Former Meta exec (Nick Clegg) says asking for artist permission will kill AI industry
- Nick Clegg, former Meta executive and UK Deputy Prime Minister, has reiterated a familiar line when it comes to AI and artist consent.
- He said that any push for consent would “basically kill” the AI industry.
- Clegg added that the sheer volume of data that AI is trained on makes it “implausible” to ask for consent.
If abiding to the law destroys your business then you are a criminal. Simple as.
But the law is largely the reverse. It only denies use of copyright works in certain ways. Using things "without permission" forms the bedrock on which artistic expression and free speech are built upon.
AI training isn’t only for mega-corporations. Setting up barriers like these only benefit the ultra-wealthy and will end with corporations gaining a monopoly of a public technology by making it prohibitively expensive and cumbersome for regular folks. What the people writing this article want would mean the end of open access to competitive, corporate-independent tools and would jeopardize research, reviews, reverse engineering, and even indexing information. They want you to believe that analyzing things without permission somehow goes against copyright, when in reality, fair use is a part of copyright law, and the reason our discourse isn’t wholly controlled by mega-corporations and the rich.
I recommend reading this article by Kit Walsh, and this one by Tory Noble staff attorneys at the EFF, this one by Katherine Klosek, the director of information policy and federal relations at the Association of Research Libraries, and these two by Cory Doctorow.
They want you to believe that analyzing things without permission somehow goes against copyright, when in reality, fair use is a part of copyright law, and the reason our discourse isn’t wholly controlled by mega-corporations and the rich.
Ok, but is training an AI so it can plagiarize, often verbatim or with extreme visual accuracy, fair use? I see the 2 first articles argue that it is, but they don't mention the many cases where the crawlers and scrappers ignored rules set up to tell them to piss off. That would certainly invalidate several cases of fair use
Instead of charging for everything they scrap, law should force them to release all their data and training sets for free. "But they spent money and time and resources!" So did everyone who created the stuff they're using for their training, so they can fuck off.
The article by Tory also says these things:
This facilitates the creation of art that simply would not have existed and allows people to express themselves in ways they couldn’t without AI. (...) Generative AI has the power to democratize speech and content creation, much like the internet has.
I'd wager 99.9% of the art and content created by AI could go straight to the trashcan and nobody would miss it. Comparing AI to the internet is like comparing writing to doing drugs.
The fact that this is upvoted is so funny but unsurprising given the types who visit this site
Good, then it should die
If I ran the zoo, then any AI that trained on intellectual property as if it were public domain would automatically become public domain itself.
That's the only correct take
The audacity... If our technology isn't allowed to break the law, it will fail. Therefore we should change the law.
The issue is that they want to change the law only for themselves. Distributing a partially reverse-engineered, cleansed from evil, modded and made good version of Windows NT that would give us the feeling of W2K and compatibility with Windows device drivers, for example, they don't want to make legal.
Generally yes, laws are subject to common sense and are changed when common sense dictates so.
I think the law should be changed; copyright law is kind of a mess, but I don't know how to make it better. It would also need to be changed in a way that's fair, which these companies absolutely do not want; fairness would mean the end of laws like the DMCA.
The current system is far from perfect and needs an update but any change in their spirit would make things worse.
Yes, I know I’m doing something illegal (stealing and reselling IP) but it’s in service of something legal (continuing to be rich). You can’t punish me for doing bad things while rich, it would undermine your entire legal system.
Indeed. Simply that. If a business is not sustainable without breaking the law, it is not a business, it's a criminal organisation.
I can hear this picture
If your industry can't exist without theft then your industry doesn't deserve to exist, pretty simple.
Copying isn't theft, the original still exists. Just like watching pirated movies.
If someone pirates a movie for home use its no big deal because yes. If someone pirates a movie and then opens a movie theatre and starts charging people to watch the movie that's an entirely different matter. AI is a business generating income, not a person skipping out on a $4 rental fee.
Copying isn't theft, the original still exists. Just like watching pirated movies.
Shit take when the results are used for profit. Most of us that pirate aren't legally monetizing our stash.
As long as people get punished for pirating media, corporations need to license their shit just as well.
Cool, so I can torrent without a VPN now?
Oh, only the super rich can benefit. How convenient.
Good, I think it should be killed.
AI or the music industry?
AI. Rich people trying to change the law to get richer via shady means is a huge no from me every time.
Yes
if something so simple can kill an entire industry, that industry should not exist.
I have a proposition. Raid them with police and search their computers for stolen data like you would do with your citizens.
If being declined concent is going to kill your industry then maybe your industry deserved to die.
Fucking rapist mentaility right there.
My thought exactly. If consent isn't needed, what other actions do they deem justified without consent?
This is not a IP-issue, this is about human rights.
Pure entitlement mindset.
If your business is not able to stay afloat while providing fair compensation to those whose labor is used, whether employee, co-owner, or third-party, you are not entitled to keep running it. Society doesn't have a duty to prop up wealthy thieves.
oh noes
Look, these goddamn assholes have got in their head that they have a right to profit.
NOBODY HAS A RIGHT TO PROFIT.
You have a right to try to create a profit and there are rules to that. You're gonna lose your billions in investment if you can't plaigerize content?....fuck you, your loss, and you shoulda fucking known better when the idea was presented to you.
Assholes
Using the same logic, it is "implausible" that we would not take money from those who have it and give it to the sheer volume of people who need it.
Oh. Suddenly it doesn't work that way. Huh. Funny how that is.
It depends on how rich you are. CEOs have their own, reduced edition of the law.
