I heard about C2PA and I don’t believe for a second that it’s not going to be used for surveillance and all that other fun stuff. What’s worse is that they’re apparently trying to make it legally required. It also really annoys me when I see headlines along the lines of “Is AI the end of creativity?!1!” or “AI will help artists, not hurt them!1!!” or something to that effect. So, it got me thinking and I tried to come up with some answers that actually benefit artists and their audience rather that just you know who.
Unfortunately my train of thought keeps barreling out of control to things like, “AI should do the boring stuff, not the fun stuff” and “if people didn’t risk starvation in the first place…” So I thought I’d find out what other people think (search engines have become borderline useless haven’t they).
So what do you think would be the best way to satisfy everyone?
Well, it would be a start to let artists sue AI for copyright infringement in some way. If a human can’t hide behind “oh but I draw inspiration from a lot of places, this was an accident” then neither should an AI company. And on the flip side the same way you can’t just accuse someone of infringement because “they must have drawn inspiration from somewhere, everything is a remix”, it shouldn’t make sense to accuse an AI this way. So far we’ve somehow been able to deal with the supposedly intractable question of whether something is plagiarism or not, I reckon we should hold AI to the same standard.
Agreed. Even if technically it’s probably maybe fair use, it’s not in spirit. Taking Copilot as an example, it doesn’t matter if the training data was open source (and some of it most likely wasn’t), the AGPL is copyleft and people choose it to propogate free software. Even if the AI may or may not be in violation of the licence legally, it’s 100% not in the spirit of foss since the model is proprietary.