this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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Well, fine, and I can't fault new published material having a "no AI" clause in its term of service. But that doesn't mean we get to dream this clause into being retroactively for all the works ChatGPT was trained on. Even the most reasonable law in the world can't be enforced on someone who broke it 6 months before it was legislated.
Fortunately the "horses out the barn" effect here is maybe not so bad. Imagine the FOMO and user frustration when ToS & legislation catch up and now ChatGPT has no access to the latest books, music, news, research, everything. Just stuff from before authors knew to include the "hands off" clause - basically like the knowledge cutoff, but forever. It's untenable, OpenAI will be forced to cave and pay up.
OpenAI and such being forced to pay a share seems far from the worst scenario I can imagine. I think it would be much worse if artists, writers, scientists, open source developers and so on were forced to stop making their works freely available because they don't want their creations to be used by others for commercial purposes. That could really mean that large parts of humanity would be cut off from knowledge.
I can well imagine copyleft gaining importance in this context. But this form of licencing seems pretty worthless to me if you don't have the time or resources to sue for your rights - or even to deal with the various forms of licencing you need to know about to do so.
None of them are forced to stop making their works freely available. If they want to voluntarily stop making their works freely available to prevent commercial interests from using them, that’s on them.
Besides, that’s not so bad to me. The rest of us who want to share with humanity will keep sharing with humanity. The worst case imo is that artists, writers, scientists, and open source developers cannot take full advantage of the latest advancements in tech to make more and better art, writing, science, and software. We cannot let humanity’s creative potential be held hostage by anyone.
On the contrary, AI is making knowledge more accessible than ever before to large parts of humanity. The only comparible other technologies that have done this in recent times are the internet and search engines. Thank goodness the internet enables piracy that allows anyone to download troves of ebooks for free. I look forward to AI doing the same on an even greater scale.
Shouldn't there be a way to freely share your works without having to expect an AI to train on them and then be able to spit them back out elsewhere without attribution?
No, there shouldn’t because that would imply restricting what I can do with the information I have access to. I am in favor of maintaining the sort of unrestricted general computing that we already have access to.
You're not talking about sharing it with humanity, you're talking about feeding it into an AI. How is this holding back the creative potential of humanity? Again, you're talking about feeding and training a computer with this material.
Sure it can. Just because it is a new law doesn't mean they get to continue benefiting from IP 'theft' forever into the future.
How is this an issue for the IP holders? Just because you build something cool or useful doesn't mean you get a pass to do what you want.
Untenable for ChatGPT maybe, but it's not as if it's the end of 'knowledge' or the end of AI. It's just a single company product.