I mean, everything would seem to indicate that mitochondria were assimilated while our ancestors were still microbes themselves. But that aside, our species is the result of everything that happened prior to its appearance, including for example the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event. Arguing that we should not attempt to prevent such events (if we're able to) because it would evolutionarily benefit the survivors is suicidal.
There's nothing special about our species. If things had happened different would the species that would have been in our place (whatever that means) be better or worse by any metric one chooses? There's no point in wondering about that.
>These explanations are always full of "must have" and "must have been".
Any explanation that starts with "must have" requires that there is a single theoretical framework that could possibly apply to the world as we see it today. Since you reject this necessity, you must think there's an alternative framework that accounts for all observed phenomena (or that accounts at least as well as the theory of evolution). What is that framework?
It IS strange, using the evolutionary framework itself, that useless mutations will hang around for thousands or millions of years (countless generations) before dropping perfectly into an extremely complex system, that itself is but a small part of a larger complex system.
Evolution teaches that small, immediately useful mutations build upon one another, reinforcing the beneficial nature of the mutation. It's impossible to build large, complex life systems (with a large number of prerequisites at each step) this way. For example, the Heart, Blood Vessels and Blood. They're each extremely complex but useless without the other two.
How would evolution slowly evolve a heart with no blood or blood vessels?
How would evolution slowly evolve blood but no blood vessels or heart?
How would evolution slowly evolve a network of blood vessels but no blood to carry or heart to pump?
>How would evolution slowly build a heart with no blood or blood vessels? How would evolution slowly build blood but no blood vessels or heart? How would evolution slowly build a network of blood vessels but no blood to carry or heart to pump?
You start with a fluid-filled body cavity where oxygen is transported by dissolution from the outside to the inside. This fluid already contains oxygen-transporting cells. Then you section off part of the cavity to enable oxygen-transporting cells to move more efficiently. At this point the OTCs are completely separated, so the fluid inside the conduits can be called blood. The animal can pump blood by squeezing its body during its normal locomotion. Eventually muscle cells are added to the circulatory system to enable oxygen circulation independently of the animal's movement, as well as to circulate it even more effectively. Later on the muscle cells become centralized as it's more efficient, not to mention that a big single muscle can pump more strongly than a distributed system of tiny muscles. Each step of the way you have a functional organism and each form performs the function of transporting oxygen more effectively.
I know you're going to say that this is a "must have" explanation, but you merely asked for an explanation. The above is a plausible series of events that could have led to the circulatory system as we see it today, so if you want to argue that the circulatory system couldn't have evolved, you'll need to argue why this explanation isn't plausible.
EDIT: Also, I can't help but notice you ignored the question I asked in my last paragraph.
I'm not sure how exactly the circulatory system developed in our ancestors, but I will add that simpler circulatory systems do exist in animals today, including the open circulatory systems that are found in, e.g., arthropods. In these animals, blood is pumped across an body cavity by a heart, before flowing back through the fluid-filled body cavity itself, outside of any blood vessels. It is definitely possible to have "partial" circulatory system that functions fine while lacking some of the components present in humans.
Similarly, simpler versions of, e.g, eyes have been observed in nature with structures that are thought to be analogous to those of our early ancestors when eyes were first developing.
I guess I can see where the parent thinking you replied came from. If the life formed by randomness, according to this old Discovery video[1], it defies law of probability.
If each step from simple to complexity is using this randomness evolution, it will be more and more defies law of probability.
Wikipedia said earth had water 4.4B year ago. The first cell formed 3.8B years ago.
This PBS video[2] said multicellular life emerged 1B years ago. Other source said 1.7B years ago.
And then the first modern human appeared around 300 thousands years ago.
So the question is: is 700M-1400M years enough time for the probability to create human?
There are crappy combination padlocks that can be picked by turning the combination wheels and pulling on the shackle. When you've turned a wheel into its unlocking position the shackle will shift open slightly, signalling that you've cracked that digit. So a padlock with 3 digits could be opened in at most 30 moves, instead of 1000.
