also how many people are responsible for stuff like ChatGPT... 300? getting the bulky of their trainning data on, again, how many people?
it seems the monopoly history is re-inventing itself, now with fancy computers replicating human behaviour
I guess the only solution is to get rid of copyright law so people don't exploit it so much.
Problem solved. Let's all stop protecting this, and allow anyone to innovate by making cool and new awesome things.
How about Make the model so big you can only run it in a data center?
My older brother decided to go to art school.
It wasn’t until he was 40 that his artwork started to be noticed and worth something.
His images have been bootlegged endlessly by Asian companies placing them on t-shirts and selling them for $5 on Etsy and every other marketplace.
Fortunately for him, he’s designed a very popular set of kids books that have allowed him to move out of my parents, get a place of his own, pay down debt and buy a house.
Intellectual property is how he takes care of his family. He should be able to at least provide for his kids college after his death if his IP still has value in the marketplace.
…And so should other creators.
Not everyone is Disney.
As an artist starting out in the beginning of my career, I made a rationalized choice to never post my work online - in retrospect this seems to have been the right choice. My work is no AI’s whetstone.
It is a luxury career supported exclusively by surplus. There will always be demand for it, but it is highly elastic and heavily influenced by trends and skewed by the top end.
Sorry if I framed it confusingly, this isn't only for artists, it's for everyone. They don't care what you do, only how much money you make.
> how it's not the same as a basic unemployment
It pretty much is, though unemployment has more strings attached. Anything you get from unemployment is subtracted from social security, and vice versa. For unemployment the online form is simpler and money comes much quicker, but you have to attend unemployment office events and stuff.
> whether there is a maximum amount of people who can be on this programme
The true maximum is of course however much the system as a whole can support, through taxing people's income. My back-of-the-napkin math puts the cost of the whole program at about $1/mo per taxpayer. So all artists and bums combined. Might not include basic retirement, which is slightly less.
> how qualification works
It's based on income/assets. If you make less than $10k/y plus $150/mo, the program covers the difference for living expenses.
In practice, there are limits to how much they're willing to pay for things like rent and utilities. In my city the max rent is $560/mo. On this winter's coldest month they complained that my electricity bill was too high (electric heating), but still paid it in full when I complained back.
To qualify, you have to attach to your application all of your bank accounts' statements from the past 3 months, so they can see how much money you've got. When you get a bill, you send the bill and they cover it.
The social security program covers: rent, water, electricity, home insurance, Internet, healthcare, moving van, security deposit of new apartment. On top of that you get about $15/day for food and other stuff like clothes, cleaning products, what have you. In my experience food costs some $10/day to live comfortably so some $150/mo remains for everything else. Second hand clothing stores sell decent clothes for a few dollars a piece, sometimes less.
You can request additional funds for infrequent, dire needs, like a new bed, vaccuum cleaner, etc.
Feel free to ask more questions, I'm happy to elaborate :)
Ah, OK, that was what I was wondering. Some social security schemes for artists that I am aware of require proof that you are in fact an artist, which can be problematic.
I think it doesn't go quite far enough though. I still believe a universal basic income would do better and be easier to administer.
What is your career, precisely?
My point was that it's a career whose demand is dictated by fluctuations in the economy and trends. And can be almost completely shut down (in theory) if the situation dictates.
Wherever you stand on copyrights, it would be a mistake to underestimate the central importance of this issue going forward.
I don't think my comment implies that at all. I'm not convinced it'll ever grow that large though. See: Content is not king [1] for a good explanation of why.
I think it's natural that it grows now to levels never seen before.
What am I underestimating? I agree it is an important issue; my comment is orthogonal to it though.
The US has cultural poverty because it has decided to support litigation machines.
I mean a good thought experiment here would be to replace "artists" with "entrepreneurs" or "founders" ("historically, [...] were independently wealthy" would expose some of the myths we attach to the idea of "self-made" which we rarely attach to artists and authors) here and rethink the history of Western commerce from that perspective.
Can you explain this position? My understanding is most artists don't thrive economically because there's not much demand for the art they make. I'm not sure that's correct, but "lack of IP protections" seems even less likely for most artists. What protections do you think would help?
It seems to me that the current system primarily benefits corporations who acquire a vast library of IP and can afford to legally defend it all as necessary.
I agree that a different set of policies would result in more art being created and more artists who are able to support themselves doing art, but my immediate assumption of what that would look like is more like funding art educations and exhibitions (of various kinds).
https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-53ec1e395a4b59adb8391...
Yeah, the law may be more on their side, but overall it seems unless you're somebody on the level of Akira Toriyama you likely barely managed to retain your sanity while cranking out your world famous works, and even the famous ones suffer greatly during the process.
You think we should have 1000x more artists than we do? I think there's another economic problem with that idea...
> The US has chosen relative cultural poverty compared to other cultures that find non-market mechanisms to support artists.
