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OpenAI now tries to hide that ChatGPT was trained on copyrighted books, including J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
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Nobody would defend copyright if it wasn't already in place, it's a sick idea. They ask us to cut the field of human knowledge for private benefit. Now they want to destroy a new technology in its name. Greed knows no bounds.
I defend the idea of copyright. The first copyright law was in 1710, to protect authors from the printing press. Without copyright, whoever owned the printing press would sell copies of books with no obligation to pay the author. When copying art is trivial, the artist needs copyright protection in order to make a living creating art.
There are major problems with modern copyrights. Like all things in capitalism it has been subverted to benefit the rich, but the core idea behind copyright is sound.
These lawsuits are not to stop the development if generative AI. These lawsuits are to stop the unlicensed use of copyrighted works as AI training data.
There are AI models that are only trained with licensed data. This doesn't stop the development of AI.
Artists should have the right to choose whether their work is used as training data. And they should be compensated fairly for it. That will be the case if these lawsuits succeed.
Ultimately it's a propertarian scheme of ownership imposed onto the realm of concepts and ideas. The first person to successfully lay claim to an idea is given a monopoly on that idea for some number of years. A book, an invention, a melody. To secure profit for that individual, the entire rest of humanity is prevented access to the idea except under his terms, and the naturally free exchange of information is curtailed by statute to accomplish this, via the imposition of punishments for anyone who goes against this scheme. I do not think that's defensible. That is to say, I don't think humanity sees a net benefit from this way of doing things. Even some hypothetical 20-30% reduction in the generation of different kinds of creative works would be well offset by the benefit humanity sees from being able to access them, and the funds that would be going to the artist still could if people saw fit.
Is this being used to stop the development of generative AI? Yes, literally the imprint on an AI of having parsed the works and understood them in some symbolic capacity, they want to curtail that. And the existing models that have already done that would likely be rendered illegal, setting the entire technology back a year or two.
In an ideal world without greed, you are right in saying that copyright is not beneficial for the human race as a whole. Unfortunately we don't live in such a world. Look at what happened with insulin. The person invented it placed a ludicrously low priced patent of one dollar because he felt that it should be available cheaply to all who need and yet today in the US, insulin is a ridiculously expensive drug which many people struggle to afford. This is because while the inventor was not greedy and thought about the greater good, the pharmaceutical industry did not. They saw an opportunity to make money and are screwing people in the process
Insulin is ridiculously expensive because of monopoly status over methods on how to produce it (on top of any other laws restricting supply). I personally contributed to a project to create an open source method to make insulin.
I don't know about that. Say you take a few years to write a handful of poems, and it turns out people in your neighborhood really like them. You compile the poems into a book, and sell it for $5, and it sells well. Seeing this, your neighbor buys one, copies it, and starts selling it one neighborhood over for $2, and representing themself as the author. I would think most people in that situation would want to say, 'hey, that's not fair'. I don't think that's sick or rooted in greed, copyright can be a check on greed.
So the people who generate and curate that knowledge don't deserve to be compensated? Are you going to be a full time wikipedia editor then? Or does your "greed know no bounds"?
I defend copyright. The original intent was to protect creators in order to foster more creativity. Most artists will have no incentive to create if their work can be reappropriated by a larger group to leverage it for monetary gain, which is directly being taken from the original creator.
I’m a photographer. I’ve removed all my pictures from the internet and plan to never post more. I don’t want my work being used to train AI. Right now we have no choice in that matter, so the only option is to no longer share our work.