11 ms·
If I read a lot of stories in a certain genre that I like, and I later write my own story, it’s almost by definition going to be a mish-mash of everything I lik
by Aeolun 3y ago
If I read a lot of stories in a certain genre that I like, and I later write my own story, it’s almost by definition going to be a mish-mash of everything I like.
Should I pay the authors of the books I read when I sell mine?
- fragmede 3y agoDid you not pay them when you bought their book to read it in the first place? That dead trees don't lend themselves to that sort of payoff is a limitation of the technology. In music, sampling is a well-accepted mechanism for creating new music, and the original authors of the music they used do get paid when the new one is used.
- soulofmischief 3y agoNo, I bought the books used for 25 cents at a local booksale, and the authors did not benefit from my secondary market transaction.
- downWidOutaFite 3y agoYou got that via the legal "first sale doctrine" which has been killed for digital works.
- soulofmischief 3y agoIt's a tough issue to correlate to physical goods, especially when you realize that people sometimes donate books.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- MacsHeadroom 3y ago"In 2012, the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) held in UsedSoft GmbH v. Oracle International Corp that the first sale doctrine applies to used copies of [intangible goods] downloaded over the Internet and sold in the European Union." [0] Arguably the U.S. courts are in the wrong here. We can only hope first sale doctrine is extended to digital goods in the U.S. in the future, as it has been in the EU for over a decade. [0] https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1193&context=nulr https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewconten...
- sandworm101 3y ago>> the authors did not benefit from my secondary market transaction. But they did. The presence of a secondary market for used books increased the value of some new books. People buy them knowing that they might one day recoup some costs by selling them. Would people pay more, or less, for a new car if they were told they could never sell or trade it away as a used car?
- soulofmischief 3y agoGee I don't know, but I'm glad that digital goods do not incur the same material costs as a car. "You wouldn't download a car", we've come full circle.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- cwkoss 3y agoLol, did an AI write this? Literally no one buys books because they might one day recoup a fraction of the sticker price on the secondary market. Baffling
- JambalayaJim 3y agoThey actually do exactly this, they’re just not thinking about it. You buy a book because you want the physical possession, which gives you the ability to sell it or give it to someone or display it. Not because you want to read the contents - else you would just borrow it from a library.
- soulofmischief 3y ago> You buy a book because you want the physical possession, which gives you the ability to sell it or give it to someone or display it. Not because you want to read the contents - else you would just borrow it from a library. Please back up this statement. I for one, buy primary market books for the content; and to support creators whom I wish to support. Not to display the book or resell it. That is some capitalist jive. People typically use libraries because A) they are too poor to afford the books, and libraries therein provide a valuable community function B) they are doing research and only need the books for a short time C) they read more books than they can afford and other such reasons.
- huimang 3y agoHow many books can you write per second? How how many books per second can you read to influence and change your personal style? I don't think any person who actually has worked on anything creative in their life would compare a personal style to a model that can output in nearly any style at extreme speeds. And even if you're inspired by a specific author, invariably what happens is it becomes mix of yourself + those influences, not a damn near-copy. With visual mediums it's even worse, because you have to take the time [months, years] to specialize in that specific medium/style.
- sandworm101 3y ago>> How many books can you write per second? On my laptop, using modern tools backed by AI? ... many. >> How how many books per second can you read to influence and change your personal style? Thanks now to AI, hundreds. I can plug the output of the book-reading AI into the input of the tool I use to write my books and thereby update my personal style to incorporate all the latest trends. Blame the idiots who are paying me for my books.
- californical 3y agoThis is clearly a bad-faith response to the point that the GP was making
- rangerelf 3y agoSo, zero. You yourself: zero. You completely ignored the premise of the question.
- bluefirebrand 3y agoWe shouldn't hold individual humans and ML models to the same standards, because ML models themselves are products capable of mass production and individual humans are not even remotely at the same scale. If you write that book, chances are you will gain some fans that are also fans of other authors in that genre. If ML models write that genre, they can flood that genre so full that human artists won't be able to complete. It's not even a remotely equivalent scenario
- csallen 3y agoComputers and machines have been capable of mass production for decades, and humans have used them as tools. In the past 170 years, these tools of mass production have already diminished many thousands of professions that were staffed by people who had to painstakingly craft things one at a time. Why is art some special case that should be protected, when many other industries were not? Why should we kill this technology to protect existing artistic business models, when many other technologies were allowed to bloom despite killing other existing business models? Nobody can really answer these questions.
- bluefirebrand 3y ago> Why is art some special case that should be protected, when many other industries were not? It shouldn't be. As soon as someone makes an AI that can produce it's own artwork without requiring ingesting every piece of stolen artwork it can, then I'm on board. But as long as it needs to be trained on the work of humans it should not be allowed to displace those people it relied on to get to where it is. Simple as that.
- csallen 3y agoAre there any humans that can produce artwork without ingesting inspiration from other art? Do you know any artists that lived in a box their whole life and never saw other art? Do you know any writers who'd never read a book? Are they any human artists who can't, if requested, draw or write something that's a copy of some other person's drawings or writings? Also, FYI, you can't steal digital artwork. You can only commit copyright infringement, which is not the same crime as theft, because theft requires depriving the owner of something in their possession.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- madeofpalk 3y agoPut differently - if you perfectly memorise Harry Potter, write it down into a book and sell it, you'll get into trouble.