The USA has the largest market in the world for creative products and the most rich artists.
> My work is no AI’s whetstone.
Are you the same way with juniors? "I paid dearly to learn this technique - you should too!"
Aside from overtraining issues, the AI can't store your work anymore than you can store representations of everything you've trained on, it's vastly smaller than the sum of its training data. It distills out features and their combinations.
Some bigname artist is upset because he thinks he's the first one to put certain bat and lizard features on a dragon and that he now owns that entire sort of creature. Turns out though, that given an old picture of a dragon and that single sentence of mine that he could be copied by almost anyone. The only way to keep the AI from "copying" his work is to make sure that, even if not trained on his work, nobody asks it for those features. To satisfy these people it'll have to have a big red sign that says "Dragons are off limits, Bob owns them because you might put claws on the wings!".
What is the market price for a potato?
What is the market price for a chair?
What is the price of developing an art career over 40 years? Unless you believe that art, music, poetry, literature, and the rest have no value to society then IP protections are what incentives a portion of humanity to do something crazy like go to art school…
…instead of you know doing the “responsible” thing and getting a CS degree so you can one day get an AI gig stealing “training data” in the name of profit
If you want to encourage more creative work, maybe look for other mechanisms, because going into creative work in the hope of making it is pretty much gambling with awful odds.
Sure, we can say that still isn't "good enough", but that kinda proves the smaller point that the actual creative output of most creatives is not valued, and at the same time ignores that the main point I made above is that it is irrational for people to gamble on being valued, because the vast majority of "successful" creators as measured by relative rank within their peer group has no realistic prospect of that happening today.
* Rejecting intellectual property necessitates rejecting that art provides any value to society.
* The only reason artists make art is to make money.
* (Implicitly) Without IP artists would have no incentive to make art, monetary or otherwise.
* Making art requires going to art school.
* Getting a CS degree and making art are mutually exclusive.
Of course, with weaker IP protections, there would be change. Some very specific business models that exist today would go extinct. And other business models (e.g. live performances) might see a renaissance in popularity.
> IP protections are what incentives a portion of humanity to do something crazy like go to art school
Hard disagree, most of the art fields are first a passion and then a profession. People who go to art school is normally because they love it so much that they cannot imagine themselves doing something else, even though they already know it pays little. I've never ever heard of someone going to art school "because of IP protections".
One of the reasons it's so hard to make money is because there's many people doing it as a hobby that are already great at it, and so would jump at the chance of getting some money for it, leaving people who want to make livable wages out of it in the cold. Which is fine, this way society as a whole benefits greatly, sure it's unfortunate there are no more people living off it, but in exchange there are many, many amateurs experimenting and doing art, and from time to time one finds a formula that allows them to live off it (or "shills" to corporate).
I really didn't get any vibe of bias from them.
Either way, it seems you miss their point entirely, which is that you cannot equate a creative idea as the same as a product.
The furniture example all boils down to if the work is allowed by the author to be mass produced (if it even can be done) but the creative idea is still theirs.
>I've never ever heard of someone going to art school "because of IP protections".
Similar with my first point you misunderstood their point. Their point is that thanks to ip protection they can invest the time needed to become a successful artist within their lifetime.
> "He should be able to at least provide for his kids college after his death if his IP still has value in the marketplace."
Why should he, besides because that's a good desire for a family member? If it was a 3rd party wanting this, usually we'd call that rent-seeking behavior and it's usually seen negatively.
> But the creative idea is still theirs
Why is this (besides copyright law ofc)? The carpenter doesn't forbid me from creating a similar chair of him, and if we are talking about a painting and e.g. I was learning I could definitely copy it for learning purposes and everyone would be fine with that, so at which point should it "not be okay" to copy it? To lend to a friend in private? Can I share (in person, no copies) to a group of friends? I bought a painting, can I print it on a t-shirt for myself? What I can do after I purchase a copy of the idea in private should not be up to the author IMHO, and that line is often very blurry.
Technically as long as you don't sell a product that is a copy, you are "fine" to have said product.
However if you do sell it, it would incentivize a parasitic market.
Something you see sometimes in open source software, esp with IaaS.
You sure about that, legally?
>…instead of you know doing the “responsible” thing and getting a CS degree so you can one day get an AI gig stealing “training data” in the name of profit
You're right about this, though. But this strikes me as a discursive issue that has more to do with the generalized butthurt over schooling that you see here in HN and tech circles - I think it's funny that it's Local Boob Paul Graham talking about writing (which to be fair he cannot shutup about) that set this whole thing off.
They just show it to the AI, it doesn't store it - just data about it. The same as you when you look at something, be it a painting or a chair.
The only reason AI companies store the data is they want repeatability. If you want to train two copies on the same data you can't rely on the same sites being up. I commit the same crime by saving websites I've read because I don't want my sources to dry up on me.
