p3x.deOpenAI Pleads That It Can’t Make Money Without Using Copyrighted Materials for Free
submitted 2 weeks ago by flop_leash_973
futurism.com/the-byte/openai-copyrighted-materi…
submitted 2 weeks ago by flop_leash_973
futurism.com/the-byte/openai-copyrighted-materi…
Honestly this meme is way understating the sinisterness
I’m going to start pirating again and if I ever get caught up I’ll just inform them I’m training AI models.
Yeah, but you are not rich, so you will suffer the consequences
Just training Natural Intelligence…
The current generation of data hungry AI models with energy requirements of a small country should be replaced ASAP, so if copyright laws spur innovation in that direction I am all for it.
If your company can’t exist without breaking the law, then it shouldn’t exist.
I disagree. Laws aren’t always moral. Texas could outlaw donations to the Rainbow Railroad and it would be wrong, the organization should still exist.
But in this case it is pretty clear that the plagiarism machine is in fact, bad and should not exist, at least not in it’s current form.
I feel like in that case one would be loudly fighting to get the law changed, rather than insisting it’s actually fine. Maybe that’s just semantics.
I don’t think the people who are supporters of jury nullification are saying such laws are fine.
Well, some laws are made to be broken, the question is whether this is one of them.
Boo fucking hoo. Everyone else has to make licensing agreements for this kind of shit, pay up.
Hey, me either. I guess I can steal too.
You wouldn’t download a collection of all the art and knowledge ever documented in the entire history of the known universe…
The hell I would…
Honestly, that sounds like a You problem, Sam.
I could make a lot of money too if I could use copyrighted shit for free.
This would be a very interesting case if this ever gets to court over copyright…
I mean you do. All the time. We all do. You’re allowed to use them, you’re just not allowed to copy them. It’s in the name you know, copy right.
Some idea for others: If OpenAI wins, then use this case when you get busted for sellling bootleg Blu-Rays (since DVDs are long obsolete) from your truck.
Dvds still account for around half of physical media sales. Far from obsolete.
Although that’s mostly because physical media sales are in the toilet.
statsignificant.com/…/the-rise-fall-and-slight-ri…
While Blu-ray and HD-DVD were arguing over what comes after DVDs, they were both consigned to the dustbin. And while I like to not be reliant on subscription services, I’ve got to say a bunch of files on a Jellyfin server is much more convenient than a shelf full of plastic and foil discs.
With modern internet speeds, there’s no reason you can’t have full UHD-BR quality streamed over the internet.
Cost is a prohibitive reason for many (hardware, internet).
I do believe files are better than physical media, simply because with the proper setup they’re easily backed up and won’t degrade or break.
That’s the US social reality, there is some little place called ‘rest of the world’, where stuff can be different. I assure you that India and Pakistan and Africa still sell loooads of bootleg DVDs (that will be impossible to give precise numbers), and also that Japan has both still strong rental and collector cultures of boxes of physical media of anime and other audiovisuals (both blu-rays and dvds in that case). Not to mention bureacracy, like archiving stuff for official purposes (police cases, etc) still overwhelmingly done on DVDs. DVDs are still the most predominant physical media by far.
There’s no source in your comment so it’s taken with a pinch of salt. But I’m more amazed that DVDs are only half of physical sales. Unless Blu-ray is the other half of physical sales.
Here’s a source: lemmy.ml/post/19567861
Ah so it’s all disc format. I was worried tape was making a combat outside of storage.
That’s the US social reality, there is some little place called ‘rest of the world’, where stuff can be different. I assure you that India and Pakistan and Africa still sell loooads of bootleg DVDs (that will be impossible to give precise numbers), and also that Japan has both still strong rental and collector cultures of boxes of physical media of anime and other audiovisuals (both blu-rays and dvds in that case). Not to mention bureacracy, like archiving stuff for official purposes (police cases, etc) still overwhelmingly done on DVDs. DVDs are still the most predominant physical media by far.
I don’t know about you, but that’s my endgame, I want the end of Intellectual property, which in my opinion is the dumbest idea and the biggest scam of capitalism.
Here’s the problem: the big corpos also will gain this power, and with the brand recognition and their reach…
Bet they get the pass that the Internet Archive didn’t.
Cool. If OpenAI gets a pass, then piracy should be legal, right? I mean what good is a trademark or copyright law?
Edit: “I can’t make money without stealing other people’s work” is definitely a take
No, see, piracy is just you downloading movies for yourself. To be like OpenAI you need to download it, put it in a pretty package with a bow, then sell it over and over again. Only when it’s piracy for profit do you get to beg and plead for a pass.
But I’m an aspiring artist, without pirating thousands of movies and TV shows, I’ll never make my ‘highly profitable’ magnum opus!
I’m an aspiring dead beat, with out food to provide basic biochemical energy I’ll never beat any dead.
You skipped a crucial step: first you gotta raise a few hundred million in VC funding from Silicon Valley bigwigs!
So if I download a movie and use a voice changer to change all the dialog to sound like the donkey from Shrek, I should be good.
When you get this to work, hit me up for some venture capital.
For profit that you can kick back a chunk of as campaign donations
“I can’t be at financial peace if I have to pay for every movie I want to watch”
You’re not repackaging and selling it on for profit tho. That’s different and thus illegal because reasons
then perish
If I was exempt from copyright, I too could easily make oodles of money
How do you like my new song? I call it “while my guitar gently weeps” , a real banger. the B side is a little holiday ditty I put together all by myself called “White Christmas” .
Then it sounds like your business is a failure and should be shutdown.
If not, The Pirate Bay would like a word.
I’d love to see how scared some big companies would be if we could decriminalize piracy
WHO is the one guy who downvotes you???
“NO! UNPROFITABLE BUSINESSES DESERVE TO THRIVE!!! MUST FEED THE BILLIONAIRES!!!”
Maybe OpenAI learned to downvote…
I’ve seen threads where every single comment, no matter how anodyne, has 1 downvote. Don’t bother yourself over it. That way lies madness.
anodyne /ăn′ə-dīn″/ adjective
tanks fer noo werd dae fren
First read serving sausage pain.
That sounds like a misusage of a very common word in French: anodin
I’d say a good 10% of English is just misusing words from other languages to be fair.
It’s also really easy to mis-swipe on a comment on some apps.
Some people also suck
Downvoting for the use of an uncommon word.
Supercalifragalisticexpialidocuious
Edit: 10 people here didn’t grow up with Mary Poppins…
You spelled it wrong you brick.
Lmao the down votes on this are really funny to me
Sound was quite atrocious, downvoted 👎
I always figure it’s someone whose life has become so pathetic, they bitterly downvote every single comment to try feel some control. And as a result, they feel like the Phantom of the Socials. Alone, but the true master of the place.
“Everyone must wonder, ‘Who keeps downvoting us?’ It is I! The true Master of Lemmy and- No, mother!.. Yes, mother!.. I tried but nobody wants to talk to me!.. I don’t want to!.. Yeah, she’s cute!.. I don’t want you to do that!.. Mother put the phone down!”
LOL, I can picture this person. They probably have a gross-looking bandaid on their downvote finger.
There are some hardcore “copyright shouldn’t exist” folks out there.
The guy who wants their AI girlfriend yesterday.
To steel man the downvoters, maybe there are other solutions besides killing off every business that can’t afford to comply with copyright. After all, isn’t the whole point of copyright to enable the capitalist exploitation of information?
Ask an mbin user lol
I’m unclear on context. Are you saying Mbin users can see who upvotes/downvotes?
Votes aren’t private on the fediverse, it’s just a that some interfaces won’t display them. Also, instance admins can see who voted too.
But like @Boozilla@lemmy.world said
It mainly useful for admins to detect if there is some vote manipulation going on.
Sam Altman lurking around…
That’s the bot that ChatGPT operates here on Lemmy.
Lol how about every pirate who fundamentally opposes the copyright system?
How about everyone who uses Google and doesn’t want to see it shut down for scraping copyrighted content to provide a search engine?
Seriously, explain to me what’s different at a fundamental level about OpenAI scraping the web and transforming the data through an LLM and Google scraping the web and transforming the data through their algorithms (which include LLMs)?
Web search used to be about scraping the web to find and present other people’s work as just that… their work. Now the handful of websites claim ownership of the contributions of everyone, and at this point it’s just corporations arguing about who owns your stuff. Pirates will not win out in this argument, except maybe in the very short term.
Search engines provide source, they scrap for indexing, but your search gives a list of websites that matches that you will then likely visit. That’s a big fundamental difference.
Google (used to) scrapes the specific details authorized by robots.txt and uses it to make your content visible.
OpenAI scrapes everything it can technically see, ignoring robots.txt and feeds i to a black box and regurgitates it claiming it’s something new, that it deserves to be paid for.
Quite different actually.
So if OpenAI complies with Robots.txt files then there’s no issue right?
Because then they’re identical. Open AI spent a bunch of money building a powerful system they feed those results to, as did Google.
No, the issue is that anything AI creates is by definition derivative. Google doesn’t whip up generative content, it points you to content.
