IP laws are legal constructs and subject to changes like everything else depending on our needs. When and if enough of us see benefits from AI hugely outweighing benefits from maintaining IP framework, I'm pretty sure laws will be passed to make needed adjustments.
You see, you're part of the system, not outside it. If it were not for my deep, deep hatred of the farce we call IP law, I must admit, I'd seriously consider walking over to the other side; because I look at these AI folks scouring training data without so much as asking the original creator for consent, or even sparing a couple cycles to think about whether they should, and it really rankles me.
In fact, the entire damn computing industry is filled with people with some seriously flawed ideas around the concept and mechanics of the act of obtaining consent.
Consent for… what exactly? Why is anyone entitled to some notion of ownership & power over who may and may not make use of information?
I understand to some degree practical arguments around recouping cost of development and distribution of information, but I don’t think anyone should really concern themselves ethically with what some random person wants them to do with the information. This isn’t like ensuring a sexual partner is an enthusiastic participant, this feels to me more like I’m not going to ask mommy for permission every time I want to play outside (let alone care if I’m told “no”). What practical defense is that anyways?
Maybe my understanding of your framing is off?
You mean like copyright holders? Patent holders? Somebody with a trade secret?
>but I don’t think anyone should really concern themselves ethically with what some random person wants them to do with the information. This isn’t like ensuring a sexual partner is an enthusiastic participant, this feels to me more like I’m not going to ask mommy for permission every time I want to play outside (let alone care if I’m told “no”). What practical defense is that anyways?
But yes, anyone should. You're just saying "I don't think people should disagree with me" not "information distribution and consent aren't ethical concerns" - of course they are! Why wouldn't you propose as counterexample a model like medicine's "informed consent" instead of sexual consent or "asking mommy"?
These are legal fictions that exist because the state’s monopoly on violence. Like I said, I understand the motivation to enable e.g. book writers to seek profit for their work. That’s about where my sympathy ends, especially when those mechanisms are abused for petty control by entities making billions. I hardly view them as ethical constructs, in fact I think the vast majority of restrictions based on these are unethical and immoral.
> Why wouldn't you propose as counterexample a model like medicine's "informed consent"
I think there’s a disconnect here. “Consent” in a sexual or medical context is ethically necessary due to the fact that the asker wants to perform acts directly upon/with the concerned party. Consent to play outside or make use of information does not involve the intimate invasion of one’s person, and really does not need to involve this other arbitrary party at all. This is what I was trying to express in my previous reply.
I don’t see why anyone is ethically entitled under these conditions to insert themselves as a governing authority of how people use information. It’s not even a realistic expectation to hold, information wants to be free and people will do what they want with it regardless.
> You're just saying "I don't think people should disagree with me"
I mean, we are talking about ethics here after all. The best I can do is disagree with your conception of consent and make my own arbitrary value judgement.
Well, ok I get you there. But they're not really "fictions" when backed by the force of that violence. This critique makes sense, I just don't know if it really can ignore the fact that the legal regime applies in most cases.
Did you pay for the product? See, that's what you get under Rights of First Sale. If you pay for it, it's yours. Free and clear, no entanglements whatsoever. You still generally have to ask and negotiate a sale.
>This isn’t like ensuring a sexual partner is an enthusiastic participant.
I wasn't even going to bring it up, but since you opened the door... Someone has to bear significant cost to bring into being something (this is the part you claim to understand, do I'll hold you to your given); you come along and enter a business relationship with them (they are a supplier), set their compensation at non-negotiable 0, use their output as your input, to enable you to do things that they might not be at all comfortable contributing to, even indirectly, which again, you don't even know either way, because you didn't ask. Just saying, you've got more similarity here than you may be comfortable with on further deconstruction. Can't blame you for not wanting to do it, but as someone who has, maybe you should reevaluate?
Besides which, why does everyone think "consent" only applies to sex anyway? Consent is a fundamental underpinning of a liberal government of, by, and for the people.
>This feels to me more like I’m not going to ask mommy for permission every time I want to play outside (let alone care if I’m told “no”).
Live somewhere in the midst of a warzone, political upheaval, or a high crime area, and this could get you shot. In the case you were a child, where your mother has custodianship of you, she bears responsibility for your actions. That you, in that situation, would not care if she said no, just sort of proves my point.
Stakes may be low, but there is a flow to the interaction. If it were not an issue in our industry "it is easier to ask forgiveness than permission" wouldn't be such a sticking point of our industry.
It's reflected everywhere. Even the innocuous places. Our biggest industry actors have made their fortunes on tracking people whether they wanted to be tracked or not. We have browser fingerprinting, which is the equivalent of "hold on a minute, need to figure out what your living room looks like so I can forward the description to all my buddies so we'll know who you are when we next see you." Except that isn't ever outright said or explained to the end user, because if it was, no one would ever consent. Which is why nobody asks and just does, which proves our industry has a problem with consent.
These are exactly the types of thing to get tied in ethical knots over, because damnit, we won't be here forever, and we're setting the example for down the line. While it'd be nice for our practices around IP to be less rigid, there is still a line to be drawn such that it is not okay to just run off with digital info because digital.
Every vice we maintain for ourselves individually, will be abused collectively; likely to a far more destructive degree. Asking first is not a huge ordeal. Lord knows. We might get so tired of being asked we finally figure out some default terms so that people can stop asking. That never happens if no one bothers to get the ball rolling though. You have to ask to get the iteration started.
Authentic human generated information has irreducible newness.
I believe that point is open to debate.
"Human brain is magic." <> "Human brain is not simulatable by Turing machines."
There are other possibilities. I'm sure you can think of a few.
Sure, a style like cubism is unlikely to appear from current AI art generation, but ultimately there's a human still in the loop. The human picks the direction the generation goes in and you can definitely see "styles" or even "characters" appear in certain types of prompts.
If you hang around people that do this a lot you'll see that some of them end up generating hundreds, if not thousands, of images of what seems to be the same character in varying situations. That indicates to me that you could potentially find a type of prompt that would lead to an art movement.
Hell, AI art itself might constitute an art movement.
Think language change every 1000 years. Would AI adapt to that? What new training data would it require? Surely obviously it would require some new inputs. It surely requires internet connected speakers of the developing language.
I think the “surely it would require new inputs” is enough to favour the irreducible newness point.
“Irreducible newness” may be just overhyped “changing relevancy” though, that’s what I’m stuck on.
https://ustr.gov/sites/default/files/2019_Special_301_Report...