Thousands of authors demand payment from AI companies for use of copyrighted works::Thousands of published authors are requesting payment from tech companies for the use of their copyrighted works in training artificial intelligence tools, marking the latest intellectual property critique to target AI development.
Okay, given that AI models need to look over hundreds of thousands if not millions of documents to get to a decent level of usefulness, how much should the author of each individual work get paid out?
Even if we say we are going to pay out a measly dollar for every work it looks over, you’re immediately talking millions of dollars in operating costs. Doesn’t this just box out anyone who can’t afford to spend tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars on AI development? Maybe good if you’ve always wanted big companies like Google and Microsoft to be the only ones able to develop these world-altering tools.
Another issue, who decides which works are more valuable, or how? Is a Shel Silverstein book worth less than a Mark Twain novel because it contains less words? If I self publish a book, is it worth as much as Mark Twains? Sure his is more popular but maybe mine is longer and contains more content, whats my payout in this scenario?
i admit it’s a hug issue, but the licensing costs are something that can be negotiated by the license holders in a structured settlement.
moving forward, AI companies can negotiate licensing deals for access to licensed works for AI training, and authors of published works can decide whether they want to make their works available to AI training (and their compensation rates) in future publishing contracts.
the solutions are simple-- the AI companies like OpenAI, Google, et al are just complaining because they don’t want to fork over money to the copyright holders they ripped off and set a precedent that what their doing is wrong (legally or otherwise).
Sure, but what I’m asking is: what do you think is a reasonable rate?
We are talking data sets that have millions of written works in them. If it costs hundreds or thousands per work, this venture almost doesn’t make sense anymore. If its $1 per work, or cents per work, then is it even worth it for each individual contributor to get $1 when it adds millions in operating costs?
In my opinion, this needs to be handled a lot more carefully than what is being proposed. We are potentially going to make AI datasets wayyyy too expensive for anyone to use aside from the largest companies in the market, and even then this will cause huge delays to that progress.
If AI is just blatantly copy and pasting what it read, then yes, I see that as a huge issue. But reading and learning from what it reads, no matter how rudimentary that “learning” may be, is much different than just copying works.
that’s not for me to decide. as I said, it is for either the courts to decide or for the content owners and the AI companies to negotiate a settlement (for prior infringements) and a negotiated contracted amount moving forward.
also, I agree that’s it’s a massive clusterfuck that these companies just purloined a fuckton of copyrighted material for profit without paying for it, but I’m glad that they’re finally being called out.
Dude, they said
That’s in no way agreeing “that’s it’s a massive clusterfuck that these companies just purloined a fuckton of copyrighted material for profit without paying for it”. Do you not understand that AI is not just copy and pasting content?
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AI isn’t doing anything creative. These tools are merely ways to deliver the information you put into it in a way that’s more natural and dynamic. There is no creation happening. The consequence is that you either pay for use of content, or you’ve basically diminished the value of creating content and potentiated plagiarism at a gargantuan level.
Being that this “AI” doesn’t actually have the capacity for creativity, if actual creativity becomes worthless, there will be a whole lot less incentive to create.
The “utility” of it right now is being created by effectively stealing other people’s work. Hence, the court cases.
Sure, AI is not doing anything creative, but neither is my pen, its the tool im using to be creative. Lets think about this more with some scenarios:
Lets say software developer “A” comes along, and they’re pretty fucking smart. They sit down, read through all of Mark Twains novels, and over the course of the next 5 years, create a piece of software that generates works in Twain’s style. Its so good that people begin using it to write real books. It doesn’t copy anything specifically from Twain, it just mimics his writing style.
We also have developer “B”. While Dev A is working on his project, Dev B is working on a very similar project, but with one difference: Dev B writes an LLM to read the books for him, and develop a writing style similar to Twain’s based off of that. The final product is more or less the same as Dev A’s product, but he saves himself the time of needing to read through every work on his own, he just reads a couple to get an idea of what the output might look like.
Is the work from Dev A’s software legitimate? Why or why not?
Is the work from Dev B’s software legitimate? Why or why not?
Assume both of these developers own copies of the works they used as training data, what is honestly the difference here? This is what I am struggling with so much.
Both developers have created a parrot tool. A utility to plagiarise a style.
So now the output of both programs is “illegimate” in your eyes, despite one of them never even getting direct access to the original text.
Now lets say one of them just writes a story in the style of Twain, still plagiarism? Because I don’t know if you can copyright a style.
The first painter painted on cave walls with his fingers. Was the brush a parrot tool? A utility to plagiarize? You could use it for plagiarism, yes, and by your logic, it shouldn’t be used. And any work created using it is not “legitimate”.
Please first define “creativity” without artificially restricting it to humans. Then, please explain how AI isn’t doing anything creative.
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The government could allow the donation of original art for the purpose of tech research to be a tax write-off, and then there can be non-profits that work between artists and tech developers to collect all the legally obtained art, and grant access to those that need it for projects
That’s just one option off the top of my head, which I’m sure would have some procedural obstacles, and chances for problems to be baked in, but I’m sure there are other options as well.
Congress has been here before. In the early days of radio, DJs were infringing on recording copyrights by playing music on the air. Congress knew it wasn’t feasible to require every song be explicitly licensed for radio reproduction, so they created a compulsory license system where creators are required to license their songs for radio distribution. They do get paid for each play, but at a rate set by the government, not negotiated directly.
I’d say no one. Just like Taylor Swift gets the same payment as your garage band per play, a compulsory licensing model doesn’t care who you are.
Why is any of that the author’s problem