Technology

Is that hatred, or fear, that I hear in this comment?

That's "suppressing theft masquerading as art is awesome" you hear in that comment.

I don’t have a problem with training on copyrighted content provided 1) a person could access that content and use it as the basis of their own art and 2) the derived work would also not infringe on copyright. In other words, if the training data is available for a person to learn from and if a person could make the same content an AI would and it be allowed, then AI should be allowed to do the same. AI should not (as an example) be allowed to simply reproduce a bit-for-bit copy of its training data (provided it wasn’t something trivial that would not be protected under copyright anyway). The same is true for a person. Now, this leaves some protections in place such as: if a person made content and released it to a private audience which are not permitted to redistribute it, then an AI would only be allowed to train off it if it obtained that content with permission in the first place, just like a person. Obtaining it through a third party would not be allowed as that third party did not have permission to redistribute. This means that an AI should not be allowed to use work unless it at minimum had licence to view the work. I don’t think you should be able to restrict your work from being used as training data beyond disallowing viewing entirely though.

I’m open to arguments against this though. My general concern is copyright already allows for substantial restrictions on how you use a work that seem unfair, such as Microsoft disallowing the use of Windows Home and Pro on headless machines/as servers.

With all this said, I think we need to be ready to support those who lose their jobs from this. Losing your job should never be a game over scenario (loss of housing, medical, housing loans, potentially car loans provided you didn’t buy something like a mansion or luxury car).

What I don’t understand is how many people condemn all of generative AI. For me the issue seems to be one of consent and compensation, and ultimately of capitalism.

Would you be okay with generative AI whose training data was vetted to be acquired consentually?

Not if it was used to undercut human artists' livelihoods.

Hypothetical future where everybody gets UBI and/or AI becomes sentient and able to unionize, maybe we look back at this again.

I don't think AI has a soul but there no reason it couldn't be given one.

Are you going to somehow reach into my personal computer and remove the software and models from it?

Neuromorphic hardware is coming to some future gen phones to allow training custom sophisticated models.

Indeed we'll see... the rest of the iceberg.