I’d like to point out that the title is conflating two very different acts of “piracy”. What I think of as “the little guy” piracy is content “theft”, whereby they acquire some content they didn’t pay for to enjoy. What “the big guy” piracy looks like is licensing theft, whereby they take something “freely available on the internet” and use it to make their own product which directly affects the creator.

The world in which I watch some P&R or play some Warhammer for free in my little cave looks identical to the world in which I didn’t do that. The world in which I read all the Warhammer lore and make a game and sell it using the same setting and characters without talking to GW directly devalues their IP and the world looks different (this is effectively what AI does as it can be made to reproduce a lot of the training data).

I’d love to live in a world without DRM and “always online” and purchased**TM (arbitrarily revocable) games, and convenient and affordable ways to access media so piracy isn’t necessary and the degree to which it would still happen would be so minor we wouldn’t even need laws for it. I support the kind of piracy that rallies against that shit, I do not support arbitrary license theft.

Judging by my extensive arguing with people like this on reddit they fall into one of two camps:

• Once bigcorp creates panicea AIs, they won’t need to pirate anymore because they will be able to ask ChatGPT to make all the movies and music they need.

• They don’t think that additional copyright protections will ever be able to touch Microsoft and can only ever hurt the little guy.

I really want to see someone use the lack of any AI accountability as an active defense in a copyright trial for piracy. Force the court to compare the “theft” of a digital item like a book or movie that is used a few times probably, to copying something that is then effectively used internally every time the AI generates something.

Copyright law is full of ambiguities and gray areas, some intentional and some unintentional. The concept of “fair use” is an example of an intentional gray area, since the idea is that society as a whole will benefit from allowing people to skirt copyright law in certain circumstances, and lawmakers can’t possibly hope to enumerate every such circumstance. It then falls on courts to determine if a given circumstance falls under “fair use”. The problem is courts move very slowly when faced with a new circumstance that hasn’t been litigated before, and that’s what’s happening with AI companies training AI on copyrighted works. Once decisions have been made and stare decisis is established, then they’ll move faster. The NY Times vs OpenAI is the case to watch IMO, since that’s the biggest one challenging the idea that training AI is fair use.

They don’t think that.

I have not followed any current debate, so this is just my own thoughts. I expect any battle between Disney and Microsoft to end with a deal where consumers and independent producers are worse off.

Similar to how YouTube often hands out copyright strikes for musicians uploading their own music, in a possible future you might need an AI license to upload any work to any platform of size. I mean, you don’t technically have to, it is just that that the AI driven filter will otherwise strike you faster than Tumblr hiding images of trans women. Oh, and when you fold and get the AI license, you notice that it includes signing away your rights to not have your uploaded work be part of the AI training materials.

Maybe I am just jaded. But until AI crashes and burns the in my opinion most likely outcome of legal proceedings is splitting the loot in proportion to the power of the interested parties. On the other hand I don’t expect anything good to come out of letting AI companies run wild. So I dearly hope they destroy each other, but I expect them to embrace.

Not my fight either way tbh

The differing factor for me is profit, those Jetflicks guys aren’t getting any sympathy from me. Charging or taking donations just to maintain infrastructure is one thing, but they had millions of dollars in profit.

You should be able to use anything you want for things, but once you start trying to make a profit off others works, that’s where I tend to draw the line. For example, I have no qualms to pirate Photoshop to make memes or fix old family photos or whatever, but if I were to ever actually get good with it I would buy it or switch to an open source competitor before trying to make money with it.

AI training is where it starts to get murky, but having a base understanding of how training generally goes, I don’t see an issue with it. The original image(s) fed into it is not really there anymore, it was processed into weights and math and then discarded in a way.

Yes, it’s possible to recreate an original image from its training, but every example I’ve seen required a very very specific prompt to get it to do that and even then it was a bit off. It’s akin to a person memorizing a piece of art and then re-creating it from memory, depending on the individual skill level it’ll get pretty close but it’ll be just a bit off

Now, training data taken from behind a paywall or private data like DMs or private posts can be a bit different and I’m generally against that.

So I’ve adopted this line: “If it’s posted publicly, expect it to be used publicly” which includes just your average joe seeing it browsing around or a bot grabbing it for AI training