Thousands of authors demand payment from AI companies for use of copyrighted works
Thousands of authors demand payment from AI companies for use of copyrighted works::Thousands of published authors are requesting payment from tech companies for the use of their copyrighted works in training artificial intelligence tools, marking the latest intellectual property critique to target AI development.
Isn’t learning the basic act of reading text?
not even close. that’s not how AI training models work, either.
if your position is that only humans can learn and adapt text
nope-- their demands are right at the top of the article and in the summary for this post:
Thousands of authors demand payment from AI companies for use of copyrighted works::Thousands of published authors are requesting payment from tech companies for the use of their copyrighted works in training artificial intelligence tools
that broadly rules out any AI ever
only if the companies training AI refuse to pay
Okay, given that AI models need to look over hundreds of thousands if not millions of documents to get to a decent level of usefulness, how much should the other of each individual work get paid out?
Even if we say we are going to pay out a measly dollar for every work it looks over, you’re immediately talking millions of dollars in operating costs. Doesn’t this just box out anyone who can’t afford to spend tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars on AI development? Maybe good if you’ve always wanted big companies like Google and Microsoft to be the only ones able to develop these world-altering tools.
Another issue, who decides which works are more valuable, or how? Is a Shel Silverstein book worth less than a Mark Twain novel because it contains less words? If I self publish a book, is it worth as much as Mark Twains? Sure his is more popular but maybe mine is longer and contains more content, whats my payout in this scenario?
AI isn’t doing anything creative. These tools are merely ways to deliver the information you put into it in a way that’s more natural and dynamic. There is no creation happening. The consequence is that you either pay for use of content, or you’ve basically diminished the value of creating content and potentiated plagiarism at a gargantuan level.
Being that this “AI” doesn’t actually have the capacity for creativity, if actual creativity becomes worthless, there will be a whole lot less incentive to create.
The “utility” of it right now is being created by effectively stealing other people’s work. Hence, the court cases.
Sure, AI is not doing anything creative, but neither is my pen, its the tool im using to be creative. Lets think about this more with some scenarios;
Lets say software developer “A” comes along, and they’re pretty fucking smart. They sit down, read through all of Mark Twains novels, and over the course of the next 5 years, create a piece of software that generates works in Twain’s style. Its so good that people begin using it to write real books. It doesn’t copy anything specifically from Twain, it just mimics his writing style.
We also have developer “B”. While Dev A is working on his project, Dev B is working on a very similar project, but with one difference: Dev B writes an LLM to read the books for him, and develop a writing style similar to Twain’s based off of that. The final product is more or less the same as Dev A’s product, but he saves himself the time of needing to read through every work on his own, he just reads a couple to get an idea of what the output might look like.
Is the work from Dev A’s software legitimate? Why or why not?
Is the work from Dev B’s software legitimate? Why or why not?
Assume both of these developers own copies of the works they used as training data, what is honestly the difference here? This is what I am struggling with so much.
So now the output of both programs is “illegimate” in your eyes, despite one of them never even getting direct access to the original text.
Now lets say one of them just writes a story in the style of Twain, still plagiarism? Because I don’t know if you can copyright a style.
The first painter painted on cave walls with his fingers. Was the brush a parrot tool? A utility to plagiarize? You could use it for plagiarism, yes, and by your logic, it shouldn’t be used. And any work created using it is not “legitimate”.
L4sBot
bouncing
BrooklynMan
goetzit