donuts

At any rate, if you train your NN using appropriately licensed or public domain data, more power to you. But if you feed a machine a bunch of other people’s writing, artwork, music, etc., please understand that you will never truly own the output.

I am.

It is only the profit maximizing hyper capitalists who intend to use AI to exploit workers and rip off artists. I have no problem with the technology behind AI, I just don’t think people should be using it as a tool for continual, industrialized mass exploitation of the little people (like you and me) who actually own the data that they put online.

I was wrong to use the dismissive term “AI bots”. I’m genuinely sorry about that and I let my feelings as an artist get the best of me, but other than that my point still stands. To be fair, “you’re wrong” and “shut up” aren’t exactly the strongest counter arguments either. No hard feelings.

The objective truth is that “AI” neural networks synthesize an output based on an input dataset. There is no creativity, personality artistry or other x-factor there, and until there is real “general artificial intelligence” there never will be. Human beings feed inputs into the machine, and they generate an output based on some subset of those inputs. If those inputs are “fair use” or otherwise licensed, then that’s perfectly fine. But if those inputs are unlicensed copyrighted works, then you would be insane to believe that you own the output that the algorithm produces–that’s like thinking you own the music that comes out of your speakers because you hit the play button. Just because you’re in control of the playback does not mean that you created the music, and nobody would seriously think that.

I’ve worked as an artist and a programmer, and a simple analogy is the concept of a software license. Just because you can see or download some source code on GitLab does not mean that you own it or can use it freely for any purpose; most code repositories are open sourced under some kind of license, which legitimate users of that code must comply with. We’ve already seen Microsoft make this mistake and then instantly backtrack with Github Copilot, because they understand that they simply do not have the IP rights to use GPL code (for one example) to train their AI. Similarly, if a musician samples a portion of a song to use in their own song, depending on various factors they may have to share credit with the original creator, and sometimes that make sense, in my opinion.

No matter how you or I feel about it, copyright law has always been there with the basic intent to protect people who create unique works. There are some circumstances which are currently considered “fair use” of unlicensed copyrighted works (for example, for educational purposes), and I think that’s great. But I think there is zero argument that unlimited automated content generation via AI ought to be considered genuine fair use. No matter how much AI fans want to try to personify the technology, it is not engaging in a creative or artistic process, it is merely synthesizing an output based on mixed inputs, just like how an AI chat bot is not truly thinking but merely stringing words together.

You do realize individuals can train neural networks on their own hardware, right?

Good luck training something that rivals big tech, especially now that they’re all putting “moats” around their data…

We, the little people, don’t have the data, the storage, the processing power, the RAM, and least but not least, the cash, to compete with them.

At any rate, if you train your NN using appropriately licensed or public domain data, more power to you. But if you feed a machine a bunch of other people’s writing, artwork, music, etc., please understand that you will never truly own the output.

You seem to be imagining a future in which AI is the great equalizer that ushers us in to some kind of utopia, but right now I’m only seeing even more money, power and control being clawed away from the people in favor of the biggest, richest tech conglomerates. It’s fucking dystopian, and I hope people like you will recognize that before it’s really too late.

Wrong. Copyright protects works, not ideas.

The part that you AI bots always forget is that the machine doesn’t do shit without a dataset. No data input, no output. And if you don’t own the inputs, what the hell makes you think you can claim ownership over the outputs?

If you ask an AI art program to paint you a “pretty kitty cat”, it can only do so because it has been fed enough pictures and paintings (plus metadata) to synthesize an acceptable output. Your human intent is an insignificant filter over their data, and if they haven’t trained on any pictures of cats, you will never achieve anything even close to your intent. Your prompt has the value of a Google search.

Finally, there is a key thing called the “artistic process” in which a human artist imagined vision of their finished work takes shape as they work. This is nothing like what happens under a neutral network, and it is why you are never going to be an artist simply by filling in a web form. You have no vision, and even if you did, the AI will never achieve it on your behalf.

Sorry, but if AI art sounds too good to be true, it’s because it is simply exploiting and distorting other people’s copyrighted artwork. It gives you the illusion of having created something, like the kid mashing buttons at the arcade machine without putting any money in. But the good news is that it’s not too late to learn how to draw.

AI has no personal agency, lived experiences, or independent creative input.
Humans don’t have the ability to synthesize thousands of pages of text in a matter of minutes.

Any analogy toward human learning or behavior is shallow and flawed.

Not at all… In fact, it’s totally batshit insane to determine that the biggest tech companies in the world can freely use anybody’s copyrighted data or intellectual property to train an AI and then claim to have ownership over the output.

The only way that it makes sense to have AI training be “fair use” is if the output of AI is not able to be copyrighted or commercially used, and that’s not the case here. This decision will only enable a mass, industrialized exploitation of workers, artists and creators.