‘Impossible’ to create AI tools like ChatGPT without copyrighted material, OpenAI says

OK, so pay for it.

Pretty simple really.

Or let's use this opportunity to make copyright much less draconian.
- ¿Porque no los dos?
  
  I don't understand why people are defending AI companies sucking up all human knowledge by saying "well, yeah, copyrights are too long anyway".
  
  Even if we went back to the pre-1976 term of 28 years, renewable once for a total of 56 years, there's still a ton of recent works that AI are using without any compensation to their creators.
  
  I think it's because people are taking this "intelligence" metaphor a bit too far and think if we restrict how the AI uses copyrighted works, that would restrict how humans use them too. But AI isn't human, it's just a glorified search engine. At least all standard search engines do is return a link to the actual content. These AI models chew up the content and spit out something based on it. It simply makes sense that this new process should be licensed separately, and I don't care if it makes some AI companies go bankrupt. Maybe they can work adequate payment for content into their business model going forward.
- I'm no fan of the current copyright law - the Statute of Anne was much better - but let's not kid ourselves that some of the richest companies in the world have any desire what so ever to change it.
- As long as capitalism exist in society, just being able go yoink and taking everyone's art will never be a practical rule set.
Every work is protected by copyright, unless stated otherwise by the author.
If you want to create a capable system, you want real data and you want a wide range of it, including data that is rarely considered to be a protected work, despite being one.
I can guarantee you that you're going to have a pretty hard time finding a dataset with diverse data containing things like napkin doodles or bathroom stall writing that's compiled with permission of every copyright holder involved.
- How hard it is doesn't matter. If you can't compensate people for using their work, or excluding work people don't want users, you just don’t get that data.
  
  There's plenty of stuff in the public domain.
- Sounds like a OpenAI problem and not an us problem.
- I never said it was going to be easy - and clearly that is why OpenAI didn't bother.
  
  If they want to advocate for changes to copyright law then I'm all ears, but let's not pretend they actually have any interest in that.
- I can guarantee you that you're going to have a pretty hard time finding a dataset with diverse data containing things like napkin doodles or bathroom stall writing that's compiled with permission of every copyright holder involved.
  
  You make this sound like a bad thing.
- And why is that a bad thing?
  
  Why are you entitled to other peoples work, just because “it’s hard to find data”?

If it ends up being OK for a company like OpenAI to commit copyright infringement to train their AI models it should be OK for John/Jane Doe to pirate software for private use.

But that would never happen. Almost like the whole of copyright has been perverted into a scam.

You wouldn't steal a car, would you?
Using copyrighted material is not the same thing as copyright infringement. You need to (re)publish it for it to become an infringement, and OpenAI is not publishing the material made with their tool; the users of it are. There may be some grey areas for the law to clarify, but as yet, they have not clearly infringed anything, any more than a human reading copyrighted material and making a derivative work.
- It comes from OpenAI and is given to OpenAI’s users, so they are publishing it.
- Insane how this comment is downvoted, when, as far as a I'm aware, it's literally just the legal reality at this point in time.
- any more than a human reading copyrighted material and making a derivative work.
  
  It seems obvious to me that it's not doing anything different than a human does when we absorb information and make our own works. I don't understand why practically nobody understands this
  
  I'm surprised to have even found one person that agrees with me

Its almost like we had a thing where copyrighted things used to end up but they extended the dates because money

This is where they have the leverage to push for actual copyright reform, but they won't. Far more profitable to keep the system broken for everyone but have an exemption for AI megacorps.

I guess the lesson here is pirate everything under the sun and as long as you establish a company and train a bot everything is a-ok. I wish we knew this when everyone was getting dinged for torrenting The Hurt Locker back when.

Remember when the RIAA got caught with pirated mp3s and nothing happened?

What a stupid timeline.

Wow! You’re telling me that onerous and crony copyright laws stifle innovation and creativity? Thanks for solving the mystery guys, we never knew that!

innovation and creativity

Neither of which are being stiffled here. OpenAI didn't write ChatGPT with copyrighted code.

What's being "stiffled" is corporate harvesting and profiting of the works of individuals, at their expense. And damn right it should be.
- at their expense
  
  How?
- Please show me the poor artist whose work was stolen. I want a name.
  
