It’s becoming increasingly apparent that one of the reasons why tech companies are so enthusiastic about shoving AI into every product and service is that they fundamentally do not understand…
Pro-AI people want to do away with copyright entirely. Seen a lot of stupid shit recently, but seeing so-called anarchists on db0 claiming that copyright only helps big business takes the cake.
Movements to abolish or reduce the scope of copyright existed long before the current “AI” hype. Keywords around it are: free culture, the Pirate Bay, “copying is not theft”, etc.
I’ve long been sympathetic to such and I don’t think “AI” changes anything about that.
Wait, wouldn’t it make sense for an anarchist to opposite intellectual property law on the grounds that the only way you could possibly enforce it beyond those in one’s immediate community would be with a larger state and associated law enforcement apparatus, which an anarchist would be expected to be against the existence of?
I’m not sure that has much to do with AI, and if anything, AI companies should somewhat like copyright since what they are ultimately selling is a form of software, which is harder to profit off without such law. They just want the concept to apply selectively so as not to impede them.
In an actual anarchistic society, we wouldn’t need copyright. But we live in capitalism. Stuff like copyright is needed until property itself no longer needs to exist. I’m all for changing the world toward anarchism, but I am not naive enough to believe for a second you can do it all at once without a major cataclysmic event and taking away the few things that at least attempt to make things fair within the current system is monumentally stupid.
Unfortunately there is a bit of a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation here. Put overly simply: If we start enforcing copyright in training AI models now, do you really believe that any companies who have already trained their models are really going to just toss them? I’m afraid that it’s going to just be regulatory capture where the existing big names just pull the ladder up behind them while still making money off of their stolen content fueled plagiarism machines.
We’ll ignore that OpenAI isn’t actually profitable for the sake of the argument.
That said, abolishing copyright is quite possibly the stupidest solution I’ve ever heard for this issue.
No, I don’t think they would. But I also do think that copyright has been bastardized from its original intent (mostly by Disney). Abolishing it entirely while not moving away from capitalism would be bad. Going back to it only lasting for the lifetime of the creator, and not being able to pass it down would be better.
Id argue that to some extent, its foundational to capitalism, such that any effort to actually abolish it would almost necessarily require destroying or significantly curtailing capitalism to succeed anyway. Virtually every company based on selling information, such as software and media companies that are some of the biggest on the planet right now, would find such an effort an existential threat, and even companies not based on such things may have patents or designs that give them an edge and that they would expend a lot on avoiding giving competition free range to copy. If you’re able to overpower them on something so important to them, in so consequential a fashion, then their grip on economic and political power would have to already have been greatly reduced, and some other basis of such power to draw on for support would have to exist.
Pro-AI people want to do away with copyright entirely. Seen a lot of stupid shit recently, but seeing so-called anarchists on db0 claiming that copyright only helps big business takes the cake.
Movements to abolish or reduce the scope of copyright existed long before the current “AI” hype. Keywords around it are: free culture, the Pirate Bay, “copying is not theft”, etc.
I’ve long been sympathetic to such and I don’t think “AI” changes anything about that.
Wait, wouldn’t it make sense for an anarchist to opposite intellectual property law on the grounds that the only way you could possibly enforce it beyond those in one’s immediate community would be with a larger state and associated law enforcement apparatus, which an anarchist would be expected to be against the existence of?
I’m not sure that has much to do with AI, and if anything, AI companies should somewhat like copyright since what they are ultimately selling is a form of software, which is harder to profit off without such law. They just want the concept to apply selectively so as not to impede them.
In an actual anarchistic society, we wouldn’t need copyright. But we live in capitalism. Stuff like copyright is needed until property itself no longer needs to exist. I’m all for changing the world toward anarchism, but I am not naive enough to believe for a second you can do it all at once without a major cataclysmic event and taking away the few things that at least attempt to make things fair within the current system is monumentally stupid.
Yeah
Unfortunately there is a bit of a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation here. Put overly simply: If we start enforcing copyright in training AI models now, do you really believe that any companies who have already trained their models are really going to just toss them? I’m afraid that it’s going to just be regulatory capture where the existing big names just pull the ladder up behind them while still making money off of their stolen content fueled plagiarism machines.
We’ll ignore that OpenAI isn’t actually profitable for the sake of the argument.
That said, abolishing copyright is quite possibly the stupidest solution I’ve ever heard for this issue.
No, I don’t think they would. But I also do think that copyright has been bastardized from its original intent (mostly by Disney). Abolishing it entirely while not moving away from capitalism would be bad. Going back to it only lasting for the lifetime of the creator, and not being able to pass it down would be better.
Id argue that to some extent, its foundational to capitalism, such that any effort to actually abolish it would almost necessarily require destroying or significantly curtailing capitalism to succeed anyway. Virtually every company based on selling information, such as software and media companies that are some of the biggest on the planet right now, would find such an effort an existential threat, and even companies not based on such things may have patents or designs that give them an edge and that they would expend a lot on avoiding giving competition free range to copy. If you’re able to overpower them on something so important to them, in so consequential a fashion, then their grip on economic and political power would have to already have been greatly reduced, and some other basis of such power to draw on for support would have to exist.