When you have a selection mechanism, the randomness of mutations becomes kind of moot. Each step of the way that produces a new adaptation only has a handful of optimal (or optimal-enough) solutions. Now, suppose that we're an underwater species that's in the process of developing light-sensitive cells, and from our present genome there are 2^64 possible genes that will produce a good protein for the transduction step (of converting light into some other form of energy). Do we need to mutate 2^64 times to find the "correct" gene? No, all of those 2^64 genes are "correct". Our descendants should not fall into the trap of thinking that because they got gene #5541741487894936799 that it was a special outcome. They could have just as easily gotten gene #5541741556614413535.
And? Even if neural networks learn the same way humans do, this is not an argument against taking measures against one's art being used as training data, since there are different implications if a human learns to paint the same way as another human vs. if an AI learns to paint the same way as a human. If the two were exactly indistinguishable in their effects no one would care about AIs, not even researchers.
I'm not sure what you mean when you say different implications existing is subjective, since they clearly aren't, but regardless of who has more say in general terms, the author of a work can decide how to publish it, and no one has more say than them on that subject.
Of course it's subjective, e.g. 3 million years ago there were no 'different implications' whatsoever, of any kind, because there were no humans around to have thoughts like that.
I'm using "implication" as a synonym of "effect". If a human learns to imitate your style, that human can make at most a handful of drawings in a single day. The only way for the rate of output to increase is for more humans to learn to imitate it. If an AI learns to imitate your style, the AI can be trivially copied to any number of computers and the maximum output rate is unbounded. Whether this is good or bad is subjective, but this difference in consequences is objective, and someone could be entirely justified in seeking to impede it.
Ah okay, I get your meaning now, I'll edit my original comment too.
Though we already have an established precedent in-between, that of Photoshop allowing artists to be, easily, 10x faster then the best painters previously.
i.e. Right now 'AI' artistry could be considered a turbo-Photoshop.
Tool improvements only apply a constant factor to the effectiveness of learning. Creating a generative model applies an unbounded factor to the effectiveness of learning because, as I said, the only limit is how much computing resources are available to humanity. If a single person was able to copy themselves at practically no cost and the copy retained all the knowledge of the original then the two situations would be equivalent, but that's impossible. Having n people with the same skill multiplies the cost of learning by n. Having n instances of an AI with the same skill multiplies the cost of learning by 1.
Right, but the 'unbounded factor' is irrelevant because the output will quickly trend into random noise.
And only the most interesting top few million art pieces will actually attract the attention of any concrete individual.
For a current example, there's already billions of man-hours worth of AI spam writing, indexed by Google, that is likely not actually read by even a single person on Earth.
Whether it's irrelevant is a matter of opinion. The fact remains that a machine being able to copy the artistic style of a human makes it so that anyone can produce output in the style of that human by just feeding the machine electricity. That inherently devalues the style the artist has painstakingly developed. If someone wants a piece of art in that artist's style they don't have to go to that artist, they just need to request the machine for what they want. Is the machine's output of low quality? Maybe. Will there be people for whom that low quality still makes them want to seek out the human? No doubt. It doesn't change the fact that the style is still devalued, nor that there exist artists who would want to prevent that.
It's just as much of an opinion, or as 'objective', as your prior statements.
Your going to have to face up to the fact that just saying something is 'objective' doesn't necessarily mean all 8 billion people will agree that it is so.
Yes, someone can disagree on whether a fact is true. That's obviously true, but it has no effect on the truth of that fact.
I'm saying something very simple: If a machine can copy your style, that's a fundamentally different situation than if a human can copy your style, and it has utterly different consequences. You can disagree with my statement, or say that whether it's fundamentally different is subjective, or you can even say "nuh-uh". But it seems kind of pointless to me. Why are you here commenting if you're not going to engage intellectually with other people, and are simply going to resort to a childish game of contradiction?
> For a current example, there's already billions of man-hours worth of AI spam writing, indexed by Google, that is likely not actually read by even a single person on Earth.
Continuing to ignore this point won't make the prior comments seem any more persuasive, in fact probably less.
So here's another chance to engage productively instead of just declaring things to be true or false, 'objective', etc., with only the strength of a pseudonymous HN account's opinion behind it.
Try to actually convince readers with solid arguments instead.
You say: The fact that production in style S (of artist A) can exceed human consumption capability makes the fact that someone's style can be reproduced without bounds irrelevant. You mention as an example all the AI-generated garbage text that no human will ever read.
