this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2024
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A bipartisan group of senators introduced a new bill to make it easier to authenticate and detect artificial intelligence-generated content and protect journalists and artists from having their work gobbled up by AI models without their permission.

The Content Origin Protection and Integrity from Edited and Deepfaked Media Act (COPIED Act) would direct the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to create standards and guidelines that help prove the origin of content and detect synthetic content, like through watermarking. It also directs the agency to create security measures to prevent tampering and requires AI tools for creative or journalistic content to let users attach information about their origin and prohibit that information from being removed. Under the bill, such content also could not be used to train AI models.

Content owners, including broadcasters, artists, and newspapers, could sue companies they believe used their materials without permission or tampered with authentication markers. State attorneys general and the Federal Trade Commission could also enforce the bill, which its backers say prohibits anyone from “removing, disabling, or tampering with content provenance information” outside of an exception for some security research purposes.

(A copy of the bill is in he article, here is the important part imo:

Prohibits the use of “covered content” (digital representations of copyrighted works) with content provenance to either train an AI- /algorithm-based system or create synthetic content without the express, informed consent and adherence to the terms of use of such content, including compensation)

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[–] [email protected] 159 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

This is essentially regulatory capture. The article is very lax on calling it what it is.

A few things to consider:

  • Laws can't be applied retroactively, this would essentially close the door behind Openai, Google and Microsoft. Openai with sora in conjunction with the big Hollywood companies will be the only ones able to do proper video generation.

  • Individuals will not be getting paid, databrokers will.

  • They can easily pay pennies to a third world artist to build them a dataset copying a style. Styles are not copyrightable.

  • The open source scene is completely dead in the water and so is fine tuning for individuals.

Edit: This isn't entirely true, there is more leeway for non commercial models, see comments below.

  • AI isn't going away, all this does is force us and the economy into a subscription model.

  • Companies like Disney, Getty and Adobe reap everything.

In a perfect world, this bill would be aiming to make all models copyleft instead but sadly, no one is lobbying for that in Washington and money talks.

[–] [email protected] 53 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Yup, I fucking knew it. I knew this is what would happen with everyone bitching about copyright this and that. I knew any legislation that came as a result was going be bastardized and dressed up to make it look like it's for everyone when in reality it's going to mostly benefit big corps that can afford licensing fees and teams of lawyers.

People could not/would not understand how these AI models actually processes images/text or the concept of "If you post publicly, expect it to be used publicly" and here we are....

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[–] [email protected] 88 points 4 months ago (5 children)

This is a brutally dystopian law. Forget the AI angle and turn on your brain.

Any information will get a label saying who owns it and what can be done with it. Tampering with these labels becomes a crime. This is the infrastructure for the complete control of the flow of all information.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago

Exactly, this isn't about any sort of AI, this is the old playbook of trying to digitally track images, just with the current label slapped on. Regardless of your opinion on AI, this is a terrible way to solve this.

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[–] [email protected] 86 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (10 children)

They did it. They're passing the worst version of the AI law. Thats the end for open source AI! If this passes, all AI will be closed source, and only from giant tech companies. Im sure they will find a way to steal your stuff "legally".

[–] [email protected] 45 points 4 months ago

To the cheer of so-called progressives who never understood the tech and continue to be wilfully ignorant of it the corporations win again.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 4 months ago

This is exactly what OpenAI etc. wanted to achieve with all the “AI safety” bullshit doomer talk. I really hope this doesn’t pass

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[–] [email protected] 51 points 4 months ago (11 children)

A bit late now, isn't it?

All the big corporations have already trained most of their current ai, so all this does is put the up and comers at a disadvantage.

[–] MagicShel 34 points 4 months ago (2 children)

It could halt the progress of improving their models and stagnate the whole technology.

That being said, it only halts progress for American companies. Other countries will happily ignore this law and grow beyond our capabilities. I'm not sure if that's better or worse than the current situation.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Reminds me of Russia before WWI began. They realized they had fallen horribly behind the rest of the world in terms of military technology, so they called an arms limitation treaty conference where they pushed for basically every country in the world to agree to stop inventing any new weapons of any kind.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago (2 children)

From what I understand the next rounds of ai are being trained on further refined versions of the same datasets and supplemented with synthetic data.

The damage to existing copyrighted content is already done.

Source: I'm a random internet user

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Seeing as laws can't be applied retroactively, what would have been the alternative?

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[–] [email protected] 50 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (18 children)

I don't like AI but I hate intellectual property. And the people that want to restrict AI don't seem to understand the implications that has. I am ok with copying as I think copyright is a load of bullocks. But they aren't even reproducing the content verbatim are they? They're 'taking inspiration' if you will, transforming it into something completely different. Seems like fair use to me. It's just that people hate AI, and hate the companies behind it, and don't get me wrong, rightfully so, but that shouldn't get us all to stop thinking critically about intellectual property laws.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I'm the opposite, actually. I like generative AI. But as a creator who shares his work with the public for their (non-commercial) enjoyment, I am not okay with a billionaire industry training their models on my content without my permission, and then use those models as a money machine.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago (7 children)

This law will ensure only giant tech company have this power. Hobbyists and home players will be prevented.

