I’m starting to think commercial AI should be banned. if the only way to make useful models is by ingesting human culture, then all humans should benefit from it without having to pay to have that culture shat back out in response to a prompt.
i disagree. IP laws have more or less handled humans stealing ideas from humans for commercial gain. not perfectly by any means… but both the scale an impunity and frankly the entitlement exhibited by these GenAI companies is on another level.
no matter how many times people make the argument that AIs are just “doing what humans do”, it fails to sway me. an AI copying, ingesting and tokenizing other people’s intellectual property is nothing like a human watching a video or hearing a song and creating something based upon or derived from it. a database backed algorithm does nothing even remotely like a human mind. it’s using software to process and regurgitate the works of others, and that is pretty plainly IP theft.
I’m not saying the process is exactly the same but conceptually it’s quite similar. Humans don’t create original ideas. They build on what came before. Maybe a truly brilliant artist or inventor adds 1% new ideas. That’s not enough to justify the extremely broad ownership of ideas that exists in our society. These laws implicitly assume that ideas were created from nothing through the sheer brilliance of the creator. Pure nonsense.
Humans have been freely copying each other for millions of years. It’s how we built everything we have. Ideas and art were not meant to be owned. The very concept of owning something non-physical is violent and authoritarian in nature. Without physical possession, the only way IP laws can be enforced is a global police empire, which the US has successfully created for its own enrichment at the expense of the global poor.
So in that context, the fact that AI is borrowing human ideas and then profiting from it doesn’t bother me any more than that humans do the same thing.
IP laws have more or less handled humans stealing ideas from humans for commercial gain. not perfectly by any means…
“Until author’s death + 70 years”… not perfectly, is WAY of an understatement.
an AI copying, ingesting and tokenizing other people’s intellectual property is nothing like a human watching a video or hearing a song and creating something based upon or derived from it. a database backed algorithm does nothing even remotely like a human mind. it’s using software to process and regurgitate the works of others, and that is pretty plainly IP theft.
Wrong. There is no database of the training data in the model that “regurgitates” abstracted concepts from it.
Sure, but the argument isn’t “should we ban work that is based on the study of past cultural creation” it’s “we should prevent computational/corporate exploitation of past cultural creation in order to protect the interests of humans.”
Companies use pirated content: line go up! 📈
Everyday people use pirated content: STRAIGHT TO JAIL!
If companies were really treated like people, they’d be in jail right now - at least in the US. But they wouldn’t come out reformed, just beaten and bruised, ready to commit more crimes.
The point of treating companies like people is so no one in those companies can be held accountable. The worst case for them that the intangible “coorporation” did something wrong and now it has to go away, so the entire board moves to a new company under a new name that owns the same properties and has the same practices. Only now they have practice obfuscating their crimes.
What ends lives and careers for people are just a minor inconvinience to coorporations.
Surprise!
Hehe we do a little scraping
The funny thing is that Google can’t make a big fuss about it without screwing themselves when they are inevitably sued for the same thing.
