Otherwise viewers of the art would just interpret it as random noise. There has to be some amount of familiarity for a viewer to identify with it.
So if someone builds an atom-perfect artificial brain from scratch, sticks it in a body, and shows it around the world, should we expect the creator to pay licensing fees to the owners of everything it looks at?
No.
I am so fucking sick of this “AI art is just doing what humans do" bullshit. It is so utterly devoid of any kind of critical thinking that it sounds like a 100% bad faith argument every time it comes up.
AI can only give you a synthesis of exactly what you feed it. It can’t use its life experience, its upbringing, its passions, its cultural influences, etc to color its creativity and thinking, because it has none and it isn’t thinking. Two painters who study and become great artists, and then also both take time to study and replicate the works of Monet can come away from that experience with vastly different styles. They’re not just puking back a mashup of Monet’s collected works. They’re using their own life experience and passions to color their experience of Impressionism.
That’s something an AI can never do, and it leaves the result hollow and meaningless.
There is so so so so so much more to human experience, life experience, and just being alive than simply absorbing "content."
No offense, but I get the sense that you don't actually know how ML works and you're just familiar with pop science descriptions of it. Am I wrong?
It's an incredibly bold claim to say that a human brain is doing something an AI could never do. That is a very antiquated notion, to the point that I would say it's 100% devoid of any critical thinking.
Now if you're arguing that there is a supernatural plane of some kind that cannot be measured in any way, and is fully responsible for our consciousness, then that's a different story, there's nothing I can say to change your mind.
That's the thing though, it's all the same "content" to a living brain. Your brain doesn't distinguish between your lived experiences and watching cat videos, the experience of watching those videos is also a lived experience.
I know it's tempting to say humans (or living creatures) are special and unique in their ability to experience emotions and consciousness etc, but the reality is, you're a biological machine. You take inputs via various senses, chemical reactions happen throughout your body, and the illusion of memory and experience is created. Now either prove to me that this phenomenon is not replicable in a lab or virtual setting, or get off your high horse and join the actual discussion that needs to happen.
Ah yes, let me just give you all the definitive answers to all the metaphysical and philosophical debates that have happened throughout the entirety of human history so you don't have to think about the actual real world ramifications your art theft bot
So you acknowledge there is a valuable discussion to be had here. Thank you. I would like to have that discussion, would you? Or would you like to stick with the dismissive and arrogant schtick?
No, there isn't a valuable discussion to be had here. I'm not looking to "debate" you, or anyone else. AI is causing real, material harm in the world right now, not because it does the same thing humans do, but because of the greedy, heartless, scum-sucking capitalists and grifters behind it, driving it, and deciding the gibberish they pump out is good enough to destroy entire industries and livelihoods so they can maximize their bottom lines. And I'm not looking to find "nuance" in the dystopian hellscape this is creating.
So your contribution to the discussion is that you don't want to have the discussion. Noted.
No, it's that there's no discussion to have. But I'm glad you at least got close.
Also I'm blocking you now. I have no fucking patience for sealioning
My goal thus far has been to have this discussion. If you'd like to recap yourself on this thread so far, you'll find that I am not the arrogant and dismissive one. That would be the person who called the discussion "devoid of any critical thinking".
If that is not your position, great, let's talk.
People like that are stuck in a sealioning/"debate me bro" mindset that makes discussion impossible
This comparison doesn’t make sense to me. If the person then makes money off it: yes.
Otherwise the question would be if copyright law should be abolished entirely. E.g. if I create a new news portal with content copied form other source, would that be okay then?
You are comparing a computer program to a human. Which… is weird.
Just because it's weird to you doesn't make it any less valid.
As a species we sit at the threshold of artificial life, created by us. Seems silly to think that such a monumental jump would not be accompanied by substantial changes in our made up rules of engagement.
Might be a fundamental difference in opinion. I don’t see us anywhere near anything related to artificial life.
What they’ve built there is a product, a computer program and they used other folks data to build it without getting their permission. I also cannot go and just copy and paste source code from all over the internet to build my program. There are licenses attached to it that determine what you can or can’t do with it.
I feel like just because the term “learning” is involved people no longer view it as simply building or programming a system. Which it is.
Every idea you've ever profited from was inspired by something you saw in the past. That's my point. There are no ideas that exist entirely within a vacuum, they all stem from something else, we just draw a line arbitrarily and say "this idea is too much like that other idea". But if you combine 3 other ideas into something that is sufficiently non-obvious (which is entirely relative) then we call it "novel" and "original".
