Thousands of authors demand payment from AI companies for use of copyrighted works | CNN Business
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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.

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.

  • dystop@lemmy.worldEnglish
    112·
    1 year ago

    There’s a difference between a sapient creature drawing inspiration and a glorified autocomplete using copyrighted text to produce sentences which are only cogent due to substantial reliance upon those copyrighted texts.

    But the AI is looking at thousands, if not millions of books, articles, comments, etc. That’s what humans do as well - they draw inspiration from a variety of sources. So is sentience the distinguishing criteria for copyright? Only a being capable of original thought can create original work, and therefore anything not capable of original thought cannot create copyrighted work?

    Also, irrelevant here but calling LLMs a glorified autocomplete is like calling jet engines a “glorified horse”. Technically true but you’re trivialising it.

    • tenitchyfingers@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      Yes. Creative work is made by creative people. Writing is creative work. A computer cannot be creative, and thus generative AI is a disgusting perversion of what you wanna call “literature”. Fuck, writing and art have always been primarily about self-expression. Computers can’t express themselves with original thoughts. That’s the whole entire point. And this is why humanistic studies are important, by the way.

      • Methylman@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        I absolutely agree with the second half, guided by Ian Kerr’s paper “Death of the AI Author”; quoting from the abstract:

        Claims of AI authorship depend on a romanticized conception of both authorship and AI, and simply do not make sense in terms of the realities of the world in which the problem exists. Those realities should push us past bare doctrinal or utilitarian considerations about what an author must do. Instead, they demand an ontological consideration of what an author must be.

        I think the part courts will struggle with is if this ‘thing’ is not an author of the works then it can’t infringe either?

    • pandacoder@lemmy.worldEnglish
      33·
      1 year ago

      The trivialization doesn’t negate the point though, and LLMs aren’t intelligence.

      The AI consumed all of that content and I would bet that not a single of the people who created the content were compensated, but the AI strictly on those people to produce anything coherent.

      I would argue that yes, generative artificial stupidity doesn’t meet the minimum bar of original thought necessary to create a standard copyrightable work unless every input has consent to be used, and laundering content through multiple generations of an LLM or through multiple distinct LLMs should not impact the need for consent.

      Without full consent, it’s just a massive loophole for those with money to exploit the hard work of the masses who generated all of the actual content.