6 ms·

Prediction: Some nation-state that cares nothing about IP (i.e. China) wins the AI race in this domain making these regulations totally useless.

EntrePrescott 4y ago
Another prediction would be: maybe Western states start blocking Chinese businesses that don't comply with their laws. After all, China already blocks the Western businesses that don't implement the spying/surveillance measures the Chinese communist party wants. The more the Chinese communist government continues pushing a war course against Taiwan makes that even more likely, e.g. in the context of sanctions.
- mrbungie 4y ago
  Good luck blocking such a big market. Money simply speaks louder.
  - vkou 4y ago
    Blocking imports is actually very easy.
- londons_explore 4y ago
  But it won't matter. If an integrated economy can be more efficient by copying each other internally, then it will eventually be more competitive at business worldwide, despite trade levies aimed against it.
gumballindie 4y ago
Yeah China hasn't been respecting IP for a long time and it's still well behind. We shouldn't become China just to win a race - there are rules to the game you know? If everyone's content is stolen and resold by an AI then why would anyone want to create content?
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  Assuming a race to the bottom, eventually the content won't sell because people will just generate it for themselves.
- pdntspa 4y ago
  It would go back to the best reason: for the joy of creating. The field would be reduced to those who enjoy making art for the sake of making art. It would also do wonders for filtering out the amount of crap that people produce. We would all have a much more rich and varied diet of art to appreciate.
  - tjr 4y ago
    Possibly. When wearing my "artist" hat, I work on two different things: art that I personally care about, and art that might sell. If AI made all the art that might sell, that would give me more time and energy to work on the art I actually care about, but maybe less sales from art.
    - pdntspa 4y ago
      That's the thing. "Art that might sell" is corrupted. The diversity and uniqueness of art we would encounter regularly would be so much higher if that category was simply eliminated.
      - tjr 4y ago
        I agree. A great deal of "art that might sell" is already borderline repetitive, uncreative garbage. Maybe pleasant garbage, but still. Nothing anybody would be really interested in, except to add a bit of color to empty space. The more creativity you inject, the less likely it is to sell.
  - kmeisthax 4y ago
    So far AI art is doing the opposite: increasing the amount of crap that people produce. The kinds of people who were once limited to underpaying ghostwriters to make spam books for Audible[0] can now chuck together a few prompts to ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion and get the same result. Yes, you have to be good at art in order to make good art with AI, but that doesn't matter when your goal is to create spam. The idea that artists should "do stuff for the joy of creating" is just plain insulting, too. They already do that. While artists would love to see, say, AI art models that were trained with licensed or public-domain data; training data theft isn't even their biggest concern. Their biggest concern is having the fun sucked out of their job as the artful minutae of drawing or writing is replaced with finding the correct combination of words to make Stable Diffusion draw the character you want with exactly the same details every time. It would be like if you worked at a PC building shop and one day the boss said "Actually we're just going to be an Apple authorized reseller now." The thing that's destroying artists' jobs being trained on their own work is just insult to injury. To be clear, though, AI doesn't "steal and resell content" in the vast majority of cases, either. Regurgitation is a thing, but the cause is duplicate data in the training set making it advantageous to memorize a few images to improve loss metrics. Most diffusion model architectures are not big enough to memorize the whole training set, or even large pieces of it. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw
wokwokwok 4y ago
Funny, they seem to be more proactive about putting laws around it there already (1), and that hasn't stopped progress at all, while protecting the vested interests they care about. If only our law makers were so capable of a) understanding whats going on and b) actually passing laws when it mattered. [1] - https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/12/china-bans-ai-generated-media-without-watermarks/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/12/china...
- jquery 4y ago
  Is there any evidence of mass compliance with these regulations? It seems basically impossible to enforce in a humane and fair way. Such laws will be used to prosecute political minorities if they are enforced at all.
- mrbungie 4y ago
  That is obviously going to happen in mainland China specially when it may affect the CCP's plans in some way (i.e. even "morally" in the case of Xi Jinping deepfakes). Are they going to enforce it for products/services sold overseas? I'm not so sure, not until I see watermarks in Tiktok's content.
  - ozymandias12 4y ago
    >Are they going to enforce it for products/services sold overseas? Like, are you a troll or you just don't know how laws work? >I'm not so sure, not until I see watermarks in Tiktok's content. Tiktok literally exports all videos with watermarks, its the people that remove them to post on reddit lmao how clueless are you
    - mrbungie 4y ago
      Just look for the words "China IP law infrigement" in Google FFS, if that is trolling, well, then I'm trolling. About watermarks, I'm obviously talking about AI generated content watermarks, not general tiktok watermarks. I guess I should've been more concrete with my phrasing as some people can't read considering context.
throwaway290 4y ago
