Post #3368761

I’m probably the most anti-AI person I know, but I agree discourse around how “AI is theft” is a bit shallow. However. Copyright is often erroneously conflated with plagiarism. While the two do sometimes coincide, they’re very different concerns. I, myself, believe copyright is so broken we’d be better off throwing it away. (The only thing I believe I’d miss about copyright if I woke up tomorrow and it didn’t exist would be copyleft.) But I do deeply believe in a right to attribution. I don’t think AI is theft. I think it’s plagiarism. And I do believe that listing the names of all those whose works were involved in training data for a model would still be a great disservice to the artists. Meanwhile, asking an LLM or image generating model which training data was involved in generating the particular output it produced is similarly futile to asking which rep at the gym allowed a stage strongman to lift a car. And if someone objected that giving what I would consider “sufficient credit” to artists/authors/whoever would make AI models completely infeasible, then my response would be “that’s exactly my point.” Finally, one more point I want to make is that if AI didn’t make billionaires a huge amount of money, the legal system would have put a stop to the mass scraping of training data and made a very visible example of whoever undertook to do so first long ago. (coughAaron Swartzcough) As terrible as it is having to deal with the shitty IP laws we have, the greater injustice is that the laws only apply when billionaires want them to.