- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
Copyright class actions could financially ruin AI industry, trade groups say.
AI industry groups are urging an appeals court to block what they say is the largest copyright class action ever certified. They’ve warned that a single lawsuit raised by three authors over Anthropic’s AI training now threatens to “financially ruin” the entire AI industry if up to 7 million claimants end up joining the litigation and forcing a settlement.
Last week, Anthropic petitioned to appeal the class certification, urging the court to weigh questions that the district court judge, William Alsup, seemingly did not. Alsup allegedly failed to conduct a “rigorous analysis” of the potential class and instead based his judgment on his “50 years” of experience, Anthropic said.
They’re not stealing anything. Nor are they “repackaging” anything. LLMs don’t work like that.
I know a whole heck of a lot of people hate generative AI with a passion but let’s get real: The reason they hate generative AI isn’t because they trained the models using copyrighted works (which has already been ruled fair use; as long as the works were legitimately purchased). They hate generative AI because of AI slop and the potential for taking jobs away from people who are already having a hard time.
AI Slop sucks! Nobody likes it except the people making money from it. But this is not a new phenomenon! For fuck’s sake: Those of us who have been on the Internet for a while have been dealing with outsourced slop and hidden marketing campaigns/scams since forever.
The only difference is that now—thanks to convenient and cheap LLMs—scammers and shady marketers can generate bullshit at a fraction of the cost and really, really quickly. But at least their grammar is correct now (LOL @ old school Nigerian Prince scams).
It’s humans ruining things for other humans. AI is just a tool that makes it easier and cheaper. Since all the lawsuits and laws in the world cannot stop generative AI at this point, we might as well fix the underlying problems that enable this bullshit. Making big AI companies go away isn’t going to help with these problems.
In fact, it could make things worse! Because the development of AI certainly won’t stop. It will just move to countries with fewer scruples and weaker ethics.
The biggest problem is (mostly unregulated) capitalism. Fix that, and suddenly AI “taking away jobs” ceases to be a problem.
Hopefully, AI will force the world to move toward the Star Trek future. Because generating text and images is just the start.
When machines can do just about everything a human can (and scale up really fast)—even without AGI—there’s no future for capitalism. It just won’t work when there’s no scarcity other than land and energy.
I respectfully disagree. Meta was caught downloading books from Libgen, a piracy site, to “train” it’s models. What AI models do in effect is scan information (i.e., copy), and distill and retain what they view as its essence. They can copy your voice, they can copy your face, and they can copy your distinctive artistic style. The only way they can do that is if the “training” copies and retains a portion of the original works.
Consider Shepard Fairies’ use of the AP’s copyrighted Obama photograph in the production of the iconic “Hope” poster, and the resultant lawsuit. While the suit was ultimately settled, and the issue of “fair use” was a close call given the variation in art work from the original source photograph, the suit easily could have gone against Fairey, so it was smart for him to settle.
Also consider the litigation surrounding the use of music sampling in original hip hop works, which has clearly been held to be copyright infringement.
Accordingly, I think it is very fair to say that (1) AI steals copyrighted works; and (2) repackages the essential portions of those works into new works. Might a re-write of copyright law be in order to embrace this new technology? Sure, but if I’m a actor, or voice actor, author, or other artist and I can no longer earn a living because someone else has taken my work to strip it down to it’s essence to resell cheaply without compensating me, I’m going to be pretty pissed off.
Lol. The liberal utopia of Star Trek is a fantasy. Far more likely is that AI will be exploited by oligarchs to enrich themselves and further impoverish the masses, as they are fervently working towards right now. See, AI isn’t creative, it gives the appearance of being creative by stealing work created by humans and repackaging it. When artists can no longer create art to survive, there will be less material for the AI models to steal, and we’ll be left with soulless AI slop as our de facto creative culture.
That action itself can and should be punished. Yes. But that has nothing to do with AI.
Is that what people think is happening? You don’t even have a layman’s understanding of this technology. At least watch a few videos on the topic.
I think that copying my voice makes this robot a T-1000, and T-1000s are meant to be dunked in lava to save Sarah Connor.
Absurd. It’s their entire fucking business model.
Meaning it would illegal even if they weren’t doing anything with ai…
So what an Ai does is the same thing as every human ever who has read/saw/listened a work and then wrote more words being influenced by that book/artwork/piece.
If you’ve ever done anything artistic in your life, you know that the first step is to look at what others have done. Even subconsciously you will pull from what you’ve seen, heard. To say that AI is not creative because it is derivative is to to say that no human being in history has been creative.
Meta literally torrented an insane amount of training materials illegally, from a company that was sued into the ground and forced to dissolve because of distributing stolen content
“When machines can do just about everything a human can (and scale up really fast)—even without AGI—there’s no future for capitalism.”
This might be one of the dumbest things I’ve ever read.
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Look these people are neck deep in a tribalistic worldview. You cannot reason with anyone who’s against AI simply because their claims are unfalsifiable and contradictory depending on the day and article they are reading. On the one hand it is the shitiest technology ever made which cannot do anything right and at the same time it is an existential threat to humanity.
And I can tell you, that the only reason this is the case is because the right is for AI more strongly than the left. If the right had condemned it, you can be damn right the tables would be turned and everyone who thinks they are left would be praising the tech.
Just move on and take solace in the fact that the technology simply cannot be rebottled, or uninvented. It exists, it is here to stay and literally no one can stop it at this point. And I agree with you, AI is the only tool that can provide true emancipation. It can also enslave. But the fact is that all tools can be used for right or wrong, so this is not inherent to AI.