Have you checked on the state of AI in China lately? It might be enlightening if you think there's some sort of arms race going on, or anything even close to that. Also, if you follow through your logic you are arguing for abolishing all laws in the US that constrain US companies if some other countries can ignore these laws and get the upper hand. Keep in mind that these laws (like intellectual property, copyright, patents) is the reason US has innovated so much in the first place
- alasdair_ 4y ago
  China’s AI strategy is likely “annex Taiwan”. After that, they will decimate global gpu supply and they can use their newfound lead in compute to win the race.
  - politician 4y ago
    Can you explain where China obtains a lead in compute from attacking Taiwan? TSMC fabs on the island will not survive an invasion.
    - mrbungie 4y ago
      Probably it will be more like espionage and ensuring at least constant access to the litography equipment that China is lacking right now.
- mrbungie 4y ago
  Nope, I haven't and I also didn't mention or suggest any actual arms race. My point is that any policy regarding AI (or any policy for that matter) is going to be hard to enforce when including potential (economically) "rogue" states, just that. Now, if you have any information about AI and China, enlighten me. The more one knows the better. PS/edit: I need more information about your last ghost edit. China (and others) would say otherwise about IP laws. If anything I would at least say that innovation can be either cut or assured through IP laws depending on the domain/technology, but it is difficult to conclude that absolutely for all cases.
vkou 4y ago
Western AI currently doesn't respect IP, as it scrapes the web, and turns it into proprietary model weights, with zero attribution, and with zero compliance with the wishes of the original IP's owners.
newswasboring 4y ago
And they will deserve to. The point of copyright wasn't to bar anyone from using any work anywhere. It was to encourage artists to create art. Doing it by protecting the work they create was just a mechanism. The current mechanism of almost perpetual copyrights and just constant nagging over things which don't include a recognizable semblance of the original work is just insanity.
- tjr 4y ago
  I don't think that taking one's art and using it to train a machine to be able to make limitless art is super encouraging to the artist.
  - amanaplanacanal 4y ago
    But the goal is more art, not keeping artists employed. If machines do it better, so be it.
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      If you shift the reward from the people doing one kind of work to people owning (one kind of, but this is fungible) capital, and don't shift capital at the same time, you are doing concrete harm to identifiable people, even if the net is positive in some constructed aggregate. AI has a tremendous ability to do that across a wide range of different types of work rapidly and simultaneously.
    - YurgenJurgensen 4y ago
      No it isn't. 'Not enough art' is basically the exact opposite of the problem we're facing right now. Do you honestly believe that there's not enough music on Spotify? That a two hundred year catalogue isn't enough and you'd rather it be two hundred thousand years?
      - dwallin 4y ago
        If your point is that we already have more than enough music than needed, isn’t that an indication that current copyright laws don’t need to be nearly as strong as they are in order to continue to promote the “useful arts”? (at least when it comes to music)
winternett 4y ago
Prediction: Hacks will flood spotify, youtube, and social sites with terrible cheap shoddy songs titled as if they are made by actual artists and the platforms will dish out royalties meant for authentic artists to total frauds. Real musicians may possibly abandon mega-music platforms altogether, and implement more secure (direct sales) platforms on their own web sites... Big platforms really are not helpful nor respectful to musicians, especially musicians that are working hard to be discovered. It's a total shame that shotify charges musicians to be promoted on their platform while giving a ton of royalties away to so many fraudulent actors every year.
- _fat_santa 4y ago
  > Prediction: Hacks will flood spotify, youtube, and social sites with terrible cheap shoddy songs titled as if they are made by actual artists and the platforms will dish out royalties meant for authentic artists to total frauds. Real musicians may possibly abandon mega-music platforms altogether, and implement more secure (direct sales) platforms on their own web sites... I don't think that would work, if a song is detectable enough to give the artist royalties for a song, it's detectable enough to see that it's copyrighted music. IMHO I think music piracy is essentially dead, because the music industry has finally learned and made a compelling product. With services like Spotify and Apple Music, pirating music is just not worth it anymore. Why bother when for $10/month you could listen to all the music to your hearts content. Universal asking steaming companies to not use their label's music on training is just stupid because all they are doing is shooting the artists in the foot. Most AI in music is recommendation engines, do you not want your artists to be discovered? The streaming services are not stealing your music you idiot [UMG], they are trying to make you more money by directing people to music they like.
  - winternett 4y ago
    You have no idea of what you're typing about, nor about how content ID works online for music. Ai music generators are specifically designed to circumvent content ID. Ai generators put music and other content in a blender and then scrambles the source samples until they are unrecognizable and then mashes the tiny cut pieces of source samples back together into a collage. Kind of like putting a strawberry into a smoothie... It's no longer a strawberry, but the smoothie now has the extracted taste of strawberry AND the other original materials used to source the end product. Content ID only recognizes strawberries and whole fruits, not smoothies.

