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I think the worst possible outcome is a licensing regime that means that Disney or Paramount or Elsevier or whoever all get to have a monopoly on training large

• JohnFen 2y ago
  > Anyway, I'm rooting for "no regulation" for now. Not me. I want appropriate regulation. Without any regulation, these companies will just continue their abusive practices without restraint. Will regulation encourage a concentration in a couple of large companies? Maybe. It depends on the nature of the regulation. Even if it does, though, I'd take that over the current status quo.
• DevX101 2y ago
  It's already happening. Mega content aggregators will either build their own LLMs, or license for $$$$. Twitter's doing both and reddit did the latter.
• janoc 2y ago
  It is good that you are rooting for the poor industry because they are "being screwed". Sad that you didn't consider the content creators, people who's faces, voices, writings, art, personal information, etc. are being used without consent and without any compensation as the ones "being screwed" here.
  • Terr_ 2y ago
    It's kind of like the history of the web with regular human consumers and various attempts to allow microtransactions, which receded in favor of ads and tracking. If the pattern holds, the "cost" of training non-paywalled data will be attempts to hack/influence the model, as opposed to hacking humans.
  • mylastattempt 2y ago
    Content creators or artists, will have to find a way to deal with AI (as a broad term). Both in how they will or won't use it, but also in how it affects or threathens their jobs and livelyhoods. People in the AI (using this term very loosely here) business are worried that only the biggest players effectively monopolize AI with the help of badly thought out (or plain corrupt) regulations that may be set in place in the near future. These two issues are not mutually exclusive problems, these two groups are not fighting against eachother. It feels like a typical divide and conquer, where the regular people are being pitted against eachother because of your view, while they should work together towards a solution for both of their problems and fight bad regulation (and monopolies in AI).
    • RodgerTheGreat 2y ago
      Generative "AI" enthusiasts build their models by ripping off creative human beings for profit. Generative "AI" enthusiasts fear that bigger fish will squeeze them out of the niches they created for themselves through theft. Suggesting that artists and genAI enthusiasts should "work together" to defend the regulatory environment of the latter is ludicrous; it would be like a burglar breaking into my house, stealing my appliances, and asking for my support in his campaign for mayor!
  • rcxdude 2y ago
    They've generally already been screwed by distributors, they're being screwed further by gen AI, and in the case where large corporations which own their works are allowed to extract further rent from those works from those creators, they will be triply-screwed. It's a shit situation but the existing copyright system is not a good solution for the average creator.
  • chii 2y ago
    > are being used without consent gatekeeping the information that is being learnt off these data is not a right they have been granted. I do not see an ai weight/model as a derivative works of the individual works used to train it, provided that you can obtain new works that would not have violated the copyright of the original had it been manually made.
  • visarga 2y ago
    Copyright supports creativity by limiting creativity. It's paradoxical. But more recently we have seen open source, wikipedia and open scientific publication pushing this trend back.
• oldkinglog 2y ago
  > I think the worst possible outcome is a licensing regime that means that Disney or Paramount or Elsevier or whoever all get to have a monopoly on training large models within their niche. Why is this the worst possible outcome? Companies using AI would be training with properties they own or have licensed appropriately, rather than the existing scheme of ignoring copyright law to extract $$$ from the creative works of ordinary people.
  • mylastattempt 2y ago
    In reality it would be a situation where a/the few big players control all the usefull datasets and trained models, and everybody has to pay in perpetuity (SaaS style) to use those, rather than being able to train their own. The copyright law being ignored will not be "solved" by pushing all the benefits to a few large players, but you will create new problems up ahead.
  • rcxdude 2y ago
    Because it would simply perpetuate the current copyright system which primarily rewards the large distribution companies disproportionately to the creators, especially smaller ones, while doing little to alleviate the effects on the job market for said creatives, in fact enhancing this effect by effectively feeding even more of the value into existing license holders as opposed to those creating new works (now instead of new works with existing franchises primarily rewarding those who own the franchises, this would effectively apply to all new works, if generative AI were to become mandatory to compete).
