I mean seriously, look at the logic of these firms. They want endless data to feed their commercial AI systems, and they KNOW it would be too expensive to pay for it SO THEY JUST TAKE IT.
Totally unethical, totally like any other crook.
Except, I suspect your average bank robber would NOT try claim it's all for the good of the world. Your average bank robber would be more honest about their crimes than Big Tech can ever manage.
An artist uses other artists work for inspiration and to learn from. They may or may not pay for that work directly. However when the artist makes a new song that was say inspired by the Beatles, but is different from any Beatles songs, the artist doesn't need to pay the Beatles for that work. If they are doing a cover of the work then there are established protocols to follow, but that's not what this argument is referring to.
So the argument is essentially that an AI learning from licensed or copyrighted work is similar to how a human would learn from it. The AI and the human would only pay if the work is within a certain percentage similar to the original work, but as long as its different, its all good.
This is obviously complicated by an ad based revenue model, like youtube, where the AI didnt necessary watch the ad which funds the video. Comparison can be made to someone listening to the radio, for "free".
@hunkyscotsman This argument falls apart because an artist is an individual, not a firm running millions of CPUs to create massive profit centers for itself at enormous scale.
@hunkyscotsman Irrelevant. Major enterprises doing what I just said would have the resources to keep scaling up the damage they're doing and completely dominate. That other, smaller enterprises would be enabled as well to do their own damage at smaller scales is irrelevant.
@lauren Google (and Lycos, and AltaVista etc.) got started by crawling and indexing other people's content without their consent.
I think there's a serious culture clash between the original sin of the Internet ("why did you put it up in public-readability if you didn't want people to access it and use it?") and traditional ideas of copyright and exclusive monopoly on ideas.
@mark Leaving aside the fact the firms are going after copyrighted works for their training as well as anything else, the implicit value exchange for search engines was clear. Generative AI is almost entirely TAKE BUT GIVE NOTHING IN RETURN.
It's unethical, hypocritical, and if it isn't criminal, it should be.
@lauren I agree; I think the Internet culture is having chickens come home to roost in a way that was unanticipated.
I'm thinking to myself, for example, how much of DeviantArt was slurped for image generation engines... When the content of DeviantArt is itself both original IP characters and thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of "artist's interpretation of someone else's character."
I think there is a philosophical grounding we can establish on "The moral thing to do is to give more than you take," but that's remarkably different from a "respect copyright" moral grounding which has never really existed in online communities, from their first use in the academic setting where plagarism isn't protected via copyright to through the "pIrAcY iS a cRiMe" era to meme culture to today. Slurping the entire 'net to feed AI is a logical extension of existing cultural norms (that weren't universal, but were definitely big enough to be their own "oh is that bad should I not have done that" bloc).
The machine is a copy engine first and foremost. The entire Internet is a system for copying bits quickly and efficiently from source to destination.
@mark Having been involved with the Net since pretty much its earliest days starting at UCLA, I can assure you that the purpose of the Net was not to permit a handful of powerful firms to suck up all the information that has been put on the Net mostly as a public service, so that they can grossly enrich themselves and their stockholders while in essence giving the finger to all the sites being slurped. And laughing all the way to the bank while not even questioning if their actions are moral. Like ordinary criminals -- but even worse.
Add comment