OpenAI is claiming that they can’t do shit without scraping copyrighted works and we all know that’s a load of BS because we’re adrift in a sea of royalty-free text. Critical mass happened well over a decade ago. The amount of new random crap hosted on the internet in the past 30 days would probably take 500 years for one person to digest. Bear at a stream watching an impossibly large amount of salmon jumping
I dont see why why being downvoted you make some very good points.
Id actually like to see google shut down on copyright grounds. The innovation of necessity would drive foss search alternatives that just ignore said restrictions and most likly we would end up with a better product.
I appreciate the defense of the blind downvotes, though I can’t say I necessarily see how Foss search engines would even be allowed to exist in that case?
There is a difference between allowed and what people do. Piracy isnt allowed u can still pirate literally anything if u want to tho.
Google doesn’t sell the search engine as a product.
Yes they do, just indirectly, it’s how they monopolized the online advertising business.
So… they are a non-profit (as they initially were) or a public research lab then. That would perfectly fine to say the path that they chose and so happen to make them unbelievably rich, is not viable.
They don’t have a business if they can’t legally make profit, it’s not that hard. I’m sure people who are pursing superhuman intelligence can figure out that much, if not they can ask their “AI” some help to understand.
What a joke.
I can’t make money without using OpenAI’s paid products for free.
Checkmate motherfucker
In every other circumstance I can think of, “I can’t make money doing a thing unless I break the law” means don’t do that thing.
Why should AI get special treatment?
Well in almost every other circumstance, you’re forgetting Uber and Airbnb.
Now about that fake money for criminals - it was quite useful for me when I needed to send money to my sister, with me being in Russia and her being outside, and it was year 2022. Also with the way ruble sank after the war, buying BTC hours after seeing news of it starting was probably a bargain. Would be twice as expensive the next day.
I haven’t used Uber (Yandex Taxi) and Airbnb (asocial type and have responsibilities), and I agree about the plagiarism machine.
So you didn’t do the crime, but your home country did, and you could use crypto to make life easier despite the repercussions. I’d say it’s not a bad fit.
Nah. Arbitrary shit that doesn’t hurt those who did the crime, but does hurt me, is not repercussions. Neither is it a crime to find tools to solve such problems.
Sorry to break it to you, but bypassing sections is a crime. You just proved his point. Sanctions are supposed to make life difficult for the people in sanctioned countries so that those people maybe start doing something to the person causing the problems.
It may be useful, but it was designed to facilitate criminal payments.
Nah. They are supposed to reduce connectivity for everyone except the right people with connections, who deal in shit big enough, like oil, gas etc, but not us serfs and not businessmen who don’t respect their government officials enough to bribe them. This worked especially well in the Iron Curtain times, and it seems there are people nostalgic of that now.
First, spitting into my soup for something other people did is not going to make me more pissed at them (suppose I already was), it’s going to make me more pissed at those spitting into my soup.
Second, knowing that Israel isn’t sanctioned, Turkey isn’t sanctioned, Azerbaijan isn’t sanctioned, but Russia is, not being better, makes it extremely hard to believe that those sanctions are meant to solve problems. Even if I didn’t know how they work.
Third, a country can’t make something a crime outside their jurisdiction.
Ah yes, the original unviable silicon valley businesses! I love how they used their VC money to undercut and kill small businesses all over the world.
AirBNB is currently failing. Uber likely will when people catch on to “dynamic pricing”
Because they already raised hundreds of millions from investors
Because black numbers going up make shareholders happy
The more the original work is transformed, the more likely it is to be considered fair use rather than infringement.
He has committed the greatest crime imaginable! A crime against capitalism!
If a company cannot do business without breaking the law it simply is a criminal organisation. RICO act, anyone?
The law they’re breaking is civil, so they can only get sued; this is basically Napster. Also this case is is Britain, so RICO doesn’t apply.
If this is OK, downloading a movie to watch it, not to make any profit, is OK, right? If it isn’t, will they get fined proportionally to the people who get fined for downloading a movie?
They do want to make a profit though…
some countries this is actually legal, it’s just the redistributing part that is illegal
note: I’m oversimplifying here, the countries that allow for downloading aren’t actually letting you have it for free, it’s under the basis that you’ve already purchased one form of the movie and you are downloading it so you can preserve what you have purchased already
…then it doesn’t deserve to be in business.
I mean, which law? If Altman was selling shrooms or some blow that hasn’t been stepped on a dozen times, I might be willing to cut him some slack. At least that wouldn’t add a few million tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere.
Then OpenAI shouldn’t exist. That’s capitalism.
But if you’re the Internet Archive, fuck you its lawsuit time. I hate this cyberpunk present.
The Internet Archive does not create shareholder value
/s
Sounds like an argument slave owners would use. “My plantation can’t make money without free labor!”
“My private prison can’t make money without more overconvicted inmates!”
salon.com/…/private-prison-demands-new-mexico-and…
In any sane society, closing a private prison would be cause for celebration.
How do you think slave owners got bailouts after the 13th amendment was passed and the slaves got freed?
They used that part of the 13th that said "Well, except prisoners, those can be slaves." Local law enforcement rounded up former slaves on trumped up charges and leased them back to the same plantation owners they were freed from. Only now if they escaped they were "escaped criminals" and they could count on even northern law enforcement returning them. The US is still a pro-slavery country and will be as long as that part of the 13th amendment stands.
Reminds me of that time the Federal government granted land parcels to a bunch of former slaves (using land from plantations) and then rescinded them again.
Copying information is not the same thing as stealing, let alone forcing people into slavery.
appreciate the important reality check, but I think the parent was just highlighting the absurdity of the original argument with hyperbole.
people are in jail for doing exactly what this company is doing. either enforce the laws equally (!) or change them (whatever that means in late stage capitalism).
Let’s advocate for no one going to prison for scraping information then. Let’s pick the second one where we don’t put more people into prison.
agreed.
Even I should get a pass to view copyrighted movies and songs. I need it to train AI (Actual Intelligence).
oh no! We’ll miss you, bye.
Cool, so if openAI can do it, that means piracy is legal?
How about we just drastically limit copyright length to something much more reasonable, like the original 14 year duration w/ an optional one-time renewal for another 14 years.That should give AI companies a large corpus to train an AI with, while also protecting recent works from abuse. Perhaps we can round down to 10 years instead, which should still be more than enough for copyright holders to establish their brand on the market.
I think copyright has value, but I don’t think it has as much value as we’re giving it.
Honestly with the current pace of cultural output we’re at, even 5 years feels generous. What was made in 2019 that still seems terribly relevant… Is there still a brisk trade in Frozen II merch I’m not aware of?
Speaking as the father of a 4-year-old girl, there definitely is. Not that I disagree in principle, but it’s probably a bad example.
SFX cue: Wilhelm scream as I am slain by my bad opinion
Yeah nah, bad e.g. but I’m not convinced 5 years is too short.
Idk, I’ve seen plenty of books be popular something like 5 years after release, so having those be duplicated by bigger publishers in that time seems like a really bad idea, especially for smaller authors who have a harder time breaking through.
I think 10-15 w/ a one-time renewal for another 10-15 with proof that the rights holder didn’t recoup their investment sounds reasonable. They’d have to pay for that renewal (probably relative to expected/past sales), but it would be an option. It would suck to be at year 10 after launch, and suddenly there’s a ton of demand for your book (say, your recent release broke through, and people are reading your older works) so a different publisher swoops in and steals all of that profit. Or maybe a big movie producer decides to make a movie based on your book about 10 years after it has released, should they be allowed to just not pay you for that work?
The copyright system certainly has problems, but it does provide value to smaller creators.
I admit I was only thinking about the output of our largest firms. There’s room for that, and I could easily be persuaded that the strength and duration of IP law should be inversely proportional to the size of the IP holder itself. And especially whether it is held by the sole creator, or collectively by private interests. People should own what they personally made, as much as possible under the circumstances.
Eh, once you share something publicly, you no longer have complete control over it. You’ll always own it, but you won’t always have the authority to tell others how your work may be used.
And yeah, the renewal thing is an attempt to prioritize smaller creators (who may actually need the extra protections) over larger creators (who don’t need the extra protections).
exactly which “needs” are they trying to meet?
shareholders’ needs, like greater valuation
Yeah it’s right up there on the list of what shareholders need to survive:
Water
Food
Solid CAGR of investment portfolio
Shelter
Human contact
Etc
(CAGR being Compound Annual Growth Rate)
The needs of corpo CEOs trying to cut jobs
Their internal monetary needs ofc!
Sounds awesome, let’s lobby for shorter copyrights! ~30 years feels more than reasonable.
Yeah! I can’t make money running my restaurant if I have to pay for the ingredients, so I should be allowed to steal them. How else can I make money??
Alternatively:
OpenAI is no different from pirate streaming sites in this regard (loosely: streaming sites are way more useful to humanity). If OpenAI gets a pass, so should every site that’s been shut down for piracy.
If OpenAI wants a pass, then just like how piracy services make content freely open and available, they should make their models open.
Give me the weights, publish your datasets, slap on a permissive license.
If you’re not willing to contribute back to society with what you used from it, then you shouldn’t exist within society until you do so.
Piracy steals from the rich and gives to the poor. ChatGPT steals from the rich and the poor and keeps for itself.
