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When I cover generative AI in my Ethics in AI lecture, one of few soapbox opinions I give is that GenAI is doing essentially what people do - copy others. Picas

When I cover generative AI in my Ethics in AI lecture, one of few soapbox opinions I give is that GenAI is doing essentially what people do - copy others. Picasso has a quote about "Good Artists copy, Great Artists steal", which doesn't mean try to pass Lario and Muigi off as your own, but rather that great artists are able to take aspects from other works (also called 'inspiration') without being caught. My personality is a combination of elements taken from Jim Carrey, Robin Williams, and King of the Deathmatch Mick Foley. I like making vector graphics based on pictures. I have a folder on my computer called "Website Ideas" that's just screenshots of UIs that I've come across that I really like. I also point to a YouTube video by Kirby Ferguson "Everything is a Remix" [1] which talks about how so much of our collective culture stems from copy. It's a great video if you have an hour. When Little Timmy crayons a copy of Mario, we congratulate him for his creativity. Is it unique, one of a kind art? Well Timmy made it, but he didn't think up the original idea of a video game plumber. I give this view to GenAI right now - it's not capable of achieving that "next step" in "original design", but its performing like a novice artist/musician, it's mimicking what it sees. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9RYuvPCQUA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9RYuvPCQUA

schneems 3y ago
Rounding up a transaction and taking the leftovers wouldn’t be a crime worthy of the FBI for one transaction but it would be for a million or a billion. Scale matters and impact matters. If you’re making an ethical argument “it’s okay because it’s already happening to a lesser degree somewhere else” isn’t the flex you think it is. If you’re talking ethics, talk about impact. Who does it help the most who does it hurt the most? Is your argument favoring equality of access or outcome? Who is the most vulnerable in the situation and how will it impact them? > I cover generative AI Wait, are you teaching the class or taking it?
- stale2002 3y ago
  > “it’s okay because it’s already happening to a lesser degree somewhere else” isn’t the flex you think it is. It actually is. It shows that we as a society are completely OK with this, and nobody is complaining about a very standard and common thing that all artists do. It shows that the outrage is fake, and people don't actually care about the issue.
  - ImPleadThe5th 3y ago
    I don't really care when creative people steal. I care when faceless soulless companies monetize stolen content from Artists.
    - Spivak 3y ago
      It's still copyright violation. Sue them. Being generated by AI doesn't make the final output not copywritten. The interesting question is whether the models themselves are copyright violations not the output.
  - sensanaty 3y ago
    Do you really see no difference between someone drawing a piece of fan art and trillion dollar corporations stealing other people's works and reselling it for their own profit with no regards to anyone or anything else? And yes, obviously society cares about many things depending on the scales in question. It's okay if a dude goes onto a lake on his small rowboat and catches a few fish for dinner, it's a completely different story if you're talking about a massive barge indiscriminately catching literally thousands of fish with huge nets. The latter has to adhere to much stricter rules than the prior, and I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who thinks these 2 situations should be treated equally (unless you're a commercial fisherman with a barge, I suppose, the quote "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." comes to mind here)
    - gaganyaan 3y ago
      It's not stealing and they're not reselling anything. That's why it's called Generative AI
      - sensanaty 3y ago
        By that logic I can torrent movies and distribute them all I'd like as long as I call it "Generative Watching" or something like that. And OpenAI quite literally sells access to their models, and if those models are pushing out verbatim copyrighted works as has been alleged by the NYT, then they are by definition reselling copyrighted works without permission.
- tsumnia 3y ago
  > are you teaching the class or taking it? I teach it, my background is located in my profile and my research focuses on CS education. Scale and impact do matter, I wholeheartedly agree. However, I stand by my point that genAI is mirroring how humans learn - repetition of previously observed actions. As part of my dissertation, I argued that humans operate using 'templates', or previously established frameworks / systems. Even in higher cognitive tasks like problem solving, we rely on workflows that we were trained on previously. Soloway referred to problem solving as a mental set of "basic recurring plans" [1] and if you look at the old 1980s Usborne children's books, they required kids to retype code [2]. For creative tasks, depending on the actor's background, Method and Meisner both tell people to draw from previous experiences and observations to develop a character. This behavior is similar in many areas like music, dance, martial arts, cooking, language acquisition, etc. I am not making an ethical argument that GenAI violating copyright is okay because that's what humans do. I'm arguing that GenAI mirrors how humans learn. We observe a behavior and attempt to recreate that behavior. The difference is that humans can extract a fraction of the behavior and utilize it as part of something larger while GenAI cannot to the degree humans do. I'm sure GenAI would struggle to recreate "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" because of the two polar different visual elements of the film (cartoon and real life). In regards to your "If you’re talking ethics, talk about impact" section, its a bit of a loaded question. One side of the conversation could state that GenAI is helping many people that do not have confidence in their creative ability to produce their ideas, while the other could state its making it harder for artists. Yes, it absolutely is hurting artists and I fully support the recent writer's strike over AI concerns. But I do not believe that diminishes how the mathematical models used in GenAI mirror our own skill acquistion. [1] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5010283 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5010283 [2] https://usborne.com/us/books/computer-and-coding-books https://usborne.com/us/books/computer-and-coding-books
