'Stealing Isn't Innovation': Hundreds of Creatives Warn Against an AI Slop Future (theverge.com) 60
Around 800 artists, writers, actors, and musicians signed on to a new campaign against what they call "theft at a grand scale" by AI companies. From a report: The signatories of the campaign -- called "Stealing Isn't Innovation" -- include authors George Saunders and Jodi Picoult, actors Cate Blanchett and Scarlett Johansson, and musicians like the band R.E.M., Billy Corgan, and The Roots.
"Driven by fierce competition for leadership in the new GenAI technology, profit-hungry technology companies, including those among the richest in the world as well as private equity-backed ventures, have copied a massive amount of creative content online without authorization or payment to those who created it," a press release reads. "This illegal intellectual property grab fosters an information ecosystem dominated by misinformation, deepfakes, and a vapid artificial avalanche of low-quality materials ['AI slop'], risking AI model collapse and directly threatening America's AI superiority and international competitiveness."
"Driven by fierce competition for leadership in the new GenAI technology, profit-hungry technology companies, including those among the richest in the world as well as private equity-backed ventures, have copied a massive amount of creative content online without authorization or payment to those who created it," a press release reads. "This illegal intellectual property grab fosters an information ecosystem dominated by misinformation, deepfakes, and a vapid artificial avalanche of low-quality materials ['AI slop'], risking AI model collapse and directly threatening America's AI superiority and international competitiveness."
Define "stealing" (Score:2, Insightful)
Most "creative" works nowadays are built upon years of influence from other existing work. What an LLM is doing isn't all that different really.
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True! And not just that: one of the claims of AI advocates, like Mark Cuban, was that AI would take over all the drudgery and repetitive work that humans do, and the only thing humans will have to be is become more creative. Not only are most humans not creative: AI does a pretty good job of its own in the creative realm. I've watched quite a few AI videos, and was pretty impressed
Also, what if less talented humans use AI to create music? Will they get the same recognition as normal musicians, who use
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It's all hallucination. The LLM has no real understanding of the underlying concepts.
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Posting A/C since I know I'll be pounded into oblivion for this. However, I used to pay people to draw stuff for an AD&D campaign run on Discord, as commissions. I'd get people flaking out, lying about what has been paid, given art that might be ok for a furry pr0n lover or scribbled in MSPaint. I suck at drawing, so that isn't an issue.
The fix? MidJourney, and other AI programs. Once I got approval from players to use AI, I was able to get the pictures/drawings about events, and they were more tha
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That's a good use of AI.
You are not trying to sell what was "created". For your personal use it is a great tool. I use meta to do a similar thing. I "created" a unique monetary system and the coins to support it. I think of using AI like that as similar to the quick NPC generator at https://www.fastcharacter.com/ [fastcharacter.com]
Trying to sell somthing created by AI leaves a multitude of issues. Do you/can you "OWN" something AI created ?
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Do you/can you "OWN" something AI created ?
De jure? No. At least not yet.
De facto? Yes.
If someone uses AI generated art in a larger product, then they will still be able to sell it for money. You can't simply ignore the fact that they have copyright on the rest of the product, even if you're sure the artwork is AI generated. For example, they may have a unique character design. That is copyrightable.
Besides, what is anyone going to do about it?
You can't sue them because they haven't infringed upon anything you in particular have made. You have no st
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depressing...
It seems we lose no matter...AI will co-opt everything and a
black hole corp will claim ownership forever...
Influence is inspiration (Score:1)
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Says someone who's never created anything, including dinner.
Re:Define "stealing" (Score:5, Insightful)
Usually you'd pay the authors or artists for your own personal copy of their work to influence and inspire your own, though. The AI companies don't even do that.
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What if I just I borrowed it from a library or heard it on the radio?
The AI companies are slimy, but copyright should never control who can read those books or listen to that music, that would be cultural and intellectual suicide.
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When you borrowed it at the library a small but non-zero royalty payment went to the author. Same when it was played on the radio, paid for by advertising, media tax, or however your radio station of choice is financed.
