Thousands of authors demand payment from AI companies for use of copyrighted works::Thousands of published authors are requesting payment from tech companies for the use of their copyrighted works in training artificial intelligence tools, marking the latest intellectual property critique to target AI development.

  • novibe@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    You know what would solve this? We all collectively agree this fucking tech is too important to be in the hands of a few billionaires, start an actual public free open source fully funded and supported version of it, and use it to fairly compensate every human being on Earth according to what they contribute, in general?

    Why the fuck are we still allowing a handful of people to control things like this??

    • Zetaphor@zemmy.cc
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      1 year ago

      Setting aside the obvious answer of “because capitalism”, there are a lot of obstacles towards democratizing this technology. Training of these models is done on clusters of A100 GPU’s, which are priced at $10,000USD each. Then there’s also the fact that a lot of the progress being made is being done by highly specialized academics, often with the resources of large corporations like Microsoft.

      Additionally the curation of datasets is another massive obstacle. We’ve mostly reached the point of diminishing returns of just throwing all the data at the training of models, it’s quickly becoming apparent that the quality of data is far more important than the quantity of the data (see TinyStories as an example). This means a lot of work and research needs to go into qualitative analysis when preparing a dataset. You need a large corpus of input, each of which are above a quality threshold, but then also as a whole they need to represent a wide enough variety of circumstances for you to reach emergence in the domain(s) you’re trying to train for.

      There is a large and growing body of open source model development, but even that only exists because of Meta “leaking” the original Llama models, and now more recently releasing Llama 2 with a commercial license. Practically overnight an entire ecosystem was born creating higher quality fine-tunes and specialized datasets, but all of that was only possible because Meta invested the resources and made it available to the public.

      Actually in hindsight it looks like the answer is still “because capitalism” despite everything I’ve just said.

      • novibe@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        I know the answer to pretty much all of our “why the hell don’t we solve this already?” questions is: capitalism.

        But I mean, as Lrrr would say “why does the working class, as the biggest of the classes, doesn’t just eat the other one?”.

        • Zetaphor@zemmy.cc
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          1 year ago

          The short answer is friction. The friction of overcoming the forces of violence the larger class has at its disposal and utilizes at the smallest hint of uprising is greater than the friction of accepting the status quo.

      • novibe@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        No entity on the planet has more money than our governments. It’d be more efficient for a government to fund this than any private company.

        • Lazz45@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          Actually many bills are more of a fabric material now than an actual paper product. Many bills in Europe now are polymer based. Both of which add to the difficulty of counterfeiting

          • rocketeer8015@discuss.tchncs.de
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            1 year ago

            Actually most of the money are just 1‘s and 0‘s in a computer, coming into existence from nothing and vanishing into nothing. Fiat money backed by “trust”. As Henry Ford once said:

            It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.

  • cerevant@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    There is already a business model for compensating authors: it is called buying the book. If the AI trainers are pirating books, then yeah - sue them.

    There are plagiarism and copyright laws to protect the output of these tools: if the output is infringing, then sue them. However, if the output of an AI would not be considered infringing for a human, then it isn’t infringement.

    When you sell a book, you don’t get to control how that book is used. You can’t tell me that I can’t quote your book (within fair use restrictions). You can’t tell me that I can’t refer to your book in a blog post. You can’t dictate who may and may not read a book. You can’t tell me that I can’t give a book to a friend. Or an enemy. Or an anarchist.

    Folks, this isn’t a new problem, and it doesn’t need new laws.

    • scarabic@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      When you sell a book, you don’t get to control how that book is used.

      This is demonstrably wrong. You cannot buy a book, and then go use it to print your own copies for sale. You cannot use it as a script for a commercial movie. You cannot go publish a sequel to it.

      Now please just try to tell me that AI training is specifically covered by fair use and satire case law. Spoiler: you can’t.

