The biggest problem about AI is not intrinsic to AI. It’s to do with the fact that it’s owned by the same few people, and I have less and less interest in what those people think, and more and more criticisms of what the effect of their work has been.
Sorry, just to be clear, are you equating a human learning to an organization scraping creative works as inputs for their software?
Everything is a remix of a copy of derivative works. They learn from other people, from other artists, from institutions that teach entire industries. Some of it had “informed consent”, some of it was “borrowed” from other ideas without anybody’s permission. We see legal battles on a monthly basis as to whether these four notes are too similar to these other four notes. Half of the movies are reboots, and some of them were actually itself another reboot a few times over.
“Good artist copy, great artist steal.”
No human has truly had an original thought in their head ever. It’s all stolen knowledge, whether we realize it’s stolen or not. In the age of the Internet, we steal now more than ever. We pass memes to each other with stolen material. Journalists copy entire quotes from other journalists, who then create other articles about some guy’s Twitter post, who actually got the idea from Reddit, and that article gets posted on Facebook. And then when it reaches Lemmy, we post the whole article because we don’t want the paywall.
We practice Fair Use on a regular basis by using and remixing images and videos into other videos, but isn’t that similar to an AI bot looking at an image, figuring out some weights from it, and throwing it away? I don’t own this picture of Brian Eno, but it’s certainly sitting in my browser cache, and Brian Eno and Getty Images didn’t grant me “informed consent” to do anything with it. Did I steal it? Is it legally or morally unethical to have it sitting on my hard drive? If I photoshop it and turn it into a dragon with a mic on a mixing board, and then pass it around, is that legally or morally unethical? Fair Use says no.
It’s folly to pretend that AI should be held to a standard that we ourselves aren’t upholding.
A: “Hey, did you just download all the movies of 2024?”
B: “Yeah”
A: “That’s illegal”
B: “No no, it’s not illegal. I’m gonna train my AI model. So it’s fine”
A: “With your i3 PC with 4 GB of RAM?”
B: “I’ll get better hardware later on. I might have to watch them to understand what to use for training”
A: “As long as you use it for training, it’s fine. Make sure to not watch it for your entertainment”
B: “Yeah sure, bye”
Legally, the one hosting the material is the one who is punished, not the downloader. Though, if they are using torrent software, they are both downloading and hosting. Copyright law doesn’t give a shit why they’re watching it.
If I downloaded pictures on the internet by visiting a web site, I’m not going to suddenly get punished because it’s copyrighted. Otherwise, every one of us is now in trouble because of the linked article.