  • dnissley 2y ago
    They are extracting slivers of pennies on a per-work basis. Not $$$.
    • bumby 2y ago
      That’s still value though. It was illegal in the plot of Superman 3, I don’t see why it would be ignored here. Jaron Lannier has proposed a micro financing approach where the data owners are paid for their contributions to the data that is monetized by tech.
• 6gvONxR4sf7o 2y ago
  What about copyleft analogues? Plenty of important work in our field is licensed with e.g. apache license, which only came into existence because people needed new kinds of licenses for new kinds of purposes.
  • femto 2y ago
    Copyright enables copyleft. Does copyright in relation to AI also enable copyleft in relation to AI? The logic seems to be that "some of the training input was copyright, therefore the inference output is copyright." The same logic says "some of the training input was copyleft, therefore the inference output is copyleft." Maybe future training sets will have to worry about the license compatibility between all the data in the training set?
    • himinlomax 2y ago
      You're making a historical mistake. Copyleft was precisely designed by Richard Stallman to use copyright against itself.
      • chgs 2y ago
        The idea copyleft doesn’t need copyright has been dead since TiVo, you need copyright to ensure people’s freedom, if you simply repealed copyright laws you would still have your rights as a user trampled. The problem in this case is the AI companies aren’t ignoring copyright and then releasing their output with no copyright, which would happen in a copyleft or copyrightless world. They instead want the benefits of closing their output but they want the benefits of taking other peoples work to make that output.
• bastien2 2y ago
  There is yet to actually be a use case for chatbots that isn't profit-motivated. The entire effort to find a problem for them to solve has meant ecological harms at a scale that makes crypto mining seem trivial. The data required has copyright and other commercial use restrictions on it. Much of the data being overtly restricted was never available for harvest to start with. Given these facts, bringing and end to the LLMs an snaping techbros out of their latest delusion is a good thing.
• qingcharles 2y ago
  Caveat: In countries that adopt an AI-aware copyright statute. In other countries they will just scrape whatever-the-hell from wherever-the-hell. Right now all we're seeing is gentlemens' agreements and self-enforcement. A robots.txt is just asking you nicely. I don't know of any country that has any judicial ruling on the topic of AI scraping yet?
  • fvncc 2y ago
    Japan passed a law allowing use of copyrighted material for machine learning. https://www.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/japan-ai-data-laws-explained/ https://www.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/japan-ai-data-laws-exp...
    • qingcharles 2y ago
      Thank you. Well, if the USA does the opposite then all apps and research will be moved overseas. This is a complicated topic and I don't know the right answer. I hope people with far greater skills in IP can figure out a meaningful solution that everyone doesn't hate. It might be that there is no good solution.
• TZubiri 2y ago
  who gives a shit about disney? We are talking about AI. Just don't train on the script of little mermaid, not the end of the world. Elsevier on the other hand. Same deal as ever, if you want knowledge, pay for it. Writers deserve food on the table, and have the right to have control over who sees their work for economic or strategic reasons. No one owes you anything
  • oezi 2y ago
    Elsevier is a scientific publisher which doesn't pay writers at all. Public money paid the researchers, results should be free.
    • bumby 2y ago
      There is already a mandate that publicly funded research will be open access going forward (in the US). There are loopholes though, that I exist will be used just because it’s cheaper and quicker to do so. There’s also plenty of research published that is not publicly funded.
    • bonestamp2 2y ago
      I agree the results should be free for personal use, but not for commercial use (such as training paid AIs). Training free AIs is probably fine. Similar to how it's free to use google maps in your project if your use is free to everyone, but you must pay if you're charging people to use it.
  • dcow 2y ago
    An AI that doesn't know the little mermaid would have trouble interfacing contextually with a society where it’s common knowledge.
    • haldean 2y ago
      who cares
    • NicuCalcea 2y ago
      "This product would not work without copyright infringement" is not a good argument.
• mandibeet 2y ago
  How to balance innovation, intellectual property and access to technology