I've said it before, but the whole property angle of this is a red herring to frame all the discussion around AI on an issue that benefits large property holders and any corporation that claims ownership over its users content, and away from its effects on labor and the harm that generative AI enables in both volume and nature of material.
That is, it focuses all the ethics on "first of all, property is sacred and ideas can be owned and made exclusive to companies that can buy them, and second the gravest sin is infringing upon property by daring to look at an idea in a manner you have not expressly paid for" which is all 100% bullshit in every way and is a distraction from the fact that owning tons of property doesn't make generative AI ok.
The correct angle should be forcing all generative AI and its products to be public domain, as well as anything incorporating them. Completely kill its commercial and industrial value to corporations when they can no longer own it exclusively nor use it to eliminate labor because they cannot own anything it produces.
That is, it focuses all the ethics on "first of all, property is sacred and ideas can be owned and made exclusive to companies that can buy them, and second the gravest sin is infringing upon property by daring to look at an idea in a manner you have not expressly paid
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It's crazy how this conception of "property rights" is considered the State of Nature, instead of a social construct
The correct angle should be forcing all generative AI and its products to be public domain
None of these parties want to expand public domain, though. So that's not on the table.
This is purely a tug of war between "disruptor" tech industry piracy that's supposed to be Too Big To Fail and legacy media that would drag us back to flip books and cave paintings if they thought it would benefit the bottom line.
In the abstract you’re absolutely correct. But it is funny to watch tech bros vigorously defend the IP sanctity of their code out of one side of their mouth and protest having to follow that IP law when it comes to their datasets out of the other. A sort of, you made your bed now lie in it scenario.
It just goes to show how insidious the propaganda is, because all the talk is focused on like small property holders who have very little wealth and a portfolio of work that's public but not public domain and how their souls are being stolen by the infernal machine so the natural impulse is to support them as workers, except the reality is that they're never gonna get a cut no matter what: maybe their work gets cut out entirely, or the hosting site they trusted with their portfolio gets a payout which makes the use "properly licensed" since they inevitably insist they have the right to do whatever they want with anything they host, and the big property holders like Disney and other huge media conglomerates get to use their own libraries or license them out for training, and this all goes into a big proprietary black box to be used to replace professional animators or other film staff or voice actors, etc.
And the result is enclosure and the obliteration of the arts in favor of 100% corporate owned and operated slop machines with minimal human involvement.
It'd take time to synthesize, but I think there's probably an interesting analysis to be had about how this relates to small property holders and their relationship to capital in general, because just typing this out I can't stop thinking about historic peasant movements and their relation to revolutionaries either in support or against them depending on when and where, and how modern yeoman farmers are getting completely fucked by large property holders but side with Capital just because they're scared of losing what little they have and because they rely on hyperexploitation of even less privileged peoples themselves.
Totally agree, however there is the problem that any FOSS approach gets exploited by corps for free labour. Which is how half the web is maintained by 3 furries in their non-existent spare time even though billion dollar comapnies use it every second.
Now 98% of AI is goopshit, but I'm sure a few useful applications will arise here and there and I'd rather corps have to fucking pay their way rather than coast off of the labour of workers they haven't even bother to make a wage slave.
For productive generative AI, all that's needed is for what it produces to be non-ownable along with anything incorporating it. For generative AI fitting into an internal supporting labor role a different solution would have to be found, I'm not sure what but a nuclear option to strip away property rights from anything touching it would probably be the simplest and strongest (also the idea that "the servers running the chatbot are free you can just take them home I have hundreds of them" being real and legal is very funny).
I've come to the conclusion that it's impossible to stop all the negative effects of AI, so policy responses should be focused on stopping the most harmful uses that can be stopped, and within that framework corporate control and ownership of it is an existential threat in a way that all the harm that would come from AI proliferation is not.
I'm an incredibly small bean, policing data at this scale is borderline impossible, and we already demonstrated (via RIAA/MPAA wack-a-mole enforcement efforts) that this isn't profitable in any meaningful sense.
The only people who really benefit from this kind of legislation are Mega-Corps who want to compel one another at some macro level.
The real end goal here is to force OpenAI to purge it's model of images captured from Marvel or Disney or some WB property. Nobody is coming for your home rolled desktop image generator.
Nobody is coming for your home rolled desktop image generator.
Yuzu and YouTube-DL are two real examples of copyright holders coming for your "home rolled" (in reality trained at a cost of millions of dollars in a datacenter) desktop image generator.
The real end goal here is to force OpenAI to purge it's model of images captured from Marvel or Disney or some WB property. Nobody is coming for your home rolled desktop image generator.
People were saying "nobody's gonna actually sue you for downloading Metallica songs" when the band went after Napster and guess what happened. to use a different, more recent example, the company that owns Monster cables is infamous for suing small businesses that have Monster in the name even if there's no possible way anyone could get their business confused with their company.
IP mafia in US has so much power as to not only blatantly extort people, but it basically enforced its wishes on both US and EU law. no chance any US govt can hurt them. I can absolutely guarantee that if they ever go against business, it will only serve to squeeze the lesser publisning entities into monopolising everything in even fewer media conglomerates.