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Nick Clegg says asking artists for use permission would 'kill' AI industry
- billy99k 1y agoFunny how copyright infringement has made a come back in AI and it's somehow a bad thing. What happened to all of the pirates fighting for our right to not pay for anything?
- thaumiel 1y agoFrom what I remember that was never the issue people was fighting for. It was more about the right to own what you payed for and bought, and the right to create a copy of it for yourself. Which still are a big issue. Why do I get to keep a physical book for as long as I want, but when I "buy" a digital book it is only a license.
- didntcheck 1y agoThat's a generous recollection. The right to create private backups was generally a very small part of people's arguments. Most discussions tended to be about justify torrenting media that they never owned, nor had any real intention of paying for
- mathgradthrow 1y agoNo one has ever taken the philosophical position that they have the right to sell someone else's work as their own.
- olddustytrail 1y agoThat's literally the entire foundation of Capitalism. Working for yourself, and selling what you produce yourself, is called Cottage Industry and is what Capitalism replaced.
- techpineapple 1y agoI didn’t know that OpenAI employed all of the artists that they were training models in. Problem solved!
- olddustytrail 1y agoThey don't and I never said they did. And even if they did, would one company being the sole employer of artists and paying them minimum wage, really be "problem solved"? It seems people don't like the reality of where we currently are . Don't shoot the messenger!
- AlecSchueler 1y agoI'm as big a believer in IP reform as someone could be but the current situation is that regular people still have to follow the rules, the artists themselves still have to follow the rules, while big businesses with endless VC funding get to ignore them. If it was the same for everyone I would have much less problem with this but it's the glaring disparity in how different parties are expected to behave that is truly repugnant.
- opan 1y agoI don't like AI and I don't like copyright, but if I had to pick, I would definitely prefer copyright die out as it has more of a personal impact on me and my interests than AI does. Emulators and game projects getting threatened and/or shut down is a real shame. It takes some of the magic out of the world of software when we have to worry about this stuff. I do tend to use free as in freedom software, but proprietary software still manages to have an unfortunate presence around me.
- SonOfKyuss 1y agoIf your industry relies on stealing to exist, maybe it doesn’t deserve to live
- chrischen 1y agoThat "industry" is everyone's industry if AI models that rely on public data is available to the public. Then everyone can benefit.
- SonOfKyuss 1y agoYour point would be kind of valid if the tools they build were free to use
- chrischen 1y agoI'm saying they should be. Rather than fighting to stop them from doing it, force them to legally open it to the public domain. Often the training code already is, so if they use public data they should release a public model.
- barbazoo 1y agoMost industries do this basically by “stealing” from the environment without paying their fair share for dealing with the environmental damage they’re doing.
- vrighter 1y agoAsking people for permission to kill them would kill the hitman business. That is not a bad thing.
- KaisoEnt 1y agoThey tried to make this guy prime minister when I was a kid.
- GardenLetter27 1y agoI voted for him! I actually agree with him on this though, AI is a bigger net benefit to humanity than some artists' IP.
- GPerson 1y agoAI is clearly a net negative to humanity in its current form, and almost certainly all future forms. The fact that you refer to an actual human being as “some artist” betrays the absolute disdain you hold for humanity and in my opinion should disqualify you from polite discourse of any kind.
- sach1 1y ago> AI is clearly a net negative to humanity in its current form, and almost certainly all future forms. I'm going to make an equally supported and valid statement here and say AI is clearly a net positive to humanity in its current form, and almost certainly all future forms. You should consider providing a less hyperbolic point to argue if you are looking to have any kind of productive or healthy discussion on the internet.
- pintxo 1y agoIf that’s true, can we agree to slap on a 10% tax on every AI company’s revenue? To account for the externalities?
- mentalgear 1y agoIn other words: It would punish the ones who steal. Which is normally considered a good thing in society, unless you're a Big (Tech) Company who's entire business model rests on the extraction of value (i.e. free labor) from less powerful entities.