  If there is no victim there is no crime.

if it's impossible for you to have something without breaking the law you have to do without it

if it's impossible for the artistocrat class to have something without breaking the law, we change or ignore the law

Copyright law is mostly bullshit, though.
- Oh sure. But why is it only the massive AI push that allows the large companies owning the models full of stolen materials that make basic forgeries of the stolen items the ones that can ignore the bullshit copyright laws?
  
  It wouldn't be because it is super profitable for multiple large industries right?

Cool, don't do it then

finally capitalism will notice how many times it has shot up its own foot with their ridiculous, greedy infinite copyright scheme

As a musician, people not involved in the making of my music make all my money nowadays instead of me anyway. burn it all down

Pitchfork fest 2024
- ... that's a good album name, might use that ;)

I'm dumbfounded that any Lemmy user supports OpenAI in this.

We're mostly refugees from Reddit, right?

Reddit invited us to make stuff and share it with our peers, and that was great. Some posts were just links to the content's real home: Youtube, a random Wordpress blog, a Github project, or whatever. The post text, the comments, and the replies only lived on Reddit. That wasn't a huge problem, because that's the part that was specific to Reddit. And besides, there were plenty of third-party apps to interact with those bits of content however you wanted to.

But as Reddit started to dominate Google search results, it displaced results that might have linked to the "real home" of that content. And Reddit realized a tremendous opportunity: They now had a chokehold on not just user comments and text posts, but anything that people dare to promote online.

At the same time, Reddit slowly moved from a place where something may get posted by the author of the original thing to a place where you'll only see the post if it came from a high-karma user or bot. Mutated or distorted copies of the original instance, reformated to cut through the noise and gain the favor of the algorithm. Re-posts of re-posts, with no reference back to the original, divorced of whatever context or commentary the original creator may have provided. No way for the audience to respond to the author in any meaningful way and start a dialogue.

This is a miniature preview of the future brought to you by LLM vendors. A monetized portal to a dead internet. A one-way street. An incestuous ouroborous of re-posts of re-posts. Automated remixes of automated remixes.

--

There are genuine problems with copyright law. Don't get me wrong. Perhaps the most glaring problem is the fact that many prominent creators don't even own the copyright to the stuff they make. It was invented to protect creators, but in practice this "protection" gets assigned to a publisher immediately after the protected work comes into being.

And then that copyright -- the very same thing that was intended to protect creators -- is used as a weapon against the creator and against their audience. Publishers insert a copyright chokepoint in-between the two, and they squeeze as hard as they desire, wringing it of every drop of profit, keeping creators and audiences far away from each other. Creators can't speak out of turn. Fans can't remix their favorite content and share it back to the community.

This is a dysfunctional system. Audiences are denied the ability to access information or participate in culture if they can't pay for admission. Creators are underpaid, and their creative ambitions are redirected to what's popular. We end up with an auto-tuned culture -- insular, uncritical, and predictable. Creativity reduced to a product.

But.

If the problem is that copyright law has severed the connection between creator and audience in order to set up a toll booth along the way, then we won't solve it by giving OpenAI a free pass to do the exact same thing at massive scale.

Mutated or distorted copies of the original instance, reformated to cut through the noise and gain the favor of the algorithm. Re-posts of re-posts, with no reference back to the original, divorced of whatever context or commentary the original creator may have provided… This is a miniature preview of the future brought to you by LLM vendors. A monetized portal to a dead internet. A one-way street. An incestuous ouroborous of re-posts of re-posts. Automated remixes of automated remixes.

The internet is genuinely already trending this way just from LLM AI writing things like: articles and bot reviews, listicle and ‘review’ websites that laser focus for SEO hits, social media comments and posts to propagandize or astroturf…

We are going to live and die by how the Captcha-AI arms race is ran against the malicious actors, but that won’t help when governments or capital give themselves root access.
And yet, I believe LLMs are a natural evolutionary product of NLP and a powerful tool that is a necessary step forward for humanity. It is already capable of exceptionally quickly scaffolding out basic tasks. In it, I see the assumptions that all human knowledge is for all humans, rudimentary tasks are worth automating, and a truly creative idea is often seeded by information that already exists and thus creativity can be sparked by something that has access to all information.

