I would be careful in asserting that it's proven until the evidence is heard in court and we have all the data.
This extends to music as well, if someone hears a song and is inspired by that in their work, the original artist gets credit.
That's only true in a very narrow set of circumstances. Imagine the case where someone listens to 10,000 songs, and then takes the sum total of that experience and writes their own. There's no credit given to the inspiration that each of those 10,000 songs gave. And that is in fact much closer to what AI is currently doing.
https://www.ajschwartzlaw.com/can-i-use-that-part-2-remix-cu...
But all of this, doesn't have much to do with whether an AI should be allowed to consume public media -- even if we agree they need to do a better job about avoiding verbatim reconstruction when prompted.
Edit: I wasn't able to find the Lawrence Lessig talk I wanted to link, but here's a quite old one that makes some of the same points:
I’m not a lawyer but I’m pretty certain that’s not actually how things work.
Of course, just like a human artist, it could probably closely approximate the source material if it wanted to, but it would still be its own approximation, not an exact duplicate. As for plagiarism, we all have to be careful to rephrase things we've read elsewhere, and perhaps AI's need to be trained to do this a bit better... but it doesn't change the underlying fact that they're learning from the text they read, not storing a verbatim copy (at least, no more so than a human reader with a good memory)
I think the term "AI" is one of the most loaded and misleading to come up in recent discourse. We don't say that relational databases "pack and ship" data, or web clients "hold a conversation" with each other. But for some reason we can say that LLMs and generative models "get inspired" by the data they ingest. It's all just software.
In my own opinion I don't think the models can copy verbatim except in cases of overfitting, but people like the author of the post have a right to feel that something is very wrong with the current system. It's the same principle of compressing a JPEG of the Mona Lisa to 20% and calling that an original work. I believe the courts don't care that it's just a new set of numbers, but instead want to know where those numbers originated from. It is a color of bits[1] situation.
When software is anthropomorphized, it seems like a lot of criticisms against it are pushed aside. Maybe it is because if you listen to the complaints and stop iterating on something like AI, it's like abandoning your child before their potential is fully realized. You see glimpses of something like yourself within its output and become (parentally?) invested in the software in a way beyond just saying "it's software." I feel as if people are getting attached to this kind of software unlike they would to a database, for example.
A thought experiment I have is whenever the term "AI" appears, mentally replace it with the term "advanced technology." The seeming intent behind many headlines changes with this replacement. "Advanced developments in technology will displace jobs." The AI itself isn't the one coming for people.
My own perspective is that humans do not have an exclusive right to intelligence, or ultimately to personhood. I am not anthropomorphizing when I defend the rights of AI. Instead, I am doing so in the abstract sense, without claiming that the current technology should be rightly classified as AI or not. But since the arguments are being framed against the rights of AI to consume media, I think the defense needs to be framed in the same way.
Well i'll leave it to the legal system to decide if that's true.
But in any case, that's no different from a human with a photographic memory doing the same thing after reading a paragraph. We don't blame them for their superior memory, or being inspired by the knowledge. We don't claim they've violated copyright because their memory contains an exact copy of what they read.
We may still demand that they avoid reproducing the exact words they've read, even though they are capable of it -- which is fine. We can demand the same of AI's. All I object to, is the idea that a smart AI, with a great memory is guilty of something just by reading or viewing content that was willingingly shared online.
But to be honest, I don't really care one way or the other, since it doesn't get to the heart of the matter as I see it. To my mind, it's no different than a human with a good memory doing the same thing.
Specifically, it isn't the consumption of the media that is the problem, or even remembering it very well. Rather, it is the public verbatim reproduction of it, which a human might inappropriately do as well. AI's need to be trained to avoid unfair use of source material, but I don't think that means they should be prohibited from consuming public material.
You had me till that^ line. In your example if "inspired" human start competing with you, then there is harm. If the inspired human is replaced by an AI, then it also harms. By harm I am referring to competition.
So instead of saying "no harm done", then maybe its more accurate to say "same harm as a other humans being inspired by your work".
I don't disagree with you. But then that is a completely different issue, and has nothing specifically to do with AI, but rather the tradeoff between the benefits of releasing your work to the public, and the potential competition it might inspire.
There's such thing as consent, I hope you've heard of it.
No artist whose work was used to train the AIs consented to such use.
Particularly if they released their work online before generative AI was a possibility.
>it's really there for everyone to view and be inspired by
Generative AI model is not "everyone". It's a model, a combination of data that goes into it.
It's a thing. A product. A derivative work, to be specific, made by the person who trained it.
>If an AI views it, and is inspired by it, again, no harm done.
Such a romantic notion!
But the same metric, a photocopy machine is an auteur that gets inspired by the work that it happens to stumble into to produce its own original art.
No.
The AI doesn't "view" the work, it has no agency. The human that trains the model does.
And that human is the one that is ripping the artist off.
The AI, as many people said, is just a tool. It doesn't suddenly turn into a person for copyright purposes.
It still remains a tool for people who train the models. A tool to rip off others' intellectual property, in the case we're discussing.
When you release something into the world, you have to accept that things beyond your control will engage with it. When you walk outside, down the street, you consent to being in public, and being recorded by video cameras, whether you like it or not. Even if a new 3D camera you don't know about exists and is recording you in ways you don't understand.
And in the same way, when you release something on the internet, it is there essentially forever. If you imagine that you get a "do-over" when the world changes in ways you didn't anticipate -- you're wrong. Nobody should feel entitled to such a reset.
> And that human is the one that is ripping the artist off.
Nobody is being ripped off.
> The AI, as many people said, is just a tool
People said the same thing about slaves. They aren't real people, worthy of rights. They were compared to animals, the same way you compared AI to a photocopier. Someday, this human self-obsession and self-importance against silicon based lives, will be seen in the same light, and artificial intelligences will be granted personhood. We should start protecting their rights in law today. Please don't be a bigot.
Yes, and those laws will be very useful as soon as any actual artificial intelligence will crop up. Blindly applying them to DALL-E or ChatGPT because they are marketed as AI would be... short-sighted.
>Nobody should feel entitled to such a reset.
>Please don't be a bigot.
Please don't project.
>We should start protecting their rights in law today.
LOL.
You can't have it both ways:
-AI is just a tool, work produced with AI is original work of the user
-AI is an intelligence that gets "inspired" by data it's trained on
Anyway. I don't want to regulate the AI.
I want to regulate the humans that make the choice of which data goes into training an AI.
I see it differently. To me, if you post your work online as an artist, it's really there for everyone to view and be inspired by. As long as nobody copies it verbatim, don't think you've been hurt by any other usage. If another artist views it, and is inspired by it... so be it. If an AI views it, and is inspired by it, again, no harm done.