Nick Clegg says asking artists for use permission would 'kill' AI industry(theverge.com)
theverge.com
Nick Clegg says asking artists for use permission would 'kill' AI industry
https://www.theverge.com/news/674366/nick-clegg-uk-ai-artists-policy-letter
81 comments
A lot of people seem to think AI development happens in a vacuum, but there are a lot of international implications to consider. Even if the US had some incredibly thorough process for ensuring everyone got paid for their AI additions, many nations would just straight-up steal the data anyways. So maybe in ChatGPT, you can’t ask for a studio ghibli-style photo, but in ChinaGPT (or what-have-you), it’ll work just fine.
China might do it, so we did it first. I love this logic, and another place to apply it is about when to use nuclear bombs.
I’m not talking about China. I’m talking about every single nation on the planet.
As you say, "China" is here only a placeholder.
This "logic" that you need to do obviously illegal stuff (under current legislation) because otherwise someone else would do it and take the loot from that raid remains highly questionable no matter what country you put in that placeholder.
The same "logic" would for example dictate that you should dismiss patents as otherwise "someone in China" could do it before you. Somehow nobody would agree that this is a valid approach in that case…
This "logic" that you need to do obviously illegal stuff (under current legislation) because otherwise someone else would do it and take the loot from that raid remains highly questionable no matter what country you put in that placeholder.
The same "logic" would for example dictate that you should dismiss patents as otherwise "someone in China" could do it before you. Somehow nobody would agree that this is a valid approach in that case…
Huh? No, im saying if China builds the ability to teleport soldiers around a field, and we’re stuck getting consent waivers from everyone because teleportation technically means you’re being killed, we’re gonna lose the war.
If you’re the leader of a nation, that’s the reality you need to work within. I really don’t care, as someone responsible for 330 million souls, if everyone is pretty equally robbed to support the whole nation. That’s like… taxes, man.
If you’re the leader of a nation, that’s the reality you need to work within. I really don’t care, as someone responsible for 330 million souls, if everyone is pretty equally robbed to support the whole nation. That’s like… taxes, man.
The key difference is that if China uses their nukes, so will we. On them.
I'm the kind of creative whose job is threatened by AI, but if I'm being honest and cold-blooded, I'm not actually sure that I'd call what AI training does stealing—apart from any illicit acquisition of the data, that is. I'm open to being persuaded. I just have not read a really persuasive argument that when a model is trained, what it's doing is closer to stealing than it is to being influenced and then recapitulating the general form of those influences.
The latter is something we have no problem with in our culture. Every generation of artists do this. Every artist does this, in fact. It may be how creativity itself works, for all I know. But we never call it stealing, or when we do we say things like "great artists steal" and acknowledge it as a process rather than a problem.
It feels to me like when people make the "AI is stealing" argument, they're really arguing about something else and using this as a proxy for it. Not exactly sure what that other thing is. Fear of losing work and being displaced is the obvious one, and it's a valid fear. I share it! But, if that's what it is, I think we should be having that discussion directly, rather than talking around it. We always do the thing where we piss around talking about proxies, rather than going right to the agon.
The latter is something we have no problem with in our culture. Every generation of artists do this. Every artist does this, in fact. It may be how creativity itself works, for all I know. But we never call it stealing, or when we do we say things like "great artists steal" and acknowledge it as a process rather than a problem.
It feels to me like when people make the "AI is stealing" argument, they're really arguing about something else and using this as a proxy for it. Not exactly sure what that other thing is. Fear of losing work and being displaced is the obvious one, and it's a valid fear. I share it! But, if that's what it is, I think we should be having that discussion directly, rather than talking around it. We always do the thing where we piss around talking about proxies, rather than going right to the agon.
AIs are not creative, that's anthropomorphism. They use lossy compression to save training data. Later on, the compressed data is used to generate things that are potentially copyright violations (because they are very close to the original).
People don’t like honesty because they want to be special snowflakes, but sorry, humans aren’t that creative. The entire copyright and patent system is predicated on that fact, that you can only make money by making a thing exclusive and proprietary. That is directly caused by the fact that not only is it NOT original, but that others absolutely will invent/create the same thing eventually even without exposure to the original material, which is why people want to protect their exclusivity.
“I’m original because I add the little curls to the lines, make the lines softer, and make faces pointy rather than round” isn’t originality, nor is any of the art that people claim copyright for.
