Technology

Yup, I fucking knew it. I knew this is what would happen with everyone bitching about copyright this and that. I knew any legislation that came as a result was going be bastardized and dressed up to make it look like it's for everyone when in reality it's going to mostly benefit big corps that can afford licensing fees and teams of lawyers.

People could not/would not understand how these AI models actually processes images/text or the concept of "If you post publicly, expect it to be used publicly" and here we are....

Exactly, this isn't about any sort of AI, this is the old playbook of trying to digitally track images, just with the current label slapped on. Regardless of your opinion on AI, this is a terrible way to solve this.

To the cheer of so-called progressives who never understood the tech and continue to be wilfully ignorant of it the corporations win again.

This is exactly what OpenAI etc. wanted to achieve with all the “AI safety” bullshit doomer talk. I really hope this doesn’t pass

I'm the opposite, actually. I like generative AI. But as a creator who shares his work with the public for their (non-commercial) enjoyment, I am not okay with a billionaire industry training their models on my content without my permission, and then use those models as a money machine.

It could halt the progress of improving their models and stagnate the whole technology.

That being said, it only halts progress for American companies. Other countries will happily ignore this law and grow beyond our capabilities. I'm not sure if that's better or worse than the current situation.

Seeing as laws can't be applied retroactively, what would have been the alternative?

China would be the world leader in making AI model trained on copyrighted content

It's strengthening copyright laws by negating the transformative clause when dealing with AI

As if a law could prevent anything of that.

Generating legal liability goes a long way towards curbing how businesses behave, particularly when they can be picked on by rival mega-firms.

But because we've made class action lawsuits increasingly difficult, particularly after Comcast Corp. v. Behrend, the idea that individual claimants can effectively prosecute a case against an interstate or international entity is increasingly farcical. You're either going to need big state agencies (the EU seems increasingly invested in cracking down on American tech companies for anti-competitive practices) or rivalrous business interests (MPAA/RIAA going after Big Tech backed AI firms) to leverage this kind of liability. It's still going to be open season on everyone using DeviantArt or Pinterest or whatever.

I see this argument a lot as a defense for AI art and I see a couple major flaws in this line of thinking.

First, it's treating the AI art as somehow the same as a dirivitive (or parody) work made by an actual person. These two things are not the same and should not be argued like they are.

AI art isn't just dirivitive. It's a Frankenstein's Monster of a bunch of different pieces of art stitched together in a procedural way that doesn't credit and in fact obfuscates the original works. This is problematic at best and flat out dishonest thievery at worst. Whereas a work made by a person that is dirivitive or parody has actual work and thought put into it by an actual person. And would typically at least credit the original works being riffed on. This involves actual creative thought and human touch. Even if it is dirivitive it's unique in some way simply by virtue of being made by a person.

AI art cannot and will not ever be unique, at least not when used to just create a work wholesale. Because it's not being creative. It's calculating and nothing more. (at least if we're talking about current tachnology. A possible future General AI could flout this argument. But that would get into an AI personhood conversation not really relevant to our current machine learning tech).

Secondly, no one is worried that some hypothetical shitty AI video is going to somehow usurp the work that it's stealing from. What people are worried about is that AI art is going to be used in place of hiring actual artists for bigger projects. And the fact that this AI art exists solely because it's scraped the internet of art from those same artists now losing their livelihoods makes the tech incredibly fucked up.

Now don't get me wrong though. I do believe machine learning has its place in society. And we've already been using it for a long time to help with large tasks that would be incredibly difficult if not impossible for people to do on their own in a bunch of different industries. Things like medicine research in the pharmaceutical sector and fraud monitoring in the banking sector come to mind.

Also, there is an argument to be had that machine learning algorithms could be used as tools in creating art. I don't really have a problem with those use cases. Things that come to mind are a bunch of different tools that exist in music production right now that in my opinion help in allowing artists to fulfill their vision. Watch some There I Ruined It videos on YouTube to see what I mean. Yeah that guy is using AI to make himself sound like other musicians. But that guy also had to be a really solid singer and impressionist in the first place for those songs to be any good at all.

Don't be a fool. Of course, content corporations like Disney or the NYT are able to prove just when something was made.

I get what you're saying, but there's something of a difference between someone studying something for months or years then writing about it, and a language model ran by one of the tech giants scraping media and immediately generating stuff from it, for commercial use, for the profit of the company that owns it.

It's kinda like how plagiarising somebody's book word for word never used to be a crime when it was a painstaking process of manually writing it back out for every copy. When the printing press came out, though? It allowed dodgy businesses to large-scale fuck over authors, and the law had to play catch-up.

I don't actually think this proposal is that well thought out, but I also don't think we should think of AI models or corporations as being people - they aren't people, and they shouldn't necessarily have the same rights and privileges that we do.

No matter how much you'd like for it to be the case, proprietary algorithms owned by big corporations are not remotely comparable to children.

In the same way that the law doesn't prevent you from murdering someone, but just makes it illegal to do so.