Comment by sshine
1 day ago
It’s great that you have sympathy for illustrators, but I don’t see a big difference if the training data is a novel, a picture, a song, a piece of code, or even a piece of legal text.
As my mom retired from being a translator, she went from typewriter to machine-assisted translation with centralised corpus-databases. All the while the available work became less and less, and the wages became lower and lower.
In the end, the work we do that is heavily robotic will be done by less expensive robots.
Here’s the argument:
The output of her translations had no copyright. Language developed independently of translators.
The output of artists has copyright. Artists shape the space in which they’re generating output.
The fear now is that if we no longer have a market where people generate novel arts, that space will stagnate.
A translation is absolutely under copyright. It is a creative process after all.
This means a book can be in public domain for the original text, because it's very old, but not the translation because it's newer.
For example Julius Caesar's "Gallic War" in the original latin is clearly not subject to copyright, but a recent English translation will be.
So if a machine was to do the translation, should that also be considered a creative work?
If not, that would put pressure on production companies to use machines so they don’t have to pay future royalties
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> The output of artists has copyright.
Copyright is a very messy and divisive topic. How exactly can an artist claim ownership of a thought or an image? It is often difficult to ascertain whether a piece of art infringes on the copyright of another. There are grey areas like "fair use", which complicate this further. In many cases copyright is also abused by holders to censor art that they don't like for a myriad of unrelated reasons. And there's the argument that copyright stunts innovation. There are entire art movements and music genres that wouldn't exist if copyright was strictly enforced on art.
> Artists shape the space in which they’re generating output.
Art created by humans is not entirely original. Artists are inspired by each other, they follow trends and movements, and often tiptoe the line between copyright infringement and inspiration. Groundbreaking artists are rare, and if we consider that machines can create a practically infinite number of permutations based on their source data, it's not unthinkable that they could also create art that humans consider unique and novel, if nothing else because we're not able to trace the output to all of its source inputs. Then again, those human groundbreaking artists are also inspired by others in ways we often can't perceive. Art is never created in a vacuum. "Good artists copy; great artists steal", etc.
So I guess my point is: it doesn't make sense to apply copyright to art, but there's nothing stopping us from doing the same for machine-generated art, if we wanted to make our laws even more insane. And machine-generated art can also set trends and shape the space they're generated in.
The thing is that technology advances far more rapidly than laws do. AI is raising many questions that we'll have to answer eventually, but it will take a long time to get there. And on that path it's worth rethinking traditional laws like copyright, and considering whether we can implement a new framework that's fair towards creators without the drawbacks of the current system.
Ambiguities are not a good argument against laws that still have positive outcomes.
There are very few laws that are not giant ambiguities. Where is the line between murder, self-defense and accident? There are no lines in reality.
(A law about spectrum use, or registered real estate borders, etc. can be clear. But a large amount of law isn’t.)
Something must change regarding copyright and AI model training.
But it doesn’t have to be the law, it could be technological. Perhaps some of both, but I wouldn’t rule out a technical way to avoid the implicit or explicit incorporation of copyrighted material into models yet.
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>Art created by humans is not entirely original.
The catch here is that a human can use single sample as input, but AI needs a torrent of training data. Also when AI generates permutations of samples, does their statistic match training data?
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That makes no sense, neither legally nor philosophically.
> Language developed independently of translators.
And it also developed independently of writers and poets.
> Artists shape the space in which they’re generating output.
Not writers and poets, apparently. And so maybe not even artists, who typically mostly painted book references. Color perception and symbolism developed independently of professional artists, too. Moreover, all of the things you mention predate copyright.
> The fear now is that if we no longer have a market where people generate novel arts, that space will stagnate.
But that will never happen; it's near-impossible to stop humans from generating novel arts. They just do it as a matter of course - and the more accessible the tools are, the more people participate.
Yes, memes are a form of art, too.
What's a real threat is lack of shared consumption of art. This has been happening for the past couple decades now, first with books, then with visual arts. AI will make this problem worse by both further increasing volume of "novel arts" and by enabling personalization. The real value we're using is the role of art as social objects - the ability to relate to each other by means of experiencing the same works of art, and thus being able to discuss and reference it. If no two people ever experienced the same works of art, there's not much about art they can talk about; if there's no shared set of art seen by most people in a society, there's a social baseline lost. That problem does worry me.
If you think memes are art too and we lack shared consumption of art due to personalization, you clearly don't have kids into YouTube or Minecraft or Frozen, or ...
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You are wrong. Translations have copyright. That is why a new translation of for example an ancient book has copyright and you are now allowed to reproduce it without permission.
