this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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Dude, I'm not calling you a bad person. I am calling you out of touch with a very real problem.
Look, you asked what the endgame was for people who hoped that copyright would get applied to AI. I TOLD you. We want to slow down the deployment of AI by large companies and establish legal protections for creatives and others who
You responded by comparing the AI to those human creatives, which honestly is a trap I fell into. Because it derails us from the point, which is those creatives need legal protection. The legal system will see AI as a tool no matter HOW similar or dissimilar it is to a human being until an AGI comes along that is granted legal personhood. Then those legal restrictions won't apply to that AGI, and it will instead fall under the legal restrictions applied to people.
Because the intended use of art is communication between PEOPLE. And the person involved in AI right now is the person who feeds it the art and makes a machine to create what they desire. This is not the intended use case. It is not intended to create machines, it is intended to inspire people.
So unless your AI is LEGALLY classified as a person, applying copyright restrictions to it will not apply to a human reader that is inspired.
I DEFINITELY want a legal distinction between using my writing to make a machine and reading my writing.
Because using the work of creatives to make an AI is exploitation. And I don't think we should preserve the right of a corporation to exploit creatives just so that the average person can ALSO exploit creatives.
But if it makes you happy, how about we get a copyright ala Creative Commons that can allow an individual to create an AI using the copyrighted work for non-profit reason, but restrict corporations from doing so with an AI used for profit, and considers any work created by this AI to be noncopyrighted.
Honestly, I think keeping the output of AI non-copyrighted is probably the best of both worlds, because it allows individuals to use AI as an expressive tool (you keep separating "creatives" from "average people", which I take issue with) while making it impractical for large media companies to use.
At any rate, the reason copyright restrictions would just kill open source AI is that it strikes me as incredibly unlikely that you're going to be able to stop corporations from training AI on media that they own outright. Disney has a massive library of media that they can use as training data, and no amount of stopping open source AI users from training AI on copyrighted works is going to prevent Disney from doing that (same goes for Warner Bros, etc). Disney, which is known for exploiting its own workers, will almost certainly use that AI to replace their animators completely, and they'll be within their legal rights to do so since they own all the copyrights on it.
Now consider companies like Adobe, Artstation, and just about any other website that you can upload art to. When you sign up for those sites, you agree to their user agreement, which has standard boilerplate language that gives them a sublicenseable right to use your work however they see fit (or "for business purposes", which means the same thing). In other words, if you've ever uploaded your work anywhere, you've already given someone else the legal right to train an AI on your work (even with a creative interpretation of copyright law that allows concepts and styles to be copyrighted), which means they're just going to build their own AI and then sell it back to you for a monthly fee.
But artists and writers should be compensated every time someone uses an AI trained on their work, right? Well, let's look at ChatGPT for a moment. I have open source code out there on github, which was almost certainly included in ChatGPT's training data. Therefore, when someone uses ChatGPT for anything (since the training data doesn't go into a database; it just makes tiny tiny little changes to neuron connection weights), they're using my copyrighted work, and thus they owe me a royalty. Who better to handle that royalty check but OpenAI? So now you get on there and use ChatGPT, making use of my work, and some of the "royalty fee" they're now charging goes to me. Similarly, ChatGPT has been trained on some of whatever text you've added to the internet (comments, writing, whatever, it doesn't matter), so when I use it, you get royalties. So far so good. Now OpenAI charges us both, keeps a big commission, and we both pay them $50/month for the privilege of access to all that knowledge, and we both make $20/month because people are using it, for a net -$30/month. Who wins? OpenAI. With a compensation scheme, the big corporations win every time and the rest of us lose, because it costs money to do it, and open source can't do it at all. Better to skip the middle man, say here's an AI that we all contributed to and we all have access to.
So again, what specifically is your plan to slow down deployment? Because onerous copyright restrictions aren't going to stop any of the people who need to be stopped, but they will absolutely stop the people competing with those people.
@IncognitoErgoSum Honestly? Arguing against AI to anyone I can find and supporting any legal action to regulate the industry. That includes my boss when he considers purchasing an AI service.
If find something that's mine has been used to train an AI, I am willing to join a class action suit. The next work contract renegotiation I have will take into account the possibility of my writing being used to train, and it'll be a no. I'm supporting the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes because those contracts will set important precedents on how AI can be used in creative industries at least, and will likely spread to other industries.
And I think if enough people don't buy into the hype, and are skeptical, and public opinion remains against it, then it's less likely AI will be used in industries that need a strict safety standard until we get a regulatory agency for it.
I get it, then.
It's more about the utilitarian goal of convincing people of something that it's convenient for you if the public believes it, in order to protect yourself and your immediate peers from automation, as opposed to actually seeking the truth and sticking going with established legal precedent.
Legally, your class action lawsuit doesn't really have a leg to stand on, but you might manage to win anyway if you can depend on the ignorance of the judge and the jury about how AI actually works, and prejudice them against it. If you can get people to think of computer scientists and AI researches as "tech bros" instead of scientists with PHDs, you might be able to get them to dismiss what they say as "hype" and "fairy tales".
