this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2023
216 points (94.3% liked)

Technology

60082 readers
3315 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 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.

[–] hellothere@sh.itjust.works 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.

[–] ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 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.