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.
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.
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
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.
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?!?
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.
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?
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.
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.
Yeah, that’s basically it.
But I think what’s getting overlooked in this conversation is that it probably doesn’t matter whether it’s AI or not. Either new content is derivative or it isn’t. That’s true whether you wrote it or an AI wrote it.
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.
I completely fail to see how it wouldn’t be considered transformative work
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.