this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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Thousands of authors demand payment from AI companies for use of copyrighted works::Thousands of published authors are requesting payment from tech companies for the use of their copyrighted works in training artificial intelligence tools, marking the latest intellectual property critique to target AI development.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (4 children)

So what's the difference between a person reading their books and using the information within to write something and an ai doing it?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Because AIs aren't inspired by anything and they don't learn anything

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So uninspired writing is illegal?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No but a lazy copy of someone else’s work might be copyright infringement.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

So when does Kevin Costner get to sue James Cameron for his lazy copy of Dances With Wolves?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Avatar is not Dances with Wolves. It's Ferngully.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Idk, maybe. There are thousands of copyright infringement lawsuits, sometimes they win.

I don’t necessarily agree with how copyright law works, but that’s a different question. Doesn’t change the fact that sometimes you can successfully sue for copyright infringement if someone copies your stuff to make something new.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Why not? Hollywood is full to the brim with people suing for copyright infringement. And sometimes they win. Why should it be different for AI companies?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Language models actually do learn things in the sense that: the information encoded in the training model isn't usually* taken directly from the training data; instead, it's information that describes the training data, but is new. That's why it can generate text that's never appeared in the data.

  • the bigger models seem to remember some of the data and can reproduce it verbatim; but that's not really the goal.
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

What does inspiration have to do with anything? And to be honest, humans being inspired has led to far more blatant copyright infringement.

As for learning, they do learn. No different than us, except we learn silly abstractions to make sense of things while AI learns from trial and error. Ask any artist if they've ever looked at someone else's work to figure out how to draw something, even if they're not explicitly looking up a picture, if they've ever seen a depiction of it, they recall and use that. Why is it wrong if an AI does the same?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

the person bought the book before reading it

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago

not if i checked it out from a library. a WORLD of knowledge at your fingertips and it's all free to me, the consumer. So who's to say the people training the ai didn't check it out from a library, or even buy the books they are using to train the ai with? would you feel better about it had they purchased their copy?

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

A person is human and capable of artistry and creativity, computers aren’t. Even questioning this just means dehumanizing artists and art in general.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Large language models can only calculate the probability that words should go together based on existing texts.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Isn't this correct? What's missing?

Let's ask chatGPT3.5:

Mostly accurate. Large language models like me can generate text based on patterns learned from existing texts, but we don't "calculate probabilities" in the traditional sense. Instead, we use statistical methods to predict the likelihood of certain word sequences based on the training data.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

"Mostly accurate" is pretty good for an anonymous internet post.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I thought so too so I'm still confused about the votes. Oh well

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I don't see how "calculate the probability" and "predict the likelihood" are different. Seems perfectly accurate to me.