That’s a good litmus test. If asking/paying artists to train your AI destroys your business model, maybe you’re the arsehole. ;)
Not only that, but their business model doesn’t hold up if they were required to provide their model weights for free because the material that went into it was “free”.
There’s also an argument that if the business was that reliant on free things to start with, then it shouldn’t be a business.
No-one would bat their eyes if the CEO of a real estate company was sobbing that it’s the end of the rental market, because the company is no longer allowed to get houses for free.
Businesses relying on free things. Logging, mining, ranching, and oil come to mind. Extracting free resources of the land belonging to the public, destroying those public lands and selling those resources back to the public at an exorbitant markup.
You misspelled capitalism.
The entire internet is built on free things.
Just saying.
Doesn’t mean that businesses should allowed to be.
even the top phds can learn things off the amount of books that openai could easily purchase, assuming they can convince a judge that if the works aren’t pirated the “learning” is fair use. however, they’re all pirating and then regurgitating the works which wouldn’t really be legal even if a human did it.
also, they can’t really say how they need fair use and open standards and shit and in the next breathe be begging trump to ban chinese models. the cool thing about allowing china to have global influence is that they will start to respect IP more… or the US can just copy their shit until they do.
imo that would have been the play against tik tok etc. just straight up we will not protect the IP of your company (as in technical IP not logo, etc.) until you do the same. even if it never happens, we could at least have a direct tik tok knock off and it could “compete” for american eyes rather than some blanket ban bullshit.
This particular vein of “pro-copyright” thought continuously baffles me. Copyright has not, was not intended to, and does not currently, pay artists.
Its totally valid to hate these AI companies. But its absolutely just industry propaganda to think that copyright was protecting your data on your behalf
Copyright has not, was not intended to, and does not currently, pay artists.
You are correct, copyright is ownership, not income. I own the copyright for all my work (but not work for hire) and what I do with it is my discretion.
What is income, is the content I sell for the price acceptable to the buyer. Copyright (as originally conceived) is my protection so someone doesn’t take my work and use it to undermine my skillset. One of the reasons why penalties for copyright infringement don’t need actual damages and why Facebook (and other AI companies) are starting to sweat bullets and hire lawyers.
That said, as a creative who relied on artistic income and pays other creatives appropriately, modern copyright law is far, far overreaching and in need of major overhaul. Gatekeeping was never the intent of early copyright and can fuck right off; if I paid for it, they don’t get to say no.
modern copyright law is far, far overreaching and in need of major overhaul.
https://rufuspollock.com/papers/optimal_copyright_term.pdf
This research paper from Rufus Pollock in 2009 suggests that the optimal timeframe for copyright is 15 years. I’ve been referencing this for, well, 16 years now, a year longer than the optimum copyright range. If I recall correctly I first saw this referenced by Mike Masnick of techdirt.
Copyright has not, was not intended to, and does not currently, pay artists.
Wrong in all points.
Copyright has paid artists (though maybe not enough). Copyright was intended to do that (though maybe not that alone). Copyright does currently pay artists (maybe not in your country, I don’t know that).
Wrong in all points.
No, actually, I’m not at all. In-fact, I’m totally right:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhBpI13dxkI
Copyright originated create a monopoly to protect printers, not artists, to create a monopoly around a means of distribution.
How many artists do you know? You must know a few. How many of them have received any income through copyright. I dare you, to in good faith, try and identify even one individual you personally know, engaged in creative work, who makes any meaningful amount of money through copyright.
I know several artists living off of selling their copyrighted work, and no one in the history of the Internet has ever watched a 55 minute YouTube video someone linked to support their argument.
You forgot to link a legitimate source.
I know quite a few people who rely on royalties for a good chunk of their income. That includes musicians, visual artists and film workers.
Saying it doesn’t exist seems very ignorant.
No, it means that copyrights should not exist in the first place.
I’m fine with this. “We can’t succeed without breaking the law” isn’t much of an argument.
Do I think the current copyright laws around the world are fine? No, far from it.
But why do they merit an exception to the rules that will make them billions, but the rest of us can be prosecuted in severe and dramatic fashion for much less. Try letting the RIAA know you have a song you’ve downloaded on your PC that you didn’t pay for - tell them it’s for “research and training purposes”, just like AI uses stuff it didn’t pay for - and see what I mean by severe and dramatic.
It should not be one rule for the rich guys to get even richer and the rest of us can eat dirt.
Figure out how to fix the laws in a way that they’re fair for everyone, including figuring out a way to compensate the people whose IP you’ve been stealing.
Until then, deal with the same legal landscape as everyone else. Boo hoo
🌏👨🚀🔫👨🚀🌌
I also think it’s really rich that at the same time they’re whining about copyright they’re trying to go private. I feel like the ‘Open’ part of OpenAI is the only thing that could possibly begin to offset their rampant theft and even then they’re not nearly open enough.
