Technology

I wish the protections placed on corporate control on cultural and intellectual assets were placed on the average persons privacy instead.

Like I really don't care that someone's publicly available book and movie in the last century is analysed and used to create tools, but I do care that without people's actual knowledge a intense surveillance apparatus is being built to collect every minute piece of data about their lives and the lives of those around them to be sold without ethical oversight or consent.

IP is bull, but privacy is a real concern. No one is going to using a extra copy of NY times article to hurt someone, but surveillance is used by authoritarians to oppress and harass innocent people.

I'm not a huge fan of Microsoft or even OpenAI by any means, but all these lawsuits just seem so... lazy and greedy?

It isn't like ChatGPT is just spewing out the entirety of their works in a single chat. In that context, I fail to see how seeing snippets of said work returned in a Google summary is any different than ChatGPT or any other LLM doing the same.

Should OpenAI and other LLM creators use ethically sourced data in the future? Absolutely. They should've been doing so all along. But to me, these rich chumps like George R. R. Martin complaining that they felt their data was stolen without their knowledge and profited off of just feels a little ironic.

Welcome to the rest of the 6+ billion people on the Internet who've been spied on, data mined, and profited off of by large corps for the last two decades. Where's my god damn check? Maybe regulators should've put tougher laws and regulations in place long ago to protect all of us against this sort of shit, not just businesses and wealthy folk able to afford launching civil suits and shakey grounds. It's not like deep learning models are anything new.

Edit:

Already seeing people come in to defend these suits. I just see it like this: AI is a tool, much like a computer or a pencil are tools. You can use a computer to copyright infringe all day, just like a pencil can. To me, an AI is only going to be plagiarizing or infringing if you tell it to. How often does AI plagiarize without a user purposefully trying to get it to do so? That's a genuine question.

Regardless, the cat's out of the bag. Multiple LLMs are already out in the wild and more variations are made each week, and there's no way in hell they're all going to be reigned in. I'd rather AI not exist, personally, as I don't see protections coming for normal workers over the next decade or two against further evolutions of the technology. But, regardless, good luck to these companies fighting the new Pirate Bay-esque legal wars for the next couple of decades.

If it's not infringement to input copyrighted materials, then it's not infringement to take the output.

Copyright can be enforced at both ends or neither end, not one or the other.

All the grifters coming out to feed 🫣