It's no moral stretch to say that if society pays tax to provide police and courts to enforce intellectual property rights for pharmaceuticals to encourage production of pharmaceuticals (note: not because of some "moral right" of a chemist), and you the pharma co don't hold up your end of the bargain (producing the pharmaceuticals), then we as a society need not hold up ours (enforcing the limited rights we granted you with our courts and police).
That seems like a straightforward deal. You provide us benefits, we provide you benefits. A one sided deal like you propose (we protect "your" medicine and yet get none ourselves) is the real moral stretch.
True (to some extent, there's always the other side), but now there's no longer a shortage. The drugs are there in the pharmacies. That's why compounding is outlawed.
The same goes for anything that provides value right? If you make some useful software, by that logic I should be allowed to copy it and use it in whatever way I see fit (including commercially), no matter what license you used?
If I refuse to make it available (commercially or otherwise)? Absolutely. Copyright exists to incentivize production and distribution.
I can see it argued that, being less critical than medicine, perhaps a book or software could be "out of print" for longer than medicine being out of production before the copyright protection ceases, but ultimately the only reason we have copyright to begin with is too encourage people to create and make available.
So yes, by all means. Make orphaned and out of production works publicly available.
You mean - on a permanent basis? Everyone knows that poor availability of GLP-1 medicines in the past were because of difficulties scaling production to match demand that unexpectedly proved insane. No one was ever intentionally withholding them. It was a temporary problem and it is now solved.
I do think medicine is a special category because people need it, whereas if there is a 36 month gap between a novel's first printing and second, I (being the radical copyright reform advocate I consider myself) wouldn't think we need an exception to allow other publishers to publish it during that window, as with medicine.
I do think that at some point that window is long enough that the author and publisher lose any logical justification for keeping something unavailable while the rest of us subsidize their ability (via courts, laws, and police) to do so. After all, if we're paying for that stuff, what are we getting in return?
Maybe we should look at it differently. If there was no patenting, only way to create drugs will be know-how: just keep contents secret and there will be no copy-catting. But that's not allowed: they can't sell drugs without telling the public what's in them, and assuring that the content and the effects of it have been thoroughly tested.
Citizen science, also known as science, has no incentive to falsify results to advance their career since they're already happily employed in an unrelated field.
People cheat, even in single games. If there is an online game to find birds IRL, there is an achievement to find a dodo, someone will find it.
I've also see a lot of dubious or even wrong results in preprints and journal articles, so the only conclusion is that there are morons and liars everywhere. Trust but verify.
Sad but true. For instance, there are subprofessional tiers for many sports like cycling. They generally don't have drug testing because of cost and the presumption that no one would cheat for a mere hobby. But occasionally people get caught because of mistakes.
I have a finite amount of time on earth, I want to see the story in games but i no longer have the patience to learn every mechanic in every game. For idle games, speed up time. For survivors-likes I might hack up the meta currency a bit to get the game loop to plane out earlier (gold in vampire survivors, e.g.), for FPS unlimited ammo is usually enough. I've never cheated in an online game, going all the way back to warcraft and StarCraft on dialup. Never cheated at cards, either.
My point is, I am an ethical and moral person and I take umbrage with the link to other forms of cheating.
I have "finished" a lot of games, though. If I actually want the challenge I get the game on a console.
I as a child, a teen, and a young adult thought I hated math, I got bad grades and it bored me. I dropped out of school. I later went to college and took remedial algebra twice.
Math in school was purposeless and rigid, a rote procedure to be followed by command because that's what kids have to do.
Now, I have grown older, and my curiosity drove me to learn because I wanted to make things, machines and software and probabilistic strategies. Things that necessitate math. If you can't rotate a vector, your guy walks faster diagonally. If you can't think mathematically and you want to lift a 2 jointed robot arm that weighs several tons, you're going to tip it over, and possibly die in the process. You can do it without trig but you can't do it without thinking about math.
Once I found purpose, I began to appreciate the beauty of the more elegant solutions. I kind of fell in love with math as an adult. Now I watch numberphile with my kids and make complicated machinery and software at work.
