This is an extremely unpopular opinion, but I just hate copyright as a concept to begin with. Yes I want creators to own their own work and be able to profit from it…but that’s not even how it works now. Like 10 companies own all the popular IPs, many don’t even do anything with them. They hire artists, tell them to make stuff and because they are on payroll the company owns it. Fan fiction already exists and rarely do they get confused with the original. I’m not concerned about big companies stealing the little guys work because those big companies most of the time can’t even manage to make interesting concepts out of their existing work with the benefit of already owning the creations of thousands of artists.
All so Mickey Mouse could be covered under copyright for 100 fucking years.
Edit: I have apparently misunderstood the popularity of this opinion.
I think the big problem is the duration of copyright. That it’s so much longer than patents is pretty hard to logically defend.
If you want this to be unpopular, then you need to point out some of the implications. Lemme…
They hire artists, tell them to make stuff and because they are on payroll the company owns it.
This means, that those who think that AI training should require a license are not standing up for artists. They are shilling for intellectual property owners; for the corporations and rich people.
If it requires a license, that means that money must be paid to property owners simply because they are owners. The more someone owns, the more money they get. Rich people own the most property, so rich people get the most money.
And what do employees get? They get to pay.
It is missing one point: as a creator, I want to be able to forbid you from training on my creations. And the only tool that could enable that is the copyright enforcement over AI training.
Exactly
If there was an opt out system that was actually respected then this wouldn’t be a problem. But as it stands, artists have no control over if their work is used for NN training.
I don’t want my work used to train models, which should be a completely valid stance to have. Open Source or not really doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of it.
Do you think that other artists should be allowed to look at your work that you post online and as a result they become a better artist because of it?
That’s not how AI works and is an argument rooted in a misunderstanding of how it functions.
AI does not “learn” or “understand” - it replicates. It is not near how a human learns, processes and transforms an idea.
The AI companies shown that they are incapable of regulating themselves on this topic, and so people with art at stake should force their hand.
Open source or not doesn’t matter here, what matters is the copyright. If even Disney can defend works they own (whatever their ethics), so should anyone else.
100% agreement from me again. Non-artists don’t have anything at stake, so they’re perfectly happy with the established copyright rules are demolished. People keep countering with the open source idea, which completely misses the entire point of our arguments. A model being open source does not excuse the stealing of training data.
IMO individual copyright should be strengthened and corporate copyright weakened, but that’d be next to impossible to pass.
That’s exactly what’s at stake, waiting to be sufficiently litigated. And I hope that creators will win, and that they would be able to tell if they allow richest big tech companies in the world to train on their creations.
Likewise, I hope they don’t win, as that will give the richest tech companies so much more of a stranglehold.
I doubt there’s any chance of it happening anyway, since there’s a ton of money to be made and and there’s already countries which have rules this will never happen (Like Japan ), so it would mean they become the AI powerhouses
They have already trained on those creations though. Including the newer stuff just released today. How will you claw that back?
And I want a law making you pay me 500$ for reading your posts.
Copyright law already extends beyond what society finds reasonable. It’s routinely broken by normal people without them even thinking about it. It’s even broken by those vested in it both corporations and individual artists.
Finally you are not getting the copyright law you want ( nor should you, you a minority, a special interest ), big corps are. They might be ‘content’ corps or tech or both but they certainly won’t make a law to benefit either society as a whole or you as a small artist.
I’ll lift a comment from techdirt:
“Let companies rip off your work, or else only Big Tech will be able to rip off your work”
Maybe we’re so far in capitalist hellholle that we simply consider everything to be for sale. What about GPL work that OpenAI steals? Or personal data? With how secretive they are with data they “scraped” we don’t even know if they have any right at all to repackage and sell it.
Making only big companies able to “rip off your work” (not an accurate representation, but whatever) Is not the solution you think it is.
The only solution is to force all models trained on public data to not be covered by copyrights by default. Any output from those models should also by default be in the commons. The solution is to avoid copyright cartels, not strengthen them.
Agreed that interim solution should be to make all “AI” work public domain since it treats everything it trains on as public domain. I’m for it because it would would immediately stop being profitable for commercial enterprises. Then check who they ripped off and settle any financial claims and damages before moving on to establish license for already created output.
Exactly. Make ALL output public domain. Force them to release their training sets. Force them to open source their models.
There will still be companies like Adobe and DeviantArt who will be able to work around this due to their ToS, but we have enough existing models to make them obsolete due to the power of FOSS.
IMO, we need to ask: What benefits the people? or What is in the public interest?
That should be the only thing of importance. That’s probably controversial. Some will call it socialism. It is pretty much how the US Constitution sees it, though.
Maybe you agree with this. But when you talk about “models trained on public data” you are basically thinking in terms of property rights, and not in terms of the public benefit.
The models (ie the weights specifically) may not be copyrightable, anyways. There’s no copyright on the result of number crunching. Once the model is further fine-tuned, there might be copyright, but it’s still unlike anything covered by copyright in the past.
One analogy I have is a 3D engine. The engineers design the look of the typical output by setting parameters, but that does not create a specific copyright on the parameters. There’s copyright on the design documents, the code, the UI, if any and maybe other stuff. It’s not quite the same, though.
Some jurisdictions have IP on databases. I think that would cover AI models. If I am right, then that means that any license agreements that come with models are ineffective in the US.
However, to copy these models, you first need to get your hands on them. They are still trade secrets, so don’t on leaks.
The main thing investors do with technology is find something free and make a product out of it. This time they flipped the script by stealing, and I want these companies and investors to face consequences. I don’t want all of humanity’s creative works that have ever been posted online to be repurposed and repackaged by a new technology and then sold.
I don’t want all of humanity’s creative works that have ever been posted online to be repurposed and repackaged by a new technology and then sold.
Me neither. But unless it’s the “by a new technology” part that really bothers you, this is a capitalism problem, not AI.
Sure, that’s what they want. They want the backing of copyright strengthening from emotional reactions like yours so that the only ones able to do GenerativeAI is those few big companies. They’re playing you.
Think about WHY only the absurdly wealthy companies would be able to purchase all of that data though. Because that data has immense value. Many authors and artists would certainly refuse to sell. I care that few companies hoard so much wealth and power, but I care more about the current issue that companies with wealth and power dont even have to spend a dime because they are just stealing.
Dont solve the problem of power consolidation on the dime of peoples life’s work.
You don’t need every artist to sell. Just enough. Likewise most artists already traded away their rights to the likes of Adobe and deviantart. And since there’s no real powerful artist union they all have basically 0 power compared to the capitalists who have more than enough economic power to get this done. Nothing will be fixed or prevented in this path. Only skewed even more in favour of the rich
Finally some sane level headed coverage of AI copyright issues. Techdirt doesn’t miss.