I am not sure what we are defending by not developing them. Is it a capitalism issue of defending people's money so they can survive? Then that's a capitalism problem. Is it that we don't want to get exactly plagiarized by AI? That's certainly something companies are and need to continue taking into account. But researchers repeat research and come to the same conclusions all the time, so we're clearly comfortable with sharing ideas. Even in the Writer's Guild strikes in the States, both sides agreed that AI is helpful in script-writing, they just didn't want production companies to use it as leverage to pay them less or not give them credit for their part in the production.
- The big issue is, as you said, a capitalism problem, as people need money from their work in order to eat. But, it goes deeper than that and that doesn't change the fact that something needs to be done to protect the people creating the stuff that goes into the learning models. Ultimately, it comes down to the fact that datasets aren't ethically sourced and that people want to use AI to replace the same people whose work they used to create said AI, but it also has a root in how society devalues the work of creativity. People feel entitled to the work of artists. For decades, people have believed that artists shouldn't be fairly compensated for their work, and the recent AI issue is just another stone in the pile. If you want to see how disgusting it is, look up stuff like "paid in exposure" and the other kinds of things people tell artists they should accept as payment instead of money.
  
  In my mind, there are two major groups when it comes to AI: Those whose work would benefit from the increased efficiency AI would bring, and those who want the reward for work without actually doing the work or paying somebody with the skills and knowledge to do the work. MidJourney is in the middle of a lawsuit right now and the developers were caught talking about how you "just need to launder it through a fine tuned Codex." With the "it" here being artists' work. Link The vast majority of the time, these are the kinds of people I see defending AI; they aren't people sharing and collaborating to make things better - they're people who feel entitled to benefit from others' work without doing anything themselves. Making art is about the process and developing yourself as a person as much as it is about the end result, but these people don't want all that. They just want to push a button and get a pretty picture or a story or whatever, and then feel smug and superior about how great an artist they are.
  
  All that needs to be done is to require that the company that creates the AI has to pay a licensing fee for copyrighted material, and allow for copyright-free stuff and content where they have gotten express permission to use (opt-in) to be used freely. Those businesses with huge libraries of copyright-free music that you pay a subscription fee to use work like this. They pay musicians to create songs for them; they don't go around downloading songs and then cut them up to create synthesizers that they sell.
Too long didn't read, busy downloading a car now. How much did Disney pay for this comment?

It's not "impossible". It's expensive and will take years to produce material under an encompassing license in the quantity needed to make the model "large". Their argument is basically "but we can have it quickly if you allow legal shortcuts."

That argument has unfortunately worked for many other Tech Bros
Whenever a company says something is impossible, they usually mean it's just unprofitable.
The law is shit

Maybe you shouldn't have done it then.

I can't make a Jellyfin server full of content without copyrighted material either, but the key difference here is I'm not then trying to sell that to investors.

Maybe copyrights don't protect artists they protect corporations
- Reading these comments has shown me that most users don't realize that not all working artists are using 1099s and filing as an individual. Once you have stable income and assets (e.g. equipment) there are tax and legal benefits to incorporating your business. Removing copyright protections for large corporations will impact successful small artists who just wanted a few tax breaks.
- They protect artists AND protect corporations, and you can’t have one without the other. It’s much better the way it is compared to no copyright at all.

Cool! Then don't!

hijacking this comment

OpenAI was IMHO well within its rights to use copyrighted materials when it was just doing research. They were* doing research on how far large language models can be pushed, where's the ceiling for that. It's genuinely good research, and if copyrighted works are used just to research and what gets published is the findings of the experiments, that's perfectly okay in my book - and, I think, in the law as well. In this case, the LLM is an intermediate step, and the published research papers are the "product".

The unacceptable turning point is when they took all the intermediate results of that research and flipped them into a product. That's not the same, and most or all of us here can agree - this isn't okay, and it's probably illegal.

