‘Impossible’ to create AI tools like ChatGPT without copyrighted material, OpenAI says::Pressure grows on artificial intelligence firms over the content used to train their products

      • dhork@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        ¿Porque no los dos?

        I don’t understand why people are defending AI companies sucking up all human knowledge by saying “well, yeah, copyrights are too long anyway”.

        Even if we went back to the pre-1976 term of 28 years, renewable once for a total of 56 years, there’s still a ton of recent works that AI are using without any compensation to their creators.

        I think it’s because people are taking this “intelligence” metaphor a bit too far and think if we restrict how the AI uses copyrighted works, that would restrict how humans use them too. But AI isn’t human, it’s just a glorified search engine. At least all standard search engines do is return a link to the actual content. These AI models chew up the content and spit out something based on it. It simply makes sense that this new process should be licensed separately, and I don’t care if it makes some AI companies go bankrupt. Maybe they can work adequate payment for content into their business model going forward.

        • lolcatnip@reddthat.com
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          8 months ago

          I don’t understand why people are defending AI companies

          Because it’s not just big companies that are affected; it’s the technology itself. People saying you can’t train a model on copyrighted works are essentially saying nobody can develop those kinds of models at all. A lot of people here are naturally opposed to the idea that the development of any useful technology should be effectively illegal.

          • BURN@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            You can make these models just fine using licensed data. So can any hobbyist.

            You just can’t steal other people’s creations to make your models.

            • lolcatnip@reddthat.com
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              8 months ago

              Of course it sounds bad when you using the word “steal”, but I’m far from convinced that training is theft, and using inflammatory language just makes me less inclined to listen to what you have to say.

              • BURN@lemmy.world
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                8 months ago

                Training is theft imo. You have to scrape and store the training data, which amounts to copyright violation based on replication. It’s an incredibly simple concept. The model isn’t the problem here, the training data is.

        • AnneBonny@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          8 months ago

          I don’t understand why people are defending AI companies sucking up all human knowledge by saying “well, yeah, copyrights are too long anyway”.

          Would you characterize projects like wikipedia or the internet archive as “sucking up all human knowledge”?

          • assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            Wikipedia is free to the public. OpenAI is more than welcome to use whatever they want if they become free to the public too.

          • MBM@lemmings.world
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            8 months ago

            Does Wikipedia ever have issues with copyright? If you don’t cite your sources or use a copyrighted image, it will get removed

          • dhork@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            In Wikipedia’s case, the text is (well, at least so far), written by actual humans. And no matter what you think about the ethics of Wikipedia editors, they are humans also. Human oversight is required for Wikipedia to function properly. If Wikipedia were to go to a model where some AI crawls the web for knowledge and writes articles based on that with limited human involvement, then it would be similar. But that’s not what they are doing.

            The Internet Archive is on a bit less steady legal ground (see the resent legal actions), but in its favor it is only storing information for archival and lending purposes, and not using that information to generate derivative works which it is then selling. (And it is the lending that is getting it into trouble right now, not the archiving).

            • randon31415@lemmy.world
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              8 months ago

              Wikipedia has had bots writing articles since the 2000 census information was first published. The 2000 census article writing bot was actually the impetus for Wikipedia to make the WP:bot policies.

      • HelloThere@sh.itjust.works
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        8 months ago

        I’m no fan of the current copyright law - the Statute of Anne was much better - but let’s not kid ourselves that some of the richest companies in the world have any desire what so ever to change it.

    • S410@lemmy.ml
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      8 months ago

      Every work is protected by copyright, unless stated otherwise by the author.
      If you want to create a capable system, you want real data and you want a wide range of it, including data that is rarely considered to be a protected work, despite being one.
      I can guarantee you that you’re going to have a pretty hard time finding a dataset with diverse data containing things like napkin doodles or bathroom stall writing that’s compiled with permission of every copyright holder involved.

  • S410@lemmy.ml
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    8 months ago

    They’re not wrong, though?

    Almost all information that currently exists has been created in the last century or so. Only a fraction of all that information is available to be legally acquired for use and only a fraction of that already small fraction has been explicitly licensed using permissive licenses.

    Things that we don’t even think about as “protected works” are in fact just that. Doesn’t matter what it is: napkin doodles, writings on bathrooms stall walls, letters written to friends and family. All of those things are protected, unless stated otherwise. And, I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen a license notice attached to a napkin doodle.

    Now, imagine trying to raise a child while avoiding every piece of information like that; information that you aren’t licensed to use. You wouldn’t end up with a person well suited to exist in the world. They’d lack education regarding science, technology, they’d lack understanding of pop-culture, they’d know no brand names, etc.

    Machine learning models are similar. You can train them that way, sure, but they’d be basically useless for real-world applications.