- yetihehe 1y agoWhen you extract a lot of value from small number of people, it's called theft. If you extract small amounts from millions of people, it's called banking.
- ndegruchy 1y agoWhere's the outcry and rage from the MPAA and RIAA that the infringement on their copyright is for more than all the money in the world combined? It's fine to nail a $10m verdict against a guy with no money, but dare to tread on the beloved and bespoke * aI iNdUsTrY * and suddenly you've got better things to do?
- GPerson 1y agoI’m in complete support of anything that will kill the ‘AI’ industry.
- kulahan 1y agoNothing will kill it, but you might hamper one nation’s ability to work with it.
- OgsyedIE 1y agoThe title (at time of writing) omits the full quote in a way that becomes a glaring misquote. His quote in full has a very different meaning: > "And by the way if you did it in Britain and no one else did it, you would basically kill the AI industry in this country overnight." This is important to keep in mind. There are competing AI R&D orgs in dozens of different countries, not just America, China and France.
- kulahan 1y agoA lot of people seem to think AI development happens in a vacuum, but there are a lot of international implications to consider. Even if the US had some incredibly thorough process for ensuring everyone got paid for their AI additions, many nations would just straight-up steal the data anyways. So maybe in ChatGPT, you can’t ask for a studio ghibli-style photo, but in ChinaGPT (or what-have-you), it’ll work just fine.
- jimmydoe 1y agoChina might do it, so we did it first. I love this logic, and another place to apply it is about when to use nuclear bombs.
- Gud 1y agoThe key difference is that if China uses their nukes, so will we. On them.
- kulahan 1y agoI’m not talking about China. I’m talking about every single nation on the planet.
- still_grokking 1y agoAs you say, "China" is here only a placeholder. This "logic" that you need to do obviously illegal stuff (under current legislation) because otherwise someone else would do it and take the loot from that raid remains highly questionable no matter what country you put in that placeholder. The same "logic" would for example dictate that you should dismiss patents as otherwise "someone in China" could do it before you. Somehow nobody would agree that this is a valid approach in that case…
- jll29 1y agoIn most areas of law, whatever is not forbidden, is permitted. Licensing law is the opposite: you are not permitted to do anything with a protected work unless you have been granted a prior written license. (exceptions: fair use for scientific, non-commercial research, and copyright expiry e.g. seven decades after the death of the author, depending on the jurisdiction, of course.)
- OgsyedIE 1y agoLaw is downstream of politics in every place it has ever existed, however. The truth about 'Rule of Law' is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.
- bachmeier 1y agoImagine if someone stole the Windows source code, started a business selling their own version of Windows, and then claimed that the requirement to get a license from Microsoft would kill their business model.
- GPerson 1y agoThe main argument the AI defenders use nowadays to promote the development of this clearly harmful technology is that “if we don’t make the thing that almost certainly harms all humanity then China will!” This is just Mutually Assured Destruction all over again. The only correct solution is for AI pacifists on both sides (means the people who support humanity and oppose this nonsense) to do a as much as they can sideline the AI hardliners (the people who think AI is a benefit) on both sides. Each country needs to believe the AI pacifists in the other country have relatively more support than the hardliners.
- seanhunter 1y agoFor people who don’t know the UK backstory, Nick Clegg is a widely-derided figure in the UK. He was the leader of the 3rd biggest party (the liberal democrats) and by making an alliance with the conservatives to let David Cameron become prime minister and then going along (as deputy prime minister) with a number of policies [1] that were seen by supporters of his party as anathema to their basic principles, saw his party utterly destroyed in the next election to the extent where they went from being a credible political force to having few enough members of parliament where they could all have fit into a US—style SUV and not been too cramped. He didn’t care because he peaced out immediately and took the Zuck dollar. All of which to say if Nick Clegg says X there are a very large number of people who think “not X” by default. He’s even a lame duck at meta because they’re ditching him to replace him with Joel Kaplan who they think will help in their attempts to cosy up further with the Trump administration. [1] Tuition fees for tertiary education in particular https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/libdems-tuition-fees/ https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/libdems-tuition-fe...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- chrischen 1y agoWe have copyright laws to protect innovation as have deemed it as a society (for the most part) to be important, but there is no fundamental right to the protection of information. So the question now is: is it worth protecting the rights of innovators at the expense of whatever benefits that AI provides?
