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Comment by cloudking | Hacker News Reader

Prediction: regulation will require AI companies to have copyright licenses granted for training data. There will be legal models trained on datasets that have copyright granted, and illegal black market models trained on copyrighted materials. However, it will be really difficult to enforce and prove what data was used for training in each.

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Prediction: Some nation-state that cares nothing about IP (i.e. China) wins the AI race in this domain making these regulations totally useless.

Another prediction would be: maybe Western states start blocking Chinese businesses that don't comply with their laws.

After all, China already blocks the Western businesses that don't implement the spying/surveillance measures the Chinese communist party wants.

The more the Chinese communist government continues pushing a war course against Taiwan makes that even more likely, e.g. in the context of sanctions.

Good luck blocking such a big market. Money simply speaks louder.

Blocking imports is actually very easy.

But it won't matter. If an integrated economy can be more efficient by copying each other internally, then it will eventually be more competitive at business worldwide, despite trade levies aimed against it.

Yeah China hasn't been respecting IP for a long time and it's still well behind. We shouldn't become China just to win a race - there are rules to the game you know? If everyone's content is stolen and resold by an AI then why would anyone want to create content?

Assuming a race to the bottom, eventually the content won't sell because people will just generate it for themselves.

It would go back to the best reason: for the joy of creating. The field would be reduced to those who enjoy making art for the sake of making art. It would also do wonders for filtering out the amount of crap that people produce. We would all have a much more rich and varied diet of art to appreciate.

Possibly. When wearing my "artist" hat, I work on two different things: art that I personally care about, and art that might sell.

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.

That's the thing. "Art that might sell" is corrupted. The diversity and uniqueness of art we would encounter regularly would be so much higher if that category was simply eliminated.

I agree. A great deal of "art that might sell" is already borderline repetitive, uncreative garbage. Maybe pleasant garbage, but still. Nothing anybody would be really interested in, except to add a bit of color to empty space. The more creativity you inject, the less likely it is to sell.

So far AI art is doing the opposite: increasing the amount of crap that people produce. The kinds of people who were once limited to underpaying ghostwriters to make spam books for Audible[0] can now chuck together a few prompts to ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion and get the same result. Yes, you have to be good at art in order to make good art with AI, but that doesn't matter when your goal is to create spam.

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

I consider myself an artist, and I give away my work for free. I make my money in other ways, as should everyone, as money irreversibly corrupts the artistic process by dragging everything towards a bland middle ground.

So no, I don't consider that insulting.

You are not all artists.

Funny, they seem to be more proactive about putting laws around it there already (1), and that hasn't stopped progress at all, while protecting the vested interests they care about.

If only our law makers were so capable of a) understanding whats going on and b) actually passing laws when it mattered.

[1] - https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/12/china...

Is there any evidence of mass compliance with these regulations? It seems basically impossible to enforce in a humane and fair way. Such laws will be used to prosecute political minorities if they are enforced at all.

That is obviously going to happen in mainland China specially when it may affect the CCP's plans in some way (i.e. even "morally" in the case of Xi Jinping deepfakes).

Are they going to enforce it for products/services sold overseas? I'm not so sure, not until I see watermarks in Tiktok's content.

>Are they going to enforce it for products/services sold overseas?

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

Just look for the words "China IP law infrigement" in Google FFS, if that is trolling, well, then I'm trolling.

About watermarks, I'm obviously talking about AI generated content watermarks, not general tiktok watermarks. I guess I should've been more concrete with my phrasing as some people can't read considering context.

I think perhaps one of the reasons they were so quick to push was for the introduction of a section saying the content generated by such services should not contain elements that could subvert state power, incite secession or disrupt social order, according to the rules [1].

[1] https://archive.is/nPLDu

Have you checked on the state of AI in China lately? It might be enlightening if you think there's some sort of arms race going on, or anything even close to that.

Also, if you follow through your logic you are arguing for abolishing all laws in the US that constrain US companies if some other countries can ignore these laws and get the upper hand. Keep in mind that these laws (like intellectual property, copyright, patents) is the reason US has innovated so much in the first place

China’s AI strategy is likely “annex Taiwan”.

After that, they will decimate global gpu supply and they can use their newfound lead in compute to win the race.

Can you explain where China obtains a lead in compute from attacking Taiwan? TSMC fabs on the island will not survive an invasion.

Probably it will be more like espionage and ensuring at least constant access to the litography equipment that China is lacking right now.