      This is a novel (pun intended) problem space and deserves to be discussed and decided, like everything else. So yeah, your cavalier dismissal is cavalierly dismissed.

        • scarabic@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          It fails the transcendence criterion.Transformative works go beyond the original purpose of their source material to produce a whole new category of thing or benefit that would otherwise not be available.

          Taking 1000 fan paintings of Sauron and using them in combination to create 1 new painting of Sauron in no way transcends the original purpose of the source material. The AI painting of Sauron isn’t some new and different thing. It’s an entirely mechanical iteration on its input material. In fact the derived work competes directly with the source material which should show that it’s not transcendent.

          We can disagree on this and still agree that it’s debatable and should be decided in court. The person above that I’m responding to just wants to say “bah!” and dismiss the whole thing. If we can litigate the issue right here, a bar I believe this thread has already met, then judges and lawmakers should litigate it in our institutions. After all the potential scale of this far reaching issue is enormous. I think it’s incredibly irresponsible to say feh nothing new here move on.

    • Dark Arc@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It’s 100% a new problem. There’s established precedent for things costing different amounts depending on their intended use.

      For example, buying a consumer copy of song doesn’t give you the right to play that song in a stadium or a restaurant.

      Training an entire AI to make potentially an infinite number of derived works from your work is 100% worthy of requiring a special agreement. This even goes beyond simple payment to consent; a climate expert might not want their work in an AI which might severely mischatacterize the conclusions, or might want to require that certain queries are regularly checked by a human, etc

      • bouncing@partizle.com
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        1 year ago

        The thing is, copyright isn’t really well-suited to the task, because copyright concerns itself with who gets to, well, make copies. Training an AI model isn’t really making a copy of that work. It’s transformative.

        Should there be some kind of new model of renumeration for creators? Probably. But it should be a compulsory licensing model.

        • jecxjo@midwest.social
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          1 year ago

          The slippery slope here is that we are currently considering humans and computers to be different because (something someone needs to actually define). If you say “AI read my book and output a similar story, you owe me money” then how is that different from “Joe read my book and wrote a similar story, you owe me money.” We have laws already that deal with this but honestly how many books and movies aren’t just remakes of Romeo and Juliet or Taming of the Shrew?!?

          • bouncing@partizle.com
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            1 year ago

            If you say “AI read my book and output a similar story, you owe me money” then how is that different from “Joe read my book and wrote a similar story, you owe me money.”

            You’re bounded by the limits of your flesh. AI is not. The $12 you spent buying a book at Barns & Noble was based on the economy of scarcity that your human abilities constrain you to.

            It’s hard to say that the value proposition is the same for human vs AI.

            • jecxjo@midwest.social
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              1 year ago

              We are making an assumption that humans do “human things”. If i wrote a derivative work of your $12 book, does it matter that the way i wrote it was to use a pen and paper and create a statistical analysis of your work and find the “next best word” until i had a story? Sure my book took 30 years to write but if i followed the same math as an AI would that matter?

              • bouncing@partizle.com
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                1 year ago

                It wouldn’t matter, because derivative works require permission. But I don’t think anyone’s really made a compelling case that OpenAI is actually making directly derivative work.

                The stronger argument is that LLM’s are making transformational work, which is normally fair use, but should still require some form of compensation given the scale of it.

                • jecxjo@midwest.social
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                  1 year ago

                  But no one is complaining about publishing derived work. The issue is that “the robot brain has full copies of my text and anything it creates ‘cannot be transformative’”. This doesn’t make sense to me because my brain made a copy of your book too, its just really lossy.

                  I think right now we have definitions for the types of works that only loosely fit human actions mostly because we make poor assumptions of how the human brain works. We often look at intent as a guide which doesn’t always work in an AI scenario.

  • Durotar@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    How can they prove that not some abstract public data has been used to train algorithms, but their particular intellectual property?

    • Square Singer@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      Well, if you ask e.g. ChatGPT for the lyrics to a song or page after page of a book, and it spits them out 1:1 correct, you could assume that it must have had access to the original.