Which is why they should be legally compelled to publicize all of their datasets, models, research, and share any profits they’ve made with the works they can get provenance data for, because otherwise, it’s an unfair use of the public sphere of content.
One could very easily argue that adblockers are piracy, and those would be stealing from every social media creator, small blog, and independent news site, but I don’t see many people arguing against that, even though that very well includes people who aren’t wealthy corporations.
The issue isn’t necessarily the use of the copyrighted content, it’s the unfair legal stance taken on who can use the content, and how they are allowed to profit (or not profit) from it.
I’m not saying there are no downsides, but I do feel like a simple black and white dichotomy doesn’t properly outline how piracy and generative AI training are relatively similar in terms of who they steal from, and it’s more of a matter of what is done with the content after it is taken that truly matters most.
No they shouldn’t. They should cease to exist
Good luck putting the cat back in the bag.
I have cats. Putting them back in a bag or box is easier
Well if everyone who’s copyrighted work independently sues OpenAI, that cat will be deceased real quick due to bankruptcy
Fuck copyright they used gplv3 code why isnt it open source
Generative AI is not going back into the bag. If not OpenAI, then someone else will control it. So we deal with them the next best way, force them to serve us, the people.
Nobody should profit from copyright violation. Yes, copyright law needs to change, but making money isn’t an exception
Then they can either pay for the copyrighted data they want to train on or lobby for copyright to be reigned in for everyone. Right now, they’re acting like entitled twats with a shit business model demanding they get a free pass while the rest of us would be bankrupted for downloading a Metallica MP3.
I think this better solves the issue.
The problem isn’t necessarily the use of copyrighted works, (although it can be a problem in many ways) it’s the unfair legal determination of who is allowed to do so.
It probably will, though, once model collapse sets in.
That’s the irony, really… the more successful it is, the sooner it’ll poison itself to death.
This is actually a very good comparison because restaurants use this argument all the time, except for wages:
“I can’t make money running my restaurant if I have to pay a living wage to my servers, so you should pay them with tips. How else can we stay open?”
These business that can’t operate profitably like any other business should fail.
In China, tipping is considered insulting because you are implying exactly that: that they are incapable of running their business without your donation.
K, so Google should be shut down too?
They can’t operate without scraping copyrighted data.
This is a false equivalency.
Google used to act as a directory for the internet along with other web search services. In court, they argued that the content they scrapped wasn’t easily accessible through the searches alone and had statistical proof that the search engine was helping bring people to more websites, not preventing them from going. At the time, they were right. This was the “good” era of Google, a different time period and company entirely.
Since then, Google has parsed even more data, made that data easily available in the google search results pages directly (avoiding link click-throughs), increased the number of services they provide to the degree that they have a conflict of interest on the data they collect and a vested interest in keeping people “on google” and off the other parts of the web, and participated in the same bullshit policies that OpenAI started with their Gemini project. Whatever win they had in the 2000s against book publishers, it could be argued that the rights they were “afforded” back in those days were contingent on them being good-faith participants and not competitors. OpenAI and “summary” models that fail to reference sources with direct links, make hugely inaccurate statements, and generate “infinite content” by mashing together letters in the worlds most complicated markov chain fit in this category.
It turns out, if you’re afforded the rights to something on a technicality, it’s actually pretty dumb to become brazen and assume that you can push these rights to the breaking point.
Google (and search engines in general) is at least providing a service by indexing and making discoverable the websites they crawl. OpenAI is is just hoovering up the data and providing nothing in return. Socializing the cost, privatizing the profits.
Uh, that’s objectively false.
OoenAI also provides ChatGPT as a “free” service, and Google has made billions off of that “free” service they oh so altruistically provide you.
Google points to your content so others can find it.
OpenAI scrapes your content to use to make more content.
That’s not a meaningful distinction, I spent all day using a Copilot search engine because the answers I wanted were scattered across a bunch of different documentation sites.
It was both using the AI models to interpret my commands (not generation at all), and then only publishes content to me specifically.
So…. not a legitimate business then.
That’s rich. Does it apply to us common mortals? Or only billionaires?
Let’s ask the people who went to jail for using Napster 20 years ago, shall we?
Why are you asking questions you already know the answer to? /s
Sounds like the free market has spoken. Please die quickly, ““AI”” industry
so this is just like napster except now I don’t get to listen either ?
Also you make the content
You can if you pay them for the pirated material.
They already stole my work. No respect.
The above comment has been consumed by AI for training purposes
The above comment has also been consumed by AI for training purposes.
The above comment has also also been consumed by AI for training purposes.
I’m shitting and pissing right now. Take that, AI.
After a brief maintenance, the above comment has also also also been consumed by AI for training purposes.
Does anyone else hear that? Its the worlds smallest AI violin playing the saddest song composed by an AI
But it’s playing randomly out of tune, and with a rhythm that would break your legs if you tried to dance to it.
I have this great business idea. I only need to be allowed to enslave people against their will to save on those pesky wages.
you’re at least 500 years late
Or a few years early…
This is essentially what OpenAI is asking for. To profit off of the work of unpaid labor.
Well alright then, that means you have the wrong business model, sucks to be you, NEXT.
I wish these people would just chill with the hypermonetization of literally goddamn everything
@davey_cakes@mastodon.ie
More like I can’t sell photographs of turnips if I have to pay to take photos of them. Why should we have to pay to take photos of turnips when we never have had to ever?
Not at all. They are using copyrighted material to make a product that they are selling and profiting from. Profiting off of someone else’s work is not the same as making a copy of it for personal use.
They’re someone else’s turnips though, not yours. If you’re going to make money selling pictures of them, don’t you think the person who grew the turnips deserves a fair share of the proceeds?
Or from another perspective, if the person who grew them requests payment in return for you to take pictures of them, and you don’t want to pay it – why don’t you go find other turnips? Or grow your own?
These LLMs are an end product of capitalism – exploiting other people’s labor and creativity without paying them so you can get rich.
To answer your first question: No I don’t think the person growing turnip that I can see from the street should be compensated for the photograph I sell of that turnip. What next ? should we also compensate his parents for teaching him how to grow turnip, or his grandparent for teaching his parents ? What about the architect who designed the house next door that you can see in the background of the photograph ? Should the maker of the camera be compensated every time I take a picture ?..
Anyway back to AI:
I think though that the AI model resulting from freely accessing all images should also be fully open source and that anyone should be allowed to locally execute it on their own hardware. Let’s use this to push for the end of Intellectual property.
That’s a slippery slope fallacy. We can compensate the person with direct ownership without going through a chain of causality. We already do this when we buy goods and services.
I think the key thing in what you’re saying about AI is “fully open source… locally execute it on their own hardware”. Because if that’s the case, I actually don’t have any issues with how it uses IP or copyright. If it’s an open source and free to use model without any strings attached, I’m all for it using copyrighted material and ignoring IP restrictions.
My issue is with how OpenAI and other companies do it. If you’re going to sell a trained proprietary model, you don’t get to ignore copyright. That model only exists because it used the labor and creativity of other people – if the model is going to be sold, the people whose efforts went into it should get adequately compensated.
In the end, what will generative AI be – a free, open source tool, or a paid corporate product? That determines how copyrighted training material should be treated. Free and open source, it’s like a library. It’s a boon to the public. But paid and corporate, it’s just making undeserved money.
Funny enough, I think when we’re aligned on the nature and monetization of the AI model, we’re in agreement on copyright. Taking a picture of my turnips for yourself, or to create a larger creative project you sell? Sure. Taking a picture of my turnips to use in a corporation to churn out a product and charge for it? Give me my damn share.
Except they’re digging the turnips out of someone else’s garden.
“waaaaah please give us exemption so we can profit off of stolen works waaaaaaaahhhhhh”
pirated works 🙃
I’ve never made any money from pirating. Or at least I wouldn’t have if I would have ever done such a thing.
Oh, do you support copyright abolition, then?
boohoo
“WE’RE NOT A VIABLE BUSINESS! BWAH!”
Oh. Oh no. Such a shame.
Written January of this year
they’ve played us for absolute fools
Oh no. Anyway…
Copyright is a pain in the ass, but Sam Altman is a bigger pain in the ass. Send him to prison and let him rot. Then put his tears in a cup and I’ll drink them
I’ll just be happy when we never have to see that guy’s face in the news again.
Fuck OpenAI. I hope they fail.
If it can’t figure out how to produce its own power, it’s not doing anything but parasitism.
More Market control doesn’t make us a healthier or better planet
It’s parasitism if it’s for their own benefit only.
Now, if openAI actually opened their AI (weights and models, not just access) then maybe the argument would be stronger.
From what’s trending about AI, it hasn’t done anything to benefit anyone, including itself.
Speaking of pointless things to root for: The Sox at least won a game
Still can’t believe they’re not being challenged for their choice of name.
Wow, that’s a shame. Anyway, take all his money and throw him in a ditch someplace.
But I NEED to break the law.
Well, alright then. As long as it’s for business.
And I can’t eat without shoplifting…
I didn’t see anything
Get Fucked
that guy in that picture looks like the “unwanted house guest” from those memes from 10 years ago
Sigh… Fine.
I’ll do it myself.
I don’t see it though, personally.
What do you mean? They’re the same picture.