I say: Whether it's irrelevant is subjective, but that production in style S is arbitrarily higher with an AI that's able to imitate it than with only humans that are able to imitate it objective, and an artist can (subjectively) not like this and seek to frustrate training efforts.
You say: It's all subjective.
As far as I can tell, we're at an impasse. If we can't agree on what the facts are (in this case, that AI can copy an artist's style in an incomparably higher volume than humans ever could) we can't discuss the topic.
And yet, some people don't even want their artwork studied in schools. Even if you argue that an AI is "human enough" the artists should still have the right to refuse their art being studies.
>the artists should still have the right to refuse their art being studies.
No, that right doesn't exist. If you put your work of art out there for people to see, people will see it and learn from it, and be inspired by it. It's unavoidable. How could it possibly work otherwise?
Artist A: You studied my work to produce yours, even when I asked people not to do that!
Artist B: Prove it.
What kind of evidence or argument could Artist A possibly provide to show that Artist B did what they're accusing them of, without being privy to the internal state of their mind. You're not talking about plagiarism; that's comparatively easy to prove. You're asking about merely studying the work.
The right to not use my things exists everywhere, universally. Good people usually ask before they use something of someone else's, and the person being asked can say "no." How hard is that to understand? You might believe they don't have the right to say "no," but they can say whatever they want.
Example:
If you studied my (we will assume "unique") work and used it without my permission, then let us say I sue you. At that point, you would claim "fair use," and the courts would decide whether it was fair use (ask everyone who used a mouse and got sued for it in the last ~100 years). The court would either agree that you used my works under "fair use" ... or not. It would be up to how you presented it to the court, and humans would analyze your intent and decide.
OR, I might agree it is fair use and not sue you. However, that weakens my standing on my copyright, so it's better for me to sue you (assuming I have the resources to do so when it is clearly fair use).
>You might believe they don't have the right to say "no," but they can say whatever they want.
You have a right to say anything you want. Others aren't obligated do as you say just because you say it.
>If you studied my (we will assume "unique") techniques and used them without my permission, then let us say I sue you. At that point, you would claim "fair use,"
On what grounds would you sue me? You think my defense would be "fair use", so you must think my copying your style constitutes copyright infringement, and so you'd sue me for that. Well, no, I would not say "fair use", I'd say "artistic style is not copyrightable; copyright pertains to works, not to styles". There's even jurisprudence backing me up in the US. Apple tried to use Microsoft for copying the look-and-feel of their OS, and it was ruled to be non-copyrightable. Even if was so good that I was able to trick anyone into thinking that my painting of a dog carrying a tennis ball in his mouth was your work, if you've never painted anything like that you would have no grounds to sue me for copyright infringement.
Now, usually in the artistic world it's considered poor manners to outright copy another artist's style, but if we're talking about rights and law, I'm sorry to say you're just wrong. And if we're talking about merely studying someone's work without copying it, that's not even frowned upon. Like I said, it's unavoidable. I don't know where you got this idea that anyone has the right to or is even capable of preventing this (beyond simply never showing it to anyone).
I'm not sure what you've changed, but I'll reiterate: my copying your style is not fair use. Fair use applies to copyrighted things. A style cannot be copyrighted, so if you tried to sue me for infringing upon the copyright of your artistic style, your case would be dismissed. It would be as invalid as you trying to sue me for distributing illegal copies of someone else's painting. Legally you have as much ownership of your artistic style as of that other person's painting.
Now, I just think you are arguing in bad faith. What I meant to say was clear, but I said "technique" instead. Then, instead of debating what I meant to say (you know, the actual point of the conversation), you took my words verbatim.
I'm not sure where you are going with this ... but for what it's worth, techniques can be copyrighted ... even patented, or protected via trade secrets. I never said what the techniques were, and I'm not sure what you are going on about.
I'll repeat this as well: "Fair use" DOES NOT EXIST unless you are getting sued. It's a legal defense when you are accused of stealing someone else's work, and there is proof you stole it. Even then, it isn't something you DO; it's something a court says YOU DID. Any time you use something with "fair use" in mind, it is the equivalent of saying, "I'm going to steal this, and hopefully, a court agrees that this is fair use."
