Technology

OK, so pay for it.

Pretty simple really.

If it ends up being OK for a company like OpenAI to commit copyright infringement to train their AI models it should be OK for John/Jane Doe to pirate software for private use.

But that would never happen. Almost like the whole of copyright has been perverted into a scam.

Its almost like we had a thing where copyrighted things used to end up but they extended the dates because money

I guess the lesson here is pirate everything under the sun and as long as you establish a company and train a bot everything is a-ok. I wish we knew this when everyone was getting dinged for torrenting The Hurt Locker back when.

Remember when the RIAA got caught with pirated mp3s and nothing happened?

What a stupid timeline.

Wow! You’re telling me that onerous and crony copyright laws stifle innovation and creativity? Thanks for solving the mystery guys, we never knew that!

if it's impossible for you to have something without breaking the law you have to do without it

if it's impossible for the artistocrat class to have something without breaking the law, we change or ignore the law

Cool, don't do it then

It's not "impossible". It's expensive and will take years to produce material under an encompassing license in the quantity needed to make the model "large". Their argument is basically "but we can have it quickly if you allow legal shortcuts."

I'm dumbfounded that any Lemmy user supports OpenAI in this.

We're mostly refugees from Reddit, right?

Reddit invited us to make stuff and share it with our peers, and that was great. Some posts were just links to the content's real home: Youtube, a random Wordpress blog, a Github project, or whatever. The post text, the comments, and the replies only lived on Reddit. That wasn't a huge problem, because that's the part that was specific to Reddit. And besides, there were plenty of third-party apps to interact with those bits of content however you wanted to.

But as Reddit started to dominate Google search results, it displaced results that might have linked to the "real home" of that content. And Reddit realized a tremendous opportunity: They now had a chokehold on not just user comments and text posts, but anything that people dare to promote online.

At the same time, Reddit slowly moved from a place where something may get posted by the author of the original thing to a place where you'll only see the post if it came from a high-karma user or bot. Mutated or distorted copies of the original instance, reformated to cut through the noise and gain the favor of the algorithm. Re-posts of re-posts, with no reference back to the original, divorced of whatever context or commentary the original creator may have provided. No way for the audience to respond to the author in any meaningful way and start a dialogue.

This is a miniature preview of the future brought to you by LLM vendors. A monetized portal to a dead internet. A one-way street. An incestuous ouroborous of re-posts of re-posts. Automated remixes of automated remixes.

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There are genuine problems with copyright law. Don't get me wrong. Perhaps the most glaring problem is the fact that many prominent creators don't even own the copyright to the stuff they make. It was invented to protect creators, but in practice this "protection" gets assigned to a publisher immediately after the protected work comes into being.

And then that copyright -- the very same thing that was intended to protect creators -- is used as a weapon against the creator and against their audience. Publishers insert a copyright chokepoint in-between the two, and they squeeze as hard as they desire, wringing it of every drop of profit, keeping creators and audiences far away from each other. Creators can't speak out of turn. Fans can't remix their favorite content and share it back to the community.

This is a dysfunctional system. Audiences are denied the ability to access information or participate in culture if they can't pay for admission. Creators are underpaid, and their creative ambitions are redirected to what's popular. We end up with an auto-tuned culture -- insular, uncritical, and predictable. Creativity reduced to a product.

But.

If the problem is that copyright law has severed the connection between creator and audience in order to set up a toll booth along the way, then we won't solve it by giving OpenAI a free pass to do the exact same thing at massive scale.

If OpenAI is right (I think they are) one of two things need to happen.

1. All AI should be open source and non-profit
2. Copywrite law needs to be abolished

For number 1. Good luck for all the reasons we all know. Capitalism must continue to operate.

For number 1. Good luck because those in power are mostly there off the backs of those before them (see Disney, Apple, Microsoft, etc)

Anyways, fun to watch play out.

Cool! Then don't!

They're not wrong, though?

Almost all information that currently exists has been created in the last century or so. Only a fraction of all that information is available to be legally acquired for use and only a fraction of that already small fraction has been explicitly licensed using permissive licenses.

Things that we don't even think about as "protected works" are in fact just that. Doesn't matter what it is: napkin doodles, writings on bathrooms stall walls, letters written to friends and family. All of those things are protected, unless stated otherwise. And, I don't know about you, but I've never seen a license notice attached to a napkin doodle.

Now, imagine trying to raise a child while avoiding every piece of information like that; information that you aren't licensed to use. You wouldn't end up with a person well suited to exist in the world. They'd lack education regarding science, technology, they'd lack understanding of pop-culture, they'd know no brand names, etc.

Machine learning models are similar. You can train them that way, sure, but they'd be basically useless for real-world applications.

This situation seems analogous to when air travel started to take off (pun intended) and existing legal notions of property rights had to be adjusted. IIRC, a farmer sued an airline for trespassing because they were flying over his land. The court ruled against the farmer because to do otherwise would have killed the airline industry.

But our current copyright model is so robust and fair! They will only have to wait 95y after the author died, which is a completely normal period.

If you want to control your creations, you are completely free to NOT publish it. Nowhere it's stated that to be valuable or beautiful, it has to be shared on the world podium.

We'll have a very restrictive Copyright for non globally transmitted/published works, and one for where the owner of the copyright DID choose to broadcast those works globally. They have a couple years to cash in, and then after I dunno, 5 years, we can all use the work as we see fit. If you use mass media to broadcast creative works but then become mad when the public transforms or remixes your work, you are part of the problem.

Current copyright is just a tool for folks with power to control that power. It's what a boomer would make driving their tractor / SUV while chanting to themselves: I have earned this.

Let's wait until everyone is laid off and it's 'impossible' to get by without mass looting then, shall we?

Then LLMs should be FOSS

Maybe you shouldn't have done it then.

I can't make a Jellyfin server full of content without copyrighted material either, but the key difference here is I'm not then trying to sell that to investors.

I have the perfect solution. Shorten the copyright duration.

Piracy by another name. Copyrighted materials are being used for profit by companies that have no intention of compensating the copyright holder.

Then don't

If the copyright people had their way we wouldn't be able to write a single word without paying them. This whole thing is clearly a fucking money grab. It is not struggling artists being wiped out, it is big corporations suing a well funded startup.

Is this the point where we start UBI and start restructuring society for the future of AI?