Take a look at the story about Nvidia trying to get high-speed access to a library of pirated books.
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Bullshit x 1000.
If I see a painting in a book or a museum, and think, "cool, I could do my own take on that" the artist doesn't get one red cent.
"But" you say, "The museum or the book paid the author for that art".
They likely did.
But whether one argues that
a) the creator was already fully paid already and they get nothing more for later views, or
b) that their payment is backward-rationalized across all the potential viewers in the future (meaning what they're paid per-view asymptotically approaches zero ANY
Re:Define "stealing" (Score:4, Interesting)
This. But what you mention is not all of it. No one likes AI slop, but it is not slop because it is created by AI. It is slop because it is bad, REGARDLESS of how it was made. Stop blaming AI on the slop issue. People have the option to continue tuning for better output but they stop when it's good enough to get views. If the content is GOOD, who cares where it came from? Same for when it is bad. ALSO, if someone creates two identical videos, one completely done by humans using software tools like photoshop and after effects or any other similar package, and the other one uses AI. If the AI model creates its output using knowledge it gained from seeing and interacting with intellectual property, why is the AI considered bad, but when the person using the same knowledge of IP and creates a similar output, there is no crying foul of IP theft. If a person can freely see ideas and things and incorporate that knowledge into projects that put that knowledge to use, then the same person doing the same thing and creating nearly the same output using AI tools should not be a problem either.
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The results are only the same when looking at an individual piece of work. The worse part, by far, is that AI enables spamming of bad artwork with zero cost or effort. You can't ignore quantity.
AI is absolutely to blame for diluting the average quality of work in any ecosystem where it's allowed to proliferate.
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This argument is no different than the 2nd amendment arguments. Is it the tool or the person using it to blame? I personally do not want my rights (or yours) to use tools appropriately, restricted in any way due to other people doing bad things with those tools, even if the good to bad is outnumbered 100 or 1000's to 1 or more. Put in systems to make PEOPLE do the right thing, not the tools. If we put bans on anything AI, then we will lose those good ones. We will also put a cap on future advancements becau
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As a very poor musician, I could be inspired as much as I want by other existing work and still the stuff I produced would be lacklustre.
If I was prepared to use a dose of "AI" pixie dust then I could produce something that gets 10s of thousands of downloads on all the services, possibly even making a bit of money in the process.
So what an LLM is doing really is all that different. It's a sausage machine, "controlled" by uninspired people like me, refabricating stolen works into good-enough stuff for uninsp
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Big up to whoever modded this "troll". Maybe you could show your working?
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It's true, but it's unprecedented in history. Usually an artist is inspired to create a novel work based on their lifetime of "training" accrued in their own fleshy neural net. In this case we can simulate that with generative AI and get a similar product, without the messy problems associated with maintaining (and paying) a fleshy brain. We've never been able to automate that before and the implications are terrifying. Stealing maybe isn't a good analogy, but it's certainly a licensing conundrum.
Given that
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LLMs can't create anything new, all they do is convert other people original works to tokens and store internally. Using this with user input to produce new tokens and converted back to text. Without this original work all the average LLM is, is a gigantic doorstop.
Re: Define "stealing" (Score:2)
Openai didn't violate copyright law. That's why artists have to use gray terms like "stealing".
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The point on terms and the subversion of them stands, but I'd like to nitpick a bit - most of the process of conversion of copyright and other temporary monopolies to the "intellectual property" fiction and to extending it until forever isn't artists' doing, but the doing of their hungry lawyers.
Re: agreed (Score:2)
I don't think you understood what I wrote based on your reply. I said it was for corporations.
Re:agreed (Score:5, Insightful)
Stealing isn't innovation, which is why we shouldn't respect the modern term of copyright. Its original limit's intent was to allow The People to have control of their cultural identity. Those terms have been extended again and again specifically to prevent that for the purpose of guaranteeing profit not for creators, but for corporations.
The natural limitation on copying is no limit. Copyright was supposed to be a limited time thing, not for longer than the typical creator's lifetime. Copying is a natural right.