I think a lot more people love math than realize it, because they're conflating math itself and what school calls math, which is worksheets and demands, not beauty and creation.
With my kid in elementary school, I can see how math instruction is generally terrible: teachers rarely have any enthusiasm for teaching it. I only had one great math teacher (combining enthusiasm, skill and hard work) and I've been through special math programs (in high school and uni).
Again, it is a question of incentives: someone with enthusiasm for math would likely go with a higher paying job requiring higher level math.
Still, despite the crappy teachers, I was better than most to persevere at it until high school where I had the great teacher.
But this does not scale and we are losing kids to bad teachers: how can we fix this?
Ghibli art is famous because ghibli art means ghibli movies. It is more beautiful in motion than still, the beauty is in part due to the emotion evoked by the story.
There were a million Doom clones, none of which were as good as Doom. The same will be true of AI art copycats.
Yes they used to work at ghibli, but so too did john romero work at id, and yet daikatana was not a quake-killer.
This doesn't devalue ghibli at all, I think
(In fact, I think AI will always have the fundamental problem that most people have no taste or sense or introspection, they don't know why good things are good, and can't see that crap things are crap, so they are predestined to only be able to produce garbage. Nod to Ted Sturgeon.)
It is not "competition" and "copying", it is the fact that Ghibli almost closed for good several times, so some employees created their own studio.
>On August 3, 2014, Toshio Suzuki announced that Studio Ghibli would take a "brief pause" to re-evaluate and restructure in the wake of Miyazaki's retirement. He stated some concerns about where the company would go in the future. This led to speculation that Studio Ghibli will never produce another feature film again. On November 7, 2014, Miyazaki stated, "That was not my intention, though. All I did was announce that I would be retiring and not making any more features."[40] Lead producer Yoshiaki Nishimura among several other staffers from Ghibli, such as director Hiromasa Yonebayashi, left to found Studio Ponoc in April 2015, working on the film Mary and the Witch's Flower.
> There were a million Doom clones, none of which were as good as Doom.
Sorry to take this on a tangent, but the problem with Doom clones isn't that they aren't as good as Doom, it is that Doom already exists and is known to the audience. If you've had your mind blown by Doom, playing a 10% better version of Doom isn't going to blow your mind again, it is going to merely be a fun experience. Many people won't even bother to try that 10% better Doom clone, since all they'll see is a clone of something they already tried.
To add, cloning is one thing, but a lot of games - including id's own games - iterated on the formula, leading to the genre of first-person shooters like Quake, Unreal, Half-Life, Medal of Honor, Halo, Bioshock, etc.
That is, clones rarely work, but evolutions do. Stardew Valley on the surface can be considered a Harvest Moon clone, but it iterated on the formula, leading to a lot of attempts at casual farm games from many different competitors. Minecraft was an Infiniminer clone (or inspired by?) and iterated on the idea. Fortnite was a PUBG clone which was a DayZ clone.
The wrongdoing here isn't in devaluing somebody's work, it is about enriching oneself by openly repurposing their IP without compensation and dodging any kind of repercussions whatsoever. It was bad when Chinese companies did it, OpenAI using legal sleight of hand to indemnify their actions isn't any less galling.
I personally think the line should be mostly output based. You should be able to train on any copyrighted work by having a single reader license (e.x. purchasing a book or e-book) for that work and no other special licenses. You shouldn't be able to download pirated works for training but you shouldn't need special licenses to train instead of read.
But if your model produces outputs that too closely match their inputs and a company can show it that is a copyright violation and you can be sued for it.
OpenAI definitely is, as apparently image generation is, for the time being, not available in the free tier, so the only way to keep up with the fad is to upgrade.
OpenAI had a publicity cycle around how tuned their image generator is for this particular style in the same week that google released a major rev for Gemini. That kind of social media dominance against a major competitor is incredibly valuable.
Utter bullshit. Or more politely - wrong take. OpenAI embeds itself further in public consciousness, arguably attracting more users therefore profiting.