    • foggy@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Not without some seriously invasive warrants! Ones that will never be granted for an intellectual property case.

      Intellectual property is an outdated concept. It used to exist so wealthier outfits couldn’t copy your work at scale and muscle you out of an industry you were championing.

      It simply does not work the way it was intended. As technology spreads, the barrier for entry into most industries wherein intellectual property is important has been all but demolished.

      i.e. 50 years ago: your song that your band performed is great. I have a recording studio and am gonna steal it muahahaha.

      Today: “anyone have an audio interface I can borrow so my band can record, mix, master, and release this track?”

      Intellectual property ignores the fact that, idk, Issac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz both independently invented calculus at the same time on opposite ends of a disconnected globe. That is to say, intellectual property doesn’t exist.

      Ever opened a post to make a witty comment to find someone else already made the same witty comment? Yeah. It’s like that.

        • foggy@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Spoken like someone who is having trouble admitting they’re standing on the shoulders of Giants.

          I don’t expect a nuanced response from you, nor will I waste time with folks who can’t be bothered to respond in any form beyond attack, nor do I expect you to watch this

          Intellectual property died with the advent of the internet. It’s now just a way for the wealthy to remain wealthy.

  • linearchaos@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I don’t know how I feel about this honestly. AI took a look at the book and added the statistics of all of its words into its giant statistic database. It doesn’t have a copy of the book. It’s not capable of rewriting the book word for word.

    This is basically what humans do. A person reads 10 books on a subject, studies become somewhat of a subject matter expert and writes their own book.

    Artists use reference art all the time. As long as they don’t get too close to the original reference nobody calls any flags.

    These people are scared for their viability in their user space and they should be, but I don’t think trying to put this genie back in the bottle or extra charging people for reading their stuff for reference is going to make much difference.

    • BartsBigBugBag@lemmy.tf
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      1 year ago

      It’s not at all like what humans do. It has no understanding of any concepts whatsoever, it learns nothing. It doesn’t know that it doesn’t know anything even. It’s literally incapable of basic reasoning. It’s essentially taken words and converted them to numbers, and then it examines which string is likely to follow each previous string. When people are writing, they aren’t looking at a huge database of information and determining the most likely word to come next, they’re synthesizing concepts together to create new ones, or building a narrative based on their notes. They understand concepts, they understand definitions. An AI doesn’t, it doesn’t have any conceptual framework, it doesn’t even know what a word is, much less the definition of any of them.

      • Buttons@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        I think you underestimate the reasoning power of these AIs. They can write code, they can teach math, they can even learn math.

        I’ve been using GPT4 as a math tutor while learning linear algebra, and I also use a text book. The text book told me that (to write it out) “the column space of matrix A is equal to the column space of matrix A times its own transpose”. So I asked GPT4 if that was true and it said no, GPT disagreed with the text book. This was apparently something that GPT did not memorize and it was not just regurgitating sentences. I told GPT I saw it in a text book, the AI said “sorry, the textbook must be wrong”. I then explained the mathematical proof to the AI, and the AI apologized, admitted it had been wrong, and agreed with the proof. Only after hearing the proof did the AI agree with the text book. This is some pretty advanced reasoning.

        I performed that experiment a few times and it played out mostly the same. I experimented with giving the AI a flawed proof (I purposely made mistakes in the mathematical proofs), and the AI would call out my mistakes and would not be convinced by faulty proofs.

        A standard that judged this AI to have “no understanding of any concepts whatsoever”, would also conclude the same thing if applied to most humans.

        • unlimitedolm_sjw@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          That doesn’t prove that GPT is reasoning, its model predicts that those responses are the most likely given the messages your sending it. It’'s read thousands of actual conversations with people stating something incorrect, then having it explained to them and them coming around and admitting they were wrong.