* disclaimer: I'm half-remembering things I've heard a long time ago, so even if I phrase things definitively I might be wrong
- True, with the acknowledgement that this was their plan all along and the research part was always intended to be used as a basis for a product. They just used the term 'research' as a workaround that allowed them to do basically whatever to copyrighted materials, fully knowing that they were building a marketable product at every step of their research
  
  That is how these people essentially function, they're the tax loophole guys that make sure you and I pay less taxes than Amazon. They are scammers who have no regard for ethics and they can and will use whatever they can to reach their goal. If that involves lying about how you're doing research when in actuality you're doing product development, they will do that without hesitation. The fact that this product now exists makes it so lawmakers are now faced with a reality where the crimes are kind of past and all they can do is try and legislate around this thing that now exists. And they will do that poorly because they don't understand AI.
  
  And this just goes into fraud in regards to research and copyright. Recently it came out that LAION-5B, an image generator that is part of Stable Diffusion, was trained on at least 1000 images of child pornography. We don't know what OpenAI did to mitigate the risk of their seemingly indiscriminate web scrapers from picking up harmful content.
  
  AI is not a future, it's a product that essentially functions to repeat garbled junk out of things we have already created, all the while creating a massive burden on society with its many, many drawbacks. There are little to no arguments FOR AI, and many, many, MANY to stop and think about what these fascist billionaire ghouls are burdening society with now. Looking at you, Peter Thiel. You absolute ghoul.

This situation seems analogous to when air travel started to take off (pun intended) and existing legal notions of property rights had to be adjusted. IIRC, a farmer sued an airline for trespassing because they were flying over his land. The court ruled against the farmer because to do otherwise would have killed the airline industry.

I member

And we did so before then with 'Mineral Rights'. You can drill for oil on your property but If you find it - it ain't yours because you only own what you can walk on in many places. Capitalists are gonna capitalize

If OpenAI is right (I think they are) one of two things need to happen.

All AI should be open source and non-profit
Copywrite law needs to be abolished

For number 1. Good luck for all the reasons we all know. Capitalism must continue to operate.

For number 1. Good luck because those in power are mostly there off the backs of those before them (see Disney, Apple, Microsoft, etc)

Anyways, fun to watch play out.

There's a third solution you're overlooking.

3: OpenAI (or other) wins a judgment that AI content is not inherently a violation of copyright regardless of materials it is trained upon.
- It's not really about the AI content being a violation or not though is it. It's more about a corporation using copyrighted content without permission to make their product better.
There's no open source without copyright, only public domain
- If all is public domain, all is open source
It’s why AI ultimately will be the death of capitalism, or the dawn of the endless war against the capitalists (literally, and physically).

AI will ultimately replace most jobs, capitalism can’t work without wage slave, or antique capitalism aka feudalism… so yeah. Gonna need to move towards UBI and more utopian, or just a miserable endless bloody awful war against the capitalists.

If the copyright people had their way we wouldn't be able to write a single word without paying them. This whole thing is clearly a fucking money grab. It is not struggling artists being wiped out, it is big corporations suing a well funded startup.

It feels to be like every other post on lemmy is taking about how copyright is bad and should be changed, or piracy is caused by fragmentation and difficulty accessing information (streaming sites). Then whenever this topic comes up everyone completely flips. But in my mind all this would do is fragment the ai market much like streaming services (suddenly you have 10 different models with different licenses), and make it harder for non mega corps without infinite money to fund their own llms (of good quality).

Like seriously, can't we just stay consistent and keep saying copyright bad even in this case? It's not really an ai problem that jobs are effected, just a capitalism problem. Throw in some good social safety nets and tax these big ai companies and we wouldn't even have to worry about the artist's well-being.

I think looking at copyright in a vacuum is unhelpful because it's only one part of the problem. IMO, the reason people are okay with piracy of name brand media but are not okay with OpenAI using human-created artwork is from the same logic of not liking companies and capitalism in general. People don't like the fact that AI is extracting value from individual artists to make the rich even richer while not giving anything in return to the individual artists, in the same way we object to massive and extremely profitable media companies paying their artists peanuts. It's also extremely hypocritical that the government and by extention "copyright" seems to care much more that OpenAI is using name brand media than it cares about OpenAI scraping the internet for independent artists' work.

