Sequoia: Generative AI: A Creative New World

Re:Sequoia: Generative AI: A Creative New World by freejazz on Monday November 28, 2022 @02:30PM (#33778373)

As I already explained to you, which you did not seem to appreciate, this is not already not a problem in copyright litigation because if your defense is "it's generated by AI" then it is your burden to establish that convincingly. You can't just say "well, you can't prove that I didn't copy it", it will not be convincing to a judge or jury. The plaintiff will make allegations that the defense will have to rebut. Saying "it's hard to tell where it came from" doesn't rebut copying.

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Re:Sequoia: Generative AI: A Creative New World by exit on Monday November 28, 2022 @04:28PM (#33779973)

we're definitely talking past each other at some point here (i didn't propose a defense of "it's generated by AI" for example)

- i've worked for a company which acquired its art content from a foreign outsourcing business.

- the foreign outsourcing business of course hired human artists, albeit at much lower wages than is possible where the company i worked for was located.

- the company i worked for launched a product containing this art content and never encountered a copyright challenge.

if AI eventually produces content indistinguishable from what humans can produce, what prevents these foreign outsourcing businesses from quietly pretending they still hire humans? the true origin of the content can be trivially "laundered".

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Re:Sequoia: Generative AI: A Creative New World by freejazz on Monday November 28, 2022 @05:14PM (#33780615)

I'm aware you didn't "propose" it as a defense, but that's how it would work in a litigation.

>if AI eventually produces content indistinguishable from what humans can produce, what prevents these foreign outsourcing businesses from quietly pretending they still hire humans?

The fact that they don't and if it is discovered, it will mean all of the work generated by them is not copyrightable and therefore everyone is free to copy it. They'd also have to lie to the copyright office and the businesses they were selling their services. The only thing doing the work here is the lie.

Right now I can go to another place and find another photographer who will recreate something for less. Technology might make that more trivial, but it doesn't change the fact that as a business opportunity it'd only work by having to massively misrepresent oneself.

Ostensibly, if I was a business and I was contracting these kinds of services, one thing guaranteed to be in the contract would be a clause that they authored the works, obtained the copyrights, etc, lawfully. And generally in a contract they would represent what the business represents (we are an illustration shop that sells images that we authored... etc).

So to more specifically answer your question - "what would stop them?" the same exact repercussions as would right now (which is what I intended to make clear in my initial response to you).

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Re:Sequoia: Generative AI: A Creative New World by exit on Monday November 28, 2022 @06:57PM (#33781681)

> The fact that they don't and if it is discovered, it will mean all of the work generated by them is not copyrightable and therefore everyone is free to copy it. They'd also have to lie to the copyright office and the businesses they were selling their services. The only thing doing the work here is the lie.

you and i have extremely different impressions of how effective regulatory repercussions are at actually constraining behaviour.

circumventing laws and regulations really does do a lot of the work in the economy. vast amounts of plagiarised code run in software we touch every day. artistic work gets crudely lifted. i don't see something as powerful as ai content generation being constrained by dictums about what can be copyrighted.

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Re:Sequoia: Generative AI: A Creative New World by freejazz on Tuesday November 29, 2022 @12:59PM (#33790879)

What regulators? These are all private actors using contract law and copyright law. They are only as effective as the potential gain in winning a lawsuit and I never suggested otherwise. As I pointed out, already, yes people do copy now. I think your belief is mistaken that the triviality of creating the content is the fulcrum in this scenario. The fulcrum is profitability. Having to operate extra-judiciously and at the bottom of the barrel in order to make your grift isn't an exciting proposition now, and it's not going to be in the future.

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