They are not releasing anything of value in open source recently.
Sam altman said they were on the wrong side of history about this when deepseek released.
They are not open anymore I want that to be clear. They decided to stop releasing open source because 💵💵💵💵💵💵💵💵.
So yeah I can have huge fines for downloading copyrighted material where I live, and they get to make money out of that same material without even releasing anything open source? Fuck no.
Absolutely agreed - and to make matters worse, their clearly stated goals ultimately amount to replacing all of us with their AI. This deal just keeps getting better, doesn’t it?
I mean, if they are allowed to go forward then we should be allowed to freely pirate as well.
In the end, we’re just training some non-artifical intelligence.
Yeah, you can train your own neural network on pirated content, all right, but you better not enjoy that content at the same time or have any feelings while watching it, because that’s not covered by “training”.
Don’t worry: the law will be very carefully crafted so that it will be legal only if they do it, not us.
That sounds like a you problem.
“Our business is so bad and barely viable that it can only survive if you allow us to be overly unethical”, great pitch guys.
I mean that’s like arguing “our economy is based on slave plantations! If you abolish the practice, you’ll destroy our nation!”
Good point. I’ve never seen it framed this way before. Poignant.
Come on guys, his company is only worth $157 billion.
Of course he can’t pay for content he needs for his automated bullshit machine. He’s not made of money!
Sam Altman is a grifter, but on this topic he is right.
The reality is, that IP laws in their current form hamper innovation and technological development. Stephan Kinsella has written on this topic for the past 25 years or so and has argued to reform the system.
Here in the Netherlands, we know that it’s true. Philips became a great company because they could produce lightbulbs here, which were patented in the UK. We also had a booming margarine business, because we weren’t respecting British and French patents and that business laid the foundation for what became Unilever.
And now China is using those exact same tactics to build up their industry. And it gives them a huge competitive advantage.
A good reform would be to revert back to the way copyright and patent law were originally developed, with much shorter terms and requiring a significant fee for a one time extension.
The current terms, lobbied by Disney, are way too restrictive.
I totally agree. Patents and copyright have their place, but through greed they have been morphed into monstrous abominations that hold back society. I also think that if you build your business on crawled content, society has a right to the result to a fair price. If you cannot provide that without the company failing, then it deserves to fail because the business model obviously was built on exploitation.
I agree, which is why I advocate for reform, not abolishment.
Perhaps AI companies should pay a 15% surcharge on their services and that money goes directly into the arts.
But Sam is talking about copyright and all your examples are patents
It just so happens that in AI it’s about copyright and with margarine (and most other technologies) it’s about patents.
But the point is the same. Technological development is held back by law in both cases.
If all IP laws were reformed 50 years ago, we would probably have the technology from 2050, today.
It’s all the same shit. No patents and copyrights should exist.
Is it? In Sam’s case, we’re mostly talking about creative products in the form of text, audio, and video. If an artist releases a song and the song is copyrighted, it doesn’t hamper innovation and technological development. The same cannot be said when a company patents a sorting algorithm, the method for swiping to unlock a smartphone, or something similar.
If copyrights are used to add a huge price tag to any AI development, then it did just hamper innovation and technological development.
And sadly, what most are clamoring for will disproportionately affect open source development.
If open source apps can’t be copyrighted then the GPL is worthless and that will harm open source development much more
I’m not sure how that applies in the current context, where it would be used as training data.
That’s not fair to change the system only when businesses require it. I received a fuckin’ letter from a government entity where I live for having downloaded the trash tier movie “Demolition”.
I agree copyright and patents are bad but it’s so infuriating that only the rich and powerful can choose not to respect it.
So I think openAI has to pay because as of now that shitty copyright and patent system is still there and has hurt many individuals around the world.
We should try to change the laws for copyright but after the big businesses pay their due.
I mean, I’d say there’s a qualitative difference between industrial products and a novel, for example.
Good if AI fails because it can’t abuse copyright. Fuck AI.
*except the stuff used for science that isn’t trained on copyrighted scraped data, that use is fine
Yeah unfortunately we’ve started calling any LLM “AI”
In ye old notation ML was a subset of AI, and thus all LLM would be considered AI. It’s why manual decision trees that codify get NPC behaviour are also called AI, because it is.
Now people use AI to refer only to generative ML, but that’s wrong and I’m willing to complain every time.
That’s like calling stealing from shops essential for my existence and it would be “over” for me if they stop me. The shit these clowns say is just astounding. It’s like they have no morals and no self awareness and awareness for people around them.
That’s like calling stealing from shops essential for my existence and it would be “over” for me if they stop me.
