this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2024
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I don't know why everybody pretends we need to come up with a bunch of new laws to protect artists and copyright against "AI". The problem isn't AI. The problem is data scraping.
An example: Apple's iOS allows you to record your own voice in order to make it a full speech synthesis, that you can use within the system. It's currently tooted as an accessibility feature (like, if you have a disability preventing you from speaking out loud all of the time, you can use your phone to speak on your behalf, with your own custom voice). In this case, you provide the data, and the AI processes it on-device over night. Simple. We could also think about an artist making a database of their own works in order to try and come up with new ideas with quick prompts, in their own style.
However, right now, a lot of companies are building huge databases by scraping data from everywhere without consent from the artists that, most of the time, don't even know their work was scraped. And they even dare to advise that publicly, pretend they have a right to do that, sell those services. That's stealing of intellectual property, always has been, always will be. You don't need new laws to get it right. You might need better courts in order to enforce it, depending on which country you live in.
There's legal use of AI, and unlawful use of AI. If you use what belongs to you and use the computer as a generative tool to make more things out of it: AI good. If you take from others what don't belong to you in order to generate stuff based on it: AI bad. Thanks for listening to my TED talk.
You say this because you think you understand copyright law. If you actually knew anything about copyright law, you'd never say this. Nobody who understands copyright law thinks it's been done right, unless they're getting rich off of it.
Scraping data has been allowed for decades. It's the foundation of image search engines. We allowed large-scale image scraping and categorization this whole time because we liked the results. Now that there are results we don't like, we have a lot of back-pedaling to do if we want something different. New laws would need to be written to reign this in, and those laws might end up destroying the efficacy of image search engines in the process.
As understandably upset that artists get that AI "steals their style", existing copyright law allows me, without an AI, to steal anyone's style that I want to, because artistic style cannot be copyrighted. If you want to protect artistic styles from being stolen by an AI, you need new laws to protect styles because they don't currently exist at all. Those laws might end up having a chilling effect on things like parody and satire if aesthetics can be owned and protected.
And this is just arguing against the ways the system isn't, as you claim, already prepared to handle the concerns surrounding AI. There are countless other shortcomings. The entire system is broken, partly because it was conceived pre-Internet and hasn't aged well into the modern age, but mostly because it protects giant corporations above all, so remember that when you're begging it to protect small artists from big tech companies.
Yes, most image search engines are also unlawful. Google knows that firsthand. It's not because it exists that it's legal? You seem to believe that.
It's almost like if big tech corporations don't care about laws, and the problem is elsewhere?
even if it is currently lawful... why can't we make new laws or change laws now the considerations are completely different?
Because that’s not really how laws work. You don’t add laws over laws to just state the same thing again. Legal books are already fat enough.
Go ahead. Let me know how that works for you.