I'm pretty sure you don't mean it that way, but this argument comes really close to the same reasoning of a woman "proving" she was raped.
Should we allow for AI-generated fiction writing?
- Thread starter Sgt_G
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I'm pretty sure you don't mean it that way, but this argument comes really close to the same reasoning of a woman "proving" she was raped.
"Beyond a reasonable doubt" is the standard for criminal trials.
The standard for civil trials is lower: "Preponderance of the evidence."
The standard for civil trials is lower: "Preponderance of the evidence."
Right.
But what I *CAN* do is buy a book and make a movie that is similar to it but just different enough. AI generally CAN do that, especially with some human intervention to correct anything that might veer into copyright territory (my aforementioned "Star Trek but no copyright violations" story, it did well until the last line using "where no one has gone before". Edit that out and it's... Star Trek, but not Star Trek enough to violate copyright.)
This brings me right back to the ultimate point... we have existing copyright law for exactly this reason. It's already been dealt with. You're already protected.
I'm not really sure what the point is here but... yes, if a woman claims she was raped, there absolutely does need to be proof.
I don't want to live in a society that puts people into jail based on an accusation.
The problem is you keep equating AI output with human output. AI can't innovate. It can only cut and paste. AI would need autonomy to be granted the consisederations you're giving it. So therefore anything it puts out is by definition a copyright violation because, even if it adds enough pieces from enough sources to fool its own plagiarism sensors, it lacks the human ability to innovate.
My point is that the attitude is coming across adversarial, almost like a dare. I understand that tone and nuance are lost on the internet, but that's why it's important to real8ze how it comes across sometimes.
But creators don't hold a copyright on like, the letters that compose words or just words in general. Proper nouns potentially yes, but not most words.
So even if some words were copy/pasted from your work, if they aren't arranged in such a way that duplicates the creative idea of the original, it's not a copyright violation.
Right back at you though, yes I think the tone in general is somewhat adversarial. I'm certainly not intending to be any sort of dare, i'm just taking a pragmatic position acknowledging the fact that this technology exists, it will continue to exist and become more advanced, and there is really nothing anyone can do to stop it. I also take the pragmatic position that many of the demands of content creators are simply not feasible, and I take an ideological position that even if some of them were feasible, there's really no compelling reason to implement them because they're largely irrelevant. Even if an AI company had to disclose all of the materials used, it doesn't actually matter. If the end product doesn't violate copyrights, it's absolutely irrelevant what the AI was trained on. And then to also make all of this irrelevant, if the end product DOES violate copyrights, we already have preexisting laws to protect content creators.
The anti-AI position to me very much does feel luddite, in desperately trying to stifling technological innovation to protect a status quo. I am fundamentally against that in almost every facet of life. I want technological progression, I want people to adapt to said technological progression.
While I sympathize with people who fear their livelyhood is at risk, I also understand that such is the reality of the world. I recently switched careers myself due to automation making my former field less lucrative. I wasn't about to go to war over technological progression making some of what I did obsolete, I just... adapted and moved on.
Maybe in time writing will be a less lucrative career. It is what is. Many careers have become less lucrative over time. That has no real bearing on the enjoyment of the art. AI producing works should in no way affect your enjoyment of writing. It may affect the bottom-line money of writing as a profession... and my genuine feelings on that are "oh well. adapt."
Which is horrifying to me.
No, I will never prioritize AI over humans. Call me a luddite, or whatever; I've been called worse for darimg to be skeptical of new technology and the failure of any sort of foresight of possible negative outcomes.
Its more troublesome the lack of empathy expressed.
The difference is, you can track every letter the program uses, where it pulls that letter from.
It's very different from a human who is capable of innovation.
But at any rate, I am not worried about AI putting me out of a job. I just want to be paid fairly. For instance, ChatGPT or whatever pays me $10,000 to license my work for usage in their training. They also pay
me an 1/8 of a cent for every word of mine it uses. Which they absolutely can (and do) track.
Do that, and you'll never hear a complaint from me again.