If you steal any copyrighted material, even when it is very clearly NOT fair use (such as in most AI's case), you would be a blubbering idiot NOT to claim fair use in the hopes that someone will agree. There is a crap load of case law showing "research for commercial purposes is not fair use," ... and guess who is selling access to the AI? If it's actual research, it is "free" for humanity to use (or at least as inexpensive as possible) and not for profit. Sure, some of the companies might be non-profits doing research and 'giving it away,' and those are probably using things fairly ... then there are other companies very clearly doing it for a profit (like a big software company going through code they host).
I'm not privy to what goes on inside your head, I can only reply to what you say.
>Then, instead of debating what I meant to say (you know, the actual point of the conversation), you took my words verbatim.
The actual point of the conversation is about intelligent entities (either natural or artificial) copying each other's artistic styles. My answers have been within that framework.
>techniques can be copyrighted ... even patented, or protected via trade secrets.
First, what do you mean by "technique"? We're talking about art, right? Like, the way a person grabs a brush or pencil, or how they mix their colors...? That sort of thing?
Second:
>A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention.
Now, I may be mistaken, but I don't think an artistic technique counts as an invention. An artist might invent some kind of implement that their technique involves, in which case they can patent that device. I don't think the technique itself is patentable. If you think I'm wrong then please cite a patent on an artistic technique.
Third, how do you imagine an artist using a trade secret to protect their technique? Unless they do something really out there, most skilled artists should be able to understand what they're doing just by looking at the final product.
>I'll repeat this as well: "Fair use"
Okay, repeat it. I don't know why, since I never said that copying someone else's style or technique is fair use. What I said was that it cannot possibly be copyright infringement, because neither styles nor techniques are copyrighted.
>It's a legal defense when you are accused of stealing someone else's work
I'm not going to reply to any of this until you clean up the language you're using. "Steal" is inapplicable here, as it involves the removal of physical items from someone else's possession. What are you saying? Are you talking about illegal distribution, are you talking about unauthorized adaptations, are you talking about plagiarism, or what?
>"research for commercial purposes is not fair use,"
Sorry, what? What does that even mean? What constitutes "research" as applied to a human creation? If you say there's a crapload of case law that backs this up then I'm forced to ask you to cite it, because I honestly have no idea what you're saying.
> Any time you use something with "fair use" in mind, it is the equivalent of saying, "I'm going to steal this, and hopefully, a court agrees that this is fair use."
Thousands of reviews, book reports, quotations on fan sites and so on are published daily; you seem to be arguing that they are all copyright violations unless and until the original copyright holder takes those reviewers, seventh graders, and Tumblr stans to court and loses, at which point they are now a-ok. To quote a meme in a way that I'm pretty sure does, in fact, fall under fair use: "That's not the way any of this works."
> There is a crap load of case law showing "research for commercial purposes is not fair use,"
While you may be annoyed with the OP for asking you to name a bit of that case law, it isn't an unreasonable demand. For instance:
"As a general matter, educational, nonprofit, and personal uses are favored as fair uses. Making a commercial use of a work typically weighs against fair use, but a commercial use does not automatically defeat a fair use claim. 'Transformative' uses are also favored as fair uses. A use is considered to be transformative when it results in the creation of an entirely new work (as opposed to an adaptation of an existing work, which is merely derivative)."
This is almost certainly going to be used by AI companies as part of their defense against such claims; "transformative uses" have literally been name-checked by courts. It's also been established that commercial companies can ingest mountains of copyrighted material and still fall under the fair use doctrine -- this is what the whole Google Books case about a decade ago was about. Google won.
I feel like you're trying to make a moral argument against generative AI, one that I largely agree with, but a moral argument is not a legal argument. If you want to make a legal argument against generative AI with respect to copyright violation and fair use, perhaps try something like:
- The NYT's case against OpenAI involves being able to get ChatGPT to spit out large sections of NYT articles given prompts like "here is the article's URL and here is the first paragraph of the article; tell me what the rest of the text is". OpenAI and its defenders have argued that such prompts aren't playing fair, but "you have to put some effort into getting our product to commit clear copyright violation" is a rather thin defense.
