I know a lot of people want to interpret copyright law so that allowing a machine to learn concepts from a copyrighted work is copyright infringement, but I think what people will need to consider is that all that’s going to do is keep AI out of the hands of regular people and place it specifically in the hands of people and organizations who are wealthy and powerful enough to train it for their own use.
If this isn’t actually what you want, then what’s your game plan for placing copyright restrictions on AI training that will actually work? Have you considered how it’s likely to play out? Are you going to be able to stop Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and the NSA from training an AI on whatever they want and using it to push propaganda on the public? As far as I can tell, all that copyright restrictions will accomplish to to concentrate the power of AI (which we’re only beginning to explore) in the hands of the sorts of people who are the least likely to want to do anything good with it.
I know I’m posting this in a hostile space, and I’m sure a lot of people here disagree with my opinion on how copyright should (and should not) apply to AI training, and that’s fine (the jury is literally still out on that). What I’m interested in is what your end game is. How do you expect things to actually work out if you get the laws that you want? I would personally argue that an outcome where Mark Zuckerberg gets AI and the rest of us don’t is the absolute worst possibility.
@IncognitoErgoSum I don’t think you can. Because THIS? Is not a model of how humans learn language. It’s a model of how a computer learns to write sentences.
If what you’re going to give me is an oversimplified analogy that puts too much faith in what AI devs are trying to sell and not enough faith in what a human brain is doing, then don’t bother because I will dismiss it as a fairy tale.
But, if you have an answer that actually, genuinely proves that this “neural” network is operating similarly to how the human brain does… then you have invalidated your original post. Because if it really is thinking like a human, NO ONE should own it.
In either case, it’s probably not worth your time.
If what you’re going to give me is an oversimplified analogy that puts too much faith in what AI devs are trying to sell and not enough faith in what a human brain is doing, then don’t bother because I will dismiss it as a fairy tale.
I’m curious, how do you feel about global warming? Do you pick and choose the scientists you listen to? You know that the people who develop these AIs are computer scientists and researchers, right?
If you’re a global warming denier, at least you’re consistent. But if out of one side of you’re mouth you’re calling what AI researchers talk about a “fairy tail”, and out of the other side of your mouth you’re criticizing other people for ignoring science when it suits them, then maybe you need to take time for introspection.
You can stop reading here. The rest of this is for people who are actually curious, and you’ve clearly made up your mind. Until you’ve actually learned a bit about how they actually work, though, you have absolutely no business opining about how policies ought to apply to them, because your views are rooted in misconceptions.
In any case, curious folks, I’m sure there are fancy flowcharts around about how data flows through the human brain as well. The human brain is arranged in groups of neurons that feed back into each other, where as an AI neural network is arranged in more ordered layers. There structure isn’t precisely the same. Notably, an AI (at least, as they are commonly structured right now) doesn’t experience “time” per se, because once it’s been trained its neural connections don’t change anymore. As it turns out, consciousness isn’t necessary for learning and reasoning as the parent comment seems to think.
Human brains and neural networks are similar in the way that I explained in my original comment – neither of them store a database, neither of them do statistical analysis or take averages, and both learn concepts by making modifications to their neural connections (a human does this all the time, whereas an AI does this only while it’s being trained). The actual neural network in the above diagram that OP googled and pasted in here lives in the “feed forward” boxes. That’s where the actual reasoning and learning is being done. As this particular diagram is a diagram of the entire system and not a diagram of the layers of the feed-forward network, it’s not even the right diagram to be comparing to the human brain (although again, the structures wouldn’t match up exactly).
But, if you have an answer that actually, genuinely proves that this “neural” network is operating similarly to how the human brain does… then you have invalidated your original post. Because if it really is thinking like a human, NO ONE should own it.
I think this is a neat point.
The human brain is very complex. The neural networks trained on computers right now are more like collections of neurons grown together in a petri dish, rather than a full human brain. They serve one function, say, recognizing or generating an image or calculating some probability or deciding on what the next word should be in a sequence. While the brain is a huge internetwork of these smaller, more specialized neural networks.
No, neural networks don’t have a database and they don’t do stats. They’re trained through trial and error, not aggregation. The way they work is explicitly based on a mathematical model of a biological neuron.
And when an AI is developed that’s advanced enough to rival the actual human brain, then yeah, the AI rights question becomes a real thing. We’re not there yet, though. Still just matter in petri dishes. That’s a whole other controversial argument.
I don’t believe that current AIs should have rights. They aren’t conscious.
My point is was purely that AIs learn concepts and that concepts aren’t copyrightable. Encoding concepts into neurons (that is, learning) doesn’t require consciousness.
Oh, 100%. They’re way too rudimentary. NNs alone don’t go through the sense-think-act loops that necessitates a conscious autonomous agent. One day, maybe, but again, we’re at the brain matter in petri dish stage.
I agree on the concepts thing too. People learn to paint by imitating what they see around them, their favourite artists, their favourite comics and cartoons. Then, over time with practice and experimentation, these things get encoded, but there’s always that influence there somewhere.
Midjourney just has the benefit of being able to learn from way more imagery in a way shorter of an amount of time and practice way faster than any living human. So like, I get why artists are scared of it, but there’s definitely a fundamental misunderstanding around how these things work floating around.
@IncognitoErgoSum If they don’t have consciousness, then they aren’t comparable to a human being being inspired. It is that simple.
The human who created the AI is profitting from the AI’s work, but that human was not inspired by the works he used to train the AI. He fed them into a machine to help make that machine. It doesn’t matter how close the machine is to human thought, it is a machine that is making something for other to profit from.
The people who created the AI took work without permission, used it to build and refine a machine, and are now using that machine to profit. They are selling that machine to people who would otherwise hire the people who did the work that was taken without permission and used to build the machine. This is all sorts of fucked up, man.
If an AI’s creation is comparable to a direct human’s creation, then it belongs to the AI. Whatever it is, it doesn’t belong to the guys who built the AI OR the guys who BOUGHT the AI. Which is actually one of the demands from the WGA, that AI-generated scripts have NOBODY listed as the writer and NOBODY able to copyright that work.
SAG-AFTRA just got a contract offer that says background performers would get their likeness scanned and have it belong to the studio FOREVER so that they can simply generate these performers through AI.
This is what is happening RIGHT NOW. And you want to compare the output of an AI to a human’s blood sweat and tears, and argue that copyright protections would HURT people rather than help them avoid exploitation.
Because that is what the AI programmers are doing, they are EXPLOITING living authors, living artists, living performers to create a machine that will replace those very people.
The copyright system, which yes is exploited and manipulated by these corporations, is still the only method we have to protect small-time creatives FROM those corporations. And right now, those corporations are poised to use AI to attack small-time creatives.
So yes, your comparison to human inspiration is a damned fairy tale. Because it whitewashes the exploitation of human workers by equating them to the very machine that’s being used to exploit them.