Technology

While I agree that AI generated content is annoying and of poor quality, those are hardly reasons to disallow the creation of AI generated content. If we want to expand IP protections to protect against AI plagerism, we need to draw a better line than just calling it garbage.

That's all wrong. It's propaganda.

The rulers of old were brutal, theocratic tyrants. Forget all that Disney shit. Think witch burnings. Think medieval torture. Of course, they sought to control the printing press. They cracked down on blasphemy and regime criticism. Maybe they only allowed trusted individuals to operate presses. That also funneled money to cronies. Or maybe they even forbade the printing of anything that had not been approved.

Freedom of the press originally means that this is not done anymore.

The first copyright was created over a quarter millennium after the printing press came into use in Europe. It lasted 14 years.

Here's a question: If we were to ban free, open source software, would that protect programmers? Of course not. They have the choice to make their products a gift or not. In the same sense, copyright does not protect authors. Without copyright, there would be only the public domain. People would have a choice to make a gift to the public or not to publish.

Copyright does not protect authors. It was supposed to give the public a tool to support authors. The US Constitution gives that as the only acceptable purpose of copyrights and patents. Unfortunately, current copyright derives from a different source. It was created by the tyrannical empires of Europe in the 19th century. Americans like to blame Disney, but all they did was lobby for the US to adopt it.

Once there was the technology to quickly and trivially rip off their work and print it mass-scale, IP protections were granted to authors.

the statute of ann had nothing to do with protecting authors. it was about which london printers were allowed to print shakespeare's work long after he was dead.

Mickey Mouse is public domain...

of course they have trained models in house. they had ai write a song during a meme conference last year

they also use ai to train a model for DLSS image upscaling in house.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/may/27/gun-lawsuits-manufacturer-sellers-crimes

"That led to the 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA), which effectively granted gun manufacturers and sellers immunity from lawsuits related to harm “resulting from the criminal or unlawful misuse” of guns.

Unlike other industries, the gun industry was now largely free to act as it chose."

No offense, but the article is not about Nvidia GPUs, but their own AI model NeMo. Literally in the first line of the report. In this case, they definitely have the say on what training data to be used in the model.

Creating material that is copyright infridgement is not a desired output

Agreed.

the purpose of guns is to kill (when used).

Guns is a term with varied definitions of which not all are intended to kill. There are rubber bullets, air soft, small caliber, and even paint ball guns. These MAY be lethal but were made with other goals in mind.

Nvidia on the other hand made GPUs for applications that revolve around video, the G literally stands for graphics. Some people found out that they are also efficient at other tasks so Nvidia made a new line of products for that workload because it was more lucrative. Gamers usually only buy 1 graphics card per machine, a few years ago some would even buy up to 3. In contrast, AI researchers/architects/programmers buy as many as they can afford and constantly buy more. This has made Nvidia change their product stack to cater to the more lucrative customer.

AI manufacturers depend on copyrighted material to "train" the AI

With everything I said, these AI creators CHOOSE what to feed into these new tools. They can choose to input things in the public domain or even paid-licensed-content but instead using copyrighted and pirated content is the norm. That is because this is a new field and we are collectively learning where the boundaries are and what is considered acceptable and legal.

Reddit recently signed a deal to license it's data (user generated content like posts and comments) for use with AI generation. Other companies are using internal data to tailor their AIs to solve field-specific problems. The problem is that AI, just like guns, is a broad term.

the method of creation makes it more likely to infridge.

Nvidia has given us the tools but until we define what is considered acceptable, these kinds of things will be inevitable. I do believe that the authors had their copyrights infringed but they are also going after the wrong people. There have been reports of AI spitting out full books on command, clearly proving that those works were used to train. The authors should be going after the creators of those specific AIs, not Nvidia.

There is a long and bumpy road ahead.