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Neither the devil you know nor the devil you don’t
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this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2024
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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I've been disappointed to see Doctrow's reaction to the AI industry, to say the least. He's spent so much time relentlessly campaigning against intellectual property that he apparently cannot imagine anything worse than intellectual property winning anything ever. I don't think he's a big picture guy, I think the internet just really likes him because at the end of the day he was popular on slashdot and he tells people that piracy is awesome.
Doctorow's had some pretty bad takes, honestly, for all I agree with him on some things. His review of Naomi Klein's Doppleganger -- a book which explores conspiracy theories and how they capture people -- reduces the entire book, incorrectly, to his own political soapbox:
This is, frankly, juvenile. Not every bad thing in the world can be mapped on to one's particular soapboxes. Treating GenAI as Good because Copyright is Bad is exactly in character for him.
(Also Cory gets smug about releasing his novels CC, as if all working writers can do that, but I'm sure it helps the family finances that his wife is an executive at Disney. It's great to use money from one of copyright's biggest monsters to act self-righteous about other people trying to make a living.)
Wait. What? Holy shit, every good goddamn thing he's ever released regarding copyright and intellectual property needs a big bold disclaimer about that in front then.
Fucker's talking out both sides of his mouth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Taylor_%28businesswoman%29
I'm sorry, in non-executive speak, doesn't that heavily imply that she at least oversees some work on DRM? Any content distribution method Disney touches with a 40-foot pole is going to have DRM methodology.
Motherfucker.
so should he have divorced her in 2017 to prove his ideological purity?
(waves to the local chapter of the leftist circular firing squad)
To be clear, I was critiquing his smug intolerance to be people who don’t meet his standards of so-called leftist perfection, when he, himself, is as complex as anyone else. I was not critiquing his being married or his living under capitalism.
fwiw i was mostly annoyed by the “his wife is doing what” in the comment i was answering directly – going after him just because of his wife would be like going after varoufakis just because his wife is supposedly the heroine of blur's “common people”.
and i happily agree that doctorow could dispense with his privilege, tone down the smugness and try for less shallow takes once in a while.
(if we were to question bonafides of leftist intellectuals[^1] just because they are supported by someone belonging to the moneyed class, or come from the moneyed class themselves, we'd need to start with certain mr. marx, comrades. and numerous others.)
[^1]: however you value doctorow's qualities as an intellectual.
One of my fav Marx anecdotes is no matter how tough economically the family had it, they never dispensed with the maid. Tbf maid wages were prolly really low, and the maid probably made Mrs Marx' life easier, but I also don't think Marx ever thought of the maid's work as Labor.
Marx (who to be fair was operating in a very different global economy) explicitly excluded servants and other service labor from the proletariat, because he had an extremely industrial (cough gendered) definition of “productive labour.” That being said, he was friends, intellectual collaborators, and possibly lovers with the housekeeper.
Disclaimer: I am no marx historian; my knowledge of marxist theory tends toward literary analysis. I may be simplifying to the point of wrong.
Yeah, I think his ideological commitment to "all intellectual property rights are bad forever and always amen" kind of blinds him to the actual issue here, and his proposed solution is kind of nonsensical in terms of its ability to get off the ground.
More broadly, (ie not just in relation to Cory Doctorow), I've seen the take floating around that's like "hey, what the heck, artists who were opposed to ridiculous IP rights restrictions when it was the music industry doing it are now in favor of those restrictions when it's AI, what gives with this hypocrisy?" which I think kind of... misses the point?
A lot of artists generally are in favor of using their work for interesting collaborative stuff and aren't going to get mad if you use their stuff for your own creative endeavors. This is why we have things like Creative Commons. The actual things artists tend not to like are things like having their work used for commercial purposes without permission and/or having their work taken without credit. (This is why CC licenses often restrict these usages!) With that in mind, a lot of the artist outrage over AI feels much more in line with artists getting mad about, say, watermark-removal tools, or people reposting art without credit, than it does with the copyright battles of the 00s. (You may remember one of the big things artists were affronted by about AI art was the way it would imitate an artist's signature, because of what that represented.)
