AI industry horrified to face largest copyright class action ever certified
AI industry horrified to face largest copyright class action ever certified
AI industry horrified to face largest copyright class action ever certified
Copyright class actions could financially ruin AI industry, trade groups say.
AI industry groups are urging an appeals court to block what they say is the largest copyright class action ever certified. They've warned that a single lawsuit raised by three authors over Anthropic's AI training now threatens to "financially ruin" the entire AI industry if up to 7 million claimants end up joining the litigation and forcing a settlement.
Last week, Anthropic petitioned to appeal the class certification, urging the court to weigh questions that the district court judge, William Alsup, seemingly did not. Alsup allegedly failed to conduct a "rigorous analysis" of the potential class and instead based his judgment on his "50 years" of experience, Anthropic said.
"If we have to pay for the intellectual property that we steal and repackage, our whole business model will be destroyed!"
One thing this whole AI training debacle has done for me: made me completely guilt-free in pirating things. Copyright law has been bullshit since Disney stuck their finger in it and if megacorps can get away with massively violating it, I’m not going to give a shit about violating it myself.
For me it was Disney floating the idea of asking the wrongful death suit be dismissed because of the liability waiver in a Disney+ free trial.
I have the $$$, but I don't agree with the terms for any of the streaming services, so I'll just sail the seven seas and toss a doubloon (coin) to independent creators (my witchers) when I can.
I'm pretty much there too, the whole industry consolidates on the new things and charges us as they make it worse. And there can be some arguments to be made over the benefits of AI but we all know that it will not be immune to the entshitification that has already ruined all the things before it
If I downloaded ten movies to watch with my nephew in the cancer ward, they'd sue me into oblivion. Download tens of millions of books and claiming your business model depends on doesn't make it okay. And sharing movies with my sick nephew would cause less harm to society and to the environment than AI does.
Same thing but for some reason it's different. They hate when we use their laws against them. Let's root they rule against this class action so we can all benefit from copyright being thrown out. Or alternatively it kills AI companies, either way is a win.
We'll get a good taste of just how corrupt the US legal system now is, instead. Copyright law will still apply to we plebs, the Executive branch will overstep its powers, requiring some mafioso payoff from AI companies to keep doing what they do. The case will go away, mysteriously.
They're not stealing anything. Nor are they "repackaging" anything. LLMs don't work like that.
I know a whole heck of a lot of people hate generative AI with a passion but let's get real: The reason they hate generative AI isn't because they trained the models using copyrighted works (which has already been ruled fair use; as long as the works were legitimately purchased). They hate generative AI because of AI slop and the potential for taking jobs away from people who are already having a hard time.
AI Slop sucks! Nobody likes it except the people making money from it. But this is not a new phenomenon! For fuck's sake: Those of us who have been on the Internet for a while have been dealing with outsourced slop and hidden marketing campaigns/scams since forever.
The only difference is that now—thanks to convenient and cheap LLMs—scammers and shady marketers can generate bullshit at a fraction of the cost and really, really quickly. But at least their grammar is correct now (LOL @ old school Nigerian Prince scams).
It's humans ruining things for other humans. AI is just a tool that makes it easier and cheaper. Since all the lawsuits and laws in the world cannot stop generative AI at this point, we might as well fix the underlying problems that enable this bullshit. Making big AI companies go away isn't going to help with these problems.
In fact, it could make things worse! Because the development of AI certainly won't stop. It will just move to countries with fewer scruples and weaker ethics.
The biggest problem is (mostly unregulated) capitalism. Fix that, and suddenly AI "taking away jobs" ceases to be a problem.
Hopefully, AI will force the world to move toward the Star Trek future. Because generating text and images is just the start.
When machines can do just about everything a human can (and scale up really fast)—even without AGI—there's no future for capitalism. It just won't work when there's no scarcity other than land and energy.
I respectfully disagree. Meta was caught downloading books from Libgen, a piracy site, to "train" it's models. What AI models do in effect is scan information (i.e., copy), and distill and retain what they view as its essence. They can copy your voice, they can copy your face, and they can copy your distinctive artistic style. The only way they can do that is if the "training" copies and retains a portion of the original works.