EntrePrescott 4y ago

Another prediction would be: maybe Western states start blocking Chinese businesses that don't comply with their laws. After all, China already blocks the Western businesses that don't implement the spying/surveillance measures the Chinese communist party wants. The more the Chinese communist government continues pushing a war course against Taiwan makes that even more likely, e.g. in the context of sanctions.

mrbungie 4y ago
Good luck blocking such a big market. Money simply speaks louder.
- vkou 4y ago
  Blocking imports is actually very easy.
londons_explore 4y ago
But it won't matter. If an integrated economy can be more efficient by copying each other internally, then it will eventually be more competitive at business worldwide, despite trade levies aimed against it.

gumballindie 4y ago

Yeah China hasn't been respecting IP for a long time and it's still well behind. We shouldn't become China just to win a race - there are rules to the game you know? If everyone's content is stolen and resold by an AI then why would anyone want to create content?

hammyhavoc 4y ago
Assuming a race to the bottom, eventually the content won't sell because people will just generate it for themselves.
pdntspa 4y ago
It would go back to the best reason: for the joy of creating. The field would be reduced to those who enjoy making art for the sake of making art. It would also do wonders for filtering out the amount of crap that people produce. We would all have a much more rich and varied diet of art to appreciate.
- tjr 4y ago
  Possibly. When wearing my "artist" hat, I work on two different things: art that I personally care about, and art that might sell. If AI made all the art that might sell, that would give me more time and energy to work on the art I actually care about, but maybe less sales from art.
  - pdntspa 4y ago
    That's the thing. "Art that might sell" is corrupted. The diversity and uniqueness of art we would encounter regularly would be so much higher if that category was simply eliminated.
    - tjr 4y ago
      I agree. A great deal of "art that might sell" is already borderline repetitive, uncreative garbage. Maybe pleasant garbage, but still. Nothing anybody would be really interested in, except to add a bit of color to empty space. The more creativity you inject, the less likely it is to sell.
- kmeisthax 4y ago
  So far AI art is doing the opposite: increasing the amount of crap that people produce. The kinds of people who were once limited to underpaying ghostwriters to make spam books for Audible[0] can now chuck together a few prompts to ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion and get the same result. Yes, you have to be good at art in order to make good art with AI, but that doesn't matter when your goal is to create spam. The idea that artists should "do stuff for the joy of creating" is just plain insulting, too. They already do that. While artists would love to see, say, AI art models that were trained with licensed or public-domain data; training data theft isn't even their biggest concern. Their biggest concern is having the fun sucked out of their job as the artful minutae of drawing or writing is replaced with finding the correct combination of words to make Stable Diffusion draw the character you want with exactly the same details every time. It would be like if you worked at a PC building shop and one day the boss said "Actually we're just going to be an Apple authorized reseller now." The thing that's destroying artists' jobs being trained on their own work is just insult to injury. To be clear, though, AI doesn't "steal and resell content" in the vast majority of cases, either. Regurgitation is a thing, but the cause is duplicate data in the training set making it advantageous to memorize a few images to improve loss metrics. Most diffusion model architectures are not big enough to memorize the whole training set, or even large pieces of it. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw

wokwokwok 4y ago

Funny, they seem to be more proactive about putting laws around it there already (1), and that hasn't stopped progress at all, while protecting the vested interests they care about. If only our law makers were so capable of a) understanding whats going on and b) actually passing laws when it mattered. [1] - https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/12/china-bans-ai-generated-media-without-watermarks/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/12/china...

jquery 4y ago
Is there any evidence of mass compliance with these regulations? It seems basically impossible to enforce in a humane and fair way. Such laws will be used to prosecute political minorities if they are enforced at all.
mrbungie 4y ago
That is obviously going to happen in mainland China specially when it may affect the CCP's plans in some way (i.e. even "morally" in the case of Xi Jinping deepfakes). Are they going to enforce it for products/services sold overseas? I'm not so sure, not until I see watermarks in Tiktok's content.
- ozymandias12 4y ago
  >Are they going to enforce it for products/services sold overseas? Like, are you a troll or you just don't know how laws work? >I'm not so sure, not until I see watermarks in Tiktok's content. Tiktok literally exports all videos with watermarks, its the people that remove them to post on reddit lmao how clueless are you
  - mrbungie 4y ago
    Just look for the words "China IP law infrigement" in Google FFS, if that is trolling, well, then I'm trolling. About watermarks, I'm obviously talking about AI generated content watermarks, not general tiktok watermarks. I guess I should've been more concrete with my phrasing as some people can't read considering context.