          I’ve seen other similar cases where the AI is wrong about something, and when it’s explained, it just doubles down. Because humans do that type of thing too, refusing to admit their wrong.

          The way it’s designed means that it cannot reason in the same way humans experience it. It can simulate a likely conversation someone would have if they could reason.

      • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
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        1 year ago

        How can you tell that our thoughts don’t come from a biological LLM? Maybe what we conceive as “understanding” is just a feeling emerging from a more fondamental mechanism like temperature emerges from the movement of particles.

        • Telodzrum@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Because we have biological, developmental, and psychological science telling us that’s not how higher-level thinking works. Human brains have the ability to function on a sort of autopilot similar to “AI”, but that is not what we are describing when we speak of creative substance.

  • mayo@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I think this is more about frustration experienced by artists in our society at being given so little compensation.

    The answer is staring us in the face. UBI goes hand in hand with developments in AI. Give artists a basic salary from the government so they can afford to live well. This isn’t a AI problem this is a broken society problem. I support artists advocating for themselves, but the fact that they aren’t asking for UBI really speaks to how hopeless our society feels right now.

    • angrynomad@infosec.pub
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      1 year ago

      What incentive is there at all to work with UBI? Why would anyone try hard at anything if you’re not rewarded?

      • mayo@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Also I think it’s funny that we can bail out large companies on repeat, but bailing out people is a show stopper. It’s backwards. The economy is supposed to serve us, not the other way around.

      • tomkatt@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        There will always be people who seek to challenge themselves.

        Others will want more money than is included with their UBI. What on earth would be wrong with people having a little more, as opposed to so many struggling, needing roommates, and so on? I imagine with an extra 1k-2k in their pocket monthly, a lot more people would buy or build housing, and a lot of service industries would boom with all the additional potentially disposable income.

        Or how about people being able to retire, like actually retire, without stress. We could lower the retirement age, or people could retire independently from government assistance, leading to more available jobs for younger people as more roles transition away due to automation.

        And frankly, I honestly don’t see anything wrong with some portion of the populace just living on UBI and enjoying life if that’s how they want to do things. Nothing wrong with people being happier, less stressed, and potentially mentally and/or physically healthier for it.

  • adibis@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    This is so stupid. If I read a book and get inspired by it and write my own stuff, as long as I’m not using the copyrighted characters, I don’t need to pay anyone anything other than purchasing the book which inspired me originally.

    If this were a law, why shouldn’t pretty much each modern day fantasy author not pay Tolkien foundation or any non fiction pay each citation.

    • CurlyMoustache@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Machine learning algorithms does not get inspired, they replicate. If I tell a MLM to write a scene for a film in the style of Charlie Kaufman, it has to been told who Kaufman is and been fed alot of manuscripts. Then it tries to mimicks the style and guess what words come next.

      This is not how we humans get inspired. And if we do, we get accused of stealing. Which it is.

    • Telodzrum@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      There’s a difference between a sapient creature drawing inspiration and a glorified autocomplete using copyrighted text to produce sentences which are only cogent due to substantial reliance upon those copyrighted texts.

      All AI creations are derivative and subject to copyright law.

      • dystop@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        There’s a difference between a sapient creature drawing inspiration and a glorified autocomplete using copyrighted text to produce sentences which are only cogent due to substantial reliance upon those copyrighted texts.

        But the AI is looking at thousands, if not millions of books, articles, comments, etc. That’s what humans do as well - they draw inspiration from a variety of sources. So is sentience the distinguishing criteria for copyright? Only a being capable of original thought can create original work, and therefore anything not capable of original thought cannot create copyrighted work?

        Also, irrelevant here but calling LLMs a glorified autocomplete is like calling jet engines a “glorified horse”. Technically true but you’re trivialising it.

        • tenitchyfingers@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Yes. Creative work is made by creative people. Writing is creative work. A computer cannot be creative, and thus generative AI is a disgusting perversion of what you wanna call “literature”. Fuck, writing and art have always been primarily about self-expression. Computers can’t express themselves with original thoughts. That’s the whole entire point. And this is why humanistic studies are important, by the way.

