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Copyright holders make all kinds of arguments for why they should be get money for incidental exposure to their work. This is all about greed and jealousy. If s

• ethanbond 3y ago
  > People just see someone else making money in a way that is completely dependent upon their own prior work and want to try and get a piece of it
  • qt31415926 3y ago
    It's actually impressive that Weird Al has made it as far as he did now that I think about it
    • sensanaty 3y ago
      Weird Al explicitly seeks out the permission from the people whose songs he's parodying, despite not really having to (legally), and he compensates them in kind as well, so kinda the exact opposite of what the AI crowd wants to do.
    • kmeisthax 3y ago
      Weird Al gets permission and licenses for every song parody he makes. The legal definition of parody in fair use wouldn't exactly cover everything he does. That being said, there's still occasionally times where he gets screwed over by the licensing machine anyway - either because the label forgot to ask the artist (Amish Paradise) or because the artist forgot to ask the label (You're Pitiful).
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  • Ukv 3y ago
    > in a way that is completely dependent upon their own prior work Ultimately information has to come from somewhere. If something has no information about what a "car" is, it cannot paint a car more successfully than a random guess. When you draw a car or write an algorithm to do so, you'll be slightly affected by the existing car designs you've seen. It's not a limitation specific to AI - it's just more obscured for humans since there's no explicit searchable database of all the cars you've glanced at. Whether it was affected by (and dependant on in aggregate) prior work is not the standard for copyright infringement, and I'd claim would implicate essentially all action as infringement. Instead, it should be judged by whether there's substantial similarity - and if there is substantial similarity, then by the factors of fair use.
  • paulmd 3y ago
    > completely dependent No, AI art would exist without Disney or HBO just like human art would. It literally does come back to the idea that either AI is doing more or less the same thing as an art student, and learns styles and structures and concepts, in which case training an art student is infringing because it’s completely dependent on the work of artists who came before. And sure, if you ask a skilled 2d artist if they can draw something in the style of 80s anime, or specific artists, they can do it. There are some artists who specialize in this in fact! Can’t have retro anime porn commissions if it’s not riffing on retro anime images. Yes twitter, I see what you do with that account when you’re not complaining about AI. The problem is that AI lowers the cost of doing this to zero, and thus lays bare the inherent contradictions of IP law and “intellectual ownership” in a society where everyone is diffusing and mashing up each others ideas and works on a continuous basis. It is one of those “everyone does it” crimes that mostly survives because it’s utterly unenforced at scale, apart from a few noxious litigants like disney. It is the old Luddite problem - the common idea that luddites just hated technology is inaccurate. They were textile workers who were literally seeing their livelihoods displaced by automation mass-producing what they saw as inferior goods. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite In general this is a problem that's set up by capitalism itself though. Ideas can’t and shouldn’t be owned, it is an absurd premise and you shouldn’t be surprised that you get absurd results. Making sure people can eat is not the job of capitalism, it’s the job of safety nets and governments. Ideas have no cost of replication and artificially creating one is distorting and destructive. Would a neural net put a tax on neurons firing? No, that’s stupid and counterproductive. Let people write their slash fiction in peace. (HN probably has a good understanding of it, but in general people don't appreciate just how much it is not just aping images it's seen but learning the style and relationships of pixels and objects etc. To wit, the only thing NVIDIA saved from DLSS 1.0 was the model... and DLSS 2.0 has nothing to do with DLSS 1.0 in terms of technical approach. But the model encodes all the contextual understanding of how pixels are supposed to look in human images, even if it's not even doing the original transform anymore! And LLMs can indeed generalize reasonably accurately about things they haven't seen, as long as they know the precepts etc. Because they aren't "just guessing what word comes next", it's the word that comes next given a conceptual understanding of the underlying ideas. And that's a difficult thing to draw a line between a human and an AI large model, college students will "riff on the things they know" if you ask them to "generalize" about a topic they haven't studied too, etc.)
• exabrial 3y ago
  Lets try this: I'd like you do give away 100% of your salary, ok? Are you greedy if you say no?
  • Tadpole9181 3y ago
    This is a blatant non-sequitor. There are many approaches to actually having a good faith discussion on the societal/economic/moral/humanitarian effects of large-scale AI taking over entire workforces. Being coy and asking loaded questions does nothing to convince anyone of them.