Additionally, it is a fundamental misunderstanding of AI modes if you think the models are simply lossy compression of data. That is like saying the alphabet is just lossy compression of The Odyssey.
“I’m original because I add the little curls to the lines, make the lines softer, and make faces pointy rather than round” isn’t originality, nor is any of the art that people claim copyright for.
Additionally, it is a fundamental misunderstanding of AI modes if you think the models are simply lossy compression of data. That is like saying the alphabet is just lossy compression of The Odyssey.
But why should things work differently for "AI"?
One could of course say that "IP" ("intellectual property") is an ill concept all in all and abolish it. But than without exceptions! If it's not a valid concept in regard to "AI" it's not a valid concept in general. But if we want to keep that concept "AI" needs to bend to the same rules that apply to anybody else. Simple as that. Law is universal. (At least it should be like that everybody is equal before the law.)
One could of course say that "IP" ("intellectual property") is an ill concept all in all and abolish it. But than without exceptions! If it's not a valid concept in regard to "AI" it's not a valid concept in general. But if we want to keep that concept "AI" needs to bend to the same rules that apply to anybody else. Simple as that. Law is universal. (At least it should be like that everybody is equal before the law.)
I don’t understand, generating (and then monetizing) things that are copyright violations is already illegal.
What we’re taking about is suing the tool that could potentially be used to generate copyright violations. Which seems silly?
Steelmanning your argument a bit more: OpenAI is selling the fact that you could potentially generate copyrightable material as a subscription, because the artwork is somewhere in the compressed data?
Abstracting the underlying tech a bit: If we imagined a printer that could faithfully represent whatever you told it to and you told it to reproduce Da Vinci’s that you later sold as originals while others told it to reproduce original forms of art (successfully), who’s at fault here, you or the printer?
Seems obvious to me it’s the user of the printer, not the printer itself, even if the printermaker is making money.
What we’re taking about is suing the tool that could potentially be used to generate copyright violations. Which seems silly?
Steelmanning your argument a bit more: OpenAI is selling the fact that you could potentially generate copyrightable material as a subscription, because the artwork is somewhere in the compressed data?
Abstracting the underlying tech a bit: If we imagined a printer that could faithfully represent whatever you told it to and you told it to reproduce Da Vinci’s that you later sold as originals while others told it to reproduce original forms of art (successfully), who’s at fault here, you or the printer?
Seems obvious to me it’s the user of the printer, not the printer itself, even if the printermaker is making money.
In a strict reading, the tool itself is a copyright violation. In that an LLM is the code and its weights, and the weights contain a lossy compressed copy of a copyrighted work.
Now you might say that's an overly rigid reading of copyright law, and I might agree, but that is nevertheless the reading of it applied to other domains - music, film and so on - where incorporating even a fractional, lossy and heavily processed portion of another work is enough to trigger copyright law. There is no blanket de-minimis that says "well, it's only 5%, so it's fair use".
Now you might say that's an overly rigid reading of copyright law, and I might agree, but that is nevertheless the reading of it applied to other domains - music, film and so on - where incorporating even a fractional, lossy and heavily processed portion of another work is enough to trigger copyright law. There is no blanket de-minimis that says "well, it's only 5%, so it's fair use".
The legality of Copyright material being present in the latent space of a commercialized foundation model would definitely be an interesting case!
Though most of these cases aren't litigating this. They are charging that the ability to recreate copyrightable material is the fault of the tool and not the tool user[1].
[1]: https://www.darrow.ai/resources/ai-copyright-law
Though most of these cases aren't litigating this. They are charging that the ability to recreate copyrightable material is the fault of the tool and not the tool user[1].
[1]: https://www.darrow.ai/resources/ai-copyright-law
Copyright law has never clearly and adequately defined the boundary between copying and measuring.
If I measure the length of a song? Not copyright infringement. If I take even a very short sequence of PCM samples, copyright infringement.
But the practical thresholds appear to be different, there's a bunch of ways you can extract kbs' worth of information from a song, some are considered copying (ripping the melody to midi with a converter, say), some are not.
And in the case of "AI", depending on the model it could be extracting and encoding almost anything, because it's a catch-all term encompassing dozens of architectures and methods.
If I measure the length of a song? Not copyright infringement. If I take even a very short sequence of PCM samples, copyright infringement.
But the practical thresholds appear to be different, there's a bunch of ways you can extract kbs' worth of information from a song, some are considered copying (ripping the melody to midi with a converter, say), some are not.
