5 ms·

The world of literature is increasingly making itself inaccessible to broad audiences by turning this into a zero-sum game. I wish OpenAI, Anthropic and Gemini

The world of literature is increasingly making itself inaccessible to broad audiences by turning this into a zero-sum game. I wish OpenAI, Anthropic and Gemini would all figure out how to pay royalties to copyright holders anytime their content is used. I see absolutely no reason why they can't do this. It would really take all the steam out of these hardline anti-AI positions.

deadbabe 1y ago
Why go after the AI company? If someone is using the AI generated content for commercial purposes and it’s based of a copyrighted work, they are the ones who should be paying the royalty. The AI company is really more like a vector search company that brings you relevant content, kind of like Google, but that does not mean the user will use those results for commercial purposes. Google doesn’t pay royalties for displaying your website in search results.
- Nursie 1y ago
  Surely both of them should have some sort of valid license to the work in that case?
- sampullman 1y ago
  It's not quite the same though, when I search Google I'm generally directed to the source (though the summary box stuff might cross the line a bit). With AI, copyrighted material is often not obvious to the end user, so I don't think it's fair to go after them. I think it's non-trivial to make the AI company pay per use though, they'd need a way to calculate what percent of the response is from which source. Let them pay at training time with consent from the copyright holder, or just omit it.
  - deadbabe 1y ago
    The AI company isn’t making money off the copyrighted material, they make money off finding the copyrighted material for you. The end user is 100% to blame for any copyright violations.
    - whywhywhywhy 1y ago
      This argument didn’t work out for Napster or Google Image Search.
- jarjoura 1y ago
  Sure and that's one way to solve royalties. I suspect from purely logistics, AI training is better when it's free to injest all the content it can, and for that freedom it pays in some small royalty amount when that source is cited. They'd simply pass that cost onto the customer. For universities or enterprises or lawfirms, or whatever, they would either include pre-existing agreements, or pay for blanket access. Whatever terms OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini sign with these entities, they can workout the royalties there. These are all solved problems for every other technology middle man company.
- whywhywhywhy 1y ago
  This only makes sense if we have open access to the training data so can verify if it’s copyrighted or not. Otherwise how am I supposed to know it’s replicated someone’s IP.
CuriouslyC 1y ago
I'm down for this, but only if the people who are getting paid by OpenAI/etc also turn around and pay any inspiration they've had, any artist they've copied from, etc over their entire life. If we're going to do this, we need to do it in a logically consistent way; anyone who's derived art from pre-existing art needs to pay the pre-existing artist, and I mean ALL of it, for anything derivative. Good luck with that.
- lelanthran 1y ago
  > I'm down for this, but only if the people who are getting paid by OpenAI/etc also turn around and pay any inspiration they've had, any artist they've copied from, etc over their entire life. Why? Things are scale have different rules (different laws as well) from things done individually or for personal reasons. What is the argument for AI/LLM stuff getting an exemption in this regard? I don't see why AI/LLMs should get exemptions or special treatment.
  - CuriouslyC 1y ago
    If copying someone is bad, and they should be paid for it, that should be universal. We already have copyright laws, they already prevent people from distributing AI outputs that infringe on intellectual property. If you don't like those laws in the age of AI, get them changed consistently, don't take a broken system and put it on life support. I find it funny that many people are pro-library and pro-archive, and will pay money to causes that try to do that with endangered culture, but get angry at AI as having somehow stolen something, when they're fulfilling an archival function as well.
    - ratmice 1y ago
      What I find funny about your argument is how completely degraded fair use has become when using anything by a corporation capable of delaying and running up legal fees. It sure feels like there are a separate set of rules.
    - lelanthran 1y ago
      > If copying someone is bad, and they should be paid for it, that should be universal. But we (i.e. society) don't agree that it is; the rules, laws and norms we have is that some things are bad at scale! As a society, we've already decided that things at scale are regulated differently than things for personal use. That ship has sailed and it's too late now to argue for laws to apply universally regardless of scale. I am asking why AI/LLMs should get a blanket exemption in this regard. I have not seen any good arguments for why we society should make a special exemption for AI/LLMs.
chrisulloa 1y ago
I think we will be seeing a lot more business pop up that will take cater to people who are unhappy with AI. Especially if you consider the large amount of inevitable layoffs, people will begin to resent everything AI. The intelligent machine was never supposed to replace laborers, it was supposed to do your dishes and laundry.
- ares623 1y ago
  tbf dishes and laundry are also labourers' jobs. but i agree i think there will be a small market for “vegan” content.
- lelanthran 1y ago
  > I think we will be seeing a lot more business pop up that will take cater to people who are unhappy with AI. How will those potential customers know which businesses are providing an AI-generated product and which are not? It's only a viable business if there is a way for potential customers to determine the amount of AI in whatever the product is.
- mr_mitm 1y ago
  My dishes and laundry are done by machines. Dumb ones though.
Nursie 1y ago
> anytime their content is used So ... every time a model is used? Because it has been trained on these works so they have some influence on all its weights? > I see absolutely no reason why they can't do this They didn't even pay to access the works in the first place, frankly the chances of them paying now seems pretty minimal, without being forced to by the courts.
onetokeoverthe 1y ago
[dead]
andrepd 1y ago
> We put an identifying mark on publishers committed to publishing only (human-written) literature >hardline anti-AI position Some people are beyond parody.
tpmoney 1y ago
I've had this idea kicking around in my head now for a few months that this is an opportunity to update copyright / IP law generally, and use the size and scope of government to do something about both the energy costs of AI and compensation for people whose works are used. At a very rough draft and high level it goes something like this: Update copyright to an initial 10 year limit, granted at publication without any need to register. This 10 year period also works just like copyright today, the characters, places, everything is projected. After 10 years, your entire work falls into the public domain. Alternatively, you can register your copyright with the government within the first 3 years. This requires submitting your entire work in a machine readable specified format for integration into official training sets and models. These data sets and models will be licensed by the government for some fee to interested parties. As a creator with material submitted to this data set, you will receive some portion of those licensing feed, proportional to the quantity and amount of time your material has been in the set, with some caps set to prevent abuse. I imagine this would work something like the broadcast licensing for radios works. You will receive these licensing fees for up to 20 years from the first date of copyright. During the first 10 years, copyright is still enforced on your work for all the same things that would normally be covered. For the 10 years after that, in additional consideration for adding your work to the data sets, you will be granted an additional weaker copyright term. The details would vary by the work, but for a novel for example, this might still protect the specific characters and creatures you created, but no longer offer protection on the "universe" you created. If we imagine Star Wars being created under this scheme, while Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker and Leia Organa might still be protected from 1987-1997, The Empire, Tatooine, and Star Destroyers might not be. What I envision here is that these government data sets would be known good, clean, properly categorized and in the case of models, the training costs have already been paid once. Rather than everyone doing a mad dash to scrape all the world's content, or buy up their own collection of books to be scanned and processed, all of that work could already have been done and it's just a license fee away. Additionally because we're building up an archive of media, we could also license custom data sets. Maybe someone wants to make a model trained on only cartoons, or only mystery novels or what have you. The data is already there, a nominal fee can get you that data, or maybe even have something trained up, and all the people who have contributed to that data are getting something for their work, but we're also not hamstringing our data sets to being decades or more out of date because Disney talked the government into century long copyrights decades ago.

