This is the best path forward I think. And it will become increasingly sensible as things continue to evolve. AI wasn't necessary to violate copyright before, and it isn't necessary today.
The determination of copyright violation should be made against the output of the model in the event that someone uses it for commercial purposes.
If the models have a risk of generating copyrighted content, it will be up to the consumers of the system to mitigate that risk through manual review or automated checks of the output.
A divergence, but I see a lot of posters asserting that "humans learn by copying other people, but we don't call that a violation of copyright when they draw"
People casually asserting that software is equivalent to humanity will be a non-negligible thing to consider, as irritating and poorly-founded as it seems.
If the reproduction isn't pixel-perfect, but merely obvious and overwhelming, how do you refute that philosophically to people who refuse a distinction between 50GB and a human life?
> People casually asserting that software is equivalent to humanity will be a non-negligible thing to consider, as irritating and poorly-founded as it seems.
> If the reproduction isn't pixel-perfect, but merely obvious and overwhelming, how do you refute that philosophically to people who refuse a distinction between 50GB and a human life?
Software equivalence to humanity is a very philosophical question that many sci-fi writers have approached. But our primary issue related to this technology does not depend on anyone making a determination there.
The challenge is that losses to livelihood from this technology are going to come from far broader impacts than copyright alone. Copyright disputes are just the first things to get everyone's attention.
Let's say we err on the side of protection of copyright, and all training data must be fully licensed, in addition to users being responsible for ensuring outputs did not accidentally reproduce something similar to a copyrighted work, even if it was part of the licensed training dataset. Great! This fixes the problem of lost value for the owners of copyrights. Companies will face a slight delay and slightly increased costs as they license content; however, in the end, model capabilities will be the same and continue to increase.
The number of jobs that actually cannot be performed without humans will continue to dwindle — livelihoods will be lost at essentially the same scale despite upholding copyrights.
The only way we can handle a technology capable of reducing most need for human labor is by focusing on planning and executing a smooth transition toward an economy with more people than jobs — aiming for minimal human suffering during this process.
A mass loss of human jobs does not need to mean a mass loss of livelihood if our society is prepared to transition to a universal basic income. After all, human life is far more than just a job. We have the opportunity for much more fulfilling lives if we plan this transition well. We must understand that this is a far larger issue than copyright - copyright disputes are just one of the first symptoms of this disruptive process.
A human is still entering the prompt to generate the possibly copyrighted image/text. I don't think copyright law should care about the implementation. It's ok to copy a style if you use paint brushes or photo shop. But not ok if you use a statistic model?
The determination of copyright violation should be made against the output of the model in the event that someone uses it for commercial purposes.
If the models have a risk of generating copyrighted content, it will be up to the consumers of the system to mitigate that risk through manual review or automated checks of the output.