Consider Shepard Fairies' use of the AP's copyrighted Obama photograph in the production of the iconic "Hope" poster, and the resultant lawsuit. While the suit was ultimately settled, and the issue of "fair use" was a close call given the variation in art work from the original source photograph, the suit easily could have gone against Fairey, so it was smart for him to settle.
Also consider the litigation surrounding the use of music sampling in original hip hop works, which has clearly been held to be copyright infringement.
Accordingly, I think it is very fair to say that (1) AI steals copyrighted works; and (2) repackages the essential portions of those works into new works. Might a re-write of copyright law be in order to embrace this new technology? Sure, but if I'm a actor, or voice actor, author, or other artist and I can no longer earn a living because someone else has taken my work to strip it down to it's essence to resell cheaply without compensating me, I'm going to be pretty pissed off.
Lol. The liberal utopia of Star Trek is a fantasy. Far more likely is that AI will be exploited by oligarchs to enrich themselves and further impoverish the masses, as they are fervently working towards right now. See, AI isn't creative, it gives the appearance of being creative by stealing work created by humans and repackaging it. When artists can no longer create art to survive, there will be less material for the AI models to steal, and we'll be left with soulless AI slop as our de facto creative culture.
Meta literally torrented an insane amount of training materials illegally, from a company that was sued into the ground and forced to dissolve because of distributing stolen content
"When machines can do just about everything a human can (and scale up really fast)—even without AGI—there's no future for capitalism."
This might be one of the dumbest things I've ever read.
That's the main point, though: the tire fire of humanity is bad enough without some sick fucks adding vast quantities of accelerant in order to maximize profits.
Clearly that's not true. They'll keep it up for as long as it's at all positive to extract profits from it, but not past that. Handled right, this class action could make the entire concept poisonous from a profiteering perspective for years, maybe even decades.
Of COURSE! Why didn't anyone think to turn flick off the switches marked "unscrupulous profiteering" and "regulatory capture"?!
We'll have this done by tomorrow, Monday at the latest! 🙄
The cancer might be the underlying cause but the tumor still kills you if you don't do anything about it.
Again, it WILL if all profitability is removed.
Than silicon valley? Than the US government when ultra-rich white men want something?
No such country exists.
Finally right about something.
"Discover the cure for cancer and suddenly the tumord in your brain, lungs, liver, and kidneys won't be a problem anymore!" 🤦
Wtf have you been drinking??
Of course many of them are stealing. That's already been clearly established. As for the other groups, the ones that haven't gotten caught stealing yet, perhaps it's just that they haven't gotten caught, and not that they haven't been pirating things.
I like your rant, but I would like it better if the facts were facts.
I disagree that it is fair use. But, I was actually expecting the judiciary to say that it was. So, despite the ruling, I AM still mad that they used copyrighted works (including mine), in violation of the terms. (And, honestly, my terms [usually AGPLv3] are fairly generous.)
I'm also concerned about labor issues, and environmental impact, and general quality, but the unauthorized use of copyrighted works is still in the mix. And, if they are willing to all my private viewing of torrented TV "theft", I'm willing to call their selling of an interface to a LLM / NN that was trained on and may have incorporated (or emit!) my works (in whole or in part) "theft".
Labor issues are mostly solved by making to the workers control the means of production, not captial. Same old story.
Environment impact is better policed independent of what the electricity/water is used for. We aren't making a lot of headway there, but we need to reign in emissions (etc.) whether they are using it to train LLMs or research cancer.
Quality... is subjective and I don't think we are near the ceiling of that. And, since I don't use "AI" for the above reasons, it really isn't much of a concern to me.
They were bad on purpose. People responding to such bad writing are easy marks.
But usually this only improves after an AI winter, meaning the whole sector crashes until someone finds a better architecture/technology. Except there are now billions involved.
That's unfair. They also have to sue people who infringe on "their" IP. You just don't understand what it's like to a content creator.