Thousands of authors demand payment from AI companies for use of copyrighted works

How can they prove that not some abstract public data has been used to train algorithms, but their particular intellectual property?

You know what would solve this? We all collectively agree this fucking tech is too important to be in the hands of a few billionaires, start an actual public free open source fully funded and supported version of it, and use it to fairly compensate every human being on Earth according to what they contribute, in general?

Why the fuck are we still allowing a handful of people to control things like this??

There is already a business model for compensating authors: it is called buying the book. If the AI trainers are pirating books, then yeah - sue them.

There are plagiarism and copyright laws to protect the output of these tools: if the output is infringing, then sue them. However, if the output of an AI would not be considered infringing for a human, then it isn’t infringement.

When you sell a book, you don’t get to control how that book is used. You can’t tell me that I can’t quote your book (within fair use restrictions). You can’t tell me that I can’t refer to your book in a blog post. You can’t dictate who may and may not read a book. You can’t tell me that I can’t give a book to a friend. Or an enemy. Or an anarchist.

Folks, this isn’t a new problem, and it doesn’t need new laws.

Someone should AGPL their novel and force the AI company to open source their entire neural network.

This is a good debate about copyright/ownership. On one hand, yes, the authors works went into 'training' the AI..but we would need a scale to then grade how well a source piece is good at being absorbed by the AI's learning. for example. did the AI learn more from the MAD magazine i just fed it or did it learn more from Moby Dick? who gets to determine that grading system. Sadly musicians know this struggle. there are just so many notes and so many words. eventually overlap and similiarities occur. but did that musician steal a riff or did both musicians come to a similar riff seperately? Authors dont own words or letters so a computer that just copies those words and then uses an algo to write up something else is no more different than you or i being influenced by our favorite heroes or i formation we have been given. do i pay the author for reading his book? or do i just pay the store to buy it?

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While I am rooting for authors to make sure they get what they deserve, I feel like there is a bit of a parallel to textbooks here. As an engineer if I learn about statics from a text book and then go use that knowledge to he'll design a bridge that I and my company profit from, the textbook company can't sue. If my textbook has a detailed example for how to build a new bridge across the Tacoma Narrows, and I use all of the same design parameters for a real Tacoma Narrows bridge, that may have much more of a case.

So what's the difference between a person reading their books and using the information within to write something and an ai doing it?

I don't know how I feel about this honestly. AI took a look at the book and added the statistics of all of its words into its giant statistic database. It doesn't have a copy of the book. It's not capable of rewriting the book word for word.

This is basically what humans do. A person reads 10 books on a subject, studies become somewhat of a subject matter expert and writes their own book.

Artists use reference art all the time. As long as they don't get too close to the original reference nobody calls any flags.

These people are scared for their viability in their user space and they should be, but I don't think trying to put this genie back in the bottle or extra charging people for reading their stuff for reference is going to make much difference.

All this copyright/AI stuff is so silly and a transparent money grab.

They're not worried that people are going to ask the LLM to spit out their book; they're worried that they will no longer be needed because a LLM can write a book for free. (I'm not sure this is feasible right now, but maybe one day?) They're trying to strangle the technology in the courts to protect their income. That is never going to work.

Notably, there is no "right to control who gets trained on the work" aspect of copyright law. Obviously.

I think this is more about frustration experienced by artists in our society at being given so little compensation.

The answer is staring us in the face. UBI goes hand in hand with developments in AI. Give artists a basic salary from the government so they can afford to live well. This isn't a AI problem this is a broken society problem. I support artists advocating for themselves, but the fact that they aren't asking for UBI really speaks to how hopeless our society feels right now.

This is tough. I believe there is a lot of unfair wealth concentration in our society, especially in the tech companies. On the other hand, I don't want AI to be stifled by bad laws.

If we try to stop AI, it will only take it away from the public. The military will still secretly use it, companies might still secretly use it. Other countries will use it and their populations will benefit while we languish.

Our only hope for a happy ending is to let this technology be free and let it go into the hands of many companies and many individuals (there are already decent models you can run on your own computer).

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/827/

This is so stupid. If I read a book and get inspired by it and write my own stuff, as long as I'm not using the copyrighted characters, I don't need to pay anyone anything other than purchasing the book which inspired me originally.

If this were a law, why shouldn't pretty much each modern day fantasy author not pay Tolkien foundation or any non fiction pay each citation.

Isn’t learning the basic act of reading text? I’m not sure what the AI companies are doing is completely right but also, if your position is that only humans can learn and adapt text, that broadly rules out any AI ever.

What did you pay the author of the books and papers published that you used as sources in your own work? Do you pay those authors each time someone buys or reads your work? At most you pay $0-$15 for a book anyway.

In regards to free advertising when your source material is used... if your material is a good source and someone asks say ChatGPT, shouldn't your work be mentioned if someone asks for a book or paper and you have written something useful for it? Assuming it doesn't hallucinate.

Love to see it!

democrats