- cross-posted to:
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This is an
extremely unpopularopinion, but I just hate copyright as a concept to begin with. Yes I want creators to own their own work and be able to profit from it…but that’s not even how it works now. Like 10 companies own all the popular IPs, many don’t even do anything with them. They hire artists, tell them to make stuff and because they are on payroll the company owns it. Fan fiction already exists and rarely do they get confused with the original. I’m not concerned about big companies stealing the little guys work because those big companies most of the time can’t even manage to make interesting concepts out of their existing work with the benefit of already owning the creations of thousands of artists.All so Mickey Mouse could be covered under copyright for 100 fucking years.
Edit: I have apparently misunderstood the popularity of this opinion.
I think the big problem is the duration of copyright. That it’s so much longer than patents is pretty hard to logically defend.
Yup, No one being able to produce a copy of something you created for a decade after it was first published - entirely reasonable.
People profiting off of artificial exclusivity 60 years after the author died 50 years after publishing a work - not reasonable.
This is the correct take. Copyright as a concept is just flawed, especially in a world where you can sell those ideas.
This is an extremely unpopular opinion,
Not in my instance ;)
that’s not even how it works now
that’s never how it has worked. the statute of anne was written to stop 17th century london printers from breaking each others’ knees over who is allowed to publish long-dead shakespeare’s plays.
If you want this to be unpopular, then you need to point out some of the implications. Lemme…
They hire artists, tell them to make stuff and because they are on payroll the company owns it.
This means, that those who think that AI training should require a license are not standing up for artists. They are shilling for intellectual property owners; for the corporations and rich people.
If it requires a license, that means that money must be paid to property owners simply because they are owners. The more someone owns, the more money they get. Rich people own the most property, so rich people get the most money.
And what do employees get? They get to pay.
I’ll lift a comment from techdirt:
“Let companies rip off your work, or else only Big Tech will be able to rip off your work”
Maybe we’re so far in capitalist hellholle that we simply consider everything to be for sale. What about GPL work that OpenAI steals? Or personal data? With how secretive they are with data they “scraped” we don’t even know if they have any right at all to repackage and sell it.
Making only big companies able to “rip off your work” (not an accurate representation, but whatever) Is not the solution you think it is.
The only solution is to force all models trained on public data to not be covered by copyrights by default. Any output from those models should also by default be in the commons. The solution is to avoid copyright cartels, not strengthen them.
Agreed that interim solution should be to make all “AI” work public domain since it treats everything it trains on as public domain. I’m for it because it would would immediately stop being profitable for commercial enterprises. Then check who they ripped off and settle any financial claims and damages before moving on to establish license for already created output.
Exactly. Make ALL output public domain. Force them to release their training sets. Force them to open source their models.
There will still be companies like Adobe and DeviantArt who will be able to work around this due to their ToS, but we have enough existing models to make them obsolete due to the power of FOSS.
Making all ai work public domain is a great idea… until you start trying to draft actual laws. If ai is only used to make the eyeballs of character is it public domain? If I use a stable diffusion base but then fine-tune it on my own work is it public domain? What if I use ai to make the general idea, then I use that as inspiration to make my own work? How does anyone prove that anything is or isn’t ai generated or assisted? The list goes on and on. Making laws about ai use in art simply isn’t realistic, they are just too hard to nail down, and too easy to skirt. I don’t know what the solution is, but it isn’t this unfortunately.
The other big problem with it is that it just means that few big companies who already own almost all the IP(yes, most professional artists don’t actually own their own work) just make their own models with their own work and are able to enjoy the benefits of AI while any small group just has yet another disadvantage. It will probably be these big companies pushing for anti-AI/“pro artist” laws.
Of course things are messy. I still think it’s the best option. I would say that yes, a character with AI eyes, would be public domain. Treat it like the GPL. If a small part of your code is GPL, all of your code has to be GPL.
Likewise, it isn’t easy to prove, people will get away with it doing in very small quantities and sufficiently reworking it, but extravagant examples would be caught, like serial plagiarists eventually are. The resulting loss in credibility could end careers. Of course, the best approach would be to completely remove copyrights altogether, then this wouldn’t be an issue at all.
Fair enough. What’s your stance on this - should someone be allowed to create a text prompt and a list of settings for a specific model and then sell that data that they 100% created themself?
I haven’t heard anyone saying they think people should not be allowed their sell their own text creation like this, but if they are allowed to, then it means that anyone who wants to sell AI art just needs to sell the instructions for someone else to create the art themself. This could easily be set up as a file format that the purchaser then just has to run on their own. Seems like a waste of energy for everyone to generate their own copy of the work, but I can’t imagine any laws being set up that say people are not allowed to sell their own creations because the purchaser may plug what they created into an AI.