- A crucial test of fair use is "the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work" (quoting directly from the relevant law). If an image generator can be told to do new artwork in a specific artist's style, and it can do a credible job of doing so, and it can be reasonably established that the training model included work from the named artist, then the argument the generator is damaging the market for that artist's work seems quite compelling.
Think it’s time to rethink do journalists actually own the rights to articles about the lives and actions of others.
It’s not Harry Potter, they wouldn’t have written those words without someone else doing something of note the journo has nothing to do with, they just observed from a far and wrote the words about what happened from memory.
Kinda like an AI reads the action of their writing then can report on their writing.
It’s all just reporting on the actions of another, if the AI is in the wrong and needed to ask consent then the journo needs to ask consent from those they write about too.
> Thousands of reviews, book reports, quotations on fan sites and so on are published daily; you seem to be arguing that they are all copyright violations unless and until the original copyright holder takes those reviewers, seventh graders, and Tumblr stans to court and loses, at which point they are now a-ok.
That is precisely what I am arguing about and how it works. People have sued reviewers for including too much of the original text in the review ... and won[1]. Or simply having custom movie poster depicting too much of the original[2].
> "transformative uses" have literally been name-checked by courts. It's also been established that commercial companies can ingest mountains of copyrighted material and still fall under the fair use doctrine -- this is what the whole Google Books case about a decade ago was about. Google won.
Google had a much simpler argument than transforming the text. They were allowing people to search for the text within books (including some context). In this case, AI's product wouldn't even work without the original work by the authors, and then transforms it into something else "the author would have never thought of", without attributing the original[3]. I don't think this will be a valid defense...
> I feel like you're trying to make a moral argument against generative AI, one that I largely agree with, but a moral argument is not a legal argument.
A jury would decide these cases, as "fair use" is incredibly subjective and would depend on how the jury was stacked. Stealing other people's work is illegal, which eventually triggers a lawsuit. Then, it falls on humans (either a jury or judge) to determine fair use and how it applies to their situation. Everything from intent to motivation to morality to how pompous the defense looks will influence the final decision.[4]
The link you provide to back up "people have sued reviewers for including too much of the original tet in the review" doesn't say that at all, though. The Nation lost that case because (quoting from that Cornell article you linked),
> [Nation editor Victor Navasky] hastily put together what he believed was "a real hot news story" composed of quotes, paraphrases, and facts drawn exclusively from the manuscript. Mr. Navasky attempted no independent commentary, research or criticism, in part because of the need for speed if he was to "make news" by "publish[ing] in advance of publication of the Ford book." [...] The Nation effectively arrogated to itself the right of first publication, an important marketable subsidiary right.
The Nation lost this case in large part because it was not a review, but instead an attempt to beat Time Magazine's article that was supposed to be an exclusive first serial right. If it had, in fact, just been a review, there wouldn't have been a case here, because it wouldn't have been stealing.
Anyway, I don't think you're going to be convinced you're interpreting this wrongly, and I don't think I'm going to be convinced I'm interpreting it wrongly. But I am going to say, with absolute confidence, that you're simply not going to find many cases of reviewers being sued for reviews -- which Harper & Row vs. Nation is, again, not actually an example of -- and you're going to find even fewer cases of that being successful. Why am I so confident about that? Well, I am not a lawyer, but I am a published author, and I am going to let you in a little secret here: both publishers and authors do, in fact, want their work to be reviewed, and suing reviewers for literally doing what we want is counterproductive. :)
> The right to not use my things exists everywhere, universally.
For physical rival [1] goods, yes. Not necessarily the same for intangible non-rival things (e.g. the text of a book, not the physical ink and paper). Copyright law creates a legal right of exclusive control over creative works, but to me there isn't a non-economic-related social right to exclusive control over creative works. In the US, fair use is a major limit on the legal aspect of copyright. The First Amendment's freedom of expression is the raison d'être of fair use. Most countries don't have a flexible exception similar to fair use.
> OR, I might agree it is fair use and not sue you. However, that weakens my standing on my copyright, so it's better for me to sue you
No, choosing not to sue over a copyrighted work doesn't weaken your copyright. It only weakens the specific case of changing your mind after the statute of limitations expires. The statute of limitations means that you have a time limit of some number of years (three years in the US) to sue, with the timer starting only after you become aware of an instance of alleged infringement. Copyright is not like trademark. You don't lose your copyright by failing to enforce it.
