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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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So this has been going around in my head for the last couple days. Why are opinions here, on this topic, so decidedly right-wing?
I’ll have to pick this apart.
Copyrights are a form of property. Where such intellectual property is used to make money, it is intangible capital. License payments are capital income. Property is distributed very unequally. Most of it is owned by rich people. Those who demand license payments here are literally demanding that more money should go to rich capitalists.
People who create copyrighted materials for their employers do not own the copyrights thereto. They are just like factory workers who do not own the product either. The people who worked on animations in the pre-CGI era were basically factory workers. When these jobs disappeared due to computers, where was the hand-wringing?
A brush-wielding artist has as much to do with the copyright industry as a pitchfork-wielding farmer with the agro-industry.
This isn’t even normal capitalism but the absolutely worst kind. The copyrighted material was uploaded to the net for many reasons, including making a profit. Some people used this publically available resource to train AIs. The owners contributed no labor. They were affected so little that they mostly seem to have been unaware that anything was going on.
The sole argument for paying seems to be mainly “muh property rights!”. I am not seeing any consideration of the good of society, public benefit, the general welfare, or anything of the sort. Those who say the trained AI models should be released for free, seem to imply that they should not be able to profit, because they looked at someone else’s property.
This is far more capitalistic than even US capitalism.
Consider patents. To get a patent, a new invention has to be registered, which involves publishing how it works in enough detail so that others can copy it. Then the government will enforce a monopoly on that invention for 20 years. During that time, the inventor can demand license fees. But also, other people can learn from it and maybe find other solutions. After those 20 years, the knowledge becomes public domain. This is often framed as a social contract: temporary monopoly in exchange for advancing knowledge. Scientific discoveries don’t get anything at all.
Compared to how copyright is treated by so many here, actual US capitalism looks almost like socialism!
US copyright used to work exactly like patents, with the same duration. Today, copyrights last until 70 years after the death of the creator. It’s just FUBAR. The US Constitution, far-left manifesto that it is, still it limits to the purpose of promoting intellectual output (to put it in modern terms). It is supposed to help society and not to enable capitalist grift.
People like to blame corrupt politicians or lobbyists for what is going wrong in the US but perhaps US politics is delivering exactly what people want. They may not like the necessary and predictable outcome of their choices, but it’s still what they want.
Americans left and right curse those evil corporations. Of course, Americans side with the individuals when some faceless corporation tries to bully money out of them. Well, a union is just such a corporation. Look up the definition of corporation if you don’t believe me.
Tough tits. Imagine all the books, movies and games that could have been made if copyright didn’t exist. Nobody else gets to ignore the rules just because it’s inconvenient.
That’s the key, humans can take inspiration from other people’s copyrighted work, why can’t AI?
Because they cant. They do not have the ability to be creative or be inspired.
Why can’t they? Sure if you ask it to make a pixel perfect replica of the Mona Lisa it will probably do it. But if you’re asking it to make something new it will make something new.
Then you don’t need to use copyrighted material as training data. If the AI can be creative and make new things it doesn’t need the copyrighted material. Just tell it to make new things and use the new things to make other new things.
Here is what deliberative experts way smarter and more knowledgeable than I am are saying ( on TechDirt )
TLDR: Letting AI be freely trained on human-made artistic content may be dangerous. We may decide to stop it so long as capitalists control who eats and lives. But copyright is not the means to legally stop it. This is a separate issue to how IP law is way, way broken. And precedents stopping software from training on copyrighted work will be used to stop humans from training on copyrighted work. And that’s bad.
Agree, it’s not much different from a human learning from all these sources and then applying said knowledge
Scale matters. For example
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A bunch of random shops having security cameras, where their employees can review footage
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Every business in a country having a camera connected to a central surveillance network with facial recognition and search capabilities
Those two things are not the same, even though you could say they’re “not much different” - it’s just a bunch of cameras after all.
Also, the similarity between human learning and AI training is highly debatable.
Both of your examples are governed by the same set of privacy laws, which talk about consent, purpose and necessity, but not about scale. Legislating around scale open up the inevitable legal quagmires of “what scale is acceptable” and “should activity x be counted the same as activity y to meet the scale-level defined in the law”.
Scale makes a difference, but it shouldn’t make a legal difference w.r.t. the legality of the activity.
Scale makes a difference, but it shouldn’t make a legal difference w.r.t. the legality of the activity.
What do you think the difference between normal internet traffic and a ddos attack is?
Lack of consent and the intent to cause harm.
Ok, then how about automated cold calling vs “live” cold calling?
Falls under unwanted calls, you should be able to opt out of both (though I believe both are currently legal in the US).
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The way I see it, if training on copyrighted content is forbidden, then that should apply universally.
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.
Oh, also all copyrighted content should lose its copyright. The only copyrighted content should be the original cave paintings by the first cavemen to develop art, since all art since then uses its influence.
And if this sounds ridiculous, then it’s no less so than arguments that AI shouldn’t be allowed to learn.
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.
