I find it odd that Lemmy users are so adverse to tech.
TLDR: “we should be able to steal other people’s work, or we’ll go crying to daddy Trump. But DeepSeek shouldn’t be able to steal from the stuff we stole, because China and open source”
Let’s say I write a book.
If I don’t want people copying it, people shouldn’t be copying it. I don’t care if it’s been 500 years. It’s my book.
This is a weird thread. Lots of people for artists losing control of their creations quickly while simultaneously against artist creations being used by others without consent. Just my perspective but why should artists lose control of their own creations at all? The problem in copyright is tech companies doing patent thickets; not artists.
Even artistic creations held by corporations. Waiting for Marvel stuff to hit public domain to publish a bunch of Marvel novels since they can’t protect their creations any more? Why is that acceptable? If someone creates something and doesn’t want it stolen, I don’t give a fuck what the law says, stealing it is theft. The thief should instead be using Marvel stuff as inspiration as they make their own universe; not just waiting an amount of time before stealing someone else’s creation without consent. It isn’t holding progress back at all to make novel artistic creations instead of steal others. Art = very different from tech.
when I publish a book, to steal it is consenting to be Luigi’d; no matter how long ago it came out.
He means development of AI in public view is over. Governments will continue without regard for copyright protections until we are all dead.
To be fair copyright is a disease. But then so is billionaires, capitalism, business, etc.
I mean, if there’s a war, and you shoot somebody, does that make you bad?
Yes and no.
Do you promise?!?!
That’s a good litmus test. If asking/paying artists to train your AI destroys your business model, maybe you’re the arsehole. ;)
Interesting copyright question: if I own a copy of a book, can I feed it to a local AI installation for personal use?
Can a library train a local AI installation on everything it has and then allow use of that on their library computers? <— this one could breathe new life into libraries
This particular vein of “pro-copyright” thought continuously baffles me. Copyright has not, was not intended to, and does not currently, pay artists.
Its totally valid to hate these AI companies. But its absolutely just industry propaganda to think that copyright was protecting your data on your behalf
Copyright has not, was not intended to, and does not currently, pay artists.
You are correct, copyright is ownership, not income. I own the copyright for all my work (but not work for hire) and what I do with it is my discretion.
What is income, is the content I sell for the price acceptable to the buyer. Copyright (as originally conceived) is my protection so someone doesn’t take my work and use it to undermine my skillset. One of the reasons why penalties for copyright infringement don’t need actual damages and why Facebook (and other AI companies) are starting to sweat bullets and hire lawyers.
That said, as a creative who relied on artistic income and pays other creatives appropriately, modern copyright is far, far overreaching and in need of major overhaul. Gatekeeping was never the intent of early copyright and can fuck right off; if I paid for it, they don’t get to say no.
Copyright does not give the holder control over every “use”, especially something as vague as “using it to undermine their skillset”.
Copyright gives the rights holder a limited monopoly on three activities: to make and sell copies of their works, to create derivative works, and to perform or display their works publicly.
Not all uses involve making a copy, derivative, or performance.
Gatekeeping absolutely was the intention of copyright, not to provide artists with income.
modern copyright law is far, far overreaching and in need of major overhaul.
https://rufuspollock.com/papers/optimal_copyright_term.pdf
This research paper from Rufus Pollock in 2009 suggests that the optimal timeframe for copyright is 15 years. I’ve been referencing this for, well, 16 years now, a year longer than the optimum copyright range. If I recall correctly I first saw this referenced by Mike Masnick of techdirt.
Copyright has not, was not intended to, and does not currently, pay artists.
Wrong in all points.
Copyright has paid artists (though maybe not enough). Copyright was intended to do that (though maybe not that alone). Copyright does currently pay artists (maybe not in your country, I don’t know that).
Wrong in all points.
No, actually, I’m not at all. In-fact, I’m totally right:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhBpI13dxkI
Copyright originated create a monopoly to protect printers, not artists, to create a monopoly around a means of distribution.
How many artists do you know? You must know a few. How many of them have received any income through copyright. I dare you, to in good faith, try and identify even one individual you personally know, engaged in creative work, who makes any meaningful amount of money through copyright.
You forgot to link a legitimate source.
A lecture from a professional free software and activist whose focus is the legal history and relevance of copyright isn’t a legitimate source? His website: https://questioncopyright.org/promise/index.html
The anti-intelectualism of the modern era baffles me.