In this case, artists are leaning on copyright not out of any particular ideological commitment but just because it's the blunt instrument that they already have at their disposal. But I think Cory Doctorow's previous experience in "getting mad at the MPAA" or whatever kind of forces him to analyze this using the same framing as that issue, which doesn't really make sense in this case. And ironically saying "copyright shouldn't count for AI" aligns him with the position of the MPAA so it really does feel like a "live long enough to see yourself become the villain" scenario. :/
I've noticed that too, on occasion. I think the "hey whoa, artists are copyright maximalists now?!" takes tend to miss how artists are coming from concerns about what is morally right and how they can make a living, not copyright as a principle. The latter is, at most, a tool to achieve the former.
This says it better than I was going to.
I'm no lawyer, I don't even play one on TV, so upfront apologies if I'm hanging my ass out.
That said, it sounds to me like Doctorow might have a point here. Suppose Universal et al. gets a precedent-setting ruling and slays OpenAI. LOL, LMAO even, but then what? What's to keep the current entertainment cartels from making deals with Microsoft or the husks of the AI companies to rev up their own (now) fully legal and licensed bullshit engines? The only winning legal play is Giant Asteroid.
He says some pretty ignorant stuff in this post that undercuts his argument, though:
The writers' and actors' strikes, in an overwhelmingly unionized workforce, did not say "hey, we as a labor force want a cut of the dirty GPT lucre". Instead, they said not today, satan to studios working with GenAI at all. And won. Those writers and actors, who are overwhelmingly huge supporters of copyright and moral rights, defeated the rich assholes at the Big Five not by throwing up their hands and giving all their creative output to the glurge machine, but by unionizing and painful, hard-won solidarity.
Whether SAG-AFTRA and the AFM (or non US equivalents) can organize as effectively for musicians and lyricists is unclear. But Cory, who claims to be a leftist, is defaulting to "you as a musician should work for free" and not "you as a musician should organize to counter the power of capital", and that's about as leftist as Grimes posing with The Communist Manifesto.
I read one of his books and I gotta tell ya, his idea of scifi was 'what if the people negatively impacted by DRM were oppressed minorities instead of just first world complainers.'
I think it remains to be seen if you can train a base model without something as big as common crawl. A precedent that Universal needs to give you permission could also be a precedent that everyone must give you permission for you to scrape them.
The point is that these big companies have enough money to get permission from whoever they want, so we'll still end up with proprietary models destroying industries, but only the big corpos will be able to use this tech effectively and everyone else will have to beg. A future like the 70s where the only OS' and programming languages were proprietary, or the 90s where all the DBs were proprietary. A paradigm where a powerful tech (good or not) is only available to the rich or for rent, is never a good one.
Yeah but this presumes "the best way to beat 'em is to join 'em," right? Like, when all the operating systems or databases are proprietary, that's bad because those things are really useful and help you do things better and faster than you would otherwise.
But this argument applied here is like, oh no, what if large entertainment companies start making all their movies out of AI garbage, and everyone else can't do that because they can't get the content licensed? Well... what if they do? Does that mean they're going to be making stuff that's better? Wouldn't the best way to compete with that be not to use the technology because you'll get a higher-quality product? Or are we just giving up on the idea of producing good art at all and conceding that yes we actually only value cheapness and quantity?
Also, just on a personal level, for me as a J. Random Person who uploads creative work to the internet (some of which is in common crawl), but who doesn't work for a major entertainment corporation that has rights to my work, I would really prefer to have a way to say "sorry no, you can't use my stuff for this." I don't really find "well you see, we need to be able to compete with large entertainment companies in spam content generation, so we need to be able to use your uncompensated labor for our benefit without your permission and without crediting you" particularly compelling.
The point is that this tech is not only made for one reason (replacing artists and authors etc). It has plenty of other valid uses, such as an assistant, a sex toy, personal entertainment etc and probably a lot we don't know due to how young it is. I don't want to pre-emptively see all the valid uses locked-in to proprietary models and everyone becoming a serf to openAI to use them.
Call me radical, but I don't agree that anyone should have the right to tell others how to use their creative work. If you share it, it's out of your hands. All culture is a remix and has always been this way until the last 120 years. Copyright and Patents have always been a mistake and should be abolished as they achieved the opposite of what they promised.
Haha, sounds like we might have to agree to disagree on this one.