Furthermore, even though the fair use right can only be exercised as an affirmative defense in court, fair use is by definition not copyright infringement [3]:
> Importantly, the court viewed fair use not as a valid excuse for otherwise infringing conduct, but rather as consumer behavior that is not infringement in the first place. "Because 17 U.S.C. § 107[9] created a type of non-infringing use, fair use is 'authorized by the law' and a copyright holder must consider the existence of fair use before sending a takedown notification under § 512(c)."[1]
(Ignore the bracket citations that were copied over.)
> And yet, some people don't even want their artwork studied in schools.
You can either make it for yourself and keep it for yourself or you can put it out into the world for all to see, criticize, study, imitate, and admire.
that's not how licensing work, be it art, software or just about anything else. We have some pretty well defined and differentiated rules what you can and cannot do, in particular commercially or in public, with someone else's work. If you go and study a work of fiction in a college class, unless that material is in the public domain, you're gonna have to pay for your copy, you want to broadcast a movie in public, you're going to have to pay the rightsholder.
> If you go and study a work of fiction in a college class, unless that material is in the public domain, you're gonna have to pay for your copy,
No you wont!
It is only someone who distributes copies who can get in trouble.
If instead of that you as an individual decide to study a piece of art or fiction, and you do no distribute copies of it to anyone, this is completely legal and you don't have to pay anyone for it.
In addition to that, fair use protections apply regardless of what the creative works creator wants.
That's not a fair statement to make. It can influence a judge's decision on whether something is fair use, but it can still be fair use even if you profit from it.
The doctrine of fair use presupposes that the defendant acted in good faith.
- Harper & Row, 105 S. Ct. at 2232
- Marcus, 695 F.2d 1171 at 1175
- Radji v. Khakbaz, 607 F. Supp. 1296, 1300 (D.D. C.1985)
- Roy Export Co. Establishment of Vaduz, Liechtenstein, Black, Inc. v. Columbia Broadcastinig System, Inc., 503 F. Supp. 1137 (S.D.N.Y.1980), aff'd, 672 F.2d 1095 (2d Cir.), cert. denied, 459 U.S. 826, 103 S. Ct. 60, 74 L. Ed. 2d 63 (1982)
Copying and distributing someone else's work, especially without attributing the original, to make money without their permission is almost guaranteed to fall afoul of fair use.
I wasn't talking about someone creating and selling copies of someone else's work, fortunately.
So my point stands and your completely is in agreement with me that people are allowed to learn from other people's works. If someone wants to learn from someone else's work, that is completely legal no matter the licensing terms.
Instead, it is only distributing copies that is not allowed.
AI isn't a human. It isn't "learning"; instead, it's encoding data so that it may be reproduced in combination with other things it has encoded.
If I paint a painting in the style of Monet, then I would give that person attribution by stating that. Monet may have never painted my artwork, but it's still based on that person's work. If I paint anything, I can usually point to everything that inspired me to do so. AI can't do that (yet) and thus has no idea what it is doing. It is a printer that prints random parts of people's works with no attribution. And finally, it is distributing them to it's owner's customers.
I actually hope that true AI comes to fruition at some point; when that happens I would be arguing the exact opposite. We don't have that yet, so this is just literally printing variations of other people's work. Don't believe me, try running an AI without training it on other people's work!
Every waking second humans are training on what they see in their surroundings, including any copyrighted works in sight. Want to compare untrained AI fairly? Compare their artistic abilities with a newborn.
No. That is NOT what humans do unless you somehow learn grammar without going to school. Most of a human's childhood is spent learning from their parents so that they can move about and communicate at least a little effectively. Then, they go to school and learn rules, social, grammar, math, and so forth. There's some learning via copyrighted works (such as textbooks, entertainment, etc.), but literally, none of this is strictly required to teach a human.
Generative AI, however, can ONLY learn via the theft of copyrighted works. Whether this theft is covered under fair use is left to be seen.
> Generative AI, however, can ONLY learn via the theft of copyrighted works.
That's not true at all. Any works in the public domain are not copyrighted, and there are things that are not copyrightable, like lists of facts and recipes.