I don't think the Berne Convention on Copyright was meant as a complete list of things where humans have valuable input. Translators do shape the space in which they generate output. Their space isn't any single language bit rather the connecting space between languages.
Most translation work is simple just as the day-to-day of many creative professions is rather uncreative. But translating a book, comic or movie requires creative decisions on how to best convey the original meaning in the idioms and cultural context of a different language. The difference between a good and a bag translation can be stark
Makes me wonder if the generous copyright protections afforded to artists had not become so abhorrent (thanks, Disney) then this kind of thing might not have happened.
Wrong from the first sentence…
Stagnate just like hand thatched rooves? Or like weavers, ever since Jaquard?
I don't see too many people defending artists also calling for people to start buying handmade clothing and fabrics again.
That said and because people on here are feisty, I have many artist friends and I deeply appreciate their work at the same time as appreciating how cool diffusion models are.
The difference being of course that we live in a modern society and we should be able to find a solution that works for all.
That said, humans can't even get in something basic like UBI for people and humans consistently vote against each other in favour of discriminating on skin colour, sex, sexuality, culture. Meanwhile the billionaires that are soon to become trillionaires are actively defended by many members of our species, sometimes even by the poor. The industrial age broke our evolved monkey brains.
Translations absolutely have copyright.
Piracy is promotion, look at all the fanfiction.
Also in case of graphic and voice artists unique style looks more valuable than output itself, but style isn't protected by copyright.
My prediction:
It will be like furniture.
A long time ago, every piece of furniture was handmade. It might have been good furniture, or crude, poorly constructed furniture, but it was all quite expensive, in terms of hours per piece. Now, furniture is almost completely mass produced, and can be purchased in a variety of styles and qualities relatively cheaply. Any customization or uniqueness puts it right back into the hand-made category. And that arrangement works for almost everyone.
Media will be like that. There will be a vast quantity of personalized media of decent quality. It will be produced almost entirely automatically based on what the algorithm knows about you and your preferences.
There will be a niche industry of 'hand made' media with real acting and writing from human brains, but it will be expensive, a mark of conspicuous consumption and class differentiation.
This. Except one should also disillusion themselves of the idea that there will always be a higher quality to the 'hand made' versions. AI will almost certainly outpace us in every way, including the ability to make something beautiful that looks 'hand-made', even with artificial flaws and illusions of the history and natural rugged beauty of the piece.
The only discernable difference that won't be replicable is a cryptographic signature "Certified 100% Human-Made!" sticker, which will probably become the mark of the niche industry.
Somewhat more accurate analogy would be the custom car market. Beautiful collectible convertibles with fine detailing everywhere, priced thousands of times higher than normal cars, that actually run far worse and basically break apart after a few thousand miles and are impossible to find parts for. Automated factories certainly could churn them out but they don't because they're impractical poorly-designed status items kept artificially scarce for the very rich to peacock with.
Except AI will probably still produce equivalent impractical stuff anyway, just because production (digital and physical) will eventually be easy enough that resources are negligible, and everyone can have flashy impractical stuff. So again, only that "100% Human!" seal will distinguish, eventually.
The reproduction cost for the 2nd copy of media is near zero just like software. Handmade or customized furniture is more expensive because it takes more labor for each copy. With media, the cost is fixed, even if it is large. Once the first version of handmade media has been created, the owner is incentivized to get as much value from it as possible. The optimal demand curve is probably not a few rich people paying as much as possible.
> There will be a niche industry of 'hand made' media with real acting and writing from human brains, but it will be expensive, a mark of conspicuous consumption and class differentiation.
This addresses one axis of development.
Meanwhile, there's lots of people around willing to express themselves for advertisement money.
Like with translation: We're going to see tool-assisted work where the tools get more and more sophisticated.
Your example with furniture is good. Another is cars: From horses to robotaxis. Humans are in the loop somewhere still.
This prediction implies that people will value consuming tailored media, knowing 100% that it was generated because they wanted it (as opposed to because someone wanted to express something), with no deeper story or connection or exploration to it.
If people instead care about the creation story and influences (the idea of "behind the scenes" and "creator interviews" for on demand ai generated media is pretty funny) then this won't have much value.
Time will tell - it's an exciting, discouraging time to be alive, which has probably always been the case.
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> As my mom retired from being a translator, she went from typewriter to machine-assisted translation with centralised corpus-databases. All the while the available work became less and less, and the wages became lower and lower.
She was lucky to be able to retire when she did, as the job of a translator is definitely going to become extinct.