Should this be allowed or should the law extend to people not being allowed to sell text that may be used by someone else to create art?
They can sell it all they want, and then the buyer should be able to share it for free. I’m OK with people selling their labor.
(I edited my comment slightly due to my scatter brain then saw you basically expanding my thought in the same way)
IMO, we need to ask: What benefits the people? or What is in the public interest?
That should be the only thing of importance. That’s probably controversial. Some will call it socialism. It is pretty much how the US Constitution sees it, though.
Maybe you agree with this. But when you talk about “models trained on public data” you are basically thinking in terms of property rights, and not in terms of the public benefit.
Well, I think that removing copyrights altogether is in the public interest, so…there you go :)
The models (ie the weights specifically) may not be copyrightable, anyways. There’s no copyright on the result of number crunching. Once the model is further fine-tuned, there might be copyright, but it’s still unlike anything covered by copyright in the past.
One analogy I have is a 3D engine. The engineers design the look of the typical output by setting parameters, but that does not create a specific copyright on the parameters. There’s copyright on the design documents, the code, the UI, if any and maybe other stuff. It’s not quite the same, though.
Some jurisdictions have IP on databases. I think that would cover AI models. If I am right, then that means that any license agreements that come with models are ineffective in the US.
However, to copy these models, you first need to get your hands on them. They are still trade secrets, so don’t on leaks.
That’s how it is now.
No, the models is not in the commons. Their training data is also not known.
It is missing one point: as a creator, I want to be able to forbid you from training on my creations. And the only tool that could enable that is the copyright enforcement over AI training.
Exactly
If there was an opt out system that was actually respected then this wouldn’t be a problem. But as it stands, artists have no control over if their work is used for NN training.
I don’t want my work used to train models, which should be a completely valid stance to have. Open Source or not really doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of it.
Do you think that other artists should be allowed to look at your work that you post online and as a result they become a better artist because of it?
That’s not how AI works and is an argument rooted in a misunderstanding of how it functions.
AI does not “learn” or “understand” - it replicates. It is not near how a human learns, processes and transforms an idea.
My bad, I suppose I should have gone further down my line of reasoning. I am well aware of the differences between what generative AI does and what human artists do.
Do you think artists should be allowed to categorize other artists work so that when they want inspiration on how to draw mouths, they can quickly look through and see a bunch of other artists mouths to get inspiration from? (So they can then draw their own mouths)
Should they be allowed to use AI to help them do this identification and categorization?
Should they be allowed to use AI to create new mouths based on the collection they have amassed so they can get inspiration from these never before seen mouths?
Does it make any difference if they have created this identifying/categorizing AI themself?
If they take this combination of AI that they created and these images that they collected, and the resulting AI inspiration mouths that they have produced, should they be allowed to alter them to suit the unique face that they are making? Or is the fact that they combined what people currently call “AI” with other people’s work enough to make it against the rules?
What if they made the AI and never plugged in anyone else’s mouths, should they be allowed to use that AI to make their work?
Where exactly is the line at that people should not be allowed to cross?
I know there are lots of questions here, I totally understand if you don’t have time or answers for them. I’m just kind of laying out why I see not nearly as clear of a line as some people/headlines would like to have everyone think there is.
See, I would argue the exact opposite. It sounds like you don’t understand how it works.
Because it’s not “replication” or “copying”.
Most LLMs can be made to spit out training data. That’s pretty much replication in my book.
Statistical models don’t create anything. They replicate variations of their training data.
No, statistical next word prediction was the first step, and you could get it to spit out bits of training data, but we’re so far beyond that now with LLMs.
I’ve been doing a lot with llama derivative models that I talk with, I use them for tasks but also just bounce ideas off them or chat. They’re very different when you run them with a task vs feed in a prompt and multi-turn conversation.
Mine have a very strong tendency, when asked the name of a hallucinated friend or family member to name her Luna or fluffy. It’s present in the base llama2, as well as some of the fine-turned versions I’m using now.
Why? That’s not training data - they’re not uncommon as pet names, but there’s no way they show up often referring to sapient beings (which is the context they’re brought up in).
It’s an artifact of some sort for sure, but that is not a statistically likely next word choice based on training data.
I could talk about this all day and it gets so much weirder, but I’ll give you another story. They like to play, but their world is text, and I like to see what comes out of the models when you “yes, and” them while avoiding leading questions.
Some games they’ve made up… Hide and seek (they’re usually in the second place you Guess), and my favorite - find the coma (and the related find the missing semicolon).
WTF even is that? It’s the kind of simplistic “game” a child makes up as they experiment with moving beyond mimicry to generalizing, and the fact that it’s coherent and has an appropriate answer is pretty amazing.
