Posted by participant3 1 day ago
Though I am also generally opposed to the notion of intellectual property whatsoever on the basis that it doesn't seem to serve its intended purpose and what good could be salvaged from its various systems can already be well represented with other existing legal concepts, i.e deceptive behaviors being prosecuted as forms of fraud.
(Copied from a comment of mine written more than three years ago: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33582047>)
Arguments that make a case that NN training is copyright violation are much more compelling to me than this.
A regulation that require restaurants to have a public bathroom is more akin to regulation that also require restaurants to check id when selling alcohol to young customers. Neither requirement has any relation with land rights, but is related to the right of operating a company that sell food to the public.
I'll prove it by induction: Imagine that I have a service where I "train" a model on a single image of Indiana Jones. Now you prompt it, and my model "generates" the same image. I sell you this service, and no money goes to the copyright holder of the original image. This is obviously infringment.
There's no reason why training on a billion images is any different, besides the fact that the lines are blurred by the model weights not being parseable
You gloss over this as if it's a given. I don't agree. I think you're doing a different thing when you're sampling billions of things equallly.
the model isn't the one infringing. It's the end user inputting the prompt.
The model itself is not a derivative work, in the same way that an artist and photoshop aren't a derivative work when they reproduce indiana jones's likeness.
Grok is supposed to be "uncensored", but there are very specific words you just can't use when asking it to generate images. It'll just flat out refuse or give an error message during generation.
But, again, if you go in a roundabout way and avoid the specific terms you can still get what you want. So why bother?
Is it about not wanting bad PR or avoiding litigation?
How they then go about implementing those guardrails is pretty telling about their understand and control over what they've build and their line of thinking. Clearly, at no point before releasing their LLMs onto the world did anyone stop and ask: Hey, how do we deal with these things generating unwanted content?
Resorting to blocking certain terms in the prompts is like searching for keywords in spam emails. "Hey Jim, I got another spam email from that Chinese tire place" - "No worry boss, I've configured the mail server to just delete any email containing the words China or tire".
Some journalist should go to a few of these AI companies and start asking questions about the long term effectiveness and viability of just blocking keywords in prompts.
Web search seems divergent: the same keyword leads to many different kinds of results.
Gen AI seems convergent: different keywords that share the same semantics lead to the same results.
Arguably, convergence is a feature, not a bug. But on the macroscopic level, it is a self reinforcing loop and may lead to content degeneracy. I guess we always need the extraordinary human artists to give AI the fresh ideas. The question is the non-extraordinary artists might no longer have an easy path to become extraordinary. Same trap is happening to junior developers right now.
It's very clear that generative has abandoned the idea of creative; image production that just replicates the training data only serves to further flatten our idea of what the world should look like.
How useful is an image generator that, when asked to generate an image of an archaeologist in a hat, gives you Harrison Ford every time?
Clearly that’s not what we want from tools like this, even just as tools.
Second, it doesn’t create the kind of originality we want. It just limits the kind of unoriginality we are getting.
The real issue here is that there's a whole host of implied context in human languages. On the one hand, we expect the machine to not spit out copyrighted or trademarked material, but on the other hand, there's a whole lot of cultural context and implied context that gets baked into these things during training.
It's not clear what the asker wants, and the obvious answer is probably the culturally relevant one. Hell, I'd give you the same answers as the AI did here if I had the ability to spit out perfect replicas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights#United_Stat...
edit - also, I wasn't making a binary claim, the person I was responding to was: "no law". There are more than zero laws relevant to this situation. I agree with you that how relevant is context dependent.
Rules around copyright (esp. Fair use) can be very context dependent.
If I ask an artist to draw me a picture of Indiana Jones and they do it would that be copyright infringement? Even if it's just for my personal use?
It may or may not be fair use, which is a complicated question (ianal).
If e.g. Patreon hosts an artist who will draw a picture of Indiana Jones for me on commission, then my money is going to both Patreon and the artist. Should Patreon also police their artists to prevent reproducing any copyrighted characters?
I get that copyright is a bit of a minefield, and there's some clear cases that should not be allowed, e.g. taking photos of a painting and selling them
That said, I still get the impression that the laws are way too broad and there would be little harm if we reduced their scope. I think we should be allowed to post pictures of Pokemon toys to Wikipedia for example.
I'm willing to listen to other points of view if people want to share though
Not to mention that wikimedia commons, which tries to be a globally reusable repository ignores fair use (which is context dependent), which covers a lot of the cases where copyright law is just being reduculous.
Also, there are IP limits of various sorts (e.g. copyright, trademark) for various purposes (some arguably good, some arguably bad), and some freedoms (e.g., fair use). There's no issue if this follows the rules... but I don't see where that's implemented here.
It looks like they may be selling IP they don't own the right to.
Unfortunately, it's just the opposite. It seems most people have fully assimilated the idea that information itself must be entirely subsumed into an oppressive, proprietary, commercial apparatus. That Disney Corp can prevent you from viewing some collection of pixels, because THEY own it, and they know better than you do about the culture and communication that you are and are not allowed to experience.
It's just baffling. If they could, Disney would scan your brain to charge you a nickel every time you thought of Mickey Mouse.
These legal protections are needed by the people. To the Pirate Party's credit, undoing corporate personhood would be a good first step, so that we can focus on enforcing protections for the works of humans. Still, attributing those works to CEOs instead of corporations wouldn't result in much change.
