Comment by AnIrishDuck
2 years ago
Generative AI. Anything that can create detailed content out of a broad / short prompt. This currently means diffusion for images, large language models for text. That may change as multi-modality and other developments play out in this space.
This capability is clearly different from the examples you list.
Just because there may be no precise engineering definition does not mean that we cannot arrive at a suitable legal/political definition. The ability to create new content out of whole cloth is quite separate from filters, cropping, and generic "pre-AI" image post-processing. Ditto for spellcheck and word processors for text.
The line actually is pretty clear here.
How do you expect to regulate this and prove generative models were used? What stops a company from purchasing art from a third party where they receive a photo from a prompt, where that company isn't US based?
> How do you expect to regulate this and prove generative models were used?
Disseminating or creating copies of content derived from generative models without attribution would open that actor up to some form of liability. There's no need for onerous regulation here.
The burden of proof should probably lie upon whatever party would initiate legal action. I am not a lawyer, and won't speculate further on how that looks. The broad existing (and severely flawed!) example of copyright legislation seems instructive.
All I'll opine is that the main goal here isn't really to prevent Jonny Internet from firing up llama to create a reddit bot. It's to incentivize large commercial and political interests to disclose their usage of generative AI. Similar to current copyright law, the fear of legal action should be sufficient to keep these parties compliant if the law is crafted properly.
> What stops a company from purchasing art from a third party where they receive a photo from a prompt, where that company isn't US based?
Not really sure why the origin of the company(s) in question is relevant here. If they distribute generative content without attribution, they should be liable. Same as if said "third party" gave them copyright-violating content.
EDIT: I'll take this as an opportunity to say that the devil is in the details and some really crappy legislation could arise here. But I'm not convinced by the "It's not possible!" and "Where's the line!?" objections. This clearly is doable, and we have similar legal frameworks in place already. My only additional note is that I'd much prefer we focus on problems and questions like this, instead of the legislative capture path we are currently barrelling down.
> It's to incentivize large commercial and political interests to disclose their usage of generative AI.
You would be okay allowing small businesses exception from this regulation but not large businesses? Fine. As a large business I'll have a mini subsidiary operate the models and exempt myself from the regulation.
I still fail to see what the benefit this holds is. Why do you care if something is generative? We already have laws against libal and against false advertising.
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This is a ridiculous proposal, and obviously not doable. Such a law can't be written in a way that complies with First Amendment protections and the vagueness doctrine.
It's a silly thing to want anyway. What matters is whether the content is legal or not; the tool used is irrelevant. Centuries ago some authoritarians raised similar concerns over printing presses.
And copyright is an entirely separate issue.
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> The burden of proof should probably lie upon whatever party would initiate legal action. I am not a lawyer, and won't speculate further on how that looks.
You're proposing a law. How does it work?
Who even initiates the proceeding? For copyright this is generally the owner of the copyrighted work alleged to be infringed. For AI-generated works that isn't any specific party, so it would presumably be the government.
But how is the government, or anyone, supposed to prove this? The reason you want it to be labeled is for the cases where you can't tell. If you could tell you wouldn't need it to be labeled, and anyone who wants to avoid labeling it could do so only in the cases where it's hard to prove, which are the only cases where it would be of any value.
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