Technology

But if they make money with someone’s years of work writing a book, then please give that author some money as well.

Why? I've read many books on programming, and now I work as a programmer. The authors of those books don't get a percentage of my income just because they spent years writing the book. I've also read (and written) plenty of open source code over the years, and learned from that code. That doesn't mean I have to give money to all the people who contributed to those projects.

Not where I live. In the U.K. copyright for AI generated works is owned by the person that caused the AI to create the work. See s178 and s9(3) of the Copyright, Design and Patent Act of 1987.

Epic lawsuits round 2... "There are no heroes here"

Yes it seems they want copyright when it suits them and not when it doesn’t.

Who said anything about "do whatever they want"? They should obviously comply with the law.

When a human reads a comment here on Lemmy and learns something they didn't know before - copyright law doesn't stop them from using that knowledge. The same rule should apply to AI.

In my opinion if you don't want AI to learn from your work, then you shouldn't allow humans to learn from it either. That's fine - everyone has the right to keep their work private if they choose to do so... but if you make it publicly available, then you don't get to control who learns from it.

You can control who makes exact replicas of it, and if AI is doing that then sure - charge the company with copyright infringement - but generally that's not how these systems work. They generally don't produce exact copies except for highly structured content where there isn't much creative flexibility (and those tend to not be protected under copyright by the way - they would be protected by patents).

• To have been influenced by that piece, legally, the human will have had to pay the copyright holder to; go to the cinema, buy the bluray, see the performance, go to the gallery, etc. Works out of copyright obviously don't apply here.
• To be trained in a discipline, the human likely pays for teaching by others, and those others have also paid copyright holders to view the media that influenced them aswell

Neither of these are necessarily true, and the first one is even demonstrably false given the amount of copyrighted content that can be freely accessed online.

• Even thought the vast majority of art is influenced by all other art, humans are capable of novel invention- ie things which have not come before - but GenAI fundamentally isn't.

That depends highly on your definition of "novel invention". Given that GenAI can be given randomised noise as input to create something from, it's highly debatable if GenAI is truly "incapable" of novel invention. And even then, it's possible to provide prompts describing a novel style (e.g. "oil painting with thick, vibrant streaks of colour" or something), so a human + GenAI together may well be capable of novel invention. I don't recall the last time a human was able to create something that could not be expressed in previously existing words at all. You can describe Van Gogh without using his name, or describe a Picasso without using named art styles. Yet we consider their works novel, no?

That's the reason people are complaining, cos they aren't being paid today, and they won't be paid tomorrow.

Even if AI only trained on non-copyrighted art, this would still be true. It might set the AI companies back a year or two, but AI art generation is here to stay and will threaten artists' incomes. These lawsuits are only really stalling tactics to delay the inevitable.

I can't predict if they're going to win their lawsuit or not, nor do I know if they should. But the artists' salvation won't lie in copyright law, I know that much.

The AI isn't being accused of copyright infringement. Nothing is being anthropomorphized.

Wether you write a copy of a book with a pen, or type it into a keyboard, or photograph every page, or scan it with a machine learning model is completely irrelevant. The question is - did you (the human using the pen/keyboard/camera/ai model) break the law?

I'd argue no, but other people disagree. It'll be interesting to see where the courts side on it. And perhaps more importantly, wether new legislation is written to change copyright law.

Scale matters. For example

• A bunch of random shops having security cameras, where their employees can review footage

• Every business in a country having a camera connected to a central surveillance network with facial recognition and search capabilities

Those two things are not the same, even though you could say they're "not much different" - it's just a bunch of cameras after all.

Also, the similarity between human learning and AI training is highly debatable.

When Google trained their playing neural network, they trained it to starcraft2 . It was better at it than professional gamer. It trained by watching 100years of play. Or 36500 days of play. Or 876000 hours of play.

Does a human can do that ? We both know it's impossible. As the other person said, the issue is scale.

That's the thing. I don't see how there is sacrifice involved in this. I would guess that the average user here has personally more to lose than to gain from expanded copyrights.