Wait, I'm still trying to figure out the difference between your imaginary world and the world we live in now?
If anyone in the world could make a Star Wars movie, the average Star Wars movie would be much worse, but the best 10 Star Wars movies might be better that what we currently have.
Saying the lack of creativity in the industry in because we can't copy things freely is completely moronic.
Copyright can't legally stop you from making a movie about wizards fighting each other with laser swords in space.
There are plenty of examples of copyright hurting people for creating something that wasn't exactly the same as something else which was copyrighted. Copyright is a threat to all creative works. The bigger the investment required for a creative work, the bigger the risk. For this reason, we see it a lot more often in music where the investment needed is lower than films. People have been successfully sued because they wrote a totally new song that was in the same genre as someone else's song https://abovethelaw.com/2018/03/blurred-lines-can-you-copy-a...
The Disney or otherwise copyrighted versions allow for unique spins on these old characters to be re-copyrighted. This Thor from Disney/Marvel is distinguished from Thor from God of War.
https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/54400/why-did-earl...
Huh, did not know that. As an Icelandic person I knew about Þór the Norse god much earlier than Thor the marvel character. I never really pictured his hair color, nor knew he had a specific hair color in the mythology. I actually always pictured him with a beard though. What mostly mattered though was his characteristics. His ill temper and drinking habits, and the fact that he was not a nice person, nor a hero, but rather a guy who starts shit that gets everyone else in trouble, he also wins every fight except one (he looses one against Elli [the personification of old age]). The little I’ve seen of him in the Marvel movies, he keeps almost none of these characteristics.
EDIT: My favorite story of him is the depiction of the fall of Ásgarður, where Loki and some Jötun are about to use the gods vanity against them and con them out of stuff they cannot actually pay for a wall around Ásgarður. Þór, being the way he is, cannot be around a Jötun without fighting and killing him. So rather than paying up (which the gods cannot do) Þór is sent to see this Jötun, knowing very well that he will be murdered. This betrayal is marked as the beginning of the end in Völuspá (verse 26).
I do not agree with your conjecture that big corps would win by default. Ask why would people need protection from having their work stolen when the only ones welding weaponized copyright are the corporations. People need the freedom to wield culture without restriction, not protection from someone having the same idea as them and manifesting it.
Why wouldn't big corps win by default? They have the brand name, own the resources to make more polished version of any IP, and have better distribution channels than anyone else.
Can you tell me how this scenario won't play out?
1. Big corporation has people looking for new and trending IP.
2. Instead of buying the rights to it, they get their army of people to produce more polished versions of it.
3. Because they have branding and a better distribution channel, the money goes 100% to them.
> Ask why would people need protection from having their work stolen when the only ones welding weaponized copyright are the corporations.
People working in the field sell their copyright like Gravity Falls' Alex Hirsch: https://x.com/_AlexHirsch/status/1906915851720077617
In other words, the challenge is not to understand “what exactly is being owned,” and instead, to understand “what exactly being owned is.”
Thank you, this is beautifully put and very astute. Does a recipe, a culmination of a lifetime of experience, technique, trials, errors, and luck constitute a form of someone/thing's person-hood such that it can be Intellectual Property.
Have you taken reasonable steps to keep it secret? It could be a trade secret and if course if you steal the recipe for KFC’s herbs and spices, you will be liable for civil damages for your misappropriation of their trade secret.
And if you describe a recipe in flowery prose, reminiscing about the aromas in grandmas kitchen, of course that prose is copyrightable.
Should you invent a special kind of chicken fry mix and give us a fanciful name, the recipes identifier if origin - its trademark -could be protectable.
But the fact that your chicken fry mix is made of corn starch and bread crumbs is a fact, like a phone book. Under most circumstances, not protectable.
ianyl tinla
Primarily because recipe creation is not one of the biggest cost centers for restaurants?
They barely work. Recipes are trade secrets, and the cooks who use them are either paid very well, given NDAs or given only part of the most guarded recipes
What is different about the production of Micky Mouse cartoons? Why is it normal for industries to compete in manufacturing of physical product, but as soon as you can apply copyright, now you exclusively have rights to control anything that produces a similar result?
Musicians I suppose can tour, which is grueling but it’s something. Authors, programmers, actors, game studios, anything that’s not performed live would immediately become non-viable as a career or a business.
Large corporations would make money of course, by offering all you can eat streaming feeds of everything for a monthly fee. The creators get nothing.
I've purchased books that were in the public domain and without copyright. I've paid for albums I could already legally listen to for free. I've paid for games and movies that were free to play and watch. I'm far from the only person who has or would.
The people who pirate the most are also the ones who spend the most money on the things they pirate. They are hardcore fans. They want official merch and special boxed sets. People want to give the creators of the things they love their money and often feel conflicted about having to give their cash to a far less worthy corporation in the process. There are people who love music but refuse to support the RIAA by buying albums.
There are proven ways to make profit in other ways like "pay what you want" or even "fund in advance" crowdsourced models. If copyright went away or, more ideally, were limited to a much shorter period of time (say 8-10 years) artists would continue to find fans and make money.
Part of what muddies the water here too is that copyright lasts too long. Companies like Disney lobbied for this successfully. It should have a time horizon of maybe 25 years, 50 at most.
So make copyright like patents. That’s what a lot of the copyleft movement has been arguing for forever. Make a copyright holder demonstrate their idea is unique, manifests into a tangible output, and if so protect the creator for a limited time. Everyone is free to use the work in their own provided they pay royalties at a reasonable rate for the duration of the patent.