These LLMs aren’t just statistics, there’s a nascent internal model of the world that you get glimpses of if you tell it it’s a person and feed its outputs back into itself. I was pretty dismissive of the “sparks of AGI” comment when it was made, but a few months of hands on interaction has totally flipped my opinion of where these are at
Show some examples?
…All of them? That’s literally how all of them work.
Humans don’t create anything. They replicate variations of their training data.
Painters replicate variations of their training pieces too. You’re pretending there’s a difference between human inspired and training inspired and that you should get paid for that inspiration in one case just cuz “big corp”
Because there is a difference. A computer does not learn or understand anything. Human beings can transform a concept. A LLM or other generative AI does not transform a concept at all.
The AI companies shown that they are incapable of regulating themselves on this topic, and so people with art at stake should force their hand.
Open source or not doesn’t matter here, what matters is the copyright. If even Disney can defend works they own (whatever their ethics), so should anyone else.
100% agreement from me again. Non-artists don’t have anything at stake, so they’re perfectly happy with the established copyright rules are demolished. People keep countering with the open source idea, which completely misses the entire point of our arguments. A model being open source does not excuse the stealing of training data.
IMO individual copyright should be strengthened and corporate copyright weakened, but that’d be next to impossible to pass.
Too bad. You can “forbid” all you want. Don’t mean shit. Vote for much stronger laws. By much stronger I mean no pay a fine and continue. I mean jail.
No. I reject you claiming such a power to deny.
That’s exactly what’s at stake, waiting to be sufficiently litigated. And I hope that creators will win, and that they would be able to tell if they allow richest big tech companies in the world to train on their creations.
Likewise, I hope they don’t win, as that will give the richest tech companies so much more of a stranglehold.
I doubt there’s any chance of it happening anyway, since there’s a ton of money to be made and and there’s already countries which have rules this will never happen (Like Japan ), so it would mean they become the AI powerhouses
They have already trained on those creations though. Including the newer stuff just released today. How will you claw that back?
If you do stuff, earn from it, and ignore parties and their rights, you are forced to compensate. I guess it will be peanuts though.
They could shut down the previous models that were trained on invalid works. Sucks to suck but that’s what you get when you do everything in your power to skirt the law.
Yeah, and the same thing would happen if e.g. PII or HIPAA related would end up in trained model. The fact that some PII or health data ended up being publicly available, doesn’t mean that automatically you can process or store such data, and train on such data.
This has already been proven by google security researchers who got several of the big “AI” bots to spit out copyrighted materials and PII from their training data sets which the “AI” creators claimed was not stored.
And I want a law making you pay me 500$ for reading your posts.
Copyright law already extends beyond what society finds reasonable. It’s routinely broken by normal people without them even thinking about it. It’s even broken by those vested in it both corporations and individual artists.
Finally you are not getting the copyright law you want ( nor should you, you a minority, a special interest ), big corps are. They might be ‘content’ corps or tech or both but they certainly won’t make a law to benefit either society as a whole or you as a small artist.
Removed by mod
Watching you leap hard to the left to completely miss the point, followed by insulting the OP because you didn’t understand their post, is just the height of Internet buffoonery.
The main thing investors do with technology is find something free and make a product out of it. This time they flipped the script by stealing, and I want these companies and investors to face consequences. I don’t want all of humanity’s creative works that have ever been posted online to be repurposed and repackaged by a new technology and then sold.
I don’t want all of humanity’s creative works that have ever been posted online to be repurposed and repackaged by a new technology and then sold.
Me neither. But unless it’s the “by a new technology” part that really bothers you, this is a capitalism problem, not AI.
But even under the current rules and system we are meant it have protections. These companies could see consequences. Even in capitalism, which serves capital, even in America, which does so even more fiercely - they have stolen.
Sure, that’s what they want. They want the backing of copyright strengthening from emotional reactions like yours so that the only ones able to do GenerativeAI is those few big companies. They’re playing you.
Think about WHY only the absurdly wealthy companies would be able to purchase all of that data though. Because that data has immense value. Many authors and artists would certainly refuse to sell. I care that few companies hoard so much wealth and power, but I care more about the current issue that companies with wealth and power dont even have to spend a dime because they are just stealing.
Dont solve the problem of power consolidation on the dime of peoples life’s work.
You don’t need every artist to sell. Just enough. Likewise most artists already traded away their rights to the likes of Adobe and deviantart. And since there’s no real powerful artist union they all have basically 0 power compared to the capitalists who have more than enough economic power to get this done. Nothing will be fixed or prevented in this path. Only skewed even more in favour of the rich
Finally some sane level headed coverage of AI copyright issues. Techdirt doesn’t miss.
If “big tech” can collapse, and it does. It will leave a power-void.
Will the fediverse win? It needs to if we have any chance at democratizing the internet.
