8 ms·

Theft is not fair use

62 points by bgwalter 1y ago

andersa 1y ago
The entire premise is stupid. No theft occurred at any point, the original authors still have their creations.
- BoredPositron 1y ago
  Can you send me a copy of the front and back of your social security card? You still have your card so no theft happened.
  - ktallett 1y ago
    I don't feel this is quite the gotcha argument you believe it is. Your last line is indeed correct, he would still have his card, so no theft would have occurred. Just having a copy of said card is not theft. Likewise should a person use said card for a nefarious purpose, that is still not theft, that is fraud.
    - BoredPositron 1y ago
      You are really close...
      - wiseowise 1y ago
        No, your argument is a complete bogus. If I steal your ID card, then nothing really happens at all. I can spend years watching it, draw something on it, cut it in pieces, whatever. The moment I start trying to impersonate you, then it becomes a problem for you. If Bobby the metalhead downloads a copy of Enter the Sandman, then Metallica and brand doesn’t lose anything at all. If you were to make it industrial, then maybe we can talk about it.
        BoredPositron 1y ago
        You are also really close...
    - XCabbage 1y ago
      Well, not necessarily, on your last sentence. It might also be theft, depending on the precise nefarious purpose and on the jurisdiction. If you take somebody else's property without their consent, that's typically theft, even if the "property" is money in a bank account and no tangible physical object changed hands, and even if the method of taking involved deception. Fraud and theft overlap.
    - gwd 1y ago
      There was a good essay I saw a bit ago, talking about how this shift from "fraud" to "identity theft" neatly started shifting the victim from the bank to the individual. E.g., 30 years ago, if someone claiming to be me went to my bank, asked for my money, and the bank gave it to them, then the bank that was a victim of fraud. But now, if someone goes to my bank, asks for my money, and the bank gives it to them, then I am the victim of identity theft. The difference is subtle, but potentially important. If the bank unfortunately gives money to someone else, that's their problem: I can say to the bank, I'm sorry you were the victim of fraud, but you still owe me my money. If I unfortunately "have my identity stolen", then that makes it seem like it's my problem -- the bank may say, we're sorry you "had your identity stolen" and thus lost your money, but that's not really our problem.
  - rcxdude 1y ago
    "Identity theft" is another misuse of the word to deflect from what is actually an authentication failure.
    - chii 1y ago
      It's identity fraud, but people use theft to mean fraud here.
      - close04 1y ago
        People use "theft" because it's the terminology the companies responsible for the failure insist on using. The word makes it sound like the person failed to protect their identity, and hides that it was the company which failed to validate the identity. This should be called "identity validation failure". When scammers impersonate a company to steal your money it's no longer called identity theft.
        chii 1y ago
        you are absolutely correct. The idea that it is theft is tinged with victim blaming connotations.
  - close04 1y ago
    You wouldn't "steal" that identity, you'd just prove that e.g. banks are bad at validating identity.
    - tialaramex 1y ago
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS9ptA3Ya9E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS9ptA3Ya9E (Mitchell & Webb Sound - Identity Theft)
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - wiseowise 1y ago
    Can you do the same trick with my copy of Metallica, please?
- BenGosub 1y ago
  Digital music is infinitely reproducible, but that doesn't mean that I am allowed to illegally download it. It is similar with articles. The author decides who can consume their art,
  - falcor84 1y ago
    > The author decides who can consume their art, What?! How would that even happen? Unless you limit your definition of art to performing at salon events, that doesn't make much sense. Typically art is released into the world and at best the authors can get a bit of rent from the people who consume it (typically via a publisher), but they don't have any control over who the consumers would be.
    - BenGosub 1y ago
      For example, I decide if my music is going to stream on YouTube or Spotify, or it will only sell on Bandcamp. I decide if I am going to go with a publisher, which publisher and what platforms. What you label as "typically" has only been the case for the past ≈15 years.
      - wiseowise 1y ago
        You don’t decide anything on the platforms. The moment you upload your music there, they decide what they do with it.
      - falcor84 1y ago
        YouTube and Spotify and Bandcamp are distribution platforms, not your consumers
        BenGosub 1y ago
        My point is that just like I decide if I am going to distribute to streaming services, I also should be able to decide if I am going to allow models to train on my work. Isn't this something obvious?
- dartharva 1y ago
  I think they are more scared that the AI models will reproduce their original content in odd contexts that may bring liability to them and cause overall pandemonium.
- TrackerFF 1y ago
  Following this logic, anything that is digital can not be stolen? After all, you only steal a digital copy - not the original, and not something that is physical. In which case, the following is not theft: - Pirating anything that is digital video - Pirating anything that is digital audio - Pirating anything that is digital text - Pirating any software etc. EDIT: For the proponents of "it is not theft", what's your stance on personal data being stolen ("accessed")? If someone can access your medical records, are you fine with that? They can do whatever they want with that?
  - concinds 1y ago
    Correct. Piracy is potentially copyright infringement, not "theft". People insist on using that word, despite it being factually wrong, due to its emotional valence and persuasive value. The author is a photojournalist, not a lawyer, and not qualified to comment on copyright law beyond simply giving his personal opinion.
    - 9dev 1y ago
      You can hold that stance, but it completely undermines the source of income for artists or inventors. If you want a world where only rich and privileged people can afford the time to create art, this is the way to go. Otherwise, we maybe can agree that people who make something should be eligible for some kind of compensation to encourage them to continue making, for our shared benefit. You can argue that Beyoncé and George Clooney and Stephen King are so rich already they don’t need the money anyway, but that omits how even these people had to make a career from the bottom up on the sole premise that their focus on their art (regardless of your opinion on it) will pay the bills. So just saying piracy isn’t theft and thus isn’t a problem is a wholly undercooked answer to a difficult problem.
      - rcxdude 1y ago
