Regardless of whether one agrees or not with paying creators of the training data, I think the deeper issue here is about societal wealth distribution and who gets paid for X now that X is being done very well by AIs. A less equitable world has Google or billionaires getting paid. A more equitable world has the artists.
But I want to argue here that for purposes of this latter question, your proposal of copyright enforcement (or anything similar) is too little to late.
-These "copyright violating" AIs have demonstrated the proof of concept and the damage is done. Even if these AIs are banned, the companies will just parallel reconstruct it by running the 80/20 rule: pay tiny amounts to get most of the data. After all the creators of the data were doing it for free and are in such fierce competition there's no bargaining power.
- More nefarious AIs will just do transfer learning on intermediate neurons, very difficult to prove stealing here.
- Even if you get the system to work, what about future artists and writers? Are we just creating an entrenched historical group of creatives getting royalties forever?
The distributional problem is not well solved by copyright, and better solved with e.g. corporate taxes, income taxes, VATs.
>- Even if you get the system to work, what about future artists and writers? Are we just creating an entrenched historical group of creatives getting royalties forever?
This is kind of what happened with music, no? In some countries hard drives, SSDs etc all carry an additional tax that is then given to some copyright organization. Of course it's not the artists that mainly benefit from this, but instead it's the people running said organization.
> Even if you get the system to work, what about future artists and writers? Are we just creating an entrenched historical group of creatives getting royalties forever?
Copyright expires, and new artists will create new (copyrightable) art in the future. Unless your assertion is that generative AI is so good no one will make art without it ever again?
If the proposed system works, I expect those entrenched artists will sue young human artists whose work shows signs of learning from previous art. The vast majority of music, books, and movies have clear influences.
The proposed system exists, and humans have had to work in it for some time now. People get routinely sued for copyright infringement if their work is too close to an existing work. The (successful) suit against George Harrison for "My Sweet Lord" is a good example of infringement via influence with no clear malicious intent.
> Even if you get the system to work, what about future artists and writers? Are we just creating an entrenched historical group of creatives getting royalties forever?
The flip side of this is that if we undermine paid creators until there's no incentive for them to create, then the AIs abilities stagnate on old data and we as a society drop or at least diminish the skillsets that could create new media.
AI can generate stuff humans care to look at only because of the availability of data that humans created for eachother to enjoy. As tastes, fashions, zeitgeists and pop culture change amongst humans the AI models will always be behind and unable to follow trends completely. I think.
> The flip side of this is that if we undermine paid creators until there's no incentive for them to create
The incentive to create is almost never financial. How many artists finance their creative efforts by working day jobs? Making a living as an artist is more about buying yourself the time to focus on making art than it is about making money. People will continue to create art, however they can, because they must.
I agree that people wouldn't stop making art. Sorry to shift the goalposts here: I do think that there are types of art that are not created except for commercial reasons, and that body of work is what I would expect to get displaced by AI. In fact it already is, Advertising creative media is one example, it's an industry I am involved in and we are already seeing Dall-E and ChatGPT getting used for quickly concepting ideations for clients etc. I would expect an AI to get worse at meeting commercial needs over time because of what I said in my original comment. Or at least for commercial creative media to stagnate if it could only use AI (because no one is making commercial media just for fun).
This is all stuff I am actively thinking about since it is impacting me right now, so I appreciate the discussion and would be happy to be wrong.
1. Art is better when it's not paid. Real artists have day jobs that pay the bills and they create art to express their ideas, not to make money.
2. Paid art isn't going away, it will just change. Certain skillsets will be forgotten, like how landscape painting was replaced by photography. But talented artists will leverage AI tools to create works that are greater than anything that came before.
> Art is better when it's not paid. Real artists have day jobs that pay the bills and they create art to express their ideas, not to make money.