Nope, I haven't and I also didn't mention or suggest any actual arms race. My point is that any policy regarding AI (or any policy for that matter) is going to be hard to enforce when including potential (economically) "rogue" states, just that.

Now, if you have any information about AI and China, enlighten me. The more one knows the better.

PS/edit: I need more information about your last ghost edit. China (and others) would say otherwise about IP laws. If anything I would at least say that innovation can be either cut or assured through IP laws depending on the domain/technology, but it is difficult to conclude that absolutely for all cases.

> enlighten me

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

Western AI currently doesn't respect IP, as it scrapes the web, and turns it into proprietary model weights, with zero attribution, and with zero compliance with the wishes of the original IP's owners.

And they will deserve to. The point of copyright wasn't to bar anyone from using any work anywhere. It was to encourage artists to create art. Doing it by protecting the work they create was just a mechanism. The current mechanism of almost perpetual copyrights and just constant nagging over things which don't include a recognizable semblance of the original work is just insanity.

I don't think that taking one's art and using it to train a machine to be able to make limitless art is super encouraging to the artist.

But the goal is more art, not keeping artists employed. If machines do it better, so be it.

If you shift the reward from the people doing one kind of work to people owning (one kind of, but this is fungible) capital, and don't shift capital at the same time, you are doing concrete harm to identifiable people, even if the net is positive in some constructed aggregate. AI has a tremendous ability to do that across a wide range of different types of work rapidly and simultaneously.

No it isn't. 'Not enough art' is basically the exact opposite of the problem we're facing right now. Do you honestly believe that there's not enough music on Spotify? That a two hundred year catalogue isn't enough and you'd rather it be two hundred thousand years?

If your point is that we already have more than enough music than needed, isn’t that an indication that current copyright laws don’t need to be nearly as strong as they are in order to continue to promote the “useful arts”? (at least when it comes to music)

While this may be true, there is a middle ground between 'copyright lasts for the heat death of the Universe plus seventy years' and 'everything is stolen by robots the instant it's created'.

What we may have here is a need for some new use cases in copyright. The current laws were written with humans in mind -- human creators, human consumers. To retroactively say, "well, you released this to the [human] public under U.S. copyright law, therefore the rights you granted to humans extend to training AI systems as well" could be unfair.

every now and then I like to point out that not every country has the same understanding as to the purposes of copyright as the U.S, in fact this whole promotion thing seems to be a specifically American argument (although obviously not familiar with every country in the world so many some other countries also have this conception and I'm not familiar with it - maybe some countries that based their national laws on the U.S for example)

on edit: I just realized that of course British copyright law is also very similar to the American model.

Sure it is. There's a shit ton of shit on spotify, but if I want to listen to blackened ambient doom or technical jazz fusion death metal I might have one or two options each. Just because there are ~1000 Kanye/Taylor Swift wannabes trying to cash in on that played out mainstream sound doesn't mean there is enough music.

Interesting that you describe making music that appeals to a wide audience as “trying to cash in”.

Would you not say that using an AI to do essentially the same thing, just with the benefit that you don’t really need to pay anyone for creating the art meaning you can target more niche preferences is also “cashing in”?

No. I see strong generative AI allowing people who like fun genres outside the mainstream to make music in those genres that sounds good more easily. That will enable a creative explosion as new artists are given a rocket boost and established artists are taken to the next level and made more productive.

Generative AI is going to allow an amazing diversification and explosion of art and music, which is going to create the next big AI application once current systems for distributing content are strained to overloading - interactive recommenders. Imagine asking for a piece of content, getting recommendations, evaluating a short clip, giving feedback to the recommender and getting better recommendations as a result in a cycle until you get exactly what you want.

Maybe I'm a luddite, and I'm not really into technical jazz fusion death metal, but I do like some technical music and some metal music.

At least part of the reason I like technical music is because it is challenging to play for the musician. If an AI 'plays' 'technical' music, it loses its appeal for me.

Similarly, a lot of the reason I like metal music is because of the emotion and energy poured into it by the human creator.

Being able to ask a computer make noises which sounds like some musicians you like is not, in my opinion, the same as creating art.

I don't think the concern is about machines doing it better, but machines being able to angleshoot around copyright. The issue is most easily demonstrated in writing. The current state of technology is already sufficient to create a program that could take as input a book and produce as output a book with identical story, characters, settings, and more - but 'nudged around' just enough to skirt current copyright law.

