Thousands of authors demand payment from AI companies for use of copyrighted works::Thousands of published authors are requesting payment from tech companies for the use of their copyrighted works in training artificial intelligence tools, marking the latest intellectual property critique to target AI development.
Well, if you ask e.g. ChatGPT for the lyrics to a song or page after page of a book, and it spits them out 1:1 correct, you could assume that it must have had access to the original.
Or at least excerpts from it. But even then, it’s one thing for a person to put up a quote from their favourite book on their blog, and a completely different thing for a private company to use that data to train a model, and then sell it.
Even more so, if you consider that the LLMs are marketed to replace the authors.
Yeah which I still feel is utterly ridiculous. I love the idea of AI tools to assist with things, but as a complete replacement? No thank you.
I enjoy using things like SynthesizerV and VOCALOID because my own voice is pretty meh and my singing skills aren’t there. It’s fun to explore the voices, and learn how to use the tools. That doesn’t mean I’d like to see all singers replaced with synthesized versions. I view SynthV and the like as instruments, not much more.
I’ve used LLVMs to proofread stuff, and help me rephrase letters and such, but I’d never hire an editor to do such small tasks for me anyway. The result has always required editing anyway, because the LLVMs have a tendency to make stuff up.
Cases like that I don’t see a huge problem with. At my workplace though they’re talking about generating entire application layouts and codebases with AI and, being in charge of the AI evaluation project, the tech just isn’t there yet. You can in a sense use AI to make entire projects, but it’ll generate gnarly unmaintainable rubbish. You need a human hand in there to guide it.
Otherwise you end up with garbage websites with endlessly generated AI content, that can easily be manipulated by third party actors.
Can it recreate anything 1:1? When both my wife and I tried to get them to do that they would refuse, and if pushed they would fail horribly.
This is what I got. Looks pretty 1:1 for me.
Hilarious that it started with just “Buddy”, like you’d be happy with only the first word.
Yeah, for some reason it does that a lot when I ask it for copyrighted stuff.
As if it knew it wasn’t supposed to output that.
To be fair you’d get the same result easier by just googling “we will rock you lyrics”
How is chatgpt knowing the lyrics to that song different from a website that just tells you the lyrics of the song?
Two points:
Google spitting out the lyrics isn’t ok from a copyright standpoint either. The reason why songwriters/singers/music companies don’t sue people who publish lyrics (even though they totally could) is because no damages. They sell music, so the lyrics being published for free doesn’t hurt their music business and it also doesn’t hurt their songwriting business. Other types of copyright infringement that musicians/music companies care about are heavily policed, also on Google.
Content generation AI has a different use case, and it could totally hurt both of these businesses. My test from above that got it to spit out the lyrics verbatim shows, that the AI did indeed use copyrighted works for it’s training. Now I can ask GPT to generate lyrics in the style of Queen, and it will basically perform the song texter’s job. This can easily be done on a commercial scale, replacing the very human that has written these song texts. Now take this a step further and take a voice-generating AI (of which there are many), which was similarly trained on copyrighted audio samples of Freddie Mercury. Then add to the mix a music-generating AI, also fed with works of Queen, and now you have a machine capable of generating fake Queen songs based directly on Queen’s works. You can do the very same with other types of media as well.
And this is where the real conflict comes from.
I don’t know if that’s true. If Google grabs that book from a pirate site. Then publishes the work as search results. ChatGPT grabs the work from Google results and cobbles it back together as the original.
Who’s at fault?
I don’t think it’s a straight forward ChatGPT can reproduce the work therefore it stole it.
Both are at fault: Google for distributing pirated material and OpenAI for using said material for financial gain.
Copyright doesn’t work like that. Say I sell you the rights to Thriller by Michael Jackson. You might not know that I don’t have the rights. But even if you bought the rights from me, whoever actually has the rights is totally in their legal right to sue you, because you never actually purchased any rights.
So if ChatGPT ripps it off Google who ripped it off a pirate site, then everyone in that chain who reproduced copyrighted works without permission from the copyright owners is liable for the damages caused by their unpermitted reproduction.
It’s literally the same as downloading something from a pirate site doesn’t make it legal, just because someone ripped it before you.
That’s a terrible example because under copyright law downloading a pirated thing isn’t actually illegal. It’s the distribution that is illegal (uploading).
Yes, downloading is illegal, and the media is still an illegally obtained copy. It’s just never prosecuted, because the damages are miniscule if you just download. They can only fine you for the amount of damages you caused by violating the copyright.
If you upload to 10k people, they can claim that everyone of them would have paid for it, so the damages are (if one copy is worth €30) ~€300k. That’s a lot of money and totally worth the lawsuit.
On the other hand, if you just download, the damages are just the value of one copy (in this case €30). That’s so miniscule, that even having a lawyer write a letter is more expensive.
But that’s totally besides the point. OpenAI didn’t just download, they replicate. Which is causing massive damages, especially to the original artists, which in many cases are now not hired any more, since ChatGPT replaces them.