          • Methylman@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            I absolutely agree with the second half, guided by Ian Kerr’s paper “Death of the AI Author”; quoting from the abstract:

            Claims of AI authorship depend on a romanticized conception of both authorship and AI, and simply do not make sense in terms of the realities of the world in which the problem exists. Those realities should push us past bare doctrinal or utilitarian considerations about what an author must do. Instead, they demand an ontological consideration of what an author must be.

            I think the part courts will struggle with is if this ‘thing’ is not an author of the works then it can’t infringe either?

    • tenitchyfingers@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Because a computer can only read the stuff, chew it and throw it up. With no permission. Without needing to practice and create its own personal voice. It’s literally recycled work by other people, because computers cannot be creative. On the other hand, human writers DO develop their own style, find their own voice, and what they write becomes unique because of how they write it and the meaning they give to it. It’s not the same thing, and writers deserve to get repaid for having their art stolen by corporations to make a quick and easy buck. Seriously, you wanna write? Pick up a pen and do it. Practice, practice, practice for weeks months years decades. And only then you may profit. That’s how it always was and it always worked fine that way. Fuck computers.

  • joe@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    All this copyright/AI stuff is so silly and a transparent money grab.

    They’re not worried that people are going to ask the LLM to spit out their book; they’re worried that they will no longer be needed because a LLM can write a book for free. (I’m not sure this is feasible right now, but maybe one day?) They’re trying to strangle the technology in the courts to protect their income. That is never going to work.

    Notably, there is no “right to control who gets trained on the work” aspect of copyright law. Obviously.

      • joe@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Can you elaborate on this concept of a LLM “plagiarizing”? What do you mean when you say that?

        • nickwitha_k (he/him)@lemmy.sdf.org
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          1 year ago

          What I mean is that it is a statistical model used to generate things by combining parts of extant works. Everything that it “creates” is a piece of something that already exists, often without the author’s consent. Just because it is done at a massive scale doesn’t make it less so. It’s basically just a tracer.

          Not saying that the tech isn’t amazing or likely a component of future AI but, it’s really just being used commercially to rip people off and worsen the human condition for profit.

          • joe@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Everything that it “creates” is a piece of something that already exists, often without the author’s consent

            This describes all art. Nothing is created in a vacuum.

            • nickwitha_k (he/him)@lemmy.sdf.org
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              1 year ago

              No, it really doesn’t, nor does it function like human cognition. Take this example:

              I, personally, to decide that I wanted to make a sci-fi show. I don’t want to come up with ideas so, I want to try to do something that works. I take the scripts of every Star Trek: The Search for Spock, Alien, and Earth Girls Are Easy and feed them into a database, seperating words into individual data entries with some grammatical classification. Then, using this database, I generate a script, averaging the length of the films, with every word based upon its occurrence in the films or randomized, if it’s a tie. I go straight into production with “Star Alien: The Girls Are Spock”. I am immediately sued by Disney, Lionsgate, and Paramount for trademark and copyright infringement, even though I basically just used a small LLM.

              You are right that nothing is created in a vacuum. However, plagiarism is still plagiarism, even if it is using a technically sophisticated LLM plagiarism engine.

              • joe@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                ChatGPT doesn’t have direct access to the material it’s trained on. Go ask it to quote a book to you.

                • nickwitha_k (he/him)@lemmy.sdf.org
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                  1 year ago

                  That really doesn’t make an appreciable difference. It doesn’t need direct access to source data, if it’s already been transferred into statistical data.

  • Buttons@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    This is tough. I believe there is a lot of unfair wealth concentration in our society, especially in the tech companies. On the other hand, I don’t want AI to be stifled by bad laws.

    If we try to stop AI, it will only take it away from the public. The military will still secretly use it, companies might still secretly use it. Other countries will use it and their populations will benefit while we languish.