Cool, so I'll get started on building an automated business that sells cheap access to all the music, movies and shows on the streaming services.
Getting consent for each title would basically kill my business and would be implausible, so I'll just assume it's ok.
Bank robbers say laws against bank robbery will kill bank robbery.
I'm ok with "ai" dying
So they want to be able to benifit from free art while the rest of us have to pay to access it? Seems fair. /s
Fuck Nick Clegg. Fuck that guy into the fucking sun.
Back in 2010 he managed to surf a wave of genuine optimism from young British voters who wanted something less shit, and found himself in a position where he could have brought about some genuine change for the better.
Instead that cunt hitched his wagon to the fucking Tories, who straight away announced an increase to university tuition fees. And who then went on to spend 15 years raping and pillaging the country like only fucking Tories can.
So yeah, fuck Nick Clegg.
If you're giving me the choice of killing the AI industry or artists it doesn't seem like a hard decision. Am I missing something?
Bet you're not worth $100+ million. Then you'd get it.
If someone wants to make me worth 100 million I wouldn't complain. Can't guarantee I'll understand though.
A lot of AI fanboys secretly think that artists who rely on public funding to make a living deserve to be raped by gen AI companies.
The bit you're missing is that the choice isnt between killing AI and killing the music industry, its between killing AI in the UK or pissing off IP holders somewhat. Do you think China give a fuck who's IP they use in training models, or that they will stop if the UK passes a law making artists default out of using their work as training data?
What are you talking about this has nothing to do with UK policy decisions. The current UK government doesn't have any interest in restricting AI usage I don't know where you're getting that idea from.
Nick Clegg never really had much to do with UK politics, he was a deputy prime minister but he wasn't exactly in charge of anything, and he's long since left politics entirely. His previous employment has no bearing on his current statements.
Specially when you realize that AI is for more than music, literature and other forms of illegal data processing. It can be used in a huge amount of other ways. One way for example would be to replace our president with a Combination of 4 magistrates and 1 AI...the republicans get 2, the Democrats get 2. AI gets to propose actions to take but has 0 authority in doing anything. Once a proposal has been made to do something, the 4 people get to discuss the action and implement it. If the implementation ends in a tie, then AI can ask the people to vote by phone. AI would then break the tie via the people's popular vote. And no more electoral college, just use AI to pick the president based on the popular vote.
Same thing for most of billionaires' income sources.
"Respecting [insert human right] would kill [insert industry]."
hence why they push so heavily for automation, it makes it possible to earn about the same profit while respecting human rights. (nobody has a right to a job)
AI is not just limited to these overhyped plagiarism machines. Will consent laws kill vision systems? Will they kill classifiers? Will they kill gradient descent? No, they won't.
Also Clegg
asking women for permission would ruin my sexlife.
probably.
There's a thread of thought that pops up in pro-AI posters from time to time: technology can't go backwards. The implication being that the current state of AI can only improve, and is here to stay.
This is wrong. Companies are spending multitudes of piles of cash to make AI work, and they could easily take their ball and go home. Extending copyright over the training data would likely trigger that, by the industry's own admission.
No, self-hosted models are not going to change this. A bunch of people running around with their own little agents aren't going to sustain a mass market phenomenon. You're not going to have integration in Windows or VisualStudio or the top of Google search results. You're not going to have people posting many pics on Facebook of Godzilla doing silly things.
The tech can go backwards, and we're likely to see it.
Great, let's do that.
Good.
correction: will kill people's attempts to make billions out of other people's art. Otherwise inquisitive people will continue to do non-profit research this way or another.
Actually here is a question to you: Would you be ok if the law stated you don't need permission if it is non-profit and open source? Yea I thought so bitch.
The AI industry not asking artists for permission will kill the art industry.
Sounds like a plan!
I’m not a fan of intellectual property law. I’m down to abandon it, once we establish an artist stipend to pay a regular salary for artists to live a life of dignity.
Maybe introduce a tax on AI to pay for it.
yeah a 110% tax
So I can steal all their shit too, right? It would "Implausible" for me to do so.
My permission costs $2.50 for every time AI reads my text or uses it in the background. Thank you! Come again!
Well the AI companies and investors should have understood that building an industry off of doing something questionable was risky and risks don't always work out.
Oh, so it'd be ok to get movies, pictures, books, etc. without asking the right owners for us too? GREAT.
Kill the AI industry? Sweet. As an artist I do not consent.
If I had a gun with 3 bullets and I was in a room with Meta, Hitler and Bin Laden. I would shoot Meta thrice.
Can't they just write an 'AI' to ask an artist for permission then? I'll bet they can. It's just that most artists will say no unless they get paid. So, their business model, based on theft, is not sustainable. Got it.
Let's hope it does.
So?
And not asking for it will kill whatever remains of the creative industries.
What do you want, a few years of ai slop followed by the more or less rapid decline of the internet (as it is overwhelmed with model collapse creative works and untrustable content) that will afford the likes of Clegg (in his role of 'meta' executive) a huge payout, or creative people having any hope of a sustained ability to make a living?
I know what I would prefer and I also know what is most likely going to happen. This is the result of decades of neo-liberal fossil-fuel-powered capitalism.
Good.
So… what’s the down side to this bill?
Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? No, says the man on Wall Street; it belongs to the shareholders.
Is a man not entitled to the sweat of ALL the brows?
If asking for permission is going to kill an industry, then that industry should be killed.
In principle I agree. The problem is that there are countries which don't care about respecting law and if you kill AI in the West, all that will happen is the West will get left behind.
[tardigrade_violin.jpg]