Comment by dist-epoch
3 years ago
Remember when the music industry tried to use technology to stop music pirating?
This will work about as well...
Oh, I forget, fighting music pirating was considered an evil thing to do on HN. "pirating is not stealing, is copyright infringement", right? Unlike training neural nets on internet content which of course is "stealing".
FWIW, you're the only use of the word "steal" in this comment thread.
Many people would in fact argue that training AI on people's art without permission is copyright infringement, since the thing it (according to detractors) does is infringe copyright by generating knockoffs of people's work.
You will see some people use the term "stealing" but they're usually referring to how these AIs are sold/operated by for-profit companies that want to make money off artists' work without compensating them. I think it's not unreasonable to call that "stealing" even if the legal definition doesn't necessarily fit 100%.
The music industry is also not really a very good comparison point for independent artists... there is no Big Art equivalent that has a stranglehold on the legislature and judiciary like the RIAA/MPAA do.
The difference is that “pirating” is mostly done by individuals for private use, whereas training is mostly done by megacorporations looking to make more money.
A more apt comparison is sampling.
AI is sampling other's works.
Musicians can and do sample. They also obtain clearance for commercial works, pay royalties if required, AND credit the samples if required.
AI "art" does none of that.
Musicians overwhelmingly do not even attempt to clear samples. This also isn't a great comparison since samples are taken directly out of the audio, not turned into a part of a pattern used to generate new sounds like what AI generators do with images
Commercial musicians do not?
You sure about that?
Entire legal firm empires have been built on the licensing, negotiations, and fees that make up the industry.
I'm ain't talking about some dude on YouTube or Soundcloud. Few people care about some rando on Soundcloud. Those moles aren't big enough to whack. Vanilla Ice and MC Hammer were. OpenAI is as well.
There's even a company that specializes in sample clearance: https://sampleclearance.com
More info: https://www.soundonsound.com/sound-advice/sample-clearance
Also:
>not turned into a part of a pattern used to generate new sounds like what AI generators do with images
This is demonstrably false. Multiple individuals have repeatedly been able to extract original images from AI generators.
Here's one-- Extracting Training Data from Diffusion Models https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.13188
Text, too: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.17035