Something else to consider is that AI is also undermining copyleft licenses. We saw this in the GitHub Autopilot AI, a 100% proprietary product, but was trained on all of GitHub's user-generated code, including GPL and other copyleft licensed code. The art equivalent would be CC-BY-SA licenses where derivatives have to also be creative commons.
- Maybe I'm optimistic but I think your comparison to big media companies paying their artist's peanuts highlights to me that the best outcome is to let ai go wild and just... Provide some form of government support (I don't care what form, that's another discussion). Because in the end the more stuff we can train ai on freely the faster we automate away labour.
  
  I think another good comparison is reparations. If you could come to me with some plan that perfectly pays out the correct amount of money to every person on earth that was impacted by slavery and other racist policies to make up what they missed out on, ids probably be fine with it. But that is such a complex (impossible, id say) task that it can't be done, and so I end up being against reparations and instead just say "give everyone money, it might overcompensate some, but better that than under compensating others". Why bother figuring out such a complex, costly and bureaucratic way to repay artists when we could just give everyone robust social services paid for by taxing ai products an amount equal to however much money they have removed from the work force with automation.
Journalist: Read a press release. Write it in my own words. See some Tweets. Put them together in a page padded with my commentary. Learn from, reference, and quote copyrighted material everywhere.

AI

I do that too.

Journalists

How dare AI learn! Especially from copyrighted material!
- Journalists need to survive. AI is a tool for profit, with no need to eat, sleep, pay for kids clothes or textbooks.
Which jobs are going to be affected really?

One thing is for certain, the "open" web is going to become a junkyard even more than it is now.
We're just trying to pit Disney and OpenAI against each other

/s(?)

But our current copyright model is so robust and fair! They will only have to wait 95y after the author died, which is a completely normal period.

If you want to control your creations, you are completely free to NOT publish it. Nowhere it's stated that to be valuable or beautiful, it has to be shared on the world podium.

We'll have a very restrictive Copyright for non globally transmitted/published works, and one for where the owner of the copyright DID choose to broadcast those works globally. They have a couple years to cash in, and then after I dunno, 5 years, we can all use the work as we see fit. If you use mass media to broadcast creative works but then become mad when the public transforms or remixes your work, you are part of the problem.

Current copyright is just a tool for folks with power to control that power. It's what a boomer would make driving their tractor / SUV while chanting to themselves: I have earned this.

Copyright can be a double edged sword, but...

If you want to control your creations, you are completely free to NOT publish it.

... You've identified the chilling effect it's designed to prevent: namely, telling people that they don't matter in the scope of creation.

There's a great video about how plaigirism dehumanizes, and if you've got a couple minutes I'd recommend it.
- I think it's pretty amazing when people just run with the dogma that empowers billionaires.
  
  Every creator hopes they'll be the next taylor swift and that they'll retain control of their art for those life + 70 years and make enough to create their own little dynasty.
  
  The reality is that long duration copyright is almost exclusively a tool of the already wealthy, not a tool for the not-yet-wealthy. As technology improves it will be easier and easier for wealth to control the system and deny the little guy's copyright on grounds that you used something from their vast portfolio of copyright/patent/trademark/ipmonopolyrulelegalbullshit. Already civil legal disputes are largely a function of who has the most money.
  
  I don't have the solution that helps artists earn a living, but it doesn't seem like copyright is doing them many favors as-is unless they are retired rockstars who have already earned in excess of the typical middle class lifetime earnings by the time they hit 35, or way earlier.
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  
  a great video
  
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
- Them: "Oh yeah I have 10 minutes until my dentist appointment, I'll check that out."
- First:
  
  I truly believe that they don't matter as an individual when looking at their creation as a whole. It matters among their loved ones, and for that person itself. Why do you need more... importance? From who? Why do you need to matter in scope of creation? Is it a creation for you? Then why publish it? Is it a creation for others? Then why does your identity matter? It just seems like egotism with extra steps. Using copyright to combat this seems like a red herring argument made by people who have portfolio's against people who don't..
  
