Comment by yellowapple
16 days ago
Makes sense to me. AI models are trained on (as large of a subset as possible of) the sum of human knowledge, so their outputs should belong to humanity as a whole.
Really so should all creative works, on the same basis of all creative expression being the product of the society and civilization which fundamentally and inescapably influenced the creator — and they would belong to humanity as a whole, if it wasn't for intellectual property systems demanding the removal of ideas from the commons.
>Makes sense to me. AI models are trained on (as large of a subset as possible of) the sum of human knowledge, so their outputs should belong to humanity as a whole.
No it doesn't, because that would mean any sort of secondary source shouldn't be eligible for copyright either, eg. encyclopedias, which are basically rehashing "the sum of human knowledge".
Interesting POV. Remind me - did those encyclopedias pay experts to write their contents, or did they just hoover up every bit of text they could find - regardless of owner - and toss it into a blender?
Sure, I'll remind you. The most popular encyclopedia of our time, Wikipedia, doesn't pay most of its contributors (I think they do have some administrative staff or something?). Nor do they pay journalists or authors for the articles and books that they cite.
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I don't see how "experts" are relevant under OP's framework unless they're did the primary research themselves. Otherwise they're just regurgitating someone else's research. The "oh there's humans involved so that gets pass" excuse doesn't work either, because humans were also involved in training the AI.
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Correct, and if it wasn't already obvious by now I believe that to be an unambiguously good thing.
Like, now with the advent of AI, or even before? You might not have much love for encyclopedias, which were mostly replaced by wikipedia, but the "secondary sources don't get copyright protection" would also cover programming books, which roughly speaking are docs rewritten to a cohesive narrative.
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It's either/or. Either you reward creators and inventors to keep creating and inventing and keep poverty at bay, or you give everyone enough to avoid poverty whether they work or not and reward c+i in some other way.
What we have now is neither - owners are hugely over-rewarded for owning things and extracting passive value from everyone else, creators and inventors are kinda sorta rewarded sometimes if they're lucky and very much not if they're not. Just like other workers.
"The commons" is not a thing in this model, except in a few small niches.
>What we have now is neither - owners are hugely over-rewarded for owning things and extracting passive value from everyone else, creators and inventors are kinda sorta rewarded sometimes if they're lucky and very much not if they're not. Just like other workers.
Creators and inventors are rewarded but obviously they cannot consume the whole pie. The people who invest in creative pursuits eat a lot of losses. People only seem to notice profitable successes, and forget that failures need to be paid for as well.
The same logic also applies to workers. The fact that your labor costs money is a guarantee, and it might not make money at all. We can think of a few examples where the work is directly delivered to consumers with zero marginal overhead, but most work DOES have overhead and liabilities, no matter how simple.
That's indeed one of many reasons why I'm staunchly pro-UBI.
I don't really understand this, I was trained on all the knowledge I was capable of ingesting, but my outputs are largely mine unless there is too much similarity to a copyrighted work. I don't understand why AI would be different. When I do work for hire, my employer owns it, roughly equivalent to me paying Open AI/Anthropic for output.
It's not, barring any secondary issues like proof the training data was acquired illegally.
When there is a copyright dispute, it's always a subjective test on the judge/jury's part as to how similar it is in appearance, purpose, etc. if it's not deemed fair use.
I’m all for this, if we also set up a system to let society pay for artists. And I mean in full: cover for their living expenses; their rent; internet access; materials; everything.
Or how do you suppose art gets created for humanity as a whole to enjoy?
>And I mean in full: cover for their living expenses; their rent; internet access; materials; everything.
Who decides which artists get subsidized? How would larger projects work? Seeing how often open source volunteer projects implode due to various community drama, this sort of system would basically preclude any sort of big production.
> Who decides which artists get subsidized?
The easy answer is to just pay literally everyone. This is called a “universal basic income”, and has been repeatedly demonstrated to be a good idea for many reasons besides decoupling creative expression from the need to put food on the table.
That, too, is something for which I've been advocating for quite some time now.
Really gotta force the starving artist motif or what's the point?
That we all stand on the shoulders of giants? There is no private innovation that isnt built on mountains on publicly shared knowledge and innovation, and usually public funds as well. The idea that private enterprise leads innovation is propaganda, i.e publicly funded academic study paved the way for LLMs, corps just commodotise ideas to make them viable under capitalism.
>The idea that private enterprise leads innovation is propaganda, i.e publicly funded academic study paved the way for LLMs, corps just commodotise ideas to make them viable under capitalism.
So if you founded some wildly successful unicorn, I (or the government) can come over and say "nice startup, too bad it runs off of the internet (based off ARPANET), so your startup belongs to the the state now"?
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