And in the case of "AI", depending on the model it could be extracting and encoding almost anything, because it's a catch-all term encompassing dozens of architectures and methods.
If using the work as training data was lawful (which hasn't been always the case as we know today) I tend to agree with you, but it might depend: creating an alteration of the work might be prohibited altogether or you might need to give proper credit to the original authors and that might already be violated when you present certain output to a user.
In general, the user is responsible to obey the license of the original work. The problem is that the LLM doed not know on which works its output (mostly) is based on. So in theory, no output for which copyright laws might apply should be used whatsoever.
It's not cut and dried in that way ("certain output"), in many models, any one piece of training data can influence any number of weights and potential outputs, and it's difficult or impossible to say which output was influenced to what extent by which input.
A drop of blood falls in a lake.. which bit of lake now contains blood?
A drop of blood falls in a lake.. which bit of lake now contains blood?
> the user is responsible to obey the license of the original work
The user is in this case the "AI" company.
They already violated law almost certainly by copying stuff from the net in the first place. (Almost certainly as it by now does not look like this was fair use, and there is no other means to make legal what they did.)
The user is in this case the "AI" company.
They already violated law almost certainly by copying stuff from the net in the first place. (Almost certainly as it by now does not look like this was fair use, and there is no other means to make legal what they did.)
That's not true.
Some people (like the NYT¹) are in fact demanding before curt the destruction of the trained models as they obviously contain copyrighted content.
¹ https://pressgazette.co.uk/media_law/new-york-times-open-ai-...
Some people (like the NYT¹) are in fact demanding before curt the destruction of the trained models as they obviously contain copyrighted content.
¹ https://pressgazette.co.uk/media_law/new-york-times-open-ai-...
> OpenAI is selling the fact that you could potentially generate copyrightable material as a subscription, because the artwork is somewhere in the compressed data?
Yeah, that's the express and sole purpose of the tool. You use OpenAI image generation because you want something that looks like a stock image for your website. But you don't want to pay for a stock image because you're cheap. So you'll get a close enough approximation for free. Or, uh, less.
Yeah, that's the express and sole purpose of the tool. You use OpenAI image generation because you want something that looks like a stock image for your website. But you don't want to pay for a stock image because you're cheap. So you'll get a close enough approximation for free. Or, uh, less.
"express and sole purpose of the tool"
Categorically untrue. 100% of all my usage of image generation is for artistic purposes that have nothing to do with the reproduction of or even the mimicry of existing art.
This is a gaping hole in the legal case if the lawyers need this to be true.
Categorically untrue. 100% of all my usage of image generation is for artistic purposes that have nothing to do with the reproduction of or even the mimicry of existing art.
This is a gaping hole in the legal case if the lawyers need this to be true.
> 100% of all my usage of image generation is for artistic purposes that have nothing to do with the reproduction of or even the mimicry of existing art.
How? You're creating artwork that is based off of the training data and is meant to replicate a subset of it.
I think, just because you cannot pinpoint the exact art piece(s) that you are recreating doesn't mean that that isn't what you're doing.
How? You're creating artwork that is based off of the training data and is meant to replicate a subset of it.
I think, just because you cannot pinpoint the exact art piece(s) that you are recreating doesn't mean that that isn't what you're doing.
Sorry when you said "Sole purpose", I assumed you meant the ChatGPT USERS sole purpose and OpenAI's expectation of their users' Sole purpose. My sole purpose as a ChatGPT user is not to create/recreate stock photos.
"just because you cannot pinpoint the exact art piece(s)"
Precisely, and neither can the owner of the copyright. Unless of course I rub into classical copyright issues ("these two art pieces look too similar") which goes back to my original question, why isn't just enforcing existing copyright law on bad ChatGPT users enough?
If I "use" your artwork, and generate another artwork that looks nothing like yours (either from my brain or by automating it) why do you care?
"just because you cannot pinpoint the exact art piece(s)"
Precisely, and neither can the owner of the copyright. Unless of course I rub into classical copyright issues ("these two art pieces look too similar") which goes back to my original question, why isn't just enforcing existing copyright law on bad ChatGPT users enough?
If I "use" your artwork, and generate another artwork that looks nothing like yours (either from my brain or by automating it) why do you care?
> If I "use" your artwork, and generate another artwork that looks nothing like yours (either from my brain or by automating it) why do you care?