Enabling mass-production of Ghibli style without permission or monetary compensation is theft.
Styles are notoriously hard to copy. It's not like Ghibli style being copied is anything new. For example, Studio Ponoc where former Ghibli employees did the copying. As long as they aren't literally generating copyrighted works styles can't be owned.
Would the world be better off if Picasso's heirs owned Cubism and any artist wanting to produce works in that style had to buy a license?
Studio Ponoc had Miyazaki's blessing. I doubt the same can be said for OpenAI. OpenAI doing this without even asking might not be illegal, but it comes across like an act of incredible disrespect for the very creators that these memes are masquerading as an homage to.
“When we opened the new studio, Studio Ponoc, I went to report this to Mr. Miyazaki,” he went on, “and he gave his blessing and said, ‘You really need to have the conviction to go create a new film studio and the conviction to show children worthwhile films. And every film you make, you’ll have to realize that has to be a film that is worthy to show to children’.[1]
Theft of what? There was no market for "memes in ghibli style commissioned by the original studio" which would probably cost hundreds if not thousands if hand-drawn. Nobody was going to pay for that. When it became freely available and instantly reproducible, that's the new market.
It's not truly free though, it's a loss leader for the near-trillion dollar AI industry. If we're asking where the stolen value ends up, I think you can answer "in the NVIDIA share price".
It doesn't seem hard to imagine 2-5 years from now when "memes in Ghibli style" turns into "pay us 25 cents and we'll send you a 30 minute cartoon in Ghibli style".
Unless you live in some anarcho-capitalist society, it is theft, in very simple terms. And I wonder, just where are all those highly successful libertarian societies? The ones who don't need to enforce copyright and where every member of society is creating his own creative art content, movies, songs, games etc. Oh, they have all failed miserably to scammers? Poor people, how I pity them (not).
I see the neo-Silicon Valley spirit of "regulatory arbitrage as a service" is unwavering.
It's promotion for OpenAI's product, without any of the appropriate licensing. 3D printing companies don't provide Lego schematics to sell their products. There's also the small matter of their ex-employee turned copyright whistleblower, who ended up dead:
Your argument is an example of survivor bias. Just because one very wealthy corporation wasn't affected (too much) when their intellectual property was stolen, doesn't mean that smaller and less wealthy or less important companies/people aren't affected by IP theft by LLM porch pirates.
And even in Ghibly studio case it's not quite clear, if they won't be affected long term.
Don Bluth worked at Disney, and poached some of the animators to make his own independent studio, and produced quite a few Disney-like feature films that stood pretty well on their own.
The people who founded Ponoc seemed to have creative differences with Miyazaki. They wanted to make a movie [1] that they felt Ghibli won't greenlight [2] - but there seems to have been no deep seated animosity or desire to rip-off. Incidentally I just borrowed this movie from the local library a few hour ago because the cover art reminded me of Ghibli but I noticed it wasn't a Ghibli production. Some searching online led me to the cited article.
This is looking for silver lining: so, someone copied Ghibli style, which is plagiarism, which is bad, but it turns out that by plagiarizing the offender also made the original work more famous and more valuable in some ways... OK. But plagiarizing is still bad. Even if it had some positive effects.
Gee, whatever would Ghibli have done without this publicity boost.
It’s always the already-popular artist’s identity giving clout to the model, not the other way around.
And if the artist’s style is not well known, their identity is obfuscated because the model/LORA/“finetune”-peddler can get away with it. And they’re all peddlers, if it’s not OpenAI it’s grifters with Patreons to fund their “hard work” of tagging people’s work and throwing it at rental GPU compute.
> There were a million Doom clones, none of which were as good as Doom
Sure, but there were some "Doomlikes" I would still rate as better than doom; like Build Engine games Duke Nukem and Blood/Blood 2 and other IdTech based games like Hexen.
> There were a million Doom clones, none of which were as good as Doom. The same will be true of AI art copycats.
True, but this was also during a time when it was incredibly hard to make a video game. It wasn't like anyone could spin up a Doom clone in 2 minutes. Competition vs. commoditization at massive scale are different things.
