this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2025
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The biggest problem with AI is that they're illegally harvesting everything they can possibly get their hands on to feed it, they're forcing it into places where people have explicitly said they don't want it, and they're sucking up massive amounts of energy AMD water to create it, undoing everyone else's progress in reducing energy use, and raising prices for everyone else at the same time.
Oh, and it also hallucinates.
They're not illegally harvesting anything. Copyright law is all about distribution. As much as everyone loves to think that when you copy something without permission you're breaking the law the truth is that you're not. It's only when you distribute said copy that you're breaking the law (aka violating copyright).
All those old school notices (e.g. "FBI Warning") are 100% bullshit. Same for the warning the NFL spits out before games. You absolutely can record it! You just can't share it (or show it to more than a handful of people but that's a different set of laws regarding broadcasting).
I download AI (image generation) models all the time. They range in size from 2GB to 12GB. You cannot fit the petabytes of data they used to train the model into that space. No compression algorithm is that good.
The same is true for LLM, RVC (audio models) and similar models/checkpoints. I mean, think about it: If AI is illegally distributing millions of copyrighted works to end users they'd have to be including it all in those files somehow.
Instead of thinking of an AI model like a collection of copyrighted works think of it more like a rough sketch of a mashup of copyrighted works. Like if you asked a person to make a Godzilla-themed My Little Pony and what you got was that person's interpretation of what Godzilla combined with MLP would look like. Every artist would draw it differently. Every author would describe it differently. Every voice actor would voice it differently.
Those differences are the equivalent of the random seed provided to AI models. If you throw something at a random number generator enough times you could--in theory--get the works of Shakespeare. Especially if you ask it to write something just like Shakespeare. However, that doesn't meant the AI model literally copied his works. It's just doing it's best guess (it's literally guessing! That's how work!).
The issue I see is that they are using the copyrighted data, then making money off that data.
...in the same way that someone who's read a lot of books can make money by writing their own.
I hate to be the one to break it to you but AIs aren't actually people. Companies claiming that they are "this close to AGI" doesn't make it true.
The human brain is an exception to copyright law. Outsourcing your thinking to a machine that doesn't actually think makes this something different and therefore should be treated differently.
Do you know someone who's read a billion books and can write a new (trashy) book in 5 mins?
No, but humans have differences in scale also. Should a person gifted with hyper-fast reading and writing ability be given less opportunity than a writer who takes a year to read a book and a decade to write one? Imo if the argument comes down to scale, it's kind of a shitty argument. Is the underlying principle faulty or not?
Part of my point is that a lot of everyday rules do break down at large scale. Like, 'drink water' is good advice - but a person can still die from drinking too much water. And having a few people go for a walk through a forest is nice, but having a million people go for a walk through a forest is bad. And using a couple of quotes from different sources to write an article for a website is good; but using thousands of quotes in an automated method doesn't really feel like the same thing any more.
That's what I'm saying. A person can't physically read billions of books, or do the statistical work to put them together to create a new piece of work from them. And since a person cannot do that, no law or existing rule currently takes that possibility into account. So I don't think we can really say that a person is 'allowed to' do that. Rather, it's just an undefined area. A person simply cannot physically do it, and so the rules don't have to consider it. On the other hand, computer systems can now do it. And so rather than pointing to old laws, we have to decide as a society whether we think that's something we are ok with.
I don't know what the 'best' answer is, but I do think we should at least stop to think about it carefully; because there are some clear downsides that need to be considered - and probably a lot of effects that aren't as obvious which should also be considered!