Judge Rules Training AI on Authors' Books Is Legal But Pirating Them Is Not
Judge Rules Training AI on Authors' Books Is Legal But Pirating Them Is Not
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Unpopular opinion but I don't see how it could have been different.
- There's no way the west would give AI lead to China which has no desire or framework to ever accept this.
- Believe it or not but transformers are actually learning by current definitions and not regurgitating a direct copy. It's transformative work - it's even in the name.
- This is actually good as it prevents market moat for super rich corporations only which could afford the expensive training datasets.
This is an absolute win for everyone involved other than copyright hoarders and mega corporations.
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I'd encourage everyone upset at this read over some of the EFF posts from actual IP lawyers on this topic like this one:
Nor is pro-monopoly regulation through copyright likely to provide any meaningful economic support for vulnerable artists and creators. Notwithstanding the highly publicized demands of musicians, authors, actors, and other creative professionals, imposing a licensing requirement is unlikely to protect the jobs or incomes of the underpaid working artists that media and entertainment behemoths have exploited for decades. Because of the imbalance in bargaining power between creators and publishing gatekeepers, trying to help creators by giving them new rights under copyright law is, as EFF Special Advisor Cory Doctorow has written, like trying to help a bullied kid by giving them more lunch money for the bully to take.
Entertainment companies’ historical practices bear out this concern. For example, in the late-2000’s to mid-2010’s, music publishers and recording companies struck multimillion-dollar direct licensing deals with music streaming companies and video sharing platforms. Google reportedly paid more than $400 million to a single music label, and Spotify gave the major record labels a combined 18 percent ownership interest in its now-$100 billion company. Yet music labels and publishers frequently fail to share these payments with artists, and artists rarely benefit from these equity arrangements. There is no reason to believe that the same companies will treat their artists more fairly once they control AI.
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You're getting douchevoted because on lemmy any AI-related comment that isn't negative enough about AI is the Devil's Work.
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Some communities on this site speak about machine learning exactly how I see grungy Europeans from pre-18th century manuscripts speaking about witches, Satan, and evil... as if it is some pervasive, black-magic miasma.
As someone who is in the field of machine learning academically/professionally it's honestly kind of shocking and has largely informed my opinion of society at large as an adult. No one puts any effort into learning if they see the letters "A" and "I" in all caps, next to each other. Immediately turn their brain off and start regurgitating points and responding reflexively, on Lemmy or otherwise. People talk about it so confidently while being so frustratingly unaware of their own ignorance on the matter, which, for lack of a better comparison... reminds me a lot of how historically and in fiction human beings have treated literal magic.
That's my main issue with the entire swath of "pro vs anti AI" discourse... all these people treating something that, to me, is simple & daily reality as something entirely different than my own personal notion of it.
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Large AI companies themselves want people to be ignorant of how AI works, though. They want uncritical acceptance of the tech as they force it everywhere, creating a radical counterreaction from people. The reaction might be uncritical too, I'd prefer to say it's merely unjustified in specific cases or overly emotional, but it doesn't come from nowhere or from sheer stupidity. We have been hearing about people treating their chatbots as sentient beings since like 2022 (remember that guy from Google?), bombarded with doomer (or, from AI companies' point of view, very desirable) projections about AI replacing most jobs and wreaking havoc on world economy - how are ordinary people supposed to remain calm and balanced when hearing such stuff all the time?
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This so very much. I've been saying it since 2020. People who think the big corporations (even the ones that use AI), aren't playing both sides of this issue from the very beginning just aren't paying attention.
It's in their interest to have those positive to AI defend them by association by energizing those negative to AI to take on an "us vs them" mentality, and the other way around as well. It's the classic divide and conquer.
Because if people refuse to talk to each other about it in good faith, and refuse to treat each other with respect, learn where they're coming from or why they hold such opinions, you can keep them fighting amongst themselves, instead of banding together and demanding realistic, and fair policies in regards to AI. This is why bad faith arguments and positions must be shot down on both the side you agree with and the one you disagree with.
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I see this exact mental non-process in so much social media. I think the endless firehose of memes and headlines is training people to glance at an item, spend minimal brain power processing it and forming a binary opinion, then up/downvote and scroll on. When that becomes people's default mental process, you've got Idiocracy, and that's what we've got. But I see no solution. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it spend more than two seconds before screaming at the water and calling it EVIL.
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- Idgaf about China and what they do and you shouldn't either, even if US paranoia about them is highly predictable.
- Depending on the outputs it's not always that transformative.
- The moat would be good actually. The business model of LLMs isn't good, but it's not even viable without massive subsidies, not least of which is taking people's shit without paying.
It's a huge loss for smaller copyright holders (like the ones that filed this lawsuit) too. They can't afford to fight when they get imitated beyond fair use. Copyright abuse can only be fixed by the very force that creates copyright in the first place: law. The market can't fix that. This just decides winners between competing mega corporations, and even worse, up ends a system that some smaller players have been able to carve a niche in.
Want to fix copyright? Put real time limits on it. Bind it to a living human only. Make it non-transferable. There's all sorts of ways to fix it, but this isn't it.
ETA: Anthropic are some bitches. "Oh no the fines would ruin us, our business would go under and we'd never maka da money :*-(" Like yeah, no shit, no one cares. Strictly speaking the fines for ripping a single CD, or making a copy of a single DVD to give to a friend, are so astronomically high as to completely financially ruin the average USAian for life. That sword of Damocles for watching Shrek 2 for your personal enjoyment but in the wrong way has been hanging there for decades, and the only thing that keeps the cord that holds it up strong is the cost of persuing "low-level offenders". If they wanted to they could crush you.
Anthropic walked right under the sword and assumed their money would protect them from small authors etc. And they were right.
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Maybe something could be hacked together to fix copyright, but further complication there is just going to make accurate enforcement even harder. And we already have Google (in YouTube) already doing a shitty job of it and that's.... One of the largest companies on earth.
We should just kill copyright. Yes, it'll disrupt Hollywood. Yes it'll disrupt the music industry. Yes it'll make it even harder to be successful or wealthy as an author. But this is going to happen one way or the other so long as AI can be trained on copyrighted works (and maybe even if not). We might as well get started on the transition early.
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I'll be honest with you - I genuinely sympathize with the cause but I don't see how this could ever be solved with the methods you suggested. The world is not coming together to hold hands and koombayah out of this one. Trade deals are incredibly hard and even harder to enforce so free market is clearly the only path forward here.
262 comments