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AI companies have all kinds of arguments against paying for copyrighted content (www.theverge.com)

submitted 1 year ago by L4s to c/technology

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AI companies have all kinds of arguments against paying for copyrighted content::The companies building generative AI tools like ChatGPT say updated copyright laws could interfere with their ability to train capable AI models. Here are comments from OpenAI, StabilityAI, Meta, Google, Microsoft and more.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Since all people mix together ideas they've learned from their own input to create new things, just like AI does, then all people-produced content should also be inherently uncopyrightable, unless produced by a person who has never been exposed to copyrighted content.

While copyright and IP law at present is massively broken, this is a very poor interpretation of the core argument at play.

Let me break it down:

Yes, all human created art takes significant influence - purposefully, and accidently - from work which has come before it
To have been influenced by that piece, legally, the human will have had to pay the copyright holder to; go to the cinema, buy the bluray, see the performance, go to the gallery, etc. Works out of copyright obviously don't apply here.
To be trained in a discipline, the human likely pays for teaching by others, and those others have also paid copyright holders to view the media that influenced them aswell
Even thought the vast majority of art is influenced by all other art, humans are capable of novel invention- ie things which have not come before - but GenAI fundamentally isn't.

Separately, but related, see the arguments the Pirate Parties used to make about personal piracy being OK, which were fundamentally down to an argument of scale:

A teenager pirating some films to watch cos they are interested in cinema, and being inspired to go to film school is very limited in scope. Even if they pirate hundreds of films, it can't be argued that it's 100 lost sales because the person may have never bought them anyway.
A GenAI company consuming literally all artistic output of humanity, with no payment to the artists what so ever, "learning" to create "new" art, without paying for teaching, and spitting out whatever is asked of it, is massive copyright infringement on the consumption side, and an existential threat to the arts on the generation side

That's the reason people are complaining, cos they aren't being paid today, and they won't be paid tomorrow.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

To have been influenced by that piece, legally, the human will have had to pay the copyright holder to; go to the cinema, buy the bluray, see the performance, go to the gallery, etc. Works out of copyright obviously don't apply here.

To be trained in a discipline, the human likely pays for teaching by others, and those others have also paid copyright holders to view the media that influenced them aswell

Neither of these are necessarily true, and the first one is even demonstrably false given the amount of copyrighted content that can be freely accessed online.

Even thought the vast majority of art is influenced by all other art, humans are capable of novel invention- ie things which have not come before - but GenAI fundamentally isn't.

That depends highly on your definition of "novel invention". Given that GenAI can be given randomised noise as input to create something from, it's highly debatable if GenAI is truly "incapable" of novel invention. And even then, it's possible to provide prompts describing a novel style (e.g. "oil painting with thick, vibrant streaks of colour" or something), so a human + GenAI together may well be capable of novel invention. I don't recall the last time a human was able to create something that could not be expressed in previously existing words at all. You can describe Van Gogh without using his name, or describe a Picasso without using named art styles. Yet we consider their works novel, no?

That's the reason people are complaining, cos they aren't being paid today, and they won't be paid tomorrow.

Even if AI only trained on non-copyrighted art, this would still be true. It might set the AI companies back a year or two, but AI art generation is here to stay and will threaten artists' incomes. These lawsuits are only really stalling tactics to delay the inevitable.

I can't predict if they're going to win their lawsuit or not, nor do I know if they should. But the artists' salvation won't lie in copyright law, I know that much.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't recall the last time a human was able to create something that could not be expressed in previously existing words at all.

It's called outsider art.

Even if AI only trained on non-copyrighted art, this would still be true. It might set the AI companies back a year or two

If this is true then they have no excuse to continue to consume copywritten content. Given the extreme pushback from the companies involved, I think is clear that this isn't true.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Outsider art can be explained using words. It's certainly strange art, but not necessarily something that's "unpromptable".

AI companies mostly push back because dealing with copyright is very expensive, not because it would necessarily take a very long time. Google and Microsoft likely already have a sizeable library of copyright-free art they could use, but using everything is just more efficient and much, much cheaper.