I still say you're wrong about how the AI actually works, man. You're looking at it with rose-colored goggles, head filled with sci-fi catch phrases. But it's just a math machine.
I'm looking at it with a computer science degree and experience with AI programming libraries.
And yes, it's a machine that simulates neurons using math. We simulate physics with math all the way down to the quantum foam. I don't know what your point is. Whether it's simulated neurons or real neurons, it learns concepts, and concepts cannot be copyrighted.
I have a sneaking suspicion since you switched tactics from googling the wrong flowchart to accusing me of not caring about workers due to a contract dispute that's completely unrelated to anything of the copyright stuff I'm talking about, I have a feeling you at least suspect that I know what I'm talking about.
Anyway, since you're arguing based on personal convenience and not fact, I can't really trust anything that you say anyway, because we're on entirely different wavelengths. You've already pretty much indicated that even if I were to convince you I'm right, you'd still go on doing exactly what you're doing, because you're on a crusade to save a small group of your peers from automation, and damn the rest of us.
Best of luck to you.
Yeah, we're on different wavelengths. But I do have over twenty years in cyber transport and electronics. I know the first four layers in and out, including that physical layer it seems just about all programmers forget about completely.
It's not learning. It's not reading. It's not COMPREHENDING. It is processing. It is not like a person.
I admit, I'm firing from any direction I can get an angle at because this idea that these programs are actual AGI and are comparable to humanity is well... dangerous. There are people with power and influence who want to put these things in areas that WILL get people hurt. There are people who are dying to put them to work doing every bit of writing from scripts to NOTAMs and they are horrifically unreliable because they have no way of verifying the ACCURACY of what they right. They do not have the ability to make a judgement, which is a key component of human thinking. They can only favor the set result coming through the logic gate. If A and B enter, B comes out. If A and A enter, A comes out. It has no way to evaluate whether A or B is the actual answer.
You call it a small group of my peers, but everyone is in trouble because people with money are SEVERELY overestimating the capabilities of these programs. The danger is not that AI will take over the world, but that idiots will hand AI the world and AI will tank it because AI does not come with the capabilities needed to make actual decisions.
So yeah, I bring up the WGA/SAG-AFTRA strike. Because that happens to be the best known example of the harm being done not by the AI, but by the people who have too much faith in the AI and are ready to replace messy humans of all stripes with it.
And I argue with you, because you have too much faith in the AI. I'm not impressed by your degree to be perfectly honest because in my years in the trade I have known too many people with that degree who think they know way more than they do and end up having to rely on people like me to keep them grounded in what actually can be accomplished.
What, specifically, do you think I'm wrong about?
If it's the future potential of AI, that's just a guess. AGI could be 100 years away (or financially impossible) as easily as it could be 5 years. AGI is in the future still, and nobody is really qualified to guess when it'll come to fruition.
If you think I'm wrong about the present potential of AI, I've already seen individuals with no budget use it to express themselves in ways that would have required an entire team and lots of money, and that's where I believe its real potential right now lies. That is, opening up the possibility for regular period to express themselves in ways that were impossible for them before. If Disney starts replacing animators with AI, I'll be right there with you boycotting them. AI should be for everyone, not for large corporations that can already afford to express themselves however they want.
If you think I'm wrong that AIs like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion do their computing with simulated neurons, let me know and I'll try to find some literature about it from the source. I've had a lot of AI haters confidently tell me that it doesn't (including in this thread), and I don't know if you're in that camp or not.
I don't think we know enough about the human brain to actually replicate it in electronics.
So what does that mean? Do you not believe that AIs like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion have neural networks that are made up of simulated neurons? Or are you saying that we haven't simulated an actual human brain? Because the former is factually incorrect, and I never claimed the latter. Please explain exactly what "hype" you believe I'm buying into? Because I don't think you have any clue what it is you think I'm wrong about. You just really don't want me to be right.
I think they simulate what some people think neurons are like. I mean, I guess you can get the binary neurons fine but there are analog neurons (and that is something that has just now been proven). But there are so many value inputs in the human brain that we haven't isolated, so much about it we haven't mapped. We don't even know how the electricity is encoded. So no, I don't think what you're calling a "neural network" is ACTUALLY simulating the human brain.
The hype you're buying into is that AI will improve our lives just by existing. Thing is, any new tech is a weapon in the hands of the rich whether it's available to the common man or not. We need to focus on setting the rules for the rich and enforcing the rules we have. Copyright, which is also a weapon in the hands of the rich yes, has aspects which are made to protect the common man and we need to enforce those to keep the rich in line while we have them. If someday we junk copyright, it needs to be as a whole. We can't go chucking copyright for small time authors while the courts are still allowing Disney to keep Mickey Mouse out of the public domain, which is what you suggest doing when you suggest copyright should be ignored so that the common man can make their own AI.
I think I've softened on quite a bit with your arguments, honestly. It's unfair to say I just don't want you to be right. My position remains that I think copyright is a fair place for limitation on AI training.