Copyright is much older than 1904, though! It dates back to the printing press, when it became necessary because the new technology made it possible to benefit off writers' work without compensating them, which made it hard to be a writer as a profession, even though we want people to be able to do that as a society. Hey, wait a minute...
It also kickstarted one of the biggest enclosures in recent memory, where profiteers went around and copyrighted indigenous and folk songs and then went against everyone using them.
That seems bad but also not super relevant to the point under discussion! Unless your point is that it's bad when a cultural commons is exploited for business profits -- in which case, I agree, but, well...
It's as relevant as we make it in our discussion, no? You brought up the theoretical noble intentions of the copyrights, so I felt compelled to mention their actual results.
I mean, it seems like you're reading my argument as a defense of copyright as a concept. I'm ambivalent on the goodness or badness of copyright law in the abstract. Like a lot of laws, it's probably not the ideal way to fix the issue it was designed to solve, and it comes with (many) issues of its own, but that doesn't necessarily mean we'd be better off if we just got rid of it wholesale and left the rest of society as is. (We would probably be left with excitingly new and different problems.)
As I see it, the actual issue at hand with all of this is that people are exploiting the labor/art/culture of others in order to make a profit for themselves at the expense of the people affected. Sometimes copyright is a tool to facilitate that exploitation, and sometimes it's a tool that protects people from it. To paraphrase Dan Olson, the problem is what people are doing to others, not that the law they're using to do it is called "copyright."
writer protection is not where copyright came from
The Berne Convention (Which the US only joined in 1989) is from 1886 and more concerned with author's rights than the typical american flavor, and was kickstarted by successful writers such as Victor Hugo, it's fundamentally commercial in nature but was at least partially sold/incepted has protecting a writer's labour:
Translated: "The law protects land, it protects the house of the proletarian who has sweat; it confiscates the work of the poet who has thought (...)"
From the body of the convention, in some regards it does place the author higher than the publisher:
EDIT:
And contains from 1886 already the spirit of fair use.
None of that is its origin
I'm sorry for my imprecise wording, I was feeling flippant and I know what I said isn't totally accurate. not a big history person here honestly. I'll try and stick to joke-commenting next time. but also can you just say what you mean instead of darkly hinting.
iirc even though the origin of copyright is not really specifically about author protection, part of the broad-strokes motivation for its existence involved "we need to keep production of new works viable in a world where new copies can be easily produced and undercut the original," which was what I was trying to get at. maybe they picked a bad way to do that idk I'm not here to make excuses for the decisions of 16th-century monarchs
also again I'm not a copyright fan/defender. in particular copyright as currently constituted massively and obviously sucks. I just don't think copyright-in-the-abstract is like the Greatest Moral Evil either, bc I'm not a libertarian. sorry ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Agreed, earliest stuff is definetly exclusive royal grant of printing overall to a particular person/guild/company. But some author protection is baked into the first international treaties about copyright, and those treaties are old.
The copyright clause in the US constitution (1789) also frames it in terms of granting rights to authors to "promote the progress of ... useful arts". Strictly speaking author protection is not the origin of copyright but also I was snarkily responding to a person who was arguing in favor of AI-training-as-fair-use and implying copyright was 120 years old, not trying to do a detailed explication of the origins of copyright law
I happen to copyright my output (obviously not here or in other comments). The question I ask myself is: would I be ok if a Nazi organization used my photos in their propaganda? I'm not ok with that, so I like to retain control over who can use my stuff. If someone acceptable were to ask me, I'd let them use my work without compensation.
Death of the Author applies here. One can't prevent how others interpret their work. The same way a neonazi org might use your work for propaganda, is how leftists repurpose Stonetoss comics for their own purposes. Or rather, it's not that you can't prevent it, it's that the means by which you would try to prevent it, would create a functional dystopia.
Personally speaking, I hate permission culture.
I remember having this sort of conversation 20 years ago, and it didn't convince me then.
I don't really agree with this. Artists can't (and shouldn't want to) entirely control interpretation, but they still have a responsibility. If your work is palatable to nazis or advertisers or whatever kind of parasite, you need to reflect on why and make it less so, or you're complicit in my book. I say this as an artist who's repeatedly moved on to new forms of expression as fashion catches up.
Me asserting copyright means I can express myself however I want, and Nazis can get their images from Unsplash or make it themselves. There's no risk of complicity on my part.