Paul McCartney and Dua Lipa urge UK Prime Minister to rethink his AI copyright plans. A new law could soon allow AI companies to use copyrighted material without permission.

Because overall people don't like it, particularly when it comes to creating "art."

Is the ai doing anything that isn’t already allowed for humans. The thing is, generative ai doesn’t copy someone’s art. It’s more akin to learning from someone’s art and creating you own art with that influence. Given that we want to continue allowing hunans access to art for learning, what’s the logical difference to an ai doing the same?

AI stans always say stuff like this, but it doesn't make sense to me at all.

AI does not learn the same way that a human does: it has no senses of its own with which to observe the world or art, it has no lived experiences, it has no agency, preferences or subjectivity, and it has no real intelligence with which to interpret or understand the work that it is copying from. AI is simply a matrix of weights that has arbitrary data superimposed on it by people and companies.

Are you an artist or a creative person?

If you are then you must know that the things you create are certainly indirectly influenced by SOME of the things that you have experienced (be it walking around on a sunny day, your favorite scene from your favorite movie, the lyrics of a song, etc.), AS WELL AS your own unique and creative persona, your own ideas, your own philosophy, and your own personal development.

Look at how an artist creates a painting and compare it to how generative AI creates a painting. Similarly, look at how artists train and learn their craft and compare it to how generative AI models are trained. It's an apples-to-oranges comparison. Outside of the marketing labels of "artificial intelligence" and "machine learning", it's nothing like real intelligence or learning at all.

(And that's still ignoring the obvious corporate element and the four pillars of fair use consideration (US law, not UK, mind you). For example, the potential market effects of generating an automated system which uses people's artwork to directly compete against them.)

You picked the wrong thread for a nuanced question on a controversial topic.

But it seems the UK indeed has laws for this already if the article is to believed, as they don't currently allow AI companies to train on copyrighted material (As per the article). As far as I know, in some other jurisdictions, a normal person would absolutely be allowed to pull a bunch of publicly available information, learn from it, and decide to make something new based on objective information that can be found within. And generally, that's the rationale AI companies used as well, seeing as there have been landmark cases ruled in the past to not be copyright infringement with wide acceptance for computers analyzing copyrighted information, such as against Google, for indexing copyrighted material in their search results. But perhaps an adjacent ruling was never accepted in the UK (which does seem strange, as Google does operate there). But laws are messy, and perhaps there is an exception somewhere, and I'm certainly not an expert on UK law.

But people sadly don't really come into this thread to discuss the actual details, they just see a headline that invokes a feeling of "AI Bad", and so you coming in here with a reasonable question makes you a target. I wholly expect to be downvoted as well.

I like how their whole excuse to that was "WE DIDN'T SEED ANY OF IT BACK THOUGH" which arguably makes it even worse lol.

Technically it was never illegal in the US to download copywritten content. It was illegal to distribute them. That was literally Meta's defence in court: they didn't seed any downloads.

That is definitely one of the most cooked takes I've heard in a while.

Why would anyone create anything if it can immediately be copied with no compensation to you?

But downloading and illegally using that font is okay?

By "use" I actually meant "reproduce portions of" and "make derivative works of"

What fine? I thought this new law allows it. Or is it one of those instances where training your AI on copyrighted material and distributing it is fine but actually sourcing it isn‘t so you can‘t legally create a model but also nobody can do anything if you have and use it? That sounds legally very messy.

If they are training the AI with copyrighted data that they aren't paying for, then yes, they are doing the same thing as traditional media piracy. While I think piracy laws have been grossly blown out of proportion by entities such as the RIAA and MPAA, these AI companies shouldn't get a pass for doing what Joe Schmoe would get fined thousands of dollars for on a smaller scale.

It's exploiting copyrighted content without a licence, so, in short, it's pirating.

That's exactly what i was just thinking.
Where's Disney in all of this?

I'm not talking about legally\illegally, I'm talking about rightfully\unrightfully , the difference is in under whose control the category line is.

Wait, so in all these years that Europeans have been making fun of dumb Americans for having a two party system, and for having no real left wing options, the UK has been basically the same?

You've got the details a little wrong. The original two were the Whigs and the Tories, as you say. The Whigs became the Liberals who became the modern day Liberal Democrats, who still exist but haven't been in power outside of being a junior member of a coalition for a century. Tories became the Conservatives, who are still one of the major two and are regularly still called the Tories. There was a faction that broke away from the Whigs called the Liberal Unionists, who merged into the Conservatives, but they're separate from the Liberals. Labour is not a successor to either of them, though they did make some strategic agreements with the Liberals early on. In the early 1900s, Labour replaced the Liberals as one of the two major parties.

It is still consistently a two-party system. One of the historic parties got replaced and there is a stronger presence for minor parties than there is in the states (see especially the SNP in the past decade and the Tory-LibDem coalition in 2010), but still a two-party system

Shares of the vote in general elections since 1832 received by Conservatives[note 1] (blue), Liberals/Liberal Democrats[note 2] (orange), Labour (red) and others (grey)[1][2][3]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_Kingdom_general_elections

The Conservatives forming from a split in the Liberal party doesn't mean they're the same thing.

Labour and Liberal Democrats are two very different parties. Or at least they used to be, until New Labour became a thing...

Our politics are bad, FPTP is bad, but we're not a 2 party system entirely. The Lib Dems, Greens, SNP, and Reform all manage to have a say in politics and how things are done. They all influence Labour and the Conservatives.

The GPL uses copyright because it's the legal mechanism available to enforce the principles that the GPL wants to enforce. It's entirely consistent to believe that copyright shouldn't exist while also believing that a law should exist to allow/enforce the principles of the GPL.

Without copyright there would be no need for copyleft. Its right there in the name.

Slight difference between little Johny torrrenting the latest movie for personal use and an AI company doing it for commercial gain.

You should tell these companies then, because after pirating all the copyrighted information they will absolutely push for IP protections for AI output.

No it isn’t but I still refuse to choose on purpose to listen to that song. I don’t even know the name.

EDIT: Just to be clear, I can’t stop from hearing the song out in the wild. However I will not seek it out. I just do not want to hear a song purposefully made with AI in such a manner. I’m still bitter that LOVE won a Grammy over the soundtrack to Across the Universe. They only gave the award to LOVE because George Martin was involved in it.

A company that makes negative income every quarter forever, and whose latest edition costs a magnitude more power and is worse than the previous, is worth between $150 Bn and $300 Bn. Many other competing companies equally overvalued.

These are businesses who are only valuable because people keep investing in them. A Ponzi Scheme.

Cold Heart? I like that song.

a) No one is suggesting AI be regarded as equal to a person under law though?

b) if the music is being streamed then it’s up to the streaming company to pay the artists royalties. I have Spotify and I don’t pay the artists - Spotify does.

If the argument is “the people feeding data into the AI illegally acquired the content” then sure, argue that and prosecute them for piracy or whatever. That’s not the argument that is being made though.