One prominent author responds to the revelation that his writing is being used to coach artificial intelligence.
By Stephen King
Non-paywalled link: https://archive.li/8QMmu
I’ve read some of his books too.
Just as long as you don’t in any way absorb the information into your brain it’s okay.
I understand what authors are trying to say, but legally I don’t quite get how they can say that an AI is doing anything other than reading the books, which obviously they’re allowed to do.
It is not as if they are making the books publicly available for free, and it’s not as if writing in the style of another author is illegal, so I’m not quite sure what law has been broken here.
It’s baffling to me seeing comments like this as if the ‘AI’ is some natural intelligence just hanging out going around reading books it’s interested in for the hell of it… No. These are software companies illegally using artists works (which we require licensing for commercial use) to develop a commercial, profit generating product. Whatever the potential outputs of the AI are is irrelevant when the sources used to train it were obtained illegally.
Yeah, and even if it WERE truly intelligent – which these SALAMIs are almost certainly not – it doesn’t even matter.
A human and a robot are not the same. They have different needs and must be afforded different moral protections. Someone can buy a book, read it, learn from it, and incorporate things it learned from that experience into their own future work. They may transform it creatively or it may plagiarize or it may rest in some grey area in-between where it isn’t 100% clear if it was novel or plagiarized. All this is also true for a LLM “AI”. – But whether or not this process is fundamentally the same or not isn’t even a relevant question.
Copyright law isn’t something that exists because it is a pure moral good to protect the creative output of a person from theft. It would be far more ethical to say that all the outputs of human intellect should be shared freely and widely for all people to use, unencumbered by such things. But if creativity is rewarded with only starvation, creativity will go away, so copyright exists as a compromise to try and ensure there is food in the bellies of artists. And with it, we have an understanding that there is a LOT of unclear border space where one artist may feed on the output of another to hopefully grow the pot for everyone.
The only way to fit generative bots into the philosophical framework of copyright is to demand that the generative bots keep food in the bellies of the artists. Currently, they threaten it. It’s just that simple. People act like it’s somehow an important question whether they “learn” the same way people do, but the question doesn’t matter at all. Robots don’t get the same leeway and protection afforded to humans because robots do not need to eat.
Robots don’t get the same leeway and protection afforded to humans because robots do not need to eat.
Well said.
