In addition to the possible business threat, forcing OpenAI to identify its use of copyrighted data would expose the company to potential lawsuits. Generative AI systems like ChatGPT and DALL-E are trained using large amounts of data scraped from the web, much of it copyright protected. When companies disclose these data sources it leaves them open to legal challenges. OpenAI rival Stability AI, for example, is currently being sued by stock image maker Getty Images for using its copyrighted data to train its AI image generator.
Aaaaaand there it is. They don’t want to admit how much copyrighted materials they’ve been using.
FWIW that’s pretty much exactly how all creative works are created. Especially music.
Except that nobody has a superhuman ability to create endless amounts of content almost instantly based on said work.
People throw this “artists/writers use inspiration to create X” argument all the time and it just totally ignores the fact that we’re not talking about some person spending 10s/100s/1000s of hours of their time to copy someone’s working style.
It’s a piece of software churning it out in seconds.
Do generative AI models typically focus on ONE person’s style? Don’t they mix together influences from thousands of artists?
FWIW this is not an area I read up on, and so I don’t have a strong opinion one way or the other.
For the image generating ones like Midjourney you could ask for an artist’s style by putting their name in the prompt.
It probably works the same in OpenAI.
If I would create a very slow AI that takes 10 or 100 hours for each response, would that make it any better in your opinion? I do not think calculation speed of a software is a good basis for legislation.
If analyzing a piece of art and replicating parts of it without permission is illegal, then it should be illegal regardless of the tools used. However, that would make every single piece of art illegal, so it’s not an option. If we make only the digital tools illegal then the question still remains where to draw the line. How much inefficiency is required for a tool to still be considered legal?
Is Adobe Photoshop generative auto-fill legal?
Is translating with deepl.com or the modern Google Translate equivalent legal?
Are voice activated commands on your mobile phone legal (Cortana, Siri, Google)?
All of these tools were trained in similar ways. All of these take away jobs (read: make work/life more efficient).
It’s hard to draw a line and I don’t have any solution to offer.
Except the illegally obtaining the copyrighted material part, which is the main point. And definitely not on this scale.
Web scraping isn’t illegal, though.
I think there can be said to be a meaningful difference due to the sheer scale and speed at which AIs can do this though.
Ultimately, I think it’s less of a direct legal question and more a societal question of whether or not we think this is fair or not. I’d expect it to ultimately be resolved by legislative bodies, not the courts.