Also, he’s on the fediverse!
@kfogel@kfogel.org
YouTube is not a legitimate source. The prof is fine but video only links are for the semi literate. It is frankly rude to post a minor comment and expect people to endure a video when a decent reader can absorb the main points from text in 20 seconds.
I know quite a few people who rely on royalties for a good chunk of their income. That includes musicians, visual artists and film workers.
Saying it doesn’t exist seems very ignorant.
Cool. What artists?
Any experienced union film director, editor, DOP, writer, sound designer comes to mind (at least where I’m from)
Cool. Name one. A specific one that we can directly reference, where they themselves can make that claim. Not a secondary source, but a primary one. And specifically, not the production companies either, keeping in mind that the argument that I’m making is that copyright law, was intended to protect those who control the means of production and the production system itself. Not the artists.
The artists I know, and I know several. They make their money the way almost all people make money, by contracting for their time and services, or through selling tickets and merchandise, and through patreon subscriptions: in other words, the way artists and creatives have always made their money. The “product” in the sense of their music or art being a product, is given away practically for free. In fact, actually for free in the case of the most successful artists I know personally. If they didn’t give this “product” of their creativity away for free, they would not be able to survive.
There is practically 0 revenue through copyright. Production companies like Universal make money through copyright. Copyright was also built, and historically based intended for, and is currently used for, the protection of production systems: not artists.
Not only that, but their business model doesn’t hold up if they were required to provide their model weights for free because the material that went into it was “free”.
even the top phds can learn things off the amount of books that openai could easily purchase, assuming they can convince a judge that if the works aren’t pirated the “learning” is fair use. however, they’re all pirating and then regurgitating the works which wouldn’t really be legal even if a human did it.
also, they can’t really say how they need fair use and open standards and shit and in the next breathe be begging trump to ban chinese models. the cool thing about allowing china to have global influence is that they will start to respect IP more… or the US can just copy their shit until they do.
imo that would have been the play against tik tok etc. just straight up we will not protect the IP of your company (as in technical IP not logo, etc.) until you do the same. even if it never happens, we could at least have a direct tik tok knock off and it could “compete” for american eyes rather than some blanket ban bullshit.
There’s also an argument that if the business was that reliant on free things to start with, then it shouldn’t be a business.
No-one would bat their eyes if the CEO of a real estate company was sobbing that it’s the end of the rental market, because the company is no longer allowed to get houses for free.
Agribusiness in shambles after draining the water table (it is still free)
The entire internet is built on free things.
Just saying.
Doesn’t mean that businesses should allowed to be.
Businesses relying on free things. Logging, mining, ranching, and oil come to mind. Extracting free resources of the land belonging to the public, destroying those public lands and selling those resources back to the public at an exorbitant markup.
Extracting free resources of the land
Not to be contrarian, but there is a cost to extract those “free” resources; like labor, equipment, transportation, lobbying (AKA: bribes for the non-Americans), processing raw material into something useful, research and development, et cetera.
I love when apologists pop their head up so i can block them. Keeps my feed clean ya know?
If basic economics get you upset, then alright.
Bye o/
You misspelled capitalism.
Unregulated capitalism. That’s why people in dominant market positions want less regulation.
Entrenched companies often want more regulation to prevent startup competition. Pulling the ladder up behind them.
Porque no los dos?
The ai race is over AND we abolish the copyright bullshit laws we have now?
We need to annect Austria, Czechoslovak Republic and Poland otherwise China will do it first.
Hail HydraAnnex
Annex
Good if AI fails because it can’t abuse copyright. Fuck AI.
*except the stuff used for science that isn’t trained on copyrighted scraped data, that use is fine
Yeah unfortunately we’ve started calling any LLM “AI”
In ye old notation ML was a subset of AI, and thus all LLM would be considered AI. It’s why manual decision trees that codify get NPC behaviour are also called AI, because it is.
Now people use AI to refer only to generative ML, but that’s wrong and I’m willing to complain every time.
Sad to see you leave (not really, tho’), love to watch you go!
But what data would it be?
Part of the “gobble all the data” perspective is that you need a broad corpus to be meaningfully useful. Not many people are going to give a $892 billion market cap when your model is a genius about a handful of narrow subjects that you could get deep volunteer support on.