I think the line should probably be, either it's a tool and you need to license any work it references, OR it's conscious, has rights, gets paid, and is a person. I think most tech companies would much rather stay in the former camp, not having to answer any ethical dilemmas if they don't have to. But on the other hand, the first company to make something that people consider actually "conscious" will make history.
Sounds like you have about 100 years of philosophical discussion, AI research, and scifi to catch up on 😄.
It feels like you are making a computer program out to be more than it actually is right now. At the same time this all isn’t about what that program is doing. It’s about how it was built.
But copyright is entirely artificial. The deal is that the law says you have to pay when you copy a bunch of copyrighted text and reprint it into new pages of a newly bound book. The law also says you don't have to pay when you are giving commentary on a copyrighted work, or parodying a copyrighted work, or drawing inspiration from a copyrighted work to create something new but still influenced by that copyrighted work. The question for these lawsuits is whether using copyrighted works to train these models and generate new text (or art or music) is infringement of those artificial, human-made, legal rights.
As an example, sound recording copyrights only protect the literal copying of a sound recording. Someone who mimics that copyrighted recording, no matter how perfectly, doesn't actually infringe on the recording copyright (even if they might infringe on the composition copyright, a separate and distinct copyright). But a literal duplication process of some kind would be infringement.
We can have a debate whether the law draws the line in the correct places, or whether the copyright regime could be improved, and other normative discussion what what the rules should be in the modern world, especially about whether the rules in one area (e.g., the human brain) are consistent with the rules in another area (e.g., a generative AI model). But it's a separate discussion from what the rules currently are. Under current law, the human brain is currently allowed to perform some types of copying and processing and remixing that some computer programs are not.
All intellectual property should be abolish
I agree with the summary of the situation in your first paragraph.
Your second paragraph about sound mimickry, as far as I'm aware, is not accurate. Musicians have been ordered to pay for much less than rote mimickry, even simple things like using the same melody or beat as a backing track have been ruled as infringement. In the US, at least.
And I agree with the 3rd paragraph.
So I believe my original question still stands: should an artificial brain be required to pay licensing fees for everything it sees?
It is. The recording copyright is separate from the musical composition copyright. Here's the statute governing the rights to use a recording:
So if I want to go record a version of "I Will Always Love You" that mimics and is inspired by Whitney Houston's performance, I actually only owe compensation to the owner of the musical composition copyright, Dolly Parton. Even if I manage to make it sound just like Whitney Houston, her estate doesn't hold any rights to anything other than the actual sounds actually captured in that recording.
Ahh, TIL, thanks for the explanation.
Then explain how Bobby Prince could literally steal a South Park song to make "Shawn's Got the Shotgun" to make Doom 2.
I'm not familiar with the situation, but I imagine if Southpark went around suing people for using their stuff, people wouldn't take them seriously. Virtually everything in Southpark relies on their abuse of Fair Use. Just because it IS infringement, doesn't mean you have to sue them.
It looks like there are a few other tracks that Bobby Prince is responsible for that made it into Doom. In this interview he states that he made them for fun, labeled the files to not be used in the final game, and was surprised id even had copies. When Romero made the decision to include them in the game, Bobby (who is/was a lawyer apparently) says he was sure they would get sued.
And they didn't, because back then people didn't abuse Micky Mouse copyright law.
Yes I know about the MIDIs labeled with
un, meaninguse not. That still doesn't explain Running From Evil, At Dooms Gate, or literally any other song.That's unrelated to an LLM. An LLM is not a synthetic human brain. It's a computer program and sets of statistical data points from large amounts of training data to generate outputs from prompts.
If we get real general-purpose AI some day in the future, then we'll need to answer those sorts of questions. But that's not what we have today.
The discussion is about law surrounding AI, not LLMs specifically. No we don't have an AGI today (that we know of), but assuming we will, we will probably still have the laws we write today. So regardless of when it happens, we should be discussing and writing laws today under the assumption it will eventually happen.
This thread is about ChatGPT, an LLM. It is not a general purpose AI.
I'm saying the discussion about AI law. You can't responsibly have a discussion about law around LLMs without considering how it would affect future, sufficiently advanced AI.
To me there's a bit of a difference because humans are not controllable and cannot (legally) be slaves. So in the case of this hypothetical artificial brain, that brain could leave and take the profits of it's work elsewhere, with the creator no longer benefiting.
Yes, it will be interesting if a court is ever receptive to the notion that we're creating something close to actual "consciousness", because it does lead to ethical dilemmas very quickly.
I think it's probably in the tech companies' best interests to play along with the trademark requirements and treat the AI like a tool for as long as possible.