donuts

Copyright is an artificial restriction

All laws are artificial restrictions, and copyright law is not exactly some brand new thing.

AI either has to work within the existing framework of copyright law OR the laws have to be drastically overhauled. There’s no having it both ways.

What you should be advocating for instead is something like a mandatory GPL-style license, where anybody who uses the model or contributed training data to it has the right to a copy of it that they can run themselves.

I’m a programmer and I actually spend most of my week writing GPLv3 code.

Any experienced programmer knows that GPL code is still subject to copyright. People (or their employer in some cases) own the code the right, and so they have the intellectual right to license that code under GPL or any other license that happens to be compatible with their code base. In other words I have the right to license my code under GPL, but I do not have the right to apply GPL to someone else’s code. Look at the top of just about any source code file and you’ll find various copyright statements for each individual code author, which are separate from the terms of their open source licensing.

I’m also an artist and musician and, under the current laws as they exist today, I own the copyright to any artwork or music that I happen to create by default. If someone wants to use my artwork or music they can either (a) get a license from me, which will likely involve some kind of payment, or (b) successfully argue that the way they are using my work is considered a “fair use” of copyrighted material. Otherwise I can publish my artwork under a permissive license like public domain or creative commons, and AI companies can use that as they please, because it’s baked into the license.

Long story short, whether it’s code or artwork, the person who makes the work (or otherwise pays for the work to be made on the basis of a contract) owns the rights to that work. They can choose to license that work permissively (GPL, MIT, CC, public domain, etc.) if they want, but they still hold the copyright. If Entity X wants to use that copyrighted work, they either have to have a valid license or be operating in a way that can be defended as “fair use”.

tl;dr: Advocate for open models, not copyright

TLDR: Copyright and open source/data are not at odds with each other. FOSS code is still copyrighted code, and GPL is a relatively restrictive and strict license, which in some cases is good and in other cases not depending on how you look at it. This is not what I’m advocating, but the current copyright framework that everything in the modern world is based on.

If you believe that abolishing copyright entirely to usher in a totally AI-driven future is the best path forward for humanity, then you’re entitled to think that.

But personally I’ll continue to advocate for technology which empowers people and culture, and not the other way around.

But then you need to factor in that the rights holders would need to agree to that. AI companies don’t get to simply decide what peoples work is worth, they need a licensing agreement. (Otherwise they need to successfully argue that what they’re doing is fair use.)

And when you add it up and realize that “AI” is a black box based off a training dataset of thousands (if not millions) of pieces of copyrighted artwork, all the sudden you start to see the profit margins on your magical art machine (POOF!) disappear. Oh, won’t someone think about the tech venture capitalists?!

If you look at a hundred paintings of faces and then make your own painting of a face, you’re not expected to pay all the artists that you used to get an understanding of what a face looks like.

That’s because I’m a human being. I’m acting on my own volition and while I’ve observed artwork, I’ve also had decades of life experience observing faces in reality. Also importantly, my ability to produce artwork (and thus my potential to impact the market) is limited and I’m not owned or beholden to any company.

“AI” “art” is different in every way. It is being fed a massive dataset of copyrighted artwork, and has no experiences or observations of its own. It is property, not a fee or independent being. And also, it can churn out a massive amount of content based on its data in no time at all, posing a significant challenge to markets and the livelihood of human creative workers.

All of these are factors in determining whether it’s fair to use someone else’s copyrighted material, which is why it’s fine for a human being to listen to a song and play it from memory, but it’s not fine for a tape recorder to do the same (bootlegging).

Btw, I don’t think this is a fair use question, it’s really a question of whether the generated images are derivatives of the training data.

I’m not sure what you mean by this. Whether something is derivative or not is one of the key questions used to determine whether the free use of someone else’s copyrighted work is fair, as in fair use.

AI training is using people’s copyrighted work, and doing so almost exclusively without knowledge, consent, license or permission, and so that’s absolutely a question of fair use. They either need to pay for the rights to use people’s copyright work OR they need to prove that their use of that work is “fair” under existing laws. (Or we need to change/update/overhaul the copyright system.)

Even if AI companies were to pay the artists and had billions of dollars to do it, each individual artist would receive a tiny amount, because these datasets are so large.

The amount that artists would be paid would be determined by negotiation between the artist (the rights holder) and the entity using their work. AI companies certainly don’t get to unilaterally decided what people’s art licenses are worth, and different artists would be worth different amounts in the end. There would end up being some kind of licensing contract, which artists would have to agree to.

Take Spotify for example, artists don’t get paid a lot per stream and it’s arguably not the best deal, but they (or their label) are still agreeing to the terms because they believe it’s worth it to be on those platforms. That’s not a question of fair use, because there is an explicit licensing agreement being made by both parties. The biggest artists like Taylor Swift negotiate better deals because they make or break the platform.

So back to AI, if all that sounds prohibitively expensive, legally fraught, and generally unsustainable, then that’s because it probably is–another huge tech VC bubble just waiting to burst.

Well, why shouldn’t they have to pay artists a license to use their work, especially in ways that could drastically affect the market?

There is a thing called copyright, and the exception to that rule is called fair use.

Artwork is copyrighted by default and, under the law, to use someone else’s copyrighted works requires a license (that is usually bought). Whether AI training counts as fair use is the question and ultimately that is the point that will need to be proved/justified.

So again, what makes AI “fair use” and why shouldn’t companies have to pay a license for their use of copyrighted artwork?

What they should really do is pay musicians more.

I don’t use Pixelfed and this blog post doesn’t do a great job describing it, so can someone tell me what the significance of this new feature is?

I mean, I get you, but personally I don’t really like the idea of millions of innocent people losing their homes and most of their savings because some fucking dweebs decided to put all of our collective wealth in legally dubious automatic junk “content” generators. I’ve lived through enough crashes to know that it’s never the big guys that get fucked when everything goes tits up, it’s us, our parents, our grandparents, etc.

AI as a business is already running on fumes, and it’s going to become even more expensive once intellectual property law catches up to them. We can only hope that the AI bubble bursting doesn’t take the entire market economy down with it…

For fucks sake… AI continues to usher in a new age of human horror.

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I haven’t really had this problem and I follow a ton of hashtags. Also it’s good to report spammers so that their server can get rid of them.

Mastodon will never take off, it’s all about Post.
Mastodon will never take off, it’s all about Cohost.
Mastodon will never take off, it’s all about Hive.
Mastodon will never take off, it’s all about Bluesky.
Mastodon will never take off, it’s all about Threads.

Honestly I’m not holding my breath of any of it. I’m firmly in the “I’ll believe it when I see it” camp.

You should call it “ActivityPub”, it has a nice ring to it.

Hear, hear! If pop culture is gonna be a frothy cesspool of AI generated shit, I’m going all in on subculture.

AI is just going to be the next way that we’re all gonna get fucked over and exploited by the mega rich. What a future…