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- cross-posted to:
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At a Senate hearing on AI’s impact on journalism, lawmakers backed media industry calls to make OpenAI and other tech companies pay to license news articles and other data used to train algorithms.
Are they going to pay for anything that ever inspired them? Every time you publish an article, you owe a dollar to every English teacher you ever had? Fill out your taxes and you owe your math teachers?
It’s fucking goofy…
That’s a pretty dumb comparison. Are you suggesting that people who create stuff used to train AI are obligated to provide that education for free? People who create books/educational aids for teachers to use in classrooms still demand to be paid for that. Teachers are paid for delivering that education. The kids don’t pay the teachers, as a society we tax people because education benefits us all, but the teachers are still paid (not enough!)
I think he’s suggesting that it’s pretty dystopian to let creators decide that their content is free to view but only if you’re a human willing to let companies spy on you while watching it.
It’s either free or it’s not.
Not a great comparison. AI training is not problematic because of consumption, it’s a problem because it is then used to circumvent copyright law.
If you do want to argue with technicalities, you also have to contend with the fact that a large part of the concerned usage is not really free. Much of this online data is funded by advertisement. Scraping it constitutes circumvention.
There are no contracts signed agreeing to that exchange by either me nor the scrapers. Legally, it’s free.
Human brain (any brain, really) is a natural neural network which is trained throughout its life the same way an artificial neural network is. Nothing is original, every creator is “stealing” from every other creator who’s work they have studied to become better creators. No creator ever in history has created anything in pure, absolute vaccuum. Every creation is a remix and amalgamation of previously created works.
And intellectual property is a spook , anyway. No-one can own an idea.
I hate the term intellectual property. It’s a word used to describe vastly different concepts with vastly different legal backgrounds and problems.
Copyright is theoretically a good thing, giving an artist or writer the time to profit from their work before the work becomes public domain, incentivizing the work. The current international agreements around it are absolutely bonkers thanks to Disney. The fact that the copyright persists after death, let alone for a century, is complete madness. The artist obviously can’t profit from their work after they’re dead. It’s an absolute shameless cash grab that destroys culture.
Patents are also theoretically a good thing, allowing companies to release specifications of machines that allow for 10 years of exclusive use. Without patents, companies would hide their designs as trade secrets. It guarantees that after a decade, the designs will be publicly available for anyone to see. They need to be much more heavily restricted in what you can put patents on though. Patenting a specific machine design is fine, patenting molecules or math breaks the entire system. Software patents are blatantly absurd and broken.
EDIT: Should also mention that 3D printers are a patent success story of the system working as intended. Patented in 1986, the inventor made good money making expensive machines with his own company. In 1996, the patent expired and we had an explosion of competing machines, getting ever cheaper and more effective. Everybody won. The inventor made bank for his decade of exclusivity, and then everyone benefited from the design being public domain, free for everyone to use.
Trade secrets, the protection of specific recipes, client lists and strategies, can be abused to protect companies against disclosing information that may be very pertinent to their customers and governments. The Coca-Cola recipe or lists of clients as a trade secret is fine imho, but they can also abuse trade secret law to hide systems that lie about your car’s emissions.
Trademarks help protect consumers against knockoff brands that pretend to be what they’re not. This is the least abused type of “IP”. This doesn’t mean there aren’t bad actors out there registering tons of different trademarks to squat on those designs & names, hoping to force a new company to pay up to use the name. Trademark squatting could theoretically be solved by annulling the trademark if the company isn’t actively using it. Trademarks are currently much too easy to maintain.
All of this to say, lumping all of these different laws into “IP” is not useful at all when talking about the goals of the different legislations, what they’re trying to do, and how they fail.
But the big difference between us and the AI is that we have motivation and drive. We don’t exist for a split second for the sole purpose of fulfilling a prompt. We can take what we’ve learned and create new things with it. The AI just spits out what it already knows. Not what is possible to do with what it knows. It cannot invent.
Property is a spook generally.
But I can’t blame journalist’s for wanting to eat.
Which is what this is really about. Food and paying the bills. Not intellectual property.
The human brain isn’t a product that is being sold. Also in most cases, education is not free (school, university, …)
Education is free in most of the world. And people sell their brains all the time. It’s called “a job”.
You’re getting downvoted, but it will be the next thing. Don’t you dare thank the people or books that inspired you when you give that Peabody acceptance speech.