<
https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/13/spooky-action-at-a-close-up/#invisible-hand>
'When it comes to AI art (or "art"), it's hard to find a nuanced position that
respects creative workers' labor rights, free expression, copyright law's vital
exceptions and limitations, and aesthetics.
I am, on balance, opposed to AI art, but there are some important caveats to
that position. For starters, I think it's unequivocally wrong – as a matter of
law – to say that scraping works and training a model with them infringes
copyright. This isn't a moral position (I'll get to that in a second), but
rather a technical one.
Break down the steps of training a model and it quickly becomes apparent why
it's technically wrong to call this a copyright infringement. First, the act of
making transient copies of works – even billions of works – is unequivocally
fair use. Unless you think search engines and the Internet Archive shouldn't
exist, then you should support scraping at scale:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/
And unless you think that Facebook should be allowed to use the law to block
projects like Ad Observer, which gathers samples of paid political
disinformation, then you should support scraping at scale,
even when the site
being scraped objects (at least sometimes):
<
https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/06/get-you-coming-and-going/#potemkin-research-program>
After making transient copies of lots of works, the next step in AI training is
to subject them to mathematical analysis. Again, this isn't a copyright
violation.'
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
