Because the outcome of suing first is to address the potential outcome of what could happen based on what OenAI is doing right now. Kind of like how safety regulations are intended to prevent future problems based on what has happened previously, but expanded similar potential dangers instead of waiting for each exact scenario to happen.
Comment on George R.R. Martin and other authors sue OpenAI for copyright infringement
AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 1 year ago
The authors added that OpenAI’s LLMs could result in derivative work “that is based on, mimics, summarizes, or paraphrases” their books, which could harm their market.
Ok, so why not wait until those hypothetical violations occur and then sue?
snooggums@kbin.social 1 year ago
c0mbatbag3l@lemmy.world 1 year ago
The difference is that you’re trying to sue someone based on what could happen. That’s like sueing some random author because they read your book and could potentially make a story that would be a copy of it.
LLM’d are trained on writings in the language and understand how to structure sentences based on their training data. Do AI models plagiarize anymore than someone using their understanding of the English language is plagiarizing when they construct a brand new sentence. After all, we learn how to write by reading the language and learning the rules, is the training data we read when we were kids being infringed whenever we write about similar topics?
When someone uses AI to plagiarize you sue them into eternity for all I care, but no one seems concerned with the implications of trying to a sue someone/something because they trained an intelligence by letting it read publicly available written works. Reading and learning isn’t allowed because you could maybe one day possibly use that information to break copyright law.
abbotsbury@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Do AI models plagiarize anymore than someone using their understanding of the English language is plagiarizing when they construct a brand new sentence?
Yes
c0mbatbag3l@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Damn, debate over I guess.
lloram239@feddit.de 1 year ago
These replies would be a lot more valuable if you’d actually come up with some examples.
Very_Bad_Janet@kbin.social 1 year ago
I see this more like suing a musician for using a sample of your recording or a certain amount of notes or lyrics from your song without your consent. The musician created a new work but it was based on your previous songs. I'm sure if a publisher asked ChatGBT to produce a GRRM-like novel, it would create a plagiarism-lite mash up of his works that were used as writing samples, using pieces of his plots and characters, maybe even quoting directly. Sampling GRRM's writing, in other words.
Fosheze@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Except doing all of that is perfectly legal. With music it’s called a remix or a cover. With stories it’s called fanfic.
If the AI is exactly replicating an artists works then that is copyright infringment without a doubt. But the AI isn’t doing that and it likely isn’t even capable of doing that.
snooggums@kbin.social 1 year ago
Suing anyone for copyright infringement based on current infringement always includes justification that includes current and future potential losses. You don't necessarily get paid for the potential losses, but they are still justification for them to stop infringing right now.
c0mbatbag3l@lemmy.world 1 year ago
There is no current infringement unless they’ve discovered some knockoff series that was created with AI and is being used for profit. That’s what I’m saying.
uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 year ago
But if OpenAI cannot legally be inspired by your work, the implication is humans can’t either.
It’s not how copyright works. Transformative work is transformative.
kibiz0r@midwest.social 1 year ago
How is that the implication?
Inspiration is something we do through conscious experience. Just because some statistical analysis of a word cloud can produce sentences that trick a casual observer into thinking a person wrote them doesn’t make it a creative process.
In fact, I can prove to you that (so-called) AI can never be creative.
To get an AI to do anything, we have to establish a goal to measure against. You have to quantify it.
If you tell a human being “this is what it means to be creative; we have an objective measure of it”, do you know what they tend to do? They say “fuck your definition” and try to make something that breaks the rules in an interesting way. That’s the entire history of art.
You can even see that playing out with respect to AI. Artists going “You say AI art can’t be art, so I’m gonna enter AI pieces and see if you can even tell.”
That’s a creative act. But it’s not creative because of what the AI is doing. Much like Duchamp’s urinal wasn’t a creative object, but the act of signing it R Mutt and submitting it to a show was.
The kinds of AIs we design right now will never have a transformative R Mutt moment, because they are fundamentally bounded by their training. They would have to be trained to use novel input to dismantle and question their training (and have that change stick around), but even that training would then become another method of imitation that they could not escape. They can’t question quantification itself, because they are just quantitative processes — nothing more than word calculators.
uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 year ago
Those rules or objectives exist for human artists too. They’re just liquid, and human artists try to break them, or test the limits of stated rules to find the edges of the envelope of what counts as art. And more often than not (95% according to Theodore Sturgeon) they fail to sell, which could be from exceeding the boundaries of the expected art threshold, or just by doing it poorly.
