Legislators have to come up with a way to handle how copyright works in conjunction with AI.
That’s the neat part. It doesn’t.
Copyright hasn’t worked for the past 100 years. Copyright was borne out of an social agreement that works generated from it would enter public domain in a reasonable time frame. Thanks to Mark Twain and Disney, the limit is basically forever, or it might as well be. Here we are still arguing about the next Bond film for a book series that was made in the fucking 1950s. Or the Lord of the Rings series, the genesis of all fantasy. Or thousands of other things that deserve to be in public domain already.
Copyright is a blunt tool that rich people use to bash the poor with. Whatever you think copyright is doing to protect your rights or your works is easy enough for them to just spend enough money with lawyers and cases until you cave. If copyright isn’t working for the public good, then we should abolish it.
People hate AI because it’s mostly developed and used by the rich as a shitty way to save money and layoff even more people than we’ve already had. But, it doesn’t have to be. All of these LLM projects were based on freely available research. Hell, Stable Diffusion is still something you can just download and use for free, despite the fact that Stability AI is still trying to wrestle back their own control into the model.
Instead of sticking our ears in our fingers and saying “la la la la, AI doesn’t exist, it must be destroyed/regulated/fined”, we could push this technology to open sourced as much as possible. I mean, let’s assume that we somehow regulate AI so that people have to pay to use copyrighted works for training (as absurd as that is). AI training goes down drastically, and stagnates. Counties like China are not going to follow those same rules, and eventually, China will be the technological leader here.
Or the program works, and other people who don’t give a shit about copyright freely allow AI to train their works. Then you have AI models that have to follow these arcane rules, but arrived at the same spot, anyway, but only for the rich people who can afford the systems that allow for that regulation. What the fuck was the point in the regulation, except to make it even more expensive to make?
SinAdjetivos@beehaw.org 4 weeks ago
ISBNDB approximates there to be 158,464,880 published books in existence.
Meta’s annual income was ~156 billion last year.
Assuming a one time purchase scenario and a $20 average cost that’s ~3.2 billion dollars. ~2% of their annual revenue.
Or you could assume assuming a $0.2 annual license (similar to a lot of technology licenses), or a 0.002 per “stream” (which I. This instance would be ‘use of data to train model’)
I agree with most of what you said, but if you buy into a lot of the economic paradigms your arguments are based on you must also realize that those require the copyrighted works must be paid for and it’s not unreasonable to do so.