Comment on The Irony of 'You Wouldn't Download a Car' Making a Comeback in AI Debates
lightnsfw@reddthat.com 2 months ago
If ChatGPT was free I might see their point but it’s not so no. If you’re making money from someone’s work you should pay them.
Drewelite@lemmynsfw.com 2 months ago
You’re making an indie movie on your iPhone with friends. You sell one ticket. You now owe: Apple, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s estate (inventor of the camera), every cinematographer who first devised the type of shots you’re using, the writers since the beginning of time that created the types of story elements in the script, the mathematicians and scientists that developed lense technology, the car manufacturers that aided your ability to transport you to the set, the guy who’s YouTube tutorial you watched to figure out lighting, etc, etc, etc.
Your black and white framing appears to provide a clear ethical framework until you dig a millimeter into it. The reality is that society only exists because of the work that all of the individuals within it produce. Things like copyright are an adapter to our capitalistic economy to ensure people’s work that can be copied, are protected enough that they have the opportunity to make money off of it. It exists so somebody else can’t immediately turn around and sell the same book someone else wrote, or just change a few words and do as such. This protection was meant to last 15 to 20 years. Then enter the public domain for anyone to copy and rewrite as they please.
Current copyright is an utter bastardization of its intended use. Massive corporations are trying to act like they’re fighting for the little guy to own their IP forever. But they buy up all that IP for pennies compared to how they turn around and commoditize it. Then they own all of what society produces in perpetuity. They can sit on their dragon hoards and laugh as they gobble up any new creation that strays too close. And people wonder why everything is a sequel of a sequel of a sequel owned by massive corporations.
lightnsfw@reddthat.com 2 months ago
I was trying to keep it simple.
I would have paid them by purchasing the iphone and whatever software I used. I paid for the car that transported me. I would have paid for my education. People can also give their work away for free if they want, or be compensated by ads as in the case of Youtube or FOSS.
What do you think ChatGPT is trying to do? It’s already being used to churn out shitloads of garbage content. They’re not making things better.
Drewelite@lemmynsfw.com 2 months ago
By that rationalization, OpenAI is paying their Internet bill, and for a copy of Dune, so they’re free to use any content they acquired to make their product better. Your original argument wasn’t akin to, “Shouldn’t someone using an iPhone pay for one?” It was “Shouldn’t Apple get a cut of everything made with the iPhone?”
You could make the argument that people use ChatGPT to churn out garbage content, sure, but a lot of cinephiles would accuse your proverbial indie movie of being the same and blame Apple for creating the iPhone and enabling it. If you want to make that argument, go ahead. But don’t pretend it has anything to do with people getting paid fairly for what they made.
lightnsfw@reddthat.com 2 months ago
The problem is that they didn’t pay for the content they’ve acquired and they’re selling it to others. The creators are not being compensated and may not want to participate in AI development at all. If the creators agree to it then fine but most do not. Just look at what’s happening with art. People are scraping all of an artists work to create AI pictures in their style and impersonate them. That’s not okay.