Prediction: Some nation-state that cares nothing about IP (i.e. China) wins the AI race in this domain making these regulations totally useless.
on edit: I just realized that of course British copyright law is also very similar to the American model.
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”?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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"!
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?)
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?
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.
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...
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.
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
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.
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
After that, they will decimate global gpu supply and they can use their newfound lead in compute to win the race.
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.
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.
So no, I don't consider that insulting.
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.
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.
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.
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.