Apparently, stealing other people’s work to create product for money is now “fair use” as according to OpenAI because they are “innovating” (stealing). Yeah. Move fast and break things, huh?
“Because copyright today covers virtually every sort of human expression—including blogposts, photographs, forum posts, scraps of software code, and government documents—it would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials,” wrote OpenAI in the House of Lords submission.
OpenAI claimed that the authors in that lawsuit “misconceive[d] the scope of copyright, failing to take into account the limitations and exceptions (including fair use) that properly leave room for innovations like the large language models now at the forefront of artificial intelligence.”
Well… Yeah? How did everyone think it worked? How do you think it could work without that?
You could train an AI on only public domain material but it would be useless as a ‘knowledge source’ for anything contemporary.
OpenAI chose not to, to make a more effective product.
OpenAI’s notion of “fair use”: military and weapons
Those type of companies are getting so f*****g disgusting.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/12/openai-changes-policy-to-allow-military-applications/ https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/12/24036397/openai-is-softening-its-stance-on-military-use
Then shutdown your goddamn company until you find a better way.
OpenAI says it’s impossible to create useful AI models without copyrighted material
Good riddance, then just don’t.
As with many things, the golden rule applies. They who have the gold, make the rules.
…so stop doing it!
This explains what Valve was until recently not so cavalier about AI: They didn’t want to hold the bag on copyright matters outside of their domain.
Then pay for the material like everyone else who can’t do things without someone else’s copyrighted materials.
Or, or, or, hear me out:
Maybe their particular approach to making an AI is flawed.
Its like people do not know that there are many different kinds of ways that attempt to do AI.
Many of them do not rely on basically a training set that is the cumulative sum of all human generated content of every imaginable kind.
What ways do you mean? More than just expert-systems, I’d imagine.
Well, off the top of my head:
Whole Brain Emulation, attempting to model a human brain as physically accurately as possible inside a computer.
Genetic Iteration (not the correct term for it but it escapes me at the moment), where you set up a simulated environment for digital actors, then simulate quasi-neurons, quasi-body parts dictated by quasi-dna, in a way that mimics actual biological natural selection and evolution, and then you run the simulation millions of times until your digital creature develops a stable survival strategy.
Similar approaches to this have been used to do things like teach an AI humanoid how to develop its own winning martial arts style via many many iterations, starting from not even being able to stand up, much less do anything to an opponent.
Both of these approaches obviously have drawbacks and strengths, and could possibly be successful at far more than what they have achieved to date, or maybe not, due to known or existing problems, but neither of them rely on a training set of essentially the entirety of all content on the internet.
That sounds like a great idea for making an intelligent agent inside a video game, where you control all aspects of it’s environment. But what about an AI that you want to be able to interact with our current shared reality. If I want to know something that involves synthesis of multiple modalities of knowledge how should that information be conveyed? Do humans grow up inside test tubes that only consume content that they themselves have created? Can you imagine the strange society we would have if people were unleashed upon the world without having any shared experiences until they were fully adults?
I think the OpenAI people have a point here, but I think where they go off the rails is that they expect all of this copyrighted information to be granted to them at zero cost and with zero responsibility to the creators of said content.
ip protections are a spook anyway
The problem is not the use of copyrighted material. The problem is doing so without permission and without paying for it.
The real issue is money. How much and how (un)distributed.
Why is it fair/ok that one company can use all this material and make a lot of money off it without paying or even acknowledging others work?
On the flip side AI model could be useful. Maybe the models/weights should be made free just like the content they are trained on. Instead of paying for the model, we should pay for the hosting of the inference (aka. the API)
I sand by my opinion that AI will be the worst thing humans ever created, just a bit above religion.
I’d argue the issue is not the AI but capitalism.
AI is good, AI companies are evil.
This is very likely to be true.
All the AI race has done is surface the long standing issue of how broken copyright is for the online internet era. Artists should be compensated but trying to do that using the traditional model which was originally designed with physical, non infinitely copyable goods in mind is just asinine.
