Comment on The AI-focused COPIED Act would make removing digital watermarks illegal
Grimy@lemmy.world 2 months agoThis is more akin to diverting a public river into private land so the landowner can charge everyone what they were getting for free.
The river cannot be dammed and this bill doesn’t aim to even try.
trollbearpig@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t understand what you guys mean by “the river cannot be dammed”. The LLM models need to be retrained all the time to include new data and in general to get them to change their behavior in any way. Wouldn’t this bill apply to all these companies as soon as they retrain their models?
I mean, I get the point that old models would be exempt from the law since laws can’t be retroactive. But I don’t get how that’s such a big deal. These companies would be stuck with old models if they refuse to train new ones. And as much hype as there is around AI, current models are still shit for the most part.
Also, can you explain why you guys think this would stop open source models? I have always though that the best solution to stop these fucking plagiarism machines was for the open source community to create an open source training set were people contribute their art/text/whatever. Does this law prevents this? Honestly to me this panic sounds like people without any artistic talent wanted to steal the work of artist and they are now mad they can’t do it.
Grimy@lemmy.world 2 months ago
The game right now is about better training methods and curating current datasets, new data is not needed.
Obviously though, eventually they will want new data so their models aren’t stuck in the past but this won’t stop them from getting it. There isn’t a future where individuals broker with google on how much they get paid, all that data is already owned by the platform it’s being posted on. Almost all websites slap on their own copyright or something similar, even for images. Deviant art and even Cara, the platform that’s suppose to be artist friendly, does this. Anything uploaded to Google maps gets a copyright on it if I’m not mistaken, Reddit as well. This data will be prohibitively expensive to create a moat and strengthen soft monopolies.
Public datasets are great but aren’t enough in most cases. This is also the equivalent of saying “well they diverted the river, why don’t you build yourself a stream”. It’s also problematic since by it’s public nature, it means corporations can come over, dip their cup in the water and throw it into their river. It brings down theiir costs while making sure nothing can actually compete with them.
Also worth noting that there is no worthy public dataset for videos. 98% of the data is owned by YouTube or Hollywood.
trollbearpig@lemmy.world 2 months ago
My man, I think you are mixin a lot of things. Let’s go by parts.
First, you are right that almost all websites get some copyright rights when you post on their platforms. At best, some license the content as Creative Commons or similar licenses. But that’s not new, that has been this way forever. If people are surprised that they are paying with their data at this point I don’t know what to say hahaha. The change with this law would be that no one, big tech companies or open source, gets to use this content for free to train new models right?
Which brings me back to my previous question, this law applies to old data too right? You say “new data is not needed” (which is not true for chat LLMs that want to include new data for example), but old data is still needed to use the new methods or to curate the datasets. And most of this old data was acquired by ignoring copyright laws. What I get from this law is that no one, including these companies, gets to keep using this “illegaly” acquired data now right? I mean, I’m pretty sure this is the case since movie studios and similar are the ones pushing for this law, they will not go like “it’s ok you stole all our previous libraries, just don’t steal the new stuff” hahahaha.
I do get your point that the most likely end result is that movie studios, record labels, social media platforms, etc, will just start selling the rights to train on their data and the only companies who will be able to afford this are the big tech companies. But still, I think this is a net possitive (weird times for me to be on the side of these awful companies hahaha).
First of all, it means no one, including big tech companies, get to steal content that is not theirs or given to them willingly. I’m particularly interested in open source code, but the same applies to indie art and any other form of art outside of the big companies. When we say that we want to stop the plagiarism it’s not a joke. Tech companies are using LLMs to attack the open source community by stealing the code under the excuse of LLMs being transformative (bullshit of course). Any law that stops this is a possitive to me.
And second of all, consider the 2 futures we have in front of us. Option one is we get laws like this, forcing AI to comply with copyright law. Which basically means we maintain the current status quo for intellectual property. Not great obviously, but the alrtenative is so much worse. Option two is we allow people to use LLMs to steal all the intellectual property they want, which puts an end to basically any market incentives to produce art by humans. Again, the current copyright system is awful. But why do you guys want a system were we as individuals have to keep complying with copyright but any company can bypass that with an LLM? Or how do you guys think this is going to pan out if we just don’t regulate AI?
Grimy@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Google already paid 6 million to Reddit for their dataset (preemptively since I’m guessing they are lobbying for laws like this), I didn’t get a dime. Who do you think this helps here?
My point is that this essentially insure that ONLY big tech companies will get to use the content. Do you think they mind spending a few million if it gives them a monopoly? They actively want this.
If it’s between the platform I used getting paid for my content while I get nothing and then I have to pay Openai to use a tool built with my content or the platform and me getting nothing while I get free AI, I will chose the latter.
There are two scenarios and in both, AI massively brings up productivity and huge layoffs happen. The difference is in one scenario, the tools are priced low enough so it’s economical to replace 5 workers with them but high enough so those same workers can’t afford them and compete with the business that just fired them. A situation where no company can remain competitive without paying Openai or Google 50k a month is a dystopian nightmare.
Open source is the best way to make sure this doesn’t happen and while these laws are the smallest of speed bumps for big tech companies, it is a literal wall for FOSS.
The best solution would be to copyleft all models using public data, the second best would be to leave things as is. This isn’t a solution but regulatory capture.