I've contributed a fair bit to free content (CC licenses) & open source projects over the years.
Personally, I want "my" stuff to be used to make AI models better. I use open licenses precisely because I want people to come up with interesting & hopefully beneficial new uses.
I understand why lots of folks feel differently, of course.
However, it's not a clear-cut legal situation, either. Training != inference; it's only model output that violates licenses that's unambiguously infringing.
The folks who are calling such training "theft" might regret what they seem to be implicitly asking for, i.e. much stricter copyright. Copyright law won't prevent Microsoft, Google, OpenAI or Adobe from making shady licensing deals, but they'll prevent the free/open community from keeping up.
Some of the anti-#AI backlash seems to go hand in hand with an explicit or implicit defense and support for copyright -- a questionable institution that aggregates power with the Disneys & Apples of this world.
I am very skeptical that a just world is one that still makes heavy use of intellectual monopoly rights to secure individual incomes.
Copyright should, IMO, at best be regarded as a necessary evil, one which we have failed to rid ourselves of along with capitalism.
@eloquence I was told by a commons-specialist lawyer that it would be a breach of a CC-BY-NC licenses if I invited tips for such licensed films even if I gave 100% to the filmmakers (and obvs had their written permission).
It doesn’t seem reasonable then that CC restrains quite everyday ‘commercial’ use, while allowing LLM megacorps using toolsets far beyond the everyday user, to use any artists’ work to copy their style/subjects and compete with them. There needs to be a CC-No-LLM license.
@eloquence I also can’t see how any LLM wholesale copying and repurposing comes under fair use. In the four factors of fair use - purpose, nature, amount, effect (https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/) - on three of these, LLMs go far beyond the current norms of Fair Use.
Purpose - to run a commercial service imitating styles similar to the one copied.
Amount - everything!
Effect - to directly compete with commercial writers/musicians/animators/filmmakers/coders etc.
IMHO it’s just awaiting the class actions.
That question ultimately will be settled in the courts, but there are certainly plenty of experts and civil society groups who wholly or partially agree with CC's interpretation.This submission by Pamela Samuelson (Professor @ Berkeley Center for Law & Technology and a widely recognized expert on fair use) et al. to the copyright office is worth a read:
@eloquence has anyone summarised the 38 pages? Tho it’s obvs just US which maybe has most open fair use laws.
Copyright is such an asymmetrical tool, where those with resources can attack and defend it, while those without usually cannot.
But the principle of copyright: that anyone who creates can stop a Disney or OpenAI taking their work, adapting, monetising, misattributing, reselling, ruining, etc it without their consent; surely it’s the only defense the creative workers of the world have?
The gist is that if the model in its "ordinary and routine operation" does not copy the original data it was trained on, the training is (in their opinion) likely to be fair use.
We'll see what the courts find. IANAL, but my impression is that OpenAI and others are likely to prevail on most counts. There are some categories where genAI is very likely to produce infringing outputs (e.g., ask for green ogres, get Shrek), which seems the kind of thing most likely to bite them in court.
> surely it’s the only defense the creative workers of the world have?
I think framing creativity it in terms of defense/offense against Disney is playing into the cycles of exploitation that exist today.
In a world without copyright, Disney in its current form could not exist -- creating an entirely different playing field for creatives. And anyone could build on the world's entire body of creativity in new & exciting ways all the time, without worrying about "stealing" information.
@eloquence I’m not sure removing a worker protection will end those cycles. Disney still sells countless Winnie the Pooh toys despite public domain arriving https://www.disneystore.co.uk/disney/movies/winnie-the-pooh-and-friends. I assume they would just find new ways to preserve monopoly power, such as attacking network neutrality or gatekeeping distribution more tightly.
And the world’s creatives, reduced to hobbyists? My guess is they would end up like British pop music of the last few decades - a space dominated by the already wealthy.
Look to Frankenstein, Dracula, Jane Austen novels, Sherlock Holmes, Arabian nights, or Greek mythology for the rich universe of creative works that the public domain enables.
Of course, all those derivative works are again "protected" by copyright.
I disagree with calling copyright a "worker protection". If it was, it would not be something that can be hoarded into large piles that confer massive economic power.
Copyright is an intellectual monopoly right that ostensibly exists to incentivize creative works. And it's often the first thing creative workers have to sign away as part of employment agreements or contracts.
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