  You are not only your own person, you carry human culture remnants distilled out of 12000 years of humanity! You plagiarised almost the whole of humanity while creating your 'unique' addition to culture. But, because your remixed work is newer and not directly traceable to its direct origins, we're gonna pretend that you wrote it as a hermit living without humanity on a rock and establish the rules from there on out. If it was fair for all the players in this game, it would already be impossible to not plagiarise.
- Funny thing is, human artists work quite similar to AI, in that they take the whole of human art creation, build on ot and create something new (sometimes quite derivative). No art comes out of a vacuum, it builds on previous works. I would not really say AI plagiarizes anything, unless it reproduced pretty much the exact work of someone
IMHO being able to "control your creations" isn't what copyright was created for; it's just an idea people came up with by analogy with physical property without really thinking through what purpose is supposed to serve. I believe creators of intellectual "property" have no moral right to control what happens with their creations, and they only have a limited legal right to do so as a side-effect of their legal right to profit from their creations.

They're not wrong, though?

Almost all information that currently exists has been created in the last century or so. Only a fraction of all that information is available to be legally acquired for use and only a fraction of that already small fraction has been explicitly licensed using permissive licenses.

Things that we don't even think about as "protected works" are in fact just that. Doesn't matter what it is: napkin doodles, writings on bathrooms stall walls, letters written to friends and family. All of those things are protected, unless stated otherwise. And, I don't know about you, but I've never seen a license notice attached to a napkin doodle.

Now, imagine trying to raise a child while avoiding every piece of information like that; information that you aren't licensed to use. You wouldn't end up with a person well suited to exist in the world. They'd lack education regarding science, technology, they'd lack understanding of pop-culture, they'd know no brand names, etc.

Machine learning models are similar. You can train them that way, sure, but they'd be basically useless for real-world applications.

The main difference between the two in your analogy, that has great bearing on this particular problem, is that the machine learning model is a product that is to be monetized.
- And ultimately replace the humans it learned from.
- Also an “AI” is not human, and should not be regulated as such
- Artificial intelligence is incredible in its flexibility!
  
  Simultaneously, it is like a human,
  And yet "only a tool."
- And real children aren't in a capitalist society?
- Not necessarily. There's plenty that are open source and available for free to anyone willing to provide their own computational power.
  In cases where you pay for a service, it could be argued that you aren't paying for the access to the model or its results, but the convenience and computational power necessary to run the model.
The difference here is that a child can't absorb and suddenly use massive amounts of data.
- The act of learning is absorbing and using massive amounts of data. Almost any child can, for example, re-create copyrighted cartoon characters in their drawing or whistle copyrighted tunes.
  
  If you look at, pretty much, any and all human created works, you will be able to trace elements of those works to many different sources. We, usually, call that "sources of inspiration". Of course, in case of human created works, it's not a big deal. Generally, it's considered transformative and a fair use.

Then LLMs should be FOSS

All AI should be FOSS and public domain, owned by the people, and all gains from its use taxed at 100%. It’s only because of the public that AI exists, through the schools, universities, NSF, grants, etc and all the other places that taxes have been poured into that created the advances upon which AI stands, and the AI critical research as well.
That does nothing to solve the problem of data being used without consent to train the models. It doesn’t matter if the model is FOSS if it stole all the data it trained on.
- Copying is not theft or stealing.
- The only way I can steal data from you is if I break into your office and walk off with your hard drive. Do you have access to something? It hasn't been stolen.

Let's wait until everyone is laid off and it's 'impossible' to get by without mass looting then, shall we?

If a business relies on breaking the law as a fundament of their business model, it is not a business but an organized crime syndicate. A Mafia.

It's impossible to extract all the money from a bank without robbing the bank :(

I have the perfect solution. Shorten the copyright duration.

Piracy by another name. Copyrighted materials are being used for profit by companies that have no intention of compensating the copyright holder.

Piracy is OK when corporations do it.

A ton of people need to read some basic background on how copyright, trademark, and patents protect people. Having none of those things would be horrible for modern society. Wiping out millions of jobs, medical advancements, and putting control into the hands of companies who can steal and strongarm the best. If you want to live in a world run by Mafia style big business then sure.

Meh, patents are monopolies over ideas, do much more harm than good, and help big business much more than they help the little guy. Being able to own an idea seems crazy to me.

I marginally support copyright laws, just because they provide a legal framework to enforce copyleft licenses. Though, I think copyright is abused too much on places like YouTube. In regards to training generative AI, the goal is not to copy works, and that would make the model's less useful. It's very much fair use.

