this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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The slippery slope here is that we are currently considering humans and computers to be different because (something someone needs to actually define). If you say "AI read my book and output a similar story, you owe me money" then how is that different from "Joe read my book and wrote a similar story, you owe me money." We have laws already that deal with this but honestly how many books and movies aren't just remakes of Romeo and Juliet or Taming of the Shrew?!?
You're bounded by the limits of your flesh. AI is not. The $12 you spent buying a book at Barns & Noble was based on the economy of scarcity that your human abilities constrain you to.
It's hard to say that the value proposition is the same for human vs AI.
We are making an assumption that humans do "human things". If i wrote a derivative work of your $12 book, does it matter that the way i wrote it was to use a pen and paper and create a statistical analysis of your work and find the "next best word" until i had a story? Sure my book took 30 years to write but if i followed the same math as an AI would that matter?
It’s not even looking for the next best word. It’s looking for the next best token. It doesn’t know what words are. It reads tokens.
Good point.
I could easily see laws created where they blanket outlaw computer generated output derived from other human created data sets and sudden medical and technical advancements stop because the laws were written by people who don't understand what is going on.
It wouldn't matter, because derivative works require permission. But I don't think anyone's really made a compelling case that OpenAI is actually making directly derivative work.
The stronger argument is that LLM's are making transformational work, which is normally fair use, but should still require some form of compensation given the scale of it.
But no one is complaining about publishing derived work. The issue is that "the robot brain has full copies of my text and anything it creates 'cannot be transformative'". This doesn't make sense to me because my brain made a copy of your book too, its just really lossy.
I think right now we have definitions for the types of works that only loosely fit human actions mostly because we make poor assumptions of how the human brain works. We often look at intent as a guide which doesn't always work in an AI scenario.
Yeah, that's basically it.
But I think what's getting overlooked in this conversation is that it probably doesn't matter whether it's AI or not. Either new content is derivative or it isn't. That's true whether you wrote it or an AI wrote it.
I agree with that, but do politicians and judges who know absolutely nothing about the subject?
I haf a professor in college who taught about cyber security. He was renowned in his field and was asked by the RIAA to testify about some cases related to file sharing. I lost respect for him when he intentionally refrained from stating that it wasnt possible for anyone outside of the home network yo know what or who was actually downloading stuff. The technology was being ignored and an invalid view was presented for a judge who couldn't ELI5 how the internet worked let along actually networking protocols.
Well, Shakespeare has beed dead for a few years now, there's no copyright to speak of.
And if you make a book based on an existing one, then you totally need permission from the author. You can't just e.g. make a Harry Potter 8.
But AIs are more than happy to do exacly that. Or to even reproduce copyrighted works 1:1, or only with a few mistakes.
If a person writes a fanfic harry potter 8 it isn't a problem until they try to sell it or distribute it widely. I think where the legal issues get sticky here are who caused a particular AI generated Harry Potter 8 to be written.
If the AI model attempts to block this behavior. With contract stipulations and guardrails. And if it isn't advertised as "a harry potter generator" but instead as a general purpose tool... then reasonably the legal liability might be on the user that decides to do this or not. Vs the tool that makes such behavior possible.
Hypothetically what if an AI was trained up that never read Harry Potter. But its pretty darn capable and I feed into it the entire Harry Potter novel(s) as context in my prompt and then ask it to generate an eighth story
is the tool at fault or am I?
Fanfic can actually be a legal problem. It's usually not prosecuted, because it harms the brand to do so, but if a company was doing that professionally, they'd get into serious hot water.
Regarding your hypothetical scenario: If you train the AI with copyrighted works, so that you can make it reproduce HP8, then you are at fault.
If the tool was trained with HP books and you just ask really nicely to circumvent the protections, I would guess the tool (=> it's creators) would certainly be at fault (since it did train on copyrighted material and the protections were obviously not good enough), and at the latest when you reproduce the output, you too are.
It seems like people are afraid that AI can do it when i can do it too. But their reason for freaking out is....??? It's not like AI is calling up publishers trying to get Harry Potter 8 published. If i ask it to create Harry Potter 1 but change his name to Gary Trotter it's not the AI that is doing something bad, it's me.
That was my point. I can memorize text and its only when I play it off as my own that it's wrong. No one cares that I memorized the first chapter and can recite it if I'm not trying to steal it.
That's not correct. The issue is not whether you play it off as your own, but how much the damages are that you can be sued for. If you recite something that you memorized in front of a handful of friends, the damages are non-existant and hence there is no point in sueing you.
But if you give a large commercial concert and perform a cover song without permission, you will get sued, no matter if you say "This song is from and not from me", because it's not about giving credit, it's about money.
And regarding getting something published: This is not so much about big name art like Harry Potter, but more about people doing smaller work. For example, voice actors (both for movie translations and smaller things like announcements in public transport) are now routinely replaced by AI that was trained on their own voices without their permission.
Similar story with e.g. people who write texts for homepages and ad material. Stuff like that. And that has real-world consequences already now.
I think that's one in the same. I'm just not seeing the damages here because the output of the AI doesn't go any further than being AI output without a further human act. Authors are idiots if they claim "well someone could ask ChatGPT to output my entire book and you could read it for free." If you want to go after that type of crime then have ChatGPT report the users asking for it. If your book is accessible via a library I'm not see any difference between you asking ChatGPT to write in someone's style and asking me to write in their style. If you ask ChatGPT for lines verbatim i can recite them too. I don't know what legitimate damages they are claiming.
I think this is a great example but again i feel like the law is not only lacking but would need to outlaw other human acts not currently considered illegal.
If you do impressions you're mimicking the tone, cadence and selection of language someone else does. You arent recording them and playing back the recording, you are using your own voice box to create a sound similar to the celebrity. An AI sound generator isn't playing back a recording either. It's measuring tone, cadence, and language used and creates a new sound similar to the celebrity. The only difference here is that the AI would be more precise than a humans ability to use their voice.