Humans have already been able to do this of course, but the difference is scale and automation. With this software one could, under current law, setup a 100% legal 'shadow library' that effectively infringes on every single book published. Even a leaked copy of a book could be released and shared (in its legally infringing format) before the "real" copy hit the market. And again, all completely legally. The impacts of copyright infringement are regularly grossly distorted, but I think this is the sort of technology that could genuinely damage artists and creators across many endeavors.

The exact same thing will be coming to software soon enough. 'Take this assembly/IL code, and create a functionally identical but superficially rebranded program while working to ensure you sidestep all relevant patents.' 'Sure, here you go.' The issue of this being done [relatively] instantly is going to really impact things in ways I think many are not considering. Never in a million years thought I'd see myself on the side of the copyright cartel, but this is one of the extremely rare times they're right.

That shadow library already exists, people write a shit ton of fanfic and publishers publish highly derivative stories specifically because they're basically veiled ripoffs of highly lucrative IP hoping to cash in.

The barrier to shadow libraries is marketing, which is the only thing that really separates huge blockbuster music/art/books from stuff that makes literally zero money. Quality and ideas haven't been the gate for a long time.

There's more good - even great - art currently in existence than I will be able to experience in my lifetime.

If not a single new piece of art were created from this point on, I'd still die with a massive backlog of material to read, see, and listen to.

At this point, I'm infinitely more concerned about the wellbeing of artists than about whether or not new art is going to be created.

> train a machine to be able to make limitless art

> 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.

The statement I replied to spoke of the point of copyright being to encourage artists to create more art; not simply "to create more art".

But neither of those is really what's written down, with the (U.S. law) point of copyright being "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts".

We might could interpret this as, training AI is progress of science, and thus the point of copyright includes training AI. Although I'm not sure that we really need copyright to do that, and accordingly, I doubt that is the intent of the law.

Really, the issue here is may be that copyright law was not formed with AI systems in mind at all, neither as creators nor as consumers, and trying to apply it to AI systems, or to reason about copyright law as it pertains to what AI systems do, doesn't necessarily work very well.

Maybe we need to go back and amend all of our written laws with a phrase like "for humans", just like so many science headlines need to include the phrase "in mice"!

the point of copyright is to allow people to exploit their work for material gain, which in turn benefits society by encouraging people to create works

if only Microsoft (OpenAI) are able to exploit works for material gain at the cost of the literally 100% of the rest of society: why should society allow Microsoft to do this?

(or even to allow Microsoft to exist at all?)

Yup I agree. These models should be open by law. Currently the calls for open models is not happening because its the initial chaos time, but as soon as we understand a little bit more there will be either regulation or open source reproductions. I mean LLama already exists, but even that has bullshit license stuff around it.

What does it matter, the AI isn’t copying the work, just using it for “inspiration”.

I see that, but it's a matter of balance. Lots of things encourage/discourage artists, not everything will be in their favor. The way I see it, as long as nobody's work is being reproduced, they shouldn't have any real qualms.

I think that, just as content creators can designate a work to under various Creative Commons licenses, for commercial use, or for non-commercial use, or under MIT licenses, or GPL, or proprietary licenses, etc....

We may find that letting content creators choose to have their work included, or not, in AI training sets would be helpful? Or, included in training sets for a fee, or for some sort of attribution, or ?...

The apparent current status quo of "anything on the public web is fair game for an AI training set" might not be a good permanent solution?

The U.S. Supreme court will rule on that hopefully soon.

Even if we take copyright in its most limited, original conception, why would all value from creative works accruing to generative models that train on them ever encourage anyone to create these works?

IMO, what LLMs are demonstrating are the fundamental contradictions of Capitalism, where now being a capital owner with a bunch of GPUs is supposed to give you exclusive returns on the sum total of human intellectual and artistic labor. I have a feeling that people aren’t going to take to that too kindly, so we’ll either see robots mowing down the masses of unemployed, a Butlerian jihad, or various states assuming control over their productive capacities and redistributing the return in the form of greater safety nets.

Prediction: Hacks will flood spotify, youtube, and social sites with terrible cheap shoddy songs titled as if they are made by actual artists and the platforms will dish out royalties meant for authentic artists to total frauds. Real musicians may possibly abandon mega-music platforms altogether, and implement more secure (direct sales) platforms on their own web sites...

Big platforms really are not helpful nor respectful to musicians, especially musicians that are working hard to be discovered. It's a total shame that shotify charges musicians to be promoted on their platform while giving a ton of royalties away to so many fraudulent actors every year.

