this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2024
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The “issue” is that this logic applies to all human creations as well.
Sure, but the argument isn't "should we ban work that is based on the study of past cultural creation" it's "we should prevent computational/corporate exploitation of past cultural creation in order to protect the interests of humans."
i disagree. IP laws have more or less handled humans stealing ideas from humans for commercial gain. not perfectly by any means... but both the scale an impunity and frankly the entitlement exhibited by these GenAI companies is on another level.
no matter how many times people make the argument that AIs are just "doing what humans do", it fails to sway me. an AI copying, ingesting and tokenizing other people's intellectual property is nothing like a human watching a video or hearing a song and creating something based upon or derived from it. a database backed algorithm does nothing even remotely like a human mind. it's using software to process and regurgitate the works of others, and that is pretty plainly IP theft.
I’m not saying the process is exactly the same but conceptually it’s quite similar. Humans don’t create original ideas. They build on what came before. Maybe a truly brilliant artist or inventor adds 1% new ideas. That’s not enough to justify the extremely broad ownership of ideas that exists in our society. These laws implicitly assume that ideas were created from nothing through the sheer brilliance of the creator. Pure nonsense.
Humans have been freely copying each other for millions of years. It’s how we built everything we have. Ideas and art were not meant to be owned. The very concept of owning something non-physical is violent and authoritarian in nature. Without physical possession, the only way IP laws can be enforced is a global police empire, which the US has successfully created for its own enrichment at the expense of the global poor.
So in that context, the fact that AI is borrowing human ideas and then profiting from it doesn’t bother me any more than that humans do the same thing.
False. Master artisans have been keeping their knowledge secret in order to maintain a competitive advantage, only eventually passing their knowledge to the most advanced of their apprentices. Tons of knowledge has been lost over the millenia to Masters taking their knowledge with them. Temporary monopolies (Patents) and Copyright protections, in exchange for making the knowledge public, is what has enabled its exponential expansion.
Keyword being "temporary". We have Disney to thank for turning Copyright's temporariness into a mockery of itself.