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submitted 2 years ago by floofloof@lemmy.ca to c/technology@lemmy.ml
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[-] makeasnek@lemmy.ml 45 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Amazing how every new generation of technology has a generation of users of the previous technology who do whatever they can do stop its advancement. This technology takes human creativity and output to a whole new level, it will advance medicine and science in ways that are difficult to even imagine, it will provide personalized educational tutoring to every student regardless of income, and these people are worried about the technicality of what the AI is trained on and often don't even understand enough about AI to even make an argument about it. If people like this win, whatever country's legal system they win in will not see the benefits that AI can bring. That society is shooting themselves in the foot.

Your favorite musician listened to music that inspired them when they made their songs. Listening to other people's music taught them how to make music. They paid for the music (or somebody did via licensing fees or it was freely available for some other reason) when they listened to it in the first place. When they sold records, they didn't have to pay the artist of every song they ever listened to. That would be ludicrous. An AI shouldn't have to pay you because it read your book and millions like it to learn how to read and write.

[-] StalksEveryone@futurology.today 45 points 2 years ago

You’re humanizing the software too much. Comparing software to human behavior is just plain wrong. GPT can’t even reason properly yet. I can’t see this as anything other than a more advanced collage process.

Open used intellectual property without consent of the owners. Major fucked.

If ‘anybody’ does anything similar to tracing, copy&pasting or even sampling a fraction of another person’s imagery or written work, that anybody is violating copyright.

[-] NounsAndWords@lemmy.world 16 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

If ‘anybody’ does anything similar to tracing, copy&pasting or even sampling a fraction of another person’s imagery or written work, that anybody is violating copyright.

Ok, but tracing is literally a part of the human learning process. If you trace a work and sell it as your own that's bad. If you trace a work to learn about the style and let that influence your future works that is what every artist already does.

The artistic process isn't copyrighted, only the final result. The exact same standards can apply to AI generated work as already do to anything human generated.

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[-] mkhoury@lemmy.ca 10 points 2 years ago

I don't think that Sarah Silverman and the others are saying that the tech shouldn't exist. They're saying that the input to train them needs to be negotiated as a society. And the businesses also care about the input to train them because it affects the performance of the LLMs. If we do allow licensing, watermarking, data cleanup, synthetic data, etc. in a way that is transparent, I think it's good for the industry and it's good for the people.

[-] Dr_Cog@mander.xyz 13 points 2 years ago

I don't need to negotiate with Sarah Silverman if Im handed her book by a friend, and neither should an AI

[-] Madison_rogue@kbin.social 10 points 2 years ago

Except the AI owner does. It's like sampling music for a remix or integrating that sample into a new work. Yes, you do not need to negotiate with Sarah Silverman if you are handed a book by a friend. However if you use material from that book in a work it needs to be cited. If you create an IP based off that work, Sarah Silverman deserves compensation because you used material from her work.

No different with AI. If the AI used intellectual property from an author in its learning algorithm, than if that intellectual property is used in the AI's output the original author is due compensation under certain circumstances.

[-] Dr_Cog@mander.xyz 13 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Neither citation nor compensation are necessary for fair use, which is what occurs when an original work is used for its concepts but not reproduced.

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[-] iegod@lemm.ee 7 points 2 years ago

It is different. That knowledge from her book forms part of your processing and allows you to extract features and implement similar outputs yourself. The key difference between the AI module and dataset is that it's codified in bits, versus whatever neural links we have in our brain. So if one theoretically creates a way to codify your neural network you might be subject to the same restrictions we're trying to levy on ai. And that's bullshit.

[-] Noved@lemmy.ca 6 points 2 years ago

But you do need to negotiate with Sarah Silverman, if you take that book, rearrange the chapters, and then try sell it for profit. Obviously that's extremified but it's The argument they're making.

[-] Dr_Cog@mander.xyz 13 points 2 years ago

I agree. But that isn't what AI is doing, because it doesn't store the actual book and it isn't possible to reproduce any part in a format that is recognizable as the original work.

[-] iegod@lemm.ee 8 points 2 years ago

Definitely not how that output works. It will come up with something that seems like a Sarah Silverman created work but isn't. It's like calling Copyright on impersonations. I don't buy it

[-] Heratiki@lemmy.ml 8 points 2 years ago

Yes. Imagine how much trouble ANY actor would be in if they were sued for impersonating someone nearly identical but not that person. If Sarah Silverman ever interacted with a person and then imitated that person on stage for her own personal benefit without the other persons express consent it would be no different. And comedians pick up their comedy from everything around them both natural and imitation.

[-] iegod@lemm.ee 5 points 2 years ago

100%. I just can't get behind any of these arguments against AI from this segment of workers. This is no different than other rallies against technological evolution due to fear of job losses. Their scarce commodity will soon disappear and that's what they're actually afraid of.

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[-] Heratiki@lemmy.ml 7 points 2 years ago

That’s not what this is. To use your example it would be like taking her book and rearranging ALL of the words to make another book and selling that book. But they’re not selling the book or its contents, they’re selling how their software interprets the book for the benefit of the user. This would be like suing teachers for teaching about their book.

