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by wyldfire 823 days ago
But that's just it - if we believe that what the model learns from the training material is abstract enough, they shouldn't license the content at all. Humans learn from and are inspired by art all the time. They create new works that are not considered derived works, despite there being obvious influence. Could we conceive of the same circumstance being possible with machine learning?
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If we go down this road right now, we are allowing superintelligent AI powered corporations to front-run the entire human race and sell everything we think back to us.

It's not about theory of mind stuff. It's about just compensation of living human beings.

Well, with the status quo, there's no license required to train on the greatest works of art from centuries past.

I recognize some of the concerns about AI but I don't think pinning hopes on copyright law will deliver anything remotely resembling a remedy to the problems you bring up.

Are you talking about training a human or training an artist?

Downloading copyrighted data at huge scales to use in your commercial software product is pretty substantially different than an art student studying a reference.

> Are you talking about training a human or training an artist?

Neither: I am talking about training a machine learning model. Unless that's what you meant by "artist"?

> Downloading copyrighted data at huge scales to use in your commercial software product is pretty substantially different than an art student studying a reference.

You may have misunderstood my comment. My comment was stating that there's only a portion of human art - the most recent decades of works - which are protected by a copyright. Models like Stable Diffusion could be re-trained instead on centuries of artworks and not infringe at all. So the problem described as "AI powered corporations to front-run the entire human race and sell everything we think back to us" - this problem is here regardless of whether licenses were purchased.

You're right on both counts. Things are a bit fraught in this thread so I apologize for misunderstanding you.
1848 had a publication that might interest you.

I think the manifesto is missing some important aspects about game theory and human nature, and for some of that theory of mind is indeed very important, and that's why this particular political experiment didn't work out in the end despite the good intentions and that several aspects have become globally accepted.

I’ve read it but I think this case is much more unambiguous. Workers are paid; Marx would argue they are systematically underpaid and disempowered.

In this case the workers are not paid at all. Their work is not even acknowledged. It’s closer to cultural appropriation but quite a bit more unambiguous than that as well since this isn’t people learning from people. This is mass uncompensated value harvesting.

The number of hands benefiting here are incredibly tiny. In theory you could have one human owning the entire human mind and renting it back. This is the danger of present generation AI, not Skynet scenarios, and it anything the sci-fi stuff distracts us from this.

It’s like an information theory equivalent of today’s shoplifting epidemic except there are tiny gangs of only a few shoplifters able to run at Mach 10 and shoplift from every store in the country in days.