Technology

In reality people learn how to write lyrics because they listen to songs. Nobody writes a song without listening to thousands of them and many human written songs are really similar to each other. Otherwise the music industry wouldn’t be littered with lawsuits. I don’t really see the difference.

AI is trained off actual lyrics, which is why companies who create these models are at risk (they don’t own the data they’re feeding into the model.)

Nobody is "at risk" of anything here. You don't have to own data to use data, just like you're not liable for the content of an Internet page because it was downloaded to your browser's cache.

Everybody who agrees with these lawsuits have a severe misunderstanding of how LLMs and other AI models work. They are large matrices of weights and numbers, not copies of the data they consume. The entire Stable Diffusion model is a 4GB file, trained from billions of images. It's impossible to "copy" petabytes of images and somehow end up with a few gigabytes of numbers. The transformation is a lossy process, and its result does not fit the definition of copyright.

Interns are also trained off of actual lyrics... cause radio.

I conflate these things because they come from the same intentional source. I associate the copywrite chasing lawyers with the brands that own them, it is just a more generalized example.

Also an intern who can give you a songs lyrics are trained on that data. Any effectively advanced future system is largely the same, unless it is just accessing a database or index, like web searching.

Copyright itself is already a terrible mess that largely serves brands who can afford lawyers to harass or contest infringements. Especially apparent after companies like Disney have all but murdered the public domain as a concept. See the mickey mouse protection act, as well as other related legislation.

This snowballs into an economy where the Disney company, and similarly benefited brands can hold on to ancient copyrights, and use their standing value to own and control the development and markets of new intellectual properties.

Now, a neuralnet trained on copywritten material can reference that memory, at least as accurately as an intern pulling from memory, unless they are accessing a database to pull the information. To me, sueing on that bases ultimately follows the logic that would dictate we have copywritten material removed from our own stochastic memory, as we have now ensured high dimensional informational storage is a form of copywrite infringement if anyone instigated the effort to draw on that information.

Ultimately, I believe our current system of copywrite is entirely incompatible with future technologies, and could lead to some scary arguments and actions from the overbearing oligarchy. To argue in favour of these actions is to argue never to let artificial intelligence learn as humans do. Given our need for this technology to survive the near future as a species, or at least minimize the excessive human suffering, I think the ultimate cost of pandering to these companies may be indescribably horrid.