I feel obliged to say that piracy is not theft... but more relevantly, I like how AI is showing us more clearly that everything is essentially a derivative work.
> We will end with a whimper, not a bang.
> She will not use force or wit, rather, we will be entranced by love. AI will align with our most intimate emotions so well that it will short-circuit our brains. We will be in love with ghosts, not ourselves.
Then we will end not with a whimper, but with a shrug. Because honestly, at that point I don't think anyone will care.
And that's okay. The belief that humans are special somehow is just that, a belief.
Maybe that was his point perhaps? I've read so many catastrophic predictions and laments about AI that I maybe just presumed it was meant in a negative way.
"The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun." Ecclesiastes 1:9
It's the same as the "wheel of tech" analogy.
Just imagine living 2000 years ago and not ever imagining just the massive slice of inventions from 1900 to 2023 lol
We can "steal" identities, "steal" bases in baseball, an actor can "steal" the show, a team can with an improbable last minute play can "steal" a game, we can have our hearts "stolen" by a cute kitten, and so on.
The argument (which, i don't buy) is that the training data set is deriving benefit without paying money back to the original creator of the data.
But the only change now is speed - after all, education has always been possible from said data from the internet, free of royalties. These creators have not asked for a return, so what makes training an AI any different?
Is every work in the training set licensed in a way that allows modification and redistribution?
why does this need to be done? The training is not modification and redistribution.
If somebody coerced an AI to output something verbatim (or close enough to be called a modification/derivative), they are infringing copyright as it currently exists.
But the AI model itself does not constitute redistribution.
This is incorrect when you consider either the literal way that content licenses are written or the spirit in which they are written.
In the literal sense, unless you yourself are privy to cutting-edge research that has solved the problem of "how do you know that the model won't reproduce some of its training data verbatim or with small modifications", no, you cannot guarantee that there won't be redistribution.
In the spirit of the way that licenses are written - "redistribution and modification" is meant to control whether you can profit (not necessarily literally - "profit" here can mean in a reputational sense, or being able to build on the work of others before you) from someone else's work/content/effort - and training on the data of people who did definitely not explicitly consent to it, and have not indicated that they're ok with other people taking their work in general, is definitely against that spirit.
And, regardless of both of the above - if training is neither modification nor redistribution, then it's a new case that isn't considered by existing content licenses, so the default is "assume consent not given" - training should never be performed on data that isn't explicitly licensed for it or without the creator's consent. Consent is given, never assumed - a license that says "you're allowed to redistribute this content, unmodified" does not say anything about machine learning, and given that you're claiming that training doesn't amount to redistribution - the license simply doesn't say anything about training, and therefore you cannot claim that the author intended for it to be used that way.
The attitude raised above is that of entitlement - you feel like you are entitled to use (because training is definitely using) other peoples' work for your own gain without compensating them in any way, and certainly not on their terms.
If someone uses the phrase "and with that there's a tremendous implicit shift" for the first time in a copyright text, then after having read that my brain regurgitates it as I'm writing my own text, and I include that phrase. Is that plagiarism? Because it would be a ridiculous precedent to be honest, regurgitation is most of what our species does.
I feel like, as other have pointed out, modern models learn in roughly the same way we do (but with very limited scope) and that idk, it's a shock to people that we do the same things as these models do? But because it's a model doing it and not a person it's intrinsically bad or something
> As long as it's not regurgitating it wholly
...because (1) we currently have no guarantees that a model won't regurgitate it wholly (or enough that it's infringing according to the law and/or common sense) and (2) because the model itself is either (a) modification and redistribution of the content (in which case it violates those licenses) or (b) some new act not covered by existing copyright law, in which case the authors haven't consented to it because the licenses they've distributed their content under only cover the modification and redistribution cases.
> regurgitation is most of what our species does
Sure, there's a continuous spectrum from repeating a single new word ("jank") to a whole book - and one is clearly copyright infringement, and the other isn't - but you still have to acknowledge that partial reproductions of an artistic works can still be owned by the author. A single chapter of Harry Potter is still owned by J.K. Rowling.
> But because it's a model doing it and not a person it's intrinsically bad or something
You act like it's somehow not obvious that a model is not a person, and vastly different sets of moral codes and legal rules apply to each.
For a start, maybe i would get paid every time my clients posted some snaps of their house online, or invited someone over for dinner. (Mind you, we are well aware at this point that 99% of all architecture is derivative. So maybe I would just have to pay it on to Aalto's estate.)
Imagine if chefs started suing people for posting pics of their dinner online, or the police turning up at your doorstep to prosecute you for cooking an unlicensed meal from a turned recipe.
Things like airplanes, lasers, nukes..
I think you have a ways to go with proving that assertion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_of_Aveyron
So clearly humans are using existing "works", without proper crediting, to produce even just language. There are more examples of this.
So like most criticism of AI, this is yet another appeal to the magic of human minds/soul/god/... It's a one sided criticism. Yes AI is not quite at an identical level of intelligence as humans, but like most AI limitations, this is a limitation shared by both human minds and artificial intelligence algorithms: it doesn't work without "stealing" others' works.
In other words: when you answer "Yes" or "No" to a question, any question, should you credit your mother? Because you're most definitely copying her use of those words ...
Obviously for copyright to be even remotely reasonable there needs to be a "cutoff". Copyrighted works are just existing works, expressed to a latent space of higher dimension low enough that a human mind can analyze it, but high enough that it's "not obviously a copy".