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Comment by tliltocatl

6 months ago

If the AI movement will manage to undermine Imaginary Property, it would redeem it's externalities threefold.

I don’t think that’s gonna happen. I think they will manage to get themselves out of trouble for it, while the rest of us will still face serious problems if we are caught torrenting even one singular little book.

  • It's already quite widespread and likely legal for average people to train AI models on copyrighted material, in the open weight AI communities like SD and LocalLLaMa.

    Please, please differentiate between pirating books (which Anthrophic is liable for, and is still illegal) and training on copyrighted material (which was found to be legal, for both corporations and average people).

  • Even so, would be hard to prove that this particular little book wasn't generated by Claude (oopsie, it happens to be a verbatim copy of a copyrighted work, that happens sometimes, those pesky LLMs).

    • You just need to audit their system. Shouldn't take more than a couple of hours.

It would be great, but I think some are worried that new AI BigTech will find a way to continue enforcing IP on the rest of society while it won't exist for them

What are your feelings about how the small fish is stripped of their arts, and their years of work becomes just a prompt? Mainly comic artists and small musicians who are doing things they like and putting out for people, but not for much money?

  • >Mainly comic artists and small musicians who are doing things they like and putting out for people, but not for much money?

    The number of these artists I have seen receiving some bogus DMCA takedown notice for fan art is crazy.

    I saw a bloke give away some of his STL's because he received a takedown request from games workshop and didnt have the funds to fight it.

    Its not that I want small artists to lose, its that I want them to gain access to every bloody copyright and trademark so they are more free to create.

    Shit Conde Nast managed to pull something like 400 pulps off the market, so they didnt interfere with their newly launched James Patterson collaborations.

  • [flagged]

    • I think I have worded my question wrong. I asked about not about how AI affects the financials of these smaller artists, but their wellbeing in general.

      There are many small artists who do this not for money, but for fun and have their renowned styles. Even their styles are ripped off by these generative AI companies and turned into a slot machine to earn money for themselves. These artists didn't consent to that, and this affects their (mental) well-beings.

      With that context in mind, what do you think about these people who are not in this for money is ripped out of their years of achievement and their hard work exploited for money by generative AI companies?

      It's not about IP (with whatever expansion you prefer) or laws, but ethics in general.

      Substitute comics for any medium. Code, music, painting, illustration, literature, short movies, etc.

      9 replies →

It's true that intellectual property is a flawed and harmful mechanism for supporting creative work, and it needs to change, but I don't think ensuring a positive outcome is as simple as this. Whether or not such a power struggle between corporate interests benefits the public rather than just some companies will be largely accidental.

I do support intellectual property reform that would be considered radical by some, as I imagine you do. But my highest hopes for this situation are more modest: if AI companies are told that their data must be in the public domain to train against, we will finally have a powerful faction among capitalists with a strong incentive to push back against the copyright monopolists when it comes to the continuous renewal of copyright terms.

If the "path of least resistance" for companies like Google, Microsoft, and Meta becomes enlarging the public domain, we might finally begin to address the stagnation of the public domain, and that could be a good thing.

But I think even such a modest hope as that one is unlikely to be realized. :-\

That would render GPL and friends redundant too... copyleft depends on copyright.

  • Copyleft nullifies copyright. Abolishing copyright and adding right to repair laws (mandatory source files) would give the same effect as everyone using copylefted licenses.