‘Impossible’ to create AI tools like ChatGPT without copyrighted material, OpenAI says::Pressure grows on artificial intelligence firms over the content used to train their products
‘Impossible’ to create AI tools like ChatGPT without copyrighted material, OpenAI says::Pressure grows on artificial intelligence firms over the content used to train their products
They’re not wrong, though?
Almost all information that currently exists has been created in the last century or so. Only a fraction of all that information is available to be legally acquired for use and only a fraction of that already small fraction has been explicitly licensed using permissive licenses.
Things that we don’t even think about as “protected works” are in fact just that. Doesn’t matter what it is: napkin doodles, writings on bathrooms stall walls, letters written to friends and family. All of those things are protected, unless stated otherwise. And, I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen a license notice attached to a napkin doodle.
Now, imagine trying to raise a child while avoiding every piece of information like that; information that you aren’t licensed to use. You wouldn’t end up with a person well suited to exist in the world. They’d lack education regarding science, technology, they’d lack understanding of pop-culture, they’d know no brand names, etc.
Machine learning models are similar. You can train them that way, sure, but they’d be basically useless for real-world applications.
The main difference between the two in your analogy, that has great bearing on this particular problem, is that the machine learning model is a product that is to be monetized.
And ultimately replace the humans it learned from.
Good, I want AI to do all my work for me
Artificial intelligence is incredible in its flexibility!
Simultaneously, it is like a human,
And yet “only a tool.”
Also an “AI” is not human, and should not be regulated as such
And real children aren’t in a capitalist society?
Not necessarily. There’s plenty that are open source and available for free to anyone willing to provide their own computational power.
In cases where you pay for a service, it could be argued that you aren’t paying for the access to the model or its results, but the convenience and computational power necessary to run the model.
Sounds like a solution would be to force, for any AI, to either share the source code or proof that it’s not trained on copyrighted data
Naive
The difference here is that a child can’t absorb and suddenly use massive amounts of data.
The act of learning is absorbing and using massive amounts of data. Almost any child can, for example, re-create copyrighted cartoon characters in their drawing or whistle copyrighted tunes.
If you look at, pretty much, any and all human created works, you will be able to trace elements of those works to many different sources. We, usually, call that “sources of inspiration”. Of course, in case of human created works, it’s not a big deal. Generally, it’s considered transformative and a fair use.
I really don’t understand this whole “learning” thing that everybody claims these models are doing.
A Markov chain algorithm with different inputs of text and the output of the next predicted word isn’t colloquially called “learning”, yet it’s fundamentally the same process, just less sophisticated.
They take input, apply a statistical model to it, generate output derived from the input. Humans have creativity, lateral thinking and the ability to understand context and meaning. Most importantly, with art and creative writing, they’re trying to express something.
“AI” has none of these things, just a probability for which token goes next considering which tokens are there already.
I don’t think “learning” is a word reserved only for high-minded creativeness. Just rote memorization and repetition is sometimes called learning. And there are many intermediate states between them.
What evidence do you have that those aren’t just sophisticated, recursive versions of the same statistical process?
Out of curiosity, how far do you extend this logic?
Let’s say I’m an artist who does fractal art, and I do a line of images where I take jpegs of copywrite protected art and use the data as a seed to my fractal generation function.
Have I have then, in that instance, taken a copywritten work and simply applied some static algorithm to it and passed it off as my own work, or have I done something truly transformative?
The final image I’m displaying as my own art has no meaningful visual cues to the original image, as it’s just lines and colors generated using the image as a seed, but I’ve also not applied any “human artistry” to it, as I’ve just run it through an algorithm.
Should I have to pay the original copywrite holder?
If so, what makes that fundamentally different from me looking at the copywritten image and drawing something that it inspired me to draw?
If not, what makes that fundamentally different from AI images?
Because you can be inspired, and a machine cannot? We don’t give copyrights to monkeys, let alone fancy calculators.
I feel like you latched on to one sentence in my post and didn’t engage with the rest of it at all.
That sentence, in your defense, was my most poorly articulated, but I feel like you responded devoid of any context.
Am I to take it, from your response, that you think that a fractal image that uses a copywritten image as a seed to it’s random number generator would be copyright infringement?
If so, how much do I, as the creator, have to “transform” that base binary string to make it “fair use” in your mind? Are random but flips sufficient?
If so, how is me doing that different than having the machine do that as a tool? If not, how is that different than me editing the bits using a graphical tool?
That’s only because I thought your last sentence was the biggest difference – everything else is all stuff you did (or theoretically would do), which is the clincher.
(And besides, on Lemmy, comments with effort are sometimes disincentivized 😉)
Art can include buying a toilet and turning it on its side and calling it a fountain. And I imagine, in your scenario, that you could process an entire comic book by flipping just one pixel on each page, print it out, arrange it in a massive mural, and get it featured in the Louvre with the title “is this fair use?” But if you started printing out comic books en masse with the intent to simply resell them in their slightly changed form, you might get in trouble, and probably rightly so. But that’s a question of fair use, isn’t it?
Fair on all counts. I guess my counter then would be, what is AI art other than running a bunch of pieces of other art through a computer system, then adding some “stuff you did” (to use your phrase) via a prompt, and then submitting the output as your own art.
That’s nearly identical to my fractal example, which I think you’re saying would actually be fair use?
It’s a question of scale. A single child cannot replace literally all artists, for example.