- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
Copyright class actions could financially ruin AI industry, trade groups say.
AI industry groups are urging an appeals court to block what they say is the largest copyright class action ever certified. They’ve warned that a single lawsuit raised by three authors over Anthropic’s AI training now threatens to “financially ruin” the entire AI industry if up to 7 million claimants end up joining the litigation and forcing a settlement.
Last week, Anthropic petitioned to appeal the class certification, urging the court to weigh questions that the district court judge, William Alsup, seemingly did not. Alsup allegedly failed to conduct a “rigorous analysis” of the potential class and instead based his judgment on his “50 years” of experience, Anthropic said.
They’re not stealing anything. Nor are they “repackaging” anything. LLMs don’t work like that.
I know a whole heck of a lot of people hate generative AI with a passion but let’s get real: The reason they hate generative AI isn’t because they trained the models using copyrighted works (which has already been ruled fair use; as long as the works were legitimately purchased). They hate generative AI because of AI slop and the potential for taking jobs away from people who are already having a hard time.
AI Slop sucks! Nobody likes it except the people making money from it. But this is not a new phenomenon! For fuck’s sake: Those of us who have been on the Internet for a while have been dealing with outsourced slop and hidden marketing campaigns/scams since forever.
The only difference is that now—thanks to convenient and cheap LLMs—scammers and shady marketers can generate bullshit at a fraction of the cost and really, really quickly. But at least their grammar is correct now (LOL @ old school Nigerian Prince scams).
It’s humans ruining things for other humans. AI is just a tool that makes it easier and cheaper. Since all the lawsuits and laws in the world cannot stop generative AI at this point, we might as well fix the underlying problems that enable this bullshit. Making big AI companies go away isn’t going to help with these problems.
In fact, it could make things worse! Because the development of AI certainly won’t stop. It will just move to countries with fewer scruples and weaker ethics.
The biggest problem is (mostly unregulated) capitalism. Fix that, and suddenly AI “taking away jobs” ceases to be a problem.
Hopefully, AI will force the world to move toward the Star Trek future. Because generating text and images is just the start.
When machines can do just about everything a human can (and scale up really fast)—even without AGI—there’s no future for capitalism. It just won’t work when there’s no scarcity other than land and energy.
I respectfully disagree. Meta was caught downloading books from Libgen, a piracy site, to “train” it’s models. What AI models do in effect is scan information (i.e., copy), and distill and retain what they view as its essence. They can copy your voice, they can copy your face, and they can copy your distinctive artistic style. The only way they can do that is if the “training” copies and retains a portion of the original works.
Consider Shepard Fairies’ use of the AP’s copyrighted Obama photograph in the production of the iconic “Hope” poster, and the resultant lawsuit. While the suit was ultimately settled, and the issue of “fair use” was a close call given the variation in art work from the original source photograph, the suit easily could have gone against Fairey, so it was smart for him to settle.
Also consider the litigation surrounding the use of music sampling in original hip hop works, which has clearly been held to be copyright infringement.
Accordingly, I think it is very fair to say that (1) AI steals copyrighted works; and (2) repackages the essential portions of those works into new works. Might a re-write of copyright law be in order to embrace this new technology? Sure, but if I’m a actor, or voice actor, author, or other artist and I can no longer earn a living because someone else has taken my work to strip it down to it’s essence to resell cheaply without compensating me, I’m going to be pretty pissed off.
Lol. The liberal utopia of Star Trek is a fantasy. Far more likely is that AI will be exploited by oligarchs to enrich themselves and further impoverish the masses, as they are fervently working towards right now. See, AI isn’t creative, it gives the appearance of being creative by stealing work created by humans and repackaging it. When artists can no longer create art to survive, there will be less material for the AI models to steal, and we’ll be left with soulless AI slop as our de facto creative culture.
That action itself can and should be punished. Yes. But that has nothing to do with AI.
Is that what people think is happening? You don’t even have a layman’s understanding of this technology. At least watch a few videos on the topic.
I think that copying my voice makes this robot a T-1000, and T-1000s are meant to be dunked in lava to save Sarah Connor.
