mfryd

longfang said:

mfryd said:

designguybrown said:

Meh. Seems emotional and sentimental. If you are placing your content on the web, you are practically posting it on the street for general view with absurd hopes of pennies trickling in on some desperate fancy rather than through proper business channels with an effective strategy of legally protecting and promoting yourself - childish. Most people who do such art that they may avoid other types of structured paid work - what do they expect when they treat their skill set as a hobby - likely not wanting to work for others on a structured gig - if that's even around much? What's even the issue here - not getting a piece of the trifling leavings of scrapers and edu-content pedlars? pedantic. Art needs to stop being a vague creation-vocation of the rando people and grow up. Successful society is based on complex businesses and legal structures requiring serious people acting seriously. Creativity is a real skill and needs focused training and  a hierarchy of knowledgeable people to propagate it through society. Sorry, but I have little symp for the dilettantes and dabblers hoping to otherwise avoid the soulless cubicle, construction site, and assembly line.

It's not that simple.  The AI companies are scraping material that isn't on the web.  They are scanning and scraping printed books.  They are scraping copyrighted movies.   

They are scraping the copyrighted works of artists who earn their living licensing their work.

Would it be okay then if the scrapping were done via the AI’s “eyes” aka camera reading a physical book?

designguybrown said:

Meh. Seems emotional and sentimental. If you are placing your content on the web, you are practically posting it on the street for general view with absurd hopes of pennies trickling in on some desperate fancy rather than through proper business channels with an effective strategy of legally protecting and promoting yourself - childish. Most people who do such art that they may avoid other types of structured paid work - what do they expect when they treat their skill set as a hobby - likely not wanting to work for others on a structured gig - if that's even around much? What's even the issue here - not getting a piece of the trifling leavings of scrapers and edu-content pedlars? pedantic. Art needs to stop being a vague creation-vocation of the rando people and grow up. Successful society is based on complex businesses and legal structures requiring serious people acting seriously. Creativity is a real skill and needs focused training and  a hierarchy of knowledgeable people to propagate it through society. Sorry, but I have little symp for the dilettantes and dabblers hoping to otherwise avoid the soulless cubicle, construction site, and assembly line.

22july2013 said:

ATLMacFan1 said:

22july2013 said:

If everyone who writes a comment on this page will send a fee to Dr Seuss for learning from his books to read and speak, then I will pay attention to their views if they oppose AI learning from published sources. But if you aren't willing to pay everyone that you learn from, for every word that comes out of your mouth, then I don't see why AI should have to pay either. Next, are we going to charge aliens for learning English by reading the radio waves that are being sent into deep space?

Somehow you’ve convinced yourself that AI is sentient and learning from influences. It’s not. It has a database of pirated data that it uses to essentially copy/paste responses from.

By no means do I think AI is sentient. Stop putting words in my mouth. Also, I do not believe that sentience absolves an entity from paying fees for using data that it has absorbed from other beings, as you seem to be implying there. And I totally disagree with your explanation of AI. It is not a "copy" of data. In fact, every single time I use AI to get some data, it ALWAYS goes to the internet to look things up, because it hasn't "memorized the internet" as simpletons think it has.

Up until now, the courts have been the entity that decides whether a "work" that has been "used for profit" has "infringed" on someone else's work. That's a perfectly valid system for going forward. AI doesn't change anything here. If anyone uses AI to write a plagiarized work, then the persons who benefit from that plagiarization should be suable. But we shouldn't stop AI from creating fair use derivatives of other people's work, just as you shouldn't be sued for writing a song that sounds vaguely similar to an ABBA song. If you can take advantage of "fair use", then so can other people who use AI for the same thing. After all, half the videos on Youtube are taking advantage of fair use laws, by using someone else's video or audio.

danox said:

mfryd said:

It's a complicated topic.

There are good points on both sides of the training question.  On one hand, AI programs are being trained based on the hard work of previous human artists.  The AI companies are profiting, but the original artists get nothing. 

On the other hand, the AI is not doing anything new.  It's common for individuals to study the work of others, and use that study to inform their work.  When interviewed, great directors often discuss how they have studied the works of great directors to learn their techniques and style.  The AI programs are simply really good at this.

My understanding, is that an art student can study the works of a current artist, and produce new works in that style.   I don't believe an artist's style is protectable by copyright.  What an artist can't do, is to produce work that is essentially a copy of an existing copyrighted work, or that contains copyrighted elements (including copyrighted characters).  An artist also has to be careful that work done in someone else's style is not represented as being that artist's work.  If I were to write a book in the style of Dr. Seuss, I would need to make it very clear that the book was *not* a work by Dr. Seuss. 

Copyright allows control over making copies of a creative work.  It does not allow control over works that were "inspired" by a copyrighted piece.

An issue with current AI, is that it doesn't understand the limitations of copyright law, and can sometimes produce results that would typically be considered copyright infringement.  

It's going to take a while to sort out what rights various parties should have.   There is more than one reasonable way to resolve the legal issues.  It will be interesting to see how Congress and the courts resolve these issues.

Disclaimer: I am not an attorney, and this is not legal advice.  It is merely my imperfect understanding of some of the issues.

AI can’t think and it can’t reason and because of that it knows no limitations today, however one day it will, but that day is decades away, but that does not mean you should get to scrape all of the copyrighted material since 1920 at your leisure but the protected class gets to do so.