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Paul McCartney, Elton John and other creatives demand AI comes clean on scraping
- superkuh 1y agoI can't think of a group of people less qualified and less informed to comment on the issues at hand except politicians. But like usual the weavers will get upset about mechanical looms. And these weavers have big enough money to rock the boat.
- surfingdino 1y agoAre you saying that people who are affected by the AI's impact on their income/wealth are the least qualified to be concerned about it?
- gloxkiqcza 1y agoAI is a tool. Just like with a drum machine or a DAW, you need to be a musician to be able to use it to create something worthwhile. And just like sampling, drum machines and DJing didn’t kill acoustic music, AI won’t either. It will merely create a new type of music that will coexist along with all of the other types of music just fine. AI just raises the level of abstraction and therefore the capabilities of an individual.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- etblg 1y agoSince you brought up sampling in music and I feel compelled to point this out in any AI thread when that gets mentioned: sampling machines don't give you a free pass to sample music all willy nilly, if you're going to publish the result for commercial gain you have to clear the sample, the original artist is getting royalties from it. This is something that was fought for and won by musicians: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Upright_Music,_Ltd._v._Warner_Bros._Records_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Upright_Music,_Ltd._v._W.... (Not that you implied otherwise, I just want to point that out)
- gloxkiqcza 1y agoThanks for pointing that out, I actually didn’t know that! It is very relevant, although it doesn’t affect my core message. Let’s see what the future holds.
- evrimoztamur 1y ago[flagged]
- superkuh 1y agoNah, your browser is a corporate one with only corporate use cases that only accepts certs with extremely short lifetimes. I self-signed the cert so it's good till 2050. You can always turn off JS and access the HTTP version of the site. As for my qualifications, I've trained a very small (~0.8B) LLM myself on 3GB of IRC logs. So I kind of know what I'm doing and have a basic understanding of the theory involved and the pragmatic issues.
- sorcerer-mar 1y agoIs that meant to be a humorous claim to authority?
- evrimoztamur 1y agoStock iOS Safari, and I do not accept your beginner-hobbyist credentials and superficial comments on genuine political issues concerning copyright law and fair labour compensation, not copy-pasted Python tutorials.
- hu3 1y ago> Stock iOS Safari to be fair that's not a bastion of quality either.
- evrimoztamur 1y agoWhat do you mean by quality, exactly? My up to date list of recognised certificate authorities in one of the two major smartphone OSs does not validate his certificate. This is not a matter of 'quality' of Safari, or iOS.
- superkuh 1y agoThat's fine. I understand. Only corporations matter. And this is a corporation with celebrity names associated! Surely that means the people involved know what they're talking about more than a random person with direct experience. After all, that person isn't trying to make money. Their opinion can't possibly matter if they're not trying to make money.
- SirFatty 1y agoSounds like you're stereotyping... do you say that because of their age or their profession?
- superkuh 1y agoTheir profession. I doubt they understand what generative AI or large language model training actually involves. It's obvious from the ideology which comes up with an absurd law like, "If your computer has something I've made in ram at any time you must tell me about it." I do admit there are many quite informed and technically capable professional musicians but I doubt they'd support a law like this.
- mrkeen 1y ago> The group [...] said the amendments tabled for the Lords debate would create a requirement for AI firms to tell copyright owners which individual works they have ingested. They are demanding to be informed.
- pantulis 1y agoWhat are the necessary qualifications?
- 9283409232 1y agoFans of AI see artist like icemen complaining about refrigeration but it is not the same thing. Generative AI doesn't exist without their prior work and it is used to copy it 1 to 1. Make them say things they didn't say or make art they didn't make. It is fair that they want transparency, consent, and payment.
- DarkWiiPlayer 1y agoIndeed; this is like stealing the icemen's ice to fuel refrigeration. If some technology makes your job (partly) obsolete, too bad for you. But you shouldn't be forced to contribute to this technology against your will.
- imgabe 1y agoIf someone uses AI to produce an infringing copy of an existing work, the person who prompted the AI to do that can be sued just like if someone hand drew a copy or used a photocopier to make duplicates. That isn’t unique to AI.
- prophesi 1y ago> And these weavers have big enough money to rock the boat. But they're up against multi-billion dollar companies, and the richest man in the world appointed by the US president to dismantle federal oversight.
