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Music publishers sue Amazon-backed AI company over song lyrics
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
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Technology
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In reality people learn how to write lyrics because they listen to songs. Nobody writes a song without listening to thousands of them and many human written songs are really similar to each other. Otherwise the music industry wouldn’t be littered with lawsuits. I don’t really see the difference.
Chatbots don't have physical bodies that require food and shelter. So even if you could prove their creativity was identical to real human creativity and not a crude imitation more akin to assembling random collages, they still don't deserve the same protections as real artists with physical bodies that need food and shelter.
Which isn't even approaching the obvious retort that their creativity is a crude imitation of real creativity.
Copyright doesn't exist because there's some important moral value to the useful arts. It exists to keep food in bellies.
You're bending over backwards to protect bots as deserving identical rights to humans. For what purpose should they have those rights? The only benefit to treating the bots this way is to ensure the rich tech oligarchs that already have undue power and influence in our society get even richer and get even more influence.
No, it exists to maintain profits of large corporations. Copyright, patents, and intellectual rights were created under the false pretense that it "protects the little person", but these are lies told by the rich and powerful to keep themselves rich and powerful. Time and time again, we have seen how broken the patent system is, how it is impossible to not step on musical copyright, how Disney has extended copyrights to forever, and how the megacorporations have way more money than everybody else to defend those copyrights and patents. These people are not your friend, and their legal protections are not for you.
The LLMs don’t deserve or have any rights. They’re a tool that people can use. Just like reference material, spellcheckers, asset libraries or whatever else creatives use. As long as they don’t actually violate copyright in the classical sense of just copy pasting stuff the product people generate using them is probably as (un)original as a lot of art out there. And collages can be transformative enough to qualify for copyright.
As far as we know, that is exactly how they work. They are very, very complex systems for copying and pasting stuff.
Sure, if they were made with human creativity they deserve the protections meant to keep creative humans alive. But who cares? They are not humans and thus do not get those protections.
They are physically unable to just copy paste stuff. The models are tiny compared to the training data, they don’t store it.
That claim doesn't prove your premise. I get that it feels clever, but it isn't.
Just because they're very good at reproducing information from highly pared down and compressed forms does not mean they are not reproducing information. If that were true, you wouldn't be able to enforce copyright on a jpeg photo of a painting.
If it was a compression algorithm then it would be insanely efficient and that’d be the big thing about it. The simple fact is that they aren’t able to reproduce their exact training data so no, they aren’t storing it in a highly compressed form.
I think there's a lot of Dunning–Kruger here.
See: jpeg analogy. You've described here lossy compression not something that is categorically different than compression. Perhaps the AI models are VERY lossy. But that doesn't mean it is original or creative.
But the reality is, we largely do not know how these chatbots work. They are black boxes even to the researchers themselves. That's just how neural networks are. But the thing I know is they are not themselves creative. All they can do is follow weights to reproduce the things human classifiers evaluated as subjectively "good" over the things they subjectively evaluated as "bad". All the creativity happened in the training process -- the inputs and the testing. All of the apparent creativity outputted is a product of the humans involved in training and testing the model, not the model itself. The actual creative force is somewhere far away.
I see a lot of Dunning Kruger here as well. The fact is that you can generate novel images/texts/whatever with these tools. They may mostly suck but they’re still novel so they can be copyrighted by whoever used these tools to create them.
Even if I grant your premise that their produce is novel -- I don't, that is fundamentally not how they work -- the copyright would be held by the bot in that case, not the person who used it.
No more than a person who commissions a painting has copyright for the work. That's not how creativity, LLMs, nor copyright law works.
The LLM is a tool. It’s like granting copyright to a paintbrush.
Exactly. Which is how we know that calling what it does inherently creative/novel is absurd and must be wrong. Glad you came around.
Kind of a big jump
It may surprise you to learn that 'people' and 'not people's are treated differently under the law
Where did I ever say that a stupid AI should get any rights to its own product?
That’s not what I meant by that. People should have the rights to the products they produce using the tools at their disposal.