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[-] Moobythegoldensock@lemm.ee 37 points 2 years ago

At the crux of the author's lawsuit is the argument that OpenAI is ruthlessly mining their material to create "derivative works" that will "replace the very writings it copied."

The authors shoot down OpenAI's excuse that "substantial similarity is a mandatory feature of all copyright-infringement claims," calling it "flat wrong."

Goodbye Star Wars, Avatar, Tarantino’s entire filmography, every slasher film since 1974…

[-] taanegl@beehaw.org 19 points 2 years ago

Uh, yeah, a massive corporation sucking up all intellectual property to milk it is not the own you think it is.

[-] Umbrias@beehaw.org 14 points 2 years ago

But this is literally people trying to strengthen copyright and its scope. The corporation is, out of pure convenience, using copyright as it exists currently with the current freedoms applied to artists.

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[-] Even_Adder@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

AI training isn’t only for mega-corporations. We can already train our own open source models, so we shouldn't applaud someone trying to erode our rights and let people put up barriers that will keep out all but the ultra-wealthy. We need to be careful not weaken fair use and hand corporations a monopoly of a public technology by making it prohibitively expensive to for regular people to keep developing our own models. Mega corporations already have their own datasets, and the money to buy more. They can also make users sign predatory ToS allowing them exclusive access to user data, effectively selling our own data back to us. Regular people, who could have had access to a corporate-independent tool for creativity, education, entertainment, and social mobility, would instead be left worse off with fewer rights than where they started.

[-] HawlSera@lemm.ee 16 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Is actually reminds me of a Sci-Fi I read where in the future, they use an ai to scan any new work in order to see what intellectual property is the big Corporation Zone that may have been used as an influence in order to Halt the production of any new media not tied to a pre-existing IP including 100% of independent and fan-made works.

Which is one of the contributing factors towards the apocalypse. So 500 years later after the apocalypse has been reversed and human colonies are enjoying post scarcity, one of the biggest fads is rediscovering the 20th century, now that all the copyrights expired in people can datamine the ruins of Earth to find all the media that couldn't be properly preserved heading into Armageddon thanks to copyright trolling.

It's referred to in universe as "Twencen"

The series is called FreeRIDErs if anyone is curious, unfortunately the series may never have a conclusion, (untimely death of co creator) most of its story arcs were finished so there's still a good chunk of meat to chew through and I highly recommend it.

[-] anachronist@midwest.social 13 points 2 years ago

OpenAI is trying to argue that the whole work has to be similar to infringe, but that's never been true. You can write a novel and infringe on page 302 and that's a copyright infringement. OpenAI is trying to change the meaning of copyright otherwise, the output of their model is oozing with various infringements.

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[-] FaceDeer@kbin.social 34 points 2 years ago

Did anyone expect them to go "oh, okay, that makes sense after all"?

[-] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 29 points 2 years ago

I don't care what works a neural network gets trained on. How else are we supposed to make one?

Should I care more about modern eternal copyright bullshit? I'd feel more nuance if everything a few decades old was public-domain, like it's fucking supposed to be. Then there'd be plenty of slightly-outdated content to shovel into these statistical analysis engines. But there's not. So fuck it: show the model absolutely everything, and the impact of each work becomes vanishingly small.

Models don't get bigger as you add more stuff. Training only twiddles the numbers in each layer. There are two-gigabyte networks that have been trained on hundreds of millions of images. If you tried to store those image, verbatim, they would each weigh barely a dozen bytes. And the network gets better as that number goes down.

The entire point is to force the distillation of high-level concepts from raw data. We've tried doing it the smart way and we suck at it. "AI winter" and "good old-fashioned AI" were half a century of fumbling toward the acceptance that we don't understand how intelligence works. This brute-force approach isn't chosen for cost or ease or simplicity. This is the only approach that works.

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[-] ZILtoid1991@kbin.social 27 points 2 years ago

seethe

Very concerning word use from you.

The issue art faces isn't that there's not enough throughput, but rather there's not enough time, both to make them and enjoy them.

[-] mkhoury@lemmy.ca 15 points 2 years ago

That's always been the case, though, imo. People had to make time for art. They had to go to galleries, see plays and listen to music. To me it's about the fair promotion of art, and the ability for the art enjoyer to find art that they themselves enjoy rather than what some business model requires of them, and the ability for art creators to find a niche and to be able to work on their art as much as they would want to.

[-] NounsAndWords@lemmy.world 23 points 2 years ago

I take it we don't use the phrase "good writers borrow, great writers steal" in this day and age...

[-] AphoticDev@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 points 2 years ago

Wait till they find out photographers spend their whole careers trying to emulate the style of previous generations. Or that Adobe has been implementing AI-driven content creation into Photoshop and Lightroom for years now, and we've been pretending we don't notice because it makes our jobs easier.

[-] mrcleanup@lemmy.world 23 points 2 years ago

I think the place we haven't quite gotten to yet is that copyright is probably the wrong law for this. What the AI is doing is reverse engineering the authors magic formula for creating new works, which would likely be patent law.