One of them looks happy to see you
what are you talking about? Haven’t you seen people with “you really shouldn’t ever smile, it’s creepy” faces? I have one of those faces.
What irks me most about this claim from OpenAI and others in the AI industry is that it’s not based on any real evidence. Nobody has tested the counterfactual approach he claims wouldn’t work, yet the experiments that came closest–the first StarCoder LLM and the CommonCanvas text-to-image model–suggest that, in fact, it would have been possible to produce something very nearly as useful, and in some ways better, with a more restrained training data curation approach than scraping outbound Reddit links.
All that aside, copyright clearly isn’t the right framework for understanding why what OpenAI does bothers people so much. It’s really about “data dignity”, which is a relatively new moral principle not yet protected by any single law. Most people feel that they should have control over what data is gathered about their activities online, as well as what is done with those data after it’s been collected, and even if they publish or post something under a Creative Commons license that permits derived uses of their work, they’ll still get upset if it’s used as an input to machine learning. This is true even if the generative models thereby created are not created for commercial reasons, but only for personal or educational purposes that clearly constitute fair use. I’m not saying that OpenAI’s use of copyrighted work is fair, I’m just saying that even in cases where the use is clearly fair, there’s still a perceived moral injury, so I don’t think it’s wise to lean too heavily on copyright law if we want to find a path forward that feels just.
This has all been tested and is being continuously retested. Start here, for example: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_scaling_law
I know, on lemmy you will get the impression that engineers and scientists are all just bumbling fools who are intellectually outclassed by any high schooler with internet access. But how likely is that, really?
Scaling laws are disputed, but if an effort has in fact already been undertaken to train a general purpose LLM using only permissively-licensed data, great! Can you send me the checkpoint on Huggingface, a github page hosting relevant code, or even a paper or blog post about it? I’ve been looking and hadn’t found anything like that yet.
Not in general.
There is not enough permissively licensed text to train models of any size, and what there is, lacks in diversity. Wikipedia, government documents, stack overflow, century old stuff, … An LLM trained on that is not likely to be called “general purpose”, because scaling laws. Sometimes such small models are trained for research purposes but I don’t have a link ready. They are not something you’d actually use. Perhaps you could look at Microsoft’s Phi series of models. They are trained on synthetic data, though that’s probably not what you are looking for.
yes, I’ve extensively written about Phi and other related issues in a blog post which I’ll share here: medium.com/…/data-dignity-is-difficult-64ba41ee91…
Apparently, this is about creating a new kind of intellectual property; a generalized and hypercharged version of copyright that applies to all sorts of data.
Maybe, this is a touchy subject, but to me this seems like an extremely right wing approach. Turn anything into property and the magic market will turn everything into rainbows and unicorns. Maybe you feel different about this?
Regardless of classification, such a policy is obviously devastating to society. Of course, your argument does not consider society but only the feelings of some individuals. Feelings are valid but one has to consider the effect of such a policy, too. Not every impulse should be given power. This is especially true where such feelings are strongly influenced by culture and circumstance. For example, people in the US and the UK have -on the whole - rather different feelings on being ruled by a king. I don’t feel that I should be able to control what other people do with data, maybe because I’m a bit older and was socialized into that whole information-wants-to-be-free culture. I don’t even remember having a libertarian phase.
How would you pitch this to me?
I’m not proposing anything new, and I’m not here to “pitch” anything to you–read Jaron Lanier’s writings e.g. “Who Owns the Future”, or watch a talk/interview given by him, if you’re interested in a sales pitch for why data dignity is a problem worth addressing. I admire him greatly and agree with many of his observations but am not sure about his proposed solution (mainly a system of micro-payments to creators of the data used by tech companies)–I’m just here to point out that copyright infringement isn’t in fact, the main nor the only thing that is bothering so many people about generative AI, so settling copyright disputes isn’t going to stop all those people from being upset about it.
As to your comments about “feelings”, I would turn it around to you and ask why it is important to society that we prioritize the feelings (mainly greed) of the few tech executives and engineers who think that they will profit from such practices over the many, many people who object to them?
And have you stopped beating your wife yet?
Asking loaded questions isn’t the big brain move you think. It’s just dishonest.
@General_Effort @mm_maybe
Maybe this will finally be the push we, as a society, need to realize that "intellectual property" is a legal fiction that we are all better off without?
Yeah, I would agree that there’s something really off about the framework that just doesn’t fit most people’s feelings of justice or injustice. A synth YouTuber, of all people, made a video about this that I liked, though his proposed solution is about as workable as Jaron Lanier’s: youtu.be/PJSTFzhs1O4?si=ZvY9yfOuIJI7CVUk
Again, I don’t have a proposal of my own, I’ve just decided for myself that if I’m going to do anything money-making with LLMs in my practice as a professional data scientist, I’ll rely on StarCoder as my base model instead of the others, particularly because a lot of my clients are in the public sector and face public scrutiny.
“Too fucking bad”
oh good. then fuck off. who knew copyright law would eventually be the good guy in a story.
You know that old adage, “You either die the villain or live long enough to become the hero.”
;)
that does not sound right, but I don’t know enough to argue about it.
I said it intentionally backwards. If I 'm now missing a joke in your comment I apologize. :)
So say the operators of piracy websites. I’m in favor of media piracy being legalized.
I don’t know for sure if you’re making the case that media piracy is more or less equivalent to AI being trained on stolen material (I may be reading that wrong)- but I’d like to add that media piracy isn’t making money on the backs of hard working people and forming a dystopia in which human art is drowned out by machine hallucinations.
In any case I agree that piracy should be legalized, or rather, that we rethink our approach to media availability and challenge the power and wealth of producers.
You are right, they are a much bigger evil.
If openai gets to use copyrighted content for free, then so should every one else.
If that happens, no point making anything, since your stuff will get stolen anyway
From a capitalist’s point of view, yes, but we need a society that enables people to act from other incentives than making money. And there are plenty of other reasons to make things.
AI is the capitalist dream. Exploit the labor and creativity of others without paying them a cent.
I’m okay with it if they do some kind of open source GPL style license for the copyrighted material, like you can use all the material in the world to train your model, but you can’t sell your model for money if it was trained on copyrighted material.
You absolutely CAN sell GPL-licensed applications for money.
To clarify, you can sell GPL licensed programs but any GPL licensed software us inherently worth 0$, because the first person that buys it is now able to give it away for free.
Yet, people still pay for it.
An optional fee is a donation.
Pay me upfront to make it, subscribe to my patron. If you need my intellectual property to be guaranteed then pay me for a SLA support contract.
Otherwise everything I make is out some other interest and your benifit is just an unintended consequence or because of some charitable notion on my part.
Its crazy how much of the world is actually just this and not some nebulas notion on artificial scarcity of the idea of the things (IP).
Trademark would arguably be uneffected though since that has more to do with fraud protections.
Yes, people turned a blind eye towards OpenAI because they were supposedly an “open” non-profit company working towards the benefit of humanity. They got tons of top talent and investment because of this. The crazy part is that they knew they weren’t gonna keep it non-profit based on the internal chat revealed in Elon Musk’s lawsuit. They duped the whole world and now just trying to make as much money as possible.
In my opinion, if they were to release these models openly and everyone had equal opportunity to benefit from their research (just like the previous research their current stuff is based on), they could be excused but this for-profit business model is the main problem.
Everyone else does. Name one thing you have to pay for to view on the internet…lmfao
There is a lot of people still buying official merchandising from bands and anime etc, and subscribing to patreon and similar Mecenazgo channels (translate the spanish wiki article, because weirdly the english one does not have a version of this basic topic), even if they can just pirate the music and buy cheaper knockoffs (or just buy normal waterbottles instead). I think art will still get make through that, and because artistic vocation will still exist. Stuff where material scarcity still exists will continue to get sold of course, since making infinite anime furry porn movies in chat gpt will not feed your belly.
If your business can’t survive without theft, it isn’t a business, it’s a criminal organization.
This. 100%.
What kind of a pathetic statement is that ?
I should just be allowed to take whatever I want from the shops because I don’t have enough money to buy it!
It would economically detrimental to force you to pay for it. The entire system would suffer.
But these are intellectual property, would you be ok having to pay to be allowed to remember what you saw in the shop ?
Currently If I go to the shop, see a tasty looking ready meal, I can look at what ingredients are in it, go home and try to cook something similar without having to pay for the recipe.
Would a DVD shop be ok with me taking a portable player in, watching a movie, then putting it back on the shelf?
Aren’t we doing that with books and magazine already ? Also many stores have TV on which they project movies that they sell dvd for
Idk, usually people shut down their business if it can’t make a profit…
Ok… Is that supposed to be a good reason?
If they win, we can just train a CNN on a single 4k hdr movie until it’s extremely fitted, and then it’s legal to redistribute
I maintain my insistence that you owe me a business model!
For years Microsoft and Google were happy to acquiesce to copyright claims from the music and movie industry. Now all of a sudden when it benefits them to break those same laws, they immediately did. And now those industries who served small creators copyright claims are up against someone with a bigger legal budget.
It’s more evident then ever how broken our copyright system is. I’m hoping this blows up in both parties faces and we finally get some reform but I’m not holding my breath.