What’s really fucked up is that for some people this is not far from their reality at all
I think they are either completely delusional, or they know very well how important AI is for the government and the military. The same cannot be said for regular people and their daily struggles.
Copyright should not exist in the first place.
It should exist
A creator should own their creation and be able to defend misuse of it for a period of time. Current copyright laws are bullshit though.
I was thinking at the same thing
deleted by creator
No
Look we may have driven Aaron Swartz to suicide for doing basically the same thing on a smaller scale, but dammit we are getting very rich of this. And, if we are getting rich, then it is okay to break the law while actively fucking over actually creative people. Trust us. We are tech bros and we know what is best for you is for us to become incredibly rich and out of touch. You need us.
In case anyone is unfamiliar, Aaron Swartz downloaded a bunch of academic journals from JSTOR. This wasn’t for training AI, though. Swartz was an advocate for open access to scientific knowledge. Many papers are “open access” and yet are not readily available to the public.
Much of what he downloaded was open-access, and he had legitimate access to the system via his university affiliation. The entire case was a sham. They charged him with wire fraud, unauthorized access to a computer system, breaking and entering, and a host of other trumped-up charges, because he…opened an unlocked closet door and used an ethernet jack from there. The fucking Secret Service was involved.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#Arrest_and_prosecution
The federal prosecution involved what was characterized by numerous critics (such as former Nixon White House counsel John Dean) as an “overcharging” 13-count indictment and “overzealous”, “Nixonian” prosecution for alleged computer crimes, brought by then U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts Carmen Ortiz.
Nothing Swartz did is anywhere close to the abuse by OpenAI, Meta, etc., who openly admit they pirated all their shit.
You’re correct that their piracy was on a much more egregious scale than what Aaron did, but they don’t openly admit to their piracy. Meta just argued that it isn’t piracy because they didn’t seed.
Edit: to be clear. I don’t think that Aaron Swartz did anything wrong. Unlike the chatGPT, meta, etc.
Whoever brings Aaron Swartz back gets to violate all the copyright laws
Aaron Swartz was 100% opposed to all copyright laws, you remember that yah?
Yes, and he killed himself after the FBI was throwing the book at him for doing exactly what these AI assholes are doing without repercussion
And for some reason suddenly everyone leaps back to the side of the FBI and copyright because it’s a meme to hate on LLMs.
It’s almost like people don’t have real convictions.
You can’t be Team Aaron when it’s popular and then Team Copyright Maximalist when the winds change and it’s time to hate on LLMs or diffusion models.
I’m not just a copyright abolitionnist, I also abhor all intellectual property. Yes, even trademsrk
And he also said “child pornography is not necessarily abuse.”
In the US, it is illegal to possess or distribute child pornography, apparently because doing so will encourage people to sexually abuse children.
This is absurd logic. Child pornography is not necessarily abuse. Even if it was, preventing the distribution or posession of the evidence won’t make the abuse go away. We don’t arrest everyone with videotapes of murders, or make it illegal for TV stations to show people being killed.
Wired has an article on how these laws destroy honest people’s lives.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130116210225/http://bits.are.notabug.com/
Big yikes from me whenever I see him venerated.
Fine by me. Can it be over today?
Then die. I don’t know what else to tell you.
If your business model is predicated on breaking the law then you don’t deserve to exist.
You can’t send people to prison for 5 years and charge them $100,000 for downloading a movie and then turn around and let big business do it for free because they need to “train their AI model” and call one of thief but not the other…
Absolutely. But in this case the law is also shit and needs to be reformed. I still want to see Altman fail, because he’s an asshole. But copyright law in its current form is awful and does hold back society.
If your business model is predicated on breaking the law then you don’t deserve to exist.
All of Wall Street sweating nervously
The law isn’t automatically moral.
This issue just exposes how ridiculous copyright law is and how much it needs to be changed. It exists specifically to allow companies to own, for hundreds of years, intellectual property.
It was originally intended to protect individual artists but has slowly mutated to being a tool of corporate ownership and control.
But, people would rather use this as an opportunity to dunk on companies trying to develop a new technology rather than as an object lesson in why copyright rules are ridiculous.
Oh no! How will I generate a picture of Sam Altman blowing himself now!?
Photoshop, just like the rest of us.
Wdym? He removed his rib or something?
I was thinking more of a Sam 1 and Sam 2 type situation.
Good riddance. This version of AI is just a glorified search engine anyways
And it’s not even a good search engine either. It just spits out sarcastic jokes from barely up voted reddit posts.
Sounds like another way of saying “there actually isn’t a profitable business in this.”
But since we live in crazy world, once he gets his exemption to copyright laws for AI, someone needs to come up with a good self hosted AI toolset that makes it legal for the average person to pirate stuff at scale as well.
I mean, pirating media at scale for your own consumption can be considered “training of a neural network” as well…
