Try to train a human comedian to make jokes without ever allowing him to hear another comedian's jokes, never watching a movie, never reading a book or magazine, never watching a TV show. I expect the jokes would be pretty weak.

I will repeat what I have proffered before:

If OpenAI stated that it is impossible to train leading AI models without using copyrighted material, then, unpopular as it may be, the preemptive pragmatic solution should be pretty obvious, enter into commercial arrangements for access to said copyrighted material.

Claiming a failure to do so in circumstances where the subsequent commercial product directly competes in a market seems disingenuous at best, given what I assume is the purpose of copyrighted material, that being to set the terms under which public facing material can be used. Particularly if regurgitation of copyrighted material seems to exist in products inadequately developed to prevent such a simple and foreseeable situation.

Yes I am aware of the USA concept of fair use, but the test of that should be manifestly reciprocal, for example would Meta allow what it did to MySpace, hack and allow easy user transfer, or Google with scraping Youtube.

To me it seems Big Tech wants its cake and to eat it, where investor $$$ are used to corrupt open markets and undermine both fundamental democratic State social institutions, manipulate legal processes, and undermine basic consumer rights.

The problem is not the use of copyrighted material. The problem is doing so without permission and without paying for it.

Some relevant comments from Ars:

leighno5

The absolute hubris required for OpenAI here to come right out and say, 'Yeah, we have no choice but to build our product off the exploitation of the work others have already performed' is stunning. It's about as perfect a representation of the tech bro mindset that there can ever be. They didn't even try to approach content creators in order to do this, they just took what they needed because they wanted to. I really don't think it's hyperbolic to compare this to modern day colonization, or worker exploitation. 'You've been working pretty hard for a very long time to create and host content, pay for the development of that content, and build your business off of that, but we need it to make money for this thing we're building, so we're just going to fucking take it and do what we need to do.'

The entitlement is just...it's incredible.

4qu4rius

20 years ago, high school kids were sued for millions & years in jail for downloading a single Metalica album (if I remember correctly minimum damage in the US was something like 500k$ per song).

All of a sudden, just because they are the dominant ones doing the infringment, they should be allowed to scrap the entire (digital) human knowledge ? Funny (or not) how the law always benefits the rich.

https://petapixel.com/2024/01/03/court-docs-reveal-midjourney-wanted-to-copy-the-style-of-these-photographers/

What's stopping AI companies from paying royalties to artists they ripped off?

Also, lol at accounts created within few hours just to reply in this thread.

The moment their works are the one that got stolen by big companies and driven out of business, watch their tune change.

Edit: I remember when Reddit did that shitshow, and all the sudden a lot of sock / bot accounts appeared. I wasn't expecting it to happen here, but I guess election cycle is near.

1. This is not REALLY about copyright - this is an attack on free and open AI models, which would be IMPOSSIBLE if copyright was extended to cover the case of using the works for training.
2. It's not stealing. There is literally no resemblance between the training works and the model. IP rights have been continuously strengthened due to lobbying over the last century and are already absurdly strong, I don't understand why people on here want so much to strengthen them ever further.

It's crazy how everyone is suddenly in favour of IP law.

Any reasonable person can reach the conclusion that something is wrong here.

What I'm not seeing a lot of acknowledgement of is who really gets hurt by copyright infringement under the current U.S. scheme. (The quote is obviously directed toward the UK, but I'm reasonably certain a similar situation exists there.)

Hint: It's rarely the creators, who usually get paid once while their work continues to make money for others.

Let's say the New York Times wins its lawsuit. Do you really think the reporters who wrote the infringed-upon material will be getting royalty checks to be made whole?

This is not OpenAI vs creatives. OK, on a basic level it is, but expecting no one to scrape blogs and forum posts rather goes against the idea of the open internet in the first place. We've all learned by now that what goes on the internet stays there, with attribution totally optional unless you have a legal department. What's novel here is the scale of scraping, but I see some merit to the "transformational" fair-use defense given that the ingested content is not being reposted verbatim.

This is corporations vs corporations. Framing it as millions of people missing out on what they'd have otherwise rightfully gotten is disingenuous.

Having read through these comments, I wonder if we've reached the logical conclusion of copyright itself.

Well in that case maybe chat gpt should just fuck off it doesn’t seem to be doing anything particularly useful, and now it’s creator has admitted it doesn’t work without stealing things to feed it. Un fucking believable. Hacks gonna hack I guess.

As with many things, the golden rule applies. They who have the gold, make the rules.

...so stop doing it!

This explains what Valve was until recently not so cavalier about AI: They didn't want to hold the bag on copyright matters outside of their domain.

Then shutdown your goddamn company until you find a better way.

Alas, AI critics jumped onto the conclusion this one time. Read this:

Further, OpenAI writes that limiting training data to public domain books and drawings "created more than a century ago" would not provide AI systems that "meet the needs of today's citizens."

It's a plain fact. It does not say we have to train AI without paying.

To give you a context, virtually everything on the web is copyrighted, from reddit comments to blog articles to open source software. Even open data usually come with copyright notice. Open research articles also.

If misled politicians write a law banning the use of copyrighted materials, that'll kill all AI developments in the democratic countries. What will happen is that AI development will be led by dictatorships, and that's absolutely a disaster even for the critics. Think about it. Do we really want Xi, Putin, Netanyahu and Bin Salman to control all the next-gen AIs powering their cyber warfare while the West has to fight them with Siri and Alexa?

So, I agree that, at the end of the day, we'd have to ask how much rule-abiding AI companies should pay for copyrighted materials, and that'd be less than the copyright holders would want. (And I think it's sad.)

However, you can't equate these particular statements in this article to a declaration of fuck-copyright. Tbh Ars Technica disappointed me this time.

It's also "impossible" to have multiple terabytes of media on my homeserver without copyright infringement, so piracy is ok, right!?

O no, wait it actually is possible, it's just more expensive and more work to do it legally (and leaves a lot of plastic trash in form of Blurays and DVDs), just like with AI. But laws are just for poor people, I guess.

I think viral outrage aside, there is a very open question about what constitutes fair use in this application. And I think the viral outrage misunderstands the consequences of enforcing the notion that you can't use openly scrapable online data to build ML models.

Effectively what the copyright argument does here is make it so that ML models are only legally allowed to make by Meta, Google, Microsoft and maybe a couple of other companies. OpenAI can say whatever, I'm not concerned about them, but I am concerned about open source alternatives getting priced out of that market. I am also concerned about what it does to previously available APIs, as we've seen with Twitter and Reddit.

I get that it's fashionable to hate on these things, and it's fashionable to repeat the bit of misinformation about models being a copy or a collage of training data, but there are ramifications here people aren't talking about and I fear we're going to the worst possible future on this, where AI models are effectively ubiquitous but legally limited to major data brokers who added clauses to own AI training rights from their billions of users.

I stand by my opinion that AI will be the worst thing humans ever created, and that means it ranks just a bit above religion.

If it is impossible, either shut down operations or find a way to pay for it.

Or, or, or, hear me out:

Maybe their particular approach to making an AI is flawed.

Its like people do not know that there are many different kinds of ways that attempt to do AI.

Many of them do not rely on basically a training set that is the cumulative sum of all human generated content of every imaginable kind.

The real issue is money. How much and how (un)distributed.

Why is it fair/ok that one company can use all this material and make a lot of money off it without paying or even acknowledging others work?

On the flip side AI model could be useful. Maybe the models/weights should be made free just like the content they are trained on. Instead of paying for the model, we should pay for the hosting of the inference (aka. the API)