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So i'm not sure how I feel, but to play Devil's advocate --

If I know anything I create is just going to be hoovered up and input into somebody's AI model so I do 99% of the work and they get 99% of the profit, perhaps I'm much less likely to progress Science and useful Arts by creating content in the first place.

I fear an internet of signup walls and TOC agreements for everything, just to prevent crawlers that feed AI from soaking it all up.

> If I know anything I create is just going to be hoovered up and input into somebody's AI model so I do 99% of the work and they get 99% of the profit, perhaps I'm much less likely to progress Science and useful Arts by creating content in the first place.

Perhaps you wouldn't but I, and apparently most of the scientific community who publish research, would (and do). The entitlement of people here feel towards their way of doing things is astounding.

It's a story as old as time: Those who try to resist or limit progress (by placing arbitrary restrictions) will be beaten by those who adapt.

I think you should spend some time thinking about the purpose of progress. Progress in and of itself is not useful, nor is it necessarily desirable.

It's very easy to envision a society that is both more advanced than ours and profoundly worse in all meaningful aspects.

More people around here need to hear this.

> If I know anything I create is just going to be hoovered up and input into somebody's AI model so I do 99% of the work and they get 99% of the profit

Could you give a more concrete example of how this could happen?

As-is, I don't see how the existence of an AI model trained on J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is going to result in Tolkien's works receiving 99% less profit.

Maybe you could argue AI models as a whole will devalue certain types of creative works (e.g. art commissions for designing logos), but they don't need to train on any one particular creative work to accomplish that, so unless you're saying we should just ban AI models entirely I'm not sure how copyright helps with that.

> I fear an internet of signup walls and TOC agreements for everything, just to prevent crawlers that feed AI from soaking it all up.

This is a fair point, particularly since it appears to be already happening to some extent. Though it seems to be largely social media companies and content aggregators trying to control access to information they don't hold the copyright to in the first place, not individual users trying to restrict access to works that they created. I'm not sure copyright would really help "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" there so much as "promote the wallets of large social media conglomerates".

> If I know anything I create is just going to be hoovered up and input into somebody's AI model

but today, without an AI model, anything you create is already going to be learnt and studied (if it is worth studying of course). What's the difference, but speed?

> they get 99% of the profit

Why is that a priori the assumption? What stops you from getting a profit?

> I do 99% of the work

you did 0.000001% of the work, since the model contains billions of other works from which they train.

> What stops you from getting a profit?

OpenAI and Stable Diffusion not paying for their dataset. I don’t believe GitHub asked for my contribution to Copilot.

But you weren't receiving profit from your works originally? So therefore, why does it matter what someone else was doing?

If someone jacks my car while I'm asleep, races it, and wins a prize, and returns it before I wake up, they haven't deprived me of anything, profited off my property, and it's still wrong.

Profit and deprivation are not and never will be a good tests in determining things like this.

> jacks my car

no, they downloaded your car.

> Copyright, as defined in the U.S. Constitution, exists "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts"[1]. I can think of no better modern example of "the Progress of Science and useful Arts" than AI models themselves.

This makes no sense. Before AI, it’s clear that copyright itself restricts what can be done, in order to promote overall health of innovation. You can’t just say this is cool so therefore allowed, then there would never have been any copyright in the first place. You have to argue that the overall result will be better given the rules you propose.

Now, I’m no fan of copyright, but it is abundantly clear that the tech companies are able to capitalize on new tech disproportionately. Thus, it’s a transfer of privilege from the very many designers, artists, musicians, authors etc to whomever will dominate AI. That’s not good, simply because of the centralization.

Moreover, you can’t just look at the short term gains of AI models that can be produced with existing content. You need to include the change in incentives, when creators financial prospects are even more minuscule than today. Even if AI is all that matters, they still need training data, and that needs to come from somewhere.

AI is the innovation. Trying to misapply copyright here would retard the progress of science and useful arts, not promote them, because it would wrongly restrict that innovation.

The answer to big tech corporations centralizing this is to fund it publically and make it available for free to everyone as a shared summation of our culture, not lobotomize ourselves just to profit a few old dinosaurs that are relying on an outdated idea of copyright.

