Thousands of authors demand payment from AI companies for use of copyrighted works::Thousands of published authors are requesting payment from tech companies for the use of their copyrighted works in training artificial intelligence tools, marking the latest intellectual property critique to target AI development.
Because AIs aren’t inspired by anything and they don’t learn anything
So uninspired writing is illegal?
No but a lazy copy of someone else’s work might be copyright infringement.
So when does Kevin Costner get to sue James Cameron for his lazy copy of Dances With Wolves?
Idk, maybe. There are thousands of copyright infringement lawsuits, sometimes they win.
I don’t necessarily agree with how copyright law works, but that’s a different question. Doesn’t change the fact that sometimes you can successfully sue for copyright infringement if someone copies your stuff to make something new.
Avatar is not Dances with Wolves. It’s Ferngully.
Why not? Hollywood is full to the brim with people suing for copyright infringement. And sometimes they win. Why should it be different for AI companies?
Language models actually do learn things in the sense that: the information encoded in the training model isn’t usually* taken directly from the training data; instead, it’s information that describes the training data, but is new. That’s why it can generate text that’s never appeared in the data.
What does inspiration have to do with anything? And to be honest, humans being inspired has led to far more blatant copyright infringement.
As for learning, they do learn. No different than us, except we learn silly abstractions to make sense of things while AI learns from trial and error. Ask any artist if they’ve ever looked at someone else’s work to figure out how to draw something, even if they’re not explicitly looking up a picture, if they’ve ever seen a depiction of it, they recall and use that. Why is it wrong if an AI does the same?