- bilbo0s 1y agoThe weavers don’t care. In four years there will be yet another president. Probably even from a different party the way things are going. They know the system swings back and forth like that. These people have been working that system for over a hundred years now. How do you think they got d@mn near a century IP protection on a fricken mouse? Who’s in power doesn’t matter to these people.
- prophesi 1y agoI'd argue the same goes with Big Tech. I agree the length of copyright protection has gotten out of hand, and I'm normally against any expansion of copyright law, but there are several aspects of training AI that seem blatantly problematic in the way it's currently carried out.
- sp527 1y agoThis is a very primitive, pre-genAI type of thought process. People like you can only see copyright infringement when it's blatantly staring you in the face, like Studio Ghibli style AI images. Why is it obvious in that case? Because we have a large enough preexisting sample of Studio Ghibli style frames from anime to make it obvious. But move closer to zero-shot generation, which anyone with a modicum of knowledge on this subject understands was the directional impetus for generative AI development, and the monkey brain short circuits and suddenly creatives who want to protect their art can go fuck themselves, because money. You may not find common cause with multi-millionaire artists trying to protect their work now, but you certainly will in hindsight if the only fiscally-sustainable engines of creativity left to us in the future are slop-vomiting AI models.
- detectivestory 1y agoYes, they should have ran with "More than 400 of the UK's leading media and arts professionals" as the headline. But realistically, they are probably trying to appeal to a certain reader who won't be found in the comments section of a HN article.
- amelius 1y ago> But like usual the weavers will get upset about mechanical looms. Except the mechanical loom folks are dependent on the IP of the weavers. In other words, not a good analogy.
- TiredOfLife 1y agoI can. Commenters on HN.
- Dumblydorr 1y agoMulti millionaires who got very lucky demand tech companies to come clean, yeah I doubt they’ll find allies in the populace or most of tech sympathetic. Use your 100s to wipe your tears Paul.
- jakeinspace 1y agoYou know the general populous hates big tech far more than big-time artists, right? The profession is moving in the direction of lawyers and investment bankers in terms of public trust.
- m000 1y agoThis is a very regressive line of thinking, promoted by those who want to block any positive change and maintain (a favourable for them) status quo. - If you are negatively affected from a situation and you speak out, "you are doing it out of spite, because you're good for nothing". - If you are speaking out in favour of the less fortunate without being directly affected, "this doesn't concern you - you shouldn't be talking, you privileged prick". The same arguments over and over again, for anything that may result in a net positive change. Don't fall for it.
- DarkWiiPlayer 1y agoMy opinion continues to be that AI companies should have to prove that they have consent to use any and all data their models are trained on. That is, be able to prove a) that their models were actually trained on the data they claim, b) that they have consent to use said data for AI training, and c) that this consent was given by the actual author or with the author's consent. I want platforms like soundcloud, youtube, etc. to be required to actually send out an e-mail to all of its users "hey we will be using your content for AI training, please click here to give permission".
- detectivestory 1y agoI'm pretty sure soundcloud has already done this. I don't believe they gave an option to opt-out though.
- DarkWiiPlayer 1y agoThen they are stealing people's content and imho should be punished for it. It is baffling that we let companies get away with "if you don't opt out you agree" or even "you can't opt out, delete your account or you agree" and often hide that in generic sounding terms & conditions updates. Again, I think we should require companies to get the user to actively give their consent to these things. Platforms are free to lock or terminate accounts that don't, but they shouldn't be allowed to steal content because someone didn't read an e-mail.
- docdeek 1y ago> I want platforms like soundcloud, youtube, etc. to be required to actually send out an e-mail to all of its users "hey we will be using your content for AI training, please click here to give permission”. Wouldn’t sites like YouTube already have a license to make money off your content anyway? This might be a little out of date but it notes that even though you own the material you upload to YouTube, by uploading it you grant them a license to make money off it, sub-license it to others for commerical gain, make derivative works etc. IANAL but this suggests to me that if you upload it to YouTube, YouTube can license it to OpenAI without needing to inform you or get additional consent. [0] [0]: https://www.theguardian.com/money/2012/dec/20/who-owns-content-you-upload https://www.theguardian.com/money/2012/dec/20/who-owns-conte...