- tristanlukens 1y agoGood. Ask 'em
- pj_mukh 1y agoSincere question: Do we need new laws for this? If I use photoshop to create a straight reproduction of an artwork by someone else and monetize it, copyright law handles this. If I use AI to do the same, same deal? At no point did someone suggest suing Adobe for building photoshop for "enabling" people to recreate art and sell it. So what changed? The ease of use?
- birn559 1y agoAI uses lossy compression of data to generate output that is potentially a copyright violation. Photoshop doesn't recommend a (mostly) straight reproduction of existing work, but an AI potentially does.
- pj_mukh 1y ago“Photoshop doesn't recommend” Neither does OpenAI? What about an empty chat prompt “encourages” copyright abuse?
- const_cast 1y agoThe express and sole purpose of an LLM is to create output that can be found in it's input. That's what it does. When you ask for a picture of a cup of wine, you're reproducing an image of a cup of wine that was using in training. Or, more accurately, hundreds of images sort of averaged together. You can't say this isn't the intention because this is literally the singular use of LLM. They don't do anything else. They don't change your oil. They reproduce input. Just because you don't know exactly what the input was originally (and you, in fact, cannot find out) does not mean that isn't what it's doing.
- CrankyBear 1y agoThis is a feature, not a bug.
- karaterobot 1y agoI'm the kind of creative whose job is threatened by AI, but if I'm being honest and cold-blooded, I'm not actually sure that I'd call what AI training does stealing—apart from any illicit acquisition of the data, that is. I'm open to being persuaded. I just have not read a really persuasive argument that when a model is trained, what it's doing is closer to stealing than it is to being influenced and then recapitulating the general form of those influences. The latter is something we have no problem with in our culture. Every generation of artists do this. Every artist does this, in fact. It may be how creativity itself works, for all I know. But we never call it stealing, or when we do we say things like "great artists steal" and acknowledge it as a process rather than a problem. It feels to me like when people make the "AI is stealing" argument, they're really arguing about something else and using this as a proxy for it. Not exactly sure what that other thing is. Fear of losing work and being displaced is the obvious one, and it's a valid fear. I share it! But, if that's what it is, I think we should be having that discussion directly, rather than talking around it. We always do the thing where we piss around talking about proxies, rather than going right to the agon.
- tokai 1y agoIt feels to me like you are the one arguing about something else. It doesn't matter if AI doesn't copy work wholesale or it can be viewed as how artists are inspired. AI companies use work that they do not have the rights for, to construct their products.
- popularrecluse 1y agoYou don't need rights to view a work and caption it. You can walk into a library or gallery today and take your own notes on everything in there.
- const_cast 1y agoBut this is very obviously not what AI is doing. In essence, an LLM is taking works and compressing them and storing them in a big database, to later be reproduced with a touch of non-determinism. It's closer to archival and compression than captioning. But they're selling it. That's a big problem - you can't just take someone else's work, sprinkle some god knows what on it, throw it in a big pot with other shit you stole, and then reproduce it later. Even if your reproduction is super convoluted and not 100% accurate.
- morninglight 1y agoIf we hired guards and implemented security it will kill our banking industry.
- rifty 1y agoCopyright is long, but not infinite. There's little point in my opinion to permissions to train upon unless your purpose is to simply slow and postpone the inevitable. I'd be more interested in getting AI companies training with publicly scraped datasets to have them available to other AI trainers for free. The load scrapers put on the web is out of control.
- hryan001 1y ago[dead]
- jeisc 1y agoCurious that the stealing and profiteering of the human intellectual property coincides perfectly with a lawless administration in Washington DC