throwaway290 4y ago

Have you checked on the state of AI in China lately? It might be enlightening if you think there's some sort of arms race going on, or anything even close to that. Also, if you follow through your logic you are arguing for abolishing all laws in the US that constrain US companies if some other countries can ignore these laws and get the upper hand. Keep in mind that these laws (like intellectual property, copyright, patents) is the reason US has innovated so much in the first place

alasdair_ 4y ago
China’s AI strategy is likely “annex Taiwan”. After that, they will decimate global gpu supply and they can use their newfound lead in compute to win the race.
- politician 4y ago
  Can you explain where China obtains a lead in compute from attacking Taiwan? TSMC fabs on the island will not survive an invasion.
  - mrbungie 4y ago
    Probably it will be more like espionage and ensuring at least constant access to the litography equipment that China is lacking right now.
mrbungie 4y ago
Nope, I haven't and I also didn't mention or suggest any actual arms race. My point is that any policy regarding AI (or any policy for that matter) is going to be hard to enforce when including potential (economically) "rogue" states, just that. Now, if you have any information about AI and China, enlighten me. The more one knows the better. PS/edit: I need more information about your last ghost edit. China (and others) would say otherwise about IP laws. If anything I would at least say that innovation can be either cut or assured through IP laws depending on the domain/technology, but it is difficult to conclude that absolutely for all cases.

vkou 4y ago

Western AI currently doesn't respect IP, as it scrapes the web, and turns it into proprietary model weights, with zero attribution, and with zero compliance with the wishes of the original IP's owners.

newswasboring 4y ago

And they will deserve to. The point of copyright wasn't to bar anyone from using any work anywhere. It was to encourage artists to create art. Doing it by protecting the work they create was just a mechanism. The current mechanism of almost perpetual copyrights and just constant nagging over things which don't include a recognizable semblance of the original work is just insanity.

tjr 4y ago
I don't think that taking one's art and using it to train a machine to be able to make limitless art is super encouraging to the artist.
- amanaplanacanal 4y ago
  But the goal is more art, not keeping artists employed. If machines do it better, so be it.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    If you shift the reward from the people doing one kind of work to people owning (one kind of, but this is fungible) capital, and don't shift capital at the same time, you are doing concrete harm to identifiable people, even if the net is positive in some constructed aggregate. AI has a tremendous ability to do that across a wide range of different types of work rapidly and simultaneously.
  - YurgenJurgensen 4y ago
    No it isn't. 'Not enough art' is basically the exact opposite of the problem we're facing right now. Do you honestly believe that there's not enough music on Spotify? That a two hundred year catalogue isn't enough and you'd rather it be two hundred thousand years?
    - dwallin 4y ago
      If your point is that we already have more than enough music than needed, isn’t that an indication that current copyright laws don’t need to be nearly as strong as they are in order to continue to promote the “useful arts”? (at least when it comes to music)

winternett 4y ago

Prediction: Hacks will flood spotify, youtube, and social sites with terrible cheap shoddy songs titled as if they are made by actual artists and the platforms will dish out royalties meant for authentic artists to total frauds. Real musicians may possibly abandon mega-music platforms altogether, and implement more secure (direct sales) platforms on their own web sites... Big platforms really are not helpful nor respectful to musicians, especially musicians that are working hard to be discovered. It's a total shame that shotify charges musicians to be promoted on their platform while giving a ton of royalties away to so many fraudulent actors every year.

_fat_santa 4y ago
> Prediction: Hacks will flood spotify, youtube, and social sites with terrible cheap shoddy songs titled as if they are made by actual artists and the platforms will dish out royalties meant for authentic artists to total frauds. Real musicians may possibly abandon mega-music platforms altogether, and implement more secure (direct sales) platforms on their own web sites... I don't think that would work, if a song is detectable enough to give the artist royalties for a song, it's detectable enough to see that it's copyrighted music. IMHO I think music piracy is essentially dead, because the music industry has finally learned and made a compelling product. With services like Spotify and Apple Music, pirating music is just not worth it anymore. Why bother when for $10/month you could listen to all the music to your hearts content. Universal asking steaming companies to not use their label's music on training is just stupid because all they are doing is shooting the artists in the foot. Most AI in music is recommendation engines, do you not want your artists to be discovered? The streaming services are not stealing your music you idiot [UMG], they are trying to make you more money by directing people to music they like.
- winternett 4y ago
  You have no idea of what you're typing about, nor about how content ID works online for music. Ai music generators are specifically designed to circumvent content ID. Ai generators put music and other content in a blender and then scrambles the source samples until they are unrecognizable and then mashes the tiny cut pieces of source samples back together into a collage. Kind of like putting a strawberry into a smoothie... It's no longer a strawberry, but the smoothie now has the extracted taste of strawberry AND the other original materials used to source the end product. Content ID only recognizes strawberries and whole fruits, not smoothies.