        The "therefore isn't a problem" was not, I believe, present in the original post. It's entirely possible to believe that copyright infringement is not theft and yet also still a problem. It's mainly an appeal to not misrepresent the situation, because theft in a literal sense refers to a situation which is generally worse than copyright infringement.
- eastbound 1y ago
  I find the argument “Nothing was stolen” very weak compared to “The infinite endeavour of preventing private people from copying bytes, shouldn’t be a prerogative of the state” / ideas are copiable and can’t be decently guaranteed by the public against copy. That is, public funds, tribunals and lawmaking power, shouldn’t be used to protect a private interests. Corollary: 1. DRM is ok. 2. If one cracks it, it’s ok too, 3. You gotta find other ways to conduct business than retaining information (licenses, movies, etc.) 4. For software companies, cloud is one of those ways, compared to licensing downloads, 5. Netflix is the cloud of the movies and you pay for earlier access to a shared experience that is synchronized with other friends who will watch the same thing, 5. Patents are another stupid attempt by the state to protect corporations against citizens.
- DrScientist 1y ago
  I think the issue here is the theft of livelihoods. If you spend months crafting something unique with your livelihood being based on then selling access to that creation ( whether it be music, software or prose ) and somebody copies it in a way that deprives you of a livelihood ( and replaces it with a revenue to the entity that copied it's ) - it's that theft of your income stream?
  - xscott 1y ago
    Do you feel the same about spreadsheet software reducing the need for accountants? What about textile workers creating fabric for clothing by hand? Or do we only romanticize artists such that they're entitled to an income?
    - BobaFloutist 1y ago
      Does spreadsheet software have to be trained directly on the copyright-lrptected work of the accountants it's replacing without their consent (and often against their loud protesting)?
    - DrScientist 1y ago
      Of course not - you are confusing competition with theft. It's the difference between you writing a piece of competing software and taking my market share, versus you stealing my software and selling it as your own. Or you attempting to write a competing best seller versus copying mine wholesale and selling under your own name on Amazon. One activity is ultimately creative destruction that pushes society forward - the other is simply destructive free riding. ie theft involves no creation of value. Now the situation with tech companies is that there is theft, but also value add ( like somebody stealing your book and putting a better cover on it online ). Just because there is some value add doesn't forgive the theft.
      - xscott 1y ago
        Did you edit your post above? Even slightly? Because I was replying specifically to the idea that artists have a right to a livelihood, and I think you changed a few words to add the copying bit. I should be more consistent about pasting in the text I'm replying to. Regardless, you really should learn the difference between "theft", "copyright violation", and "training", because they are different things. If I read a bunch of books, learn from the authors' use of word phrasing, then pick one of Vonnegut's 8 Story Shapes, and make a book in some author's style, it's not illegal. I don't see why I can't have a computer do that for me. None of this really matters. If you feel strongly about it, you should go bribe congress to make a law. Because the existing laws about theft and copyright don't cover "learning from billions of examples and interpolating or extrapolating from them".
- socalgal2 1y ago
  Hopefully I can get you to do my taxes. when you’re done I’ll just make a copy and then not pay you because I’ll have not stolen anything and so I don’t owe you any money
  - d_k_f 1y ago
    In terms of property theft: exactly. Which is why your tax advisor would insist on a contract with you that outlines compensation for services rendered, time and material, etc.
    - socalgal2 1y ago
      not sure I get your point. So because a movie producer didn't sign a contract with a pirate it's okay for the pirate to copy the movie without compensation and that's the only difference? To me, in both cases someone did some work that someone else wants. In both cases they should pay for that work. If they are not willing to pay the price the person who did the work is asking, then they should go get work from someone else. At no point should they just say "well, I never contracted with you so therefore making a copy of the work you did is totally cool"
      - d_k_f 1y ago
        I was talking about the definition of theft and whether what you did in your example constituted it. If I did your taxes (as in: did all the calculations) and you took a picture of my results, copied the values, etc. no theft happened. If I filled out your tax return and you took that without paying then obviously theft happened, but I assumed you didn't mean that since then your example would have no connection to TFA. What did happen, though, is exactly what you described: you asked someone to do work for you ("contracting"/"work for hire") and they did just that. Then you decided not to pay them, which is a simple civil law case of contract fulfillment. EDIT: depending on the "creativity" of my tax calculations, copying them might be considered IP theft and I could come after you using the DMCA, but I guess creative accounting only goes so far ;)
- stereolambda 1y ago
  I would just establish that all references to "theft" and "stealing" in the realm of copyright (with the notable exception of plagiarism) is metaphor and emotional rhetoric. Historically it would come from copyright interest groups who want(ed) to use criminal police to enforce their state-granted copyright privileges[1] against regular people. Sadly these things are often decided by rhetoric in society, but then again, there's no actual debate if it's just throwing slogans. Now some of the same rhetoric is used in the AI battle. The only question worth asking here is what's the social benefit, as human culture is by nature all commons and derivation. But in this case, the AI companies are also accumulating power, and LLMs are removing attribution which could be argued to discourage publishing new works more than piracy. A "pirate" may learn about you and later buy from you in different ways, a LLM user won't even know that you exist. [1] Not even discussing how exaggerated these privileges are from what would be reasonable.
  - jachee 1y ago
    Why the carve-out for plagiarism? And how does an LLM reciting all or part of a work verbatim not qualify as plagiarism?
    - stereolambda 1y ago
      Because if you present yourself as the author, it follows that the actual author is deprived of attribution. So you are actually taking something from that person. LLM could commit plagiarism if authorship of generated media was claimed for either the LLM or its creators.
- exe34 1y ago
  Exactly! That's why digital content piracy is legal and copyright doesn't exist.
- jillesvangurp 1y ago