- philomath_mn 3y agoRight, I don't think anyone disagrees with that. The question is about someone/something writing a book _influenced_ by Harry Potter -- do they owe JK Rowling royalties?
- halostatue 3y agoThat depends on a variety of factors. You may find yourself in trouble if you write about a wizard boy called Perry Hotter going to Elkwood school of magic and he ends up with two sidekicks (a smarter girl and a redhead boy). It could be argued quite convincingly that stories like Brooks's Shannara and Eddings's Belgariad are LOTR with the serial numbers filed off — but there is more than enough difference in how various pieces work for those series to make them unique creations that do not infringe on the properties or cover too much the story. (Although I cringe at putting the execrable Belgariad books in any class with either LOTR or Shannara.) The "best" modern example of this is the 50 Shades series. These are Twilight fan fiction (it is acknowledged as such) with the vampire bits filed off. They are inspired by Twilight, but they are not identifiably Twilight in the end. It might be hard to tell the quality of writing from that which an LLM can produce, and frankly Anne Rice did it all better decades before (both vampires and BSDM). Humans can be influenced by writers, artists, etc. LLMs cannot. They can produce statistically approximated mishmashes of the original works themselves, but there is no act or spark of creation, insight, or influence going on that makes the sort of question you’re asking silly. LLMs are just math. Humans may be just chemistry, but there’s qualia that LLMs do not have any more than `fortune` does.
- visarga 3y ago> Humans can be influenced by writers, artists, etc. LLMs cannot. This is literally wrong, LLMs are influenced by their users. And people can input new ideas, facts and explore new directions by choosing how they interact with the LLM. A LLM writing a book all on its own start to finish would be a different story, the output would be derived 100% from its training set. A LLM being prompted with a book chapter would risk borrowing too much. But if you prompt a LLM without copy pasting protected content in the prompt, then you are the main influence. And LLMs can explore outside their training distribution in this way, helped by humans. Many people think a trained LLM is frozen, but they do in-context-learning, they can even acquire new concepts/words and properly use them in the same session. They don't keep the memory of this until retraining, but that doesn't mean they are locked up. There is plenty of space in the buffer you can use to add new material after training. This kind of thinking is like saying you can't drive a nail unless you own a licensed hammer, if someone is using his shoe to drive a nail will be in infringement. Maybe the shoe is also a hammer if the user so says.
- RobRivera 3y agoI feel like the keyword is 'almost' and then you begin pulling on that thread: How closely is this the case? What blind spots exist? How do you measure this? What is the capacity for original idea generation does the human mind have and how does it inspire a unique spin to it? This is one of those areas where 'thought experiments' are never going to pass muster against genuine experiments with metrics, trial, and robist scientific research. But with the stakes as they are, I dont have faith there exists a good faith dialogue in this arena.
- ska 3y agoThere are two problems with this (very common) line of argument. First, the law is pretty clear that yes if your story is too similar to another work, they have rights. Second, it's not at all obvious we can or should generalize from "what a human can do" and "what a bunch of computers can do" in areas like this.
- tedivm 3y agoIs your mishmash going to be a literal statistical model built on top of those other stories?
- rspoerri 3y agoI hope you payed for the book you read. If openai would pay usage fees for the training material per user its generating content for - it would never be profitable - artist would be fine off. But even all the shares are owned by people who have given this system none of it‘s knowledge.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago>If openai would pay usage fees for the training material per user its generating content for - it would never be profitable In that case, good? I thought if nothing else, these past year or two would teach companies about sinking money into unsustainable businesses and then price gauging later (i know it won't, the moment interest rates fall we are back to square one). If it isn't profitable, scale down the means of production (which may include paying C class executives one less yatch per year, tragic), charge more upfront to the customers, or work out better deals with your 3rd parties (which is artists in this case). I also find some scheudenfredre in that these companies are trying to sell "less enployees" to other companies but would also benefit from said scaling down as they throw out defenses of "we can't afford to pay every copyright" .
- kelnos 3y agoYou are not an AI model, and AI models are not human authors, so your comparison is invalid and question irrelevant.
- MrVandemar 3y ago> If I read a lot of stories in a certain genre that I like, and I later write my own story, it’s almost by definition going to be a mish-mash of everything I like. But it's also going to be affected by the teachers you had in pre-school, the people you hang around with, your relatives, films you've seen, adverts you watched, good memories and bad memories of events. You bring your lived experience to your story, and not just a mish-mash of stories in a particular genre, but everything. Whereas when you train a model, you know the exact input, and that exact input may be 100% copyright material.
- bergen 3y agoDid you read the books with the intent to incorporate their ideas into your head and profit of this?
- data-ottawa 3y agoThat’s basically the education system’s goal. However, AI models require copying and reproducing copyrighted works, whereas when I read I book I’m not copying it and I’ve secured some sort of license to use it. The collection, mass copying, and redistribution of work to create these models seems quite obviously to be a violation on IP laws.
- apersona 3y agoYou are not a machine. Have you noticed that authors and artists love sharing their inspirations? Let's say you're an up-and-coming author. In an interview, you list your sources of inspiration. Using your logic, why does the creative community celebrate you and your inspirations instead of crying foul like they are with LLMs?