GenAI tools ‘could not exist’ if firms are made to pay copyright::undefined
So… This may be an unpopular question. Almost every time AI is discussed, a staggering number of posts support very right-wing positions. EG on topics like this one: Unearned money for capital owners. It’s all Ayn Rand and not Karl Marx. Posters seem to be unaware of that, though.
Is that the “neoliberal Zeitgeist” or what you may call it?
I’m worried about what this may mean for the future.
ETA: 7 downvotes after 1 hour with 0 explanation. About what I expected.
I think it’s a conflation of the ideas of what copyright should be and actually is. I don’t tend to see many people who believe copyright should be abolished in its entirety, and if people write a book or a song they should have some kind of control over that work. But there’s a lot of contention over the fact that copyright as it exists now is a bit of a farce, constantly traded and sold and lasting an aeon after the person who created the original work dies.
It seems fairly morally constant to think that something old and part of the zeitgeist should not be under copyright, but that the system needs an overhaul when companies are using your live journal to make a robot call center.
Lemmy seems left-wing on economics in other threads. But on AI, it’s private property all the way, without regard for the consequences on society. The view on intellectual property is that of Ayn Rand. Economically, it does not get further to the right than that.
My interpretation is that people go by gut feeling and never think of the consequences. The question is, why does their gut give them a far-right answer? One answer is that somehow our culture, at present, fosters such reactions; that it is the zeitgeist. If that’s the truth (and this reflects a wider trend) then inequality will continue to increase as a result of voter’s demands.
My interpretation is that people go by gut feeling and never think of the consequences.
Often, yes.
The question is, why does their gut give them a far-right answer?
The political right exploits fear, and the fear of AI hits close to home. Many people either have been impacted, could be impacted, or know someone who could be impacted, either by AI itself or by something that has been enabled by or that has been blamed on AI.
When you’re afraid and/or operating from a vulnerable position, it’s a lot easier to jump on the anti-AI bandwagon. This is especially true when the counter-arguments address their flawed reasoning rather than the actual problems. They need something to fix the problem, not a sound argument about why a particular attempt to do so is flawed. And when this problem is staring you in the face, the implications of what it would otherwise mean just aren’t that important to you.
People are losing income because of AI and our society does not have enough safety nets in place to make that less terrifying. If you swap “AI” for “off-shore outsourcing” it’s the same thing.
The people arguing in favor of AI don’t have good answers for them about what needs to happen to “fix the problem.” The people arguing against AI don’t need to have sound arguments to appeal to these folks since their arguments sound like they could “fix the problem.” “If they win this lawsuit against OpenAI, ChatGPT and all the other LLMs will be shut down and companies will have to hire real people again. Anthropic even said so, see!”
UBI would solve a lot of the problems, but it doesn’t have the political support of our elected officials in either party and the amount of effort to completely upend the makeup of Congress is so high that it’s obviously not a solution in the short term.
Unions are a better short-term option, but that’s still not enough.
One feasible solution would be legislation restricting or taxing the use of AI by corporations, particularly when that use results in the displacement of human laborers. If those taxes were then used to support those same displaced laborers, then that would both encourage corporations to hire real people and lessen the sting of getting laid off.
I think another big part of this is that there’s a certain amount of feeling helpless to do anything about the situation. If you can root for the folks with the lawsuit, then that’s at least something. And it’s empowering to see that people like you - other writers, artists, etc. - are the ones spearheading this, as opposed to legislators.
But yes, the more that people’s fear is exploited and the more that they’re misdirected when it comes to having an actual solution, the worse things will get.
Yeah I think that this is showing a lot of people only really care about espousing anti-privatization ideas as long as it suits their personal interests and as long as they feel they have more to gain than to lose. People are selfish, and a lot of progressive, or really any kind of passionate rhetoric is often conveniently self-serving and emotionally driven, rather than truly principled.
I’m not sure what you’re referring to as a far-right position?
- AI corporations should have the right to all works in order to train their AIs.
- Copyright needs to be enforced.
The first is very pro-corporation in one way, but can lead to an argument for all intellectual works to be public domain.
The second is pro-mega-rights-owners, but also allows someone to write a story, publish it themselves, and make money without having it stolen from them.
It’s interesting as it’s many of the MPAA/RIAA attitudes towards Napster/BitTorrent but now towards gen AI.
I think it reflects the generational shift in who considers themselves content creators. Tech allowed for the long tail to become profitable content producers, so now there’s a large public audience that sees this from what’s historically been a corporate perspective.
Of course, they are making the same mistakes because they don’t know their own history and thus are doomed to repeat it.
They are largely unaware that the MPAA/RIAA fighting against online sharing of media meant they ceded the inevitable tech to other companies like Apple and Netflix that developed platforms that navigated the legality alongside the tech.
So for example right now voice actors are largely opposing gen AI rather than realizing they should probably have their union develop or partner for their own owned offering which maximizes member revenues off of usage and can dictate fair terms.
