@mark The story emerging around "AI" has so many parallels to the history of the Luddites.

As @pluralistic says, "It’s not what technology does that matters, but who it does it for and who it does it to."

@mark @pluralistic The issue with AI isn't that it will automate some processes previously done by human creators. It's that it will do so using the output of those creators as "training data" without those creators ever being compensated.

And it will do so to further enrich people that are already rich at the expense of creators, performers, and audiences.

@MadMadMadMadRN @mark @pluralistic

The training process only ever uses existing work as a point of reference to determine if the computer is making correct predictions. Not even a single pixel of the original work is ever stored in the resulting model. It's very unclear why anyone would be entitled to compensation for that. It's like saying someone needs to be compensated for measurement. The goal is not to copy the original work, and that's the only thing IP protects.

@srcrist @mark @pluralistic

Other people's work is an essential input to "AI". Without the data, the "AI" is useless. People who generated that data should be compensated for that.

There are already apps that render photos in the style of particular artists without paying those artists at all. This is not an academic problem we might encounter down the line. This is happening right now.

@MadMadMadMadRN @mark @pluralistic

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the training process and the models themselves and how they work. As long as people have a shared concept of what makes a thing look "right," you could train an AI model on literally random noise as long as human beings provided it feedback like a rorschach test to say "sure, that sorta looks like a couch."

Existing work is simply a shortcut for this process. They are extant examples of what things look like.

@srcrist @mark @pluralistic

But companies like OpenAI don't buy a bunch of couches and hire a bunch of people to take pictures and label those couches and upload those images to its servers. They just scrape the web for other people's work without compensating or even notifying them. They then fed those images into proprietary, closed systems that they sell to customers. At best, that's fencing the commons. To me, it's more like theft.

Calling it "measurement" doesn't change anything.

@MadMadMadMadRN @mark @pluralistic

Again, though, copyright does not protect an author from USE, it protects an author's right to COPY the image. I think it is an uphill argument that calculating probabilistic weights about what is or is not noise in an image, from millions of images of various concepts, is somehow infringing on an author's right to consent for replication. I do not see how that is anything other than a derivative work.

You may object to OpenAI, but I don't see the harm here.

@srcrist @mark @pluralistic I'm not going to pretend to be a copyright expert, but I'm pretty sure it protects use as well. That's why artists have to pay to cover a song written by someone else. It's why people can't make money by selling fan fiction of works not in the public domain.

But beyond the issue of copyright, the fact remains that private, for-profit companies are taking work produced by others without their consent or even knowledge and using it to make proprietary products.