But the status quo now with basically perpetual copyright controlled by large media conglomerates 100% stifles culture and is a net negative on society. It’s not the right to copy that needs defending, it’s the first right of a briefly protected enterprise, a reward to the creator, that needs to be protected. Copyright is like trying to cure a cough by sewing someone’s mouth shut.
2. You greatly underestimate the creativity of a capitalistic market. For example, on the web, it's generally difficult and frowned upon to copyright designs. Some patent trolls do it, but most don't. If you make an innovative design for your website, you're bound to be copied. And yet many programmers and tech companies still have viable business models. They simply don't base their entire business model around doing easily-copyable things.
But if you want to make money and do it from riding the brand name association of Harry Potter or Mario, they can.
What's in Coca Cola?
What are the 11 herbs and spices in Kentucky Fried Chicken?
How do I make the sauce in a Big Mac?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_the_Snow_White_tale
I see a mention of Ovid ... copyright has probably expired.
I could just be wrong about Snow White's original copyright. As indicated by my use of "I imagine", no I didn't search the origins of it. I'm not seeing a big "double down" moment where I asserted that Snow White is definitely owned by Disney--that would be the cinch. In fact nothing about my reply contradicted the GGP adding that maybe Snow White isn't the best example. Why are you so bothered? Anyway, Snow White doesn't have a recent progenitor then it kinda proves the point that the world works perfectly well in the absence of copyright, and that the ability to freely remix culture is a fundamental human right. TIL that Snow White was originally a German fairytale and I'm relieved that Disney hasn't asserted copyright over it.
But less obtusely: you don't copyright a book--which is why knowledge, language, literature should not be closed source. We'd have to find a different model to support authors than trying to prevent people from copying books. Patreon style models where you subscribe and get behind the scenes access to the creative process, additional content, early access, etc. seem to work well as do sponsorship models like YT where the more viewers you draw the more you get paid, rather than a fixed fee per individual to watch a video. And, simply pay-what-you-want based models where everyone understands they can contribute in a way that matches the value to them and their means also work. One of the strongest arguments for piracy is that the pirate would never have paid $700 for Photoshop in the first place so the value "lost" isn't real and never would have been realized by the author(s). (Note this argument doesn't work for petty theft of physical property because the thief deprives the owner of tangible property.)
Private - this includes funding by selling item(s), licensing work, and private equity
State
Charity - this includes volunteers, patrons, donations, sponsorships.
Charity relies on people willing to donate for the betterment of others.
State funding fails because of the political nature of the person holding the purse strings.
Licensing, copyright, physical sales are the only thing that artists have to sell.
You "patreon" style falls somewhere between closed source - you can only access if you buy your way behind the curtain, and charity, where creators have to rely on people donating so that their works can be seen by others (for free)
Today? All the time? I just went into a new local joint today, talked to the owner about adding some vegetarian meals, and we hashed out some ideas in terms of both ingredients and preparation.
As a pescetarian and cook myself, I frequently ask establishments detailed questions about ingredients and preparation
Disney would be among the largest beneficiaries if the right to train AI models on content was viewed as an exclusive right of the copyright holder; they absolutely do not benefit from AI training being considered fair use.
But if you'd asked this question in 2015 or earlier, everyone would have said Disney -> pro-patent, average people & indie devs -> anti-patent. Microsoft was famously pro-patent, as were a number of nuisance companies that earned the label "patent troll."
Honestly, this idea of "patents to protect the people" would've come across as a corporate lawyer trick pre-2015.
Look at YouTube. Look at SoundCloud. Look at all the fan fiction sites out there, internet mangas and manwhas and webtoons, all the podcasts, all the influencers on X and Instagram and TikTok and even OnlyFans, etc etc. Look at all the uniquely tiny distribution channels that small companies and even individuals are able to build in connection with their fans and customers.
There is endless demand for the endless variety of creativity and content that's created by normal people who aren't Disney, and endless ways to get it into people's hands. It is literally impossible for any one company to hoover all of it up and somehow keep it from the people.
In fact, the ONLY thing that makes it possible for them to come close to doing that is copyright.
And the only reason we have such a huge variety of creativity online is because people either (a) blatantly violate copyright law, or (b) work around gaps in copyright law that allow them to be creative without being sued.
The idea that we need copyrights to protect us from big companies is exactly wrong. It's the opposite. Big companies need copyright to protect their profits from the endless creativity and remixing of the people.
> intellectual property [...] used over and over again, primarily by the rich and powerful, to stifle original ideas and hold back cultural innovation.
There's nothing about IP which prevents you from creating your own. There are, in fact, a near infinite number of things you can create. More things than there exist stars in our galaxy.
The problem with ideas is that they have to be good. They have to be refined. They have to hit the cultural zeitgeist, solve a particular problem, or just be useful. That's the hard part that takes the investment of time and money.
In the old world before Gen AI, this was the hard thing that kept companies in power. That world is going away fast, and now creation will be (relatively) easy. More taste makers will be slinging content and we'll wind up in a land of abundance. We won't need Disney to give us their opinion on Star Wars - we can make our own.
The new problem is distributing that content.
> The idea of open sourcing everything and nullifying patents would benefit corporations like Disney and OpenAI vastly more than it would benefit the people. The first thing that would happen is that BigCorp would eat up every interesting or useful piece of art, technology, and culture that has ever been created and monetize the life out of it.