All I've ever asked for is rules for new tech and respect towards human beings. AI is not human and deserves zero respect.
It's like asking to respect your toaster.
Or maybe more like, respect the computer because it beat you in chess.
Oh, and this is a very interesting piece on AI from longtime Trek reviewer Jammer:
https://www.jammersreviews.com/blog/artificial-incentives.php
Well worth a read.
https://www.jammersreviews.com/blog/artificial-incentives.php
Well worth a read.
Yes, because proper nouns are associated with particular expressions of concepts, other words are not.
For instance, "United Federation of Planets" is almost certainly copyrighted to CBS et al, and any use of this word in a story would be grounds for a copyright suit, but not the generic concept of an "inter-species planetary union" so The Orville was able to freely reference the "Planetary Union" without any real risk of legal action.
An AI relying entirely on it's "learning material" would not be able to make this change without prompting by a human, therefore its output would be inherently infringing.
Change is hard, and sometimes scary. Indeed it is.
That's the most absolutely ridiculous thing I think I have ever heard in my entire life.
So if an AI spits out "the" in something in produces, and that "the" happened to have been drawn from a work you made that it was trained on, you get paid for the word "the"?
Absolutely not. ABSOLUTELY NOT. You hold no copyright over the word "the".
That is not how copyright works. You have ZERO ownership over random words. You do have ownership over unique, proper nouns you have created and you have ownership of the creative idea.
If you created a story featuring "The Star League of Hiraxium VII" and an AI generates a story utilized for profit with "The Star League of Hiraxium VII", or perhaps even potentially a shortened version of it, yep. Copyright violation. I agree.
Correct.
Therefore, if the resulting work is published for profit and the resulting work has copyrighted material in it, apply existing copyright law.
It's really not brain surgery here, and these absolutely outrageous demands are EXACTLY why AI companies will continue to fight as hard as they are against this.
EDIT -
Going back to the the point of "getting paid for every word of mine"... I will you give you the caveat of sure, you should be paid for every word... that is yours, that you hold a copyright on. I will wager a bet the amount of words you can claim copyright on is an incredibly short list.
Insensitivity is even more so. The dismissimal of human creativity is at a greater level. The fact that the attitude presented here on AI is "accept it or go to hell as a luddite" is equally apalling. That there is no differentiation between human creativity, intuition and ability vs. an AI requiring prompting to avoid copyright infringement speaks volumes to the underlying philosophy that all technological progress is good and therefore not worth commenting on.
Good.
Not nearly as ridiculous as your hyperbole would indicate.
We all know an AI program wouldn't pull just one word. If it did, you could just upload a dictionary, tell the AI to write a story, and boom.
No, it pulls those particular words from those particular texts because they fit the programmed search criteria and best match the request. I use the one word example for simplicity, but no. AI does not just pull out one word here and one word there.
So, I tell AI to write me a Star Trek story prompt. It pulls from a prompt on a fan forum that says "Picard goes to a planet where the inhabitants eat their children for sustenance." It can't copy the entire thing, though. So it switches out some words. It searches they the same forum and matches a similar plot of "going to a planet" and swaps out "children" for "senior citizens". But it got the senior citizens match from a fanfic sequel to "Half a Life". It chose that word because it's algorithm matched that author's usage of "senior citizens" to the requested output.
Because that's how AI works. It doesn't choose words at random. It searches for words that best match the criteria for requested output, which it determines based on the work this words appear in. It doesn't know "senior citizens" will work in place of "children" unless it has that Half a Life story to analyze for similarities
I don't believe i'm dismissing human creativity at all. I encourage human creativity. There is absolutely a difference between human creativity and an AI producing something. That's not what is being discussed.
Those difference are just irrelevant when it comes to copyright.
Right.
Agreed 100%. I'm not sure what the point of that was though.
Hear me out here, on your example. I'll give you a theoretical.
"Picard goes to a planet where the inhabitants eat their children for sustenance."
So far, I see an obvious copyright violation, the use of "Picard". Agreed. The rest? Let's just give some values here. I'll break down a hypothetical "AI divulges it's sources" thing.