In fact, the only way many of today’s mass content creators have platforms to create content is because the corporate fights to hold onto IP status quo failed with platforms like YouTube, etc.
Gen AI should exist in a social construct such that it is limited in being able to produce copyrighted content. But policing training/education of anything (human or otherwise) doesn’t serve us and will hold back developments that are going to have much more public good than most people seem to realize.
Also, it’s unfortunate that we’ve effectively self propagandized for nearly a century around ‘AI’ being the bad guy and at odds with humanity, misaligned with our interests, an existential threat, etc. There’s such an incredible priming bias right now that it’s effectively become the Boogeyman rather than correctly being identified as a tool that - like every other tool in human history - is going to be able to be used for good or bad depending on the wielder (though unlike past tools this one may actually have a slight inherent and unavoidable bias towards good as Musk and Gab recently found out with their AI efforts on release denouncing their own personally held beliefs).
I see way too many people advocating for copyright. I understand in this case it benefits big companies rather than consumers, but if you disagree with copyright, as I do, you should be consistent.
Copyright law should benefit humans, not machines, not corporations. And no, corporations are not people. Anthony Kennedy can get bent.
You don’t have to be against copyright, as such. Fair Use is part of copyright law. It exists to prevent copyrights from being abused against the interests of the general public.
But I am against any copyright beyond forcing attribution to the original creator.
I’d say the main reason is companies are profiting off the work of others. It’s not some grand positive motive for society, but taking the work of others, from other companies, sure, but also from small time artists, writers, etc.
Then selling access to the information they took from others.
I wouldn’t call it a right wing position.
Wanting to abolish the IRS is a right-wing policy that will benefit the rich. That doesn’t change when some marketing genius talks about how the IRS takes money from small time artists, writers, etc. Same thing. It’s about substance and not manipulative framing.
That isn’t remotely similar…
The IRS takes a portion of income. This is taking away someone’s income, then charging access to it.
Like it or not, these people need money to survive. Calling it right wing to think these individuals deserve to be paid for someone taking their work, then using it for a product they sell access to, is absolutely insane to me.
Yeah…it’s pretty weird. Feels like some folks have really dived into LLMs regardless of ethics and will do any amount of hand waving to avoid criticism of a for-profit company openly attacking creatives’ livelihood with their own uncompensated works. In an ideal world where it wasn’t a case of “earn or die cold and alone in the streets”, sure, but this is just robbing those workers of the fruits of their labor and burning the ladder while
I think the “neoliberal zeitgeist” thought may be correct as neoliberal ideology devalues anything and everything that is not solely profit-driven, including just about everything that humans have historically found to make life meaningful.
Every single poster here has relied on disruptive technologies in their life. They don’t even realize that they couldn’t even make these arguments here if it was not for people before them pushing the envelope.
They don’t know the history of their technology nor corporate law. If they did they would just roll their eyes every time an entrenched economic interest started saber rattling about the next disruptive technology that is going to steal their profits.
The posters here are the people who complained about horsewhip manufactures that were going out of business because of cars. They are ignorant and act like the few sound bytes they heard make them an expert.
It’s important to recognize that IP is conceptually fucky to begin with. They’re seeing what it’s claimed to be (creator ‘ownership’ of their creations) rather than what it really is (corporations using the government to enact violence on non-violent people).
It means nothing interesting. The position they feel they’re taking is “corporation bad” which is in line, they just haven’t analyzed how IP works in the real world.
So because corps abuse copyright, that means I should be fine with AI companies taking whatever I write–all the journal entries, short stories, blog posts, tweets, comments, etc.–and putting it through their model without being asked, and with no ability to opt out? My artist friends should be fine with their art galleries being used to train the AI models that are actively being used to deprive them of their livelihood without any ability to say “I don’t want the fruits of my labor to be used in this way?”
This is the problem people have
They don’t see artists and creators as worth protecting. They’d rather screw over every small creator and take away control of their works, just because “it’d be hard to train without copyrighted data”
Plenty of creators would opt in if given the option, but I’m going to guess a large portion will not.
I don’t want my works training what will replace me, and right now copyright is the only way we can defend what was made.
I don’t know if your fears about your friends’ livelihood are justified, but cutting down on fair use will not help at all. In fact, it would make their situation worse. Think through what would actually happen.
When you publish something you have to accept that people will make it their own to some degree. Think parody or R34. It may be hurtful, but the alternative is so much worse.
I don’t know what you’re on about, the majority of the thread is pro open source AI and anti-capitalist, which is as left a stance as it gets, it’s not called “copyleft” for no reason. No one here wants to see AI banned and the already insane IP laws expanded to the benefit of the few corpos like the NYT at the expense of broader society.
IDK. I have seen a number of pro-corpo copyleft takes. It’s absolutely crazy to me. The pitch is that expansive copyright makes for expansive copyleft. It seems neo-feudal to me. The lords have their castles but the peasants have their commons.