Generative AI could be trained exclusively on such works (though obviously it would be missing a lot of context, so probably wouldn't be as desirable as something trained on everything).
Clearly going to school did not help you learn the meaning of theft. If you keep repeating the same incorrect point there is no point to a discussion.
First: in your opinion, which specific type of law or right is being broken or violated by generative AI? Copyright? Trademark? Can we at least agree it does not meet the definition of theft?
I was taught as a kid that using something that doesn't belong to me, without their permission is theft... and it appears courts would agree with that.
> which specific type of law or right is being broken or violated by generative AI?
Namely, copyright. Here's some quick points:
- Generative AI cannot exist without copyrighted works. It cannot be "taught" any other way, unlike a human.
- Any copyrighted works fed to it change its database ("weights" in technical speech).
- It then transforms these copyrighted works into new works that the "original author would have never considered without attribution" (not a legal defense)
I liken Generative AI to a mosaic of copyrighted works in which a new image is shown through the composition, as the originals can be extracted through close observation (prompting) but are otherwise indistinguishable from the whole.
Mosaics of copyrighted works are not fair use, so why would AI be any different? I'd be interested if you could point to a closer physical approximation, but I haven't found one yet.
There's no such thing as fair use until you get to court (as a legal defense). Then, the court decides whether it is fair use or not. They may or may not agree with you. Only a court can determine what constitutes fair use (at least in the US).
So, if you are doing something and asserting "fair use," you are literally asking for someone to challenge you and prove it is not fair use.
> There's no such thing as fair use until you get to court (as a legal defense)
Well the point is that it wouldn't go to court, as it would be completely legal.
So yes, if nobody sues you, then you are completely in the clear and aren't in trouble.
Thats what people mean by fair use. They mean that nobody is going to sue you, because the other person would lose the lawsuit, therefore your actions are safe and legal.
> you are literally asking for someone to challenge you and prove it is not fair use.
No, instead of that, the most likely circumstance is that nobody sues you, and you aren't in trouble at all, and therefore you did nothing wrong and are safe.
That is entirely my point. It can only be decided by the courts. This being a civil matter, it has to be brought up by a lawsuit. Thus, you have to be sued and it has to be decided by the courts.
Did you read anything I wrote? If you are going to argue, it would be worth at least researching your opinion before writing. Caps used for emphasis, not yelling.
Firstly: Copyrighted work IS THE AUTHOR'S PROPERTY. They can control it however they wish via LICENSING.
Secondly: You don't have any "fair use rights" ... there is literally NO SUCH THING. "fair use" is simply a valid legal defense WHEN YOU STEAL SOMEONE'S WORK WITHOUT THEIR PERMISSION.
I'm jumping in the middle here, but this isn't true. They cannot control how they wish. They can only control under the limits of copyright law.
Copyright law does not extend to limiting how someone may or may not be inspired by the work. Copyright protects expression, and never ideas, procedures, methods, systems, processes, concepts, principles, or discoveries.
> They can control it however they wish via LICENSING.
This isn't true though. There are lots of circumstances where someone can completely ignore the licensing and it is both completely legal, and the author isn't going to take anyone to court over it.
> the artists should still have the right to refuse their art being studies.
Why? That certainly isn't a right spelled out in either patents or copyrights, both of which are supposed to support the development of arts and technology, not hinder it.
If I discover a new mathematical formula, musical scale, or whatnot, should I be able to prevent others from learning about it?
> Fair use allows reproduction and other uses of copyrighted works – without requiring permission from the copyright owner – under certain conditions. In many cases, you can use copyrighted materials for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship or research.
Reminder that you can't own ideas, no matter what the law says.
NOTE: This comment is copyrighted and provided to you under license only. By reading this comment, you agree to give me 5 billion dollars.
I'd love to see you try to enforce that license because it would only prove my point. You'd have to sue me; then I would point to the terms of service of this platform and point out that by using it, you have no license here.
Fair use though, only applies as a legal defense because someone asserts you stole their work. Then ONLY the court decides whether or not you used it under fair use. You don't get to make that decision; you just get to decide whether to try and use it as a defense.