> Prediction: Hacks will flood spotify, youtube, and social sites with terrible cheap shoddy songs titled as if they are made by actual artists and the platforms will dish out royalties meant for authentic artists to total frauds. Real musicians may possibly abandon mega-music platforms altogether, and implement more secure (direct sales) platforms on their own web sites...

I don't think that would work, if a song is detectable enough to give the artist royalties for a song, it's detectable enough to see that it's copyrighted music. IMHO I think music piracy is essentially dead, because the music industry has finally learned and made a compelling product. With services like Spotify and Apple Music, pirating music is just not worth it anymore. Why bother when for $10/month you could listen to all the music to your hearts content.

Universal asking steaming companies to not use their label's music on training is just stupid because all they are doing is shooting the artists in the foot. Most AI in music is recommendation engines, do you not want your artists to be discovered? The streaming services are not stealing your music you idiot [UMG], they are trying to make you more money by directing people to music they like.

You have no idea of what you're typing about, nor about how content ID works online for music. Ai music generators are specifically designed to circumvent content ID.

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.

I wonder if some sort of copyright traps cannot be created? Fake music pieces.

Map-makers use arificial "trap streets" ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street ) to show that their maps were copied. Dictionaries add fictious entries ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry ).

Similar idea could be used with music?

Prediction: clean room AI will forever lag behind AI that hoovers up whatever data it can get it's hands on.

It won't matter if using the output has sufficient risk. Go ahead and train that model on Disney content and sell the results, then see what happens.

No one will be able to prove the source of the data - was it Disney content, or was it someone copying the animation style of Disney content?

Eventually you will need to show sources and I’m sure we’ll have ways to extract sources from the models. ma these things are not magic after all.

I’m not sure why sources matter at all. In copyright you compare the end result, not how you got there.

this isn't true at all

the process the work was generated through is of primary importance for copyright

the existence of the concept of "derivative work" should make this obvious

see the reverse engineering of the IBM BIOS for another example

There are specific criterion for fair use: https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/. None of them are process specific. Maybe bone up on the law rather than getting yourself in any deeper.

> Maybe bone up on the law rather than getting yourself in any deeper.

we're not talking about fair use here buddy

And that's probably why you're talking to yourself.

Maybe try reading the thread rather than getting yourself in any deeper.

You're the one trying to ignore fair use as it has been broadly applied to creative works for something like 150 years, and make this about a very narrow slice of software copyright law even though people in the thread are talking about images and music. You're being willfully obtuse to try and make an argument because you are emotional about AI creative output.

another strawman

You actually can, but only for things the model memorized: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.13188.pdf

I've noticed programmers often think the law will be worked around by 'tricks'

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.

Why will this lead to summary judgement to the plaintiff, neither side has presented concrete proofs, just assertions.

Serious question.

The standard in US civil court is preponderance of evidence, not reasonable doubt. You'd have to go further then making an assertion (by bringing in an expert witness or something) but you don't necessarily have to prove something definitively. You just have to make the more compelling argument - you have to present evidence that it's more likely that your position is correct.

Since the hypothetical AI company wasn't able to produce anything in it's defense, it lost.

IANAL

> you don't have to prove anything, strictly speaking.

Strictly speaking, you do have to prove things (if you have the burden of proof on the specific issue), and the standard of proof is usually “preponderance of the evidence” (though there are a few other standards that apply to particular issues/circumstances in the civil justice system.) “Beyond a reasonable doubt” is a different standard of proof used for conviction in the criminal justice system, but it is strictly not correct to call proof under other standards something other than proof.

For sure, I was responding to the idea of "concrete proof" and why it didn't need to be "concrete proof," but I'm sure you're right. Thanks for keeping me honest.

I've edited my comment to reflect your correction.

But Disney also didn't present anything. Can the court case really be decided based on only expert witnesses?

I've been avoiding giving an answer in case someone who knew better than me came around (open invitation), but afaik expert testimony is evidence and the case is decided on the best evidence. So why not? You'll have to do some work to establish the expertise of the witness, and the opposing side might attack those credentials and such and they'll probably produce their own expert rather than just rolling over, but in principle you could have an entire case that consists of various expert testimony.

I don't think the suggestion is meant to be that this is a realistic scenario though, just that the court isn't as mechanical and naive as we programmers are prone to imagining (being stewards of systems that are largely mechanical and naive).