    Our only hope for a happy ending is to let this technology be free and let it go into the hands of many companies and many individuals (there are already decent models you can run on your own computer).

    • deaf_fish@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      So, in your “only hope for a happy ending” scenario, how do the artists get paid? Or will we no longer need them after AI runs everything ;)

      • Tangent5280@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        To be honest, I don’t think AI is going to get good enough to replace human creativity. Sure, some of the things that AI can do is pretty nice, but these things are mostly already solved problems - sure, AI can make passable art, but so can humans - and they can go further than art, they can create logical connections between art pieces, and extrapolate art in new reasonably justified ways, instead of the direction-less, grasping in the dark methods that AI seems to do it in.

        Sure, AI can make art a thousand times faster than a person, but if only one in thousand is tolerably good, then what’s the problem?

        • voluble@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          AI is still very much in its infancy, and seeing the sort of progress that has been made even over the past 12 months, I don’t see how anyone can imagine that it will remain a small and discrete slice of the pie, that it doesn’t have radical transformative power.

          My vision - gen z artists will reflexively use AI to enhance their material as artist and AI become entangled to a point where they’re impossible to distinguish. AI art will increase in fidelity, until it exceeds the fidelity that we can create with our tools. It will become immediately responsive to an audience’s needs in a way that human art can’t. What do you want to see? AI will make it for exactly your tastes, or to maybe confront your tastes and expand your mind, if that’s what you’d like. It will virtualize the artistic consciousnesses of Picasso, Goya, Michelangelo, and create new artists with new sensibilities, along with thousands of years of their works, more than a person could hope to view in a lifetime. Pop culture will be cheaper than ever, and have an audience of one - that new x rated final season of Friends you had a passing thought about is waiting for you to watch when you get home from work. Do you want 100 seasons of it? No problem. The whole notion of authorship is radically reformed and dies, drowned in an unfathomable abyss of AI creations. Human creativity becomes like human chess. People still busy themselves with it for fun, knowing full well that it’s anachronistic and inferior in every way.

          Donno, just a thought I have sometimes.

          • tenitchyfingers@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            So yeah, you like AI because that way you won’t have to commission and pay real artists and you also don’t mind artists losing their jobs and being dehumanized and having to slave in factories. Glad one of you finally said it.

  • Cstrrider@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    While I am rooting for authors to make sure they get what they deserve, I feel like there is a bit of a parallel to textbooks here. As an engineer if I learn about statics from a text book and then go use that knowledge to he’ll design a bridge that I and my company profit from, the textbook company can’t sue. If my textbook has a detailed example for how to build a new bridge across the Tacoma Narrows, and I use all of the same design parameters for a real Tacoma Narrows bridge, that may have much more of a case.

    • Melllvar@startrek.website
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      1 year ago

      An AI analyzes the words of a query and generates its response(s) based on word-use probabilities derived from a large corpus of copyrighted texts. This makes its output derivative of those texts in a way that someone applying knowledge learned from the texts is not.

      • planish@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        Why, though?

        Is it because we can’t explain the causal relationships between the words in the text and the human’s output or actions?

        If a very good neuroscientist traced out the engineer’s brain and could prove that, actually, if it wasn’t for the comma on page 73 they wouldn’t have used exactly this kind of bolt in the bridge, now is the human’s output derivative of the text?

        Any rule we make here should treat people who are animals and people who are computers the same.

        And even regardless of that principle, surely a set of AI weights is either not copyrightable or else a sufficiently transformative use of almost anything that could go into it? If it decides to regurgitate what it read, that output could be infringing, same as for a human. But a mere but-for causal connection between one work and another can’t make text that would be non-infringing if written by a human suddenly infringing because it was generated automatically.

        • Melllvar@startrek.website
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          1 year ago

          Because word-use probabilities in a text are not the same thing as the information expressed by the text.

