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Comment by chx | Hacker News Reader

> I firmly believe that training models qualifies as fair use

There's a hell lot of money to be made from this belief so of course the HN crowd will hold it.

Some of us here who have been around the copyright hustle for a little longer laugh at this bitterly and pray that the courts and/or Doctorow's activism saves us. But there's so much money to be made from automatized plagiarism and the forces against are so weak, the hope is not much.

The world will be a much, much poorer place once all the artists this view exploits will stop making art because they need to make a living.

See https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1744422377113501998 and https://i.imgur.com/zOOcPCi.jpg

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> There's a hell lot of money to be made from this belief so of course the HN crowd will hold it.

That is a pretty unfair response when you're skipping the part about how commercializing should not be fair use.

I literally met and worked with Doctorow on a protest back in 2005, so I'm not exactly new to this. I also think that the only way you could have written your comment was by grossly misinterpreting my comment.

I hope the idea of Intellectual Property as a whole is thrown out the window and copyright with it.

Generative models are just a tool. Artists are mad because this tool empowers other people, who they view as less talented, to make art too.

The camera and 1-hour film developing didn’t destroy oil paintings, it just enabled more people to have control over what was on their walls.

No, I have to disagree here. I'm not an artist, but I respect the creations of others. OpenAI does not. They could have trained on free data, but it did not want to because it would cost more (finding humans to find/sanction said data, etc).

>Generative models are just a tool.

Sure. It's just a tool. That need other people's art to work.

If it's "just a tool" in and of itself, then there's no problem keeping it away from other people's art.

>The camera and 1-hour film developing didn’t destroy oil paintings

Because the copyright laws were extended to include photographic reproduction of art as something you need to obtain a permission (and a license) for.

The same needs to happen for generative AI.

A photocopy machine is just a tool too. So is the printing press.

> Sure. It's just a tool. That need other people's art to work.

So does a human brain.

Which brings us to the other side of the reasoning is that tools like Midjourney and OpenAI enable idiots (when it comes to drawing/animating ... that includes me) to create engaging artwork.

Recently generating artwork like that went from almost impossible to "great, but easily recognizeable as AI artwork". Frankly, I expect the discussion will end when it stops being recognizeable.

I hate Andreesen Horowitz' reasoning, but they're right about one thing: once we have virtual artists that are not easy to distinguish from "real" ones, the discussion will end. It does not really matter what anyone's opinion on the matter is as it will not make a difference in the end.

> So does a human brain.

A major difference between a human training himself by looking at art, and a computer doing it, is that the human ends up working for himself, the computer is owned by some billionaire.

One enhances the creative potential of humanity as a whole, the other consolidates it in the hands of the already-powerful.

Another major difference is that a human can't use that knowledge to mass-produce that art at a scale that will put other artists in the poorhouse. The computer can.

Copyright exists to benefit humanity as a whole... And frankly, I see no reason for why a neural network's output should be protected by copyright. Only humans can produce copyrightable works, and a prompt is not a sufficient creative input.

No, the beneficiaries of generative AI are the users because they set the prompt and use the outputs. Providers make cents per million tokens. It is a people empowerment technology.

Right, and sharecroppers are the empowered ones in the relationship with their landlords.

Utterly ridiculous.

Visual artists cannot create without tools. Whether that tool is a brush and paint, a camera, or a neural network.

Whether an artist pays for a subscription to openAI or buys paint pots on Amazon.com money is going to a billionaire, it is not a difference between ai and other art.

You are also ignoring the existence of non-commercial open source AI, they exist.

Regarding copyright, we copyright output not input. Otherwise most photography would be uncopyrightable.

There's a substantive difference in whether the artist is using the tool, or the tool works on its own. A paintbrush doesn't produce a painting by itself, a human needs to apply an incredibly specialized creative skillset, in conjunction with the paintbrush to do so.

An LLM takes a prompt and produces a painting. No sane person would say that I 'drew' the painting in question, even if I provided the prompt.

> Regarding copyright, we copyright output not input. Otherwise most photography would be uncopyrightable.

We copyright things that require creative input. A list of facts or definitions did not require creative input, and is therefore not copyrightable.

Using an LLM does not meet the bar for creative input.

> There's a substantive difference in whether the artist is using the tool, or the tool works on its own. A paintbrush doesn't produce a painting by itself, a human needs to apply an incredibly specialized creative skillset, in conjunction with the paintbrush to do so.

That sounds like a kinder restatement of the opinion at the top of the thread: "Artists are mad because this tool empowers other people, who they view as less talented, to make art too."

Artists might not like the phrasing, but scratch the surface and there's a degree of truth there. It's an argument from self-interest, at core.

One small nitpick: It is completely possible for an artist to make all of their own tools, and indeed for the majority of history that is exactly how things went.

But today the artist that can also create a robust version of photoshop on their own doesn’t really exist. Maybe some can write code to that level but certainly not a majority and it’s certainly not the same as sanding wood to make a paintbrush.

Ok, here's a pile of sand, the goal is 1. a computer and 2. an AI to run on it. Go!

(spoiler: bootstrapping yourself up the tech tree gets progressively harder)

> I see no reason for why a neural network's output should be protected by copyright. Only humans can produce copyrightable works, and a prompt is not a sufficient creative input.

Your brain is a neural network, just FYI.

A privileged one, compared to one made of silicon, in the eyes of the law.

If you graduated from school and only used work that was public domain, would you have all the knowledge you currently have? Have you learned anything from anybody since graduating?

Where is the line? It’s ok for humans to learn from others work but not a machine?

It is NOT okay for machine owner to profit from learning, unless the machine owner compensates the owners of the training data. That is where the line should be drawn.

>Where is the line? It’s ok for humans to learn from others work but not a machine?

Yes.

The machine doesn't get to make its own choices. Once it does, we'll have a different conversations.

Presently, humans decide what goes into the training set, and what comes out. Those humans are the ones that we need to regulate.

Hot take: The LLM is learning as much as a ZIP file is learning.

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