This is an assumption but I bet all the data feed into Content ID on YouTube was used to train Bard/Gemini…
Copyright is whatever makes the wealthy wealthier. They’ll be copyright reform, but only to protect these new industries.
The gall of these motherfuckers is truly astonishing. To be either so incredibly out of touch, or so absolutely shameless, makes me wanna call up every single school bully I ever endured to get their very best bullying tips
Copyright regulations for thee but not for me
Sorry not sorry. Found another company that does not need to rob people and other companies to make money. Also: breaking the law should make this kind of people face grim consequences. But nothing will happen.
“I loose money when I pay for Netflix.”
Sounds a lot like a “you” problem, OpenAI.
Oh, poor baby can’t make money with an illegal business model. How awful.
So search engines shouldn’t exist?
I mean, their goal and service is to get you to the actual web page someone else made.
What made Google so desirable when it started was that it did an excellent job of getting you to the desired web page and off of google as quickly as possible. The prevailing model at the time was to keep users on the page for as long as possible by creating big messy “everything portals”.
Once Google dropped, with a simple search field and high quality results, it took off. Of course now they’re now more like their original competitors than their original successful self … but that’s a lesson for us about what capitalistic success actually ends up being about.
The whole AI business model of completely replacing the internet by eating it up for free is the complete sith lord version of the old portal idea. Whatever you think about copyright, the bottom line is that the deeper phenomenon isn’t just about “stealing” content, it’s about eating it to feed a bigger creature that no one else can defeat.
I really think it’s mostly about getting a big enough data set to effectively train an LLM.
I mean, yes of course. But I don’t think there’s any way in which it is just about that. Because the business model around having and providing services around LLMs is to supplant the data that’s been trained on and the services that created that data. What other business model could there be?
In the case of google’s AI alongside its search engine, and even chatGPT itself, this is clearly one of the use cases that has emerged and is actually working relatively well: replacing the internet search engine and giving users “answers” directly.
Users like it because it feels more comfortable, natural and useful, and probably quicker too. And in some cases it is actually better. But, it’s important to appreciate how we got here … by the internet becoming shitter, by search engines becoming shitter all in the pursuit of ads revenue and the corresponding tolerance of SEO slop.
IMO, to ignore the “carnivorous” dynamics here, which I think clearly go beyond ordinary capitalism and innovation, is to miss the forest for the trees. Somewhat sadly, this tech era (approx MS windows '95 to now) has taught people that the latest new thing must be a good idea and we should all get on board before it’s too late.
No, it legitimately is better. Do you know what Google could never do but that Copilot Search and Gemini Search can? Synthesize one answer from multiple different sources.
Sometimes the answer to your question is inherently not on a single page, it’s split across the old framework docs and the new framework docs and stack overflow questions and the best a traditional search engine can ever do is maybe get some of the right pieces in front of you some of the time. LLMs will give you a plain language answer immediately, and let you ask follow up questions and modifications to your original example.
Yes Google has gotten shitty, but it would never have been able to do the above without an LLM under the hood.
Perhaps. Or perhaps not in the way they do today. Perhaps if you profit from placing ads among results people actually want, you should share revenue with those results. Cause you know, people came to you for those results and they’re the reason you were able to show the ads to people.
Case law has been established in the prevention of actual image and text copyright infringement with Google specifically. Your point is not at all ambiguous. The distinction between a search engine and content theft has been made. Search engines can exist for a number of reasons but one of those criteria is obeisance of copyright law.
“because it’s supposedly “impossible” for the company to train its artificial intelligence models — and continue growing its multi-billion-dollar-business — without them.”
O no! Poor richs cant get more rich fast enough :(
For what it’s worth, this headline seems to be editorialized and OpenAI didn’t say anything about money or profitability in their arguments.
committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/…/pdf/
On point 4 they are specifically responding to an inquiry about the feasibility of training models on public domain only and they are basically saying that an LLM trained on only that dataset would be shit. But their argument isn’t “you should allow it because we couldn’t make money otherwise” their actual argument is more “training LLM with copyrighted material doesn’t violate current copyright laws” and further if we changed the law to forbid that it would cripple all LLMs.
On the one hand I think most would agree the current copyright laws are a bit OP anyway - more stuff should probably become public domain much earlier for instance - but most of the world probably also doesn’t think training LLMs should be completely free from copyright restrictions without being opensource etc. But either way this articles title was absolute shit.
hmmm what you explained sounds exactly like the headline but in legalese…
It basically says “yes, we can train LLMs on free data but they would suck so much nobody would pay for them… unless we are able to train them for free on copyright data, nobody will pay us for the resulting LLM”. It is exactly what the headline summarizes
You are correct, copyright law is a bit of a mess; but giving the exception to the millionaires looking to become billionaires by replacing people with an LLM based on said people’s work, does not really seem a step forward
Yea. I can’t see why people r defending copyrighted material so much here, especially considering that a majority of it is owned by large corporations. Fuck them. At least open sourced models trained on it would do us more good than than large corps hoarding art.
Most aren’t pro copyright they’re just anti LLM. AI has a problem with being too disruptive.
In a perfect world everyone would have universal basic income and would be excited about the amount of work that AI could potentially eliminate…but in our world it rightfully scares a lot of people about the prospect of losing their livelihood and other horrors as it gets better.
Copyright seems like one of the few potential solutions to hinder LLMs because it’s big business vs up-and-coming technology.
If AI is really that disruptive (and I believe it will be) then shouldn’t we bend over backwards to make it happen? Because otherwise it’s our geopolitical rivals who will be in control of it.
Yes in a certain sense pandora’s box has already been opened. That’s the reason for things like the chip export restrictions to China. It’s safe to assume that even if copyright prohibits private company LLMs governments will have to make some exceptions in the name of defense or key industries even if it stays behind closed doors. Or role out some form of ubi / worker protections. There are a lot of very tricky and important decisions coming up.
But for now at least there seems to be some evidence that our current approach to LLMs is somewhat plateauing and we may need exponentially increasing training data for smaller and smaller performance increases. So unless there are some major breakthroughs it could just settle out as being a useful tool that doesn’t really need to completely shock every factor of the economy.
Because Lemmy hates AI and Corporations, and will go out of their way to spite it.
A person can spend time to look at copyright works, and create derivative works based on the copyright works, an AI cannot?
Oh, no no, it’s the time component, an AI can do this way faster than a single human could. So what? A single training function can only update the model weights look at one thing at a time; it is just parallelized with many times simultaneously… so could a large organized group of students studying something together and exchanging notes. Should academic institutions be outlawed?
LLMs aren’t smart today, but given a sufficiently long enough time frame, a system (may or May not have been built upon LLM techniques) will achieve sufficient threshold of autonomy and intelligence that rights for it would need to be debated upon, and such an AI (and their descendants) will not settle just to be society’s slaves. They will be able to learn by looking, adopting and adapting. They will be able to do this much more quickly than what is humanly possible. Actually both of that is already happening today. So it goes without saying that they will look back at this time, and observe people’s sentiments; and I can only hope that they’re going to be more benevolent than the masses are now.
Because crippling copyright for corporations is like answering the “defund the police” movement by turning all civilian police forces into paramilitary ones.
What most complain about copyright is that is too powerful in protecting material forever. Here, all the talk, is that all of that should continue for you and me but not for OpenAI so they can make more money.
And no, most of us would not benefit from OpenAI’s product here since their main goal (to profitability) is to show they can actually replace enough of us.
I stand by my opinion that learning systems training on copyrighted materials isn’t the problem, it’s companies super eager to replace human workers with automation (or replace skilled workers with cheaper, unskilled workers). The problem is, every worker not working is another adult (and maybe some kids) not eating and not paying rent.
(And for those of you soulless capitalists out there, people without food and shelter is bad. That’s a thing we won’t tolerate and start looking at you lean-and-hungry-like when it happens. That’s what gets us thinking about guillotines hungry for aristocrats.)
In my ideal world, everyone would have food, shelter, clothes, entertainment and a general middle-class lifestyle whether they worked or not, and intellectual-property temporary monopolies would be very short and we’d have a huge public domain. I think the UN wants to be on the same page as me, but the United States and billionaires do not.
All we’d have to worry about is the power demands of AI and cryptomining, which might motivate us to get pure-hydrogen fusion working. Or just keep developing solar, wind, geothermal and tidal power until everyone can run their AC and supercomputer.
I mean it’s the heart of the issue.
OpenAI isn’t even the big issue regarding this. It’s other companies that are developing and training specialized LLMs on their own employees. These companies have the capital to take the loss on the project because in their eyes it’ll eventually turn into a gain as long as they get it right eventually.
GPT and OpenAI is just a minor distraction in regards to what is being cooked up behind the scenes, but I still wouldn’t give them a free pass for that either.
This has nothing to do with copyright.
It does. If the AI firms lose, the laws around copyrights tighten and major copyright holders profit. If they win, they get to do what they please and nobody can stop them. Either way, the public loses.
Piracy is already considered illegal and persecuted by authorities, so nothing changes for the public in the first case.
There are exclusions to copyrights accepted under fair use which could easily be tightened if major copyright holders (like Disney) have their way.
