I like Molly White’s recent take, that it might be more productive to treat this as a labor issue instead of a copyright issue (at least in principle). Even if the AI corporations aren’t technically re-selling copyrighted works, they’re still profiting from the authors’ unpaid labor.
That’s an evergreen. Tried and trusty.
What a brilliant Idea. Hover up all copyrighted works then regurgitate it in different forms without having to pay the copyright owners. Sounds like a great tech bro idea.
The finance bros tried that one too. Mortgage-backed security was the magic word. Cut up all the little mortgages, repackage them, and sell for profit. Then it all crashed down in 2008.
Copyright law needs to be fixed, and not in favor of these corporations, but in favor of artists.
Wanting copyright law to be fixed does not mean wanting it go away entirely for the sake of bullshit like LLMs.
Check out the research of Rufus Pollock who did a bunch of complex math to show ideal copyright length should be 15 years.
https://rufuspollock.com/papers/optimal_copyright_term.pdf
If the admins of the Pirate Bay got put in prison for far less piracy and far less profit from piracy… the same ought to happen to Sam Altman et. al.
There’s no problem. Those books should all be in the public domain anyway.
Why, so you can profit from it?
So that everyone can experience it mostly. Potentially, yes, they could profit from it too, possibly, yes.
I just want to make it clear, I am a hobby writer who regularly releases my work PD.
And what is the problem? I see no problem.
The article explains the problems in great detail.
Here’s just one small section of the text which describes some of them:
All of this certainly makes knowledge and literature more accessible, but it relies entirely on the people who create that knowledge and literature in the first place—that labor that takes time, expertise, and often money. Worse, generative-AI chatbots are presented as oracles that have “learned” from their training data and often don’t cite sources (or cite imaginary sources). This decontextualizes knowledge, prevents humans from collaborating, and makes it harder for writers and researchers to build a reputation and engage in healthy intellectual debate. Generative-AI companies say that their chatbots will themselves make scientific advancements, but those claims are purely hypothetical.
(I originally put this as a top-level comment, my bad.)
The claims aren’t entirely hypothetical, LLM AI has mapped nearly every known protein which humans were unable to do…
That’s an interesting article, but it was published in 2022, before LLMs were a thing on anyone’s radar. The results are still incredibly impressive without a doubt, but based on how the researchers explain it, it looks like it was accomplished using deep learning, which isn’t the same as LLMs. Though they’re not entirely unrelated.
Opaque and confusing terminology in this space also just makes it very difficult to determine who or which systems or technology are actually making these advancements. As far as I’m concerned none of this is actual AI, just very powerful algorithmic prediction models. So the claims that an AI system itself has made unique technological advancements, when they are incapable of independent creativity, to me proves that nearly all their touted benefits are still entirely hypothetical right now.
If humans have to pay for knowledge with expensive student loans and book purchases, why should AI get that same knowledge for free?
Has Trump dismantled libraries already?
As it so happens…
He did dismantle library funding.
In this case, AI reading for free should be your least important problem :)
These authors (and my work is in there) did not write so that Mark Zuckerberg could steal our work and profit from it