OTOH maybe there’s probably a sane business in narrow siloed (cheap and efficient and more bounded expectations) AI products: the reinvention of the “expert system” with clear guardrails, the image generator that only does seaside background landscapes but can’t generate a cat to save its life, the LLM that’s a prettified version of a knowledgebase search and NOTHING MORE
You’ve highlighted exactly why I also fundamentally disagree that all things AI are for-profit. This should be 100% non-profit and driven purely by scientific goals, in which case using copyrighted data wouldn’t even be an issue in the first place… It’d be like literally giving someone access to a public library.
In Spain we trained an AI using a mix of public resources available for AI training and public resources (legislation, congress sessions, etc). And the AI turned out quite good. Obviously not top of the line, but very good overall.
It was a public project not a private company.
Oh no! How will AI generate a picture of Sam Altman blowing himself now!?
Photoshop, just like the rest of us.
Wdym? He removed his rib or something?
How many pages has a human author read and written before they can produce something worth publishing? I’m pretty sure that’s not even a million pages. Why does an AI require a gazillion pages to learn, but the quality is still unimpressive? I think there’s something fundamentally wrong with the way we teach these models.
The more important question is: Why can a human absorb a ton of material in their learning without anyone crying about them “stealing”? Why shouldn’t the same go for AI? What’s the difference? I really don’t understand the common mindset here. Is it because a trained AI is used for profit?
It is bwcause a human artist is usually inspired and uses knowledge to create new art and AI is just a mediocre mimic. A human artist doesn’t accidentally put six fingers on people on a regular basis. If they put fewer fingers it is intentional.
That’s where I don’t agree. I don’t subscribe to the view that LLMs merely are “stochastic parrots”.
What do you think they are if not that?
They don’t have emotions, they don’t have individual motivations, and don’t have intent.
No. But I do think they mimick the language capacity in the human brain.
If your argument is that it depends on the quality of the output, then I definitely shouldn’t be allowed to look at art or read books.
What you’re talking about is if AI is actually inventing new work (imo, yes it is), but that’s not the issue.
The issue is these models were trained on our collective knowledge & culture without permission, then sold back to us.
Unless they use only proprietary & public training data, every single one of these models should be open sourced/weighted & free for anyone to use, like libraries.
I’ve been thinking about that as well. If an author has bought 500 books, and read them, it’s obviously going to influence the books they write in the future. There’s nothing illegal about that. Then again, they did pay for the books, so I guess that makes it fine.
What if they got the books from a library? Well, they probably also paid taxes, so that makes it ok.
What if they pirated those books? In that case, the pirating part is problematic, but I don’t think anyone will sue the author for copying the style of LOTR in their own works.
Exactly!
Is it because a trained AI is used for profit?
Absolutely. But especially because it skews the market dynamic. Copyright doesn’t exist for moral reasons but financial reasons.
To be fair, that’s all they have to go on. If a picture’s worth a thousand words, how many pages is a lifetime (or even a childhood) of sight and sound?
That’s a good point. A human author would be influenced by life in general, not just the books.
Because an AI is not a human brain?
It’s impressive how the technology have advanced in the last years. But obviously it is not a human brain.
Why does an AI require a gazillion pages to learn, but the quality is still unimpressive?
Because humans learn how to read and interpret those pages in school. Give that book to a toddler and not much will happen other than some bite marks.
AI needs to learn the language structure, grammar, math, logic, reasoning, problem solving and much more before it can even be trained with anything useful. Humans take years to acquire those skills, AI takes more content but can do that training much faster.
Maybe it is the wrong way to train machines but for now we have not invented robot schools yet so it’s the best we got.
By the way, I still think companies should be banned from training with copyrighted content and user data behind closed doors. Keep your models in public domain or get out.
His personal race is over? Oooohhhh, so sorry for him.
AI is not over at all. Maybe he himself will not become the ruler of the world now. No loss.
Yeah, China sure as shit isn’t going to lose sleep over a US Copyright case.
If AI gets to use copyrighted material for free and makes a profit off of the results, that means piracy is 1000% Legal. Excuse me while I go and download a car!!
No, stop! You wouldn’t!
I would, and a house. I’m a menace!
DAMMIT ALL TO HELL!
…This must be DEI’s fault.
Thank a lot Obama
