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by artninja1988·2y ago·view on hn ↗
> Bellos, a comparative-literature professor at Princeton, and Montagu, an intellectual-property lawyer, find this kind of rent-seeking objectionable. They complain that corporate copyright owners “strut the world stage as the new barons of the twenty-first century,” and they call copyright “the biggest money machine the world has seen.” They point out that, at a time when corporate ownership of copyrights has boomed, the income of authors, apart from a few superstars, has been falling. They think that I.P. law is not a set of rules protecting individual rights so much as a regulatory instrument for business.

Couldn't agree more

1 comments
Remove copywriter protections and small time authors have the potential to earn EVEN LESS.

Why write books or any creative text based content when the second it's available it will be hoovered into the next AI training cycle and can be reproduced in part or in whole by users who almost definitely do not know who you are in the first place.

Is that even the case? Who would read a small time writers fiction book through chatgpt? Most of the use cases I've seen for chatgpt, e.g. Translation, conversation, brainstorming, reformulation, summarization are wholly different from the dataset of books. I would say that the art generators have a stronger claim of competing with their work than llms
OpenAI/other is earning money (by selling subscriptions, ...) with a product that has been trained on and utilizes the protected work to produce their results.

Personally I think the only way forward is for these AI companies to curate their dataset to only material that is legal for use. E.g. only GitHub repos with licenses stating such. Just because there is not a license doesn't mean it's free to hoover.

Or there could be a very cheap license for AI training that doesn't allow other uses, much like radio licenses for music.

They could buy a bunch of content created (or specifically licensed) for purpose, the artists get paid, and the artists that don't want their work to go into the pipeline get what they want too.

But too many people consider the development of AI to be such a moral imperative that no objections can possibly be relevant.