> What is the price of developing an art career over 40 years?
Market price. How does it benefit the customer here and now?
It's no different than being a furniture maker with years of carpentry skills. The value to the customer is still just the marginal benefit over an IKEA stool.
In general for machine learning, yes, but deep learning models with large numbers of parameters such as transformers and stable diffusion do actually memorise part of their training data verbatim. The problem is mainly duplicate data points. E.g.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/resea...
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2202.07646.pdf Quantifying Memorization Across Neural Language Models
I was translating code with one of the code- models at OpenAI and it spit out about thirty words of someone's code of conduct from Github, almost verbatim. I found the repo by searching what it had produced. That's when I changed my prompts to remove comments, but it stuck with me.
In general though, I think the pigeon-hole principle is relevant. The model is fairly small compared to the training material and couldn't contain much actual full content or it wouldn't be able to contain anything about the rest.
I've heard people talking about using the model to judge similarity of new training data to what it's already seen, mainly to train more efficiently, but also to avoid this.
The point of copyright is to encourage more work. At this point he is rent seeking.
Every entrepreneur should also be forced to sell their business instead of passing that equity to their children. No more rent-seeking, multi-generational family businesses.
Matter of fact, let’s force the same on anyone with a 401k, IRA, or Roth as well because at the end of the day it’s all equity, right?
All equity stakes much be converted to cash upon death and either returned to the state OR given to charity.
That’s the way to make “Single serving wealth” happen and put an end to rent-seeking.
Meanwhile there's no effort involved in collecting royalties from your father's work, and no social benefits are provided by it.
That said, your comparison to forced confiscation of retirement plans by the state or charity is very strange, because it's not as if on your brother's death the state would come in and takes every cent he's ever made as a producer of IP.
In fact, the state literally does the opposite, and gives your brother's children and grandchildren the entire backing of both the civil and criminal justice systems. This is why we spent the 90's and 2000's sitting through VHS tapes telling us that unauthorized copying will be met with an FBI investigation, $250k in fines, and 5 years in prison.
There's nothing stopping an extremely successful and wealthy artist from handing down the money he made to his children. If they want to use that money to continue doing artwork in his style, using everything they have learned from him, there's nothing stopping them.
And why not, really? How does that affect your brother? Why should your brother have a say on what people can or cannot put on a T-Shirt? Creating pieces of art professionally should be paid for. But having some weird right of ownership on what is essentially just a huge number is, frankly, a clutch at best and outright criminal at worst. Digital artwork can be copied at zero cost and artists have to deal with that, not the world has to bend to one particular model of generating revenues for artists.
We need to stop with these schemes at one point and shift to a better market or we will effectively have to ceed all control of data and computing to copyright-control companies.
What's the happy middle ground?
Of course they will. But so can others. Without copyright Disney won't have a legally enforced monopoly.
It too can be copied for zero cost.
Why should MS have a say on what people can or cannot put on the harddrive (Well ssd)
If we were to get rid of it entirely then your success in the market largely depends on what resources you already have. Large companies have the upper hand as they already have the user base, along with the marketing budget to sink you (not that the current situation differs all that much).
If your argument is "thats the way it should be, let the market decide who succeeds" then that's a whole different conversation.
Either way I don't see an obvious solution that doesn't benefit the very companies you say we need to stop, though I agree on the sentiment.
and then, imagine if a company arrives that offers a product, let's just say, imagery. artwork. at a low low price of 'free'. not just "free copying of existing artwork", but complete "professional creation". for free. it's real hard to compete with 'free'. you may have been selling your artwork for some price, but when a 'free' alternative comes around, what do you do? how do you solve for that "challenge" on the market? tough shit. and also, since it's 'free', it's also 'whatever price they want to set', so they can undercut you at any price point, because they can just make up any price point. capturing customers, capturing profit, while you just get displaced in the market. good luck trying to explain to people that "creating pieces of art should be paid for" and that "you" "should be paid. people can just get art for free! or, at a low low price that undercuts you.
see a problem that arises here? this is what those annoying art people have been trying to argue about.
Does the system really work if he had to invest in himself for so long to even start having hopes if sustaining himself with his creative output?
If we didn't assign value to abstract concepts, ownership contracts for tangible assets would only be worth the paper they're written on. Abstract ideas are inherently valuable.
This is a very young/naive way of seeing it, as the Spanish saying dutifully notes, "physically having something is 9 parts out of 10 of the law for ownership" ("La posesión es nueve décimas partes de la ley"). Meaning ownership is not as much what is on paper but it is having something, claiming it's yours, and no one else claiming it's theirs basically (not always, but that's why the saying says 9 out of 10).
https://primaveraeuropea.eu/la-posesion-es-nueve-decimas-par...
This is already an English saying. "Possession is nine tenths of the law."
