Cory Doctorow
@markuswerle @timoreilly @internetarchive @AuthorsAlliance
Neither of these apply. The first third of my essay explains in detail why model training isn't infringing, so I won't rehearse that here.
If it's not infringing, then it doesn't require a license to undertake.
If a user need not license a work to make some use of it, they need not abide by license terms, either.
You're having a labor issue, and you're trying to solve it with copyright, and it won't work well or at all.
Markus Werle
@pluralistic @timoreilly @internetarchive @AuthorsAlliance So your opinion is that GPL code should be allowed to be used for training models that are used in commercial products? Can you elaborate on this from 2 perspectives?
1. Current legal situation. Do you think the legal setting is clear and covered by fair use? Note that my complete code is scraped.
2. Possible future legal situation that pursues the idea that you must not make money with derivatives of my work
Cory Doctorow
@markuswerle @timoreilly @internetarchive @AuthorsAlliance
No, copyleft licenses don't trump fair use,, de minimis, and other limitations and exceptions.
CC, GPL, etc are licenses for things you need permission to do.
Fair use are things you don't need permission to do, so you don't need to license those uses, so you aren't bound by sharealike or other clauses.
Markus Werle
@pluralistic @timoreilly @internetarchive @AuthorsAlliance This also extends to the Creative Commons siblings of GPL/LGPL. The issue I see here is that those large corporations do not need to win the court case. It is sufficient they have enough money to keep the thing long enough in court to have me financially exhausted. This is what happened to patents. They are useless for a startup by now.
Markus Werle
@pluralistic @timoreilly @internetarchive @AuthorsAlliance Many thanks for this elaborate discussion which is painful to grok in its consequences. Interestingly the article only deals with copy**right**. The hotter case for me is copy**left**. I choose #GPL or #LGPL because I want derivative work to maintain the same conditions. So despite recent rulings about copyright failure, how scrapers use my copylefted code does not explicitly transcend the required copyleft into the derivative work.
Cory Doctorow
Tomorrow (May 14), I'm on a livecast about AI and enshittification with @timoreilly:
Wednesday (May 15), I'm in North Hollywood for a screening of Stephanie Kelton's *Finding the Money*:
https://www.laemmle.com/film/finding-money?date=2024-05-15
Friday (May 17), I'm in San Francisco at the @internetarchive to keynote the tenth anniversary of the @AuthorsAlliance:
eof/
Cory Doctorow
They don't care if it's slop - they just care about their bottom line. A studio executive who cancels a widely anticipated film prior to its release to get a tax-credit isn't thinking about artistic integrity. They care about one thing: money. The fact that AI works can be freely copied, sold or given away may not mean much to a creative worker who actually makes their own art, but I assure you, it's the *only* thing that matters to our bosses.
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Cory Doctorow
Rather, they are calculating that they have so much market power that they can sell whatever slop the AI makes, and pay less for the AI license than they would make for a human artist's work. As is the case in every industry, AI can't do an artist's job, but an AI salesman can convince an artist's boss to fire the creative worker and replace them with AI:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain
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Cory Doctorow
But for any company contemplating selling an AI-generated work, the fact that it is born in the public domain presents a substantial hurdle, because anyone else is free to take that work and sell it or give it away.
Whether or not AI "art" will ever be good art isn't what our bosses are thinking about when they pay for AI licenses.
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Cory Doctorow
Then there's copyright's wildest wild card: The US Copyright Office has repeatedly stated that works made by AIs aren't eligible for copyright, which is the exclusive purview of works of human authorship. This has been affirmed by courts:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/20/everything-made-by-an-ai-is-in-the-public-domain/
Neither AI companies nor entertainment companies will pay creative workers if they don't have to.
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Cory Doctorow
And if we *do* want to tinker with copyright to change the way training works, let's look at *collective* licensing, which can't be bargained away, rather than individual rights that can be confiscated at the entrance to our publisher, label or studio's offices. These collective licenses have been a *huge* success in protecting creative workers:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/26/united-we-stand/
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Cory Doctorow
But *all* workers benefit from expanded labor protection. Rather than going to Congress alongside our bosses from the studios and labels and publishers to demand more copyright, we could go to Congress alongside every kind of worker, from fast-food cashiers to publishing assistants to truck drivers to demand the right to sectoral bargaining. That's a hell of a coalition.
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Cory Doctorow
That's illegal in nearly every other kind of labor market. But if we're willing to entertain the possibility of getting a new copyright law passed (that won't make artists better off), why not the possibility of passing a new *labor* law (that will)? Sure, our bosses won't lobby alongside of us for more labor protection, the way they would for more copyright (think for a moment about what that says about who benefits from copyright versus labor law expansion).
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Cory Doctorow
Just because copyright won't fix the creative labor market, it doesn't follow that *nothing* will. If we're worried about labor issues, we can look to *labor law* to improve our conditions. That's what the Hollywood writers did, in their groundbreaking 2023 strike:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/01/how-the-writers-guild-sunk-ais-ship/
Now, the writers had an advantage: they are able to engage in "sectoral bargaining," where a union bargains with *all* the major employers at once.
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Cory Doctorow
As an artist, I'm against anything that stands in the way of making art. As an artistic worker, I'm committed to things that help workers get a fair share of the money their work creates, feed their families and pay their rent.
I think today's AI art is bad, and I think tomorrow's AI art will *probably* be bad, but even if you disagree (with either proposition), I hope you'll agree that we should be focused on making sure art is legal to make and that artists get paid for it.
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Cory Doctorow
Here's what I *do* know. Creating an individual bargainable copyright over training will *not* improve the material conditions of artists' lives - all it will do is change the relative shares of the value we create, shifting some of that value from tech companies that hate us and want us to starve to entertainment companies that hate us and want us to starve.
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Cory Doctorow
Even though painstakingly cutting out tiny elements from others' images can be a meditative and educational experience, I don't think that using tiny scissors or the lasso tool is what defines the "art" in collage. If you can automate some of this process, it could still be art.
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Cory Doctorow
Think of divination:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/31/divination/
Or Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies:
http://stoney.sb.org/eno/oblique.html
I love making my little collages for this blog, though I wouldn't call them important art. Nevertheless, piecing together bits of other peoples' work can make fantastic, important work of historical note:
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Cory Doctorow
The "invisible hand" shapes our lives more than any person. The invisible hand is *fucking eerie*. Capitalism is a system in which insubstantial non-things - corporations - appear to act with intention, often at odds with the intentions of the human beings carrying out those actions.
So will AI art ever be art? I don't know. There's a long tradition of using random or irrational or impersonal inputs as the starting point for human acts of artistic creativity.
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Cory Doctorow
For Fisher, eeriness is "when there is something present where there should be nothing, or is there is nothing present when there should be something." AI art produces the seeming of intention without intending anything. It appears to be an agent, but it has no agency. It's *eerie*.
Fisher talks about *capitalism* as eerie. Capital is "conjured out of nothing" but "exerts more influence than any allegedly substantial entity."
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Cory Doctorow
As Farrell writes, "LLM art sometimes seems to communicate a message, as art does, but it is unclear where that message comes from, or what it means. *If it has any meaning at all, it is a meaning that does not stem from organizing intention*" (emphasis mine).
Farrell cites Mark Fisher's *The Weird and the Eerie*, which defines "weird" in easy to understand terms ("that which does not belong") but really grapples with "eerie."
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