Tiffany LiWGA is bargaining to block use of their written work to train AI. (ht @harikunzru)
This is a smart move. Brief 🧵:
Generally, writers do not retain copyright for scripts written for or bought by production companies. Which means those companies have the right to do what they want with the written work. Including, potentially, using the works to train AI.
Companies can train AI on work written by writers in a way that allows them to generate written output that sounds similar to what a writer would’ve written. When this gets efficient and effective enough, expect companies to try to eliminate writing jobs altogether...
We've already seen tons of examples of of AI-generated writing, art, and music made to sound or look similar to known human creators.
(Honestly IMO the tech is not quite there yet. Often what you get is a pale imitation. But tech is always improving!)
WGA is now trying to negotiate a hard stop on use of their members' writing to train AI. This will mean that companies who buy a script or hire a writer can’t exploit writers’ works by training AI to put those same writers out of a job. This is a smart move!
Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦@tiffanycli amazing. I expected something like this to start happening but I did not expect it so soon.
Question: one way OpenAI et al try to evade this whole thing is by leaning into the "well it was made public on Teh Intertubes and we just scraped it 🤷♀️" defense. Who will be / should be liable if a script gets published on the open Web, and then sucked into an LLM training set?
Also, many everyday tools (office suites, for example) start integrating "AI". Similar question as above?
Gaëtan PerraultOpenAI are trying to evade those things, but it doesn't mean that they have. We are seeing pushback on many fronts.
Samsung has already banned employees from using the tools after a leak of code.
And there's an ongoing class action suit against the image generators.
@rysiek @tiffanycli honestly, I think we'll start seeing the first big fights when people start publishing movies featuring Disney characters "tweaked" by AI.
It's going to take money on multiple sides of this issue to actually resolve it and it's going to take a few years for that to happen.
@gatesvp @tiffanycli oh absolutely.