Apparently, stealing other people’s work to create product for money is now “fair use” as according to OpenAI because they are “innovating” (stealing). Yeah. Move fast and break things, huh?
“Because copyright today covers virtually every sort of human expression—including blogposts, photographs, forum posts, scraps of software code, and government documents—it would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials,” wrote OpenAI in the House of Lords submission.
OpenAI claimed that the authors in that lawsuit “misconceive[d] the scope of copyright, failing to take into account the limitations and exceptions (including fair use) that properly leave room for innovations like the large language models now at the forefront of artificial intelligence.”
Exactly! You can glean so much from a single work, not just about the work itself but who created it and what ideas were they trying to express and what does that tell us about the world they live in and how they see that world.
This doesn’t even touch the fact that I’m learning to draw not by looking at other drawings but what exactly I’m trying to draw. I know at a base level, a drawing is a series of shapes made by hand whether it’s through a digital medium or traditional pen/pencil and paper. But the skill isn’t being able replicate other drawings, it’s being able to convert something I can see into a drawing. If I’m drawing someone sitting in a wheelchair, then I’ll get the pose of them sitting in the wheelchair but I can add details I want to emphasise or remove details I don’t want. There’s so much that goes into creative work and I’m tired of arguing with people who have no idea what it takes to produce creative works.
It seems that most of the people who think what humans and AIs do is the same thing are not actually creatives themselves. Their level of understanding of what it takes to draw goes no further than “well anyone can draw, children do it all the time”. They have the same respect for writing, of course, equating the ability to string words together to write an email, with the process it takes to write a brilliant novel or script. They don’t get it, and to an extent, that’s fine - not everybody needs to understand everything. But they should at least have the decency to listen to the people that do get it.