Apparently, stealing other people’s work to create product for money is now “fair use” as according to OpenAI because they are “innovating” (stealing). Yeah. Move fast and break things, huh?
“Because copyright today covers virtually every sort of human expression—including blogposts, photographs, forum posts, scraps of software code, and government documents—it would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials,” wrote OpenAI in the House of Lords submission.
OpenAI claimed that the authors in that lawsuit “misconceive[d] the scope of copyright, failing to take into account the limitations and exceptions (including fair use) that properly leave room for innovations like the large language models now at the forefront of artificial intelligence.”
deleted by creator
What’s stopping AI companies from paying royalties to artists they ripped off?
Also, lol at accounts created within few hours just to reply in this thread.
The moment their works are the one that got stolen by big companies and driven out of business, watch their tune change.
Edit: I remember when Reddit did that shitshow, and all the sudden a lot of sock / bot accounts appeared. I wasn’t expecting it to happen here, but I guess election cycle is near.
Money is not always the issue. FOSS software for example. Who wants their FOSS software gobbled up by a commercial AI regardless. So there are a variety of issues.
I don’t care if any of my FOSS software is gobbled up by a commercial AI. Someone reading my code isn’t a problem to me. If it were, I wouldn’t publish it openly.
I do, especially when someone’s profiting from it, while my license is strictly for non commercial.
Same. I didn’t write it for them. I wrote it for folks who don’t necessarily have a lot of money but want something useful.
Well, for $20/mo I get a super-educated virtual assistant/tutor. It’s pretty awesome.
I’d say that’s some good value for people without much money. All of my open source libs are published under the MIT license if I recall correctly. I’ve made so much money using open source software, I don’t mind giving back, even to people who are going to make money with my code.
It makes me feel good to think my code could be involved in money changing hands. It’s evidence to me that I built something valuable.
What’s stopping AI companies from paying royalties to artists they ripped off?
profit. AI is not even a profitable business now. They exist because of the huge amount of investment being poured into it. If they have to pay their fair share they would not exist as a business.
what OpenAI says is actually true. The issue IMHO is the idea that we should give them a pass to do it.
Uber wasn’t making profit anyway, despite all the VCs money behind it.
I guess they have reasons not to pay drivers properly. Give Uber a free pass for it too
When you think about it, all companies would make so much more money if they didn’t have to pay their staff, or pay for materials they use! This whole economy and capitalism business, which relies on money being exchanged for goods and services, is clearly holding back profits. Clearly the solution here is obvious: everybody should embrace OpenAI’s methods and simply grab whatever they want without paying for it. Profit for everyone!
It’s crazy how everyone is suddenly in favour of IP law.
IP law used to stop corporations from profiting off of creators’ labor without compensation? Yeah, absolutely.
IP law used to stop individuals from consuming media where purchases wouldn’t even go to the creators, but some megacorp? Fuck that.
I’m against downloading movies by indie filmmakers without compensating them. I’m not against downloading films from Universal and Sony.
I’m against stealing food from someone’s garden. I’m not against stealing food from Safeway.
If you stop looking at corporations as being the same as individuals, it’s a very simple and consistent viewpoint.
IP law shouldn’t exist, but if it does it should only exist to protect individuals from corporations. When that’s how it’s being used, like here, I accept it as a necessary evil.
IP law used to compensate creators “until their death + 70 years”… you can spin it however you want, that’s just plain wrong.
If you stop looking at corporations as being the same as individuals
That’s a separate bonkers legislation. Two wrongs don’t make one right.
I never said I like IP law. I explicitly said it shouldn’t exist. I wish they’d strip out any post-humous ownership, absolutely. But I’m fine beating OpenAI over the head with that or any other law. Whether I advocate for or against copyright law will ultimately have no impact on its existence, so I may as well cheer it on when it’s used to hurt corporations, and condemn it when it’s used to protect corporations over individuals.
That’s a separate bonkers legislation
I’m not talking about the legislation, I’m talking about the mindset, which is very prevalent in the pro-AI tech spaces. Go to HackerNews and see just how hard the AI-bros there will fellate each other over “corporate rights”.
My whole point is that there is nothing logically inconsistent with being against IP law, but also understanding that since its existence is reality, leveraging it as best as possible (i.e. to hurt corporations).
Word.
I’m not so much in favor of IP law as I am in favor of informed consent in every aspect of the word.
when posting photos, art and text content years ago, I was not able to imagine it might be trained off by an AI. As such I was not able to make a decision based on informed consent if I agreed to that or not.
Even though quotes such as “once you post it, its on the internet forever” were around, I was not aware the extend to which this reached and that had my art been vacuumed by a generative AI model (it hasnt luckily) people could create art that pretends to be created by me. Thus I could not consent
I think this goes for a lot of artists actually, especially those who exist far more publicly than I do, who are in those databases and who are a keyword to be used in prompts. There is no possible way they could have given informed consent to that at the time they posted art/at the time they started that social media profile/youtube channel etc.
To me, this is the real problem. I could care less about corporations.
I still think IP needs to eat shit and die. Always has, always will.
I recently found out we could have had 3d printing 20 years earlier but patents stopped that. Cocks !
It’s almost like most people are idiots who don’t understand the thing they’re against and are just parroting what they hear/read.
I’m the detractor here, I couldn’t give less of a shit about anything to do with intellectual property and think all copyright is bad.
