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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.
Because the law doesn't consider your memory or the arrangement or functioning of your neurons to be a tangible medium of expression, but a computer memory (including RAM, flash, spinning rust, paper tape, whatever) is. If you see a work and produce something similar, what you produce might indeed by a copyright violation (and there are a lot of lawsuits about that), but your mind can't itself be a copyright violation. A neural network in a computer can be.
This doesn't seem to follow either. Maybe what the computer produces could be a violation, but the actual information contained within it doesn't resemble the copyrighted material in any way we can determine. At least that's based on my understanding of how the trained AI works.
The fact that the information contained within the LLM doesn't, in some sense, resemble the copyrighted material isn't relevant, nor should it be; the fact that we can get it out demonstrates that it is in there.
Which is why I'm confused as to why this does not apply to a human memory, other than that just being the Court's distinction between human hardware and electronic systems that they apply.
And then, even accepting your point:
Then presumably putting sufficient controls on the system so that it WILL NOT produce copyrighted works on demand solves the objection.
We also run into the 'library of Babel" issue. If you have a pile of sufficiently large randomized information, then it probably contains 'copies' of various copyrighted works that can be extracted.
So an AI that is trained on and 'contained' the entire corpus of all human-created text might be said to contain copies of various works, but the incredible, vast majority of what it it contains is completely 'novel,' unrelated information which users can generate at will, too.
There may be no other distinction.
Only if the controls are inseparable from the system. If I can take your weights and use them in an uncensored system to produce the copyrighted works, they were still in there. Just as if you rigged a DVD player not to play a DVD of "Return of the Jedi" wouldn't mean "Return of the Jedi" wasn't on the DVD.
If the randomized information was generated without reference to the copyrighted works, this doesn't matter. That's not the case with the AIs; they had the copyrighted works as training data.
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