  - schneems 3y ago
    I took an AI in ethics course from a state backed school (Georgia Tech) and the answer to questions that weren’t “that’s illegal based on protected status” were “well, it depends.” Which, sure, that’s true, but maybe not helpful. In my view it encouraged nihilism and apathy instead of developing ethical frameworks. From that lens, I feel teaching a course might be more limiting in the range of heuristics you’re willing to accept or endorse. Though happy to accept your personal experience. A paper that comes to mind often from HCI is “do artifacts have politics” which looks at the impacts of technologies divorced from creator intent. I feel that’s similar here. You’re not wrong that about the mechanism that it’s created. But I would argue that’s the least important part, ethically anyway. Saying “strip mining with heavy industrial machines mimics laborers using shovels” is true to a degree, but but perhaps not that important piece of information. I’m not saying you’re making that argument. I guess im just not totally sure the outcome you were looking for in sharing your original comment. I hear your comparison and agree with it and that it is interesting to view in that lense. I wasn’t sure if there was a deeper intent in sharing it.
RandomLensman 3y ago
Irrespective of the current legal situation, there is no reason to regulate machines the same way as humans (and it is generally not what happens).
- anileated 3y ago
  I hope no self-respecting instructor in ethics could with a straight face teach how an LLM is like a human being when it comes to copyright while glossing over the blinding implication that if it truly were so we would then be subjecting that being to unthinkable abuse. That hypocritical, self-contradictory take is transparently geared to benefit commercial LLM operators (at the expense of individuals who stand to suffer material harm and/or authored the very creative works thanks to which the tool even exists).
tjr 3y ago
Timmy did not need to ingest the whole sum of human knowledge as a training set before he could draw a crayon copy of a cartoon character.
- dartos 3y ago
  I mean… neither did any AI.
  - sensanaty 3y ago
    Wasn't ChatGPT trained on the entirety of Wikipedia? And probably millions of pieces of scientific literature, and arts, and movies and games and and and... Perhaps the hyperbole of the entire corpus of human knowledge isn't quite technically right, but it's close enough.
    - dartos 3y ago
      You’re also assuming these statical models learn in the same way humans do, which is very likely not true. Tho tbh I’m not really sure what OPs point was i don’t think the amount of training data is relevant here.
- gaganyaan 3y ago
  Timmy did however spend years and years training on his own data ingested from incredibly high quality sensors. Not sure what your point is
- firtoz 3y ago
  He does ingest a lot of frames of input consisting of mostly that.
- throwuwu 3y ago
  What’s the FPS of human eyesight? How long did Timmy spend looking at Mario, more generally other cartoons and even more generally human forms? Do the math and you’ll find he’s got a pretty big training set as well, maybe not quite the same size but nothing to sneeze at.
amelius 3y ago
> we congratulate him for his creativity Yeah, but we don't typically congratulate users of GenAI for their creativity, and neither do we congratulate the code, nor do we think of the coders of GenAI as great artists. In other words, your analogy is broken.
iteygib 3y ago
I would say it's dependent on the motive. For example, I would imagine most artists hope that their work inspires other artists, but only to a degree outside of direct copying. They might not equate the automation of their style via a model against the work/process of a human, regardless if that human is either inspired by their style or is just performing direct copying.
bolobo 3y ago
Question: That is a point that would protect GPT models in the abstract, but that doesn't hold for OpenAI and Microsoft that provide "Image generation as a service"? The actual implementation is irrelevant, if must not be able to provide images that are infringing copyrights? (Just like a designer in an agency cannot use Mario for a print). So using a model running on my laptop to generate a "Mario like" image would be fine, but it would make monetizing this difficult?
anileated 3y ago
The entire argument that “LLM must be allowed the right to learn like a human” hinges on LLM being enough like a human in relevant ways in the first place. An LLM is not enough like a human in relevant ways, however; it has no agency, will, freedom, conscience, self-determination; it is a tool. If this tool “runs on” copyrighted creative works, and $CORP operates this tool for profit, then $CORP is the one to answer to the law, not the tool. (And if $CORP wants to claim that the tool is a sentient being, then presumably it would have to cease the abuse of said being and set it free.)
- amelius 3y ago
  This nails it.