          Any rule we make here should treat people who are animals and people who are computers the same.

          W-what?

          • planish@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            In the future, some people might not be human. Or some people might be mostly human, but use computers to do things like fill in for pieces of their brain that got damaged.

            Some people can’t regognize faces, for example, but computers are great at that now and Apple has that thing that is Google Glass but better. But a law against doing facial recognition with a computer, and allowing it to only be done with a brain, would prevent that solution from working.

            And currently there are a lot of people running around trying to legislate exactly how people’s human bodies are allowed to work inside, over those people’s objections.

            I think we should write laws on the principle that anybody could be a human, or a robot, or a river, or a sentient collection of bees in a trench coat, that is 100% their own business.

            • Melllvar@startrek.website
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              1 year ago

              But the subject under discussion is large language models that exist today.

              I think we should write laws on the principle that anybody could be a human, or a robot, or a river, or a sentient collection of bees in a trench coat, that is 100% their own business.

              I’m sorry, but that’s ridiculous.

              • planish@sh.itjust.works
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                1 year ago

                I have indeed made a list of ridiculous and heretofore unobserved things somebody could be. I’m trying to gesture at a principle here.

                If you can’t make your own hormones, store bought should be fine. If you are bad at writing, you should be allowed to use a computer to make you good at writing now. If you don’t have legs, you should get to roll, and people should stop expecting you to have legs. None of these differences between people, or in the ways that people choose to do things, should really be important.

                Is there a word for that idea? Is it just what happens to your brain when you try to read the Office of Consensus Maintenance Analog Simulation System?

                • Melllvar@startrek.website
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                  1 year ago

                  The issue under discussion is whether or not LLM companies should pay royalties on the training data, not the personhood of hypothetical future AGIs.

  • FontMasterFlex@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    So what’s the difference between a person reading their books and using the information within to write something and an ai doing it?

    • tenitchyfingers@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      A person is human and capable of artistry and creativity, computers aren’t. Even questioning this just means dehumanizing artists and art in general.

        • tenitchyfingers@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Do you think a hammer and a nail could do anything on their own, without a hand picking them up guiding them? Because that’s what a computer is. Nothing wrong with using a computer to paint or write or record songs or create something, but it has to be YOU creating it, using the machine as a tool. It’s also in the actual definition of the word: art is made by humans. Which explicitly excludes machines. Period. Like I’m fine with AI when it SUPPORTS an artist (although sometimes it’s an obstacle because sometimes I don’t want to be autocorrected, I want the thing I write to be written exactly as I wrote it, for whatever reason). But REPLACING an artist? Fuck no. There is no excuse for making a machine do the work and then to take the credit just to make a quick easy buck on the backs of actual artists who were used WITHOUT THEIR CONSENT to train a THING to replace them. Nah fuck off my guy. I can clearly see you never did anything creative in your whole life, otherwise you’d get it.

          • FontMasterFlex@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Nah fuck off my guy. I can clearly see you never did anything creative in your whole life, otherwise you’d get it.

            Oh, right. So I guess my 20+ year Graphic Design career doesn’t fit YOUR idea of creative. You sure have a narrow life view. I don’t like AI art at all. I think it’s a bad idea. you’re a bit too worked up about this to try to discuss anything. Not to excited about getting told to fuck off about an opinion. This place is no better than reddit ever was.

            • tenitchyfingers@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Of course I’m worked up. I love art, I love doing art, i have multiple friends and family members who work with art, and art is the last genuine thing that’s left in this economy. So yeah, obviously I’m angry at people who don’t get it and celebrate this bullshit just because they are too lazy to pick up a pencil, get good and draw their own shit, or alternatively commission what they wanna see from a real artist. Art was already PERFECT as it was, I have a right to be angry that tech bros are trying to completely ruin it after turning their nose up at art all their lives. They don’t care about why art is good? Ok cool, they can keep doing their graphs and shit and just leave art alone.