AI is stealing writers’ words and jobs…

[Jfdlsjfd]

@Snarf Zagyg

Thank you for your detailed input.

My take- this cuts heavily against AI Firms, given that it's a commercial use. Mitigated by the argument that it's transformative (they are not simply cutting and pasting, but using it to train).

Would it help, on the other hand, open-source models that are distributed non commercially (Mistral or Stable Diffusion come to mind), though they might not care about US law)?

3. Amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole.

This is arguably the worst factor for AI Firms, because, they are using the "whole" work. That said, there are two things to consider; while difficult, it is not impossible to find fair use of an entire work. In addition, I think that AI Firms would argue that they aren't "using" the whole work, given that the outputs are constrained to not regurgitate the whole thing.

Actually, it doesn't contain any part of the copyrighted works. The model itself is a mathematical result, so they could claim that their is no similarity between the originals (the books) and the result.

4. Effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

Here, we are looking at the damage to the market for the original work done by the alleged unlicensed product. I think that the AI Firms have a decent case in terms Books3 on this factor ... I am far less certain about how this would work for some of the image generating AIs, which I believe can mimic the styles and outputs of certain artists, and arguable would affect the existing or future market for the copyrighted works. Honestly, you could probably make the same argument for Books3 at a certain point, to the extent that the corpus contains enough of a writer's output to mimic the writer and damage the market for their books. So ...

I think the argument that it can mimic the style of certain artists is giving too much credit to AI generative ability at this point (I am not speaking for the far future, like June or July 2024). It has been noted that people used artists names in the prompt to modify the output, but it's far from being able to replicate a style. I've tried with several, if you add Hopper you get a chance to find a diner in your aerial view of the orcish capital, if you type Van Gogh you'll get a weird sky that's far from being Van Gogh's. "by Rutkowsky" might get you a generic fantasy style, but it wouldn't be different than prompting for "D&D style" or "conan style".

 

[Maxperson]

Okay? I was mentioned in this thread, and responded. I didn't read the prior 380 posts. But sure, you are welcome to the credit!

I will endeavor, in the future, to charge people for writing so I don't get summoned again like some kind of ersatz Beetlejuice.

@Snarf Zagyg @Snarf Zagyg @Snarf Zagyg

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Thank you for your detailed input.

Actually, it doesn't contain any part of the copyrighted works. The model itself is a mathematical result, so they could claim that their is no similarity between the originals (the books) and the result.

I think the argument that it can mimic the style of certain artists is giving too much credit to AI generative ability at this point (I am not speaking for the far future, like June or July 2024). It has been noted that people used artists names in the prompt to modify the output, but it's far from being able to replicate a style. I've tried with several, if you add Hopper you get a chance to find a diner in your aerial view of the orcish capital, if you type Van Gogh you'll get a weird sky that's far from being Van Gogh's. "by Rutkowsky" might get you a generic fantasy style, but it wouldn't be different than prompting for "D&D style" or "conan style".

You are most welcome, although please remember I'm just riffing on this. That said, I wanted to add two additional points.

1. I wanted to briefly address your bolded statement, simply because I've seen it a few times. That ... that's not going to fly. If you think about this for even a second, you would understand why. "Judge, I didn't violate the copyright of the book. I scanned the book, transformed it into numbers and stuff, and then sent those numbers around to other people so they could view them on their e-thingies! See, no similarity between a book and an e-thingie!" You can't do that.

2. That said, I want to re-emphasize how uncertain the law is. If someone tells you that they know the answer, they're lying to you. This really is uncharted territory. I can say that this feels like it's not going to be fair use, but ... I don't know. Mostly because when you get to completely novel issues, you never can tell for sure. To give you the three canonical examples that we all know about in copyright and transformative use-
VCRs
Naptster
Google Books

Three copyright cases. All of them, at the time, felt like they would be losers. One of them (Napster) was! But two of them (VCRs and Google Books) ... weren't! When dealing with novel issues like this one, it can be difficult to predict outcomes. Even if you try to follow a prior example (Napster, IIRC, tried to follow the VCR precedent and argue that because it had non-infringing uses, it was fine ... the infamous cookie recipe ... but that didn't work out so well).

 

[Ryujin]

You are most welcome, although please remember I'm just riffing on this. That said, I wanted to add two additional points.

1. I wanted to briefly address your bolded statement, simply because I've seen it a few times. That ... that's not going to fly. If you think about this for even a second, you would understand why. "Judge, I didn't violate the copyright of the book. I scanned the book, transformed it into numbers and stuff, and then sent those numbers around to other people so they could view them on their e-thingies! See, no similarity between a book and an e-thingie!" You can't do that.

2. That said, I want to re-emphasize how uncertain the law is. If someone tells you that they know the answer, they're lying to you. This really is uncharted territory. I can say that this feels like it's not going to be fair use, but ... I don't know. Mostly because when you get to completely novel issues, you never can tell for sure. To give you the three canonical examples that we all know about in copyright and transformative use-
VCRs
Naptster
Google Books

Three copyright cases. All of them, at the time, felt like they would be losers. One of them (Napster) was! But two of them (VCRs and Google Books) ... weren't! When dealing with novel issues like this one, it can be difficult to predict outcomes. Even if you try to follow a prior example (Napster, IIRC, tried to follow the VCR precedent and argue that because it had non-infringing uses, it was fine ... the infamous cookie recipe ... but that didn't work out so well).