  I wouldn't call it stupid but I do expect that the legal cases will die somewhere along their way to the supreme courts. Several reasons: 1) The cat is out of the bag, AI is a thing now. It's not going back in the bag. So, artists are going to have to adapt to that. And are already adapting. 2) AI affecting artists is not any different than photography wiping out the market for portrait painters. Or records wiping out the market for selling music in paper form so that professional musicians might reproduce that for an audience. Those things happened a long time ago of course and any copyright issues around that were resolved over time. Copyright law hasn't really changed much since before that happened. These are the same kind of questions that exists for AIs being obviously inspired by but not really perfectly copying songs, images, text, etc. And they have answers in many decades of case law. Judges are going to take all of that into account and are historically reluctant to introduce new interpretations. 3) AI companies are big enough to outright buy the larger copyright holders. That doesn't mean they will; but it suggests they might reach some settlement that doesn't involve pleading guilty in a court. In the end this is about money, not about principles. At least not for the parties paying the lawyers. 4) If a settlement doesn't happen, judges will be forced to look at existing cases to assess what is and isn't an infringement. And if you remove all the outrage and moralism from the equation (which judges tend to do), AI companies are simply not distributing copies of original works to anyone. They are using them, for sure. But it's distributing copies that gets you in trouble. Not using copies. That narrows it down to whether those copies, which are freely distributed on the internet, were obtained legally.
PicassoCTs 1y ago
My problem with AI is that it has humanity mediocre, filtered for the masses culture baked into it by definition. This is machinery that can not suggest experimental jazz- unless it is already mainstream. It can not go to the fringes and shove the species towards new and wild discoveries. I find it hilarious though, that it may destroy the cultural behemoths with their IPs by mashUp. Death by a million beatles-clone songs, yesterday came suddenly indeed. And after all that is sad and done for- some of us, might even venture out to the fringe and find the weird and wild parts again.
- BenGosub 1y ago
  If you use it like a search engine it can find some obscure blogs that list some rare jazz though.
- BLKNSLVR 1y ago
  Humanity rarely ventures out to the fringes on its own anyway. Only the committed freaks out there between the creation of experimental jazz and the mainstreaming of LLMs. The more it changes, the more it stays the same. As a sibling commenter said in fewer words: the models will still consume the fringe content and will be able to regurgitate it given the right prompt; suggesting experimental jazz or whatever other fringe art pursuit the committed freaks have an itch for. I'll still slowly progress may way through John Zorn's catalogue, and occasionally re-invigorate my appreciation for HR Giger's bleak works, and keep listening (and subscribing) to the local community radio station, and seeking out uncomfortable movies, safe in the knowledge that likely I'll be watching, listening, and appreciating them all in solitude. I do not think that "culture" can be forced, it must be slowly, almost imperceptibly, absorbed.
- FeepingCreature 1y ago
  It can absolutely go outside the mainstream, it just doesn't by default. You can push it outside of its median.
ktallett 1y ago
I'm not AI's biggest fan, but it is training it's virtual brain on images and data, just like a creative human would, yet it is just far quicker at that. Do we need to limit scraping and learning to only free publicly available data? Therefore is a Reuters photo still not publicly available for learning style of photo, composition, lighting, even with a watermark. What you pay for is the license to reproduce the image, you can still look at them beforehand.
- nicbou 1y ago
  I think the main issue is that it uses monopolistic behaviour to press its advantage. It feels as if Google et al are scalping information from the actual producers. There is also the nonconsensual aspect of it. I make things for humans. Just because it’s free for humans does not mean it’s free to be used by corporations, especially they use my work to kill the economics of my industry. It feels like a parasitic relationship.
- can16358p 1y ago
  No one was able to summarize exactly what I had in mind about AI this well for years. Thank you!
- hau 1y ago
  What really matters is the society where we want to live in. It doesn't matter much what kind of technology allows private entities to reproduce creativity. We can assume these brains are not virtual and are actually organic and more capable than human ones, or that they are magical black boxes. Since it changes incentives and mechanics of the creativity market so much it forces us to reassess current approaches. I can't agree that mechanism behind this tech and the approach to IP is of any consequence. We don't make laws, norms and judgements for the sake of our tools. It's ok to say that we're not ready to arrange things in a proper way yet, without letting everything slide on some arbitrary technicality.
- notachatbot123 1y ago
  As a human I am not allowed to freely acquire anything I want. I have to pay, rent, license. This makes me unable to learn and train my brain in many ways I would like to. Why should "AI" companies be allowed more than I?
verisimi 1y ago
Yes, all that data that ai is sucking up belongs to Google, twitter and Facebook! Lol. They are the owners of it. Those corporates didn't commit legal theft! So ridiculous. The whole idea of copyright is wrong. Anything that is popular and therefore successful, owes that to the crowd that made it popular. The crowd has is what gives it the interest. I personally wouldn't even be averse to some sort period of copyright, say 2 years, with the possibility to extend to say 5, but these things are common.
findthewords 1y ago
One of two legal outcomes must follow from OpenAI's piracy. 1. OpenAI must be fined according to law. 2. Piracy is decriminalized. Failing to do neither is an admission that the US has become a corporatocracy. That is, a form of oligarchy where the rule of law is not by a majority or plurality of people, but by a number or corporations you can count with one hand.
- hsbauauvhabzb 1y ago
  > Failing to do neither is an admission that the US has become a corporatocracy. Not sure it really matters unless there’s something that will or can be done about it.
- PicassoCTs 1y ago
  3. The law splits and breaks down controlled. One for cooperations and the upper echelons. One for the peasants.
skerit 1y ago
I don't understand the example image. The description says: > The yellow circles highlight areas of similarity between the original photo and the AI-generated photo What about the person in the middle, doing the throwing? It's exactly the same. Why don't they have a circle around them? Why highlight some lens flares & distorted faces when the actual subject is the same? Or was this some kind of image-to-image generation?
- theknarf 1y ago