deadbabe 1y ago

Why go after the AI company? If someone is using the AI generated content for commercial purposes and it’s based of a copyrighted work, they are the ones who should be paying the royalty. The AI company is really more like a vector search company that brings you relevant content, kind of like Google, but that does not mean the user will use those results for commercial purposes. Google doesn’t pay royalties for displaying your website in search results.

Nursie 1y ago
Surely both of them should have some sort of valid license to the work in that case?
sampullman 1y ago
It's not quite the same though, when I search Google I'm generally directed to the source (though the summary box stuff might cross the line a bit). With AI, copyrighted material is often not obvious to the end user, so I don't think it's fair to go after them. I think it's non-trivial to make the AI company pay per use though, they'd need a way to calculate what percent of the response is from which source. Let them pay at training time with consent from the copyright holder, or just omit it.
- deadbabe 1y ago
  The AI company isn’t making money off the copyrighted material, they make money off finding the copyrighted material for you. The end user is 100% to blame for any copyright violations.
  - whywhywhywhy 1y ago
    This argument didn’t work out for Napster or Google Image Search.
jarjoura 1y ago
Sure and that's one way to solve royalties. I suspect from purely logistics, AI training is better when it's free to injest all the content it can, and for that freedom it pays in some small royalty amount when that source is cited. They'd simply pass that cost onto the customer. For universities or enterprises or lawfirms, or whatever, they would either include pre-existing agreements, or pay for blanket access. Whatever terms OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini sign with these entities, they can workout the royalties there. These are all solved problems for every other technology middle man company.
whywhywhywhy 1y ago
This only makes sense if we have open access to the training data so can verify if it’s copyrighted or not. Otherwise how am I supposed to know it’s replicated someone’s IP.