So most of my opinions about what AI can do aren't about hype at all, but what I've personally experienced with it firsthand. The news, frankly, is just as bad a source about AI is marketing departments of AI companies, because the news is primarily written by people who feel threatened by its existence and are rationalizing reasons that it's bad, as well as amplifying bad things that they hear and, in the best case, reporting on it without really understanding what it actually does. The news is partly why you're connecting what's happening with that WGA/SAG-AFTRA contract; nothing I've said here supports people losing their existing rights to their own likenesses, and the reason they're trying to slip it into the contracts is because even under existing copyright law, AI isn't a get out of jail free card to produce copyrighted works despite the fact that you can train it on them.
At any rate, here are a few of my personal experiences with using AI:
This kind of thing is why I'm excited about AI -- it's improving my life in a big way right now. None of what I've done with it is "hype". I don't care that Elon Musk's dumb ass is starting his own AI company, or what tech company marketing divisions have to say about it, or what some MBA CEO's wild guess about what we'll be using it for in 5 years is.
It's nice that your life is better, but that doesn't change that these AIs were trained by being fed the work of creatives who were never compensated for that work.
And it doesn't change that on the high level and in the real world, they're pushing to put AI in places AI isn't ready to be, because they don't want to pay humans to do those jobs.
I mean, yeah, you don't care... but the rest of us do.
Waaaaait a minute. How is it you thinking AI is good because it makes your life a bit better leisure-wise different from me thinking it's a problem because it will make my life worse work-wise? You threw that at me saying I was worried about a small group and here you are basing your excitement on it helping your niche hobbies?
Are you sure you're not projecting here? In this entire thread, have you budged an inch based on all the people arguing against your original post? Or are you just refusing to admit that it could cause trouble in the world for people's livelihoods because you get to have fun with it?
When did I refuse to admit automation causes problems for people?
When did I refuse to admit it could help with anything?
I'm not sure why you're asking that. You literally just asked me if I'm refusing to admit that AI could cause trouble for people's livelihoods. I don't know where you even got that idea. I never asked you anything about whether you admit it could help with things, because that's irrelevant (and also it would be a pretty silly blanket assumption to make).
Who am I supposed to be budging for? Of the three people here who are actually arguing with me, you're the only one who isn't saying they're going to slash my car tires and likening personal AI use to eating steak in terms of power usage (it's not even in the same ballpark), or claiming that Stable Diffusion doesn't use a neural network. I only replied to the other guy's most recent comment because I don't want to be swiftboated -- people will believe other people who confidently state something that they find validating, even if they're dead wrong.
We just seem to mostly have a difference of opinion. I don't get the sense that you're making up your own facts. And fundamentally, I'm not convinced of the idea that only a small group of people deserve laws protecting their jobs from automation, particularly not at the expense of the rest of us. If we want to grant people relief from having their jobs automated away, we need to be doing that for everybody, and the answer to that isn't copyright law.
And as far as AI being used to automate dangerous jobs, copyright isn't going to stop that at all. Tesla's dangerous auto-pilot function (honestly, I have no idea if that's a neural network or just a regular computer program) uses data that Tesla gathers themselves. Any pharmaceutical company that develops an AI for making medicines will train it on their own trade secrets. Same with AI surgeons, AI-operated heavy machinery, and so on. None of that is going to be affected by copyright, and public concerns about safety aren't going to get in the way of stockholders and their profits anymore than it has in the past. If you want to talk about the dangers of overreliance on AI doing dangerous work, then by all means talk about that. This copyright fight, for those large companies, is a beneficial distraction.
All right, let's go back to the original post. You said copyright being applied to materials used for AI training would lock poor people out of AI and make it so only corporations could use it.
This isn't true, because there's a wealth of public domain info out there.
Many of us pointed out that waiving copyright for AI training means that people who are being replaced by AI would have also had their work used to build the AI, which is an exploitation of their labor being used to eliminate their livelihood.
We argued about this and got on tangents, and ultimately you accused me of an anti-AI bias that is made to protect a "small group" of my peers and "damn" everyone else.
But ultimately, everyone else would just be required to keep their training to public domain works, or leave their lives the same. The group of my peers would have their lives worsened.
You haven't budged on this, this basic idea that training AI is so important that it is worth having those lives worsened. That it's so important we can't even give them a cut for the works already used.
And your examples for why AI is so important are... checks your comment Slightly easier websearch, being able to summarize stuff more easily, not having to draw or think up stories for your TTRPG, and... free background art on a video game you made for your kids.
Over this entire time you have budged on... acknowledging there is some trouble, but that the trouble is worth it and we still shouldn't try to use copyright protections to slow down the businesses who are ready to start downsizing or force them to at least pay people for work completed. I appreciate this acknowledgement, must've taken a lot of effort and soulsearching on your part.
So, yeah. I am sorry that I made you feel bad for saying that starving artists should be consigned to poverty--despite their work being used to make this tool--so that your children can have full background art on their free videogames. That's on me, man.
In all seriousness, of course I don't want to slash your tires or anything but come on. Copyright's not the final answer, but we can't just throw it away. It's a tool we have to make sure people get their due, and it is going to take way longer to make a new tool that helps everyone, so why would we waive the one tool we have while working on it?
If one author gets a meal out of copyright awards from an AI company, then yeah, it's worth applying copyright to it.