- empath75 1y agoI think we would all like to think that policy is formed from a dispassionate view of the issues at hand and everyone works to produce fair out comes for everyone, but what is going to happen with regard to AI, is that whichever policy produces the most economic "value", however that is defined is going to win out. For example, pretty much everyone agrees that the current copyright regime that allows large corporations to hold copyrights on vast libraries of content for near perpetuity isn't what's best for society, but it has earned a lot of companies and a few people a lot of money with which they can influence politics, and so it remains. Now, it seems that there is a lot of money to be made through training AI on these vast libraries of material, and the companies making that money can use it to influence politics to allow it. There is of course, the remote possibility that policy on this topic is going to be formed by rich and famous people persuading people of the rightness of their cause, but I don't have a lot of high hopes on that outcome -- and the even remoter chance that the much larger number of "creatives" on the lower manage to band together and lobby over it. This whole conversation is basically just a public negotiation between corporations on who gets to make the most money from "content" that they didn't create.
- sorcerer-mar 1y agoI don't think your framing nor your conclusion is correct. Copyright law wasn't written to make Party A or B wealthy, it was written to protect the incentive to produce things that society values. It is very clear that a huge portion of AI's value is specifically the destruction of incentive to the original creator of the work, ergo courts will over time find that AI will have to pay for that right. Or courts will have to decide we know longer value music, art, literature, etc. made by humans -- seems like a long shot to me.
- thomastjeffery 1y agoOr we can recognize that virtue is not equivalent to value. Just because copyright was made with good intentions does not mean it's actually helping. It's pretty clear that copyright is used almost entirely to hoard wealth.
- empath75 1y ago
- tedivm 1y agoI think calling this "scraping" is hiding an important point. Scraping tends to mean crawling the web and pulling down stuff people put up. In the US (and yes, I know that this is a UK article) it is legal to scrape, with the idea being that if people responded to the request that's on them. This is why lots of sites have login gates to access data, since to log in you have to agree to a TOS. AI companies haven't just been scraping, they've been pirating. I think it's important because people consent to put their comments on websites, but authors don't consent to have their work stolen. Mixing the two together as if they are the same is an attempt by AI companies to muddy the ethical waters a bit more than I'm comfortable with.
- graemep 1y agoIts not necessarily OK with comments. A lot of people posted comments before LLMs, a lot of people posted comments in places with T & Cs that said the comments would be used in connection with the service. Because I consented to a comment being posted on a website to be read by people does not mean I consented to it being used to train LLMs.
- eWeSaYYY 1y agoCopyright is pirating our attention to boost a minority of creatives who have immense resource and political influence at the expense of the rest of us. Life of author + 100 years is beyond the life of many. While the Constitution provides copyright for a limited time. The rest of any givens persons life is effectively “infinite amount of time”. It’s just another Boomer Ponzi scheme, extracting as much as possible, trickling down as little as possible. Americans have disassociated from reality into a world of propaganda narratives of corporations. This is just sad how little pushback there is to these obviously exploitative economic schemes that conveniently allow all the elders to funnel all wealth into their hands and control society’s agency.
- alganet 1y agoTerms of service cannot override the law. For example, lots of TOS make the works of users property of the platform owners. All of that can stop being relevant if that practice becomes illegal. People consented to put their comments publicly, they didn't consented to feeding a machine that steals their ideas. One ruling establishing that the wording on the terms is not good enough, and all of that can fall.
- ksymph 1y agoThe neatest outcome IMO would be to grandfather in data from before ~2022, but strictly require consent for anything new going forward. Enforcement would be kind of impossible though. How would you prove the age of the data? And what about for things like websites - if a website from 2015 gets scraped in 2025, where does that fall? So, maybe not a very practical solution. But I think the ideal outcome is one where AI companies don't have to throw away progress from the past few years, but artists have control over their participation going forward. It's hard to say if there's any solution that can respect both. More likely than not, one party is going to be shafted; and it's probably not going to be the one with the money behind it.
- herbturbo 1y agoI personally don’t see why AI companies should be allowed to hold on to any of the “progress” that came from theft of intellectual property.
- hndownfall 1y ago[flagged]
- Waterluvian 1y agoIt feels like a data laundering problem. Within the models the data still exists in some form, but it’s been laundered with so much other data that they feel it’s sufficiently untrackable and clean.
- sixtyj 1y agoIt is data laundering. When Open Street Maps project started, it was the same situation. You take data, use them, clean them, and voila… they are open source
- francisofascii 1y agoWe all "stand on the shoulders of giants." Much of our creative work is a derivative of earlier work. Humans and AI are no different.
- 4d4m 1y agoLol but laws are laws, and copyright law is exceedingly clear. The vibe that all creative work is based on something from earlier doesn't hold up in court. Breaking copyright isn't legal, it's theft.