"Picard goes" - Fanfic X
"planet where the inhabitants" - Unrelated entry from a synopsis of a Stargate episode.
"eat their for sustenance." = Fanfic Y
"children" Fanfic Z
Out of all of those words and sources, I can see only one copyrighted (or even, copywritable) word/phrase, "Picard".
If the creator of Fanfic Y suggested this violates their copyright, I was ask them to prove they own a copyright on "eat their" and "for sustenance". I can tell you with 100% certainty, they do not.
I'm genuinely curious again, but people seem to not want to ask my question. How do you believe copyright works? How would it be applied here? The AI was trained on Fanfic Y, but the end product, while drawn from Fanfic Y was not a copyrighted word/phrase. Correct? I don't understand the argument that one should be paid because words that were used in your writing also appeared from the AI, words you do not own a copyright on.
The only people who seemed to be owed anything in compensation is Paramount for the use of "Picard".
Copyright is about way, way more than the individual words. That's why it's called "intellectual property".
The AI, incapable of creating on its own, must use the creativity of others to create a simulacrum of creativity. It can not, for instance, understand what "going to a planet" means. It has to use programmed references to compute that one thing (Stargate) has a similarity to another (Star Trek).
It's kind of like the Samsung AI fridge. It will scan your fridge, and based on its algorithm will analyze how parts are put together. But it will not understand why it would be a mistake to put mustard on your ice cream. It just is programmed to know that. So at the end of the day, it's using the ideas of others to cobble together a simulated work. It violates intellectual property rights because, by it's nature, it can not come up with any ideas on its own. It only knows to use "go to a planet" because someone else wrote it first. And since it's just a tool, we can absolutely see exactly whose "go to a planet" it yanked for reference.
Going to break up the reply here but yes, correct.
That does not mean "words". People here are trying to make an argument that they need to be paid for "their words"...
True, much like how a human mind doesn't know what "going to a planet" means until it has learned what that means...
This is where it breaks down and nobody has been able to, or willing to, answer my question.
Here's the ultimate question. You wrote a story, and yadda yadda yadda "go to a planet".
Do you own a copyright on "go to a planet"?
The answer is no.
Why then would an AI developer pay you for use a copyright you don't own, simply because you wrote it down and it was fed into a machine?
If you do not own a copyright on something, by definition you have no protection under copyright laws.
If the AI produced a story that was not word for word, but incredibly similar to a story you own a copyright on? Yep, potential copyright violation and existing laws protect you.
There still is no compelling argument as to why there needs to be new laws. Seems like people are trying to get paid for intellectual property they have no valid claim on.
Also, you quoted my text. You owe me $10,000 now. For some reason. copyright.
This can be answered from the opposite end.
Olympus has Fallen and White House Down come out at nearly the same time. But both writers are able to demonstrate they came up with the idea independently of one another.
Same with Armageddon / Deep Impact.
And Dante's Peak / Volcano.
And Man-thing / Swamp Thing.
With AI, it doesn't "come up" with anything "independently". Everything it outputs is literally lifted wholly from something else.
Also: For another example of how copyright laws are more complicated than you're implying, see "World Wrestling Federation Vs. World Wildlife Foundation"
Right.
Now demonstrate how you own a copyright to "goes to a planet".
Copyright laws, like most laws, are not incredibly simplistic but realistically in this case... it is fairly straightforward and it only went on for so long due to lawyers keeping it going.
The World Wildlife Foundation had a copyright on the abbreviation "WWF". The World Wrestling Federation used the abbreviation as well. They meant different things, but the World Wildlife Foundation was able to demonstrate it had created first and owned the intellectual property.
In the same world, the World Wrestling Federation violated Marvel Comics copyright by calling Hulk Hogan "The Incredible Hulk Hogan" (which they settled out of court).
Now prove to me how x writer has a copyright on "goes to a planet", that they created that unique phrase and concept before anyone else did and they own the rights to the concept of "going to a planet", or more specifically, the usage of "goes to a planet".
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