  Presumably the guy doing the throwing was a part of the actual prompt. While the things circled was not.
  - therealpygon 1y ago
    Presumably we don’t know because the prompts aren’t provided, which is telling for opinion pieces like this.
wiseowise 1y ago
> Intellectual property rights and copyrights be damned Yes, be damned and fuck them. And stop pursuing individuals too. You can have omniscient AI without feeding all of the data into it.
gwd 1y ago
He gives two examples that are meant to prove his point, but they don't really convince me. The first example is the image: the AI has seen the famous photograph of the Ferguson riots, and (with 6 prompts?!) manages to get something fairly similar. But suppose a human had seen that photo, and then you asked that human to draw you a photo of the riots; and then continued prompting them to make it look similar. Is it really unrealistic that the human could generate something that looks as similar? Is the human themselves therefore inherently a violation of copyright? The NYT article to begin with looks a bit more damning -- except that, it appears that they prompted the AI directly with the beginning of the article. My son, when a toddler, for a long time could recite nearly the full text of his favorite story books with minimal prompting -- does that mean he's inherently a violation of copyright? Because he can recite The Gruffalo almost verbatim when prompted, is he a walking violation of Julia Donaldson's copyright? What about people with photographic memory, that can recite long sections of books verbatim -- are they inherently violating copyright? Now sure, in both cases, the output might be a violation of copyright, if it's clearly derived from it -- both for humans and for AI. But I don't think the fact that AI can be prompted to generate copyright-violating material is proof that the AI training itself has violated copyright, any more than the fact that a human can be prompted to generate copyright-violating material is proof that human training has violated copyright.
- makeitdouble 1y ago
  Scale matters. > But suppose a human [...] A human doesn't ingest half of the web and simultaneously deal with millions of people. We've be been through this times and times again. Justice didn't go after humans copying books by hand, it went after reprints of existing copyrighted material. Music industry didn't go after people singing tunes in their kitchen, but after wide distribution networks. Removing scale from the discussion leads to absurd conclusions.
  - spwa4 1y ago
    > Justice didn't go after humans copying books by hand, it went after reprints of existing copyrighted material. Not sure who "justice" is, but copyright owners most definitely did go after individuals copying even small excerpts of copyrighted material, in fact that is currently still going on in libraries: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/09/us-library-system-attack-digital-licensing https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/09/us-lib... (yes, they explicitly made taking excerpts impossible and fought against any attempt to change that) > Music industry didn't go after people singing tunes in their kitchen Again, yes they did. I'm not aware of kitchen incidents, but this happened: https://stanforddaily.com/2020/08/04/warner-chappell-music-sues-people-for-singing-happy-birthday-while-washing-their-hands/ https://stanforddaily.com/2020/08/04/warner-chappell-music-s...
milliams 1y ago
Copying is not theft - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeTybKL1pM4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeTybKL1pM4 As much as I think that what these companies is doing has moral and legal issues, reframing copyright violations as "theft" will cut both ways and make the arguments for open culture more difficult.
thedevilslawyer 1y ago
The fact that they called this captioned as "The bottom photo is an AI-generated image created in six prompts using OpenAI’s ChatGPT", without actually releasing the 6 prompts is quite telling. Because that will show they were prompting things to match the original image. Iconic images (mona lisa, tank man, widely reported news stories, styles like ghibli) would of course be incorporated in as styles. It doesn't refute fair use. So, you can't say "draw this person in the mona lisa pose, in simpsons style" and then act surprised and shocked when the model does exactly that. That's not theft.
- therealpygon 1y ago
  Well, for one, no “theft” occurred at all. There is a reason it is called “infringement”. This is like saying that our brains are “stealing” the art we look at. Second, absolutely. Even if someone wanted to call it theft, the only theft occurred by the user, not the LLM. This is like saying photoshop is stealing because you can use it to recreate copyrighted images. Or, again, like saying when a user looks at a painting then paints something similar, they are “infringing”. What a silly, silly thing. Beyond that, this cites Reuters v Ross Inteligence as a precious “win” against AI, but that case had literally nothing to do with AI. It was a straight direct infringement case. It’s the difference between “we had an LLM read the law and create notes”, and “we had the LLM rephrase the copyrighted notes directly so we could try to avoid licensing them”. That activity would be infringing with or without the LLM participation. Even funnier is that none of the circled items are actually infringing. Right off the top, none of the positions line up with the original image, and none of the items match the original image. In fact, if anyone looks closer, the entire image is different and just shares similarities (likely prompted) with the original. The fire is different, the shadows are different, the persons pants, shirt, hair, mask are different. Literally nothing is the same other than the overall composition…which isn’t protectable. Are they seriously trying to argue that any image that contains a street sign, tail light, and green blob, and looks similar to another image is, is therefore “infringement”? How many people have taken exactly the same photo of the Eiffel Tower from the same location? Did they all infringe on each other because they have similar features and compositions? What nonsense.
  - 1y ago
msgodel 1y ago
I think most people are already pretty annoyed with how copyright law makes very reasonable applications of technology impossible. What these whiny retards want to do is put copyright between everyone and a technical revolution. Do that and copyright will go away entirely. If you like copyright, try to come up with practical and reasonable compromises. Don't try to break things.
mikewarot 1y ago
It's obvious to me that the converse is true here as well... Fair Use is NOT theft. I've seen plenty of photos of "The Bean" in Chicago, most of which aren't mine if I look really, really closely, but that's all ok. I'd be an idiot if I got upset by any other similar photos. Clearly copyright needs to be updated for the modern era, but perhaps it's reputation that should replace it? Instead of focusing on the content, let's instead work to secure the sources of information, so that we know a story is from a given source, and everything has a digital provenance.