    • coding123 3y ago
      The ability of AI to produce the content that it does actually will be reducing potentially hundreds of thousands of jobs. Now, the percentage of those jobs lost because some of the content was accidentally copy written may be small but does account for some percentage of that job loss. So it isn't actually a non sequitur in my opinion.
      • Turing_Machine 3y ago
        > The ability of AI to produce the content that it does actually will be reducing potentially hundreds of thousands of jobs. You mean like tractors, electric motors, powered looms, machine tools, excavators, and such? Yeah, and? In the limit, those things are why our population isn't 90% unfree agricultural laborers (serfs or slaves), 9+% soldiers to keep the serfs in line, and < 1% "nobles" and "priests", who get to consume all the goodies. This same basic argument about "putting artists out of work" was made when photography was invented. It didn't work then, and it's not going to work now.
      • Tadpole9181 3y ago
        I don't disagree with you at all, your point is important to communicate and debate on! But the framing of the original comment was unproductive and only served to hurt the argument. I, personally, think that AI is a tremendous opportunity that we should be investing in and pushing forward. And my existing dislike of property right laws does feed into my views on the training data discussion; prioritizing a revolution in productivity over preservation of jobs for the sake of maintaining the status quo. But I'm not stupid enough to think there will be no consequences for being unprepared for the future. Rather unfortunately, I'm not quite clever enough to see what being prepared would actually look like either.
• rvz 3y ago
  All I see is AI companies poorly justifying their grift that they know they don't want to pay for the content that they are commercializing without permission and pull the fair use excuses. It is no wonder why OpenAI had to pay Shutterstock for training on their data and Getty suing Stability AI for training on their watermarked images and using it commercially without permission and actors / actresses filing lawsuits against commercial voice cloners which costs them close to nothing, as those companies either take down the cloned voice offering or shutdown. These weak arguments from these AI folks sound like excuses justifying a newly found grift.
  • artninja1988 3y ago
    Afaik Getty's case is strong against stability because they were dumb enough not to remove the water marks before training so now their model recreates their watermark, which is an infringement. Also let's not pretend openai licensed their dataset from all the stock image sites they scraped. The main reason they have a deal with Shutterstock is probably easy access and also Shutterstock partnered up with openai for ai tech to sell on their website.
  • Tadpole9181 3y ago
    When you're viewing everyone with a different opinion than you as a grifter, corporate rat, or some other malicious entity, you've disabled the ability or desire for people to try to engage with you. You won't be convinced, and you're already being uncivil and fallacious. AI outputs should be regulated, of course. Obviously impersonation and copyright law already applies to AI systems. But a discussion on training inputs is entirely novel to man and our laws, and it's a very nuanced and important topic. And as AI advances, it becomes increasingly difficult because of the diminishing distinction between "organic" learning and "artificial" learning. As well as when stopping AI from — as an example — learning from research papers means we miss out on life-saving medication. Where do property rights conflict with human rights? They're important conversations to have, but you've destroyed the opportunity to have them from the starting gun.
    • sillysaurusx 3y ago
      Thank you.
• Animats 3y ago
  Yes, most of this is whining from the "copyright forever" crowd. If you get out something vaguely similar to something old, they complain. What they're really worried about is becoming obsolete, not being copied. The case against "tribute bands" is much stronger than the case against large language models built with some copyrighted content. Those are a blatant attempt to capitalize on the specific works of specific named people.
  • gumballindie 3y ago
    What people are worried about is the age old thieves stealing property and monetising it - which is what a lot of ai companies do. Pay up or create your own content and its fair game.
    • gaganyaan 3y ago
      It's not theft, etc. Boring tangent to try to introduce
      • gumballindie 3y ago
        Outside the organised ai bubble that's what it's called I'm afraid.
        • gaganyaan 3y ago
          Well, no. The courts disagree. You're in a bubble that you should leave
• gumballindie 3y ago
  AI companies monetising people’s IP need to pay up. End of story. Make smarter ai next time that can “learn” with less content - or as it stands, so called ai is just a massive database that procedurally mixes content to generate what looks like “new” content.
  • gaganyaan 3y ago
    Calling it a massive database makes it clear you lack a basic understanding of how it works. Please go learn the basics before commenting.
    • gumballindie 3y ago
      It is a massive database, but not in the classic sense. I believe your comment is a projection.