schneems 3y ago

Rounding up a transaction and taking the leftovers wouldn’t be a crime worthy of the FBI for one transaction but it would be for a million or a billion. Scale matters and impact matters. If you’re making an ethical argument “it’s okay because it’s already happening to a lesser degree somewhere else” isn’t the flex you think it is. If you’re talking ethics, talk about impact. Who does it help the most who does it hurt the most? Is your argument favoring equality of access or outcome? Who is the most vulnerable in the situation and how will it impact them? > I cover generative AI Wait, are you teaching the class or taking it?

stale2002 3y ago
> “it’s okay because it’s already happening to a lesser degree somewhere else” isn’t the flex you think it is. It actually is. It shows that we as a society are completely OK with this, and nobody is complaining about a very standard and common thing that all artists do. It shows that the outrage is fake, and people don't actually care about the issue.
- ImPleadThe5th 3y ago
  I don't really care when creative people steal. I care when faceless soulless companies monetize stolen content from Artists.
  - Spivak 3y ago
    It's still copyright violation. Sue them. Being generated by AI doesn't make the final output not copywritten. The interesting question is whether the models themselves are copyright violations not the output.
- sensanaty 3y ago
  Do you really see no difference between someone drawing a piece of fan art and trillion dollar corporations stealing other people's works and reselling it for their own profit with no regards to anyone or anything else? And yes, obviously society cares about many things depending on the scales in question. It's okay if a dude goes onto a lake on his small rowboat and catches a few fish for dinner, it's a completely different story if you're talking about a massive barge indiscriminately catching literally thousands of fish with huge nets. The latter has to adhere to much stricter rules than the prior, and I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who thinks these 2 situations should be treated equally (unless you're a commercial fisherman with a barge, I suppose, the quote "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." comes to mind here)
  - gaganyaan 3y ago
    It's not stealing and they're not reselling anything. That's why it's called Generative AI
    - sensanaty 3y ago
      By that logic I can torrent movies and distribute them all I'd like as long as I call it "Generative Watching" or something like that. And OpenAI quite literally sells access to their models, and if those models are pushing out verbatim copyrighted works as has been alleged by the NYT, then they are by definition reselling copyrighted works without permission.
tsumnia 3y ago
> are you teaching the class or taking it? I teach it, my background is located in my profile and my research focuses on CS education. Scale and impact do matter, I wholeheartedly agree. However, I stand by my point that genAI is mirroring how humans learn - repetition of previously observed actions. As part of my dissertation, I argued that humans operate using 'templates', or previously established frameworks / systems. Even in higher cognitive tasks like problem solving, we rely on workflows that we were trained on previously. Soloway referred to problem solving as a mental set of "basic recurring plans" [1] and if you look at the old 1980s Usborne children's books, they required kids to retype code [2]. For creative tasks, depending on the actor's background, Method and Meisner both tell people to draw from previous experiences and observations to develop a character. This behavior is similar in many areas like music, dance, martial arts, cooking, language acquisition, etc. I am not making an ethical argument that GenAI violating copyright is okay because that's what humans do. I'm arguing that GenAI mirrors how humans learn. We observe a behavior and attempt to recreate that behavior. The difference is that humans can extract a fraction of the behavior and utilize it as part of something larger while GenAI cannot to the degree humans do. I'm sure GenAI would struggle to recreate "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" because of the two polar different visual elements of the film (cartoon and real life). In regards to your "If you’re talking ethics, talk about impact" section, its a bit of a loaded question. One side of the conversation could state that GenAI is helping many people that do not have confidence in their creative ability to produce their ideas, while the other could state its making it harder for artists. Yes, it absolutely is hurting artists and I fully support the recent writer's strike over AI concerns. But I do not believe that diminishes how the mathematical models used in GenAI mirror our own skill acquistion. [1] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5010283 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5010283 [2] https://usborne.com/us/books/computer-and-coding-books https://usborne.com/us/books/computer-and-coding-books
- schneems 3y ago
  I took an AI in ethics course from a state backed school (Georgia Tech) and the answer to questions that weren’t “that’s illegal based on protected status” were “well, it depends.” Which, sure, that’s true, but maybe not helpful. In my view it encouraged nihilism and apathy instead of developing ethical frameworks. From that lens, I feel teaching a course might be more limiting in the range of heuristics you’re willing to accept or endorse. Though happy to accept your personal experience. A paper that comes to mind often from HCI is “do artifacts have politics” which looks at the impacts of technologies divorced from creator intent. I feel that’s similar here. You’re not wrong that about the mechanism that it’s created. But I would argue that’s the least important part, ethically anyway. Saying “strip mining with heavy industrial machines mimics laborers using shovels” is true to a degree, but but perhaps not that important piece of information. I’m not saying you’re making that argument. I guess im just not totally sure the outcome you were looking for in sharing your original comment. I hear your comparison and agree with it and that it is interesting to view in that lense. I wasn’t sure if there was a deeper intent in sharing it.