I wouldn't, but presumably the person who you are immitating would.
The fallacy here is that you think an LLM is taking one or two art pieces and then turning around and creating something brand new, like a human brain might do.
No. It's taking billions of art pieces and then sampling them at various frequencies to create your art work. We can find your art work somewhere in the training data, it's just hard.
In essence, we're smuggling the copyright violation through convolution. Since these models are truly very large, we can pretend that there isn't copyright violation. But there is, we just can't really find it because LLMs cannot work backwards.
I wouldn't, but presumably the person who you are immitating would.
The fallacy here is that you think an LLM is taking one or two art pieces and then turning around and creating something brand new, like a human brain might do.
No. It's taking billions of art pieces and then sampling them at various frequencies to create your art work. We can find your art work somewhere in the training data, it's just hard.
In essence, we're smuggling the copyright violation through convolution. Since these models are truly very large, we can pretend that there isn't copyright violation. But there is, we just can't really find it because LLMs cannot work backwards.
" taking one or two art pieces and then turning around and creating something brand new, like a human brain might do."
I don't think the human brain is doing this at all (except maybe if you're writing a satire or homage). Your writing is the sum total of all your experiences which includes everything you've ever read, a number that might (depending on your age) at least approach millions of tokens.
And just like an LLM you'd find it difficult to piece together your influences.
I don't think the human brain is doing this at all (except maybe if you're writing a satire or homage). Your writing is the sum total of all your experiences which includes everything you've ever read, a number that might (depending on your age) at least approach millions of tokens.
And just like an LLM you'd find it difficult to piece together your influences.
The difference is I'm a person - I get special privileges. A computer program does not, we don't need to cater to them because, well, they don't have feelings. Or rights.
Ultimately these are tools, slaves to humans, meant for one thing only - to serve us. If they're not serving us, they should be eradicated. Because that's what we do.
Stealing from humans, no matter how convoluted, is bad. We shouldn't do that, and luckily that's completely optional and we don't have to stand for it. The computer programs can't fight back, it's okay.
Ultimately these are tools, slaves to humans, meant for one thing only - to serve us. If they're not serving us, they should be eradicated. Because that's what we do.
Stealing from humans, no matter how convoluted, is bad. We shouldn't do that, and luckily that's completely optional and we don't have to stand for it. The computer programs can't fight back, it's okay.
Don't care if a computer program has special privileges or not, that's irrelevant. It's a tool, and it has the potential to make a whole host of processes and people's lives easier, and no one, not you, not an internet mob, not a council of elders has the right to preemptively stop those real-world tests based on vibes.
So getting to the bottom of what is actually stealing or not will be important (we can't just unilaterally declare it so), and AFAICT if a user misuses it to regenerate copyrighted material that particular user is at fault, not the tool itself.
So getting to the bottom of what is actually stealing or not will be important (we can't just unilaterally declare it so), and AFAICT if a user misuses it to regenerate copyrighted material that particular user is at fault, not the tool itself.
It feels to me like you are the one arguing about something else. It doesn't matter if AI doesn't copy work wholesale or it can be viewed as how artists are inspired.
AI companies use work that they do not have the rights for, to construct their products.
AI companies use work that they do not have the rights for, to construct their products.
You don't need rights to view a work and caption it. You can walk into a library or gallery today and take your own notes on everything in there.
But this is very obviously not what AI is doing. In essence, an LLM is taking works and compressing them and storing them in a big database, to later be reproduced with a touch of non-determinism.
It's closer to archival and compression than captioning. But they're selling it. That's a big problem - you can't just take someone else's work, sprinkle some god knows what on it, throw it in a big pot with other shit you stole, and then reproduce it later. Even if your reproduction is super convoluted and not 100% accurate.
It's closer to archival and compression than captioning. But they're selling it. That's a big problem - you can't just take someone else's work, sprinkle some god knows what on it, throw it in a big pot with other shit you stole, and then reproduce it later. Even if your reproduction is super convoluted and not 100% accurate.
In other words: It would punish the ones who steal. Which is normally considered a good thing in society, unless you're a Big (Tech) Company who's entire business model rests on the extraction of value (i.e. free labor) from less powerful entities.
When you extract a lot of value from small number of people, it's called theft. If you extract small amounts from millions of people, it's called banking.
Where's the outcry and rage from the MPAA and RIAA that the infringement on their copyright is for more than all the money in the world combined?