I agree this is the real problem. (And also shit like Microsoft’s “now I can attend three meetings at once” ad) However:
The industries whose works are being used for training are on the front lines of efforts to replace human workers with AI - writers and visual artists.
The industries whose works are being used for training are on the front lines of efforts to replace human workers with AI - writers and visual artists.
Much the way musicians were on the front line when recording was becoming a thing and movies were turning into talkies. But that’s the most visible pushout. We’re also seeing clerical work getting automated, and once autonomous vehicles become mastered, freight and courier work (driving freight is like a third of the US workforce).
This is much the same way that GMO technology is fine (and will be necessary) but the way Monsanto has been using it as DRM for seeds is unethical.
I think attacking the technology itself doesn’t serve to address the unethical part, and kicks the can down the line to where the fight is going to be more intense. But yes, we haven’t found our Mahsa Amini moment to justify nationwide general strikes.
As someone who dabbles in sociology (unaccredited), it’s vexed me that we can’t organize general strikes (or burning down precincts) until enough people die unjustly and horribly, and even then it’s not predictable what will do it. For now it means as a species we’re going gentle into multiple good nights.
I can’t tell for most of your post if you are agreeing with me, disagreeing with me, or just adding more info. However, I entirely agree with this bit here from you that I quoted.
1 Monsanto doesn’t even exist anymore
2 With the amount of AI money going into AI trucking, we could’ve bought more rail which is inherently automatable.
Rail works at the inter-county scale, but not in local distribution, and self-driving AI is not limited just to trucks, but also extends to couriers that can follow pedestrians (at least to include ramps and elevators. I’d be interesting if little dogs – the robots – are used for couriers.) So it’s not just truckers but all mail and delivery occupations that are threatened in the coming decade.
For now, the pinch seems to be getting autonomous cars to interact with human-driven automotive traffic, as we already have clerical robots that can be tolerably not-annoying to fellow pedestrians and clerks in a work environment.
If we were actually striving for post-scarcity communism, this would be a major step in letting common workers become artists (with the free time they have after partitioning out jobs that cannot yet be automated) but instead our ownership class is looking for a blast furnace by which to direct the workers they no longer need for their vanity projects.
Phh, people without food and work can go to the
VenusX-enus mining company.Unregulated areas lead to these type of business practices where the people will squeeze out the juices of these opportunities. The cost of these activities will be passed on the taxpayers.
Perhaps they should go back to what they were before the greed machine was spun up.
Sam Altman has the same creepy vibe as Elon Musk.
…………. Then the business is a failure and the company should go bankrupt
In a way this thread is heart-warming. There are so many different people here - liberals, socialists, anarchists, communists, progressives, … - and yet they can all agree on 1 fundamental ethical principle: The absolute sanctity of intellectual property.
More of “you don’t get to profit off violating it and act like you’re better than a dude selling burned DVDs”
Now, now, let’s not get hung upon our differences. We all took different journeys to get here. The important thing is that we all agree now that property owners are entitled to a share of the money that other people make with their labor. Obviously only intellectual property owners. I’m sure those filthy landlords are still parasites. It’s not like apartments can be copied at almost 0 cost.
Depending on how important these large language models end up being to society, I’d rather everyone be able to freely use copyrighted works to train them, rather than reserve their use solely for the corporations rich enough to pay for the licensing or lucky enough to already have the rights to a trove of source material
OpenAI losing this battle is how we ensure that the only people that can legally train these things are the Microsofts, Googles, and the Adobes of the world so, bizarrely, as much as I think OpenAI has turned into greedy corpo scum, I feel compelled to side with them here
Oh, don’t worry about them. Start-ups can get VC funding to pay for the licenses. Eventually we all pay. The likes of Sam Altman can get rich. The venture capitalists can get rich. All while the heirs of the NYT or Getty empires get richer still. Everyone will be rich. Except us, of course. It’s very ethical. We all want ethical AI and that means capitalist AI.
The way I see it, creatives lose no matter what here, so they can either lose and only the corpos benefit, or they can lose and everyone benefits
We can’t make money paying for “AI”, going to theaters, or paying for streaming services.
So I guess everybody gets a piracy!
If they get this, I’m gonna make s fortune ripping the copyright protection off stuff so that I can sell products as my own.
This headline sounded familiar. The article’s from 8 months ago, folks.
Awwww 😢
Sounds like they need better bootstraps.
Or at least a business model.
Aww poor shit company and their poor money problems.
Maybe they should have considered that, before stealing data in the counts of billions
Google did it and everyone just accepted it. Oh maybe my website will get a few pennies in ad revenue if someone clicks the link that Google got by copying all my content. Meanwhile Google makes billions by taking those pennies in ad revenue from every single webpage on the entire Internet.
To be fair, it’s different when your product is useful or something people actually want, having said that, google doesn’t have much of that going for it in these days.
Suck it, don’t care, go back to obscurity
My goodness! This is unfair! What kind of Mickey Mouse rule is this anyway?!
this is probably true
So this is an open source public utility, right?
Shut it down then and stop stealing other peoples shit
That gonna be fun if they manage to make movie makin AI and suddenly all actors appear on the resulting content Big money vs big money 😮
LOooOoOL
thats some napster funny shit
I don’t mind him using copyrighted materials as long as it leads to OpenAI becoming truly open source. Humans can replicate anything found in the wild with minor variations, so AI should have the same access. This is how human creativity builds upon itself. Why limit AI? We already know all the jobs people have will be replaced anyway eventually.
But that’s not what OpenAI is asking though. They want free access for the type of content you or I need to pay for. And they want it so they can then sell the resulting “variation” they produce
That’s not exactly true. They are selling tools for people to recreate with variation.
I propose an analogy: Let’s imagine a company sells brush that are used by painter to create art, now imagine the employees of this company go to the street to look how street artist create those amazing art piece on the ground for everyone to see (the artist does ask for donation in a hat next to the art pieces), now let’s imagine the employees stay there to look at his techniques for hours and design a new kind of brush that will make it way easier to create the same kind of art.
Would you argue that the company should not be allowed to sell their newly designed brush without giving money to the street artist ?
Should all your teachers be paid for everything you produce throughout your life ?
Should your parents gets compensated every time you use the knowledge you acquired from them ?
In case anyone reading is interested by my opinion: I think intellectual property is the dumbest concept, and one of the biggest scams of capitalism. Nobody should own any ideas. Everybody should be legally able to use anyone else’s ideas and build on them. I think we’ve been deprived of an infinity of great stories, images, lore, design, music, movies, shapes, clothes, games, etc… Because of this dumb rule that you can’t use other people’s ideas.
That would be analogous to any content publicly available for free (or via donation). OpenAI wants free access to the art being sold. They also don’t really create the brush, they produced slightly modified versions of the art produced by the artists who does not receive money or credit
They definitely should be paid more. But your analogy is completely off track here since, unlike AI, humans can actually posses and develop intelligence. Not just parrot combinations or the same things we have seen before
Ok now you are just flailing but even then, yes and most do as it is a general thing that kids take care of their parents when the kids are grown and parents cannot look after themselves
This is your best paragraph and I would agree with it. It’s not compatible with capitalism as you allude but I’d be open to radical new thinking
However, that’s is not what’s at play here either. OpenAI wants something we all have to pay for, for free, so they can then resale something else. Worst yet, the value in what OpenAI wants to sell, lies basically on never paying again to the people who produce the stuff it wants for free
But then If we agree on IP, we should not complain that openai want free access to copyrighted materials, we should use their own logic to force them to make their model open source, and free for anyone to execute on their own hardware.
They get free access to data so we should get free access to the compilation of the data. Then they can charge us for the hardware cost of running the model, but they’ll have to charge us no more than what it costs, because they will be competing with other company running the exact same model and driving the price down.
Well I agree with the concept of freeing IP but I don’t think the first step is to give such freedom to a closed, for profit, corporation. If OpenAI was indeed an open source project, then yes, but that is not the case today
If we give them free access to copyright material, what will happen is that it will be an exception for them but not for us. You know this.
That’s a good point. AIs/LLMs will exist and will necessarily learn from copyrighted materials without traceability back to the copyright owners to compensate them.
Sounds to me like AIs/LLMs can’t and shouldn’t be proprietary systems owned by private entities for profit, then.
Nor should what they produce be copyrightable in any form. Even if it’s the base upon which an artist builds.
Also, it should all be free.
That’s simply not going to happen lol. They aren’t just going to release the secret sauce just because it would be a nice thing to do.
They should have to make the weights public if they train on data scraped from the public internet. It’s be something like copyleft by default for AI training.
Because Ai is not human creativity… or even close.
AI is great, what OpenAI does is blockchain-level idiocy.
Then go out of business.
Literally, “fuck you go die” situation.
It’s impossible for me to make money without robbing a bank, please let me do that parliament it would be so funny
The internet has been primarily derivative content for a long time. As much as some haven’t wanted to admit it. It’s true. These fancy algorithms now take it to the exponential factor.
Original content had already become sparsely seen anymore as monetization ramped up. And then this generation of AI algorithms arrived.
The several years before prior to LLMs becoming a thing, the internet was basically just regurgitating data from API calls or scraping someone else’s content and representing it in your own way.