62 points by bgwalter 1y ago

andersa 1y ago

The entire premise is stupid. No theft occurred at any point, the original authors still have their creations.

BoredPositron 1y ago
Can you send me a copy of the front and back of your social security card? You still have your card so no theft happened.
- ktallett 1y ago
  I don't feel this is quite the gotcha argument you believe it is. Your last line is indeed correct, he would still have his card, so no theft would have occurred. Just having a copy of said card is not theft. Likewise should a person use said card for a nefarious purpose, that is still not theft, that is fraud.
  - BoredPositron 1y ago
    You are really close...
    - wiseowise 1y ago
      No, your argument is a complete bogus. If I steal your ID card, then nothing really happens at all. I can spend years watching it, draw something on it, cut it in pieces, whatever. The moment I start trying to impersonate you, then it becomes a problem for you. If Bobby the metalhead downloads a copy of Enter the Sandman, then Metallica and brand doesn’t lose anything at all. If you were to make it industrial, then maybe we can talk about it.
      - BoredPositron 1y ago
        You are also really close...
  - XCabbage 1y ago
    Well, not necessarily, on your last sentence. It might also be theft, depending on the precise nefarious purpose and on the jurisdiction. If you take somebody else's property without their consent, that's typically theft, even if the "property" is money in a bank account and no tangible physical object changed hands, and even if the method of taking involved deception. Fraud and theft overlap.
  - gwd 1y ago
    There was a good essay I saw a bit ago, talking about how this shift from "fraud" to "identity theft" neatly started shifting the victim from the bank to the individual. E.g., 30 years ago, if someone claiming to be me went to my bank, asked for my money, and the bank gave it to them, then the bank that was a victim of fraud. But now, if someone goes to my bank, asks for my money, and the bank gives it to them, then I am the victim of identity theft. The difference is subtle, but potentially important. If the bank unfortunately gives money to someone else, that's their problem: I can say to the bank, I'm sorry you were the victim of fraud, but you still owe me my money. If I unfortunately "have my identity stolen", then that makes it seem like it's my problem -- the bank may say, we're sorry you "had your identity stolen" and thus lost your money, but that's not really our problem.
- rcxdude 1y ago
  "Identity theft" is another misuse of the word to deflect from what is actually an authentication failure.
  - chii 1y ago
    It's identity fraud, but people use theft to mean fraud here.
    - close04 1y ago
      People use "theft" because it's the terminology the companies responsible for the failure insist on using. The word makes it sound like the person failed to protect their identity, and hides that it was the company which failed to validate the identity. This should be called "identity validation failure". When scammers impersonate a company to steal your money it's no longer called identity theft.
      - chii 1y ago
        you are absolutely correct. The idea that it is theft is tinged with victim blaming connotations.
- close04 1y ago
  You wouldn't "steal" that identity, you'd just prove that e.g. banks are bad at validating identity.
  - tialaramex 1y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS9ptA3Ya9E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS9ptA3Ya9E (Mitchell & Webb Sound - Identity Theft)
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- wiseowise 1y ago
  Can you do the same trick with my copy of Metallica, please?
BenGosub 1y ago
Digital music is infinitely reproducible, but that doesn't mean that I am allowed to illegally download it. It is similar with articles. The author decides who can consume their art,
- falcor84 1y ago
  > The author decides who can consume their art, What?! How would that even happen? Unless you limit your definition of art to performing at salon events, that doesn't make much sense. Typically art is released into the world and at best the authors can get a bit of rent from the people who consume it (typically via a publisher), but they don't have any control over who the consumers would be.
  - BenGosub 1y ago
    For example, I decide if my music is going to stream on YouTube or Spotify, or it will only sell on Bandcamp. I decide if I am going to go with a publisher, which publisher and what platforms. What you label as "typically" has only been the case for the past ≈15 years.
    - wiseowise 1y ago
      You don’t decide anything on the platforms. The moment you upload your music there, they decide what they do with it.
    - falcor84 1y ago
      YouTube and Spotify and Bandcamp are distribution platforms, not your consumers
      - BenGosub 1y ago
        My point is that just like I decide if I am going to distribute to streaming services, I also should be able to decide if I am going to allow models to train on my work. Isn't this something obvious?
dartharva 1y ago
I think they are more scared that the AI models will reproduce their original content in odd contexts that may bring liability to them and cause overall pandemonium.
TrackerFF 1y ago
Following this logic, anything that is digital can not be stolen? After all, you only steal a digital copy - not the original, and not something that is physical. In which case, the following is not theft: - Pirating anything that is digital video - Pirating anything that is digital audio - Pirating anything that is digital text - Pirating any software etc. EDIT: For the proponents of "it is not theft", what's your stance on personal data being stolen ("accessed")? If someone can access your medical records, are you fine with that? They can do whatever they want with that?
- concinds 1y ago
  Correct. Piracy is potentially copyright infringement, not "theft". People insist on using that word, despite it being factually wrong, due to its emotional valence and persuasive value. The author is a photojournalist, not a lawyer, and not qualified to comment on copyright law beyond simply giving his personal opinion.
  - 9dev 1y ago
    You can hold that stance, but it completely undermines the source of income for artists or inventors. If you want a world where only rich and privileged people can afford the time to create art, this is the way to go. Otherwise, we maybe can agree that people who make something should be eligible for some kind of compensation to encourage them to continue making, for our shared benefit. You can argue that Beyoncé and George Clooney and Stephen King are so rich already they don’t need the money anyway, but that omits how even these people had to make a career from the bottom up on the sole premise that their focus on their art (regardless of your opinion on it) will pay the bills. So just saying piracy isn’t theft and thus isn’t a problem is a wholly undercooked answer to a difficult problem.
    - rcxdude 1y ago
      The "therefore isn't a problem" was not, I believe, present in the original post. It's entirely possible to believe that copyright infringement is not theft and yet also still a problem. It's mainly an appeal to not misrepresent the situation, because theft in a literal sense refers to a situation which is generally worse than copyright infringement.
eastbound 1y ago
I find the argument “Nothing was stolen” very weak compared to “The infinite endeavour of preventing private people from copying bytes, shouldn’t be a prerogative of the state” / ideas are copiable and can’t be decently guaranteed by the public against copy. That is, public funds, tribunals and lawmaking power, shouldn’t be used to protect a private interests. Corollary: 1. DRM is ok. 2. If one cracks it, it’s ok too, 3. You gotta find other ways to conduct business than retaining information (licenses, movies, etc.) 4. For software companies, cloud is one of those ways, compared to licensing downloads, 5. Netflix is the cloud of the movies and you pay for earlier access to a shared experience that is synchronized with other friends who will watch the same thing, 5. Patents are another stupid attempt by the state to protect corporations against citizens.
