Great! So given your articles are in the public domain on your website I can make millions out of it without given you a cent or direct credit and sources without paying you and can claim it all as my own then.
I have sympathy for the artists, but frankly this is progress and it can't be stopped. The economics are so lop-sided in favour of silicon that the law won't be able to hold it back without crippling society at large. Artists aren't the only ones affected and they may not even be the profession most impacted.
Not sure about that. It's like saying if AIs are good at art, they'll be better at math.
Also, GPT-3.5 is already a better coder than a few humans whose mistakes I've had to fix. 3.5 is nowhere near the best, yet it's already eating at the bottom rungs despite being free.
Kinda sad that artists having their income even more crippled is seen as progress.
Sadly, I think most artists would bite my head off right this minute? So I guess I'm going to have to wait until the storm blows over.
On the other hand, I grew up in one of those places, the UK, and there were a lot of people moaning that the TV License (which funds the BBC) was an abominable stealth tax or words to that effect.
I'm now in Germany, where everyone has to pay the equivalent even if they don't own a TV or watch live over the internet (unlike the UK where not doing that means you don't need to pay); I've not heard anyone complain so far… but I don't know if that's because they genuinely don't, or if I'm peacefully oblivious by never having been suckered into reading a German-language comments section.
But if they claimed that they wrote the content then they would be defrauding their customers, since saying they wrote them would just be lying. You don't need intellectual property for fraud (as in "lying for material gain") to exist and be bad. At the very least it would be dishonest academically speaking and they should be criticized for it.
You're mischaracterizing me by suggesting that it's "economic suicide", as I said in my original comment in this thread:
> But we shouldn't be responding to that by clinging harder to schemes that have outlived their usefulness, we should be developing new models for funding production.
Sure it would be disruptive if we snapped our fingers and said "no more IP starting tomorrow", there should be a gradual phasing out of these unfair protections and effort put into sustainable pro-creative models.
The hypothetical of lost revenue needs to be validated by the evidence of actual revenue being made in this way. Right now, I see lots of interest in paying for the _tool_, but almost none in paying human wages for the _output_ of generative models.
(I am not proposing that my above distinction is a legal test. Just pointing out that all these arguments would be more credible if actual ai generated works were being sold by AI companies)
There is no recognition of 'lost revenue' for the commercialization of public domain works.
My point was that we haven't yet seen the products of GenAI stuff really making money yet. People are paying for the tool, and people are paying for work that is being done using the tool, but nobody buys a book, image, movie, or similar from OpenAI or Google directly.
A lot of people are very myopic about generative AI, thinking that large Hollywood studios are going to steal people's work and put everyone out of a job. Hollywood studios won't exist soon enough because anyone will be able to put together a movie that rivals existing expensive productions. In fact, generative AI is democratizing, as long as it's not gatekept by a few large corporations, which is exactly what trying to misapply copyright here would do.
Tens of millions of fans of a living celebrity would pay for it and the fans do not care about the original author as long as it is the celebrity's name that is selling it and can claim it as their own.
They don't need to give credit or sources to whatever their selling to generate millions.
This describes how ideas work - and ideas are rarely (if ever) IP-locked by a first originator - because there usually isn't one.
Everything by everyone, everywhere is built on the output of predecessors. Progress is a shared effort made up of minuscule increments or slight reorderings - which are typically done several times before they catch on.
IP exists to hinder this process by preventing 99.99999% of potential people from advancing ideas.