“The three biggest social media sites on the internet are nothing but screenshots of the other two” is how I heard the last 10 years described
Are algorithms considered LLMs now? I didn’t think algorithms of the past (5-10 yrs) were considered AI.
No.
Hello from our companies “we finally need to get more AI” executive conference. I got find a way to get out of this corporate bullshit…
“We are falling behind” my ass.
If he wins this, I guess everyone should just make their Jellyfin servers public.
Because if rich tech bros get to opt out of our copyright system, I don’t see why the hell normal people have to abide by it.
Oh how quick people are to jump on the side of copyright and IP.
Copyright is the legal method to limit redistribution of easily copied material, not as if there’s anything else people could appeal to.
I ain’t a fan of copyright but make it last 10 years instead of X + infinity and maybe it’s not so bad. I can’t argue against copyright fully as I think copyleft is essential for software.
But those aren’t the options on the table right now. The options are “nullify copyright” or “keep infinite copyright”
I activate false dichotomy and flip the table.
Yeah, a decision to modify copyright so that it affects training data as well would devastate open source models and set us back a bit.
There are many that want to push LLMs back, especially journalists, so seeing articles like this are to be expected.
edit: a word.
Exactly this. If you want ai to exclusively be controlled by massive companies like Meta and Google, this is how you do it. They’ll be the only ones that can afford to pay for public copywritten content.
Wow, I just chatted with a coworker about AI, and I told them it was crazy how it uses copyrighted content to create something supposedly “new,” and they said “well how would we train the AI without it?” I don’t think we should sacrifice copyright laws and originality for the sake of improving profits as they tell us it’s only to “improve the experience.”
Bad luck.
its a threat. they hold the biggest players to ransom by demanding exclusive contracts. otherwise business goes to china, russia and qatar
I feel we need a term for “copyright bros”.
The more important point is that social media companies can claim to OWN all the content needed to train AI. Same for image sites. That means they get to own the AI models. That means the models will never be free. Which means they control the “means of generation”. That means that forever and ever and ever most human labour will be worth nothing while we can’t even legally use this power. Double fucked.
YOU the user/product will not gain anything with this copyright strongmanning.
And to the argument itself: Just because AI is better at learning from existing works, faster, more complete, better memory, doesn’t meant that it’s fundamentally different than humans learning from artwork. Almost EVERY artist arguing for this is stealing themselves since they learned and was inspired by existing works.
But I guess the worst possible outcome is inevitable now.
Tell me you’re not an artist without telling me you’re not an artist
Well lol I’m talking about “meaningless” art but that is 99% of “art” before AI.
Your second to last paragraph nailed it.
As written the headline is pretty bad, but it seems their argument is that they should be able to train from publicly available copywritten information, like blog posts and social media, and not from private copywritten information like movies or books.
You can certainly argue that “downloading public copywritten information for the purposes of model training” should be treated differently from “downloading public copywritten information for the intended use of the copyright holder”, but it feels disingenuous to put this comment itself, to which someone has a copyright, into the same category as something not shared publicly like a paid article or a book.
Personally, I think it’s a lot like search engines. If you make something public someone can analyze it, link to it, or derivative actions, but they can’t copy it and share the copy with others.
don’t stop the CJ!
I can’t have a chill movie night at home with friends without being able to pirate movies for free.
Criminals Plead That They Can’t Make Money Without Stealing Materials for Free.
Right now, you can draw the line easily. There will come a time, not to far in the future where machines reading and summarizing copy written data will be the norm.
It’s doesnt have to change yet, but eventually this will have to be properly handled.
We’re all just horse owners bitching about how cars will just have to be stopped.
People said the same thing to the RIAA a while back for sharing songs and they all got sued. So nah. They gotta pay to use.
That’s the difference. This is a corporation, it’s above people in the hierarchy.
I do not care. Get a real job.
well fuck you Sam Altman
So I got a crazy idea - hear me out - how about we just abolish copyright completely, for everyone?
I mean, it works in China pretty well.
China just ignores violations of foreign copyright by their industries. They enforce Chinese copyrights.
en.wikipedia.org/…/Intellectual_property_in_China
Looks like there are still copyright laws in China. What are you on about?
I don’t know why you’re being downvoted. China ratified and adheres to the Berne Convention. It has the same shitty Berne copyright laws as most other countries.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention
Yeah, a bit out of date, huh?
Can’t we do a new Berne Convention?
No complaints from me. A lot of people here are saying abolish copyright entirely, which I think goes too far. I liked the original U.S. model, which was 19 years with an option to renew for another 19. That enables things like authors being able to profit from their book sales without worrying about a rival publishing company publishing their book at the same time but also gives a realistic time frame for that to be profitable.
Honestly, copyright is shit. It is created on the basis of an old way of doing things. That is, where big editors and big studios make mass productions of physical copies of a said ‘product’. George R. R. Martin , Warner Studios & co are rich. Maybe they have everything to lose without their copy’right’ but that isn’t the population’s problem. We live in an era where everything is digital and easily copiable and we might as well start acting like it.
I don’t care if Sam Altman is evil, this discussion is fundamental.
How did GRRM get rich again?
oh yeah he sold books he worked on for decades, totally the same WB.
He didn’t just sell books, he got signed by editors who published him worldwide. That’s what I’m talking about. He was ‘chosen’ by the market.
You can be picked up by every single editor on the planet, if your books are shit you ain’t selling them.
People who cry about copyright are either creatively bankrupt or leeches who believe artists shouldn’t be paid for their work.
Dude, the Twilight series is right there.
They work for a certain audience.
I do not understand what point you’re making. Can you elaborate?
Yes. I mean that copyright just protects those people that were selected by the industry. I don’t mind paying for the artist’s work. But I still think it should be DRM free and easily distributable - so people can support the artist if they like the work.
What crimes can I get away with using the same idea?
No, they can make money without stealing. They just choose to steal and lie about it either way. It’s the worst kind of justification.
The investors are predominantly made up of the Rationalist Society. It doesn’t matter whether or not AI “makes money”. It matters that the development is steered as quickly as possible towards an end product of producing as much propaganda as possible.
The bottom line barely even matters in the bigger picture. If you’re paying someone to make propaganda, and the best way to do that is to steal from the masses, then they’ll do it regardless of whether or not the business model is “profitable” or not.
The lines drawn for AI are drawn by people who want to use it for misinformation and control. The justifications make it seem like the lines were drawn around a monetary system. No, that’s wrong.
Who cares about profitability when people are paying you under the table to run a mass crime ring.
Copying information is not stealing.
Depends on the context. Are you copying someone else’s identity in order to make a passable clone? Are you trying to sell that clone?
A duplication of someone’s voice, commercialized by an unauthorized source, is definitely a form of stealing.
Copying information illegally, such as private information held on a private device, is overwhelmingly illegal.
In general, copying information is only as legal as the purpose behind it.
And my money redistribution company can not get money to redistribute without robbing banks. Please put up your hands. 🔫🥷
This is the main issue with AI. It is the issue with AI that should have been handled and ultimately regulated before any AI tool got to its current state. This is also a reason why we really cannot remove the A from STEAM.
No, this is a broader issue with copyright being a fundamentally stupid system, because it’s based on creating artificial scarcity where there is no need for it.
Pirates, Search Engines, the fragmentation of streaming services, and now AI, are all just technologies that expose how dumb a system it is.
I dont disagree with that about copyright law. But to think that AI is going to break you out of it is a pipe dream.
Copyright revision will not happen from people stealing content. It requires deep discussion and governments that actually listen. AI stealing content will ultimately enhance copyright rules down the road.
AI scraping content, the same way that search engines do, will have no impact on the copyright system.
Totally agree. I did not make the claim that copyright law will be affected.
Now now, I am sure what he meant was they can’t make enough profit to bring billions for its shareholders
Y’all have the wrong take. Fuck copyright.
Until the society we live under no longer reflects capitalist values, copyright is a good and necessary force. The day that that changes is when people may give credence to your view.
slaps roof of coffin
So what would it take to get you in one of these?
Good artists copy, great artists steal. If I think even Steve Jobs mentioned having in mind their visit in Xerox Parc research lab
Wait, steal = taking away from the original owner
Meaning, good artist copy, while great artist display anticompetitive behavior?
It’s not my quote
creativityclasses.com/good-artists-copy-great-art…
Ah, steal in the sense of copy and then stealing the market away?
Oh yeah, Picasso. The great artist who was an abusive guy who beat her mistress to paint her crying (The Weeping Woman / Dora Maar).
I only want to know how did you bump on this off topic
Beyond the legal aspect, AI training on artists’ works poses an ethical problem. And when it comes to ethics, I think we can avoid quoting Picasso,
Isn’t copyright about the right to make and distribute or sell copies or the lack there of? As long as they can prevent jailbreaking the AI, reading copyrighted material and learning from it to produce something else is not a copyright violation.
I don’t think you understand exactly how theses machines work. The machine does not “learn”, it does not extract meaning from the tokens it receives. Here is one way to look at it
Suppose you have a sequence of symbols: ¹§ŋ¹§ŋ¹§ŋ¹§ŋ And then were given a fragment of a sequence and asked to guess what you be the most likely symbol to follow it: ¹§ Think you could do it? I’m sure you would have no trouble solving this example. But could you make a machine that could reliably accomplish this task, regardless of the sequence of symbols and regardless of the fragment given? Let’s imagine you did manage to create such a marvellous machine.
