Comment on Congress Wants Tech Companies to Pay Up for AI Training Data
DrMcRobot@lemmy.world 5 months agoThat’s a pretty dumb comparison. Are you suggesting that people who create stuff used to train AI are obligated to provide that education for free? People who create books/educational aids for teachers to use in classrooms still demand to be paid for that. Teachers are paid for delivering that education. The kids don’t pay the teachers, as a society we tax people because education benefits us all, but the teachers are still paid (not enough!)
Human brain (any brain, really) is a natural neural network which is trained throughout its life the same way an artificial neural network is. Nothing is original, every creator is "stealing" from every other creator who's work they have studied to become better creators. No creator ever in history has created anything in pure, absolute vaccuum. Every creation is a remix and amalgamation of previously created works.
And intellectual property is a spook , anyway. No-one can own an idea.
I hate the term intellectual property. It’s a word used to describe vastly different concepts with vastly different legal backgrounds and problems.
Copyright is theoretically a good thing, giving an artist or writer the time to profit from their work before the work becomes public domain, incentivizing the work. The current international agreements around it are absolutely bonkers thanks to Disney. The fact that the copyright persists after death, let alone for a century, is complete madness. The artist obviously can’t profit from their work after they’re dead. It’s an absolute shameless cash grab that destroys culture.
Patents are also theoretically a good thing, basically copyright for industrial machines, and the duration is pretty ok, but they need to be much more heavily restricted in what you can put patents on. Patenting a specific machine design is fine, patenting molecules or math breaks the entire system. Software patents are blatantly absurd and broken.
Trade secrets, the protection of specific recipes, client lists and strategies, can be abused to protect companies against disclosing information that may be very pertinent to their customers and governments. The Coca-Cola recipe or lists of clients as a trade secret is fine imho, but they can also abuse trade secret law to hide systems that lie about your car’s emissions.
Trademarks help protect consumers against knockoff brands that pretend to be what they’re not. This is the least abused type of “IP”. This doesn’t mean there aren’t bad actors out there registering tons of different trademarks to squat on those designs & names, hoping to force a new company to pay up to use the name. Trademark squatting could theoretically be solved by annulling the trademark if the company isn’t actively using it. Trademarks are currently much too easy to maintain.
All of this to say, lumping all of these different laws into “IP” is not useful at all when talking about the goals of the different legislations, what they’re trying to do, and how they fail.
Human brain (any brain, really) is a natural neural network
But the big difference between us and the AI is that we have motivation and drive. We don't exist for a split second for the sole purpose of fulfilling a prompt. We can take what we've learned and create new things with it. The AI just spits out what it already knows. Not what is possible to do with what it knows.
Property is a spook generally.
Dran_Arcana@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I think he’s suggesting that it’s pretty dystopian to let creators decide that their content is free to view but only if you’re a human willing to let companies spy on you while watching it.
It’s either free or it’s not.
SkyNTP@lemmy.ml 5 months ago
Not a great comparison. AI training is not problematic because of consumption, it’s a problem because it is then used to circumvent copyright law.
Dran_Arcana@lemmy.world 5 months ago
There are no contracts signed agreeing to that exchange by either me nor the scrapers. Legally, it’s free.