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I'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 stea

I'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 ago
It 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 ago
  You 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 ago
    But 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.
birn559 1y ago
AIs are not creative, that's anthropomorphism. They use lossy compression to save training data. Later on, the compressed data is used to generate things that are potentially copyright violations (because they are very close to the original).
- pj_mukh 1y ago
  I don’t understand, generating (and then monetizing) things that are copyright violations is already illegal. What we’re taking about is suing the tool that could potentially be used to generate copyright violations. Which seems silly? Steelmanning your argument a bit more: OpenAI is selling the fact that you could potentially generate copyrightable material as a subscription, because the artwork is somewhere in the compressed data? Abstracting the underlying tech a bit: If we imagined a printer that could faithfully represent whatever you told it to and you told it to reproduce Da Vinci’s that you later sold as originals while others told it to reproduce original forms of art (successfully), who’s at fault here, you or the printer? Seems obvious to me it’s the user of the printer, not the printer itself, even if the printermaker is making money.
  - Earw0rm 1y ago
    In a strict reading, the tool itself is a copyright violation. In that an LLM is the code and its weights, and the weights contain a lossy compressed copy of a copyrighted work. Now you might say that's an overly rigid reading of copyright law, and I might agree, but that is nevertheless the reading of it applied to other domains - music, film and so on - where incorporating even a fractional, lossy and heavily processed portion of another work is enough to trigger copyright law. There is no blanket de-minimis that says "well, it's only 5%, so it's fair use".
    - pj_mukh 1y ago
      The legality of Copyright material being present in the latent space of a commercialized foundation model would definitely be an interesting case! Though most of these cases aren't litigating this. They are charging that the ability to recreate copyrightable material is the fault of the tool and not the tool user[1]. [1]: https://www.darrow.ai/resources/ai-copyright-law https://www.darrow.ai/resources/ai-copyright-law

tokai 1y ago

It 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 ago
You 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 ago
  But 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.

birn559 1y ago

AIs are not creative, that's anthropomorphism. They use lossy compression to save training data. Later on, the compressed data is used to generate things that are potentially copyright violations (because they are very close to the original).

pj_mukh 1y ago
I don’t understand, generating (and then monetizing) things that are copyright violations is already illegal. What we’re taking about is suing the tool that could potentially be used to generate copyright violations. Which seems silly? Steelmanning your argument a bit more: OpenAI is selling the fact that you could potentially generate copyrightable material as a subscription, because the artwork is somewhere in the compressed data? Abstracting the underlying tech a bit: If we imagined a printer that could faithfully represent whatever you told it to and you told it to reproduce Da Vinci’s that you later sold as originals while others told it to reproduce original forms of art (successfully), who’s at fault here, you or the printer? Seems obvious to me it’s the user of the printer, not the printer itself, even if the printermaker is making money.
- Earw0rm 1y ago
  In a strict reading, the tool itself is a copyright violation. In that an LLM is the code and its weights, and the weights contain a lossy compressed copy of a copyrighted work. Now you might say that's an overly rigid reading of copyright law, and I might agree, but that is nevertheless the reading of it applied to other domains - music, film and so on - where incorporating even a fractional, lossy and heavily processed portion of another work is enough to trigger copyright law. There is no blanket de-minimis that says "well, it's only 5%, so it's fair use".
  - pj_mukh 1y ago
    The legality of Copyright material being present in the latent space of a commercialized foundation model would definitely be an interesting case! Though most of these cases aren't litigating this. They are charging that the ability to recreate copyrightable material is the fault of the tool and not the tool user[1]. [1]: https://www.darrow.ai/resources/ai-copyright-law https://www.darrow.ai/resources/ai-copyright-law