https://twitter.com/jess_miers/status/1777799266032853364
Big e🅱️il guberment attacking small innocent ai goop buisness with the vile Copyright Fhforgement pigs
I've said it before, but the whole property angle of this is a red herring to frame all the discussion around AI on an issue that benefits large property holders and any corporation that claims ownership over its users content, and away from its effects on labor and the harm that generative AI enables in both volume and nature of material.
That is, it focuses all the ethics on "first of all, property is sacred and ideas can be owned and made exclusive to companies that can buy them, and second the gravest sin is infringing upon property by daring to look at an idea in a manner you have not expressly paid for" which is all 100% bullshit in every way and is a distraction from the fact that owning tons of property doesn't make generative AI ok.
The correct angle should be forcing all generative AI and its products to be public domain, as well as anything incorporating them. Completely kill its commercial and industrial value to corporations when they can no longer own it exclusively nor use it to eliminate labor because they cannot own anything it produces.
That is, it focuses all the ethics on "first of all, property is sacred and ideas can be owned and made exclusive to companies that can buy them, and second the gravest sin is infringing upon property by daring to look at an idea in a manner you have not expressly paid
%It's crazy how this conception of "property rights" is considered the State of Nature, instead of a social construct
If they ever manage to make cyber eyes or ears, they will come with DRM blocks and commercials built in.
They already make cybernetic ears that don't have ads
Edit: In actuality, the real concern (and this has happened) are proprietary implants that no longer work once a company goes under.
Yeah but it's because those are primitive and barely work so there is no technical possiblity to do that yet.. I meant something like the sophisticated stuff known from sci-fi. Imagine walking the street and suddenly you heard the white noise because dude walking beside you played copyrighted music from his phone, then you both get fined for copyright violations.
You know, like they are totally trying to do right now for computers.
something like the sophisticated stuff known from sci-fi
More science fantasy than fiction. That's part of the joke in it all. Not enough deaf people to make real bionic ears profitable. You'll see them in Cuba or Vietnam long before they reach stateside.
and they won't have ads or any of that bs until the US begins meddling
There was also the real life case of a company going under and repossessing the cybernetic implant, forcing them to go back into surgery
The correct angle should be forcing all generative AI and its products to be public domain, as well as anything incorporating them.
FOSSlarian Jihad.
The correct angle should be forcing all generative AI and its products to be public domain
None of these parties want to expand public domain, though. So that's not on the table.
This is purely a tug of war between "disruptor" tech industry piracy that's supposed to be Too Big To Fail and legacy media that would drag us back to flip books and cave paintings if they thought it would benefit the bottom line.
In the abstract you’re absolutely correct. But it is funny to watch tech bros vigorously defend the IP sanctity of their code out of one side of their mouth and protest having to follow that IP law when it comes to their datasets out of the other. A sort of, you made your bed now lie in it scenario.
yeah it's incredibly frustrating how often people here defend and uphold such liberalism.
It just goes to show how insidious the propaganda is, because all the talk is focused on like small property holders who have very little wealth and a portfolio of work that's public but not public domain and how their souls are being stolen by the infernal machine so the natural impulse is to support them as workers, except the reality is that they're never gonna get a cut no matter what: maybe their work gets cut out entirely, or the hosting site they trusted with their portfolio gets a payout which makes the use "properly licensed" since they inevitably insist they have the right to do whatever they want with anything they host, and the big property holders like Disney and other huge media conglomerates get to use their own libraries or license them out for training, and this all goes into a big proprietary black box to be used to replace professional animators or other film staff or voice actors, etc.
And the result is enclosure and the obliteration of the arts in favor of 100% corporate owned and operated slop machines with minimal human involvement.
It'd take time to synthesize, but I think there's probably an interesting analysis to be had about how this relates to small property holders and their relationship to capital in general, because just typing this out I can't stop thinking about historic peasant movements and their relation to revolutionaries either in support or against them depending on when and where, and how modern yeoman farmers are getting completely fucked by large property holders but side with Capital just because they're scared of losing what little they have and because they rely on hyperexploitation of even less privileged peoples themselves.
the hosting site they trusted with their portfolio gets a payout which makes the use "properly licensed" since they inevitably insist they have the right to do whatever they want with anything they host
This is 100% what's going to happen. The host is going to get paid 20m for everything ever uploaded, and open-source ai models are going to disappear. Then all the artists are going to have to fork over $20/month to Adobe to use ai features.
I just have to wonder if people will realize they've been played or not. The doomer in me says people will celebrate the free market for providing them such a service.
Yeah, it’s a petit bourgeois relationship if you own the IP of your own work.
Sort of? That comes into play more with the ownership of the capital producing it, which is also the case but it's a bit weird to classify "owns a computer and drawing tablet, and uses them productively" in like the same ballpark as "owns many tens of thousands of dollars worth of capital, but still personally works it" because certainly the material pressures on them are different.
Although with how quickly the dialogue turned to "nooo, we must protect the sanctity of property rights!" and from there got turned around to excusing ruinous anti-labor developments from companies that respected property rights, it's not hard to see the same corrupting effect of property ownership intersecting with precarity at play, where the fear of losing what little power and wealth one has makes some people naively accept and support positions that barely benefit (or even harm) them and mostly just protect and serve huge property owners.
im of two minds - on the one hand, property rights are bullshit, but on the other there has to be SOME mechanism to protect the labour of artists no? I agree, by and large a move like this most advances the positions of huge property owners, but on the other hand doing away with copyright protection in its totality under our current system is also going to most impact small scale artists who don't have the wealth to protect their property privately, as compared to those same huge property owners
no matter what, in this situation and under our current system any move is naturally going to benefit the behemoths most, and so on the whole i still think I come down on the side of worker protection via legislation than ditching protections entirely
Totally agree, however there is the problem that any FOSS approach gets exploited by corps for free labour. Which is how half the web is maintained by 3 furries in their non-existent spare time even though billion dollar comapnies use it every second.