Now you could argue (and I think you might be arguing) that creative acts or inspiration are both properties of personhood: That which we regard as a person can do art. If it’s done by nature, by a non-person animal (e.g. the Monkey Selfie) or by a mechanical process doesn’t count as a creative act, as inspiration, or as art. I get it, just as someone who uses a toaster to warm up pop-tarts is not regarded as actually cooking. That said:
a) you’d have to make that assertion by fiat. And your definition doesn’t count for anyone else, unless you pass a law or convince art-defining social groups to adhere to your definitions.
b) Capitalist interests don’t care. If it’s cheaper to make AI design their website or edit their film, and it does an adequate job cheaper than hiring an artist, they’re going to do it. Even if we make it illegal to use some works to train AI, that won’t stop it from leaking through via information technology services that scrape webs. Similarly ALPR companies, which use traffic cameras to track you in your car to determine your driving habits then sell that information to law enforcement who are totally violating your fourth-amendment rights when they do it, but it doesn’t stop them, and that information is used in court to secure convictions.
c) It’s not artists that control intellectual property, but publishing companies, and they’ve already been looking to churn out content as product the results of which we’ve seen in most blockbuster cinema offerings. The question is not if Fast & Furious XXIII is art but if people will pay to watch it. And IP law has been so long rotted to deny the public a robust public domain, we can expect they’ll lobby our representatives until they can still copyright content that is awash with AI elements.
Ultimately the problem is also not whether artist get paid for their work doing art. It’s that the most of us are desperate to get paid for anything and so it’s a right privilege when that anything is doing something arty. The strikes, the lawsuits, these are survival precarity talking. If we didn’t have to worry about that (say in an alternate reality where we had a robust UBI program) AI replacing artists would be a non-issue. People would continue to create for the sake of creation as we saw during the epidemic lockdown of 2020 and the consequential Great Resignation.
Generative AI is not at the magical level that managers and OG artists and capitalists thing it is, but short of war, a food crisis or our servers getting overrun by compound foul weather, it’s going to get better and eventually AI will outpace Theodore Sturgeon’s threshold of quality material to crap. This isn’t what is going to confine human-crafted content to the fan-art section. It’s that our shareholder-primacy-minded capitalist masters are looking to replace anyone they pay with a cheaper robot, and will at first opportunity. That’s the problem we have to face right now.
gmtom@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I really wish you lot would educate yourself on AI and the history of AI creativity and art before convincing yourself you know what you’re talking about snd giving everyone your Hot Take.
radix@lemmy.world 1 year ago
The way I’ve heard it described: If I check out a home repair book and use that knowledge to do some handy-man work on the side, do I owe the publisher a cut of my profits?
admin@lemmy.my-box.dev 1 year ago
If, without asking for permission, 1 person used my work to learn from it and taught themself to replicate it I’d be honoured. If somebody is teaching a class full of people that, I’d have objections. So when a company is training a machine to do that very same thing, and will be able to do that thousands of time per second, again, without asking for permission first, I’d be pissed.
agent_flounder@lemmy.one 1 year ago
That’s a terrible analogy.
Reading a book designed to instruct you how to do tasks is not the same thing as training generative AI with novels, say, to write a novel for you.
The user of the AI benefits from the work and talent of the authors with little effort of their own.
agent_flounder@lemmy.one 1 year ago
Generative AI training is not the same thing as human inspiration. And transformative work has this far has only been performed by a human. Not by a machine used by a human.
Clearly using a machine that simply duplicates a work to resell runs afoul of copyright.
What about using a machine that slightly rewords that work? Is that still allowed? Or a machine that does a fairly significant rewording? What if it sort of does a mashup of two works? Or a mashup of a dozen? Or of a thousand?
Under what conditions does it become ok to feed a machine with someone’s art (without their permission) and sell the resulting output?
c0mbatbag3l@lemmy.world 1 year ago
That’s the point, it’s almost a ship of Theseus situation.
At what point does the work become its own compared to a copy? How much variation is required? How many works are needed for sampling before its designing information based on large scale sentence structures instead of just copying exactly what it’s reading?
Legislation can’t occur until a benchmark is reached or we just say wholesale that AI is copyright infringement based purely on its existence and training.
AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Safety regulations are created by regulatory agencies empowered by Congress, not private parties suing each other over hypotheticals.
snooggums@kbin.social 1 year ago
It was a comparison about preventing future issues, not a literally equivalent legal situation.
AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 1 year ago
The difference is that, to sue someone, you have to demonstrate that they were acting outside of existing laws and caused you real harm. Case law was never intended to address hypothetical future scenarios—that’s what lawmakers and regulators are for.
admin@lemmy.my-box.dev 1 year ago
Because that is far harder to prove than showing OpenAI used his IP without permission.
