When I cover generative AI in my Ethics in AI lecture, one of few soapbox opinions I give is that GenAI is doing essentially what people do - copy others. Picasso has a quote about "Good Artists copy, Great Artists steal", which doesn't mean try to pass Lario and Muigi off as your own, but rather that great artists are able to take aspects from other works (also called 'inspiration') without being caught. My personality is a combination of elements taken from Jim Carrey, Robin Williams, and King of the Deathmatch Mick Foley. I like making vector graphics based on pictures. I have a folder on my computer called "Website Ideas" that's just screenshots of UIs that I've come across that I really like.

I also point to a YouTube video by Kirby Ferguson "Everything is a Remix" [1] which talks about how so much of our collective culture stems from copy. It's a great video if you have an hour.

When Little Timmy crayons a copy of Mario, we congratulate him for his creativity. Is it unique, one of a kind art? Well Timmy made it, but he didn't think up the original idea of a video game plumber. I give this view to GenAI right now - it's not capable of achieving that "next step" in "original design", but its performing like a novice artist/musician, it's mimicking what it sees.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9RYuvPCQUA

The problem is the AI companies monetizing the work of copyrighted materials.

It's not a problem for me to draw Micky Mouse. It _is_ a problem when someone pays me to draw an animated mouse and I sell them a picture of Micky Mouse.

For me, its not really about the AI at all, it's a problem of undervaluing Artists contribution to these tools. And it's not even fully about copyright it's about not asking for permission to use their content and then creating an entire business on top of that stolen content.

> Copyright should be the problem of the person using the works and not the problem of the AI generating it.

All parties are responsible on some level. This just reads like passing the buck/burying ones head in the sand to me.

The AI generating it (Hosted on OpenAI-controlled servers in the case of ChatGPT and DALL-E) is the entity redistributing the work. The end user who asked for the infringing content isn't the entity that is infringing on the copyrights and trademarks.

I'm perfectly free to ask people on the street for t-shirt with Mario on it, but as soon as someone who isn't Nintendo or licensed by Nintendo sells me that t-shirt they're the ones infringing on the copyright and trademark. As the consumer I did nothing illegal, and a court would say that I was deceived by the infringing party.

Distribution (seeding, uploading) and facilitating copyright infringement is what gets you in trouble. When you ask DALL-E (a paid, commercial product) for a picture of Italian plumbers and it gives you an obvious picture of Mario 100% recognizable to the layperson as Mario and not a distinctly different image of a similar character, that's blatant trademark and/or copyright infringement on the part of OpenAI.

> If the AI is completely unable to generate non-infringing works even if you are _trying_ to get away from it (which the author very much doesn't seem they are, they are purposefully making and show prompts that infringe), that's the problem of the AI creator then.

I see some parallels to the Napster lawsuit. The fact that the users were the bad people asking for infringing content didn't give Napster the right to facilitate infringement. Napster was ordered to monitor its network and make sure that they were blocking non-legitimate uses. They couldn't logistically comply and went bankrupt.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napster

Which begs the question: Does OpenAI even have the technological ability to block trademark and copyright infringing content generation? Even if they do, how useful will ChatGPT be if all phrases and imagery that closely resemble copyrighted works are blocked from output?

Whats even worse for OpenAI compared to Napster is that it wasn’t individual users uploading copyrighted content, it was OpenAI’s ingesting the data. Nobody twisted their arm to include copyrighted works in their models.

Copyright shouldn't be a problem for anyone. It's simply a bogus idea that artificial scarcity of information is a benefit to society.

The thing is: OpenAI and Microsoft have indemnified their users - so their users problems are their problems.

True.

Further extending the argument - I can potentially ask GenAI "Can you show me what does Mario looks like?" since I have never seen one and GenAI is my go to tool.

The examples given are all billion-dollar, decades old characters. The volume of material directly/indirectly referencing those characters in a random internet crawl will be fairly large. Most copyrighted works won't have that issue. If anything it means they only infringe on archetypal works and not the other 99.9%. If I write a story involving robots and spaceships (of which there are many, before and since Star Wars) DALL-E won't infringe me because it will be busy infringing on Star Wars.

Japan is already taking action regarding copyright law and the AI world is noticing:

https://www.natlawreview.com/article/japanese-government-ide...

https://www.cliffordchance.com/insights/resources/blogs/talk...

If a child is instructed to read a copyrighted work at school, which later becomes a factor in his own derivative works, he won't be in breach of copyright.

Why should other intelligent entities be prevented from reading copyrighted works and gaining whatever there is to gain from those works the way any human might?