Trademarks are generally good, but sometimes abused as well.
- Patents don’t let you own an idea. They give you an exclusive right to use the idea for a limited time in exchange for detailed documentation on how your idea works. Once the patent expires everyone can use it. But while it’s under patent anyone can look up the full documentation and learn from it. Without this, big business could reverse engineer the little guys invention and just steal it.
I agree with you on part ..It's moot anyway. It's the current law of the land. The glue of society and all that. It's illegal now so they shouldn't do it.

If you have enough money (required) and make a solid legal argument to change the laws (optional: depends on how much money you start with) then they can do it... But for now they should STFU and shut the fuck down.
I see and understand your point regarding trademark, but I don't understand how removing copyright or patents would have this effect, could you elaborate ?
- Small business comes up with something, big business takes idea and puts it in all their stores/factories. Small business loses out because they can't compete. Small business goes poof trying to compete.

"Impossible"? They just need to ask for permission from each source. It's not like they don't already know who the sources are, since the AIs are issuing HTTP(S) requests to fetch them.

Ask permission AND pay for its use in perpetuity.

Impossible. Then illegal? Get fucked AI

Is this the point where we start UBI and start restructuring society for the future of AI?

Then don't

Intellectual property is crap anyway

I don't even know which side you're on, and I love that.
- Lol I despise both monopolies and intellectual property. And it's so nice to see them fight each other for once.

Burglary is impossible without breaking some doors and locks. So you have to make it legal to break doors and locks now, because otherwise I cannot go on with my profession.

Sharing knowledge isn't burglary.
- But is there a nal in a nalogy?

TBH I only use LLMs when traditional search fails and even then I'm not sure if I'm getting something useful or hallucination. I need better search engines not fancy AI bullshitters

Help Help! My business model is illegal, but it makes SO MUCH money! What do I doooo?

It doesn't really make any money yet also the law is bad. Copyrights shouldn't be a thing but if they have to be they should be short duration.

We’ll, strictly speaking you could have an AI that only knows about the world up to 1928 and talks like it’s 1928.

Too bad

Why do they have free reign to store and use copyrighted material as training data? AIs don’t learn as a human would, and comparisons can’t be made between the learning processes.

They can be made. Imagine trying to hold any conversations without being able to reference popular culture.
Why do you have free reign to do the same?

AIs don’t learn as a human would, and comparisons can’t be made between the learning processes.

I think you're going to have a hard time proving a financial distinction between them
- You don’t need to prove a financial difference. They are fundamentally different systems that function in different ways. They cannot be compared 1:1 and laws cannot be applied as a 1:1. New regulations need to be added around AI use of copyrighted material.

Yeah, I also have no way to own a billion dollar. Sucks for both of us...

I wonder if the act of picking cotton was copyrighted, would we had got the cotton gin? We have automated most non-creative pursues and displaced their workers. Is it because people can take joy out of creative pursues that we balk at the automation? If you have a particular style in picking items to fulfill Amazon orders, should that be copyrighted and protected from being used elsewhere?

Bro the cotton gin literally led to millions of black slaves because now it was profitable. Worst example possible

i literally coughed i laughed so hard
- So automation can lead to more (crappy) jobs? https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-future

I've learned from lemmy that individual's abuse of copyright is good👍

LLMs trained on copyrighted material and suddenly everyone is an advocate for more strict copyright enforcement?

Who is behind each? Individual abuse is just an expense to a corporation, LLMs caused a lot of fear in regular artists.
- You're not afraid of the technology you're afraid of corporations abusing it to exploit their workforce. Don't blame the technology, blame the corporations.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The developer OpenAI has said it would be impossible to create tools like its groundbreaking chatbot ChatGPT without access to copyrighted material, as pressure grows on artificial intelligence firms over the content used to train their products.

Chatbots such as ChatGPT and image generators like Stable Diffusion are “trained” on a vast trove of data taken from the internet, with much of it covered by copyright – a legal protection against someone’s work being used without permission.

AI companies’ defence of using copyrighted material tends to lean on the legal doctrine of “fair use”, which allows use of content in certain circumstances without seeking the owner’s permission.

