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Sarah Silverman, Christopher Golden, and Richard Kadrey are suing OpenAI and Meta over violation of their copyrighted books. The trio says their works were pulled from illegal “shadow libraries” without their consent.
Good. Artists should get paid extra for AIs being trained on their stuff. Doing it for free is our job.
Should those artists pay the other artists they studied?
in design school, I had to pay for the books I bought which contained the images of the art. whomever owns those images got paid for the license to appear in the book. when I go to museums, I had to pay (by admission price or by the tax dollars that go into paying for the museum’s endowment), and that pays for the paintings/sculptures/etc.
whenever I saw or see art, in one context or another, there’s some compensatory arrangement (or it’s being/has been donated— in which case, it’s tax-deductible).
edit: then again, my work is not a remixed amalgam of all of the prior art I consumed— unlike AI, I am capable of creating new unique works which do not contain any of the elements of original works I may be seen or learned from previously. I am able to deconstruct, analyze, and implement nuanced constructs such as style, method, technique, and tone and also develop my own in the creation of an original work without relying on the assimilation and reuse of other original works in part or whole. AI cannot.
for this reason I find this a flawed premise— comparing what an artist does to what LLMs or AI do is logically flawed because they aren’t the same thing. LLMs can only ever create derivative works, whereas human artists are capable of creating truly original works.
In all those instances you paid for the physical resources.
These AI are just automating remix culture.
Human creations should be free for all of us to use where possible (e.g. material costs for say a book).
Everything is a remix. Including all the work you’ve ever done. And everything I’ve ever done. Nothing is wholly original.
But it is partially original. With AI nothing is original.
No. This fundamentally misrepresents the ai models.
No it doesn’t.
AI doesn’t generate anything new. It uses mathematical models to rearrange and regurgitate what it’s already been given. There’s no creation, there’s nothing original. It’s simply stats.
Like a remix?
Absolutely.
Unworkable copyright maximalist take that wouldn’t help artists but would further entrench corporate IP holders.
You want to try explaining how, or is throwing basic claims it?
What, explain why “artists should pay artists that they study” is an unworkable copyright maximalist take? No, that’s self evident. How it won’t actually help artists, but would further entrench the corporate IP hoarders? No, I won’t do that either. It’s self evident. If your position is literally that artists should pay the artists that inspire them and that they study, you’re a deeply unserious person whose position doesn’t deserve to be seriously debated.
It’s simple: if you have to pay “copyright holders” for anything you use your AI training on, there can be no AI training. They need to ingest all the data they can to become better and it would cost dozen of billions if you had to pay every single piece of content. So we have to pick between a future in which “copyright holders” fight to get their $ or a future where we can push AI to enter a new era
If it isn’t copyright infringement to read a book and apply those ideas to make a product (which it isn’t), then it isn’t copyright infringement to train an LLM with the info in a piece of media.
Pretty cut and dry.
But if you pirated a book to read it, then applied those ideas to make a product, you still committed a crime.