> Something that is purely speculative, undefined, and has been promised in the near future for 50+ years.

"Undefined", although not literally, in practice definitely: each letter of that initialism means a different thing to different people. To that extent, I'll even grant "speculative" despite many of those meanings being demonstrably met by us humans.

But as someone who (unfortunately) has just turned 40: who was it that was promising AGI "in the near future" for more than my entire lifetime? Including the second AI winter? Because even the biggest timeline-optimists I can remember (Kurzweil and Yudkowsky), who very few cared to listen to, put things more than 20 years ahead of when they were writing. (And yes, Yudkowsky was definitely wrong about a singularity in 2021, though as you say AGI is undefined I think if someone in 1996 had seen ChatGPT they'd have said "yes, this is AGI" despite its flaws).

Now the crowdsourced guess for AGI is 7 about years: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/5121/date-of-artificial-...

> I don't see copyright holders lying down for one else's benefit and I don't see governments gutting copyright, contract law, and several other avenues of protection that copyright holders can deploy in the name of something that doesn't exist and may not exist.

I tend to agree. Although I don't accept that contract law has much of anything to do with this discussion, to the extent that it does have implications, it isn't going anywhere.

But at the same time, Google exists by reading the entire public internet, indexing it, and presenting clips of it to its users. This has in fact resulted in copyright disputes, and I was surprised how long it took for that to happen. Likewise, while copyright holders must fight for their survival, mere LLMs even as they exist right now are economically relevant, so this isn't going to be a one-sided fight by just copyright holders.

Thank you for this. The greed-fueled magical thinking around AI is absolutely out of control at the moment.

Developing AGI is a matter of national security. "Content" isn't.

Apple could buy most of the NYT, RIAA and MPAA companies combined with petty cash. The big ones are Disney and Sony with a combined market cap about 250b. Microsoft alone is worth over 10 times that.

> and the people in it are politically better connected. reply

Tech companies have more money to throw at politicians.

If making money is the only reason to create maybe it’s good if they stop.

creation should happen for its own sake. You don't see GMs stopping chess because bots are that much better.

> Would you ever actually use generative AI to pirate something when you could just torrent it? While there may be an argument that generative AI is infringing copyright, it is not really a very good tool for it.

How do you square this with literally the first image in the OP showing side by side GPT reproing copyrighted work? imo a good modern art project would be someone making a website that “archives” NYT articles by laundering them through GPT rather than using the archive link that everyone posts to get around the paywall. Even HN guidelines bend over backwards to allow bypassing the paywall by allowing these links.

Even if this is right, its a shitty consolation. These llms aren't ever going to be an agent of greater democratic, every-man content creation or whatever, its just going to be the transfer of capital from one type of huge company to another. Not much of a future, even if it feels cool for a bit.

AFAIK the EU AI Act primarily prevents profiling, social scoring and other high risk activities from using AI.

It generally didn’t care about generative AI.

And supporters of AI aren't really making a case that's likely to persuade skeptics, they're just regurgitating "It learns like a human" "It doesn't store the info, just the recipe for making it" and completely failing to address that we've decided it's not ok for someone to regurgitate protected works with 100% accuracy, and that artists don't want people to train AI on their works without permission.

There's a way to sell this to the public, but AI proponents don't want to have to sell it, because they feel that they shouldn't have to, and there's an underlying theme of "The benefit of AI is so overwhelming, and eventually it will replace most commodified creative work anyway so why bother litigating this now, let's just skip this messy step and get to that part" and that's super not going to work to convince skeptics.

Eh? With a gun to my head I'd say the CCP cares more about censorship than the NYT does about plagiarism, but it's not an easy call. The problems are the same ("training set contains lots of stuff I don't want the LLM to say").

> “funny magic parrot box” can write some mid-tier high school essays

That's your take on LLMs?

Ask it how it is possible for a photon to travel across the universe, arriving at the same time it departed, resulting in the journey taking zero time (in its reference frame).

Ask what implications are if certain viral amino sequences result in messenger RNA translocating to the host cell nucleus, potentially with the entire genome.

Ask if aircraft fly due to Bernoulli's Principle or Newton's Third Law and physical impact.

This is "crypto-bro territory"? No, not quite.

That might be like a buzzfeed summary of an article.

The EU and many other countries already exempted training from copyright restrictions. The only condition EU added was opt-out, and even then it can be ignored if you're doing research. [1]

[1] https://www.reedsmith.com/en/perspectives/ai-in-entertainmen...