John Grisham, Jodi Picoult and George RR Martin were among 17 authors who sued OpenAI in September alleging “systematic theft on a mass scale”.

Getty Images, which owns one of the largest photo libraries in the world, is suing the creator of Stable Diffusion, Stability AI, in the US and in England and Wales for alleged copyright breaches.

The submission said it backed “red-teaming” of AI systems, where third-party researchers test the safety of a product by emulating the behaviour of rogue actors.

The original article contains 530 words, the summary contains 190 words. Saved 64%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

My hot take is that it's not like most of those independent artists are getting compensated fairly by the companies that own them anyway if at all. Stealing ai training content is just stealing from corporations. Corporations who are probably politically fighting to keep things worse for the average person in your country.

Theft is "a crime" but I never saw anyone complaining about how unfair it was all those times I myself got fucked over by google bullshitting their way out of giving me my ad revenue. If normal people can't profit from stuff like this, we shouldn't be doing anything to protect the profits of evil corporations.

Sounds like a fatal problem. That's a shame.

“Impossible to build evil stronghold without walls made out of human skulls” claims necromancer.

So if I look at a painting study it and then emulate the original painter's artstyle, then I'm in breach of their copyright?

Or if I read a lot of fantasy like GRRM or JK Rowling and I also write a fantasy book and say, that they were my Inspiration, I'm breaching their copyright??

That's not how it works, and if it is, it shouldn't be!

Sure, if a start reproducing work, i.e. plagiarizing the work of others, then I'm doing sth wrong.

And to spin this further: If I raise a child on children's books by a specific author, am I breaching copyright, when my child enters the workforce and starts to earn money???? Stupid, yes! But so are the copyright claims against LLMs, in my opinion.

I don't think it's accurate to call the work of AI the same as the human brain, but most importantly, the difference is that humans and tools have and should have different rights. Someone can't simply point a camera at a picture and say "I can look at it with my eye and keep it in my memory, so why can't the camera?"

Because we ensure the right of learning for people. That doesn't mean it's a free pass to technologically process works however one sees fit.

Nevermind that the more people prodded AIs, the more they have found that the reproductions are much more identical than simply vaguely replicating style from them. People have managed to get whole sentences from books and obvious copies of real artwork, copyrighted characters and celebrities by prompting AI in specific ways.
- To be fair, I think your analogy falls apart a bit because you can in fact take a picture of pretty much any art you want to, legally speaking.
  
  You can't go sell it or anything, but you are definitely not in breach of copyright just by taking the picture.
- the right of learning
  
  That's not a thing. There is a right to an education, but that is not about copyright (though it may imply the necessity of fair use exceptions in certain contexts).
  
  Also, you are confused about AI output. It's possible to make the AI spit out training data, but it takes, indeed, prodding. It's unlikely to matter by US law.
You're comparing something humans often do subconsciously to a machine that was programmed to do that. Unless you're arguing that intent doesn't matter ~~(pretty much every judge in America will tell you it does)~~ then we're talking about 2 completely different things.

Edit: Disregard the struck out portion of my comment. Apparently I don't know shit about law. My point is that comparing a a quirk of human psychology to the strict programming of a machine is a false equivalency.
- Intent does not matter for copyright infringement, it’s a strict liability.

Copyright protection only exists in the context of generating profit from someone else's work. If you were to figure out cold fusion and I'd look at your research and say "That's cool, but I am going to go do some woodworking." I am not infringing any copyrights. It's only ever an issue if the financial incentive to trace the profits back to it's copyrighted source outway the cost of doing so. That's why China has had free reign to steal any western technology, fighting them in their courts is not worth it. But with AI it's way easier to trace the output back to it's source (especially for art), so the incentive is there.

The main issue is the extraction of value from the original data. If I where to steal some bricks from your infinite brick pile and build a house out of them, do you have a right to my house? Technically I never stole a house from you.

You're conflating copyright and patents.
- Shit, you're right, I'am.
You stole bricks. How rich I am does not impact what you did. Copying is not theft. You can keep stretching any shady analogy you want but you can't change the fundamentals.

Nah... it's not too complicated
AI basically just bunch of if / else or case / switch statement in spaghetti code