Apparently, stealing other people’s work to create product for money is now “fair use” as according to OpenAI because they are “innovating” (stealing). Yeah. Move fast and break things, huh?
“Because copyright today covers virtually every sort of human expression—including blogposts, photographs, forum posts, scraps of software code, and government documents—it would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials,” wrote OpenAI in the House of Lords submission.
OpenAI claimed that the authors in that lawsuit “misconceive[d] the scope of copyright, failing to take into account the limitations and exceptions (including fair use) that properly leave room for innovations like the large language models now at the forefront of artificial intelligence.”
I think viral outrage aside, there is a very open question about what constitutes fair use in this application. And I think the viral outrage misunderstands the consequences of enforcing the notion that you can’t use openly scrapable online data to build ML models.
Effectively what the copyright argument does here is make it so that ML models are only legally allowed to make by Meta, Google, Microsoft and maybe a couple of other companies. OpenAI can say whatever, I’m not concerned about them, but I am concerned about open source alternatives getting priced out of that market. I am also concerned about what it does to previously available APIs, as we’ve seen with Twitter and Reddit.
I get that it’s fashionable to hate on these things, and it’s fashionable to repeat the bit of misinformation about models being a copy or a collage of training data, but there are ramifications here people aren’t talking about and I fear we’re going to the worst possible future on this, where AI models are effectively ubiquitous but legally limited to major data brokers who added clauses to own AI training rights from their billions of users.
People hate them not because it is fashionable, but because they can see what is coming.
Tech companies want to create tools that would replace million of jobs without compensating the very people that created these works in the first place.
That’s not “coming”, it’s an ongoing process that has been going on for a couple hundred years, and it absolutely does not require ChatGPT.
People genuinely underestimate how many of these things have been an ongoing concern. A lot like crypto isn’t that different to what you can do with a server, “AI” isn’t a magic key that unlocks automation. I don’t even know how this mental model works. Is the idea that companies who are currently hiring millions of copywriters will just rely on automated tools? I get that yeah, a bunch of call center people may get removed (again, a process that has been ongoing for decades), but how is compensating Facebook for scrubbing their social media posts for text data going to make that happen less?
Again, I think people don’t understand the parameters of the problem, which is different from saying that there is no problem here. If anything the conversation is a net positive in that we should have been having it in 2010 when Amazon and Facebook and Google were all-in on this process already through both ML tools and other forms of data analysis.
Tech companies will create those tools no matter what. Then they will charge everyone through the nose for using them.
The question is whether:
In this case, OpenAI is acting as “the devil’s advocate”… and it’s working to fool people into supporting the opposite position.
It is an open question. As others have pointed out, a human taking inspiration from the work of others is totally fine. My issue is that AI are not human.
A human’s production of work is limited. A human can only produce so fast for so long. An AI could theoretically be scaled infinitely and produce indefinitely. I don’t want to live in a world where FAANGCORP’s OmniAI is responsible for 90% of all art, media, and music because humans can’t keep pace with it.
A lot of this can be traced back to the invention of photography, which is a fun point of reference, if one goes to dig up the debate at the time.
In any case, the idea that humans can only produce so fast for so long and somehow that cleans the channel just doesn’t track. We are flooded by low quality content enabled by social media. There’s seven billion of us two or three billion of those are on social platforms and a whole bunch of the content being shared in channels is created by using corporate tools to make stuff by pointing phones at it. I guarantee that people will still go to museums to look at art regardless of how much cookie cutter AI stuff gets shared.
However, I absolutely wouldn’t want a handful of corporations to have the ability to empower their employed artists with tools to run 10x faster than freelance artists. That is a horrifying proposition. Art is art. The difficulty isn’t in making the thing technically (say hello, Marcel Duchamp, I bet you thought you had already litgated this). Artists are gonna art, but it’s important that nobody has a monopoly on the tools to make art.
“It’s too fast” is a really really dumb argument against AI
It’s like the classic “objection!” “On what grounds?” “It’s devastating to my case!” Scenario.
Throughout history technology has repeatedly been developed that lets people do things faster than the people currently doing it. That’s usually the point of technological progress. Of course the people left behind by that will complain, but that alone is no reason to limit the rest of us who would benefit from the advance.
who benefit from automating creative process
Anyone who enjoys creative things, since they now have access to a lot more of it a lot more easily.
is low quality
Then it’s not a threat to professional creatives, is it?
because average person always prioritize quality over low cost
Mass produced garbage is still mass produced garbage. As you point out AIs aren’t human and while that removes the limitations of the flesh (including limitations that we might want there - no human ever says oops, I made a child porn), it imposes limitations of the machine. AI output isn’t that good at anything practical. It writes garbage code that even if you manage to get it working, the business manager or whoever isn’t capable of seeing the flaws in it. The art is devoid of any sort of soul and almost always has glaring flaws that require actual humans to identify and fix.
We are about to be inundated with AI produced garbage, sure, but that only proves the lie that shady internet sites and social media have always been a cesspool of shitty, unreliable content, and connecting with hundreds of thousands of faceless strangers was never a good idea. Hopefully we’ll come up with (or go back to) solutions that don’t treat the problem as simply one of volume.
It’s not right to say that ML output isn’t good at practical tasks. It is and it’s already in use and has been for ages. The conversation about these is guided by the relatively anecdotal fact that chatbots and image generation got good so this stuff went viral, but ML models are being used for a bunch of practical uses, from speeding up repetitive, time consuming tasks (e.g. cleaning up motion capture, facial modelling or lip animation in games and movies) or specialized tasks (so much science research is using ML tools these days).
Now, a lot of those are done using fully owned datasets, but not all, and the ramifications there are also important. People dramatically overestimate the impact of trash product flooding channels (which is already the case, as you say) and dramatically underestimate the applications of the underlying tech beyond the couple of viral apps they only got access to recently.