Trying to define who "real" artists are is a folly for the ages. It is the dream of many artists that they get paid for their art, and many achieve it. The starving artist is a mythos of pain and suffering, a good story but hardly good for art. Some of the best composers from history were paid, some of the most influential artists were from wealthy families. They were able to focus on their work without fear of money and because of this they could excel in techique and execution, which allowed them to produce some of the highest forms of their art in history.
AI models need human creative decisions as part of the process of making art. This is consistent with current copyright law as well as contemporary art theories of authorship and practice…
Eg, Donald Judd’s works are these creative decisions and processes distilled to the most basic of sculptural form.
> - Even if you get the system to work, what about future artists and writers? Are we just creating an entrenched historical group of creatives getting royalties forever?
The boat has long since sailed on this… ands it’s globally entrenched as a norm of international trade that we are all “ok with this” regime of 75 years or century plus copyright terms …
And arguably the entire copyright vs AI/ML training datasets debate is founded on the notion that the artists individual copyright will last long enough that it’s going to outlive the average artist. If we look at one of the old copyright regimes, for comparison… in a world where copyright is a short default/implicit/automatic term (14 or 28 years) and the copyright owner can elect to register and pay for extensions (for a more modern twist, preferably combined with increasing incentive to prevent perpetual renewal abuses by Disney, et al)… now imagine how much data from up to 28 years ago there is, the catalogue of art and photographs and text and books and academic writings… all public domain because the authors didn’t consider them of sufficient value… all free for the ML model training… this gets even larger with a 14 year term…
Suffice to say that we are seeing systemic impacts already, culturally we’re seeing more and more money put behind less and less content controlled by fewer and fewer people due to a slow death spiral off copyright stranglehold across multiple industries, written, visual, audio and video arts are all dominated by large corporations holding IP … yes individuals continue to create, but other than rare breakthrough chance successes and internet age viral success (which are often just completely arbitrarily/random and have no real quality) these companies decide what will be popular culture…
My prediction is that the AI/ML models will be allowed but heavily scrutinised, under the simple legal doctrine that the user is the one committing the infringement since the primary purpose of these models is not infringement but unique creation, but suspicion will linger by artists and it will become a normal part of contracts in the art word…effectively an artist equivalent of the way police in many places view spray cans… just as the primary purpose of spray paint is not to create illegal graffiti, which is the justification many places used to overturn poorly justified civic bans on possession of spray paint.
I’d like to see any more draconian spread of derivative work rights (style rights etc) to be accompanied by drastic reductions in the automatic copyright term, as the ability to churn out lots of automatic content drastically lowers the value of long long terms, and the counter argument that it makes the existing rights more valuable is fucking insane as we do not need to pass copyright down to the great-great-great-great-grandchildren… the terms are already too long.
What’s great about your comment is that you show that what we need the most is to reduce the power of copyright in such a corporate-centric legal regime.
Personally I’d like to see the right to train statistical models on any works without the permission of the author enshrined in statute and an end to common-law copyright, a return to the Statute of Anne 14/28 time length, and a clear delineation between the “work” as having an author for an eternity but having a “copyright of the work” vastly limited in scope.
Ask yourself, do we want to be extending the reach of large copyright holders like Disney into taking a fee from LLM producers because they COULD be helping people draw Mickey ears on their private creations?
This is Betamax all over again and luckily that Supreme Court opinion will favor heavily in the lower court’s judgement of these models as fair use.
But I want to argue here that for purposes of this latter question, your proposal of copyright enforcement (or anything similar) is too little to late.
-These "copyright violating" AIs have demonstrated the proof of concept and the damage is done. Even if these AIs are banned, the companies will just parallel reconstruct it by running the 80/20 rule: pay tiny amounts to get most of the data. After all the creators of the data were doing it for free and are in such fierce competition there's no bargaining power.
- More nefarious AIs will just do transfer learning on intermediate neurons, very difficult to prove stealing here.
- Even if you get the system to work, what about future artists and writers? Are we just creating an entrenched historical group of creatives getting royalties forever?
The distributional problem is not well solved by copyright, and better solved with e.g. corporate taxes, income taxes, VATs.