Thousands of authors demand payment from AI companies for use of copyrighted works::Thousands of published authors are requesting payment from tech companies for the use of their copyrighted works in training artificial intelligence tools, marking the latest intellectual property critique to target AI development.
Typically the argument has been “a robot can’t make transformative works because it’s a robot.” People think our brains are special when in reality they are just really lossy.
Even if you buy that premise, the output of the robot is only superficially similar to the work it was trained on, so no copyright infringement there, and the training process itself is done by humans, and it takes some tortured logic to deny the technology’s transformative nature
Go ask ChatGPT for the lyrics of a song and then tell me, that’s transformative work when it outputs the exact lyrics.
Well, they’re fixing that now. I just asked chatgpt to tell me the lyrics to stairway to heaven and it replied with a brief description of who wrote it and when, then said here are the lyrics: It stopped 3 words into the lyrics.
In theory as long as it isn’t outputting the exact copyrighted material, then all output should be fair use. The fact that it has knowledge of the entire copyrighted material isn’t that different from a human having read it, assuming it was read legally.
Go ask a human for the lyrics of a song and then tell me that’s transformative work.
Oh wait, no one would say that. This is why the discussion with non-technical people goes into the weeds.