I'd like to see copyright go back to a reasonable time limit, like author's lifetime, or even less. But I really don't like the trend of folks decrying copyright as a concept at all right when it's convenient for the corporations who have traditionally supported extended copyright to abolish copyright outright so they have the right to outright steal all creative works from the moment of inception. Copyright of reasonable limits? Yes. Abolish it outright right now? Fuck no. Let those fucking tech companies work around it like the other corporations have made all of humanity work around it over the past few decades.
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The problem for most writers and movie-makers is not people stealing their work but people finding their work. Copyright primarily exists to keep Disney and other big media companies in business.
And big business has mostly worked around it in recent decades by bribing politicians to keep extending the duration.
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Well, it clearly doesn't work does it?
If Disney takes my book and republishes it with their name instead of mine, that's fraud. If Disney takes my book, copies the plot and turns it into a movie, their lawyers will ensure they don't have to pay me for it.
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Are you sure about that? You might want to think again because copyright is specified in the Constitution, which was written and ratified centuries before those big media companies existed.
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"I'd like to see copyright go back to a reasonable time limit, like author's lifetime, or even less."
Copyright in the US was originally 14 years, renewable once for another period of 14 years if the copyright holder was still alive.
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"I'd like to see copyright go back to a reasonable time limit, like author's lifetime, or even less."
Copyright in the US was originally 14 years, renewable once for another period of 14 years if the copyright holder was still alive.
As someone who writes both fiction and music, I'd be all for a return to this.
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I'd like to see copyright go back to a reasonable time limit, like author's lifetime, or even less.
Seven years, renewable once to 14, was good enough for the founding fathers. Would be good enough for me ...
learn how to own mistakes (Score:3, Insightful)
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nothing but bullshit but coming from the good guys (Score:2)
Training AI models isn't "stealing" or "theft", nor is that training claimed to be the "innovation".
Current intellectual property laws simply don't work, making dishonest claims about that law doesn't work either. We need new law, billionaires won't allow it except to protect their wealth and power.
Copyright Is A Privilege (Score:4, Interesting)
The big copyright lobby steals from everyone, every day with their outrageous 95-year terms.
*They* should be the ones properly refunding the creatives they parasite off.
And we must force them to encourage creation instead of greed by replacing 95-year copyright with 5-year copyright.
99% of all commercial profit from copyrighted media is collected within 5 years.
Until then, PIRATE ON !
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It's not, because you can theoretically determine exactly which documents, songs or movies the LLM used to create its output. You can't do that for a human unless they're doing it intentionally and obviously.
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Give me an AI trained only on the public domain (Score:2)
We can do a lot with an AI trained in pre-1923 literature, pre-1923 sheet music (especially classical and other pre-20th-century styles), etc.
"ChatGPT, give me music in the style of J. S. Bach, suitable for playing by a small ensemble consisting of ..."
Home Taping Is Killing Music (Score:2)
Acting not really my field so I don't know. But for music creation...I get the point, but I don't really fully agree with it. It's another tool to learn.
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Laurels (Score:2)
Good ideas will always be copied. Artificial gatekeeper laws are doomed to fail.
The logical answer to people copying your shit is to keep making new shit. Don't expect a free ride forever on that one idea you came up with 10 years ago. I mean you're a "creative" right? so go create.
AI is just an Advanced Photoshop (Score:1)
Horses are forever (Score:2)
Horses are forever!
You're just a passing fad,
combustion-carriage!
https://preview.redd.it/vbf3w4... [preview.redd.it]
I like slop (Score:2)
Seriously, it's funny.
The music is good too.
Apparently a lot of other people do too.
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Won't be long before AI starts eating its own tail and goes crazy.
Plagiarize (Score:2)
Plagiarize.
Let no one else's work evade your eyes.
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes.
So don't shade your eyes.
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize.
- Tom Lehrer
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You'd have hated ... (Score:2)
... the days of wandering musicians and "players" companies.
Songs were copied, and tweaked into new works, left and right. So were plays.
my slop your slop (Score:2)
The "creatives" demand that we exclusively buy THEIR slop, not AI slop.