The user of the system is accountable — jkop
If the user asks for an intentional plagiarized copy of something, or a derivative output, then yes, the user is the only one accountable as the system does not have intention on its own.
possibly its programmers as they intentionally instruct the system to process copyright protected content in order to produce a remix. It seems fairly clear, I think, that it's plagiarism and corruption of other people's work. — jkop
But this is still a misunderstanding of the system and how it works. As I've stated in the library example, you are yourself feeding copyrighted material into your own mind that's synthesized into your creative output. Training a system on copyrighted material does not equal copying that material, THAT is a misunderstanding of what a neural system does. It memorize the data in the same way a human memorize data as neural information. You are confusing the "intention" that drives creation, with the underlying physical process.
There is no fundamental difference between you learning knowledge from a book and these models learning from the same book. And the "remix" is fundamentally the same between how the neural network forms the synthesis and how you form a synthesis. The only difference is the intention, which in both systems, the mind and the AI model, is the human input component.
So it's not clear at all that it's plagiarism because the description of the system that you did isn't correct about how it functions. And it's this misunderstanding that a neural network and machine learning functions and this mystification about how the human mind works that produces these faulty conclusions.
If we are to produce laws and regulations for AI, they will need to be based on the most objective truths about how these systems operate. When people make arguments that make arbitrary lines between how artificial neural networks work and neural networks in our brains, then we get into problematic and arbitrary differences that fundamentally spells out an emotional conclusion: "we shouldn't replicate human functions" and the followup question becomes "on what grounds?" Religious? Spiritual? Emotional? Neither which is grounds for laws and regulations.
What's similar is the way they appear to be creative, but the way they appear is not the way they function. — jkop
That's not what I'm talking about or what this argument is about. The appearance of creativity is not the issue or fundamental part of this. The function; the PHYSICAL function of the system is identical to how our brain functions within the same context. The only thing that's missing is the intention, the driving force in form of the "prompt" or "input request". Within us, our creativity is interlinked with our physical synthesis system and thus it also includes the "prompt"; the "intention" of creation. AI systems however, only has the synthesis system, but that in itself is not breaking any copyrights anymore than our own mind when we experience something and dream, hallucinates and produce ideas. The intention to plagiarize is a decision and that decision is made by a human, that responsibility is made by a human at the point of the "intention" and "prompt", not before it.
And so, the argument can be made that a person who reads three books and writes a derivative work based on those three books is doing the same as someone who prompts an AI to write derivative work. Where do you put the blame? On reading the three books (training the models), or the intention of writing the derivative work (prompting the AI model to write derivative)?
If you put the blame on the act of training the models, then you also put blame on reading the books. Then you are essentially saying that the criminal act of theft is conducted by all people all the time they read, see, hear and experience someone else's work. Because that is the same as training these models, it is the same fundamental process.
But putting blame on that is, of course, absurd. We instead blame the person's intent of writing a derivative piece. We blame the
act of wanting to produce that work. And since the AI models doesn't have that intent, you cannot logically put blame on the act of training these models on copyrighted material, because there's nothing in that act that breaks copyright. It's identical to how we humans consume copyrighted material, storing it in neural memory form. And a person with photographic memory excels at this type of neural storage, exactly like these models.
A machine's iterative computations and growing set of syntactic rules (passed for "learning") are observer-dependent and, as such, very different from a biological observer's ability to form intent and create or discover meanings. — jkop
I'm not sure if you really read my argument closely enough because you keep mixing up
intention with the fundamental process and function of
information synthesis.
There are two parts of creation: 1) The accumulation of information within neural memory and its synthesis into a new form. 2) The intention for creation that guides what is formed. One is the source and one is the driving principle for creation out of that source. The source itself is just a massive pool of raw floating data, both in our minds and in these systems. You cannot blame any of that for the creation because that is like blaming our memory for infringing on copyrighted material. It's always the intention that defines if something is plagiarized or derivative. And yes, the intention is a separate act. We constantly produce ideas and visions even without intent. Hallucinations and dreams form without controlled intent. And it's through controlled intent we actually create something outside of us. It is a separate act and part of the whole process.
And this is the core of my argument. Blaming the process of training AI models as being copyright infringement is looking to be objectively false. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of how the system works, and they seem to more or less come from people's emotional hate for big tech. I'm also critical of big tech, but people will lose much more control over these systems if our laws and regulations get defined by court rulings in which we lose because side of the people made naive emotional arguments about things they fundamentally don't understand. Misunderstandings of the system, of the science of neural memory and functions and how our own minds work.
I ask, how are these two different?
A) A person has a perfect photographic memory. They go to the library every day for 20 years and read every book in that library. They then write a short story drawing upon all that has been read and seen in that library during these 20 years.
B) A tech company let an algorithm read through all books at the same library, which produces a Large Language Model based on that library as its training data. It's then prompted to write a short story and draws upon all it has read and seen through the algorithm. — Christoffer
This is the core of this argument. The difference between intention and the formation of the memory core that creation is drawn from and how synthesis occurs. That formation and synthesis in itself does not break copyright laws, but people still call it theft without thinking it through properly.
Neither man nor machine becomes creative by simulating some observer-dependent appearance of being creative. — jkop
This isn't about creativity. This isn't about wether or not these systems "can be creative". The "creative process" does not imply these systems being able to produce "art". This type of confusion in the debate is what makes people not able to discuss the topic properly. The process itself, the function that
simulates the creative process, is not a question of "art" and AI, that's another debate.
The problem is that people who fight against AI, especially artists fighting against these big tech companies, put blame on the use of copyrighted material in training these models, without understanding that this process is identical to how the human mind is "trained" as well.
All while many artists, in their own work and processes, directly use other people's work in the formation of their own, but still put some arbitrary line between themselves and the machines when these machines seem to do the same, even though things like diffusion models are fundamentally unable to do produce
direct copies in the same way as some of these artists do (as per the concept art example).
It's a search for a black sheep in the wrong place. Antagonizing the people in control of these systems rather than trying to promote themselves, as artists, to be part of the development and help form a better condition for future artists.