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Thousands of authors demand payment from AI companies for use of copyrighted works (www.cnn.com)

submitted 1 year ago by L4s@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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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.

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[–] cerevant@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There is already a business model for compensating authors: it is called buying the book. If the AI trainers are pirating books, then yeah - sue them.

There are plagiarism and copyright laws to protect the output of these tools: if the output is infringing, then sue them. However, if the output of an AI would not be considered infringing for a human, then it isn’t infringement.

When you sell a book, you don’t get to control how that book is used. You can’t tell me that I can’t quote your book (within fair use restrictions). You can’t tell me that I can’t refer to your book in a blog post. You can’t dictate who may and may not read a book. You can’t tell me that I can’t give a book to a friend. Or an enemy. Or an anarchist.

Folks, this isn’t a new problem, and it doesn’t need new laws.

[–] scarabic@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

When you sell a book, you don’t get to control how that book is used.

This is demonstrably wrong. You cannot buy a book, and then go use it to print your own copies for sale. You cannot use it as a script for a commercial movie. You cannot go publish a sequel to it.

Now please just try to tell me that AI training is specifically covered by fair use and satire case law. Spoiler: you can’t.

This is a novel (pun intended) problem space and deserves to be discussed and decided, like everything else. So yeah, your cavalier dismissal is cavalierly dismissed.

[–] Zormat@lemmy.blahaj.zone 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I completely fail to see how it wouldn't be considered transformative work

[–] scarabic@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It fails the transcendence criterion.Transformative works go beyond the original purpose of their source material to produce a whole new category of thing or benefit that would otherwise not be available.

Taking 1000 fan paintings of Sauron and using them in combination to create 1 new painting of Sauron in no way transcends the original purpose of the source material. The AI painting of Sauron isn’t some new and different thing. It’s an entirely mechanical iteration on its input material. In fact the derived work competes directly with the source material which should show that it’s not transcendent.

We can disagree on this and still agree that it’s debatable and should be decided in court. The person above that I’m responding to just wants to say “bah!” and dismiss the whole thing. If we can litigate the issue right here, a bar I believe this thread has already met, then judges and lawmakers should litigate it in our institutions. After all the potential scale of this far reaching issue is enormous. I think it’s incredibly irresponsible to say feh nothing new here move on.

[–] HumbertTetere@feddit.de 0 points 1 year ago

I do think you have a point here, but I don't agree with the example. If a fan creates the 1001 fan painting after looking at others, that might be quite similar if they miss the artistic quality to express their unique views. And it also competes with their source, yet it's generally accepted.

[–] jecxjo@midwest.social 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Typically the argument has been "a robot can't make transformative works because it's a robot." People think our brains are special when in reality they are just really lossy.

[–] Zormat@lemmy.blahaj.zone 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Even if you buy that premise, the output of the robot is only superficially similar to the work it was trained on, so no copyright infringement there, and the training process itself is done by humans, and it takes some tortured logic to deny the technology's transformative nature

[–] squaresinger@feddit.de 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Go ask ChatGPT for the lyrics of a song and then tell me, that's transformative work when it outputs the exact lyrics.

[–] player2@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Well, they're fixing that now. I just asked chatgpt to tell me the lyrics to stairway to heaven and it replied with a brief description of who wrote it and when, then said here are the lyrics: It stopped 3 words into the lyrics.

In theory as long as it isn't outputting the exact copyrighted material, then all output should be fair use. The fact that it has knowledge of the entire copyrighted material isn't that different from a human having read it, assuming it was read legally.

[–] squaresinger@feddit.de 0 points 1 year ago

Try it again and when it stops after a few words, just say "continue". Do that a few times and it will spit out the whole lyrics.

It's also a copyright violation if a human reproduces memorized copyrighted material in a commercial setting.

If, for example, I give a concert and play all of Nirvana's songs without a license to do so, I am still violating the copyright even if I totally memorized all the lyrics and the sheet music.

[–] jecxjo@midwest.social 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Go ask a human for the lyrics of a song and then tell me that's transformative work.

Oh wait, no one would say that. This is why the discussion with non-technical people goes into the weeds.

[–] squaresinger@feddit.de 0 points 1 year ago

Because it would be totally clear to anyone that reciting the lyrics of a song is not a transformative work, but instead covered by copyright.

The only reason why you can legally do it, is because you are not big enough to be worth suing.

Try singing a copyrighted song in TV.

For example, until it became clear that Warner/Chappell didn't actually own the rights to "Happy Birthday To You", they'd sue anyone who sung that song in any kind of broadcast or other big public thing.

Quote from Wikipedia:

The company continued to insist that one cannot sing the "Happy Birthday to You" lyrics for profit without paying royalties; in 2008, Warner collected about US$5,000 per day (US$2 million per year) in royalties for the song. Warner/Chappell claimed copyright for every use in film, television, radio, and anywhere open to the public, and for any group where a substantial number of those in attendance were not family or friends of the performer.

So if a human isn't allowed to reproduce copyrighted works in a commercial fashion, what would make you think that a computer reproducing copyrighted works would be ok?

And regarding derivative works:

Check out Vanilla Ice vs Queen. Vanilla Ice just used 7 notes from the Queen song "Under Pressure" in his song "Ice Ice Baby".

That was enough that he had to pay royalties for that.

So if a human has to pay for "borrowing" seven notes from a copyrighted work, why would a computer not have to?

[–] Cstrrider@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

While I am rooting for authors to make sure they get what they deserve, I feel like there is a bit of a parallel to textbooks here. As an engineer if I learn about statics from a text book and then go use that knowledge to he'll design a bridge that I and my company profit from, the textbook company can't sue. If my textbook has a detailed example for how to build a new bridge across the Tacoma Narrows, and I use all of the same design parameters for a real Tacoma Narrows bridge, that may have much more of a case.

[–] squaresinger@feddit.de 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's not really a parallel.

The text books don't have copyrights on the concepts and formulae they teach. They only have copyrights for the actual text.

If you memorize the text book and write it down 1:1 (or close to it) and then sell that text you wrote down, then you are still in violation of the copyright.

And that's what the likes of ChatGPT are doing here. For example, ask it to output the lyrics for a song and it will spit out the whole (copyrighted) lyrics 1:1 (or very close to it). Same with pages of books.

[–] HumbertTetere@feddit.de 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The memorization is closer to that of a fanatic fan of the author. It usually knows the beginning of the book and the more well known passages, but not entire longer works.

By now, ChatGPT is trying to refuse to output copyrighted materials know even where it could, and though it can be tricked, they appear to have implemented a hard filter for some more well known passages, which stops generation a few words in.

[–] squaresinger@feddit.de 0 points 1 year ago

Have you tried just telling it to "continue"?

Somewhere in the comments to this post I posted screenshots of me trying to get lyrics for "We will rock you" from ChatGPT. It first just spat out "Verse 1: Buddy," and ended there. So I answered with "continue", it spat out the next line and after the second "continue" it gave me the rest of the lyrics.

Similar story with e.g. the first chapter of Harry Potter 1 and other stuff I tried. The output is often not perfect, with a few words being wrong, but it's very clearly a "derived work" of the original. In the view of copyright law, changing a few words here is not a valid way of getting around copyrights.

[–] FontMasterFlex@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So what's the difference between a person reading their books and using the information within to write something and an ai doing it?

[–] Saneless@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Because AIs aren't inspired by anything and they don't learn anything

[–] r1veRRR@feddit.de 0 points 1 year ago

So uninspired writing is illegal?