In the past this hasn't really been possible for a person to do reliably, and it isn't really quantifiable as far as filling a patent for your process, yet the AI does it anyway, leaving us in a weird spot.

[-] Mandarbmax@lemmy.world 17 points 2 years ago

US patent professional here

Ya, saying it isn't possible to do under patent law is no understatement. Even making the patent applications possible to allow would require changes to 35 U. S. C. 112 (A, and probably also B), 35 U. S. C. 101. This all assumes that all authors would have the time and money and energy to file a patent, which even with a good attorney is analogous to is many many hours of work and filing pro se would be like writing a whole new book. After the patent is allowed the costs of continuation applications to account for changes in the process as the author learns and grows would be a hellish burden. After this comes the 20 year lifespan of a patent (assuming all maintenance fees are paid, which is quite the assumption, those are not cheap) at which point the patent protections are dead and the author needs to invent a new process to be protected. Don't even get me started on enforcing a patent.

Patent law is fundamentally flawed to be sure but even if every author gets infinite money and time to file patents with then the changes needed to patent law to let them do so would leave patent law utterly broken for other purposes.

Using patent law for this is a good idea to bring up but for the above reasons I don't think it is viable at all. It would be better and more realistic to have congress change copyright law than to change patent law I think. Sadly, I don't think that is particularly likely either. :(

[-] TheGreenGolem@lemm.ee 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Can't they just create a brand new law, specifically to cover these use-cases we have here?

Edit: And thank you for your detailed answer! It was educational.

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[-] tias@discuss.tchncs.de 11 points 2 years ago

And patent law is even more broken than copyright law.

[-] Mandarbmax@lemmy.world 10 points 2 years ago

I don't know if I would say more broken, at least patents have limits on how long they can exist for, putting an upper bound on how much damage they can cause. The again, limiting the production of vaccines during a pandemic is a lot more urgent than letting people do micky mouse cartoons so the standard for what broken is has to be a lot more stringent. It is more important for patent law to not be broken than it is for copyright law so the same amount of brokenness feels worse with patents.

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[-] archomrade@midwest.social 22 points 2 years ago

Copyright is already just a band-aid for what is really an issue of resource allocation.

If writers and artists weren't at risk of loosing their means of living, we wouldn't need to concern ourselves with the threat of an advanced tool supplanting them. Nevermind how the tool is created, it is clearly very valuable (otherwise it would not represent such a large threat to writers) and should be made as broadly available (and jointly-owned and controlled) as possible. By expanding copyright like this, all we're doing is gatekeeping the creation of AI models to the largest of tech companies, and making them prohibitively expensive to train for smaller applications.

If LLM's are truly the start of a "fourth industrial revolution" as some have claimed, then we need to consider the possibility that our economic arrangement is ill-suited for the kind of productivity it is said AI will bring. Private ownership (over creative works, and over AI models, and over data) is getting in the way of what could be a beautiful technological advancement that benefits everyone.

Instead, we're left squabbling over who gets to own what and how.

[-] Franzia 7 points 2 years ago

fourth industrial revolution" as some have claimed

The people claiming this are often the shareholders themselves.

prohibitively expensive to train for smaller applications.

There is so much work out there for free, with no copyright. The biggest cost in training is most likely the hardware, and I see no added value in having AI train on Stephen King ☠️

Copyright is already just a band-aid for what is really an issue of resource allocation.

God damn right but I want our government to put a band aid on capitalists just stealing whatever the fuck they want "move fast and break things". It's yet another test for my confidence in the state. Every issue, a litmus test for how our society deals with the problems that arise.

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[-] autotldr@lemmings.world 15 points 2 years ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:


ChatGPT creator OpenAI has been on the receiving end of two high profile lawsuits by authors who are absolutely livid that the AI startup used their writing to train its large language models, which they say amounts to flaunting copyright laws without any form of compensation.

One of the lawsuits, led by comedian and memoirist Sarah Silverman, is playing out in a California federal court, where the plaintiffs recently delivered a scolding on ChatGPT's underlying technology.

At the crux of the author's lawsuit is the argument that OpenAI is ruthlessly mining their material to create "derivative works" that will "replace the very writings it copied."

The authors shoot down OpenAI's excuse that "substantial similarity is a mandatory feature of all copyright-infringement claims," calling it "flat wrong."

It can brag that it's a leader in a booming AI industry, but in doing so it's also painted a bigger target on its back, making enemies of practically every creative pursuit.

High profile literary luminaries behind that suit include George R. R. Martin, Jonathan Franzen, David Baldacci, and legal thriller maestro John Grisham.


The original article contains 369 words, the summary contains 180 words. Saved 51%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[-] beejjorgensen@lemmy.sdf.org 8 points 2 years ago

"substantial similarity is a mandatory feature of all copyright-infringement claims"

Is that not a requirement? Time for me to start suing people!

[-] Madison_rogue@kbin.social 7 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Here’s current guidance from US Congress regarding AI copyright infringement.

Page 3 includes guidance on fair use.

https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/LSB/LSB10922

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this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
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