Unless the masses can create and share on equal footing, you're 100% right.
If it turns out, however, that we don't need Google, OpenAI, or big tech to make our own sci-fi epics, share them with a ton of people, and interact with friends and audiences, then the corporations won't be able to profit off of it.
If social networks were replaced with common carriers and protocols.
If Gen AI could run at the edge without proprietary models or expensive compute.
If the data of YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, Instagram didn't require hyperscaler infra to store, search, and serve.
Unfortunately, there are too many technical reasons why the giants will win. And network effects will favor the few versus many. Unless those parameters change, we'll be stuck with big tech distribution.
Even if the laws around IP change, the hard tech challenges keep the gatekeepers in power. The power accrues to those who can dominate creation (if creation is unilateral), or even more so, to the distributors of that content.
Disney would say that you can’t. And in the current copyright regime, it’s not unlikely that they’d convince the court that they’re right.
Disney won't have any control. I can already generate images and videos locally on my hardware.
Maybe they'll try to stop distribution? There will be quite a lot of people making these, though.
The same is happening already with AI creations. Doing it yourself is work and takes some technical skill, so most people use hosted AI services. Guess who makes all the money?
You will be able to create and share your own spin on Star Wars. You won’t see anything for that except maybe cred or some upvotes. The company that hosts it and provides the gateway and controls the algorithms that show it to people will get everything.
No they don't, look at music popular in social networks.
> and now creation will be (relatively) easy. More taste makers will be slinging content and we'll wind up in a land of abundance.
Even before the generative AI, I think we live in the era where there are more creators than ever in history: everybody today can publish their music or art without any large investments (except for instruments: they are expensive as always). I would prefer we have cheaper pianos, samples and microphones instead of worthless music-copying models.
There are lots of ML models that produce instrumentals and vocals that are incredibly useful for practicing musicians.
The popular and well-known Suno and Udio are pop culture toys. They also find use with content creators who don't have time to learn how to make music. (Not everyone can learn and master everything. We have to let some of our creative desires slip or we'd never be able to accomplish anything.)
Training a model is not equivalent to training a human. Freedom of information for a mountain of graphics cards in a privately owned data center is not the same as freedom of information for flesh and blood human beings.
also remember when GPU usage was so bad for the environment when it was used to mine crypto, but I guess now it's okay to build nuclear power plants specifically for gen-ai.
Honestly, seriously. Imagine some weird Thanos showed up, snapped his fingers and every single bit of generative AI software/models/papers/etc. were wiped from the Earth forever.
Would that world be measurably worse in any way in terms of meaningful satisfying lives for people? Yes, you might have to hand draw (poorly) your D&D character.
But if you wanted to read a story, or look at an image, you'd have to actually connect with a human who made that thing. That human would in turn have an audience for people to experience the thing they made.
Was that world so bad?
Would that world be so bad? Was the world really so horrible before photoshop existed?
What if we lost youtube? What if we lost MP3s?
We could lose a lot of things we didn't always have and we'd still survive, but that doesn't mean that those things aren't worth having or that we shouldn't want them.
It wasn't "so bad", but any history of improvement can be cut into slices that aren't "so bad" to reverse.
Pop culture was already democratized. That's literally what makes it popular culture.
> So now when I connect with a human it’s not to share memes, it’s higher order.
I suspect that improving the image quality of the memes does not measurably improve the quality of the human connection here.
> IOW we can spend more time playing D&D because we didn't have to draw our characters.
You never had to draw your characters. You can just play and use your imagination. Why would we let LLMs do our dreaming for us?
You're responding to the specific example, not the general argument. Unless your counter is that whatever humanity is doing that AI is helping is probably stupid and shouldn't be done anyway.
No, my counter is that whatever generative AI is doing is worth doing by humans but not worth doing by machines.
As the joke comic says: We thought technology was going to automate running errands so that we had time to make art, but instead it automates making art while we all have to be gig workers running errands.
If you're building an LLM for management or technical consulting then the valuable content is locked up behind corporate firewalls anyway so you're going to have to pay to use it. In that field most of what you could find with a web crawler or in digital books is already outdated and effectively worthless.
[0] https://commoncrawl.org/terms-of-use
> In this regard, you acknowledge that you may not rely on any Crawled Content created or accumulated by CC. CC strongly recommends that you obtain the advice of legal counsel before making any use, including commercial use, of the Service and/or the Crawled Content. BY USING THE CRAWLED CONTENT, YOU AGREE TO RESPECT THE COPYRIGHTS AND OTHER APPLICABLE RIGHTS OF THIRD PARTIES IN AND TO THE MATERIAL CONTAINED THEREIN.You're reading into the situation...
For the US getting legislators to do anything is impossible: even the powerful fail.
When a legal system is totally roadblocked, what other choice is there? The reason all startups ask forgiveness is that permission is not available.
(edit). Shit. I guess that could be a political statement. Sorry
If you ask it for a female adventure-loving archaeologist with a bullwhip, you think you'll get Harrison Ford?
What if you ask for a black man? Etc etc.
You're talking about how unoriginal it is when the human has asked it in the least creative way. And it gives what you want (when the content filters don't spot it)
they could even input/train it on their own work. I don't think someone can use AI to copy your art better than the original artist.
Plus art is about provenance. If we could find a scrap piece of paper with some scribbles from Picasso, it would be art.
Then go back and refine.
