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This announcement has immediate, significant practical impact for creatives. The most important document a creative had, up until today, was their portfolio --

This announcement has immediate, significant practical impact for creatives. The most important document a creative had, up until today, was their portfolio -- typically, a look-book of finished pieces. Now, that portfolio needs to include, for every piece, proof-of-work -- snapshots of the whatever-it-is in various states along the road to completion, in sufficient quantity to dissuade any legal claim that the work was AI-produced. At the limit, those aim to sell organic-certified free range content will want to surveil themselves during the entire creative process, and associate that recording indelibly with the created work. That's a whole lot of extra work and a whole lot of extra privacy violation, but the alternative will be to devalue one's own work: for to the extent to which it may have been produced by AI, it will be a liability to downstream consumers. For example, a film director might commission a score from a composer, but unless that score comes with timestamped, SHAsummed video of enough of the composition process to preclude invalidating the broader claim to a copyright (and thus salable work), that composition becomes a financial risk for the director. The consequences of not doing so are severe: At minimum, if the score cannot be copyrighted, then it can be borrowed, free-of-charge, by another film director, and at maximum, the spectre of AI contribution might virally taint the entire film (IANAL; am I getting this right?) "Creative" just became the most surveilled job on the planet. We also may have just found the first agreeable use for blockchain -- an indelible public record of organic artistic creation, bearing SHAsums associated recorded twitch and youtube streams (along with logs of workstation network traffic) permanently with the finished work. Wouldn't it be hilarious if AI copyright law saved crypto?

tobiasSoftware 4y ago
"at maximum, the spectre of AI contribution might virally taint the entire film" - which would also mean that anyone who used GitHub Copilot would not be able to copyright their software code.
- 1attice 4y ago
  I hadn't thought of that -- but yes, it very well might be the case. Let's say there's a 50% (extremely generous!) limit on AI contribution. An efficient company will operate close to that line, say, targeting a 49% AI contrib. (Remember how inexpensive AI contribution is in comparsion to human contribution. Market pressure will push people towards tenths of percentage points.) That means that Joey, your new intern, might accidentally commit enough SLOC to make the whole codebase uncopyrightable. Even if Joey didn't do that, the possibility of Joey doing that will have a strong deterrent effect on hiring Joey, especially if he's WFH. The only mitigation would be to record everything Joey does, so that if there's ever any question, they can whip out the recordings of Joey picking his nose or whatever.
  - kromem 4y ago
    Something I've begun thinking about after playing with GPT-4 is that I could see within a year or so any of my new software development projects being a "no code" setup using comments to define functions and correct problem areas but leaving all actual code to the generative AI. In many ways software projects for years now have this issue. A decade ago when ruby on rails scaffolded out a project - is the result copyrightable according to the new guidance? Separating out copyrighting software design at a comment level from software implementation is going to be the direction this all goes as the tools rapidly get significantly better. Which is also going to be great, as imagine how a codebase designed this way might be able to be switched to a new language or switch out the 3rd party API being used or database being run on. People are worried about protecting their busy work rather than evolving with the technology to establish their value above and beyond the busywork parts. My value in software engineering isn't in typing up the loop, and less even in knowing that I'll need one. It's in knowing how to manage complexity across a broader cross integration of concerns. The way I'm doing that will change as technology advances, but it will still be some time before that part is automated too.
    - 1attice 4y ago
      > My value in software engineering isn't in typing up the loop, and less even in knowing that I'll need one. It's in knowing how to manage complexity across a broader cross integration of concerns. The way I'm doing that will change as technology advances, but it will still be some time before that part is automated too. I think this is just normalcy bias on your part. The thing that GPT-4 does apparently works at most levels of complexity, certainly more than GPT-3. It seems likely that, for sufficiently high N, GPT-N will enable your boss to, as you say, "manage complexity across a broad[er] cross integration of concerns". There's nothing magical about "cross integration of concerns," any more than there was something magical about being able to use (say) `git rebase` correctly. There is no reason to think that GPT-N won't be better at you for that, too. Why would your boss pay you six figures when she can get the same deal for $20 a month?

tobiasSoftware 4y ago

"at maximum, the spectre of AI contribution might virally taint the entire film" - which would also mean that anyone who used GitHub Copilot would not be able to copyright their software code.

1attice 4y ago
I hadn't thought of that -- but yes, it very well might be the case. Let's say there's a 50% (extremely generous!) limit on AI contribution. An efficient company will operate close to that line, say, targeting a 49% AI contrib. (Remember how inexpensive AI contribution is in comparsion to human contribution. Market pressure will push people towards tenths of percentage points.) That means that Joey, your new intern, might accidentally commit enough SLOC to make the whole codebase uncopyrightable. Even if Joey didn't do that, the possibility of Joey doing that will have a strong deterrent effect on hiring Joey, especially if he's WFH. The only mitigation would be to record everything Joey does, so that if there's ever any question, they can whip out the recordings of Joey picking his nose or whatever.
- kromem 4y ago
  Something I've begun thinking about after playing with GPT-4 is that I could see within a year or so any of my new software development projects being a "no code" setup using comments to define functions and correct problem areas but leaving all actual code to the generative AI. In many ways software projects for years now have this issue. A decade ago when ruby on rails scaffolded out a project - is the result copyrightable according to the new guidance? Separating out copyrighting software design at a comment level from software implementation is going to be the direction this all goes as the tools rapidly get significantly better. Which is also going to be great, as imagine how a codebase designed this way might be able to be switched to a new language or switch out the 3rd party API being used or database being run on. People are worried about protecting their busy work rather than evolving with the technology to establish their value above and beyond the busywork parts. My value in software engineering isn't in typing up the loop, and less even in knowing that I'll need one. It's in knowing how to manage complexity across a broader cross integration of concerns. The way I'm doing that will change as technology advances, but it will still be some time before that part is automated too.
  - 1attice 4y ago
    > My value in software engineering isn't in typing up the loop, and less even in knowing that I'll need one. It's in knowing how to manage complexity across a broader cross integration of concerns. The way I'm doing that will change as technology advances, but it will still be some time before that part is automated too. I think this is just normalcy bias on your part. The thing that GPT-4 does apparently works at most levels of complexity, certainly more than GPT-3. It seems likely that, for sufficiently high N, GPT-N will enable your boss to, as you say, "manage complexity across a broad[er] cross integration of concerns". There's nothing magical about "cross integration of concerns," any more than there was something magical about being able to use (say) `git rebase` correctly. There is no reason to think that GPT-N won't be better at you for that, too. Why would your boss pay you six figures when she can get the same deal for $20 a month?