- This is not REALLY about copyright - this is an attack on free and open AI models, which would be IMPOSSIBLE if copyright was extended to cover the case of using the works for training.
- It’s not stealing. There is literally no resemblance between the training works and the model. IP rights have been continuously strengthened due to lobbying over the last century and are already absurdly strong, I don’t understand why people on here want so much to strengthen them ever further.
Sorry AIs are not humans. Also executives like Altman are literally being paid millions to steal creator’s work.
I didn’t say anything about AIs being humans.
They’re also not vegetables 😡
I don’t understand why people on here want so much to strengthen them ever further.
It is about a lawless company doing lawless things. Some of us want companies to follow the spirit, or at least the letter, of the law. We can change the law, but we need to discuss that.
Agreed on both counts… Except Microsoft sings a different tune when their software is being “stolen” in the exact same way. They want to have it both ways - calling us pirates when we copy their software, but it’s “without merit” when they do it. Fuck’em! Let them play by the same rules they want everyone else to play.
That sounds bad. Do you have evidence for MS behaving this way?
Literally first hit on google (after the NYT links).
Some relevant comments from Ars:
leighno5
The absolute hubris required for OpenAI here to come right out and say, ‘Yeah, we have no choice but to build our product off the exploitation of the work others have already performed’ is stunning. It’s about as perfect a representation of the tech bro mindset that there can ever be. They didn’t even try to approach content creators in order to do this, they just took what they needed because they wanted to. I really don’t think it’s hyperbolic to compare this to modern day colonization, or worker exploitation. ‘You’ve been working pretty hard for a very long time to create and host content, pay for the development of that content, and build your business off of that, but we need it to make money for this thing we’re building, so we’re just going to fucking take it and do what we need to do.’
The entitlement is just…it’s incredible.
4qu4rius
20 years ago, high school kids were sued for millions & years in jail for downloading a single Metalica album (if I remember correctly minimum damage in the US was something like 500k$ per song).
All of a sudden, just because they are the dominant ones doing the infringment, they should be allowed to scrap the entire (digital) human knowledge ? Funny (or not) how the law always benefits the rich.
Well in that case maybe chat gpt should just fuck off it doesn’t seem to be doing anything particularly useful, and now it’s creator has admitted it doesn’t work without stealing things to feed it. Un fucking believable. Hacks gonna hack I guess.
ChatGPT has been enormously useful to me over the last six months. No idea where you’re getting this notion it isn’t useful.
Any reasonable person can reach the conclusion that something is wrong here.
What I’m not seeing a lot of acknowledgement of is who really gets hurt by copyright infringement under the current U.S. scheme. (The quote is obviously directed toward the UK, but I’m reasonably certain a similar situation exists there.)
Hint: It’s rarely the creators, who usually get paid once while their work continues to make money for others.
Let’s say the New York Times wins its lawsuit. Do you really think the reporters who wrote the infringed-upon material will be getting royalty checks to be made whole?
This is not OpenAI vs creatives. OK, on a basic level it is, but expecting no one to scrape blogs and forum posts rather goes against the idea of the open internet in the first place. We’ve all learned by now that what goes on the internet stays there, with attribution totally optional unless you have a legal department. What’s novel here is the scale of scraping, but I see some merit to the “transformational” fair-use defense given that the ingested content is not being reposted verbatim.
This is corporations vs corporations. Framing it as millions of people missing out on what they’d have otherwise rightfully gotten is disingenuous.
…so stop doing it!
This explains what Valve was until recently not so cavalier about AI: They didn’t want to hold the bag on copyright matters outside of their domain.
Then shutdown your goddamn company until you find a better way.
As with many things, the golden rule applies. They who have the gold, make the rules.
It’s also “impossible” to have multiple terabytes of media on my homeserver without copyright infringement, so piracy is ok, right!?
O no, wait it actually is possible, it’s just more expensive and more work to do it legally (and leaves a lot of plastic trash in form of Blurays and DVDs), just like with AI. But laws are just for poor people, I guess.
I stand by my opinion that AI will be the worst thing humans ever created, and that means it ranks just a bit above religion.
This is very likely to be true.
Wait, so if the way I make money is illegal now, it’s the system’s fault, isn’t it? That means I can keep going because I believe I’m justified, right? Right?
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
In order to apply that license, you will need to fully and unequivocally identify yourself (aka: doxx yourself). Not sure that’s what you really want.
I don’t believe this is true, a nickname or online account works completely fine for attribution if nothing else is given.
Attribution is not the problem. The problems are:
- Entering a valid license agreement under a non-registered pseudonym.
- Enforcing the conditions of the license, particularly the NC and SA parts, without revealing one’s legal name.
Depending on the applicable legislation (US, UK, EU, other), either one or both of those points may not be possible.
The real issue is money. How much and how (un)distributed.
Why is it fair/ok that one company can use all this material and make a lot of money off it without paying or even acknowledging others work?
On the flip side AI model could be useful. Maybe the models/weights should be made free just like the content they are trained on. Instead of paying for the model, we should pay for the hosting of the inference (aka. the API)
I imagine they did pay for the content, unless the claim here is they used pirated versions of copyrighted material to build their training corpus.
Of course it is. About 50 years ago we went to a regime where everything is copywrited rather then just things that were marked and registered. Not sure where.I stand on that. One could argue we are in a crazy over copyright era now anyway.