They might also try going the route of, "i didn't digitize that copyrighted work. That other guy did. I just used it." That would likely also not fly based on the simple response, "When did you know the works were copyrighted and why didn't you stop using them, as soon as you found out?"

In Canada we had music/movie/TV groups demand that they be compensated for all media that could be used in recording their copyrighted product, as it was clear that tapes and digital media were being used to breach their rights. Our government said OK, here's your levy. I haven't looked at the current situation but for at least a decade, after that came into effect, no copyright claim for stuff like Bittorrent succeeded in this country. "You've been paid and don't get two bites at the apple" was essentially what courts said.

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

You are most welcome, although please remember I'm just riffing on this. That said, I wanted to add two additional points.

1. I wanted to briefly address your bolded statement, simply because I've seen it a few times. That ... that's not going to fly. If you think about this for even a second, you would understand why. "Judge, I didn't violate the copyright of the book. I scanned the book, transformed it into numbers and stuff, and then sent those numbers around to other people so they could view them on their e-thingies! See, no similarity between a book and an e-thingie!" You can't do that.

If they said "we used a computer thingie to do something akin to count the number of words in the book and are creating a computer table that has the word counts of many books aggregated and a dictionnary of words", would a copyright owner of one book could claim copyright on the resulting database? Ai training is much more complex than that, but the relation between the original work and the outcome isn't a translation or playing a play.

Not saying that it will work, of course, but it might be worth trying. I am not convinced the traied model would count as a derivative work under EU copyright, for example, so I am genuinely curious about the outcome in the US -- while in the EU, it is currently solved anyway by the text and datamining exception in that it's explicitely allowed to use copyrighted works for training, unless the copyright owner opts-out (which would result in Meta running the model training on EU-based servers). Which maybe they did, for all we know.

2. That said, I want to re-emphasize how uncertain the law is. If someone tells you that they know the answer, they're lying to you. This really is uncharted territory. I can say that this feels like it's not going to be fair use, but ... I don't know.

Plus, whatever the outcome, the law can change to take the novel thing into account. I guess the uncertainty comes from the courts having to interpret rather old texts with regard to the current matter.

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

In Canada we had music/movie/TV groups demand that they be compensated for all media that could be used in recording their copyrighted product, as it was clear that tapes and digital media were being used to breach their rights. Our government said OK, here's your levy. I haven't looked at the current situation but for at least a decade, after that came into effect, no copyright claim for stuff like Bittorrent succeeded in this country. "You've been paid and don't get two bites at the apple" was essentially what courts said.

In France, there is a law proposal (not yet voted) that proposes to grant collective IP management rights over AI training to artists's societies (generally in charge of providing social assistance to artists) and fund them by a tax on the revenue generated by selling AI-generated content. It would be the same outcome, a general tax (on sales, here, not on recording device) and since the individual contribution is too small to be significant, it would fund a general interest mission. It's much like the class action outcome outlined by the Snarf that Shouldn't be Named.

 

[Ryujin]

In France, there is a law proposal (not yet voted) that proposes to grant collective IP management rights over AI training to artists's societies (generally in charge of providing social assistance to artists) and fund them by a tax on the revenue generated by selling AI-generated content. It would be the same outcome, a general tax (on sales, here, not on recording device) and since the individual contribution is too small to be significant, it would fund a general interest mission. It's much like the class action outcome outlined by the Snarf that Shouldn't be Named.

The problem with the Canadian model is that people like me have to pay the levy on digital media, that I use to produce my own photographs, but there isn't a method by which I can either opt out of the levy or receive payment from the fund.

 

[lynnfredricks]

They might also try going the route of, "i didn't digitize that copyrighted work. That other guy did. I just used it." That would likely also not fly based on the simple response, "When did you know the works were copyrighted and why didn't you stop using them, as soon as you found out?"

In Canada we had music/movie/TV groups demand that they be compensated for all media that could be used in recording their copyrighted product, as it was clear that tapes and digital media were being used to breach their rights. Our government said OK, here's your levy. I haven't looked at the current situation but for at least a decade, after that came into effect, no copyright claim for stuff like Bittorrent succeeded in this country. "You've been paid and don't get two bites at the apple" was essentially what courts said.

I don't think the "somebody else did it" because IP protections typically includes distribution.

 

[Ryujin]

I don't think the "somebody else did it" because IP protections typically includes distribution.

Of course. My comment was about if they tried claiming no knowledge, while trying to minimize possible penalties/punishments.

 

[J.Quondam]

Somewhat relevant: In the run-up to this year's Game Developers' Conference, organizers have published a survey of videogame devs (conducted in October 2023) which covered in part the use of gen AI in the workplace. A quote from an article on the topic:

"The survey also found that different studio departments showed different levels of willingness to embrace AI tools. Forty-four percent of employees in business and finance said they were using AI tools, for instance, compared to just 16 percent in visual arts and 13 percent in "narrative/writing.""​

​

full article:​

Game developer survey: 50% work at a studio already using generative AI tools

But 84% of devs are at least somewhat concerned about ethical use of those tools.

arstechnica.com

​

Unsurprisingly, it looks like the business side is more receptive to gen AI than the creator side, at least in the video gaming world.