Imagine you have a magic box that can generate any video you want. Some people ask it to generate fan fiction-like videos, some ask it to generate meme-like videos, and a whole lot of people ask it to generate porn.
Then there’s a few people that ask it to generate videos using trademarked and copyrighted stuff. It does what the user asks because there’s no way for it to know what is and isn’t copyrighted. What is and isn’t parody or protected fair use.
It’s just a magic box that generates videos… Whatever the human asks for.
This makes some people and companies very, very upset. They sue the maker of the magic box, saying it’s copying their works. They start PR campaigns, painting the magic box in a bad light. They might even use the magic box quite a lot themselves but it doesn’t matter. To them, the magic box is pure evil; indirectly preventing them from gaining more profit… Somehow. Just like Sony was sued for making a machine that let people copy whatever videos they wanted (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Universal_City_Studios%2C_Inc.).
Before long, other companies make their own magic boxes and then, every day people get access to their own, personal magic boxes that no one can see the output from unless they share.
Why is this different from the Sony vs Universal situation? The AI magic box is actually worse at copying videos than a VCR.
When a person copies—and then distributes—a movie do we say the maker of the VCR/DVD burner/computer is at fault for allowing this to happen? No. It’s the person that distributed the copyrighted work.
Silence, AI defender
Now imagine it’s not a magic box. Imagine it is a computer program, written with intent, that was intentionally fed copyrighted material so it could make those things people asked for.
Giant companies operating outside the law at “the cost of doing business” built plagiarism machines off the life’s work of thousands of people so that horny weirdos could jerk it to Pikachu with tits.
O_o Pikachu with tits eh? Now where could one of these hypothetical horny weirdos find these magic boxes you speak of?
If you want to see Pikachu with tits, the magic box would be searching for it on e621 or Rule34.
Me!? Ew, no way.
To be fair, a horny weirdo would still probably pay a human artist for a Pikachu with tits. Image generators probably wouldn’t get the nuance exactly right. An image generator is better for like, Azula getting her toes sucked by a Dai Li agent or something. Probably. I’m only speculating
as a totally off-topic aside, I find that people tend to dislike AI in areas they are deeply familiar with.
This is easily top 5 dumbest takes ever about AI.
do we say the maker of the VCR/DVD burner/computer is at fault
There’s one difference you ignored: to copy a video with a VCR, the user needs to supply the copyrighted material. I’m sure the manufacturers would’ve been in more legal trouble if they shipped VCRs packed with pirated content.
And you need a blank tape to copy to, the makers of which did have to pay a charge to content firms to cover piracy.
In this tortured analogy the blanks are also included in the ai firm product, so yes they would have had to pay
The difference between Gen AI and Sony v. Universal feels pretty substantial to me: VCRs did not require manufacturers to use any copyrighted material to develop and manufacture them. They only could potentially infringe copyright if the user captured a copyrighted signal and used it for commercial purposes.
If you read the title and the description of the article, it admittedly does make it sound like the studios are taking issue with copyrighted IPs being able to be generated. But the first paragraph of the body states that the problem is actually the usage of copyrighted works as training inputs:
The Content Overseas Distribution Association […] has issued a formal notice to OpenAI demanding that it stop using its members content to train its Sora 2 video generation tool without permission.
You compare Gen AI to “magic boxes”… but they’re not magic. They have to get their “knowledge” from somewhere. These AI tools are using many patterns far more subtle and complex than humans can recognize, and they aren’t storing the training inputs using them— it’s just used to strengthen connections within the neural net (afaik, as I’m not an ML developer). I think that’s why it’s so unregulated: how to you prove they used your content? And even so, they aren’t storing or outputting it directly. Could it fall under fair use?
Still, using copyrighted information in the creation of an invention has historically been considered infringement (I may not be using the correct terminology in this comparison, since maybe it’s more relevant to patent law), even if it didn’t end up in the invention— in software, for example, reverse engineers can’t legally rely on leaked source code to guide their development.
Also, using a VCR for personal use wouldn’t be a problem, which I’d say was a prominent use-case. And using it commercially wouldn’t involve any copyrighted material, unless the owner inputs any. Those aren’t the case with Gen AI: regardless of what you generate, non-commercially or commercially, the neural network was built using a majority of unauthorized, copyrighted content.
That said, copyright law functions largely to protect corporations anyways— an individual infringing the copyright of a corporation for personal or non-commercial use causes very little harm, but can usually be challenged and stopped. A corporation infringing copyright of an individual often can’t be stopped. Most individuals can’t even afford the legal fees, anyways.
For that reason, I’m glad to see companies taking legal action against OpenAI and other megacorps which are (IMO) infringing the copyright of individuals and corporations at this kind of a massive scale. Individuals certainly can’t stop it, but corporations may be able to get some justice or encourage more to be done to safeguard the technology.
Much damage is already done, though. E-waste and energy usage from machine learning have skyrocketed. Websites struggle to fight crawlers and lock down their APIs, both harming legit users. Non-consensual AI pornography is widely accessible. Many apps encourage people, including youth, to forgo genuine connection, both platonic and romantic, in exchange for AI chatbots. Also LLMs are fantastic misinformation machines. And we have automated arts, arguably the most “human” thing we can do, and put many artists out of work in doing so.
Whether the lack of safety guards is because of government incompetence, corruption, or is inherent to free-market capitalism, I’m not sure. Probably all of those reasons.
In summary, I disagree with you. I think companies training AI with unauthorized material are at fault. And personally, I think the entire AI industry as it exists currently is unethical.
