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James Cameron on AI copyright: humans are models
- hooverd 1y agoIn other words, "big companies should have a spcial boy copyright exception". I expect both the slopification of everything and enforcement of copyright against individuals to continue.
- linksnapzz 1y agoEntirely unsurprising take from Cameron; given that he has never considered his theft from Harlan Ellison, Roger Dean or Joan Vinge to be ethically fraught.
- linksnapzz 1y agoKeep squealing, downvoters. Cameron's a technically excellent hack who only cares about special effects, which is why his films have maximal revenue and minimal cultural heft.
- robinson7d 1y agoI’m not a huge fan of his, and maybe you’re only talking about more recent films, but Terminator and Titanic have more than “minimal cultural heft” as far as Hollywood movies go.
- danielbln 1y agoTerminator 2, Titanic and I would add Aliens to that list.
- linksnapzz 1y agoThe problem with Terminator is that the plot was lifted (per Cameron's admission!) from an Outer Limits script; besides that, the significant visual was casting Arnold...which Dino DiLaurentiis might've done anyway.
- vintagedave 1y agoThing is, he’s right. We learn from all input and a great deal of it is copyrighted — every book or movie we’ve ever seen. If I tell you something I learned from a copyrighted book, I am not doing something illegal. If I produce a copy of someone else’s output and state it’s my own, I am. That’s plagiarism. And I think this is the best way to view AIs that create artworks “in the style of” etc — as plagiarism for output, not copyright violation for input. I, and I am the author of several things including proprietary software (published, sold, even acquired!) and a novel I hope to publish soon, increasingly think copyright is an evil. I like getting income from what I make but I don’t believe in stopping people accessing what I create. Using it to restrict learning absolutely is an evil. And an AI uses it to learn.
- horsawlarway 1y agoI also produce almost exclusively IP, and I agree with your take. Modern copyright is abusive and evil - we are already at the spot where large corporations entirely control the content, and pretending that copyright is somehow helping indie publishers is a pure fantasy. Copyright can exist in a way that I would not find so egregious (and historically - it was much closer to that form when originally proposed). But the modern IP rules are explicitly designed so that large corporations reap all the profit while they pay artists as little as possible. If AI cracks that apart.... eh - I don't see it as much of a loss. At least for now - plenty of AI models are open weight and publicly available for general use. As long as that trend continues, I don't see the problem.
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- lofaszvanitt 1y agoThe problem is, the average human doesn't have the means and the money to use them.
- loki-ai 1y agoso far the best models are controlled by fewer than a dozen labs. access is limited, full of restrictions and guardrails, and most are expensive, especially video models. also, open weight models deliver far inferior results, and hoping they'll catch up is, for now, just hope. what kind of breakthrough are you expecting here?
- regularjack 1y agoThis whole AI is like humans thing is so exhausting. It's obviously not the same thing. A human can't ingest all of the library of Alexandria, and then generate dollars for their employer regurgitating those books.
- knowitnone 1y agobut a human can injest some of the library of Alexandria, and then generate dollars for their employer regurgitating those books. You just mad at the scale in which it is done?
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- vintagedave 1y agoThing is, we do. As a kid I devoured our encyclopedia, dictionary, and many random books of non-fiction on my parents’ shelf. I did as best I could to devour the library. I see AIs today who have done that. I am sympathetic to them because I wish I could have been them and achieved what they have. Don’t demean human learning just because we have systems that can learn like us.
- musicale 1y ago> I did as best I could to devour the library. You'd have to devour the library of congress, and every public scientific paper, and most of the text on the internet. Likely much more than you could read in a lifetime. Then you'd have to be able to regenerate a realistic imitation of any book, on demand, in a minute, for a few cents.
- charlie-83 1y agoI think this issue with using these models is something he touches on. As big-hollywood-company-xyz you can ask the writer what were the influences of the work and determine if anything crosses a legal line. You can have a level of trust in what the writer says since their reputation/career is on the line. With the AI model, it can regurgitate something from the internet word for word and it's on you to check it. There's a lot of work being done to make AI more transparent but it seems like that has a way to go. Or you realise that the models are all trained on pirated data anyways and no one cared so if you are a big enough company you can just do whatever you want.
- kelseyfrog 1y agoJames is on the board[1] of stability.ai, so not exactly an unbiased opinion. 1. https://stability.ai/board-of-directors https://stability.ai/board-of-directors
- cthalupa 1y agoHe also got significant financial incentive in protecting copyright from his career so his stance and presence on the board in spite of that perhaps speaks even more to the authenticity of his belief.
- knowitnone 1y agowhy downvoted for a simple fact with evidence?
- BriggyDwiggs42 1y agoI hate this comparison because it ignores the obvious important difference: humans aren’t owned by somebody. When models aren’t used commercially, they should be compared to people for copyright purposes. Its when their outputs are sold for profit that copyright should be applied to the seller of the outputs, eg openai.
- alganet 1y agoIn the intellectual realm, many humans are owned. Workers whose ideas belong to their hiring companies, for example. Predatory contracts that leave only the choice of starving versus being a mind slave are commonplace in industry. Idea production is claimed by masters, instead of workers, very often. The comparison is just a trick to make people talk about one thing while it means another.
- BriggyDwiggs42 1y agoI could disagree on technicalities, but yeah we more or less agree. I won't argue with you on that.
- alganet 1y agoWait, are you folks just figuring out right now that meat AI existed before silicon AI? Intellectual property (in the context of art, movies, books, games, etc) is so valuable because it stands on the input of how humans behave, which in turn shapes their output. In other words, a movie script that people like and generates mimicry behavior is some sort of machine built using human parts. It has value because that mimicry or fan-related reaction is behavior that can be shaped (by a reboot series, a sequel, another work using similar tropes, a critic, a meme and so on). That doesn't mean we are all models. Fuck that. It means a lot of us are trapped by those systems (even if I don't mimic culture, peer pressure puts me in a position where it seems I do). The rights to a popular "intellectual property" is power. Silicon AI (in this context) stands on the web as an additional way to shape that collective behavior. We're in for a wild ride in the following decades. We need to understand those mechanisms, be wary of them (soundtrack use, camera perspective influence on perception of meaning, script writing and editing, sequels, rewrites, movie critics, duality play, all of it). IT folk in particular need to be very aware of such things.