It's fine to nail a $10m verdict against a guy with no money, but dare to tread on the beloved and bespoke * aI iNdUsTrY * and suddenly you've got better things to do?
It's fine to nail a $10m verdict against a guy with no money, but dare to tread on the beloved and bespoke * aI iNdUsTrY * and suddenly you've got better things to do?
Asking people for permission to kill them would kill the hitman business.
That is not a bad thing.
That is not a bad thing.
Sincere question: Do we need new laws for this?
If I use photoshop to create a straight reproduction of an artwork by someone else and monetize it, copyright law handles this.
If I use AI to do the same, same deal? At no point did someone suggest suing Adobe for building photoshop for "enabling" people to recreate art and sell it.
So what changed? The ease of use?
If I use photoshop to create a straight reproduction of an artwork by someone else and monetize it, copyright law handles this.
If I use AI to do the same, same deal? At no point did someone suggest suing Adobe for building photoshop for "enabling" people to recreate art and sell it.
So what changed? The ease of use?
AI uses lossy compression of data to generate output that is potentially a copyright violation. Photoshop doesn't recommend a (mostly) straight reproduction of existing work, but an AI potentially does.
“Photoshop doesn't recommend”
Neither does OpenAI? What about an empty chat prompt “encourages” copyright abuse?
Neither does OpenAI? What about an empty chat prompt “encourages” copyright abuse?
The express and sole purpose of an LLM is to create output that can be found in it's input. That's what it does.
When you ask for a picture of a cup of wine, you're reproducing an image of a cup of wine that was using in training. Or, more accurately, hundreds of images sort of averaged together.
You can't say this isn't the intention because this is literally the singular use of LLM. They don't do anything else. They don't change your oil. They reproduce input. Just because you don't know exactly what the input was originally (and you, in fact, cannot find out) does not mean that isn't what it's doing.
When you ask for a picture of a cup of wine, you're reproducing an image of a cup of wine that was using in training. Or, more accurately, hundreds of images sort of averaged together.
You can't say this isn't the intention because this is literally the singular use of LLM. They don't do anything else. They don't change your oil. They reproduce input. Just because you don't know exactly what the input was originally (and you, in fact, cannot find out) does not mean that isn't what it's doing.
Copyright is long, but not infinite. There's little point in my opinion to permissions to train upon unless your purpose is to simply slow and postpone the inevitable.
I'd be more interested in getting AI companies training with publicly scraped datasets to have them available to other AI trainers for free. The load scrapers put on the web is out of control.
I'd be more interested in getting AI companies training with publicly scraped datasets to have them available to other AI trainers for free. The load scrapers put on the web is out of control.
Curious that the stealing and profiteering of the human intellectual property coincides perfectly with a lawless administration in Washington DC
If your industry relies on stealing to exist, maybe it doesn’t deserve to live
Most industries do this basically by “stealing” from the environment without paying their fair share for dealing with the environmental damage they’re doing.
That "industry" is everyone's industry if AI models that rely on public data is available to the public. Then everyone can benefit.
Your point would be kind of valid if the tools they build were free to use
I'm saying they should be. Rather than fighting to stop them from doing it, force them to legally open it to the public domain. Often the training code already is, so if they use public data they should release a public model.
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They tried to make this guy prime minister when I was a kid.
I voted for him!
I actually agree with him on this though, AI is a bigger net benefit to humanity than some artists' IP.
I actually agree with him on this though, AI is a bigger net benefit to humanity than some artists' IP.
When in politics, in exchange for a ministerial car, he reneged on his pledge on student grants, and in coalition enabled a punishing austerity programme and the prime minister who delivered the Brexit referendum.
It would be wise to treat everything he says or supports with the utmost circumspection.
AI is clearly a net negative to humanity in its current form, and almost certainly all future forms.
The fact that you refer to an actual human being as “some artist” betrays the absolute disdain you hold for humanity and in my opinion should disqualify you from polite discourse of any kind.
The fact that you refer to an actual human being as “some artist” betrays the absolute disdain you hold for humanity and in my opinion should disqualify you from polite discourse of any kind.
> AI is clearly a net negative to humanity in its current form, and almost certainly all future forms.
I'm going to make an equally supported and valid statement here and say AI is clearly a net positive to humanity in its current form, and almost certainly all future forms.
You should consider providing a less hyperbolic point to argue if you are looking to have any kind of productive or healthy discussion on the internet.