- francisofascii 1y ago> copyright law is exceedingly clear. Not when it comes to music. It is clear when you copy a song verbatim, but when the song is similar to an older song it gets much more complicated. With all the different components: lyrics, melody, chord progression, etc. The Ed Sheeran case taught us that.
- f1codz 1y ago"you can't enforce the law if you can't see the crime taking place" Isn't this the key? If AI can learn how to write a song like the Beatles, is it a crime that it has learnt it, or is it a crime that someone can use AI to produce work that resembles those artists' creations? May the control be put on preventing AI from plagiarizing instead of putting measures to prevent scraping specific content from the open web.
- realo 1y agoI am a human. i can listen to music, look at videos, movies, read books etc etc... If I were a musician, I could pull upon my life's experience of music to create new, unheard before, music in any style I chose. My music would belong to me because I created it. How is it different for an "innocent" AI who does exactly the same thing?
- alganet 1y agoAI is not human. It doesn't have feelings, children, pupils, family, goals, ideals. It's very different.
- realo 1y agoOh? Then please bear with me and extend the comparison just a tiny bit. Replace the AI with an advanced species from Mars. Or even better yet an augmented human ... a trans-human if you will. Both the martian have kids, families, feelings, etc... AND both can absorb the entire internet in , say , a week or two. They are musicians and create new music from their internet experience. Does their music belong to them? Do they have to pay rights to all the authors they listened to so far on the internet? And finally ... what is the difference between my martian and a human today?
- awkwardpotato 1y agoWhat a wild false equivalency... This article isn't even a discussion on AI copyright ownership. It's about training. What if an evil robot race came along and begin draining your Martians of all their history, expressions, and entertainment. Would the Martians not be within their rights to go "hey, don't do that"? Parent edited rather than responded: Your "martians" already did pay for the rights to access the music (streaming services, cds, etc)! And if it's highly derivative they'll continue to have to pay (royalties). OpenAI/Meta/Anthropic did not pay, that's the inherent issue. They took when they should not have had the right to access, and trained against it. The question is not the difference between your mythical Martians and humans, its difference between your Martians and AI. Your martians, like humans, have lived experience. They have emotions, fears, beliefs. They have family, children, loved ones. This all affects how they would express themselves. An "AI" has none of this.
- hu3 1y agoEverything humans create is a product of: - a pre-trained model: DNA - and a prompt: envinronment/input Is that much different from AI?
- sceptic123 1y agoYes
- herbturbo 1y agoReal music comes from the soul.
- the_snooze 1y agoIf it's all the same, then that implies AI has no value-add and thus there's no point in developing it.
- hu3 1y agoIs it? Humans have hit a hard wall of intelligence limitation for a long time now. AIs, on the other hand, are just beginning.
- qwery 1y agoWhat is this supposed to mean? You could replace "humans" and "AI", in either place, with "plants", "E. Coli", or "cane toads", &c. and it would make just as much sense.
- alganet 1y agoWhat a dilemma. Isn't it? Fight for big copyright, or let it all be scraped? It's not just about famous works now. We live in a gray area era. Every post on social media, tap on a keyboard, click, can be used to train AI. Who owns that intelligence? It feels like AI products should acknowledge the names of billions of contributors. Common people, feeding the machine, mostly unknowingly. So, copyright could be an unusual ally. It's often a villain for common folk, but again, we live in a gray area era regarding those rights. Copyright has a precedent with pedigree. Most scraped content is not famous songs and movies, it's random internet stuff. We need to remember we want AI, but we also want good songs and movies for entertainment, and we also want to have our lesser works protected (internet banal stuff). There is a fine line connecting all that stuff somewhere.
- sceptic123 1y agoWho actually wants AI though?
- senordevnyc 1y agoPresumably myself and the other 20 million people paying for ChatGPT alone, not to mention all the other AI products out there. And then the hundreds of millions using it for free. I'm guessing they all want it, but idk.
- sceptic123 1y agoA tiny percent of the number of people on the planet though, and a much smaller number than the amount of people who's material has being sucked up without their consent or knowledge
- alganet 1y agoScraping affects those who want and those who do not want AI, it's a commons issue.
- qwery 1y agoI don't see the dilemma. Content laundering as a service shouldn't be incentivised by the government.
- sam_lowry_ 1y agoPaul McCartney does not have the rights to some of this songs, including the most popular ones. He still sucks up to the copyright lobby. Pathetic old man (