I don't exactly love the outsourcing of human creativity to AI, and personally really hope society continues to value actual human creativity, but the illegality of this stuff simply hasn't been established.
What is clear is that directly reproducing copyrighted works is illegal. Additionally, a human taking extensive inspiration from copyrighted works is generally perfectly legal. Some of the key questions are:
- Are AI models illegally reproducing copyrighted works?
- Does the sheer ease of use and scale of AI make a meaningful difference such that extensive inspiration is illegal?
- If AIs being extensively inspired by copyrighted works is in fact legal under current law, should it be? Or should legislation be passed explicitly stating that there's a material difference due to the drastically different speed and scale of, say, telling an AI to write Winds of Winter compared to an actual human struggling for years and years, and thus AI works need to be treated differently?
Personally, I'd say that (1) is a maybe, (2) is a no under current law, and therefore (3) is a yes, and I'd love to see legislation passed clarifying how we as a society want to treat AI works. I'm strongly of the opinion that human creativity is something very special and that it should be protected, but I am concerned about a future where that isn't valued very much in the face of an AI that knows your personal tastes exactly and can simply generate all the "content" you want in an instant.
Laticauda@lemmy.ca 9 months ago
Lemmy’s opinion on the topic is often very biased towards the views of tech bros rather than writers/creators, at least that’s what I’ve observed. Tech bros have a boner for LLM AIs. They don’t have anything to lose from the development of these AIs, so they don’t seem to understand the concerns of people who do.
cloudy1999@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
This has been a surprise for me. I see this community as pro privacy, anti big tech, and anti capitalism. AI seems like a hot button issue at the confluence of all three, and yet comments suggest many have rose tinted glasses for tech companies with LLMs.
jpeps@lemmy.world 9 months ago
To pile onto that, I was recently disturbed to find I was the dissenting voice in a comment thread by saying that we should not use AI to produce generated CSAM. The top comment defended the idea.
mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
It is impossible to generate CSAM.
That’s the entire goddamn point of calling it CSAM. To stop people mislabeling drawings as CP, when they don’t understand that Bart Simpson doesn’t have the same moral standing as a real human child.
mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
And you’re surprised this correlates against letting authors control information for money?
The software-freedom crowd just wants OpenAI’s models published, so no single company gets to limit access to the distilled essence of all public knowledge. Being against “big tech” has never meant being against… tech. We’re not Amish. We’re open-source diehards. Sometimes that comes through as declaring a vendetta against intellectual property, as a concept. No kidding those folks aren’t lining up behind GRRM, when he declares a robot’s not allowed to learn English from his lengthy and well-known books.
cloudy1999@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
My comment addresses my perception of Lemmy users, not the open source community. These two groups are not the same as is evidenced by the frequent complaints on the front page about open source gatekeeping and quantity of open source topics.
Let me add, I’m also a long time user and contributor of/to open source and free software. I think it’s not correct to assume we’re a single group that all share the same opinion. Best, cloudy1999
damndotcommie@lemmy.basedcount.com 9 months ago
Yeah, I was downvoted to hell in a copyright thread for suggesting that my work had worth and that I wasn’t just freely handing it over to the general public. Sounds like a bunch of 12 year olds that have never created a fucking thing in their life except for some artistic skidmarks in their underwear. These kids have a lot to learn about life.
scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 9 months ago
Look at any discussion around Sync for Lemmy and you’ll get the same thing. Oh a developer created an app that is a flawless experience so far and looks great, and he wants 20 bucks for it? Burn him at the stake!
I’m all for FOSS and stuff but people here lean more entitled than they do “free and open”.
McScience@discuss.online 9 months ago
Yeah. I write software for a living and I use open source stuff extensively. I contribute sometimes to open source projects, but not everything can be open source or I’ll be back to flipping burgers.
HawlSera@lemm.ee 9 months ago
Personally I write for free, simply because of the joy of it, and what I heard that Google was using people’s Google Drives is free training for their bots, I pulled everything. Not because I want to make a buck, but because Google sure as hell was going to make a buck off of my work without paying me a dime. It’s a little known as principle.
Neve8028@lemm.ee 9 months ago
On top of this, it’s becoming increasingly clear that many tech bros have never been genuinely moved by a piece of art whether it’s visual or written so they genuinely don’t understand that AI art is devoid of any real emotional impact. AI art just throws together cliches. It reminds me of that shitty AI generated conversation between Plato and Bill Gates when were so many tech bros talking about how “inspiring” it was.
Don’t get me wrong, I love these AI tools coming out but they’re so over hyped sometimes.
scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 9 months ago
The standard for all tech. At the beginning of this I remember them telling me that it was all a new age. Yeah, I’ve been through a few of those now. My favorites were driverless cars and crypto, the same bros told me the same things back then too. Truth is we’ll get a few new really cool things, society will get a bit worse for it, and then we’ll find a new shiny thing.
LLMs and AI aren’t even new, I studied about them in college. 10 years ago. It’s just that we have faster hardware that can finally support them.
mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
This theoretical sci-fi stuff from barely a decade ago is now real enough to threaten entire industries. Yawn, am I right?
mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
Disagreement isn’t lack of understanding. Some of us are opposed to copyright, entirely. I’m personally not. But: this is not what copyright exists to protect against. And the more it feeds on, the less it resembles any specific work.
Fuck all the replies calling people unfeeling worthless robots over this. Miserable dehumanizing hypocrites.
HawlSera@lemm.ee 9 months ago
Personally I think the copyright system should be abolished entirely, alongside capitalism, but I am radical like that
ArthurParkerhouse@lemm.ee 9 months ago
I just find “intellectual property” copyright to be completely unethical.
bermuda@beehaw.org 9 months ago
In another thread I saw today somebody said the best way to learn how to make an Android app was to buy chatgpt. That was their advice…
Laticauda@lemmy.ca 9 months ago
The number of people I’ve seen who think Chatgpt is some sort of authority or reliable source of information is genuinely concerning.
bermuda@beehaw.org 9 months ago
Exactly. It’s called “chat” for a reason. Not wikipediagpt