Electronic Frontier Foundation: The history of technology is rife with copyright panics. In the 1980s, major rightsholders ran to Congress and the courts, claiming that videotape recorders (VTR) were “to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.” Then, the Supreme Court declined to embrace the hype, noting that the VTR was capable of all kinds of non-infringing uses, like time-shifting and cautioning courts to avoid rewriting copyright law in response to new technologies. We believe that courts now should be similarly wary about the hype surrounding AI.
4 comments:
I primarily agree with this article, that it would be hasty for any major copyright law changes to go into effect, and that if they were to go into effect there would surely be unforeseen side effects that would harm human, non-ai, artists. I do understand why artists are worried though. Many artists had no say in their work being fed to LLM’s as data and now have no control over software which has the capacity to recreate their works in ways that humans cannot. Still, I worry that if we add additional copyright protection for artists, that it will discourage creativity in other artists, who will be afraid of being harmed for taking inspiration from another artist. Until we see substantive harm done by AI’s having access to art, I see no reason to take legal action based purely on speculation. If there was significant harm, the situation could change.
I do believe that there are some legal protections needed for artists in a world of AI, but this article does raise some good points. Completely changing current copyright laws could potentially harm artists in areas where AI isn’t even involved by distorting what can or cannot be protected by copyright. However, AI is more of a special case. While this article does mention historical examples of innovations raising concerns over the future of certain artforms, I believe that AI is more potent than the examples given. AI needs to use real art to create anything, so I believe the issue regarding legal protections should focus more on the input of AI rather than the output. Essentially, I believe that there should be protections that notify an artist when their work is scanned by an AI model, and that they should have a way to consent to their work being scanned or not. That way, artists who want to protect their work have the power to do so, removing the question if an AI model infringed on an artist’s work or not in the first place.
I don’t think I necessarily understand copyright law enough to understand exactly what this article is trying to argue, and I do agree that sweeping, all AI use is copyright infringement, policy could potentially be harmful for artists. However, I really do think that there needs to be some level of protection for artists whose art is used often unbeknownst to the original artist to train AI models. There are many accounts of specific artists getting their styles essentially stolen by AI models, which not only sucks because then people are getting bootlegged knockoffs of their art, but also hurts the artist because it creates a backwards effect where that artist's art is now accused of “looking like AI”. No part of me will ever really be convinced that generative AI counts as art, because it will always be missing that human element, and be harming artists whose work was used to train it. So maybe we do need some new copyright laws.
AI is really such a complicated debate, and every time I try to form a solid blanket opinion on it, I get more confused or contradicted. In my mind, plain and simple, I think that generative AI is bad. I think that it uses too much water and takes away the beauty of the human brain. But on the other hand, this article does make some very interesting points regarding similar events in history. If we were this against cameras then photography as an art, photojournalism, and physical memories simply would not exist. So maybe we as a society are looking at AI from the wrong lens. Maybe it is a gateway into a new world of creativity spurred on by artists and humans alike. But we really won't know until it happens, and I guess, we need to let it happen? Either way, still conflicted, I still think it uses too much water to do any good in the world.
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