Sarah Silverman leads class-action lawsuit against ChatGPT creator

It's a bit more complex than that. It would only be an accurate statement if the creation of art was a defined process that results in the same end product, every time.

During the industrial revolution skilled artisans and craftsmen who were previously engaged in producing goods by hand found it difficult to compete with the mass production capabilities of machines. Many of them lost their livelihoods as factories emerged.
 

log in or register to remove this ad

During the industrial revolution skilled artisans and craftsmen who were previously engaged in producing goods by hand found it difficult to compete with the mass production capabilities of machines. Many of them lost their livelihoods as factories emerged.
And yet if you want a bespoke item, even now, you go to an artisan of some description.

And I'm waiting for one of my mechanical pocket watches to be repaired, so I may not be the mean in this issue.
 

I think it’s also important to note that Fair Use is likely not a defense for AI art on a commercial scale.

That said the creation of AI’s themselves based on copyrighted work does seem to have much transformative and educational value when taken outside a commercial context.

It may be that the line in the sand is commercial use requires copyright holder consent and that most other uses are fair use.
 

Even if the books LLMs are trained on were purchased, it's still copyright infringement to create a program that spits out the text or derivative works to a third party.

Transformative use is protected under the fair use doctrine. And afaik there's nothing in that doctrine that says that you have to own a copy of the original. At worst they would be on the hook for stealing one copy of Silverman's book to read to the machine.
 

And yet if you want a bespoke item, even now, you go to an artisan of some description.

And I'm waiting for one of my mechanical pocket watches to be repaired, so I may not be the mean in this issue.
oh yes, if you want a human crafted item you can get one from the small number of folks who still do that.

Of course, this woman represents and entire industry with mass market appeal. So the comparison is still accurate for her case.
 

During the industrial revolution skilled artisans and craftsmen who were previously engaged in producing goods by hand found it difficult to compete with the mass production capabilities of machines. Many of them lost their livelihoods as factories emerged.

Right, and who the hell wants to go back to paying out the ass and waiting forever to get a product made by pre-industrial craftsmen?
 

Transformative use is protected under the fair use doctrine. And afaik there's nothing in that doctrine that says that you have to own a copy of the original. At worst they would be on the hook for stealing one copy of Silverman's book to read to the machine.
It’s not that simple.
 

Well, it is less that they were "acquired illegally" and more that however the text was acquired, using it as training data results in reproduction without permission - violation of copyright.
Exactly. That’s one very clearly defined issue.

Additional ones may be that the AI produces some images far too similar to copyrighted ones even if there was no direct copying.

Another may be that the model itself is viewed similar to a lossy image of the original, far more complex than this but think JPEG vs bitmap.

There’s alot of potential places where LLM AI art could infringe.
 

Well, it is less that they were "acquired illegally" and more that however the text was acquired, using it as training data results in reproduction without permission - violation of copyright.

At worst the only actionable reproduction is the training dataset itself, anything in the actual program is transformed at least as much as a William S. Burroughs novel.

And in any case it's likely a simple workaround to program the computer to just read from the original documents directly instead of compiling them into a single document and feeding that into the computer
 

oh yes, if you want a human crafted item you can get one from the small number of folks who still do that.

Of course, this woman represents and entire industry with mass market appeal. So the comparison is still accurate for her case.
Or if you just want something that doesn't look like the literal million other copies, out there, in varying sizes.
Right, and who the hell wants to go back to paying out the ass and waiting forever to get a product made by pre-industrial craftsmen?
Everyone who has ever bought something on Etsy? The people willing to pay me for leather goods, or chainmail, or photos? People who want to read or watch a story that's not a literal cut & paste of 40 other stories?
 

Remove ads

Top