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

If this passes, this would have the perverse effect of making China (and maybe to a lesser extent the Middle East) the leading suppliers of open source / open weight AI models...

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago (3 children)

China would be the world leader in making AI model trained on copyrighted content

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 4 months ago (13 children)

So the rich have already scalped what they could. Now it can be made illegal

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 4 months ago (1 children)

There's absolutely no way to enforce this.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 4 months ago (1 children)

As if a law could prevent anything of that. They simply demand "Pigs Must Fly", and don't waste a thought on how utterly unrealistic this is.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago

As if a law could prevent anything of that.

Generating legal liability goes a long way towards curbing how businesses behave, particularly when they can be picked on by rival mega-firms.

But because we've made class action lawsuits increasingly difficult, particularly after Comcast Corp. v. Behrend, the idea that individual claimants can effectively prosecute a case against an interstate or international entity is increasingly farcical. You're either going to need big state agencies (the EU seems increasingly invested in cracking down on American tech companies for anti-competitive practices) or rivalrous business interests (MPAA/RIAA going after Big Tech backed AI firms) to leverage this kind of liability. It's still going to be open season on everyone using DeviantArt or Pinterest or whatever.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (3 children)

If you put something on the Internet you are giving up ownership of it. This is reality and companies taking advantage of this for AI have already proven this is true.

You are not going to be able to put the cat back in the bag. The whole concept of ownership over art, ideas, and our very culture was always ridiculous.

It is past time to do away with the joke of the legal framework we call IP law. It is merely a tool for monied interests to extract more obscene profit from our culture at this point.

There is only one way forward and that is sweeping privacy protections. No more data collection, no more targeted advertising, no more dark patterns. The problem is corporations are not going to let that happen without a fight.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 4 months ago (16 children)

I posted this in a thread, but Im gonna make it a parent comment for those who support this bill.

Consider youtube poop, Im serious. Every clip in them is sourced from preexisting audio and video, and mixed or distorted in a comedic format. You could make an AI to make youtube poops using those same clips and other "poops" as training data. What it outputs might be of lower quality (less funny), but in a technical sense it would be made in an identical fashion. And, to the chagrin of Disney, Nintendo, and Viacom, these are considered legally distinct entities; because I dont watch Frying Nemo in place of Finding Nemo. So why would it be any different when an AI makes it?

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 months ago (2 children)

LOL

So I take your photo, remove your watermark, put my own watermark on it, and then I sue you for removing my watermark.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago (3 children)

Don't be a fool. Of course, content corporations like Disney or the NYT are able to prove just when something was made.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Don't be a fool either.

Of course I am going to do this to you, not to Disney etc. because I am way better at creating proof than you are.

And of course Disney etc. are going to do this to you and me, because they are even better at creating proof than you and me are.

That's how foolish this law is.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 months ago (12 children)

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, before you stands 8-year-old Billy Smith. He stands accused of training on copyrighted material. We actually have live video of him looking and reading books from the library. He he trained on the contents of over 100 books this year.

We ask you to enforce the maximum penalty and send his parents to prison.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (3 children)

I get what you're saying, but there's something of a difference between someone studying something for months or years then writing about it, and a language model ran by one of the tech giants scraping media and immediately generating stuff from it, for commercial use, for the profit of the company that owns it.

It's kinda like how plagiarising somebody's book word for word never used to be a crime when it was a painstaking process of manually writing it back out for every copy. When the printing press came out, though? It allowed dodgy businesses to large-scale fuck over authors, and the law had to play catch-up.

I don't actually think this proposal is that well thought out, but I also don't think we should think of AI models or corporations as being people - they aren't people, and they shouldn't necessarily have the same rights and privileges that we do.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago (1 children)

No matter how much you'd like for it to be the case, proprietary algorithms owned by big corporations are not remotely comparable to children.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago

Anyone supporting this better be against right of repair and jail time for anyone discussing a sporting event without written permission

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

How would this even work when you sometimes can just remove the watermark by photoshoping?

[–] [email protected] 21 points 4 months ago (27 children)

In the same way that the law doesn't prevent you from murdering someone, but just makes it illegal to do so.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago

Doesn't this infringe on fair use? e.g. if i'm making a parody of something and I mimic the original even by using a portion of the original's text word for word.

Everyone is so obsessed with having a monopoly over everything, it's not what is best for 8 billion people.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago

Why do these acts always have such stupid acronyms

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