IANAL

obviously what I said is not an actual court case and is meant to be a facetious condensation of what would happen.

so after the several days when Disney shows how this LLM was obviously trained on the dataset of available Disney content, and then the defendant responded that they trained on a corpus of pseudo-Disney but then could not produce this corpus it would be reasonable to conclude they were lying.

The parent suggested "No one will be able to prove the source of the data" and that is the kind of thing that programmers for some reason often think is some fantastic gotcha so one can really get away with anything, but it is these kinds of things that the law is generally pretty good in handling.

There is existing case law behind clean room reverse engineering (the "Chinese Wall" technique). Using generative AIs to scale up this process is inevitable.

"Clean Room Defeats Software Infringement Claim in U.S. Federal Court" http://hoviblog.blogspot.de/2008/10/clean-room-defeats-softw...

"Chinese Wall" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_wall

the AI in this situation is no different than gzipping a copyrighted file, ungzipping it and then trying to claim the output is no longer copyrighted

There have to be two AIs, one examines the original and produces a description while the second examines the description and produces a new work. Neither the description nor the new work are assigned copyright because they were produced by an AI (see [1]). However, if subsequently a human then manipulates the new work, the derived work is automatically protected by copyright assigned to that person (see [1, 2]). Furthermore, the new author has a defense against a copyright infringement claim by the owner of the original based on existing case law shared previously.

This has nothing to do with gzip.

[1] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/03/16/2023-05...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention

no matter how many AIs you layer: it's still just a lossy compression function

jpeg'ing frames of disney animation doesn't remove copyright (even if you do it twice)

Saying a model is like jpeg compression is like saying a van is like an elephant, in that maybe if you squint so hard you're almost blind it's kinda true.

What matters here for copyright are the laws, not the math.

It's quite different, because GZIP produces a lossy copy of an image, whereas models produce a distinct image that shares many aspects of style and composition. In one case it's obvious the product is the original image, in the other it's a derivative that may or may not be sufficiently different to be protected under fair use.

I can write an algorithm that just generates random noise in the dimensions of art, and if I run it long enough it'll output things that are "close enough" to copyright works. There's no argument for that program being copyright infringement, and that holds for models as well.

> In one case it's obvious the product is the original image, in the other it's a derivative that may or may not be sufficiently different to be protected under fair use.

right, so if it's a completely original work let's clear out the training set and let's see if it can do it without it

no? so the output is a product of the input... a derivative work

and if you run it again it produces exactly the same thing? (sans artificial random injection)

sounds like a lossy compression function to me!

I'd like to see a human make art after you lobotomize them.

Clean room reverse engineering is a thing because software copyright was a mistake and the judicial system understands it was a mistake. In software, it is regular and common for programmers to use licensed software libraries with defined interfaces. In writing or art, the notion of a "compatible interface" isn't really there. If you wrote a short fan story with Marvel characters and you want to liberate it from Disney's ownership, you have to redesign all the characters; you can't just argue that you need a superhero with red nanotech armor and a drinking problem in exactly this particular shape for compatibility.

I'll agree to your premise, but I'm relying on the combination of the recent guidance from the Copyright Office on AI generated output (ie: the output cannot receive copyright) with Clean Room techniques, optionally followed by a human transformation. I agree that if the output is a character named Iron Man, then no dice; if, however, the output is a new song that sounds similar to the original song but isn't the same, then I suspect that this will clear the bar for copyright.

So if I create a movie about cyber pangolin, a gory half human half pangolin cyborg fighting for Justice in a post bio-punk world where people are swapping their organs out on a daily basis due to immuno suppressant immunity; and I used a model that saw Aladdin, you think Disney could successfully sue Cyber Pangolin for violating the copyright of Aladdin?

Cuz I don’t.

Honestly at this point it's not about who is right, it's about who has the bigger legal team. So yes, I think Disney can sue and possibly win. Copyright system has not made sense in a while now.

It’s really not. That’s very dishonest and lazy hand waving.

That's only true if the judge doesn't throw the case out nearly immediately, which they will do if they view that the plaintiff's case is bullshit.

It depends on how much of a knock-off the model's output is, no different than a human artist. Taking Disney's Aladdin and putting a cyborg eye on him probably will be a legal issue that the user of the art and seller of the AI output both would be liable for. AI is a tool, and it can be used for good and evil.

I agree. But that is irrelevant to what a model was trained on.

Sure, if the company doing it is in the same jurisdiction banning it. But what if it's hosted in, say, Russia?

Yes but also no.