Absurd. It’s their entire fucking business model.
Meaning it would illegal even if they weren’t doing anything with ai…
So what an Ai does is the same thing as every human ever who has read/saw/listened a work and then wrote more words being influenced by that book/artwork/piece.
If you’ve ever done anything artistic in your life, you know that the first step is to look at what others have done. Even subconsciously you will pull from what you’ve seen, heard. To say that AI is not creative because it is derivative is to to say that no human being in history has been creative.
You’re forgetting the fact that humans always add something of our own when we make art, even when we try to reproduce another’s artpiece as a study.
The many artists we might’ve looked at certainly influence our own styles, but they’re not the only thing that’s expressed in our artwork. Our life lived to that point, and how we’re feeling in the moment, those are also the things, often the point, that artists communicate when making art.
Most artists haven’t also looked at nearly every single work by almost every artist spanning a whole century of time. We also don’t need whole-ass data centers that need towns’ worth of water supply to just train to produce some knock-off, soulless amalgamation of other people’s art.
Look at what they need to mimic a fraction of our power.
You’re arguing the quality of what AI produces which has nothing to do with the legality of it.
My comment is replying to the guy talking about whether or not you can call AI ‘creative’ though.
What is the law? A joke or a myth for the poor?
You are damn right…
You are going to need to expand a little bit more on that notion that we add something of our own. Or more specifically explain how is that not the case for AI. They might not draw from personal experiences since they have none, but not every piece of human art necessarily draws from a person’s experiences.Or at least not in any way that it can even be articulated or meaningfully differentiated from an ai using as reference the lived experiences of another person.
Also look at all the soulless corporate art ie the art that AI is going to replace. Most of it has nothing of the author in it. It simply has the intention of selling. Like I’ve seen a lot of videogame concept art in my life, like 80% of it looks like it was made by the same person. Is that kind of “creativity” any better than what an AI can do? No, it isn’t. At all.
The kind of artists that are making great, unique art that brings something fresh to the table are in no risk of being replaced anytime soon.
Your argument would only be true if AI was making 1 of 1 reproductions of existing works, but that is not the case. It is simply using existing works to produce sentences or works that use a little bit of a piece of each, like making a collage. I fail to see how that is different from human creativity, honestly. I say this as a creative myself.
Your second argument is not really an argument against AI anymore than it is an argument against any tech really. Most technologies are inefficient at first. As time goes on and we look for ways to improve the tech they become more efficient. This is universally true for every technology, in fact I think technological advancement can be pretty much reduced to the progress of energy efficiency.
What I mean by adding something of our own is how art, in Cory Doctorow’s words, contain many acts of communicative intent. There are thousands of microdecisions a human makes when creating art. Whereas imagery generated only by the few words of a prompt to an LLM only contain that much communicative intent.
I feel like that’s why AI art always has that AI look and feel to it. I can only sense a tiny fraction of the person’s intent, and maybe it’s because I know the rest is filled in by the AI, but that is the part that feels really hollow or soulless to me.
Even in corporate art, I can at least sense what the artist was going for, based on corporate decisions to use clean, inoffensive designs for their branding and image. There’s a lot of communicative intent behind those designs.
I recommend checking the blog post I referenced, because Cory Doctorow expresses these thoughts far more eloquently than I do.
As for the latter argument, I wanted to highlight the fact that AI needs that level of resources and training data in order to produce art, whereas a human doesn’t, which shows you the power of creativity, human creativity. That’s why I think what AI does cannot be called ‘creativity.’ It cannot create. It does what we tell it to, without its own intent.
Cory’s take is excellent, thanks for bringing this up because it does highlight what I try to communicate to a lot of people: it’s a tool. It needs a human behind the wheel to produce anything good and the more effort the human puts into describing what it wants the better the result, because as Cory so eloquently puts it, it gets imbued with meaning. So I think my posture is now something like: AI is not creative by itself, it’s a tool to facilitate the communication of an idea that a human has in their heads and lacks the time or skill to communicate properly.