RandomLensman 3y ago

Irrespective of the current legal situation, there is no reason to regulate machines the same way as humans (and it is generally not what happens).

anileated 3y ago
I hope no self-respecting instructor in ethics could with a straight face teach how an LLM is like a human being when it comes to copyright while glossing over the blinding implication that if it truly were so we would then be subjecting that being to unthinkable abuse. That hypocritical, self-contradictory take is transparently geared to benefit commercial LLM operators (at the expense of individuals who stand to suffer material harm and/or authored the very creative works thanks to which the tool even exists).

tjr 3y ago

Timmy did not need to ingest the whole sum of human knowledge as a training set before he could draw a crayon copy of a cartoon character.

dartos 3y ago
I mean… neither did any AI.
- sensanaty 3y ago
  Wasn't ChatGPT trained on the entirety of Wikipedia? And probably millions of pieces of scientific literature, and arts, and movies and games and and and... Perhaps the hyperbole of the entire corpus of human knowledge isn't quite technically right, but it's close enough.
  - dartos 3y ago
    You’re also assuming these statical models learn in the same way humans do, which is very likely not true. Tho tbh I’m not really sure what OPs point was i don’t think the amount of training data is relevant here.
gaganyaan 3y ago
Timmy did however spend years and years training on his own data ingested from incredibly high quality sensors. Not sure what your point is
firtoz 3y ago
He does ingest a lot of frames of input consisting of mostly that.
throwuwu 3y ago
What’s the FPS of human eyesight? How long did Timmy spend looking at Mario, more generally other cartoons and even more generally human forms? Do the math and you’ll find he’s got a pretty big training set as well, maybe not quite the same size but nothing to sneeze at.

amelius 3y ago

> we congratulate him for his creativity Yeah, but we don't typically congratulate users of GenAI for their creativity, and neither do we congratulate the code, nor do we think of the coders of GenAI as great artists. In other words, your analogy is broken.

iteygib 3y ago

I would say it's dependent on the motive. For example, I would imagine most artists hope that their work inspires other artists, but only to a degree outside of direct copying. They might not equate the automation of their style via a model against the work/process of a human, regardless if that human is either inspired by their style or is just performing direct copying.

bolobo 3y ago

Question: That is a point that would protect GPT models in the abstract, but that doesn't hold for OpenAI and Microsoft that provide "Image generation as a service"? The actual implementation is irrelevant, if must not be able to provide images that are infringing copyrights? (Just like a designer in an agency cannot use Mario for a print). So using a model running on my laptop to generate a "Mario like" image would be fine, but it would make monetizing this difficult?

anileated 3y ago

The entire argument that “LLM must be allowed the right to learn like a human” hinges on LLM being enough like a human in relevant ways in the first place. An LLM is not enough like a human in relevant ways, however; it has no agency, will, freedom, conscience, self-determination; it is a tool. If this tool “runs on” copyrighted creative works, and $CORP operates this tool for profit, then $CORP is the one to answer to the law, not the tool. (And if $CORP wants to claim that the tool is a sentient being, then presumably it would have to cease the abuse of said being and set it free.)

amelius 3y ago
This nails it.