DrScientist 1y ago
I think the issue here is the theft of livelihoods. If you spend months crafting something unique with your livelihood being based on then selling access to that creation ( whether it be music, software or prose ) and somebody copies it in a way that deprives you of a livelihood ( and replaces it with a revenue to the entity that copied it's ) - it's that theft of your income stream?
- xscott 1y ago
  Do you feel the same about spreadsheet software reducing the need for accountants? What about textile workers creating fabric for clothing by hand? Or do we only romanticize artists such that they're entitled to an income?
  - BobaFloutist 1y ago
    Does spreadsheet software have to be trained directly on the copyright-lrptected work of the accountants it's replacing without their consent (and often against their loud protesting)?
  - DrScientist 1y ago
    Of course not - you are confusing competition with theft. It's the difference between you writing a piece of competing software and taking my market share, versus you stealing my software and selling it as your own. Or you attempting to write a competing best seller versus copying mine wholesale and selling under your own name on Amazon. One activity is ultimately creative destruction that pushes society forward - the other is simply destructive free riding. ie theft involves no creation of value. Now the situation with tech companies is that there is theft, but also value add ( like somebody stealing your book and putting a better cover on it online ). Just because there is some value add doesn't forgive the theft.
    - xscott 1y ago
      Did you edit your post above? Even slightly? Because I was replying specifically to the idea that artists have a right to a livelihood, and I think you changed a few words to add the copying bit. I should be more consistent about pasting in the text I'm replying to. Regardless, you really should learn the difference between "theft", "copyright violation", and "training", because they are different things. If I read a bunch of books, learn from the authors' use of word phrasing, then pick one of Vonnegut's 8 Story Shapes, and make a book in some author's style, it's not illegal. I don't see why I can't have a computer do that for me. None of this really matters. If you feel strongly about it, you should go bribe congress to make a law. Because the existing laws about theft and copyright don't cover "learning from billions of examples and interpolating or extrapolating from them".
socalgal2 1y ago
Hopefully I can get you to do my taxes. when you’re done I’ll just make a copy and then not pay you because I’ll have not stolen anything and so I don’t owe you any money
- d_k_f 1y ago
  In terms of property theft: exactly. Which is why your tax advisor would insist on a contract with you that outlines compensation for services rendered, time and material, etc.
  - socalgal2 1y ago
    not sure I get your point. So because a movie producer didn't sign a contract with a pirate it's okay for the pirate to copy the movie without compensation and that's the only difference? To me, in both cases someone did some work that someone else wants. In both cases they should pay for that work. If they are not willing to pay the price the person who did the work is asking, then they should go get work from someone else. At no point should they just say "well, I never contracted with you so therefore making a copy of the work you did is totally cool"
    - d_k_f 1y ago
      I was talking about the definition of theft and whether what you did in your example constituted it. If I did your taxes (as in: did all the calculations) and you took a picture of my results, copied the values, etc. no theft happened. If I filled out your tax return and you took that without paying then obviously theft happened, but I assumed you didn't mean that since then your example would have no connection to TFA. What did happen, though, is exactly what you described: you asked someone to do work for you ("contracting"/"work for hire") and they did just that. Then you decided not to pay them, which is a simple civil law case of contract fulfillment. EDIT: depending on the "creativity" of my tax calculations, copying them might be considered IP theft and I could come after you using the DMCA, but I guess creative accounting only goes so far ;)
stereolambda 1y ago
I would just establish that all references to "theft" and "stealing" in the realm of copyright (with the notable exception of plagiarism) is metaphor and emotional rhetoric. Historically it would come from copyright interest groups who want(ed) to use criminal police to enforce their state-granted copyright privileges[1] against regular people. Sadly these things are often decided by rhetoric in society, but then again, there's no actual debate if it's just throwing slogans. Now some of the same rhetoric is used in the AI battle. The only question worth asking here is what's the social benefit, as human culture is by nature all commons and derivation. But in this case, the AI companies are also accumulating power, and LLMs are removing attribution which could be argued to discourage publishing new works more than piracy. A "pirate" may learn about you and later buy from you in different ways, a LLM user won't even know that you exist. [1] Not even discussing how exaggerated these privileges are from what would be reasonable.
- jachee 1y ago
  Why the carve-out for plagiarism? And how does an LLM reciting all or part of a work verbatim not qualify as plagiarism?
  - stereolambda 1y ago
    Because if you present yourself as the author, it follows that the actual author is deprived of attribution. So you are actually taking something from that person. LLM could commit plagiarism if authorship of generated media was claimed for either the LLM or its creators.
exe34 1y ago
Exactly! That's why digital content piracy is legal and copyright doesn't exist.
jillesvangurp 1y ago
I wouldn't call it stupid but I do expect that the legal cases will die somewhere along their way to the supreme courts. Several reasons: 1) The cat is out of the bag, AI is a thing now. It's not going back in the bag. So, artists are going to have to adapt to that. And are already adapting. 2) AI affecting artists is not any different than photography wiping out the market for portrait painters. Or records wiping out the market for selling music in paper form so that professional musicians might reproduce that for an audience. Those things happened a long time ago of course and any copyright issues around that were resolved over time. Copyright law hasn't really changed much since before that happened. These are the same kind of questions that exists for AIs being obviously inspired by but not really perfectly copying songs, images, text, etc. And they have answers in many decades of case law. Judges are going to take all of that into account and are historically reluctant to introduce new interpretations. 3) AI companies are big enough to outright buy the larger copyright holders. That doesn't mean they will; but it suggests they might reach some settlement that doesn't involve pleading guilty in a court. In the end this is about money, not about principles. At least not for the parties paying the lawyers. 4) If a settlement doesn't happen, judges will be forced to look at existing cases to assess what is and isn't an infringement. And if you remove all the outrage and moralism from the equation (which judges tend to do), AI companies are simply not distributing copies of original works to anyone. They are using them, for sure. But it's distributing copies that gets you in trouble. Not using copies. That narrows it down to whether those copies, which are freely distributed on the internet, were obtained legally.