CuriouslyC 1y ago

I'm down for this, but only if the people who are getting paid by OpenAI/etc also turn around and pay any inspiration they've had, any artist they've copied from, etc over their entire life. If we're going to do this, we need to do it in a logically consistent way; anyone who's derived art from pre-existing art needs to pay the pre-existing artist, and I mean ALL of it, for anything derivative. Good luck with that.

lelanthran 1y ago
> I'm down for this, but only if the people who are getting paid by OpenAI/etc also turn around and pay any inspiration they've had, any artist they've copied from, etc over their entire life. Why? Things are scale have different rules (different laws as well) from things done individually or for personal reasons. What is the argument for AI/LLM stuff getting an exemption in this regard? I don't see why AI/LLMs should get exemptions or special treatment.
- CuriouslyC 1y ago
  If copying someone is bad, and they should be paid for it, that should be universal. We already have copyright laws, they already prevent people from distributing AI outputs that infringe on intellectual property. If you don't like those laws in the age of AI, get them changed consistently, don't take a broken system and put it on life support. I find it funny that many people are pro-library and pro-archive, and will pay money to causes that try to do that with endangered culture, but get angry at AI as having somehow stolen something, when they're fulfilling an archival function as well.
  - ratmice 1y ago
    What I find funny about your argument is how completely degraded fair use has become when using anything by a corporation capable of delaying and running up legal fees. It sure feels like there are a separate set of rules.
  - lelanthran 1y ago
    > If copying someone is bad, and they should be paid for it, that should be universal. But we (i.e. society) don't agree that it is; the rules, laws and norms we have is that some things are bad at scale! As a society, we've already decided that things at scale are regulated differently than things for personal use. That ship has sailed and it's too late now to argue for laws to apply universally regardless of scale. I am asking why AI/LLMs should get a blanket exemption in this regard. I have not seen any good arguments for why we society should make a special exemption for AI/LLMs.

chrisulloa 1y ago

I think we will be seeing a lot more business pop up that will take cater to people who are unhappy with AI. Especially if you consider the large amount of inevitable layoffs, people will begin to resent everything AI. The intelligent machine was never supposed to replace laborers, it was supposed to do your dishes and laundry.

ares623 1y ago
tbf dishes and laundry are also labourers' jobs. but i agree i think there will be a small market for “vegan” content.
lelanthran 1y ago
> I think we will be seeing a lot more business pop up that will take cater to people who are unhappy with AI. How will those potential customers know which businesses are providing an AI-generated product and which are not? It's only a viable business if there is a way for potential customers to determine the amount of AI in whatever the product is.
mr_mitm 1y ago
My dishes and laundry are done by machines. Dumb ones though.

Nursie 1y ago

> anytime their content is used So ... every time a model is used? Because it has been trained on these works so they have some influence on all its weights? > I see absolutely no reason why they can't do this They didn't even pay to access the works in the first place, frankly the chances of them paying now seems pretty minimal, without being forced to by the courts.

onetokeoverthe 1y ago

[dead]

andrepd 1y ago

> We put an identifying mark on publishers committed to publishing only (human-written) literature >hardline anti-AI position Some people are beyond parody.

tpmoney 1y ago

I've had this idea kicking around in my head now for a few months that this is an opportunity to update copyright / IP law generally, and use the size and scope of government to do something about both the energy costs of AI and compensation for people whose works are used. At a very rough draft and high level it goes something like this: Update copyright to an initial 10 year limit, granted at publication without any need to register. This 10 year period also works just like copyright today, the characters, places, everything is projected. After 10 years, your entire work falls into the public domain. Alternatively, you can register your copyright with the government within the first 3 years. This requires submitting your entire work in a machine readable specified format for integration into official training sets and models. These data sets and models will be licensed by the government for some fee to interested parties. As a creator with material submitted to this data set, you will receive some portion of those licensing feed, proportional to the quantity and amount of time your material has been in the set, with some caps set to prevent abuse. I imagine this would work something like the broadcast licensing for radios works. You will receive these licensing fees for up to 20 years from the first date of copyright. During the first 10 years, copyright is still enforced on your work for all the same things that would normally be covered. For the 10 years after that, in additional consideration for adding your work to the data sets, you will be granted an additional weaker copyright term. The details would vary by the work, but for a novel for example, this might still protect the specific characters and creatures you created, but no longer offer protection on the "universe" you created. If we imagine Star Wars being created under this scheme, while Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker and Leia Organa might still be protected from 1987-1997, The Empire, Tatooine, and Star Destroyers might not be. What I envision here is that these government data sets would be known good, clean, properly categorized and in the case of models, the training costs have already been paid once. Rather than everyone doing a mad dash to scrape all the world's content, or buy up their own collection of books to be scanned and processed, all of that work could already have been done and it's just a license fee away. Additionally because we're building up an archive of media, we could also license custom data sets. Maybe someone wants to make a model trained on only cartoons, or only mystery novels or what have you. The data is already there, a nominal fee can get you that data, or maybe even have something trained up, and all the people who have contributed to that data are getting something for their work, but we're also not hamstringing our data sets to being decades or more out of date because Disney talked the government into century long copyrights decades ago.