Are you implying that educators should not be compensated or credited? Because that is not how it works in the real world.
If the answer to those three questions is "yes", then I would argue that yes, you absolutely should have to pay royalties to the authors.
Copyright lobbies can't have their own cake and eat it too, if you want to enforce such a different way of thinking about copyright compared to the current one, that would destroy the current industry and rightly so.
I could just as well argue that businesses developing or making use of LLM-models can't have their cake and eat it too. If they want their computer programs to enjoy the same rights and prerogatives as human creators do, they should be ready to demonstrate that those models truly deserve the status of legal persons as of themselves, subject to the same laws and obligations.
I don't think they care about that, they seems fine with output images not being copyrightable as per the current legislation.
That's a dead-end to start having to pay each and every one of the original sources of the components of your mind each time they are used to create!
If you're commercializing e.g. goodies that use the exact same character designed by some artist, so that anybody can tell you it's the same, AND if the traits of this character are actually original (not just so that anybody would come up with it independently), AND if the people buying your goodies are all thinking about the original character in the first place, AND if the original author is alive, then I'd absolutely agree that royalties need to be paid.
That's just an example. To tell you that in specific cases it's obvious that royalties are required.
But in the general case, no. Because, else, anything just is a derived work. Just think about it.
The world of ideas is liquid. All is mixing, all dissolves and disappears in everything else, and is reborn new and different, again and again.
Most jobs require a degree or certification of some sort.
Unless you're satirizing it or making fun of it in some other way. Then it's fair use..
"Humans" being the important word here. I don't understand why people keep trying to compare training a model to humans learning through reading etc. They are very different things. Learning done by machines at enormous scale and done to benefit private companies financially is not the same as humans learning.
Yes, but also very similar. We learn very well by spaced repetition, and by practicing things. Our whole nervous system stores information in a similar way. Is the brain and the individual neurons more complex? Yes, sure, but that doesn't negate the core similarities.
> Learning done by machines at enormous scale and done to benefit private companies financially is not the same as humans learning.
Yes, that's the important difference. That in the end if you train a robot you get a program that's easy to copy/scale, the marginal cost of using it is orders of magnitude lower than what you'd get if you would do it with humans in the loop.
We already have fair use in copyright, because there are important differences between the various forms and modalities of human imitation.
And of course maybe it's time to rename copyright to usageright. After current copyright doesn't even apply in most cases. (The results are not derivatives, there's sufficient substantial transformative difference, etc. That said, the phrasing in the US constitution still makes sense: "... the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and ..." ... if we interpret Right to mean all rights, including even the right of who can read/see it.)
If I go to a museum and look at a bunch of modern paintings, then go home and paint something new but “in the style of”, this is well-established as within my rights, regardless of how any of the painters whose work I studied and was inspired by might feel.
If I take a notebook and write down some notes about the themes and stylistic attributes of what I see, then go home and paint something in the same style, that too is fine - right? Or would you argue the notes I took are a copyright violation? Or the works I made using those notes?
Now let’s say I automate the process of recording those notes. Does that change the fundamentals of what is happening, with respect to copyright?
Personally, I don’t think so.
AI does not read, look at or listen to anything. It runs algorithms on binary data. An AI developer who uses millions of files to program their AI system also does not read, look at or listen to all of that stuff. They copy it. That is the part explicitly covered by international copyright law. It is not possible to use some file to "train" a ML model except by copying that file. That's just a fact. It wasn't the computer that went out and read or looked at the work. It was a human who took a binary copy of it, ran some algorithms on it without even looking at it, and published/sold/gave access to the software.
AI software is a work by an author; not an author.
Humans can't be owned by corporations for one.
“But officer, it is legal to drive just slightly slower than I was going!”
Simply put: You are wrong. The law makes arbitrary distinctions all the time, for practical reasons.
There's already a licensing framework for artists doing this - should they wish to. It's called Creative Commons, and allows a pretty fine distinction of rights from public domain to free for personal use not commercial, and everything in between. https://creativecommons.org/
I agree our shared culture in some sense ultimately owns the productions of the culture. But that's wildly different to (and in some senses the opposite of) letting private companies enclose, privatise and sell those products back to us. As for example Disney has done over and over again, taking myths transcribed by the Brothers Grimm, or classic novels now in the public domain, 'reinterpreting' them and viciously enforcing copyright on these new interpretations.
The entire point of copyright law is to allow the Bach's of this world to profit from their work - without having to die in poverty and obscurity, as so many artists and musicians have historically, even while others have profited from their work at scale.
> Humans have always learnt by studying what's out there already.
Finally - as other commentators have noted, there's really no similarity at all between a human at human pace studying and integrating understanding of a piece or genre of art, and an AI training to replicate that work at scale as perfectly as possible. A much better comparator would be the Chinese factory 'villages' that reproduce paintings at scale for the commercial market, without creativity or 'art' being a part of the process. But even that is a poor analogy, since individual humans mediate the process. A really good analogy would be a giant food corporation like Nestle somehow scanning the product of a restaurant and then offering that chefs unique dishes that had taken years to invent for nearly free - using the same name and benefiting from the association.
Neither an AI model nor an AI developer who programs that model are actually studying "what's out there already". One is copying files, and the other is running algorithms on copied files. And then the first one is raking in $$$ while bankrupting the authors of those files. That's illegal in the US, UK, EU and under the terms of the Berne Convention.
> Note that I'm not talking about what existing copyright law says; I'm talking about how I believe we should be regulating this new facet of the industry.
Is it really new? Humans have always learnt by studying what's out there already. Our whole culture is built on what's been done and published before (and how could it be otherwise?). Without Bach there would be no Mozart, and then down the line their influence permeates everything you hear today.
If anything I'd like to make it easier to reuse parts of our shared culture, and limit the ability of organisations to control how things that they've published are reused. You can make private works if you want to keep control of them, but at some point the public deserves to share and rework the things that have been pushed into the public consciousness.