Treat it the same as programming. Don't tell the AI to just make something and hope it magically does it as a one-shot. Iterate, combine with other techniques, make something that is truly your own.
That's the whole problem with AI. It's not creative. There's no "I" in AI. There's just what we feed it and it's a whole lot of "garbage in, garbage out". The more the world is flooded with derivative AI slop the less there will be of anything else to train AI on and eventually we're left with increasingly homogenized and uncreative content drowning out what little originality is still being made without AI.
A world without copyright is just as problematic as a world with copyright. With copyright, you run into the problem of excessive control. This wasn't too much of a problem in the past. If you bought a book, record, or video recording, you owned that particular copy. You could run into disagreeable situations because you didn't own the rights, but it was difficult to prevent anyone from from viewing a work once it had been published. (Of course, modern copyright laws and digitial distribution has changed that.)
On the flip side, without copyright, it would be far easier for others to exploit (or even take credit) for the work of another person without compensation or recourse. Just look at those AI "generated" images, or any website that blatently rips off the content created by another person. There is no compensation. Heck, there isn't even credit. Worse yet, the parties misrepresenting the content are doing their best to monetize it. Even authors who are more than willing to give their work away have every right to feel exploited under those circumstances. And all of that is happening with copyright laws, where there is the opportunity for recourse if you have the means and the will.
This reminds me of Tom Scott’s “Welcome to Life: The Singularity, Ruined by Lawyers” [1]
There's a bit of irony here too. The intellectual discourse around intellectural property, a diverse and lively one from an academic standpoint, the whole free and open source software movements, software patents, the piracy movement and so on have analyzed the history, underlying ideas and values in detail for the past thirty years. Most people know roughly what is at stake, where they stand, and can defend their position in an honest way.
Then comes new technology, everyone and their mother gets excited about it, and steamrolls all those lofty ideas into "oh look at all the shiny things it can produce!". Be careful what you wish for.
I agree.
But this must include the dissolution of patents. Otherwise corporations and the owners of the infrastructure will simply control everything, including the easily replicable works of individuals.
We need more courts and judges to speed the process, to make justice more accessible, and universal SLAPP protections to weed out frivolous abuse.
However, obvious patents like "a computer system with a display displaying a product and a button to order it" should not be allowed. Also, software patents should not exist (copyright is enough).
No matter the extent you believe in the freedom of information, few believe anyone should then be free to profit from someone else's work without attribution.
You seem to think it would be okay for disney to market and charge for my own personal original characters and art, claiming them as their own original idea. Why is that?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Duration_Directive
That itself was based on the 1886 Berne Convention. "The original goal of the Berne Convention was to protect works for two generations after the death of the author". 50 years, originally. But why? Apparently Victor Hugo (he of Les Miserables) is to blame. But why was he bothered?
Edit: it seems the extension beyond the death of the author was not what Hugo wanted. "any work of art has two authors: the people who confusingly feel something, a creator who translates these feelings, and the people again who consecrate his vision of that feeling. When one of the authors dies, the rights should totally be granted back to the other, the people." So I'm still trying to figure out who came up with it, and why.
I don't think it's like that. If we take music, for example, the existing word would be a note or a scale or a musical instrument or a style, but a melody would be an existing sentence. As for sampling, there is creative usage of samples, like Prodigy for example where it is difficult to even recognize the source.
Also today there is some leeway in copyright enforcement. For example, I often see non-commercial amateur covers of commercial songs and the videos don't get taken down.
Well, you asked why, anyway, and there's why: it's a natural thing to do.
And then even if you get past that, the world is filled with lots of IP we love, and it is easy to imagine weakened IP rights taking that away, but quite difficult to imagine what weakened IP rights might buy us.
I do have some hope still that this generative AI stuff will give a glimpse into the value of weaker IP rights and maybe inspire more people to think critically about it. But I think it is an uphill battle. Or maybe it will take younger people growing up on generative AI to notice.
* If I make a thing that is different and I get a patent - cool. * If I create a design that is unusual and I get copyright on it - is that cool?
Both concepts - patent and copyright - are somewhat controversial, for multiple reasons.
If you invented a thingie, would you not want some initial patent related protection to allow you to crack on with some sort of clout against cough CN? If you created a film/creative thang, would you not want some protection against your characters being ... subverted.
Patents and copywrite are what we have - do you have any better ideas?
Patents, sure. They're abused and come at a cost to the society. But all we've done here is created a culture where, in some sort of an imagined David-vs-Goliath struggle against Disney, we've enabled a tech culture where it's OK to train gen AI tech on works of small-scale artists pilfered on an unprecedented scale. That's not hurting Disney. It's hurting your favorite indie band, a writer you like, etc.
If companies can’t gatekeep our artistic culture for money, we’ll be better able to enjoy it.
So money will motivate a lot of the creativity that goes on.
Meanwhile, if you dabble in some kind of art or craft while working in a factory to make ends meet, that kind of limits you to dabbling, because you'll have no time to do it properly. Money also buys equipment and helpers, sometimes useful.
On the other hand, yes, it ruins the art. There's a 10cc song about that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_for_Art%27s_Sake_(song)
Though, this reminds me of an interesting aside: the origin of the phrase "art for art's sake" was not about money, but about aesthetics. It meant something like "stop pushing opinions, just show me a painting".
Either enforce the current copyright regime and sue the AI companies to dust.
Or abolish copyright and let us all go hog wild.
But this halfway house where you can ignore the law as long as you've got enough money is disgusting.
