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The Irony of 'You Wouldn't Download a Car' Making a Comeback in AI Debates

Those claiming AI training on copyrighted works is “theft” misunderstand key aspects of copyright law and AI technology. Copyright protects specific expressions of ideas, not the ideas themselves. When AI systems ingest copyrighted works, they’re extracting general patterns and concepts - the “Bob Dylan-ness” or “Hemingway-ness” - not copying specific text or images.

This process is akin to how humans learn by reading widely and absorbing styles and techniques, rather than memorizing and reproducing exact passages. The AI discards the original text, keeping only abstract representations in “vector space”. When generating new content, the AI isn’t recreating copyrighted works, but producing new expressions inspired by the concepts it’s learned.

This is fundamentally different from copying a book or song. It’s more like the long-standing artistic tradition of being influenced by others’ work. The law has always recognized that ideas themselves can’t be owned - only particular expressions of them.

Moreover, there’s precedent for this kind of use being considered “transformative” and thus fair use. The Google Books project, which scanned millions of books to create a searchable index, was ruled legal despite protests from authors and publishers. AI training is arguably even more transformative.

While it’s understandable that creators feel uneasy about this new technology, labeling it “theft” is both legally and technically inaccurate. We may need new ways to support and compensate creators in the AI age, but that doesn’t make the current use of copyrighted works for AI training illegal or unethical.

For those interested, this argument is nicely laid out by Damien Riehl in FLOSS Weekly episode 744. twit.tv/shows/floss-weekly/episodes/744

helenslunch ,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

Those claiming AI training on copyrighted works is “theft” misunderstand key aspects of copyright law and AI technology.

Or maybe they’re not talking about copyright law. They’re talking about basic concepts. Maybe copyright law needs to be brought into the 21st century?

renrenPDX ,

Then OpenAI should pay for a copy, like we do.

mightyfoolish ,

Is their an official statement if OpenAI pays for at least one copy of whatever they throw into the bots?

Shanedino ,

Maybe if you would pay for training data they would let you use copyright data or something?

T156 ,

Had the company paid for the training data and/or left it as voluntary, there would be less of a problem with it to begin with.

Part of the problem is that they didn’t, but are still using it for commercial purposes.

andrew_bidlaw ,
@andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works avatar

Their business strategy is built on top of assumption they won’t. They don’t want this door opened at all. It was a great deal for Google to buy Reddit’s data for some $mil., because it is a huge collection behind one entity. Now imagine communicating to each individual site owner whose resources they scrapped.

If that could’ve been how it started, the development of these AI tools could be much slower because of (1) data being added to the bunch only after an agreement, (2) more expenses meaning less money for hardware expansion and (3) investors and companies being less hyped up about that thing because it doesn’t grow like a mushroom cloud while following legal procedures. Also, (4) the ability to investigate and collect a public list of what sites they have agreement with is pretty damning making it’s own news stories and conflicts.

Veneroso ,

We have hundreds of years of out of copyright books and newspapers. I look forward to interacting with old-timey AI.

“Fiddle sticks! These mechanical horses will never catch on! They’re far too loud and barely more faster than a man can run!”

“A Woman’s place is raising children and tending to the house! If they get the vote, what will they demand next!? To earn a Man’s wage!?”

That last one is still relevant to today’s discourse somehow!?

Kolanaki ,
@Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

The ingredient thing is a bit amusing, because that’s basically how one of the major fast food chains got to be so big (I can’t remember which one it was ATM though; just that it wasn’t McDonald’s). They cut out the middle-man and just bought their own farm to start growing the vegetables and later on expanded to raising the animals used for the meat as well.

NeoNachtwaechter ,

Wait… they actually STOLE the cheese from the cows?

😆

VerbFlow ,
@VerbFlow@lemmy.world avatar

There are a few problems, tho. 123456

NeoNachtwaechter ,

The sad news is:

Their argument could fall on fertile ground.

The Usamerican legal system protects a running business. When such a rich and famous corporation argues (and it would be highly paid lawyers arguing) that their business could be in jeopardy, they are going to listen, no matter how ridiculous the reasoning.

In other countries, they just make a judge laughing out loud.

MentalEdge ,
@MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz avatar

The whole point of copyright in the first place, is to encourage creative expression, so we can have human culture and shit.

The idea of a “teensy” exception so that we can “advance” into a dark age of creative pointlessness and regurgitated slop, where humans doing the fun part has been made “unnecessary” by the unstoppable progress of “thinking” machines, would be hilarious, if it weren’t depressing as fuck.

wagesj45 ,
@wagesj45@fedia.io avatar

The whole point of copyright in the first place, is to encourage creative expression

...within a capitalistic framework.

Humans are creative creatures and will express themselves regardless of economic incentives. We don't have to transmute ideas into capital just because they have "value".

MentalEdge , (edited )
@MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz avatar

You’re not wrong.

The kind of art humanity creates is skewed a lot by the need for it to be marketable, and then sold in order to be worth doing.

But copyright is better than nothing, and this exemption would straight up be even worse than nothing.

wizardbeard ,

Sorry buddy, but that capitalistic framework is where we all have to exist for the forseeable future.

Giving corporations more power is not going to help us end that.

uriel238 ,
@uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Can’t say you’re wrong, however the forseeable future is less than two centuries, and our failure to navigate our way out of capitalism towards something more mutualistic figures largely into our imminent doom.

kibiz0r ,

That’s the reason we got copyright, but I don’t think that’s the only reason we could want copyright.