I'm going to make an equally supported and valid statement here and say AI is clearly a net positive to humanity in its current form, and almost certainly all future forms.
You should consider providing a less hyperbolic point to argue if you are looking to have any kind of productive or healthy discussion on the internet.
>some artists' livelihood
There I fixed it for you. If it's such a net benefit to humanity governments should provide 6-months-behind-the-state-of-the-art-model for free to the public to make up for the highway robbery of its citizens' lifelong digital output.
There I fixed it for you. If it's such a net benefit to humanity governments should provide 6-months-behind-the-state-of-the-art-model for free to the public to make up for the highway robbery of its citizens' lifelong digital output.
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We did not get to use a nuanced argument against punitive "Intellectual Property" enforcement 1995-2010. What's different now?
If your premise was right, it makes even less sense as a justification for using other peoples' IP without compensation.
AI companies are for profit organizations in a largely capitalist world. If what they're providing is so massively more valuable to humanity than artists' IP, then the AI companies should easily be able to monetize that value in a way that allows them to fairly compensate the artists for the crucial role they're apparently playing in AI development.
Of course scale is the real problem here, because we're not just talking about AI companies compensating "some artists", but likely "all artists". This probably is financially untenable since the current value AI is providing to society seems unlikely to be greater than the value of all IP that exists in the world.
But that's not some critical feature of AI, it just speaks to the way current AI models work where you take every bit of text and images that exists and throw it into a data center full of GPUs to burn through a large city's worth of electricity until something approximating human text and image generation pops out. Arguably that approach is driven by the fact that GPUs and electricity are affordable and the input data is "free" if you're willing to steal it. I see no reason to believe less wasteful models couldn't produce good results without requiring the input being all human knowledge, and you'd save some electricity and resources in the meantime.
Edit: I'm not an AI researcher, but I also think incentivizing more efficient approaches to AI model development and training might yield more human-like AI (i.e. actual AI rather than turbo charged autocomplete). Humans also develop our cognitive abilities by absorbing external information but we manage to do it by absorbing a fraction of the information as a large-scale AI model with significantly better results. Focusing on whatever difference is behind that rather than building ever larger data centers with ever more powerful GPUs might be an interesting shift.
AI companies are for profit organizations in a largely capitalist world. If what they're providing is so massively more valuable to humanity than artists' IP, then the AI companies should easily be able to monetize that value in a way that allows them to fairly compensate the artists for the crucial role they're apparently playing in AI development.
Of course scale is the real problem here, because we're not just talking about AI companies compensating "some artists", but likely "all artists". This probably is financially untenable since the current value AI is providing to society seems unlikely to be greater than the value of all IP that exists in the world.
But that's not some critical feature of AI, it just speaks to the way current AI models work where you take every bit of text and images that exists and throw it into a data center full of GPUs to burn through a large city's worth of electricity until something approximating human text and image generation pops out. Arguably that approach is driven by the fact that GPUs and electricity are affordable and the input data is "free" if you're willing to steal it. I see no reason to believe less wasteful models couldn't produce good results without requiring the input being all human knowledge, and you'd save some electricity and resources in the meantime.
Edit: I'm not an AI researcher, but I also think incentivizing more efficient approaches to AI model development and training might yield more human-like AI (i.e. actual AI rather than turbo charged autocomplete). Humans also develop our cognitive abilities by absorbing external information but we manage to do it by absorbing a fraction of the information as a large-scale AI model with significantly better results. Focusing on whatever difference is behind that rather than building ever larger data centers with ever more powerful GPUs might be an interesting shift.
If we hired guards and implemented security it will kill our banking industry.
For people who don’t know the UK backstory, Nick Clegg is a widely-derided figure in the UK. He was the leader of the 3rd biggest party (the liberal democrats) and by making an alliance with the conservatives to let David Cameron become prime minister and then going along (as deputy prime minister) with a number of policies [1] that were seen by supporters of his party as anathema to their basic principles, saw his party utterly destroyed in the next election to the extent where they went from being a credible political force to having few enough members of parliament where they could all have fit into a US—style SUV and not been too cramped. He didn’t care because he peaced out immediately and took the Zuck dollar.
All of which to say if Nick Clegg says X there are a very large number of people who think “not X” by default. He’s even a lame duck at meta because they’re ditching him to replace him with Joel Kaplan who they think will help in their attempts to cosy up further with the Trump administration.
[1] Tuition fees for tertiary education in particular https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/libdems-tuition-fe...