On the other hand, suppose I also like playing guitar covers of songs. Does that mean artists should get upset at the guitar company? Does it matter if I do it at home or at a paid gig? If I record it, do I have to give credit to the original creator? What if I write a song with a similar style to an existing song? These are all questions that have (mostly) well defined laws and ethical norms, which usually lean towards what you said - the tool isn't responsible.
Maybe not a perfect analogy. It takes more skill to play guitar than to type "Funny meme Ghibli style pls". Me playing a cover doesn't reduce demand for actual bands. And guitar companies aren't trying to... take over the world?
At the end of the day, the cat is out of the bag, generative AI is here to stay, and I think I agree that we're better off regulating use rather than prohibition. But considering the broader societal impacts, I think AI is more complicated of a "tool" than other kinds of tools for making art.
There is also a chance that AI companies didn't obtain the training data legally; in that case it would be at least immoral to build a business on stolen content.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Unive....
The best-positioned lawsuits to win, like NYTimes vs. OpenAI/MS, is actually based on violating terms of use, rather than infringing at training time.
Emitting works that violate copyright is certainly possible, but you could argue that the additional entropy required to pass into the model (the text prompt, or the random seed in a diffusion model) is necessary for the infringement. Regardless, the current law would suggest that the infringing action happens at inference time, not training.
I'm not making a claim that the copyright should work that way, merely that it does today.
Zuckerberg downloading a large library of pirated articles does not violate any laws? I think you can get a life sentence for merely posting links to the library.
This isn't true in the United States. I would be surprised if it were true in any country. Many people have posted sci-hub links here, and to my knowledge nobody has ever suffered legal problems from it:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[1] https://guides.dml.georgetown.edu/c.php?g=904530&p=6510951 (See "Notifications of Claimed Infringement")
I agree with this, but it's worth noting this does not conflict with and kind of reinforces the GP's comment about hypocrisy and "[ignoring] the law as long as you've got enough money".
The terms of use angle is better than copyright, but most likely we'll never see any precedent created that allows this argument to succeed on a large scale. If it were allowed then every ToS would simply begin to say Humans Only, Robots not Welcome or if you're a newspaper then "reading this you agree that you're a human or a search engine but will never use content for generative AI". If github could enforce site terms and conditions like that, then they could prevent everyone else from scraping regardless of individual repository software licenses, etc.
While the courts are setting up precedent for this kind of thing, they will be pressured to maintain a situation where terms and conditions are useful for corporations to punish people. Meanwhile, corporations won't be able to punish corporations for the most part, regardless of the difference in size. But larger corporations can ignore whatever rules they want, to the possible detriment of smaller ones. All of which is more or less status quo
> if [someone] thus cites the most important parts of the work, with a view, not to criticize, but to supersede the use of the original work, and substitute the review for it, such a use will be deemed in law a piracy.
Of course, we live in a post-precedent world, so who knows?
It also shows how, at the end of the day, none of the justifications for this intellectual property crap are about creativity, preserving the rights of creators, or any lofty notion that intellectual property actually makes the world a better place, but rather, it is a naked power+money thing. Warner Bros and Sony can stop you from publishing a jpeg because they have lawyers who write the rulebook. Sam Altman can publish a jpeg because the Prince of Saud believes that he is going build for corporate America a Golem that can read excel spreadsheets.
No, the idea is that rules needed to be changed in a way that can are valid for everyone, not just for mega corporations who are trying to exploit other's works and gatekeep the it behind "AI".
Edit: the point I want to illustrate is that we do not get to choose what others value, or to dictate what is scarce and no one is entitled to make a living in a specific way even if they really want to
This is where the argument falls apart. Not because the copyright isn't used by the rich and powerful, but because it misses the fact that copyright also grants very powerful rights to otherwise powerless individuals, thus allowing for many small businesses and individuals to earn a living based on the rights granted by our current copyright system.
I think that's the reason why I've (and probably many others?) have cooled down on general open source coding.
Open source started when well-paid programmers used their stable positions and ample extra time to give back to the community. What happened then is that corporations then siphoned up all that labor and gave nothing back, just like the AI bros siphoned up all data and gave nothing back. The 'contract' of mutual exchange, of bettering each other, was always a fantasy. Instead the companies took away that ample extra time and those stable positions.
Here we are in 2025 and sometimes I can't afford rent but the company C-tier is buying itself their hundredth yacht. Why should I contribute to your system?
How is copyright stifling innovation?
You could not rip something off more blatantly than Gravity, which had the lawsuit dismissed entirely.
Taurus vs Stairway to Heaven, the list goes on and on and on.
You can often get away with nearly murder ripping off other people's stuff.
Additionally plenty of people making videos for YouTube have had their videos demonetized and their channels even removed because of the Content ID copyright detection scheme and their three strikes rule. In some cases to a ridiculous extent - some companies will claim ownership of music that isn't theirs and either get the video taken down or take a share of the revenue.
I watched a video where someone wrote a song and registered it via CDBaby, which YouTube sources for Content ID. Then someone claimed ownership of the song, so YouTube assigned the third party 50% of the ad revenue of the video.
> Additionally plenty of people making videos for YouTube have had their videos demonetized and their channels even removed because of the Content ID copyright detection scheme and their three strikes rule. In some cases to a ridiculous extent - some companies will claim ownership of music that isn't theirs and either get the video taken down or take a share of the revenue.