One such model could be to make the copyright owner automatically assigned by first upload on any platform that supports the API. An API provided and enforced by the US copyright office. A percentage of the end use case can be paid back as royalties. I haven’t really thought out this model much further than this.
Machine learning is here to say and is a useful tool that can be used for good and evil things alike.
Nah. Copyright is broken, but it’s broken because it lasts too long, and it can be held by constructs. People should still reserve the right to not have the things they’ve made incorporated into projects or products they don’t want to be associated with.
The right to refusal is important. Consent is important. The default permission should not be shifted to “yes” in anybody’s mind.
The fact that a not insignificant number of people seem to think the only issue here is money points to some pretty fucking entitled views among the would-be-billionaires.
My major issue with copyright is how published works can have major cultural significance. How it can shift ideas and shape minds. But your not allowed to have some fun with on a personal level. How can it be the norm that the most important scientific knowledge and other culturally significant material is locked behind such restrictive measures. Essentially ensuring that middle class and especially poor people are locked out.
If you publish something, even if it’s paid, you don’t deserve such restrictive rights. You deserve to be compensated for your work but you don’t deserve to make it into a extortion racket.
My view on your second point is if you have posted it publicly with no paywall, maybe you should still get some percentage revenue but you don’t have a say in what it can be used. To place restrictions on what it can be used for when posting it publicly is academic as it’s basically unenforceable.
We live in a society which revolves around the discovery and sharing of ideas. We are all entitled to a certain amount of the sharing of that information. That’s the whole point. To have some business man who was in the right place at the right time create an extortion racket out of something culturally significant they almost certainly didn’t create is wrong.
Sorry if this is all over the place. I’m writing this while tired.
Of course it is. About 50 years ago we went to a regime where everything is copywrited rather then just things that were marked and registered. Not sure where.I stand on that. One could argue we are in a crazy over copyright era now anyway.
What’s stopping AI companies from paying royalties to artists they ripped off?
Also, lol at accounts created within few hours just to reply in this thread.
The moment their works are the one that got stolen by big companies and driven out of business, watch their tune change.
Money is not always the issue. FOSS software for example. Who wants their FOSS software gobbled up by a commercial AI regardless. So there are a variety of issues.
I don’t care if any of my FOSS software is gobbled up by a commercial AI. Someone reading my code isn’t a problem to me. If it were, I wouldn’t publish it openly.
I do, especially when someone’s profiting from it, while my license is strictly for non commercial.
Same. I didn’t write it for them. I wrote it for folks who don’t necessarily have a lot of money but want something useful.
Well, for $20/mo I get a super-educated virtual assistant/tutor. It’s pretty awesome.
I’d say that’s some good value for people without much money. All of my open source libs are published under the MIT license if I recall correctly. I’ve made so much money using open source software, I don’t mind giving back, even to people who are going to make money with my code.
It makes me feel good to think my code could be involved in money changing hands. It’s evidence to me that I built something valuable.
$20/mo
good value for people without much money
The absolute majority of people can not afford that. This is especially true for huge part of the art that was used to train various models on.
AI currently is a tool for rich people by rich people which uses the work of poor people who themselves won’t be able to benefit from it.
And yet it is orders of magnitude less than it cost a year ago to hire someone to do research, write reports, and tutor me in any subject I want.
If an artist can’t afford $20/mo they need a job to support that hobby.
What’s stopping AI companies from paying royalties to artists they ripped off?
profit. AI is not even a profitable business now. They exist because of the huge amount of investment being poured into it. If they have to pay their fair share they would not exist as a business.
why OpenAI is actually true. The issue IMHO is the idea that we should give them a pass to do it.
Uber wasn’t making profit anyway, despite all the VCs money behind it.
I guess they have reasons not to pay drivers properly. Give Uber a free pass for it too
When you think about it, all companies would make so much more money if they didn’t have to pay their staff, or pay for materials they use! This whole economy and capitalism business, which relies on money being exchanged for goods and services, is clearly holding back profits. Clearly the solution here is obvious: everybody should embrace OpenAI’s methods and simply grab whatever they want without paying for it. Profit for everyone!
