this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
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You are right, especially regarding the copyright law. My argument here, however, was the same argument as companies are using against non-genuine spare parts or 3D printing (even though the latter seems to be a lost battle): people who are able to generate substitutes based on the company's designs (you can say their IP) are eating into their aftermarket profits. That's not even taking into account planned obsolescence (my kids toys are prime examples) or add-ons to products (I printed my own bracket for my Ring doorbell). With AI, I don't need to buy short story books for my kids to read; I'll generate my own until they are old enough to use Chat GPT themselves.
Yea, I mean I get why automated tools are bad for companies, I just don't have any sympathy for them, nor do I think we should be stretching our laws beyond their intent to protect them from competition. I think the fair-use exceptions for the DMCA (such as for breaking digital copy-protection for personal use) are comparable here. Under those exceptions for example, it's considered fair use to rip a DVD into a digital file as long as it's for personal use. An IP holder could argue that practice "eats into their potential future profits" for individuals who may want a digital version of a media product, but it's still protected. In that case, the value to the consumer is prioritized over a companies dubious copyright claim.
In my mind, a ChatGPT short story is not a true alternative to an original creative work (an individual can't use GPT to read ASOIAF, only derivative short stories), and the work that GPT CAN produce are somewhat valueless to an individual who hasn't already read the original. Only if they were to take those short stories and distribute them (i.e. someone ripping a DVD and sharing that file with friends and family) could 'damages' really be assumed.
I think the outcome of these lawsuits can help inform what we should do, also: LLMs as a tool will not go away at this point, so the biggest outcome of this kind of litigation would be the inflation of cost in producing an LLM and inflation of the value of the "data" necessary to train it. This locks out future competitors and preemptively consolidates the market into established hands (twitter, reddit, facebook, and google already "own" the data their users have signed over to them in their TOS). Now is the time to rethink copyright and creative compensation models, not double-down on our current system.
I really hope the judges overseeing these cases can see the implications here.