Apparently, stealing other people’s work to create product for money is now “fair use” as according to OpenAI because they are “innovating” (stealing). Yeah. Move fast and break things, huh?

“Because copyright today covers virtually every sort of human expression—including blogposts, photographs, forum posts, scraps of software code, and government documents—it would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials,” wrote OpenAI in the House of Lords submission.

OpenAI claimed that the authors in that lawsuit “misconceive[d] the scope of copyright, failing to take into account the limitations and exceptions (including fair use) that properly leave room for innovations like the large language models now at the forefront of artificial intelligence.”

  • Agreed.

    There is nothing “fair” about the way Open AI steals other people’s work. ChatGPT is being monetized all over the world and the large number of people whose work has not been compensated will never see a cent of that money.

    At the same time the LLM will be used to replace (at least some of ) the people who created those works in the first place.

    Tech bros are disgusting.

    • At the same time the LLM will be used to replace (at least some of ) the people who created those works in the first place.

      This right here is the core of the moral issue when it comes down to it, as far as I’m concerned. These text and image models are already killing jobs and applying downward pressure on salaries. I’ve seen it happen multiple times now, not just anecdotally from some rando on an internet comment section.

      These people losing jobs and getting pay cuts are who created the content these models are siphoning up. People are not going to like how this pans out.

      • Any company replacing humans with AI is going to regret it. AI just isn’t that good and probably won’t ever be, at least in it’s current form. It’s all an illusion and is destined to go the way of Bitcoin, which is to say it will shoot up meteorically and seem like the answer to all kinds of problems, and then the reality will sink in and it will slowly fade to obscurity and irrelevance. That doesn’t help anyone affected today, of course.

          • It’s garbage for programming. A useful tool but not one that can be used by a non-expert. And I’ve already had to have a conversation with one of my coworkers when they tried to submit absolutely garbage code.

            This isn’t even the first attempt at a smart system that enables non-programmers to write code. They’ve all been garbage. So, too, will the next one be but every generation has to try it for themselves. AGI might have some potential some day, but that’s a long long way off. Might as well be science fiction.

            Other disciplines are affected differently, but I constantly play with image and text generation and they are all some flavor of garbage. There are some areas where AI can excel but they are mostly professional tools and not profession replacements.

      • The flip side of this is that many artists who simply copy very popular art styles are now functionally irrelevant, as it is now just literally proven that this kind of basically plagiarism AI is entirely capable of reproducing established styles to a high degree of basically fidelity.

        While many aspects of this whole situation are very bad for very many reasons, I am actually glad that many artists will be pressured to actually be more creative than an algorithm, though I admit this comes from basically a personally petty standpoint of having known many, many, many mediocre artists who themselves and their fans treat like gods because they can emulate some other established style.

        • Literally every artist copies, it’s how we all learn. The difference is that every artist out there does not have an enterprise-class-data-center-powerd-super-human ability to absorb \ and then be able to spit out anything instantly. It still takes time and hard work and dedication. And through the years of hard work people put into learning how their heroes do X, Y, and Z, they develop a style of their own.

          It’s how artists cut their teeth and work their way into the profession. What you’re welcoming in is a situation where nobody can find any success whatsoever until they are absolutely original and of course that is an impossible moving target when every original ideal and design and image can just be instantly siphoned back up into the AI model.

          Nobody could survive that way. Nobody can break into the artistic industry that way. Except for the wealthy. All the low level work people get earlier in their careers that helps keep them afloat while they learn is gone now. You have to be independently wealthy to become a high level artist capable of creating truly original work. Because there’s no other way to subsidize the time and dedication that takes when all the work for people honing their craft has been hoovered up by machines.

          • No, I am not welcoming an artist apocalypse, that would obviously be bad.

            I am noting that I find it amusing to me on a level I already acknowledged was petty and personal that many, many mediocre artists who are absolutely awful to other people socially would have their little cults of fandom dampened by the fact that a machine can more or less to what they do, and their cult leader status is utterly unwarranted.

            I do not have a nice and neat solution to the problem you bring up.

            I do believe you are being somewhat hyperbolic, but, so was I.

            Yep, being an artist in a capitalist hellscape world with modern AI algorithms is not a very reliable way to earn a good living and you are not likely to be have such a society produce many artists who do not have either a lot of free time or money, or you get really lucky.

            At this point we are talking about completely reorganizing society in fairly large and comprehensive ways to achieve significant change on this front.

            Also this problem applies to far, far more people than just artists. One friend of mine wanted her dream job as running a little bakery! Had to set her prices too high, couldn’t afford a good location, supply chain problems, taxes, didn’t work out.

            Maybe someone’s passion is teaching! Welp, that situation is all fucked too.

            My point here is: Ok, does anyone have an actual plan that can actually transform the world into somewhere that allow the average person to be far more likely to be able to live the life they want?

            Would that plan have more to do with the minutiae of regulating a specific kind of ever advancing and ever changing technology in some kind of way that will be irrelevant when the next disruptive tech proliferates in a few years, or maybe more like an actual total overhaul of our entire society from the ground up?

      • Yup. I said it in another discussion before but think its relevant here.

        Tech bros are more dangerous than Russian oligarchs. Oligarchs understand the people hate them so they mostly stay low and enjoy their money.

        Tech bros think they are the savior of the world while destroying millions of people’s livelihood, as well as destroying democracy with their right wing libertarian politics.