this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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A rising movement of artists and authors are suing tech companies for training AI on their work without credit or payment

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[–] inspxtr@lemmy.world 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I believe with humans, the limitations of our capacity to know, create, learn, and the limited contexts that we apply such knowledge and skills may actually be better for creativity and relatability - knowing everything may not always be optimal, especially when it is something about subjective experience. Plus, such limitations may also protect creators from certain claims about copyright, 1 idea can come from many independent creators, and can be implemented briefly similar or vastly different. And usually, we, as humans, develop a sense of work ethics to attribute the inspirations of our work. There are other who steal ideas without attribution as well, but that’s where laws come in to settle it.

On the side of tech companies using their work to train, ~~AI~~ gen tech is learning at a vastly different scale, slurping up their work without attributing them. If we’re talking about the mechanism of creativity, ~~AI~~ gen tech seems to be given a huge advantage already. Plus, artists/creators learn and create their work, usually with some contexts, sometimes with meaning. Excluding commercial works, I’m not entirely sure the products ~~AI~~ gen tech creates carry such specificity. Maybe it does, with some interpretation?

Anyway, I think the larger debate here is about compensation and attribution. How is it fair for big companies with a lot of money to take creators’ work, without (or minimal) paying/attributing them, while those companies then use these technologies to make more money?

EDIT: replace AI with gen(erative) tech

[–] Ath47@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

How is it fair for big companies with a lot of money to take creators’ work, without (or minimal) paying/attributing them, while those companies then use these technologies to make more money?

Because those works were put online, at a publicly accessible location, and not behind a paywall or subscription. If literally anyone on the planet can see your work just by typing a URL into their browser, then you have essentially allowed them to learn from it. Also, it's not like there are copies of those works stored away in some database somewhere, they were merely looked at for a few seconds each while a bunch of numbers went up and down in a neural network. There is absolutely not enough data kept to reproduce the original work.

Besides, if OpenAI (or other companies in the same business) had to pay a million people for the rights to use their work to train an AI model, how much do you think they'd be able to pay? A few dollars? Why bother seeking that kind of compensation at all?