PicassoCTs 1y ago

My problem with AI is that it has humanity mediocre, filtered for the masses culture baked into it by definition. This is machinery that can not suggest experimental jazz- unless it is already mainstream. It can not go to the fringes and shove the species towards new and wild discoveries. I find it hilarious though, that it may destroy the cultural behemoths with their IPs by mashUp. Death by a million beatles-clone songs, yesterday came suddenly indeed. And after all that is sad and done for- some of us, might even venture out to the fringe and find the weird and wild parts again.

BenGosub 1y ago
If you use it like a search engine it can find some obscure blogs that list some rare jazz though.
BLKNSLVR 1y ago
Humanity rarely ventures out to the fringes on its own anyway. Only the committed freaks out there between the creation of experimental jazz and the mainstreaming of LLMs. The more it changes, the more it stays the same. As a sibling commenter said in fewer words: the models will still consume the fringe content and will be able to regurgitate it given the right prompt; suggesting experimental jazz or whatever other fringe art pursuit the committed freaks have an itch for. I'll still slowly progress may way through John Zorn's catalogue, and occasionally re-invigorate my appreciation for HR Giger's bleak works, and keep listening (and subscribing) to the local community radio station, and seeking out uncomfortable movies, safe in the knowledge that likely I'll be watching, listening, and appreciating them all in solitude. I do not think that "culture" can be forced, it must be slowly, almost imperceptibly, absorbed.
FeepingCreature 1y ago
It can absolutely go outside the mainstream, it just doesn't by default. You can push it outside of its median.

ktallett 1y ago

I'm not AI's biggest fan, but it is training it's virtual brain on images and data, just like a creative human would, yet it is just far quicker at that. Do we need to limit scraping and learning to only free publicly available data? Therefore is a Reuters photo still not publicly available for learning style of photo, composition, lighting, even with a watermark. What you pay for is the license to reproduce the image, you can still look at them beforehand.

nicbou 1y ago
I think the main issue is that it uses monopolistic behaviour to press its advantage. It feels as if Google et al are scalping information from the actual producers. There is also the nonconsensual aspect of it. I make things for humans. Just because it’s free for humans does not mean it’s free to be used by corporations, especially they use my work to kill the economics of my industry. It feels like a parasitic relationship.
can16358p 1y ago
No one was able to summarize exactly what I had in mind about AI this well for years. Thank you!
hau 1y ago
What really matters is the society where we want to live in. It doesn't matter much what kind of technology allows private entities to reproduce creativity. We can assume these brains are not virtual and are actually organic and more capable than human ones, or that they are magical black boxes. Since it changes incentives and mechanics of the creativity market so much it forces us to reassess current approaches. I can't agree that mechanism behind this tech and the approach to IP is of any consequence. We don't make laws, norms and judgements for the sake of our tools. It's ok to say that we're not ready to arrange things in a proper way yet, without letting everything slide on some arbitrary technicality.
notachatbot123 1y ago
As a human I am not allowed to freely acquire anything I want. I have to pay, rent, license. This makes me unable to learn and train my brain in many ways I would like to. Why should "AI" companies be allowed more than I?

verisimi 1y ago

Yes, all that data that ai is sucking up belongs to Google, twitter and Facebook! Lol. They are the owners of it. Those corporates didn't commit legal theft! So ridiculous. The whole idea of copyright is wrong. Anything that is popular and therefore successful, owes that to the crowd that made it popular. The crowd has is what gives it the interest. I personally wouldn't even be averse to some sort period of copyright, say 2 years, with the possibility to extend to say 5, but these things are common.

findthewords 1y ago

One of two legal outcomes must follow from OpenAI's piracy. 1. OpenAI must be fined according to law. 2. Piracy is decriminalized. Failing to do neither is an admission that the US has become a corporatocracy. That is, a form of oligarchy where the rule of law is not by a majority or plurality of people, but by a number or corporations you can count with one hand.

hsbauauvhabzb 1y ago
> Failing to do neither is an admission that the US has become a corporatocracy. Not sure it really matters unless there’s something that will or can be done about it.
PicassoCTs 1y ago
3. The law splits and breaks down controlled. One for cooperations and the upper echelons. One for the peasants.

skerit 1y ago

I don't understand the example image. The description says: > The yellow circles highlight areas of similarity between the original photo and the AI-generated photo What about the person in the middle, doing the throwing? It's exactly the same. Why don't they have a circle around them? Why highlight some lens flares & distorted faces when the actual subject is the same? Or was this some kind of image-to-image generation?

