Why The New York Times might win its copyright lawsuit against OpenAI::The AI community needs to take copyright lawsuits seriously.
Why The New York Times might win its copyright lawsuit against OpenAI::The AI community needs to take copyright lawsuits seriously.
You don’t have to agree. It’s a value judgement. What is important to you? There is no correct answer.
My conviction is that property is mainly a means to an end. That end is human well-being, but if you pressed me on what exactly that means, I’d start flailing.
You can believe that intellectual property is fundamentally important. Mind that what you think of as intellectual property is probably broader/different from copyright in law. You can say that enforcing this kind of property right is an end in itself, that justifies the terrible consequences. Small artists would get shafted one way or the other.
And ideally they wouldn’t. Letting AI companies take as they please is one part of that, therefore it should be stopped.
Injustice is such a frustrating thing. But when the opposing party has trillions of dollars and you draw in your free time there’s literally nothing you can do. So much for equality.
That’s a result of your values. Your views on property are incompatible with equality.
You made the assumption that I do not care if my writings are used for AI training but I actually do. I like it. I like knowing that I helped other people. I feel the same way about taxes, but this is better since it does not cost me anything.
This may be too long but here’s a quick overview of what your views on property mean for small artists.
Per Google, Getty Images’ archive is the largest privately-owned photographic archive in the world, containing over 130 million images dating back to the beginning of photography and beyond. Unsurprisingly, Getty is suing over AI.
How many images does your small artist own? A few dozen? A few hundred?
So when your small artist gets a few dollars, Getty gets many millions. Of course, they won’t be getting the same per image. Getty can pay lawyers millions to negotiate and there will still be many millions left in profit. Your small artist can’t do that. Even the negotiation would cost more than their images are worth. They can only upload to their images to Adobe or Shutterstock and accept whatever they are given.
Even the most selfless non-profit would have to take a big chunk just to handle the cost of running the website, dealing with copyright infringement, bad quality images, “naughty” images, track payment information, handle the money,… But why should they be selfless? After all, the website is basically their property.
Now we reach the point where it gets bad.
Remember that the rent for these images does not create anything of value. No one is paid to make anything new. Money is transferred to property owners, because they own property. It ends up mainly with rich people, because they own so much property. Much of the money for “small artists” is wasted on bureaucracy. A good chunk also ends up with rich people, because middle men are unavoidable.
Since we are mainly transferring and not creating wealth, it must come from somewhere. It comes from subscription fees for AI services. It can’t come from anywhere else, right?
For example, a subscription for Photoshop has to include these fees. What Photoshop calls generative fill is genAI.
Now riddle me this: Who pays subscriptions for Photoshop?
Ah, my favourite argument.
“Clothing brands are using slavery to produce clothes.”
- “They ought to be produced sustainably!”
“Who’s going to pay for that?”
Perhaps generative AI models, as they currently exist, are too good to be true.
If they can only afford to pay individual artists pennies, perhaps it is something that shouldn’t be taken. If those artists are happy for their work to contribute to someone else’s MRR scheme then they should be free to submit their work wherever, or tag it with something.
I don’t care what Getty Images gets paid. I don’t know how the licensing works for that platform, but Getty doesn’t make all of its own images and those photographers and artists who contribute ought to be compensated in turn.
If that makes the work infeasible, so be it.
But if that’s a system that gets implemented now then the existing companies would have an insurmountable headstart. Should they be forced to completely wipe their work?
And Getty shouldn’t be making money off pictures from the 1800s. I agree with that too.
And I understand no “value is generated” by paying property owners. I guess you should give your books away to people on the street since the value has already been created by writing them and there’s no more point in selling them.
Not literally, of course. But if individual artists don’t make any money and/or reputation off their already made work they won’t be able to continue “generating new value”, I guess they’ll have to find some office job, or head out to the not-yet-automated mines.
It’s a shit situation which is profiting off a free and open internet. An internet which is slowly closing itself off further and further.
And I think, with all due respect, you’re misguided for being happy to contribute to your own replacement. If you sell your books on Amazon; Amazon is getting flooded with AI generated books, making it even more difficult for yours to stand out in the sea of regurgitated garbage. Maybe you personally have a system for getting around that, not everybody does. Alternatively you don’t rely on the income of your books, but at that point why bother publishing at all? Might as well send them directly to OpenAI or whomever.
Edit: Oh, better yet, because I just ran into it: Getty/Adobe Stock licensing you generated images! I’d laugh if it didn’t make me want to cry.
If that’s not what you want, you really should think about what you support.
Your ideas mean that wealth must be transferred to property owners. This wealth has to come from somewhere. It must be created through work.
Wealth is taken from workers and given to owners. That’s what you are demanding.
Where images are concerned, wealth must go from artists to owners.
Thank you for reading my post, only responding to a single point, and making a strawman of the rest of my argument.
Why do I even bother.
Enjoy replacing yourself.