Training on shite results in a pretty poor AI compared to one that’s trained on quality data. Do I think that means that quality AI will keep up with “hoover AI”? No. Hoover AI still gets you to profitability and that’s mostly what matters in a capitalist arms race.

Real life contains a lot of shit data that you have to learn to filter by experience. An AI containing only the best will fall flat on its face when subjected to the dirty mess reality is.

I’m not sure about that, but I’m looking forward to finding out

Lets say this another way

"A Child left in an empty room is never going to get ahead of one that has experiences with everything in the world"

Anyone that thinks a clean room is going to make a valid AI, in my mind, is insane.

Further predicition: There will be a certification process that will be required to prove you only used data you have legally obtained. Running or hosting a model will be grounds for a fine, or possible criminal penalties.

A certification would happen in the EU first.

...with the states and the uk to follow, rather like the gdpr-like privacy setup in Cali.

I think it’ll be more like using samples in music - probably not a big deal until you’re making a bunch of money, and then people come after you for licensing fees.

I'm from the future and this is true. There will certainly be AI regulations and licensed AI models and it had already happened with the Shutterstock and O̶p̶e̶n̶AI.com partnership.

Stable Diffusion and the Getty Images lawsuit will end with a settlement and licensing will be the option to go with.

I'm also from the future (2028 to be precise), and enforcing copyright on AI-generated content has become near-impossible. It's working about as well as DRM has in stopping video and music piracy. There's now BitTorrent-like software for AI, which allows groups of individuals to train and run their own AI on whatever they please, and they seem to have little regard for copyright. In fact, underground music from these creators is taking off, and despite the law requiring all AI-assisted songs to cite their influences for royalty payments, they're simply refusing to comply. The music is so good that the public has no appetite for prosecuting the individuals making it. In fact, most people are using these AIs to create their own custom music stations. The old guard is stomping its gold-encrusted shoes in anger, but the youth just don't care.

There's a cool song called 'Neural Harmony.' The creators used a mixture of classical and electronic music as input, but they never disclosed the specific songs they were influenced by. This has made it impossible for the original artists to claim royalties, and yet the public can't get enough of its sick beatz.

There's even an AI-generated album called 'Digital Renaissance.' The creators claim to have used thousands of songs from various genres as inspiration, but they never provided a list of the songs or artists. The album has gained a massive following and has even been featured in several popular playlists. There was briefly an attempt to prosecute them but the case was dropped after public outcry.

> It's working about as well as DRM has in stopping video and music piracy.

quite well then?

streaming services have essentially replaced music and video piracy

and steam (essentially streaming games) vastly reduced video game piracy

DRM was not the primary factor in reducing piracy. The music and video industries reluctantly embraced new business models that emphasized convenience and accessibility for consumers, largely in response to the frustration with existing DRM systems. For example, platforms like Spotify and Netflix made it easier for users to access content legally, decreasing the appeal of piracy.

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.

> 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.

who's going to bother for music when spotify/youtube are free?

your time would have to have negative value for it to be worth it

Or companies will just move to a country where training on copyrighted data is 100% legal and allowed (like e.g. in Japan which had an explicit amendment to its copyright law to allow it), although it'll be interesting to see how such models would be treated internationally.

The EU also had its copyright law amended to allow data mining on copyrighted data sets. And I would not be surprised if US courts decide that training an AI is fair use. The goal, after all, is to create a machine that draws new images.

AI leaders will be located in China or India then.

Prediction: that will lead to a couple huge copyright guzzlers that will sue everyone trying to enter their market.

This could be a boon for publishers since they'll be able to act as the gatekeepers of almost all professionally produced content.

This could be true.

I think we will settle on proprietary AI required to obtain licenses on trained data. Any model trained on public domain data will be completely public domain too.

So I imagine, someone will train a model to do high end law work and they will have to train it on the data produced by the people they hire to create it.

This of course assumes that the society will have the same structure as of today. What I actually think it will happen is, we will completely delegate all our work to machines and the concepts of ownership will vanish as everything for exception of land will be in abundance. I imagine in the future we will fight each other over apartments in cool areas or trade it for some kind of social credit which we generate by impressing other humans. No apartment will be worse than the other but the proximity natural wonders, cultural centres and networks will be the paramount. After all, it's all about how we pick our sexual mates and social status.

I'm sorry you don't like it but There's no way the society functions the same once resources and servants are in abundance. Your bank account is relevant only when there's a scarcity and the current scarcity can be gone once machines are autonomous in enough areas to convert the material all around us into things we need using the practically limitless energy from the sun.

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