A rising movement of artists and authors are suing tech companies for training AI on their work without credit or payment

  • goetzit@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I never understand this argument. If I go to an art museum, look at all the works, and create an art piece inspired by what i saw, no problem. If I go to an art museum, look at the works, and create a computer program that can create an art piece based on what I saw, that is somehow different? Because of the single step of abstraction that was taken by making some software to do it?

    • CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I think the difference is in the actual implementation. A lot of times AI has been caught outputing near direct copies of other peoples work or otherwise similar enough that if a human did it then it would become plagarism which is the crux of the problem. If I read someones book then write a slightly altered version and try to pass it off as my own work then thats plagarism, if I feed someones book into a language model and then have it write a slightly altered version thats somehow different and allowed.

      • goetzit@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Okay, I can understand that. But why is that being turned into “the creator of any work an AI looks at needs to be compensated” instead of holding AI companies accountable for plagiarized works?

        I totally understand fining an AI company that produces a copy of Starry Night. But if it makes a painting similar in style to Starry Night that wouldn’t normally be considered a plagiarized work if a human did it, do we still consider that an issue?

        • CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          From an existing legal perspective (giving some reddit tier legal advice here) I’m pretty sure there’s nothing legally wrong with AI art so long as its not straight up plagarism however there is another argument thats likely going to need settling at some point and iI’ll do my best to summarise it.

          Humans learn from other peoples work, but then eventually develop their own style and become net producers of ‘data’ (data being pictures, books whatever we’re training the AI on) Current AI never does this, it can effectively only remix other peoples work and thus needs to constantly scrape other peoples work in order to expand its repotoir it is never a net producer of ‘data’, this is effectively proven (for current AI) by the fact that using AI output as training data can actually make the AI worse because it compounds existing flaws and ‘AI hallucinations’

          This means human artists initially rely on others but ultimately create value from their own effort, AI on the other hand (for now) must continuously rely on the work of others in order to produce value. Or to put it even more simply, the AI industry is entierly reliant on the work of human artists but gives no credit or remediation.