Just a guy jumping from a hot mess into more prosperous waters.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • That’s fine, but not the primary issue.

    At some point these companies will need to get licenses for any copyrighted work that was part of the training data, or start over with public domain works only. The art may be data, but that data has legal owners whose rights grant control over it’s use.

    Another way to think about is proprietary code. You can see it and learn from it at your leisure. But to use it commercially requires a license, one that clearly defines what can and cannot be done with it, as well as fair compensation.


  • The short version is that it’s a licensing issue. All art is free to view, but the moment you try to integrate it into a commercial product/service you’ll owe someone money unless the artist is given fair compensation in some other form.

    For example, artists agree to provide a usage license to popular art sites to host and display their works. That license does not transfer to the guy/company scraping portfolios to fuel their AI. Unfortunately, as we can see from the article, AI may be able to generate but it still lacks imagination and inspiration; traits fundamental to creating truly derivative works. When money exchanges hands that denies the artist compensation because the work was never licensed and they are excluded from their portion of the sale.

    Another example: I am a photographer uploading my images to a stock image site. As part of ToS I agree to provide a license to host, display, and relicense to buyers on my behalf. The stock site now offers an AI that create new images based on its portfolio. The catch is that all attributed works result in a monetary payment to the artists. When buyers license AI generated works based on my images I get a percentage of the sale. The stock site is legally compliant because it has a license to use my work, and I receive fair compensation when the images are used. The cycle is complete.

    It gets trickier in practice, but licensing and compensation is the crux of the matter.









  • I feel that this can be addressed at application step. Any date of birth proven to be under 18 cannot apply without an in person interview. This protects minors from taking on debt without fully understanding the implications, and puts responsibility on the lender for providing credit to a minor. If credit is provided and defaults the debt should be the lender’s problem for taking such a huge risk.

    Alternatively, the same premise with the exception that an adult is required as a cosigner. If the account defaults the burden is shifted to the adult as they have the cognizance to understand and take responsibility.

    I wouldn’t outright ban giving accounts to minors. My parents opened a savings account in my name and kept it in good standing. This gave me a big credit boost that my peers never had. But I realize I am an exception, and the problem others face is very real.



  • It is pretty idiotic imo that the music industry can ban people from showing song lyrics. Iirc you have to get a license to list song lyrics since they’re technically a copyrighted work.

    Here’s the thing, if its copyright-able you can get a license for it. Amazon already has licenses to sell and stream music, that part of the usage agreement was already negotiated. A simple analogy would be you want to buy three games from a store, you pay for two but leave with three. Obviously the store is not happy with you. You’ve shown you’re legally compliant with two games, yet took the third without paying.

    But there are some interesting caveats in the article:

    The lawsuit, which is the first from a music publisher against an AI company over the use of lyrics, was filed in the wake of the Authors Guild — representing a host of prominent fiction authors including George R.R. Martin, Jonathan Franzen and John Grisham — suing OpenAI last month.

    This makes sense since lyrics aren’t all that different from poetry, and whole albums could be considered a collection of short works. So loosening the copyright protections may give AI companies more data to work with, but it would end up hurting authors (lyricists, screen writers, novelists) and related fields. A real world fallout would be SAG-AFTRA strikers losing royalties and bargaining power, while empowering and enriching the big studios’ own AI models.

    I wanted to see if Anthropic, the company being sued, has the money on hand to pay for licenses, to square up legally if you will. Well, doesn’t look like Anthropic is hurting for cash as of 3rd quarter 2023.

    Amazon said on Monday that it’s investing up to $4 billion into the artificial intelligence company Anthropic in exchange for partial ownership and Anthropic’s greater use of Amazon Web Services (AWS), the e-commerce giant’s cloud computing platform.

    Even if the licenses were 10 million in total, that would leave 3,990,000,000 on hand; or .0025% of what Amazon offered. I don’t see how they’d walk away without settling for the licensing fees and legal expenses. They’re financially secure and partially owned by a company that is legally compliant with its own handling of intellectual property.