Universal Music Asks Streaming Services to Block AI Access to Its Songs

> is super encouraging to the artist.

This is the "nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded!" version of making art.

Creating more, or "limitless" art is indeed the point.

Like, are you a troll or you just don't know how laws work?

>I'm not so sure, not until I see watermarks in Tiktok's content.

Tiktok literally exports all videos with watermarks, its the people that remove them to post on reddit lmao how clueless are you

It's not going to make China's AI better than US. Not nearly enough, they're so behind. So giving them competitive advantage is not something that should matter when you consider whether this law would do good or not

If AI made all the art that might sell, that would give me more time and energy to work on the art I actually care about, but maybe less sales from art.

The idea that artists should "do stuff for the joy of creating" is just plain insulting, too. They already do that. While artists would love to see, say, AI art models that were trained with licensed or public-domain data; training data theft isn't even their biggest concern. Their biggest concern is having the fun sucked out of their job as the artful minutae of drawing or writing is replaced with finding the correct combination of words to make Stable Diffusion draw the character you want with exactly the same details every time. It would be like if you worked at a PC building shop and one day the boss said "Actually we're just going to be an Apple authorized reseller now." The thing that's destroying artists' jobs being trained on their own work is just insult to injury.

To be clear, though, AI doesn't "steal and resell content" in the vast majority of cases, either. Regurgitation is a thing, but the cause is duplicate data in the training set making it advantageous to memorize a few images to improve loss metrics. Most diffusion model architectures are not big enough to memorize the whole training set, or even large pieces of it.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw

Ai generators put music and other content in a blender and then scrambles the source samples until they are unrecognizable and then mashes the tiny cut pieces of source samples back together into a collage. Kind of like putting a strawberry into a smoothie... It's no longer a strawberry, but the smoothie now has the extracted taste of strawberry AND the other original materials used to source the end product. Content ID only recognizes strawberries and whole fruits, not smoothies.

your honor, this LLM produces content that looks like various Disney intellectual products, it was obviously trained on that data.

your honor, no we trained it on a lot artwork that was copying the Disney style!

Judge: do you have this corpus of data you trained it on for the court to inspect.

uh, no.

summary judgement for plaintiff.

Gabe Newell once famously stated, "Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem." Steam's success can be attributed to addressing the service issues that initially led people to piracy, providing a user-friendly platform for gamers. So, while DRM might have had a minor role in curbing piracy, it's the innovative business models and improved services that made the most significant impact. Even now, downloading movies, albums, or video games for next to nothing remains possible, and those who prioritize money over time continue to pirate without issue.

Every single piece of idea is public domain from their inception. Actually, all ideas already exist, we humans just discover them. Ideas are information, information is bits and bits are numbers. All numbers already exist, and all "creation" is merely discovering those numbers.

Any assignment of ownership obviously happens after the fact and are completely ineffectual, especially in the 21st century, the age of information and networked computers with infinite ability to copy bits at negligible costs. The technology really exposes that sham for what it really is and it's a shame how everyone reacts by trying to destroy the perfectly good technology instead of fixing the fraud that is "intellectual property".

> Wouldn't you then see any natural wrong in sharing my work with others or even the broader public, regardless?

I'd see it as a very rude thing to do to you personally. Simply because you asked me not to do it and I generally try to be nice and respect people.

A natural universal ideological wrong though? No. Plenty of people publish the private communications they receive. It's just information. Publishing it might hurt my social standing with you buf I personally don't believe in anyone ever going to jail over it.

A musician is just a big neural network, and they sell content that is nothing but the product of all their influences, of all the music they listened to.

I don't see a difference between a musician making music after having listened to thousand of hours of music throughout their lives and an AI generating music.

It's the same thing, in one case you have neurons made out of flesh, in the other neurons made of transistors and code.

I am not saying that it is exactly the same.

Instead, I am saying that if a human can profit from other people's work, by learning from it, then there are clearly exceptions to this idea that using other people's work, for any reason at all, is "stealing".

It is perfectly legal to use other people's work, for all sort of things. Its not stealing, in many situations.

This hard rule that you have made up, is clearly not the situation, and using your hard rule, where you just call all of it "stealing" would similarly apply to all sorts of other, completely allowed behavior that nobody thinks is "stealing".

> but humans also pay to learn

Nobody is going to successfully be able to sue you, because you downloaded their publicly accessible work, and learn from it, actually.

If you release your creative works, for people to consume, and people consume it, then they are similarly allowed to learn from it.

I'd like you to learn more about LLMs then, because under the definition you want to make, you are 'software'.

Also, we made libraries so people could learn for free without being beholden to their capitalist masters.

What's your take on AI training?

To me, there's this new thing in the world. Are you going to try and stop it (unlikely), drop out (barely possible in a networked world), or try to make it work for you?

But even at that point, I would agree, the analogy still may have holes in it.

... and infringing a valid copyright willfully for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain is a criminal offense in the US (17 U.S.C. 506(A)). It's up to a felony violation.

You can, for personal reasons, assert there's a fundamental difference in kind (and you'd be joining an argument dating back past the founding of the U.S., an argument where Thomas Jefferson once said of protection of intellectual property that "other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society"), but in the sense that any law has any real meaning or force, it's exactly as much the law as the law against kicking you out of your own house because I like your house better.

This is literally a property rights case, so if your comment wasn’t about property rights it was wildly out of context.