Two good reasons to want copyright:

  1. Accurate attribution
  2. Faithful reproduction

Accurate attribution:

Open source thrives on the notion that: if there’s a new problem to be solved, and it requires a new way of thinking to solve it, someone will start a project whose goal is not just to build new tools to solve the problem but also to attract other people who want to think about the problem together.

If anyone can take the codebase and pretend to be the original author, that will splinter the conversation and degrade the ability of everyone to find each other and collaborate.

In the past, this was pretty much impossible because you could check a search engine or social media to find the truth. But with enshittification and bots at every turn, that looks less and less guaranteed.

Faithful reproduction:

If I write a book and make some controversial claims, yet it still provokes a lot of interest, people might be inclined to publish slightly different versions to advance their own opinions.

Maybe a version where I seem to be making an abhorrent argument, in an effort to mitigate my influence. Maybe a version where I make an argument that the rogue publisher finds more palatable, to use my popularity to boost their own arguments.

This actually happened during the early days of publishing, by the way! It’s part of the reason we got copyright in the first place.

And again, it seems like this would be impossible to get away with now, buuut… I’m not so sure anymore.

—

Personally:

I favor piracy in the sense that I think everyone has a right to witness culture even if they can’t afford the price of admission.

And I favor remixing because the cultural conversation should be an active read-write two-way street, no just passive consumption.

But I also favor some form of licensing, because I think we have a duty to respect the integrity of the work and the voice of the creator.

I think AI training is very different from piracy. I’ve never downloaded a mega pack of songs and said to my friends “Listen to what I made!” I think anyone who compares OpenAI to pirates (favorably) is unwittingly helping the next set of feudal tech lords build a wall around the entirety of human creativity, and they won’t realize their mistake until the real toll booths open up.

EatATaco ,

I think AI training is very different from piracy. I’ve never downloaded a mega pack of songs and said to my friends “Listen to what I made!”

I’ve never done this. But I have taken lessons from people for instruments, listened to bands I like, and then created and played songs that certainly are influences by all of that. I’ve also taken a lot of art classes, and studied other people’s painting styles and then created things from what I’ve learned, and said “look at what I made!” Which is far more akin to what AI is doing that what you are implying here.

Rekorse ,

So what if its closer? Its still not an accurate description, because thats not what AI does.

captain_aggravated ,
@captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works avatar

Humans are indeed creative by nature, we like making things. What we don’t naturally do is publish, broadcast and preserve our work.

Society is iterative. What we build today, we build mostly out of what those who came before us built. We tell our versions of our forefathers’ stories, we build new and improved versions of our forefather’s machines.

A purely capitalistic society would have infinite copyright and patent durations, this idea is mine, it belongs to me, no one can ever have it, my family and only my family will profit from it forever. Nothing ever improves because improving on an old idea devalues the old idea, and the landed gentry can’t allow that.

A purely communist society immediately enters whatever anyone creates into the public domain. The guy who revolutionizes energy production making everyone’s lives better is paid the same as a janitor. So why go through all the effort? Just sweep the floors.

At least as designed, our idea of copyright is a compromise. If you have an idea, we will grant you a limited time to exclusively profit from your idea. You may allow others to also profit at your discretion; you can grant licenses, but that’s up to you. After the time is up, your idea enters the public domain, and becomes the property and heritage of humanity, just like the Epic of Gilgamesh. Others are free to reproduce and iterate upon your ideas.

macrocephalic ,

It’s an interesting area. Are they suggesting that a human reading copyright material and learning from it is a breach?

uriel238 ,
@uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

I personally am down for this punch-up between Alphabet and Sony. Microsoft v. Disney.

🍿

overload ,

Surely it’s coming. We have The music publishing cartel vs Suno already.

TunaCowboy ,

I wouldn’t say I’m on OAI’s side here, but I’m down to eliminate copyright. New economic models will emerge, especially if more creatives unionize.

PenisDuckCuck9001 , (edited )

Honestly, if this somehow results in regulators being like “fuck it, piracy is legal now” it won’t negatively impact me in any way…

Corporations have abused copyright law for decades, they’ve ruined the internet, they’ve ruined media, they’ve ruined video games. I want them to lose more than anything else.

The shitty and likely situation is they’ll be like “fuck it corporate piracy is legal but individuals doing it is still a crime”.

Starbuncle ,

I think that training models on scraped internet data should be legal if and only if those models’ weights are required to be open-source. It’d be like slapping a copyleft license on the internet - you can do what you want with public data, but you have to give what you use it for back to the public.

randon31415 ,

I finally understand Trump supporters “Fuck it, burn it all to the ground cause we can’t win” POV. Only instead of democracy, it is copyright and instead of Trump, it is AI.

roofuskit ,

The Times’ lawyers must be chuffed reading this.

xenomor , (edited )

This take is correct although I would make one addition. It is true that copyright violation doesn’t happen when copyrighted material is inputted or when models are trained. While the outputs of these models are not necessarily copyright violations, it is possible for them to violate copyright. The same standards for violation that apply to humans should apply to these models.

I entirely reject the claims that there should be one standard for humans and another for these models. Every time this debate pops up, people claim some province based on ‘intelligence’ or ‘conscience’ or ‘understanding’ or ‘awareness’. This is a meaningless argument because we have no clear understanding about what those things are. I’m not claiming anything about the nature of these models. I’m just pointing out that people love to apply an undefined standard to them.

We should apply the same copyright standards to people, models, corporations, and old-school algorithms.

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