Thousands of authors demand payment from AI companies for use of copyrighted works::Thousands of published authors are requesting payment from tech companies for the use of their copyrighted works in training artificial intelligence tools, marking the latest intellectual property critique to target AI development.
The thing is, copyright isn’t really well-suited to the task, because copyright concerns itself with who gets to, well, make copies. Training an AI model isn’t really making a copy of that work. It’s transformative.
Should there be some kind of new model of renumeration for creators? Probably. But it should be a compulsory licensing model.
The slippery slope here is that we are currently considering humans and computers to be different because (something someone needs to actually define). If you say “AI read my book and output a similar story, you owe me money” then how is that different from “Joe read my book and wrote a similar story, you owe me money.” We have laws already that deal with this but honestly how many books and movies aren’t just remakes of Romeo and Juliet or Taming of the Shrew?!?
You’re bounded by the limits of your flesh. AI is not. The $12 you spent buying a book at Barns & Noble was based on the economy of scarcity that your human abilities constrain you to.
It’s hard to say that the value proposition is the same for human vs AI.
We are making an assumption that humans do “human things”. If i wrote a derivative work of your $12 book, does it matter that the way i wrote it was to use a pen and paper and create a statistical analysis of your work and find the “next best word” until i had a story? Sure my book took 30 years to write but if i followed the same math as an AI would that matter?
It wouldn’t matter, because derivative works require permission. But I don’t think anyone’s really made a compelling case that OpenAI is actually making directly derivative work.
The stronger argument is that LLM’s are making transformational work, which is normally fair use, but should still require some form of compensation given the scale of it.
But no one is complaining about publishing derived work. The issue is that “the robot brain has full copies of my text and anything it creates ‘cannot be transformative’”. This doesn’t make sense to me because my brain made a copy of your book too, its just really lossy.
I think right now we have definitions for the types of works that only loosely fit human actions mostly because we make poor assumptions of how the human brain works. We often look at intent as a guide which doesn’t always work in an AI scenario.
Yeah, that’s basically it.
But I think what’s getting overlooked in this conversation is that it probably doesn’t matter whether it’s AI or not. Either new content is derivative or it isn’t. That’s true whether you wrote it or an AI wrote it.
I agree with that, but do politicians and judges who know absolutely nothing about the subject?
I haf a professor in college who taught about cyber security. He was renowned in his field and was asked by the RIAA to testify about some cases related to file sharing. I lost respect for him when he intentionally refrained from stating that it wasnt possible for anyone outside of the home network yo know what or who was actually downloading stuff. The technology was being ignored and an invalid view was presented for a judge who couldn’t ELI5 how the internet worked let along actually networking protocols.
It’s not even looking for the next best word. It’s looking for the next best token. It doesn’t know what words are. It reads tokens.
Good point.
I could easily see laws created where they blanket outlaw computer generated output derived from other human created data sets and sudden medical and technical advancements stop because the laws were written by people who don’t understand what is going on.
Copyright also deals with derivative works.
Derivative and transformative are quite different though.
Challenge level impossible: try uploading something long to amazon written by chatgpt without triggering the plagiarism detector.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/chatgpt-launches-boom-ai-written-e-books-amazon-2023-02-21/