Let's take YouTube videos as an example. If the concept of copyright doesn't exist, there is nothing stopping a YouTuber with millions more subscribers from seeing a trending video you made and uploading it themselves. Since they're the one with the most subs, they will get the most views.
The winner of the rewards will always go to the brand that people know most rather than the video makers.
Why? I thought that authors post the articles to arxiv themselves.
> It locks publicly funded research behind paywalls.
It is not copyright, it is scientists who do not want to publish their work (that they got paid for) in open access journals. And it seems the reason is that we have the system where your career advances better if you publish in paid journals.
Meanwhile in China, just because you invented a thing, you don't get to sit back and rest on your laurels. sipping champagne in hot tubs, because your competitor isn't staying put. He's grinding and innovating off your innovation so you'd also better keep innovating.
It's not at all unusual for popular/iconic furniture designs to be copyrighted.
Reality is people who invent truly original, useful, desirable things are the most important human beings on the planet.
Nothing that makes civilisation what it is has happened without original inventiveness and creativity. It's the single most important resource there is.
These people should be encouraged and rewarded, whether it's in academia, industry, as freelance inventors/creators, or in some other way.
It's debatable if the current copyright system is the best way to do that, because often it isn't, for all kinds of reasons.
But the principle remains. Destroy rewards for original invention and creativity and you destroy all progress.
And the results are observable empirically: very few people are told by anyone that's been out in the world that they should choose to become a writer or an inventor, because writers and inventors simply don't make that much money. The system you claim is so necessary seems to be completely failing in its core mission.
For example, take a look at writers making a decent living on a platform like Substack. Copyright is literally doing nothing for them. People can freely copy their substack and post it everywhere online. The value is that the platform provides a centralized location for people to follow the person's writing, and to build a community around it. In cases where artists and inventors have become rich, I look at the mechanism behind it, and often it's an accident that had nothing to do with intellectual property rights at all.
While I don't disagree with what you are trying to say, saying it this way is hyperbolic. There are so many people doing important things. Think about parents.
You won't destroy the progress completely but there definitely will be a lot of unfairness like people monetizing someone else's music due to having better SEO skills and more free time than the artist. And the artist cannot hire SEO specialist because he has no money.
Or simply for the most minimal of external rewards: recognition and respect.
Or for the purest: seeing others live longer and happier as a result.
Look at open source. If Linux had been closed-source with licensing fees, the internet wouldn’t exist as we know it. Open ecosystems build faster. Contributors innovate because they can build on each other’s work freely.
Market pressure drives innovation. Reputation beats monopoly. Monopolies slow everything down. And collaboration multiplies progress.
That would never work, but like writing sci-fi.
I am yet to meet a writer who doesn't even attempt to write for fear that whatever they write will be found to be in violation of copyright (unless they are the type of writer that is always finding excuses not to write).
Several people have made successful careers out of fan fiction...
She's an awful person for other reasons, but that's beside the point here.
Reality is most trad-pub authors have full-time jobs anyway to pay the bills. If you're not one of a handful of publishing superstars, trad-pub pays incredibly badly as a result of corporate consolidation and monopoly dominance.
To be clear - there are far more people living parasitically off investments, producing nothing at all and extracting value from everyone else, than there are talented creators living the high life.
What do you want?
She's not allowed to make money selling books?
But why shouldn't everyone get to live like that? we have the technology to feed all the people, it's just a distribution and organization problem. "just". Money, and capitalism is how we've organized things and it's worked great for a lot of people but it's also left a lot of people behind.
We keep making adjustments to the system but we don't have to be trapped in the system. we can take a step back and look at things and say, hang on a minute, if the goal in life is to feed and clothe everybody, we've either succeeded beyond our wildest dreams, or utterly failed.
Because we don't have that much money?
In my opinion, if someone creates something that has value for a lot of people, they should get rewarded for it.
If you're worried about your work being infinitely reproduced, you probably shouldn't work in an infinitely-reproducible medium. Digitized content is inherently worthless, and I mean that in a non-derisive way. The sooner we realize this, the richer culture will be.
Really all content is worthless. Historically, we've always paid for the transmission medium (tape, CD) and confused it for the cost of art itself.
When you watch a musical performance, you are also paying for labor. Even when you buy a physical art object, all the costs involved decompose back to labor. When you have a digital copy of something, there is no labor input to its creation, so guess what the inherent value is.
Animators drew actual cels. Theater workers clocked in and screened the films. The guys at the DVD factory pressed the discs. We paid for all of this already. It's double-billing to charge for copypasting the mere likeness of something. Nobody's doing any work for that.
selling software isn’t much different from a musician collecting royalties, especially now when everything’s shifted to a subscription model. it lets us keep pretending we’re adding value, even though most of them often stays the same for years
Those people sometimes look at it and build a copy (competitor) and that's okay.
You don't have to publish your code, or allow other people to run it.
No they aren't, intellectual property is a legal fiction and ideas belong to all of humanity. Humanity did fine without intellectual property for thousands of years, it's a relatively recent creation.
That's an interesting speculation. You realize that it could also be turned against you, right? Never a good idea!
So, let's focus on the arguments rather than making assumptions about each other's backgrounds.
> People are entitled to the fruits of their labour and control of their intellectual property.
People are absolutely entitled to the fruits of their labour. The crucial question is whether the current system of 'IP' control – designed for scarcity – is the best way to ensure that, especially when many creators find it hinders more than it helps. That's why many people explore and use other models.
