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this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
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Still kinda blows my mind how like the most socialist people I know (fellow artists) turned super capitalist the second a tool showed like an inkling of potential to impact their bottom line.
Personally, I'm happy to have my work scraped and permutated by systems that are open to the public. My biggest enemy isn't the existence of software scraping an open internet, it's the huge companies who see it as a way to cut us out of the picture.
If we go all copyright crazy on the models for looking at stuff we've already posted openly on the internet, the only companies with access to the tools will be those who already control huge amounts of data.
I mean, for real, it's just mind-blowing seeing the entire artistic community pretty much go full-blown "Metallica with the RIAA" after decades of making the "you wouldn't download a car" joke.
Fuckin preach! I feel like I'm surrounded by children that didn't live through the many other technologies that have came along and changed things. People lost their shit when photoshop became mainstream, when music started using samples, etc. AI is here to stay. These same people are probably listening to autotuned music all day while they complain on the internet about AI looking at their art.
I feel like a lot of internet people (not even just socialists) go from seeing copyright as at best a compromise that allows the arts to have value under capitalism to treating it like a holy doctrine when the subject of LLMs comes up.
Like, people who will say "piracy is always okay" will also say "ban AI, period" (and misrepresent organizations that want regulations on it's use as wanting a full ban.)
Like, growing up with an internet full of technically illegal content (or grey area at best) like fangames and YouTube Poops made me a lifelong copyright skeptic. It's outright confusing to me when people take copyright as seriously as this.
I say piracy is always okay but also am a big fan of AI. I had chat GPT write my last cover letter and got the job
Based
Nobody would defend copyright if it wasn't already in place, it's a sick idea. They ask us to cut the field of human knowledge for private benefit. Now they want to destroy a new technology in its name. Greed knows no bounds.
I don't know about that. Say you take a few years to write a handful of poems, and it turns out people in your neighborhood really like them. You compile the poems into a book, and sell it for $5, and it sells well. Seeing this, your neighbor buys one, copies it, and starts selling it one neighborhood over for $2, and representing themself as the author. I would think most people in that situation would want to say, 'hey, that's not fair'. I don't think that's sick or rooted in greed, copyright can be a check on greed.
So thanks to copyright, we're now living in a world where artists are fairly compensated and not exploited by large corporations acting as middlemen that have seized control of their creative works and used it for their own profit?
More so than we would be without copyright at all
Copyright needs to be extended for individuals and cut back for corporations. People should be allowed to own rights to their ip, but corps should have much higher levels of restrictions and how some knowledge must be shared.
I defend the idea of copyright. The first copyright law was in 1710, to protect authors from the printing press. Without copyright, whoever owned the printing press would sell copies of books with no obligation to pay the author. When copying art is trivial, the artist needs copyright protection in order to make a living creating art.
There are major problems with modern copyrights. Like all things in capitalism it has been subverted to benefit the rich, but the core idea behind copyright is sound.
These lawsuits are not to stop the development if generative AI. These lawsuits are to stop the unlicensed use of copyrighted works as AI training data.
There are AI models that are only trained with licensed data. This doesn't stop the development of AI.
Artists should have the right to choose whether their work is used as training data. And they should be compensated fairly for it. That will be the case if these lawsuits succeed.
Ultimately it's a propertarian scheme of ownership imposed onto the realm of concepts and ideas. The first person to successfully lay claim to an idea is given a monopoly on that idea for some number of years. A book, an invention, a melody. To secure profit for that individual, the entire rest of humanity is prevented access to the idea except under his terms, and the naturally free exchange of information is curtailed by statute to accomplish this, via the imposition of punishments for anyone who goes against this scheme. I do not think that's defensible. That is to say, I don't think humanity sees a net benefit from this way of doing things. Even some hypothetical 20-30% reduction in the generation of different kinds of creative works would be well offset by the benefit humanity sees from being able to access them, and the funds that would be going to the artist still could if people saw fit.
Is this being used to stop the development of generative AI? Yes, literally the imprint on an AI of having parsed the works and understood them in some symbolic capacity, they want to curtail that. And the existing models that have already done that would likely be rendered illegal, setting the entire technology back a year or two.
In an ideal world without greed, you are right in saying that copyright is not beneficial for the human race as a whole. Unfortunately we don't live in such a world. Look at what happened with insulin. The person invented it placed a ludicrously low priced patent of one dollar because he felt that it should be available cheaply to all who need and yet today in the US, insulin is a ridiculously expensive drug which many people struggle to afford. This is because while the inventor was not greedy and thought about the greater good, the pharmaceutical industry did not. They saw an opportunity to make money and are screwing people in the process
I defend copyright. The original intent was to protect creators in order to foster more creativity. Most artists will have no incentive to create if their work can be reappropriated by a larger group to leverage it for monetary gain, which is directly being taken from the original creator.
I’m a photographer. I’ve removed all my pictures from the internet and plan to never post more. I don’t want my work being used to train AI. Right now we have no choice in that matter, so the only option is to no longer share our work.