> Intellectual property is how he takes care of his family.
Art is how he makes money. Money is how he takes care of his family. People have been making these things forever -- they are older than human language itself! "Intellectual property" otoh is a relatively new idea, and so can't have everything to do with it[1].
To think "Intellectual Property" laws are corrupt and benefit the already-rich should not be incompatible with saying some copyright term might be good: If copyright terms were half what they are, your brothers' story would be exactly the same, but Disney's would be a lot different!
I'm not saying it's a good argument (it's sentimental, for starters, not that OPs is much different - "proprietors" didn't invent IP law, and Disney is apparently giving its pound of flesh back to the powers that helped it game the system), but I'm pretty sure the same one was used in defenses of generative work and, notably, NFTs - "this will help the poor artist, who would otherwise have no market." Rogers v Koons put paid to that argument (indirectly), and I'm hoping the current class actions succeed, your brother notwithstanding.
For every case like your brother's, how many people out there are throwing their lives away chasing the illusion that they will ever "make it"?
For the general expression of ideas in a corporate setting, copyright is an asset that is backed by a legal team. You're betting that a property gives you a competitive advantage.
I don't.
I don't think my open source stuff is every going to be worth a penny. I still want it to be protected so that its license is respected. Mine, and everyone else's.
Yes it does.
I went to a meeting with one of our clients that was just signing with us. The main reason that he was contracting with us was, I quote, "the last time we went to China we found a Huawei rep making a demo of an application that worked exactly like ours - which was meant to run on Cisco gear. Even the terminal escape sequences to get to debugging mode was the same. The Chinese were stealing from us and there was absolutely nothing we could do about it."
Copyright law might be enough of a deterrent to make Joe Nobody pay $9.99 to Netflix instead of torrenting movies, and (on occasion) it may be enough to force some high-profile artist to give credit to some other lesser known musician who "served as inspiration". Outside of that, copyright law is as effective to "stop bad actors" as the "War on Drugs" is effective to stop organized crime and drug trafficking.
Let me spell it out: I think that the cost of trying to police "copyright violations" far outweighs any of the potential losses and damages that might be incurred for losing such "protections". This is not the case for murder. The cost of life is incalculable, so any measures to prevent loss of life is justifiable.
Laws that try to protect citizens from physical harm and are meant to preserve human life are of a completely different nature than "copyright violation". It's perfectly reasonable to argue for decriminalization of copyright infringement without having to accept that anything should be decriminalized.
To go further: I see no moral justification to have copyright infringement as a violation worthy of criminal persecution. I believe that "intellectual property" is a misnomer and I think that any type of current laws are meant only to protect large corporations and are not made with the best interests of society in general.
Is that enough for you, or are you going to continue pushing false slippery slopes?
You misunderstood. I was not trying to portray your argument as a slippery slope. I was trying to portray your argument as just generally weak, which it obviously was ("but china" is not even an argument). Given that you completely misunderstood my point, the rest of your comment doesn't even apply.
That you had to resort to subtly calling me an idiot says a lot.
> That you had to resort to subtly calling me an idiot says a lot.
That you didn't mind me subtly calling you dishonest says even more, and shows that I'm done here.
Which is why all AI code and datasets are freely available and legally usable by anyone for any purpose?
If you had created anything other than internet forum opinions in your life you'd have a different perspective.
Yes.
> Do you really believe they did it without knowing what they were doing?
Of course not, but I also believe they thought it would be more effective at making their point than it was.
It is tough to respond to something that is crass and meant to be offensive without resorting to the same, so by using the 'annoyed teacher' style I can get my point across without crossing the line to snark or contemptuousness.
I see. I suppose this is where we differ, I'm sure they don't care about making a point at all.
That it’s been abused by corporate entities is another matter. The fact that some famous musicians sell their whole catalog to companies is also a sign of times changing again.
AI growth as it is here based on preexisting work is directly in confrontation with copyright. And something will have to give in some way. But law will likely not catch up before at least another 10 years, the time needed for most people to really understand/experience the impact of the changes.
It is a necessary protection against moral hazard, and a way for artists who may well be poor during their lifetime to be able to leave something behind for their children.
In your world, if one wants to print Calvin-peeing-on-things t-shirts without having to deal with legal hurdles, all they'd have to do is shove Bill Watterson into traffic to force his creations into the public domain.
There is no point to creating anything if someone else can throw you under an actual bus to immediately claim rights to (and start profiting from) the years of time and effort you spent building the "brand." Forcing a delay of 50 years goes a long way toward discouraging this sort of literal piracy.
This is the premise of the current AI debate, only it's forgery at scale instead of manslaughter.
Now I think we'd all agree to something more realistic to actually protect authors, like 10-30 years protection from publication. But every time someone brings "copyright! IP!" to ML I just laugh since it's one of the more corrupt laws that we have currently.