Thousands of authors demand payment from AI companies for use of copyrighted works::Thousands of published authors are requesting payment from tech companies for the use of their copyrighted works in training artificial intelligence tools, marking the latest intellectual property critique to target AI development.
The thing is, copyright isn’t really well-suited to the task, because copyright concerns itself with who gets to, well, make copies. Training an AI model isn’t really making a copy of that work. It’s transformative.
Should there be some kind of new model of renumeration for creators? Probably. But it should be a compulsory licensing model.
The slippery slope here is that we are currently considering humans and computers to be different because (something someone needs to actually define). If you say “AI read my book and output a similar story, you owe me money” then how is that different from “Joe read my book and wrote a similar story, you owe me money.” We have laws already that deal with this but honestly how many books and movies aren’t just remakes of Romeo and Juliet or Taming of the Shrew?!?
If you say “AI read my book and output a similar story, you owe me money” then how is that different from “Joe read my book and wrote a similar story, you owe me money.”
You’re bounded by the limits of your flesh. AI is not. The $12 you spent buying a book at Barns & Noble was based on the economy of scarcity that your human abilities constrain you to.
It’s hard to say that the value proposition is the same for human vs AI.
We are making an assumption that humans do “human things”. If i wrote a derivative work of your $12 book, does it matter that the way i wrote it was to use a pen and paper and create a statistical analysis of your work and find the “next best word” until i had a story? Sure my book took 30 years to write but if i followed the same math as an AI would that matter?
Well, Shakespeare has beed dead for a few years now, there’s no copyright to speak of.
And if you make a book based on an existing one, then you totally need permission from the author. You can’t just e.g. make a Harry Potter 8.
But AIs are more than happy to do exacly that. Or to even reproduce copyrighted works 1:1, or only with a few mistakes.
If a person writes a fanfic harry potter 8 it isn’t a problem until they try to sell it or distribute it widely. I think where the legal issues get sticky here are who caused a particular AI generated Harry Potter 8 to be written.
If the AI model attempts to block this behavior. With contract stipulations and guardrails. And if it isn’t advertised as “a harry potter generator” but instead as a general purpose tool… then reasonably the legal liability might be on the user that decides to do this or not. Vs the tool that makes such behavior possible.
Hypothetically what if an AI was trained up that never read Harry Potter. But its pretty darn capable and I feed into it the entire Harry Potter novel(s) as context in my prompt and then ask it to generate an eighth story — is the tool at fault or am I?
It seems like people are afraid that AI can do it when i can do it too. But their reason for freaking out is…??? It’s not like AI is calling up publishers trying to get Harry Potter 8 published. If i ask it to create Harry Potter 1 but change his name to Gary Trotter it’s not the AI that is doing something bad, it’s me.
That was my point. I can memorize text and its only when I play it off as my own that it’s wrong. No one cares that I memorized the first chapter and can recite it if I’m not trying to steal it.
Challenge level impossible: try uploading something long to amazon written by chatgpt without triggering the plagiarism detector.