Now I don’t think this really answers our question of whether the mechanics of the AI synthesizing the information is materially different to how a human synthesizes information. Furthermore it is murkied more by the fact that the “creativity” of it is powered by a human.
Maybe it is a sliding scale? Which is actually sort of aligned with what I was saying, if AI is producing 1:1 reproductions then it is infringing rights. But if the prompt is one paragraph long, giving it many details about the image or paragraph/song/art/video etc, in such a way that it is unique because of the specificity achieved in the prompt, then it is clear that no only is the result a result of human creativity but also that it is merely using references in the same way a human does.
The way I think the concept is easier for me to explain is with music. If a user describes a song, its length, its bpm, every note and its pitch, would that not be an act of human creativity? In essence the song is being written by the human and the AI is simply “playing it” like when a composer writes music and a musician plays it. How creative is a human that is replaying a song 1:1 as it was written?
What if maybe LLMs came untrained and the end user was responsible for giving it the data? So any books you give it you must have owned, images etc. That way the AI is even more of an extension of you? Would that be the maximally IP respecting and ethical AI? Possibly but it puts too much of the burden on the user for it to be useful for 99% of the people. Also it shifts the responsibility in respects to IP infringement to the individual, something that I do not think anyone is too keen on doing.
He is more of an imitation and his work has no soul and pain and when you understand this, no matter how perfect the art is, if there is no person or story behind it about why and for what purpose this art was drawn, then it is just factory crap that cannot compare with real soul food.
Meta literally torrented an insane amount of training materials illegally, from a company that was sued into the ground and forced to dissolve because of distributing stolen content
“When machines can do just about everything a human can (and scale up really fast)—even without AGI—there’s no future for capitalism.”
This might be one of the dumbest things I’ve ever read.
There is a future, but it will be so soulless and false that those who know what real art is will feel disgust for it. It will no longer be a world but some kind of complete rotting swamp, although you won’t notice it with a consumerist eye.
That’s the main point, though: the tire fire of humanity is bad enough without some sick fucks adding vast quantities of accelerant in order to maximize profits.
Clearly that’s not true. They’ll keep it up for as long as it’s at all positive to extract profits from it, but not past that. Handled right, this class action could make the entire concept poisonous from a profiteering perspective for years, maybe even decades.
Of COURSE! Why didn’t anyone think to turn flick off the switches marked “unscrupulous profiteering” and “regulatory capture”?!
We’ll have this done by tomorrow, Monday at the latest! 🙄
The cancer might be the underlying cause but the tumor still kills you if you don’t do anything about it.
Again, it WILL if all profitability is removed.
Than silicon valley? Than the US government when ultra-rich white men want something?
No such country exists.
Finally right about something.
“Discover the cure for cancer and suddenly the tumord in your brain, lungs, liver, and kidneys won’t be a problem anymore!” 🤦
Wtf have you been drinking??
It seems like this is another consumer, just ignore him, he is no longer a person but a zombie.
You’re seriously kidding yourself if you think China won’t continue to pursue AI even if the profit motive is lost in American companies. And if China continues to develop AI, so will the US even if it is nationalized or developed through military contracting, or even as a secret project, because it will be framed as a national security issue. So unless you find a way to stop China from also developing AI, the tech is here to stay no matter what happens.
Look these people are neck deep in a tribalistic worldview. You cannot reason with anyone who’s against AI simply because their claims are unfalsifiable and contradictory depending on the day and article they are reading. On the one hand it is the shitiest technology ever made which cannot do anything right and at the same time it is an existential threat to humanity.
And I can tell you, that the only reason this is the case is because the right is for AI more strongly than the left. If the right had condemned it, you can be damn right the tables would be turned and everyone who thinks they are left would be praising the tech.
Just move on and take solace in the fact that the technology simply cannot be rebottled, or uninvented. It exists, it is here to stay and literally no one can stop it at this point. And I agree with you, AI is the only tool that can provide true emancipation. It can also enslave. But the fact is that all tools can be used for right or wrong, so this is not inherent to AI.