I have no love for the Mouse but if I can get them and the image slop-mongers to fight then that's absoutely fine. It would be nice to have a functioning, vibrant public domain but it is also nice to not have some rich asshole insisting that all copyright laws must be ignored because if they properly licensed even a fraction of what they've consumed then it would be entirely too expensive to train their glorified autocomplete databases on the entire fucking internet for the purpose of generating even more garbage "content" designed to keep your attention when you're mindlessly scrolling their attention farms, regardless of how it makes you feel, and if I can choose one or the other then I am totally behind the Mouse.
But the discussion around plagiarism calls attention to the deeper issue: "generative" AI does not have emergent thinking or reasoning capabilities. It is just very good at obfuscating the sources of its information.
And that can cause much bigger problems than just IP infringement. You could make a strategic decision based on information that was deliberately published by an adversary.
If they are indeed the output of "research" that couldn't exist without the requisite publicly available material, then they should be accessible by the public (and arguably, the products of said outputs should also be inherently public domain too).
If they are instead created products to be sold themselves, then what is utilized to create them should be licensed for that purpose.
Additionally, if they can be used to generate IP violating material, then IMHO, makes perfect sense for the rights holders of those IPs to sue their asses like they would anyone else who did that and sold the results.
Again, for emphasis: I'm not endorsing any of the effects of IP law. I am simply saying that we should all, from the poorest user to the richest corporation, be playing by the same rules, and it feels like AI companies entire existence is hinging on their ability to have their IP cake and eat it too: they want to be able to restrict and monetize access to their generative models that they've created, while also having free reign to generate clearly, bluntly plagiarizing material, by way of utilizing vast amounts of in-good-faith freely given material. It's gross, and it sucks.
Otherwise, we’re making the judgement that the originators of the IP should not be compensated for their labor, while the AI labs should be. Of course, training & running the models take compute resources, but the ultimate aim of these companies is to profit above & beyond those costs, just as artists hope to be compensated above & beyond the training & resources required to make the art in the first place.
if the data’s pulled from the public domain, the model built from this human knowledge should be shared with all creators too, meaning everyone should get access to it
Also making a billion dollar business by using hard work of talented people for free and without permission is not cool. The movie they downloaded from Pirate Bay for free took probably man-years of work to make.
Also I wonder how can we be sure that the images produced by machine are original and are not a mix of images from unknown artists at DeviantArt. Maybe it is time to make a neural image origin search engine?
It doesn't work. If you put your handmade drawing inside, it'll also tell you what images were mixed to make it, even though it was entirely human-made.
> intellectual property
rather than
> used over and over again, primarily by the rich and powerful, to stifle original ideas and hold back cultural innovation
You're using those "2008 ideas now to defend the rich and powerful exploiting and stifling creativity; the problem hasn't changed, you've just swapped sides.
OpenAI isn't the underdog here.
As far as the U.S., have you been to China or Korea and evaluated their views on IP?
I received so many Copyright and DMCA takedowns for early youtube videos posted in the early 2010's for no reason except some background music blaring a hit. It had millions of views and NO ADs. Now the ad-infested copies with whatever tricks they use can still be found, while my videos predating all had to be deleted. Google. You like their product? Don't like it too much, it may cease to exist, or maybe just for you for arbitrary reasons and simultaneously remove your access to hundreds of websites via their monopoly on Single-Sign-On.
Then there are those takedown notices for honest negative reviews on Google Maps by notorious companies having accumulated enough money via scams that they now can afford to hire lawyers. These lawyers use their tools and power to manipulate the factual scoring into a "cleansed one".
OpenAI seriously has not received any court orders from all the movie studios in the world? How is that even possible?
I previously posted in a comment that I have video evidence with a friend being eye witness how OpenAI is stealing data. How? Possibly by abusing access granted by Microsoft.
Who is still defending OpenAI and why? There are so many highly educated and incredibly smart people here, this is one of the most glaring and obvious hardcore data/copyright violations, yet OpenAI roams free. It's also the de-facto most ClosedAI out there.
OpenAI is: - Accessing private IP & data of millions of organisations - Silencing and killing whitleblowers like Boing - Using $500B tax-payer money to produce closed source AI - Founder has lost it and straight up wants to raise trillion(s)
For each of these claim there is easily material that can be linked to prove it, but some like ChatGPT and confuse the usefulness of it with the miss-aligned and bad corporate behaviour of this multi-billion dollar corporation.
> Does the growth of AI have to bring with it the tacit or even explicit encouragement of intellectual theft?
And like, yes, 100% - what else is AI but a tool for taking other people's work and reassembling it into a product for you without needing to pay someone. Do you want an awesome studio ghibli'd version of yourself? There are thousands of artists online that you could commission for a few bucks to do it that'd probably make something actually interesting - but no, we go to AI because we want to avoid paying a human.
Well, what I'd like it to be is a tool for generating what I've asked it for, which has nothing to do with other people's work.
I've been asking for video game sprites/avatars, for instance. It's presumably trained on lots of images of video games, but I'm not trying to rip those off. I want generic images.
> we go to AI because we want to avoid paying a human.
No, I go to AI because I can't imagine the nightmare of collaborating with humans to generate hundreds of avatars per day. And I rely on them being generated very quickly. And so on.
But they chose to create such an unscalable line of business, it never existed before because everyone realized it wasn't possible. It might just be that some of the AI enabled businesses aren't realistic and profitable.