Now 98% of AI is goopshit, but I'm sure a few useful applications will arise here and there and I'd rather corps have to fucking pay their way rather than coast off of the labour of workers they haven't even bother to make a wage slave.
a lot of companies won't touch free software, it's non-copyleft open source that they take advantage of
At my last job, our product depended on an open source project by one of the company’s former employees. I came across a massive bug in our code base that was related to this open source project. Despite the fix for the open source code being like 3 lines, management kept saying, “but we don’t want to help our competitors who might use this.” (No one else used it.) At one point, management asked me why don’t I fix it off the clock because then it wouldn’t be “company resources going into an open source product”. My response was basically “fuck you, pay me.” It took me a literal month to finally convince management.
For productive generative AI, all that's needed is for what it produces to be non-ownable along with anything incorporating it. For generative AI fitting into an internal supporting labor role a different solution would have to be found, I'm not sure what but a nuclear option to strip away property rights from anything touching it would probably be the simplest and strongest (also the idea that "the servers running the chatbot are free you can just take them home I have hundreds of them" being real and legal is very funny).
I've come to the conclusion that it's impossible to stop all the negative effects of AI, so policy responses should be focused on stopping the most harmful uses that can be stopped, and within that framework corporate control and ownership of it is an existential threat in a way that all the harm that would come from AI proliferation is not.
More intellectual property enforcement is not good, even if it's done to people you don't like. Because it's also going to be brought down on you
It isn't, though.
I'm an incredibly small bean, policing data at this scale is borderline impossible, and we already demonstrated (via RIAA/MPAA wack-a-mole enforcement efforts) that this isn't profitable in any meaningful sense.
The only people who really benefit from this kind of legislation are Mega-Corps who want to compel one another at some macro level.
The real end goal here is to force OpenAI to purge it's model of images captured from Marvel or Disney or some WB property. Nobody is coming for your home rolled desktop image generator.
Nobody is coming for your home rolled desktop image generator.
Yuzu and YouTube-DL are two real examples of copyright holders coming for your "home rolled" (in reality trained at a cost of millions of dollars in a datacenter) desktop image generator.
Yuzu was implicated in the "Tears of the Kingdom" leak, not just the emulation.
YouTube-DL is a 17-year-old application that still continues to appear to be widely available despite the take-down notice.
Neither are what I'd call "home rolled". They're both widely published and distributed.
The real end goal here is to force OpenAI to purge it's model of images captured from Marvel or Disney or some WB property. Nobody is coming for your home rolled desktop image generator.
People were saying "nobody's gonna actually sue you for downloading Metallica songs" when the band went after Napster and guess what happened. to use a different, more recent example, the company that owns Monster cables is infamous for suing small businesses that have Monster in the name even if there's no possible way anyone could get their business confused with their company.
People were saying "nobody's gonna actually sue you for downloading Metallica songs"
And for 99.99% of people this was true. The overwhelming majority of people actually doing piracy went untouched. And even the artists were forced to concede, by the end, that they got suckered by a constellation of shady agents and lawyers who took them for a ride.
the company that owns Monster cables is infamous for suing small businesses that have Monster in the name even if there's no possible way anyone could get their business confused with their company.
As someone who does not own a small business, I do not care.
And for 99.99% of people this was true. The overwhelming majority of people actually doing piracy went untouched. And even the artists were forced to concede, by the end, that they got suckered by a constellation of shady agents and lawyers who took them for a ride.
I'm not sure why you're posting this as if it's not still happening. The BMI has been known to sue DIY venues for playing licensed music over the PA between bands if they find out about it. Sure, most people will get away with it but it still sucks for the few that don't.
I'd also argue there's a good chance this could start happening more and more as the corporations see their rate of profit falling naturally. They're not gonna do the smart thing and blame capitalism, they're gonna try to figure out how to go after whoever they want to extract as much extra money as possible.
As someone who does not own a small business, I do not care.
I don't care about small businesses either, but it's an example of corporations weaponizing IP law to go against people smaller than them. Monster, for example, also sued charities for using Monster in the name. If you don't think big tech would go after a mutual aid group or something else doing cool shit that happens to use AI for some reason, you're wrong.
Sure, most people will get away with it but it still sucks for the few that don't.
This Act will not affect whether you get caught playing copy written music in the slightest.
About time government considers going after corporations for copyright abuse as hard as they go after regular ass people for it
IP mafia in US has so much power as to not only blatantly extort people, but it basically enforced its wishes on both US and EU law. no chance any US govt can hurt them. I can absolutely guarantee that if they ever go against business, it will only serve to squeeze the lesser publisning entities into monopolising everything in even fewer media conglomerates.
Wait, is this law really going to impact spellcheck‽ Is the government really going to free people from the tyranny of the red squiggly line‽
Automatic Tankie Self-Jerk on the mention of the initialism "AI" aside, unjerk yourself for a moment
This law is too fucking broad. It affects even basic grammar correction or spell check or predictive text systems.