theknarf 1y ago
Presumably the guy doing the throwing was a part of the actual prompt. While the things circled was not.
- therealpygon 1y ago
  Presumably we don’t know because the prompts aren’t provided, which is telling for opinion pieces like this.

wiseowise 1y ago

> Intellectual property rights and copyrights be damned Yes, be damned and fuck them. And stop pursuing individuals too. You can have omniscient AI without feeding all of the data into it.

gwd 1y ago

He gives two examples that are meant to prove his point, but they don't really convince me. The first example is the image: the AI has seen the famous photograph of the Ferguson riots, and (with 6 prompts?!) manages to get something fairly similar. But suppose a human had seen that photo, and then you asked that human to draw you a photo of the riots; and then continued prompting them to make it look similar. Is it really unrealistic that the human could generate something that looks as similar? Is the human themselves therefore inherently a violation of copyright? The NYT article to begin with looks a bit more damning -- except that, it appears that they prompted the AI directly with the beginning of the article. My son, when a toddler, for a long time could recite nearly the full text of his favorite story books with minimal prompting -- does that mean he's inherently a violation of copyright? Because he can recite The Gruffalo almost verbatim when prompted, is he a walking violation of Julia Donaldson's copyright? What about people with photographic memory, that can recite long sections of books verbatim -- are they inherently violating copyright? Now sure, in both cases, the output might be a violation of copyright, if it's clearly derived from it -- both for humans and for AI. But I don't think the fact that AI can be prompted to generate copyright-violating material is proof that the AI training itself has violated copyright, any more than the fact that a human can be prompted to generate copyright-violating material is proof that human training has violated copyright.

makeitdouble 1y ago
Scale matters. > But suppose a human [...] A human doesn't ingest half of the web and simultaneously deal with millions of people. We've be been through this times and times again. Justice didn't go after humans copying books by hand, it went after reprints of existing copyrighted material. Music industry didn't go after people singing tunes in their kitchen, but after wide distribution networks. Removing scale from the discussion leads to absurd conclusions.
- spwa4 1y ago
  > Justice didn't go after humans copying books by hand, it went after reprints of existing copyrighted material. Not sure who "justice" is, but copyright owners most definitely did go after individuals copying even small excerpts of copyrighted material, in fact that is currently still going on in libraries: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/09/us-library-system-attack-digital-licensing https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/09/us-lib... (yes, they explicitly made taking excerpts impossible and fought against any attempt to change that) > Music industry didn't go after people singing tunes in their kitchen Again, yes they did. I'm not aware of kitchen incidents, but this happened: https://stanforddaily.com/2020/08/04/warner-chappell-music-sues-people-for-singing-happy-birthday-while-washing-their-hands/ https://stanforddaily.com/2020/08/04/warner-chappell-music-s...

milliams 1y ago

Copying is not theft - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeTybKL1pM4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeTybKL1pM4 As much as I think that what these companies is doing has moral and legal issues, reframing copyright violations as "theft" will cut both ways and make the arguments for open culture more difficult.

thedevilslawyer 1y ago

The fact that they called this captioned as "The bottom photo is an AI-generated image created in six prompts using OpenAI’s ChatGPT", without actually releasing the 6 prompts is quite telling. Because that will show they were prompting things to match the original image. Iconic images (mona lisa, tank man, widely reported news stories, styles like ghibli) would of course be incorporated in as styles. It doesn't refute fair use. So, you can't say "draw this person in the mona lisa pose, in simpsons style" and then act surprised and shocked when the model does exactly that. That's not theft.

therealpygon 1y ago
Well, for one, no “theft” occurred at all. There is a reason it is called “infringement”. This is like saying that our brains are “stealing” the art we look at. Second, absolutely. Even if someone wanted to call it theft, the only theft occurred by the user, not the LLM. This is like saying photoshop is stealing because you can use it to recreate copyrighted images. Or, again, like saying when a user looks at a painting then paints something similar, they are “infringing”. What a silly, silly thing. Beyond that, this cites Reuters v Ross Inteligence as a precious “win” against AI, but that case had literally nothing to do with AI. It was a straight direct infringement case. It’s the difference between “we had an LLM read the law and create notes”, and “we had the LLM rephrase the copyrighted notes directly so we could try to avoid licensing them”. That activity would be infringing with or without the LLM participation. Even funnier is that none of the circled items are actually infringing. Right off the top, none of the positions line up with the original image, and none of the items match the original image. In fact, if anyone looks closer, the entire image is different and just shares similarities (likely prompted) with the original. The fire is different, the shadows are different, the persons pants, shirt, hair, mask are different. Literally nothing is the same other than the overall composition…which isn’t protectable. Are they seriously trying to argue that any image that contains a street sign, tail light, and green blob, and looks similar to another image is, is therefore “infringement”? How many people have taken exactly the same photo of the Eiffel Tower from the same location? Did they all infringe on each other because they have similar features and compositions? What nonsense.
- 1y ago

msgodel 1y ago

I think most people are already pretty annoyed with how copyright law makes very reasonable applications of technology impossible. What these whiny retards want to do is put copyright between everyone and a technical revolution. Do that and copyright will go away entirely. If you like copyright, try to come up with practical and reasonable compromises. Don't try to break things.

mikewarot 1y ago

It's obvious to me that the converse is true here as well... Fair Use is NOT theft. I've seen plenty of photos of "The Bean" in Chicago, most of which aren't mine if I look really, really closely, but that's all ok. I'd be an idiot if I got upset by any other similar photos. Clearly copyright needs to be updated for the modern era, but perhaps it's reputation that should replace it? Instead of focusing on the content, let's instead work to secure the sources of information, so that we know a story is from a given source, and everything has a digital provenance.