> AI is the innovation.

Yes, but it does not live in a vacuum. It’s power is derived from human creations and their labor, for now.

When Spotify transformed the music industry, they could not simply claim innovation and be exempt. They had to negotiate with the dinosaurs and eventually it came through.

The inertia is a feature, not a bug. We’re still dealing with the fallout of the social media and ad-tech transformations. Unintended side effects takes a lot of time to understand.

> Trying to misapply copyright here would retard the progress of science and useful arts[…]

How so? All of academia would be entirely exempt, and so would the hackers and tinkerers, etc. You’d only violate copyright if you sell the models or the works they produced.

> The answer to big tech corporations centralizing this is to fund it publically and make it available for free

Yeah but that won’t happen. Even if it does, we need something that works in the meantime.

> You’d only violate copyright if you sell the models or the works they produced

That's not how copyright works. Academia would be able to claim fair use in expensive lawsuits. Hackers and tinkerers would be sued into submission exactly because it's a hobby that they won't risk jail for. People would be scared to work on anything related because of lawsuits threatening them with obscene amounts of money, and hence the retardation of science and the useful arts.

Other countries would leapfrog the US, and it would be left behind, all so that a few people can continue extracting rent with their government-granted monopolies.

Do you see #1 and #3 conflicting at all? Ex: you produce a model, run it, publish and copyright some output. I can then use that as training data for another model in the style of your existing model?

I see that more as a conflict between #1 and #2, but fair point. In extreme cases, you could probably make a crude copy of a model by training a new model solely on the outputs of the first one. Normally that would be a derivative work, but that's inconsistent with the idea that training on copyrighted works is always permissible.

Maybe one way to resolve this would be to say there ought to be some practical limits on what percentage of the training data can be from any one individual source. If I train an model solely on the text of one book, for example, such that it's so overfitted that it can do nothing but regurgitate passages from that book, it's probably fair to call that a derivative work. The same would apply to a model trained solely on output from another model. (Though if it merely incorporates a few examples from a bunch of different models that would be okay.)

> provided the output does not conflict with any preexisting copyright

I think this clause is doing all the work here and unfortunately in many cases there's no quick, automatic way to verify this.

Because of the legal costs involved in litigating who copied whom, I fear this would allow someone to sue the original creator of a work for infringing on the copyrighted output of an AI model trained on that work. If this seems far fetched, consider that this already happens with the DMCA and Creative Commons works: https://www.techdirt.com/2016/04/26/ifpi-files-dmca-takedown...

If you're going to bring up the origin of copyright you also need to consider the world copyright was made for. Back then, there was only one type of copying machine: a printing press. These were huge, expensive machines that could only practically be operated by corporations. Copyright was invented to protect authors from those corporations.

Your point 1 is what concerns me. AI models seem too much like the printing presses of old. They are available mainly to corporations and authors need to be protected from them. Otherwise there will be no incentive for anyone to publish anything novel as they know the corporation will slurp it up and make it "better" with their better model.

> 3. Output of AI models should be copyrightable by the person running the model

i would go further, and declare that this output is uncopyrightable.

Number 3 doesn't really make sense. I wouldn't get copyright if I told a human artist "draw a dog". Why would that change just because I'm telling an AI to do it?

I oversimplified that point a bit for brevity's sake, but I'd say I agree that some level of creative input from the human operator should be required in order for the work to be copyrightable. If I draw a black 100px*100px square in MS paint that's not copyrightable, nor should typing "dog" with a seed of "1" into Stable Diffusion be. But as soon as even the smallest level of creative input is involved, yeah it should be copyrightable.

Also, kinda beside the point, but:

> I wouldn't get copyright if I told a human artist "draw a dog".

If they were working for hire, yeah you absolutely would.

You can get very creative in your instructions to a human, but that creativity still won't get you any copyright.

And afaik, in a work for hire scenario, the artist just agrees to transfer their copyright automatically. If there's no copyright in the first place, there's nothing to transfer

Although I disagree and consider copyright an anti-social institution only necessary due to the anti-social capitalist mode of relations, I commend you for making an actually coherent argument on this question. It is the first coherent argument I've come across outside of the small Marxist circles I run in.