All of which to say if Nick Clegg says X there are a very large number of people who think “not X” by default. He’s even a lame duck at meta because they’re ditching him to replace him with Joel Kaplan who they think will help in their attempts to cosy up further with the Trump administration.
[1] Tuition fees for tertiary education in particular https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/libdems-tuition-fe...
We have copyright laws to protect innovation as have deemed it as a society (for the most part) to be important, but there is no fundamental right to the protection of information. So the question now is: is it worth protecting the rights of innovators at the expense of whatever benefits that AI provides?
Good. Ask 'em
Imagine if someone stole the Windows source code, started a business selling their own version of Windows, and then claimed that the requirement to get a license from Microsoft would kill their business model.
The main argument the AI defenders use nowadays to promote the development of this clearly harmful technology is that “if we don’t make the thing that almost certainly harms all humanity then China will!”
This is just Mutually Assured Destruction all over again. The only correct solution is for AI pacifists on both sides (means the people who support humanity and oppose this nonsense) to do a as much as they can sideline the AI hardliners (the people who think AI is a benefit) on both sides. Each country needs to believe the AI pacifists in the other country have relatively more support than the hardliners.
This is just Mutually Assured Destruction all over again. The only correct solution is for AI pacifists on both sides (means the people who support humanity and oppose this nonsense) to do a as much as they can sideline the AI hardliners (the people who think AI is a benefit) on both sides. Each country needs to believe the AI pacifists in the other country have relatively more support than the hardliners.
This is a feature, not a bug.
Funny how copyright infringement has made a come back in AI and it's somehow a bad thing. What happened to all of the pirates fighting for our right to not pay for anything?
From what I remember that was never the issue people was fighting for.
It was more about the right to own what you payed for and bought, and the right to create a copy of it for yourself.
Which still are a big issue.
Why do I get to keep a physical book for as long as I want, but when I "buy" a digital book it is only a license.
That's a generous recollection. The right to create private backups was generally a very small part of people's arguments. Most discussions tended to be about justify torrenting media that they never owned, nor had any real intention of paying for
I'm as big a believer in IP reform as someone could be but the current situation is that regular people still have to follow the rules, the artists themselves still have to follow the rules, while big businesses with endless VC funding get to ignore them.
If it was the same for everyone I would have much less problem with this but it's the glaring disparity in how different parties are expected to behave that is truly repugnant.
If it was the same for everyone I would have much less problem with this but it's the glaring disparity in how different parties are expected to behave that is truly repugnant.
I don't like AI and I don't like copyright, but if I had to pick, I would definitely prefer copyright die out as it has more of a personal impact on me and my interests than AI does. Emulators and game projects getting threatened and/or shut down is a real shame. It takes some of the magic out of the world of software when we have to worry about this stuff. I do tend to use free as in freedom software, but proprietary software still manages to have an unfortunate presence around me.
No one has ever taken the philosophical position that they have the right to sell someone else's work as their own.
That's literally the entire foundation of Capitalism.
Working for yourself, and selling what you produce yourself, is called Cottage Industry and is what Capitalism replaced.
Working for yourself, and selling what you produce yourself, is called Cottage Industry and is what Capitalism replaced.
I didn’t know that OpenAI employed all of the artists that they were training models in. Problem solved!
They don't and I never said they did. And even if they did, would one company being the sole employer of artists and paying them minimum wage, really be "problem solved"?
It seems people don't like the reality of where we currently are . Don't shoot the messenger!
It seems people don't like the reality of where we currently are . Don't shoot the messenger!
In most areas of law, whatever is not forbidden, is permitted.
Licensing law is the opposite: you are not permitted to do anything with a protected work unless you have been granted a prior written license.
(exceptions: fair use for scientific, non-commercial research, and copyright expiry e.g. seven decades after the death of the author, depending on the jurisdiction, of course.)
Licensing law is the opposite: you are not permitted to do anything with a protected work unless you have been granted a prior written license.
(exceptions: fair use for scientific, non-commercial research, and copyright expiry e.g. seven decades after the death of the author, depending on the jurisdiction, of course.)
Law is downstream of politics in every place it has ever existed, however. The truth about 'Rule of Law' is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.
> "And by the way if you did it in Britain and no one else did it, you would basically kill the AI industry in this country overnight."
This is important to keep in mind. There are competing AI R&D orgs in dozens of different countries, not just America, China and France.