In my opinion, it should not be allowed to train a generative model on data without permission of the rights holder. So at the very least, OpenAI should publish (references to) the training data they used so far, and probably restrict the dataset to public domain–and opt-in works for future models.
Aezora@lemm.ee 1 year ago
I don’t see why they (authors/copyright holders) have any right to prevent use of their product beyond purchasing. If I legally own a copy of Game of Thrones, I should be able to do whatever the crap I want with it.
And legally, I can. I can quote parts of it, I can give it to a friend to read, I can rip out a page and tape it to the wall, I can teach my kid how to read with it.
Why should I not be allowed to train my AI with it?
Anonymousllama@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Next if you come up with some ideas of your own fantasy environment after watching game of thrones, they’ll want to chase you down considering they didn’t give you expressed permission to be “inspired” by their work 🙄
gmtom@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Its amazing how many people are against overly restrictive copyright rules that hamper creativity… until it involves AI.
koljarhr@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
Ownership is never absolute. Just like with music - you are not allowed to use it commercially i.e. in your restaurant, club, beauty salon, etc. without paying extra. You are also not allowed to do the same with books - for example, you shouldn’t share scans online, although it’s “your” book.
However, it is not clear how AI infringes on the rights of authors in this case. Because a human may read a book and produce a similar book in the same style legally.
admin@lemmy.my-box.dev 1 year ago
And basically, I can. I can quote parts of it, I can give it to a friend to read, I can rip out a page and tape it to the wall, I can teach my kid how to read with it.
These are things you’re allowed to do with your copy of the book. But you are not allowed to, for example create a copy of it and give that to a friend, create a play or a movie out of it. You don’t own the story, you own a copy of the medium.
As to why it’s unethical, see my comment here.
koljarhr@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
I agree, the ownership is not absolute.
However, just as a person does not own the work of an author, the authors do not own words, grammar, sentences or even their own style. Similarly, they do not own the names of the characters in their books or the universe in which the plot is happening. They even do not “own” their own name.
So the only question remaining becomes whether is AI allowed to “read” a book. In the future authors might prohibit it, but hey, we’re just going to end up with a slightly more archaic-speaking GPT over time because it will not train on new releases. And that’s fine by me.
Grimy@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Okay, the problem is there are only about three companies with either enough data or enough money to buy it. Any open source or small time AI model is completely dead in the water. Since our economy is quickly moving towards being AI driven, it would basically guarantee our economy is completely owned by a handful of companies like Getty Images.
Any artist with less weight than GRR and Taylor Swift is still screwed, they might get a peanut or two at most.
I’d rather get an explosion of culture, even if it mean GRR doesn’t get a last fat paycheck and Hollywood loses control of its monopoly.
admin@lemmy.my-box.dev 1 year ago
I get it. I download movies without paying for it too. It’s super convenient, and much cheaper than doing it the right thing.
But I don’t pretend it’s ethical. And I certainly don’t charge other people money to benefit from it.
Either there are plenty of people who are fine with their work being used for AI purposes (especially in a open source model), or they don’t agree to it - in which case it would be unethical to do so.
Just because something is practical, doesn’t mean it’s right.
Grimy@lemmy.world 1 year ago
There’s so much more at stake, it’s not remotely the same as pirating. AI is poised to take over any kind of job that requires only a computer and a telephone. I’d rather have robust open source options that a handful of companies exerting a subscription tax on half the economy.
Any overt legislation will only hurt us the consumer while 99.9% of the actual artists and contributers won’t see any benefit whatsoever.
Short of aggressively nationalizing any kind of AI endeavour, making it as free and accessible as possible is the best option imo.
koljarhr@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
Assuming that books used for GPT training were indeed purchased, not pirated, and since “AI training” was not prohibited at the time of the purchase, the engineers had every right to use them. Maybe authors in the future could prohibit “AI training” but for the books purchased before they do, “AI training” is a fair usage.
admin@lemmy.my-box.dev 1 year ago
I think we’ll find our whether or not that is true will be decided in this trial.
Touching_Grass@lemmy.world 1 year ago
We could get Elon musk to develop a corpus and train all AI on that instead of training AI on a corpus from scraping websites.
Fraylor@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Elon can’t develop shit.
NotAPenguin@kbin.social 1 year ago
People can do that too, are they gonna sue all people?
Noumena@kbin.social 1 year ago
I have nipples Greg, could you sue me?