James Cameron on AI copyright: humans are models

Thing is, he’s right. We learn from all input and a great deal of it is copyrighted — every book or movie we’ve ever seen.<p>If I tell you something I learned from a copyrighted book, I am not doing something illegal.<p>If I produce a copy of someone else’s output and state it’s my own, I am. That’s plagiarism. And I think this is the best way to view AIs that create artworks “in the style of” etc — as plagiarism for output, not copyright violation for input.<p>I, and I am the author of several things including proprietary software (published, sold, even acquired!) and a novel I hope to publish soon, increasingly think copyright is an evil. I like getting income from what I make but I don’t believe in stopping people accessing what I create. Using it to restrict learning absolutely is an evil. And an AI uses it to learn.

James is on the board[1] of stability.ai, so not exactly an unbiased opinion.<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stability.ai&#x2F;board-of-directors" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stability.ai&#x2F;board-of-directors</a>

This whole AI is like humans thing is so exhausting. It&#x27;s obviously not the same thing. A human can&#x27;t ingest all of the library of Alexandria, and then generate dollars for their employer regurgitating those books.

Wait, are you folks just figuring out right now that meat AI existed before silicon AI?<p>Intellectual property (in the context of art, movies, books, games, etc) is so valuable because it stands on the input of how humans behave, which in turn shapes their output.<p>In other words, a movie script that people like and generates mimicry behavior is some sort of machine built using human parts. It has value because that mimicry or fan-related reaction is behavior that can be shaped (by a reboot series, a sequel, another work using similar tropes, a critic, a meme and so on).<p>That doesn&#x27;t mean we are all models. Fuck that. It means a lot of us are trapped by those systems (even if I don&#x27;t mimic culture, peer pressure puts me in a position where it seems I do).<p>The rights to a popular &quot;intellectual property&quot; is power. Silicon AI (in this context) stands on the web as an additional way to shape that collective behavior.<p>We&#x27;re in for a wild ride in the following decades.<p>We need to understand those mechanisms, be wary of them (soundtrack use, camera perspective influence on perception of meaning, script writing and editing, sequels, rewrites, movie critics, duality play, all of it). IT folk in particular need to be very aware of such things.

I think this issue with using these models is something he touches on. As big-hollywood-company-xyz you can ask the writer what were the influences of the work and determine if anything crosses a legal line. You can have a level of trust in what the writer says since their reputation&#x2F;career is on the line.<p>With the AI model, it can regurgitate something from the internet word for word and it&#x27;s on you to check it.<p>There&#x27;s a lot of work being done to make AI more transparent but it seems like that has a way to go.<p>Or you realise that the models are all trained on pirated data anyways and no one cared so if you are a big enough company you can just do whatever you want.

In other words, &quot;big companies should have a spcial boy copyright exception&quot;. I expect both the slopification of everything and enforcement of copyright against individuals to continue.

I hate this comparison because it ignores the obvious important difference: humans aren’t owned by somebody. When models aren’t used commercially, they should be compared to people for copyright purposes. Its when their outputs are sold for profit that copyright should be applied to the seller of the outputs, eg openai.