In its submission to the Australian government’s review of the regulatory framework around AI, Google said that copyright law should be altered to allow for generative AI systems to scrape the internet.
In its submission to the Australian government’s review of the regulatory framework around AI, Google said that copyright law should be altered to allow for generative AI systems to scrape the internet.
Nah. You’re missing the forest for the trees. Let’s get abstract:
Person A makes a living by making product X and selling it.
Person B makes a living by making product Y and selling it.
Both A and B are in the same industry.
Person C uses a machine to extract the essence of product X and Y and blend them. Person C then claims authorship and sells it as product Z, which they sell in competition to X and Y.
Person C has not created anything. Their machine does not have value in the absence of products X and Y, yet received no permission, offers no credit nor compensation. In addition, they are competing for the same customers and harming the livelihoods of A and B. Person C is acting in a purely parasitic manner that cannot be seen as ethical in any widely accepted definition of the word.
You’re missing something even more basic.
The machine Person C has created is not infringing on anything by itself. It’s creation was not an infringement. “Extracting essence” isn’t a protected right provided by the copyright frameworks. Only the actual art it is used to create could infringe (which most of the generated images do not).
If the final art created is an infringement, the existing copyright system handles that situation just like an infringing piece of art created by a human. The person at fault is the person who used the machine to create an infringing work, not the creator of the machine.
In your scenario, if a human C came along and looked at the art from Person A and B, blended them together into their own style, there wouldn’t be any problem either. Even though they received no permission, and offered no credit nor compensation to the original creators. They would only get in trouble if they created an actual piece of art that was too similar to either of the specific artists works and therefore found to be infringing upon the copyright.
The scope here is not limited to “can someone legally get in trouble under current law” (which, seems likely but is still working its way through courts). The discussion is specifically discussing ethics. Person C has created nothing. They should have no product to sell, if not for persons A and B. Their competition with those that their product is derived from is a parasitic relationship, plain and simple. They are performing an act of exploitation with measurable harm both to persons A and B but also to further development of their craft by destroying any incentive to continue it.
Now, in some sort of alternate economic system, where one’s livelihood is not tied to their vocation, sure, it’s possibly not problematic because the economic harm is removed. However, in current capitalist systems that are in place where LLMs are heavily hyped, it’s an ethically bankrupt action to take.
ETA: No amount of mental gymnastics can change the fact that use of others’ works without their consent to train a model, then claiming authorship and competing IS plainly theft of the labor that went into creating the original works.
That’s not too say that LLMs and they like don’t have value or often require effort to produce something worthwhile. Just that they need to be used in an ethical manner that improves the human condition, not as another tool to rob others of the fruit of their labors.
First, feeding something into a machine is not the same as looking at it. Person C literally creates nothing. They are a parasite. There’s far more to creating than using statistical modeling algorithms. One cannot claim that that’s what people studying a style and then creating someone are doing because it is empirically false.
Second, the scope of the discussion is not just “can someone legally get in trouble”.