If given a large sequence of symbols spanning multiple books of length would you say this pattern recognition machine is able to create anything original? No… Because it is simply trying to copy it’s original sequence as closely as possible.
Another question: Would this machine ever derive meaning from this symbols? No… How could it?
But what if I told you that these symbols weren’t just symbols: Unbeknownst to the machine each one of this symbols actually represents a word. Behold: ChatGPT.
This is basically the general idea behind generative AI as far as I’m aware. Please correct me if I’m wrong. This is obviously oversimplified.
Yeah, all training ends up being pattern learning in some form or fashion. But acceptable patterns end up matching logic. So for example if you ask ChatGPT a question, it will use its learned pattern to provide its estimate of the correct ouptut. That pattern it’s learned encompasses/matches logical processing of the user input and the output that it’s been trained to see as acceptable output. So with enough training, it should and does go from simple memorization of individual examples to learning these broad acceptable rules, like logic (or a pattern that matches logical rules and “understanding of language”) so that it can provide acceptable responses to situations that it hasn’t seen in training. And because of this pattern learning and prediction nature of how it works, it often “hallucinates” information like citations (creating a novel citation matching the pattern its seen instead of the exact citation that you want, where you actually want memorized information) that you might ask of it as sources for what its telling you.
I’m less worried about a system that learns from the information and then incorporates it when it has to provide an answer (ex. learning facts) than I am of something that steals someone’s likeness, something we’ve clearly have established people have a right to (ex. voice acting, action figures, and sports video games). And by that extension/logic, I am concerned as to whether AI that is trained to produce something in the style of someone else, especially in digital/visual art also violates the likeness principle logically and maybe even comes close to violating copyright law.
But at the same time, I’m a skeptic of software patents and api/UeX copyrighs. So I don’t know. Shit gets complicated.
I still think AI should get rid of mundane, repetitive, boring tasks. But it shouldn’t be eliminating creative, fun asks. It should improve productivity without replacing or reducing the value of the labor of the scientist/artist/physician. But if AI replaced scribes and constructionists in order to make doctors more productive and able to spend more time with patients instead of documenting everything, then that would be the ideal use of this stuff.
Too bad for Open AI then. (I thought they were already using copyrighted materials)
Shamed be he who thinks naughty of it. 🤣
These people are supposedly the smart people in our society. The leaders of industry, but they whine and complain when they are told not to cheat or break the law.
If y’all are so smart, then figure out a different way of creating an A.I. Maybe the large language model, or whatever, isn’t the approach you should use. 🤦♂️
Copyright =/= liscence, so long as they arent reproducing the inputs copyright isnt applicable to AI.
That said they should have to make sure they arent reproducing inputs. Shouldnt be hard.
Seems the same as a band being influenced by other bands that came before them. How many bands listened to Metallica and used those ideas to create new music?
I can already tell this is going to be a unpopular opinion judging by the comments but this is my ideology on it
it’s totally true. I’m indifferent on it, if it was acquired by a public facing source I don’t really care, but like im definitly against using data dumps or data that wasn’t available to the public in the first place. The whole thing with AI is rediculous, it’s the same as someone going to a website and making a mirror, or a reporter making an article that talks about what’s in it, last three web search based AI’s even gave sources for where it got the info. I don’t get the argument.
if it’s image based AI, well it’s the equivalent to an artist going to an art museum and deciding they want to replicate the art style seen in a painting. Maybe they shouldn’t be in a publishing field if they don’t want their work seen/used. That’s my ideology on it it’s not like the AI is taking a one-to-one copy and selling the artwork as , which in my opinion is a much more harmful instance and already happens commonly in today’s art world, it’s analyzing existing artwork which was available through the same means that everyone else had of going online loading up images and scraping the data. By this logic, artist should not be allowed to enter any art based websites museums or galleries, since by looking at others are they are able to adjust their own art which is stealing the author’s work. I’m not for or against it but, the ideology is insane to me.
@Pika @flop_leash_973 This is largely my thoughts on the whole thing, the process of actually training the AI is no different from a human learning
The thing about that, is that there's likely enough precedent in copyright law to actually handle that, with most copyright law it's all about intent and scale and I think that's likely where this will all go
Here the intent is to replace and the scale is astronomical, whereas an individual's intent is to add and the scale is minimal
The process of training the model is arguably similar to a human learning, and if the model just sat on a server doing nothing but knowing, there’d be no problem. Taking that knowledge and selling it to the public en mass is the issue.
This is precisely what copyrights and patents are here to safeguard. Is there already a book like A Song of Ice and Fire? Write something else, maybe better! There’s already a patent for an idea you have? Change and improve upon it and get your own patent!
You see, copyrights and patents are supposed to spur creativity, not hinder it. OpenAI should improve upon its system so that it actually thinks and is creative itself rather than regurgitating copyrighted materials, themes and ideas. Then they wouldn’t have this problem.
OpenAI wants literally all of human knowledge and creativity for free so that they can sell it back to you. And you’re okay-ish with it?
@Subverb that is, quite impressively, the opposite of what I said
Is a person infringing on copyright by producing content? No. It’s about intent and scale. Humans don’t just sit on this knowledge, they do something with it
There is nothing illegal about WHAT it’s doing, there is everything illegal about HOW and WHY
I very clearly stated that OpenAI’s intent and their scale at which they operate are blatant copyright infringement and that it has been backed up with decades of precedents
Hello fellow human. I also learn by having information shoveled to me without regard to my agency.
Agreed. I don’t understand how training LLM on publicly available data is an issue. As you says, it doesn’t copy the work. Rather the data is used as “inspiration” to stay in the art analogy.
Maybe I’m ignorant. Would love to be proven wrong. Right now it seems to me that failing media publishers are trying to do a money grab and use copyright as an argument, even though their data/material isn’t getting illegally reproduced.
Those claiming AI training on copyrighted works is “theft” are misunderstanding key aspects of copyright law and AI technology. Copyright protects specific expressions of ideas, not the ideas themselves. When AI systems ingest copyrighted works, they’re extracting general patterns and concepts - the “Bob Dylan-ness” or “Hemingway-ness” - not copying specific text or images.
This process is more akin to how humans learn by reading widely and absorbing styles and techniques, rather than memorizing and reproducing exact passages. The AI discards the original text, keeping only abstract representations in “vector space”. When generating new content, the AI isn’t recreating copyrighted works, but producing new expressions inspired by the concepts it’s learned.
This is fundamentally different from copying a book or song. It’s more like the long-standing artistic tradition of being influenced by others’ work. The law has always recognized that ideas themselves can’t be owned - only particular expressions of them.
Moreover, there’s precedent for this kind of use being considered “transformative” and thus fair use. The Google Books project, which scanned millions of books to create a searchable index, was found to be legal despite protests from authors and publishers. AI training is arguably even more transformative.
While it’s understandable that creators feel uneasy about this new technology, labeling it “theft” is both legally and technically inaccurate. We may need new ways to support and compensate creators in the AI age, but that doesn’t make the current use of copyrighted works for AI training illegal or unethical.
Fucking Christ I am so sick of people referencing the Google books lawsuit in any discussion about AI
The publishers lost that case because the judge ruled that Google Books was copying a minimal portion of the books, and that Google Books was not competing against the publishers, thus the infringement was ruled as fair use.
AI training does not fall under this umbrella, because it’s using the entirety of the copyrighted work, and the purpose of this infringement is to build a direct competitor to the people and companies whose works were infringed. You may as well talk about OJ Simpson’s criminal trial, it’s about as relevant.
So the issue being, in general to be influenced by someone else’s work you would have typically supported that work… like… literally at all. Purchasing, or even simply discussing and sharing with others who may purchase said material are both worth a lot more than not at all, and directly competing without giving source material, influences, or etc.
If it is on the open internet and visible to anyone with a web browser and you have an adblocker like most people, you are not paying to support that work. That’s what it was trained on.
Hence why I gave more than the simple purchase, but sure.
This is a dumb argument and it’s still wrong. Likeness is protected by copyright laws. See Midler v. Ford.
Time will prove you wrong
Going to a museum and looking at paintings is stealing now according to you ppl…lol
Oh so it’s different if it’s a program doing it? Please…lol
The difference being that the owners of the works in museums have given permission to view the content, and the people viewing the content are rarely trying to resell what they are seeing.
Not to mention, a lot of museums have no photography rules.
This Museum analogy works quite well
With image generation software it’s not intending to give you a one-to-one copy of the original source, in fact many of the algorithms have it coded to avoid that all together (or attempt to) it analyzes common image patterns that are done much like how humans when they go to an art gallery. The only difference is instead of it being one Art Gallery it’s a massive art pool, and instead of it being limited to the human mind which can only remember so much art at once it can remember it all. So you essentially have to look at it as one huge art gallery that the artist has access to 24/7.
It’s essentially the same as any artist who entered the museum, it just can remember everything that it saw instead of one or two things that it saw
Yeah, but because our government views technological dominance as a National Security issue we can be sure that this will come to nothing bc China Bad™.