Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

nonrandomstring

Copyright vs. AI

I'll grab some popcorn. This could be one of the all time epic battles.

Earlier someone posted, and then deleted, an Ask HN: "Are artists fighting AI Art repeating Metallica versus Napster?"

This is actually an entertaining question, because it brings in the power of the entertainments business.

Where is Napster today? Didn't Metallica win that one? It might not be a great comparison, but what if RIAA, MPAA, Sony and the game industry decide that "generative AI" occupies the same threat space as "piracy"?

It was of course Metallica and an army of ten thousand lawyers and goonies from a vast, wealthy, moribund industry that actually did manage to block the road of progress and frighten the genie back into the bottle.

In fact, the power of the film and music industry to shape technology has been so immense, you have to wonder whether they could do it again over "AI".

Right now I think the entertainments industry is shitting itself over LLM technology, but is split over whether it can gain enough control to allow it on it's own terms, or mobilise to fight it. We haven't yet reached the stage of commodity proliferation. That will be the watershed.

To the artists it didn't really matter whether they were bitten by the cats (the record labels) or by the dogs (the pirates), they ended up losing out anyway. This is because artists are less motivated than either pirates (who have nothing better to do) or record label executives and their cronies (who are protecting their income stream). Artists are a rule are happy to be making enough money to be able to continue to make art. And that makes them the vulnerable party in these transactions. Witness the countless accounts of abuse by record companies of bands and individual artists, including bookkeeping tricks, contractual abuse and so on.

The artists didn't exactly win Metallica vs. Napster either.

The end result was a compromise that still funneled some degree of money into the labels, with the artists getting an equally raw deal as before proportionally speaking--but now with a micro share of your $10/mo to Spotify or wherever instead of their share of $10+ for a single album.

I'm not saying the prior business model was sustainable (at least ethically) but at the end of the day, "if you can't beat them, join them" is still one hell of a compromise to make.

Yes I think you're right. The technology was tamed and brought to heel. It starts out looking "disruptive". What will that look like when Big Media figure out how to take legal control of generative AI and become effective arbiters of all that can be cheaply, mechanically created?

Was it truly "brought to heel"? P2P file sharing is still very much around, and many people don't see it as inappropriate - especially among those under 40.

They took the cake from the pirates and gave it to the privateers. The majority of the musicians get nothing and the cats (labels) and the tech companies get paid.

> I'll grab some popcorn. This could be one of the all time epic battles.

No, it will be boring, the outcome is clear: those with the deepest pockets will win this battle.

Just look at Disney who had copyright law changed back in the previous century.

> those with the deepest pockets

But you merely beg the question. Which pocket is the deeper? The left pocket of a network of industries that stand to dominate the world via AI? Or the right pocket of the same interests who will be destroyed by it?

I can see a symbiotic relationship between large rightsholders and AI-related industries developing, perhaps where they license their corpus to be trained on, and maybe even share rights/profits/etc with AI companies when it comes to commercial use of the AI's output.

In such a world, human creators would be paid a pittance by large rightsholders to create, and then those rightsholders would license those creations to be trained on, and then the human would be cut out of the loop for subsequent creations. In this world, creators wouldn't be much different than the data labelers that currently tag ML datasets. They'd probably be paid the same, as well.

I see this going one of two ways:

* States take a laissez faire approach to regulation these networks, we get an open source community of people developing them publicly for anyone to run on their local machines, run small clusters etc.

* States take a heavy handed approach and prevent anyone distributing a model trained on copyrighted works without agreement from the copyright holder, or paying some form of tax that gets redistributed to them. We end up with an oligopoly of ad-supported, data-collecting, heavily censored SAAS models which we cannot download, modify, or run locally.

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