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The Writer's Guild of America (WGA) is on strike as of May 2nd, after negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) broke down. While most of their demands deal with the way pay and compensation in the streaming era is structured, on the second page towards the bottom is:
I think this is an interesting first salvo in the fight over AI in creative professions. While this is just where both parties are starting for strike negotiations, and either could shift towards a compromise, I still can't help but see a hint that AMPTP isn't super interested in foregoing the use of AI in the future.
In 2007, when the WGA went on strike for 3 months, it had a huge effect on television at the time. There was a shift to unscripted programming, like reality television, and some shows with completed scripts that had been on the back burner got fast tracked to production. Part of me doubts that generative AI is really at the point where this could happen, but it would be fascinating if the AMPTP companies didn't just use traditional scabs during this strike, but supplemented them with generative AI in some way. Maybe instead of a shift to reality television, we'll look back on this as the first time AI became a significant factor in the production of scripted television and movies. Imagine seeing a "prompt engineer" credit at the end of every show you watch in the future.
It'll be interesting to see how this all plays out.
Is this even legal? AFAICT there’s no abstract ownership of concepts or ideas that copyright holders can claim, only claims against produced works. So a copyright holder can sue someone who uses AI to generate similar content to what is copyrighted, but not for using a work as training data per se. Sounds like the writers should be picketing Congress too.
I'd argue that a neural net is a derivative work of its training data, so its mere creation is a copyright violation.
Once again it is unclear to me how this is very different than a human who reads a bunch of scripts/novels/poems and then produces something similar to what he studied.
There’s a lot of different ways you could look at it, but I think I might just say that the principle of “if you use someone else’s work to build a machine that replaces their job, then you have a responsibility to compensate that person” just seems axiomatic to me. To say that the original writers/artists/etc are owed nothing, even though the AI literally could not exist without them, is just blatantly unfair.
Is it not different from the early factory laborers buildings the machines that would replace them? Or maybe more aptly the carriage companies that supplied the ford factories. They were paid for the production fairly enough. That was the narrow agreement, not that no one else could be inspired by it or build an inspiration machine. To be replaced by people who were inspired by your works is the fate of every artist in history, at least those that didn't wallow in obscurity.
They consented and were paid. It's not analogous at all.
They produced the media, which is being consumed and paid for under the current payment model. They are being compensated for it regularly and under all the fair and proper agreements. The AI is trained off of the general inspiration in the air, which is also where they artists pulled their own works for. It's a common resource emitted by everyone in the culture to some degree. The Disney corporation did not invent their stories from whole cloth, they took latent myths and old traditional tales from us and packaged it for us and the ideas return to us. Now we're going to have a tool that can also tap this common vein and more equitably? This is democratization. This is equality. This is progress.
Last week I not so popularly defended copyright, and I still believe it's the best compromise available to us. But it doesn't exist because of a fundamental right, it exists because it solves a problem we have with incentivizing the upfront cost of creating media. If these costs can be removed from the equation then the balance shifts.
How do you feel about software license agreements? Plenty of software/code is publicly visible on the internet and can be downloaded for free, but it's accompanied by complex licensing terms that state what you can and can't do with it, and you agree to those terms just by downloading the software. Do you think that license agreements are just nonsense? Once something is out on the internet then no one can tell you what you can and can't do with it?
If you think that once a sequence of bits is out there, it's out there, and anyone can do anything with it, then it would follow that you wouldn't see anything wrong with AI training as well.
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