A rising movement of artists and authors are suing tech companies for training AI on their work without credit or payment

  • archomrade [he/him]@midwest.social
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    1 year ago

    However, they should, without question, have to pay for the art that they used, or cease using it if the sale won’t be completed. Any other outcome is absolutely going to lead to an economic collapse.

    This is the part that drives me crazy, the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premise. Just because machine learning poses an economic threat to artists/writers/ect, does not mean it somehow makes how they are trained unethical. It undoubtedly does pose a threat, but not because they’re “stealing” work, but because our economic system is fucked. I would challenge anyone to try applying the same copywrite legal argument to the more common training sets using reddit, Twitter, and other online forum text data, which does not have the same copywrite protections, and isn’t identifiable in the ML outputs. Machine learning applications have the potential to liberate humanity from millions of hours of meaningless work, why should we be whining about it just because “they took our jobs!”?

    Just like the Napster trials, I think our economic system and industry ought to adapt to the new technology, not cling to legal precedent to protect it from changing. Employment should not be a prerequisite to a standard of living, full stop. If some new technology comes along and replaces the labor of a couple million people, our reaction shouldn’t be to stop the progress, but to ensure those people put out of work can still afford to live without creating more meaningless work to fill their time .