AI companies have all kinds of arguments against paying for copyrighted content

There are no principles involved when companies advocate for or against things. Companies will always amorally argue for whatever makes them more money. They are entirely capable of arguing two opposing viewpoints if in one context viewpoint A makes them money and in another context opposite-viewpoint B makes them money. Being consistent, either logically, morally, ethically, or in principle, is not necessary.

"Copyright is good and necessary when it makes us money, and copyright is bad and wrong when it doesn't make us money" is a mundane and totally expected opinion coming from a corporation.

Ultimately information has to come from somewhere. If something has no information about what a "car" is, it cannot paint a car more successfully than a random guess. When you draw a car or write an algorithm to do so, you'll be slightly affected by the existing car designs you've seen. It's not a limitation specific to AI - it's just more obscured for humans since there's no explicit searchable database of all the cars you've glanced at.

Whether it was affected by (and dependant on in aggregate) prior work is not the standard for copyright infringement, and I'd claim would implicate essentially all action as infringement. Instead, it should be judged by whether there's substantial similarity - and if there is substantial similarity, then by the factors of fair use.

No, AI art would exist without Disney or HBO just like human art would.

It literally does come back to the idea that either AI is doing more or less the same thing as an art student, and learns styles and structures and concepts, in which case training an art student is infringing because it’s completely dependent on the work of artists who came before.

And sure, if you ask a skilled 2d artist if they can draw something in the style of 80s anime, or specific artists, they can do it. There are some artists who specialize in this in fact! Can’t have retro anime porn commissions if it’s not riffing on retro anime images. Yes twitter, I see what you do with that account when you’re not complaining about AI.

The problem is that AI lowers the cost of doing this to zero, and thus lays bare the inherent contradictions of IP law and “intellectual ownership” in a society where everyone is diffusing and mashing up each others ideas and works on a continuous basis. It is one of those “everyone does it” crimes that mostly survives because it’s utterly unenforced at scale, apart from a few noxious litigants like disney.

It is the old Luddite problem - the common idea that luddites just hated technology is inaccurate. They were textile workers who were literally seeing their livelihoods displaced by automation mass-producing what they saw as inferior goods. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

In general this is a problem that's set up by capitalism itself though. Ideas can’t and shouldn’t be owned, it is an absurd premise and you shouldn’t be surprised that you get absurd results. Making sure people can eat is not the job of capitalism, it’s the job of safety nets and governments. Ideas have no cost of replication and artificially creating one is distorting and destructive.

Would a neural net put a tax on neurons firing? No, that’s stupid and counterproductive.

Let people write their slash fiction in peace.

(HN probably has a good understanding of it, but in general people don't appreciate just how much it is not just aping images it's seen but learning the style and relationships of pixels and objects etc. To wit, the only thing NVIDIA saved from DLSS 1.0 was the model... and DLSS 2.0 has nothing to do with DLSS 1.0 in terms of technical approach. But the model encodes all the contextual understanding of how pixels are supposed to look in human images, even if it's not even doing the original transform anymore! And LLMs can indeed generalize reasonably accurately about things they haven't seen, as long as they know the precepts etc. Because they aren't "just guessing what word comes next", it's the word that comes next given a conceptual understanding of the underlying ideas. And that's a difficult thing to draw a line between a human and an AI large model, college students will "riff on the things they know" if you ask them to "generalize" about a topic they haven't studied too, etc.)

AI outputs should be regulated, of course. Obviously impersonation and copyright law already applies to AI systems. But a discussion on training inputs is entirely novel to man and our laws, and it's a very nuanced and important topic. And as AI advances, it becomes increasingly difficult because of the diminishing distinction between "organic" learning and "artificial" learning. As well as when stopping AI from — as an example — learning from research papers means we miss out on life-saving medication. Where do property rights conflict with human rights?

They're important conversations to have, but you've destroyed the opportunity to have them from the starting gun.

To avoid IP law causing more damage than it already has with evergreening of medical patents, I think it strictly has to be the generation of substantially similar media that counts as infringement, as the comment you're replying to suggests - not just "this tumor detector was pretrained on a large number of web images before task-specific fine-tuning, so it's illegal because they didn't pay Getty beforehand" if training were to be infringement.

authorship in many fields is well defined.. this comment slips into nonsense territory, whatever the view or jurisdiction regarding copyright laws

For example, if a college professor reads a book, and then uses the knowledge gained to teach, that reduces the value of the book (assuming the professor doesn't then use the book as the textbook for a course).

I was wrong about it being legal, however, and there are ongoing lawsuits.

Meanwhile, the lawsuit against Midjourney for training on copyrighted work is going... not that great[0]. The judge is paring down a lot of the arguments in the lawsuit.

The actual idea behind using copyright to stop AI is that if we give copyright owners of trained-on works the ability to veto that training, then we can just "stop AI". The problem is that most artists don't actually get to own their work. Publishers own the work, it's the first thing you have to bargain away in order to work with a publisher. So they're going to look at their vast dragon's horde of work, most of which isn't particularly profitable to them, and license it out to OpenAI, Stability, MidJourney, or whoever at pennies on the dollar because at their scale that becomes a pretty big deal.

To the publishers salivating over generative AI, this cost is not a big deal, because they already spend shittons on writers. So if your goal is to stop worker replacement, just adding a cost to that replacement isn't a good idea. Actually making it illegal or prohibited to actually replace workers with AI is the way to go.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/judge-pares-down-ar...