The AI genie is here. What we're deciding now is whether we all have access to it, or whether it's a privilege afforded only to rich people, corporations, and governments.
The AI genie is here. What we're deciding now is whether we all have access to it, or whether it's a privilege afforded only to rich people, corporations, and governments.
I know a lot of people want to interpret copyright law so that allowing a machine to learn concepts from a copyrighted work is copyright infringement, but I think what people will need to consider is that all that's going to do is keep AI out of the hands of regular people and place it specifically in the hands of people and organizations who are wealthy and powerful enough to train it for their own use.
If this isn't actually what you want, then what's your game plan for placing copyright restrictions on AI training that will actually work? Have you considered how it's likely to play out? Are you going to be able to stop Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and the NSA from training an AI on whatever they want and using it to push propaganda on the public? As far as I can tell, all that copyright restrictions will accomplish to to concentrate the power of AI (which we're only beginning to explore) in the hands of the sorts of people who are the least likely to want to do anything good with it.
I know I'm posting this in a hostile space, and I'm sure a lot of people here disagree with my opinion on how copyright should (and should not) apply to AI training, and that's fine (the jury is literally still out on that). What I'm interested in is what your end game is. How do you expect things to actually work out if you get the laws that you want? I would personally argue that an outcome where Mark Zuckerberg gets AI and the rest of us don't is the absolute worst possibility.
Seriously, the average person has two FAR more immediate problems than not being able to create their own AI:
-
Losing their livelihood to an AI.
-
Losing their life because an AI has been improperly placed in a decision making position because it was sold as having more capabilities than it actually has.
1 could be solved by severe and permanent economic reforms, but those reforms are very far away. 2 is also going to need legal restrictions on what jobs an AI can do, and restrictions on the claims that an AI company can make when marketing their product. Possibly a whole freaking government agency designated for certifying AI.
Right now, it's in our best interest that AI production is slowed down and/or prevented from being deployed to certain areas until we've had a chance for the law to catch up. Copyright restrictions and privacy laws are going to be the most effective way to do this, because it will force the companies to go back and retrain on public domain and prevent them from using AI to wholesale replace certain jobs.
As for the average person who has the computer hardware and time to train an AI (bear in mind Google Bard and Open AI use human contractors to correct misinformation in the answers as well as scanning), there is a ton of public domain writing out there.
The endgame, though, is to stop scenario 1 and scenario 2, and the best way to do that is any way that forces the people who are making AI to sit down and think about where they can use the AI. Because the problem is not the speed of AI development, but the speed of corporate greed. And the problem is not that the average person LACKS access to AI, but that the rich have TOO much access to AI and TOO many horrible plans about how to use it before all the bugs have been worked out.
Furthermore, if they're using people's creativity to make a product, it's just WRONG not to have permission or to not credit them.
-
I've been thinking along your line. My concern has been that dictatorships would violate the western copyright and would thus go further than the west and especially europeans, who are heading to very strict laws. It's a nightmare scenario.
And your concern on the rich only makes sense to me, too.
You have not clearly defined the danger. You just said "ai is here". Well, lawyers are here too and they have the law on their side. Also the ai will threaten their model, so they will probably have no mercy anyway and will work full time on the subject.
Wealthy and powerful corporations fear the law above anything else. A single parliament can shut down their activity better than anyone else on the planet.
Maybe you talk from the point of view of a corrupt country like the USA, but the EU parliament, which BTW doesn't host any GAFAM, is totally ready to strike hard on the businesses founded on AI.
See, people doesn't want to lose their job to a robot and they will fight for it. This induces a major threat to the ai: people destroying data centers. They will do it. Their interests will converge with the interest of the people caring about global warming. Don't take the ai as something inevitable. An ai has a high dependency on resources and generates unemployment and pollution, and a questionable value.
An AI requires:
Energy
Water
High tech hardware
Network
Security
Stability
InvestmentsIt's like a nuclear powerplant but more fragile. If an activist group takes down a datacenter hosting an ai, who will blame them? The jury will take turns to high five them.