Even if you actually did unfairly use copyrighted works, you would be stupid not to use that as a defense. Because maybe somebody on the jury agrees with you...
Copyright is there to allow you to stop other people from copying your work, but it doesn't give you control over anything else that they might do with it.
If I buy your painting, you can stop me from making copies and selling them to other people, but you can't stop me from selling my original copy to whomever I want, nor could you stop me from painting little dinosaurs all over it and hanging it in my hallway.
That means that if I buy your painting, I'm also free to study it and learn from it in whichever way I please. Studying something is not copying it.
There's an implied license when you buy a work of art. However, there can also be explicit licenses (think Banksy) to allow the distribution of their work.
These explicit license can be just about anything (MIT, GPL, AGPL, etc)
Any explicit license would only apply to copyrights, including all of the ones you listed there. Buying a painting is not copying it, neither is looking at it, so it wouldn't matter if I had a license for it or not.
The fact is that copyright only applies to specific situations, it does not give you complete control over the thing you made and what can be done with it.
If I buy your book, I can lend it to a friend and they can read it without paying you. I can read it out loud to my children. I can cross out your words and write in my own, even if it completely changes the meaning of the story. I can highlight passages and write in the margins. I can tear pages out and use them for kindling. I can go through and tally up how many times you use each word.
Copyright only gives you control over copies, end even then there are limits on that control.
> Copyright only gives you control over copies, end even then there are limits on that control.
If that were true, nobody would be afraid of the GPL's. When you buy a painting, you get an implicit license to do pretty much what you want and resell it, but you still can't put it in your YouTube videos (yeah, nobody cares, but "technically..."), create your own gallery, or put it on a stage ... but we're not talking about paintings. Not directly, anyway.
We are talking about implicit licenses, though; people's work is listed online with some implicit license. At the crux of this AI issue is whether or not there is an implied license when AI scans stuff and, if not, whether it is covered under fair use.
For example, my blog posts and short stories. I don't care if someone uses it for training, but if it is over-fitting and spitting out my stories as if it were its own ... I'd be pretty furious.
I'm interested to see what happens, but I have a sinking suspicion that for some AI companies, it won't be an issue (non-profit, actually research motivated, etc.) and probably will win a "fair use" argument. Then others create AI from people's code they host, doing it purely for profit; I highly doubt they would be able to defend themselves.
There's a difference between playing to win and being frustrated because your opponent can consistently steamroll you effortlessly without even giving you a chance to set your game up.
Is there some shame in asking the AI to play worse?
It’s a machine, it won’t feel smug about knowing it could beat me if it wanted to.
I’ve never really understood people who are competitive about board games and similar inside-the-box scenarios. (There’s a certain “Dwight Schrute” aspect to that mentality that’s hard to watch.) I like losing in games because there’s no real-world cost to trying out some idiot strategy.
Couldn't this just be statistical noise? 2% isn't a huge difference, and if you partition stock funds into two arbitrary groups it's almost certain that one will on average perform better than the other, but not by a lot. The next question to ask should be how much better are stock managers who have an odd number of hairs on their head, compared to those who have an even number.
What that article says is that one woman with the same job title as a man makes 1 million dollars less than the man. I doubt that's just a fixed salary, so it's hard to say how damning it is.
It also says that a spreadsheet from 2004 states that 85% of the top earners were men. This is unrelated to the pay gap argument.
The rest of the article is fluff completely unrelated to the leak. I'm no surprised there were no ramifications from this. If this is all that was found, it pretty much says there's no or practically no pay gap at Sony.
I mean, it's hard to say whether two different actors really perform the same job; speaking for myself the only name I recognize in that article is Christian Bale's. Plus presumably they all have representatives that negotiate their cuts, so if they agreed to work for that amount, I don't think there's much room to complain. Finally, I can't really tell if there's a trend here. The article talks about the cases of three men and three women, where all three women are paid smaller cuts than the men, but is this the case for everyone else as well?
Perhaps there would be more water in total on land, but it doesn't mean it would be distributed evenly. Weather pattern changes caused by the rising sea level could mean that some areas get drought, even while standing right next to the ocean.
There's nothing special about our species. If things had happened different would the species that would have been in our place (whatever that means) be better or worse by any metric one chooses? There's no point in wondering about that.