You can already get higher quality translations from machine learning models than you get from the majority of commercial human translations (sans occasional mistakes for which you still need editors to fix), and it's only going to get better. And unlike human translators LLMs don't mangle the translations because they're too lazy to actually translate so they just rewrite the text as that's easier, or (unfortunately this is starting to become more and more common lately) deliberately mistranslate because of their personal political beliefs.
While LLMs are pretty good, and likely to improve, my experience is OpenAI's offerings *absolutely* make stuff up after a few thousand words or so, and they're one of the better ones.
It also varies by language. Every time I give an example here of machine translated English-to-Chinese, it's so bad that the responses are all people who can read Chinese being confused because it's gibberish.
And as for politics, as Grok has just been demonstrating, they're quite capable of whatever bias they've been trained to have or told to express.
But it's worse than that, because different languages cut the world at different joints, so most translations have to make a choice between literal correctness and readability — for example, you can have gender-neutral "software developer" in English, but in German to maintain neutrality you have to choose between various unwieldy affixes such as "Softwareentwickler (m/w/d)" or "Softwareentwickler*innen" (https://de.indeed.com/karriere-guide/jobsuche/wie-wird-man-s...), or pick a gender because "Softwareentwickler" by itself means they're male.
no, "Softwareentwickler" doed NOT mean the person is male. It's the correct german form for either male OR generic. (generisches Maskulinum)
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> While LLMs are pretty good, and likely to improve, my experience is OpenAI's offerings absolutely make stuff up after a few thousand words or so, and they're one of the better ones.
That's not how you get good translations from off-the-shelf LLMs! If you give a model the whole book and expect it to translate it in one-shot then it will eventually hallucinate and give you bad results.
What you want is to give it a small chunk of text to translate, plus previously translated context so that it can keep the continuity.
And for the best quality translations what you want is to use a dedicated model that's specifically trained for your language pairs.
> And as for politics, as Grok has just been demonstrating, they're quite capable of whatever bias they've been trained to have or told to express.
In an open ended questions - sure. But that doesn't apply to translations where you're not asking the model to come up with something entirely by itself, but only getting it to accurately translate what you wrote into another language.
I can give you an example. Let's say we want to translate the following sentence:
"いつも言われるから、露出度抑えたんだ。"
Let's ask a general purpose LLMs to translate it without any context (you could get a better translation if you'd give it context and more instructions):
ChatGPT (1): "Since people always comment on it, I toned down how revealing it is."
ChatGPT (2): "People always say something, so I made it less revealing."
Qwen3-235B-A22B: "I always get told, so I toned down how revealing my outfit is."
gemma-3-27b-it (1): "Because I always get told, I toned down how much skin I show."
gemma-3-27b-it (2): "Since I'm always getting comments about it, I decided to dress more conservatively."
gemma-3-27b-it (3): "I've been told so often, I decided to be more modest."
Grok: "I was always told, so I toned down the exposure."
And how humans would translate it:
Competent human translator (I can confirm this is an accurate translation, but perhaps a little too literal): "Everyone was always saying something to me, so I tried toning down the exposure."
Activist human translator: "Oh those pesky patriarchal societal demands were getting on my nerves, so I changed clothes."
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqaAgAyBFQY)
It should be fairly obvious which one is the biased one, and I don't think it's the Grok one (which is a little funny, because it's actually the most literal translation of them all).
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This is just not true, LLMs struggle very hard with even basic recursive questions, nuances and dialects
But as a customer cannot know that, they will tend to consume (and mostly trust) whatever LLM result is given.
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Maybe for dry text. Translation of art is art too and there's no such thing as higher quality art.
I’m intrigued by this statement. It seems obvious to me that some artworks are ‘higher quality’ than others. You wouldn’t, I’d presume, consider the Sistine Chapel or the Mona Lisa to be the same quality as a dickbutt scribbled on a napkin?
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You can't compare translation to creating new works of art. Sorry mom, but that's apples and oranges. A dangerously false comparison.
If you speak more than one language(esp something like Chinese or Japanese) you understand how subjective some choices are. It certainly takes creative decision making.
I speak Japanese natively and hell, I'm just going to say, there is no such thing as translation, there is just foreign language ghostwriting.
I'm not even sure if bilingualism is real or if it's just an alternate expression for relatively benign forced split personality. Could very well be.
As noted in another sub-thread, translations are indeed works of art. As evidence, my mom has received royalties for her translations for decades, both from sales and from library lending. And she could sue for copyright infringement if someone stole her translation. The only difference is that she needs permission to distribute the translation, unless it’s translated from the public domain.