I'd argue many of the clones were better but not enough better. Doom was the first to do X and once you already played a game that did X the next game needed to do 2X not 1.2X.
Yeah, the concept of a commercial / off the shelf game engine wasn't that much of a thing until Doom, but with Doom and especially its successors Quake and Unreal from Epic it did. Quake's engine spawned Half-Life's, Unreal became one of the biggest game engines anywhere.
The question is how much that first-mover advantage still means. I guess with video games and movies (Doom and Ghibli), there's a massive difference between telling ChatGPT to make your selfie look like Ghibli.
But for illustrators and graphic artists? What's now keeping me from downloading an illustrator's portfolio and telling ChatGPT to make me something in that style, but for my company?
Is there still value in that illustrator pioneering her unique style? It used to be a client magnet, now a good portfolio might take your potential clients away.
I guess the other side of this is that the more a style/idea/media spreads, the more comesw back to the original creator, but I'm doubtful this is true in AI.
Imagine what classical realists artist though about early photography and how it shaped in history. Painters abandon achievement for replicate reality (all kind of *ism come later) or use new technology (photography) to improve creative process (Mucha).
AI is just another tool for artist. AI by itself never generate "art". It cannot by definition.
If every user of free software donated for all the free software they use, people's monthly donation bill for their "free" software would be hundreds of dollars or more.
so what? that's not a reason to not donate at all. It's not an "all or nothing" proposition. donating a little is still better than donating nothing.
(and what's more, I disagree with your premise. I think I'd everyone donated, the cost would be very spread out and it would be shockingly affordable, especially relative to the benefits we get)
It seems like we could get some good estimates based on non-census data.
For example cellular data or ad data, rf emissions, CO2 or other chemical emissions, satellite photography of human activity (mowing, cropping, logging, building, etc), food or fuel shipments, etc.
A census may miss people, but the rest of the data wouldn't.
> I am not sure why most people think autopilot is hands of the wheel without looking.
Well, because they named it autopilot.
Autopilot means it pilots... automatically. Automatic pilot. Not Manual Pilot, not with intervention, automatically.
They could have named it "driver assist", "partial-pilot", "advanced cruise control", "automatic lanekeeping" or anything else, but they named it Autopilot. That's Tesla's fault.
Why is it named like this on ships or planes then? You most certainly need to intervene, when other vehicles are approaching. Just because this happens less in those environments, the name autopilot certainly fits.
If you go back in history, Tesla was one of the first manufacturers, to provide something more than just a lane assist. It is fair in my opinion to search for a different name, that distinguishes yourself from the competition.
For the same reason ships have starboard and port, and cars have driver's side and passenger's side. The terminology is different, the surrounding culture is different, and ignoring that will result in tragedy.
That's not how words work. They chose that word because it's evocative of exactly what most people think while being just vague enough to give them regulatory deniability.
A few years ago, I sat in an Italian airplane with the cockpit door open. The pilot and copilot spent most of the trip speaking to each other, using their hands to emphasize their words (if you've ever seen two Italians arguing passionately, you'll see what I mean).
As far as I could tell, they only had their hands on the instruments during take off and landing.
Commercial pilots have that point hammered into their heads. Tesla did everything in their power to convince buyers that "driver is there only for legal purposes" and they can chill instead of driving.
We could do it. We could fundraise to cast a bronze of him and put it anywhere we like. It wouldn't take that many people or that much time, in the grand scheme of things.
Actually, the world might be a nicer place with more statues and less goofy abstract modernist art in public for even more money than bronzes.
I graduated from high school and even got a bachelor's degree. I've read several books written before last year, and have talked to dozens of people. I've never heard or seen the word gaol. And if I had, I'd probably assume it was "goal" misspelled. I make no assertions of being particularly smart or literate, but only typical.
Knowing the word exists is a different thing than using it in daily speech. I, and I'm sure most people, would be very surprised to hear there are populations of the USA where "gaol" is used regularly.
That seems like a straightforward deal. You provide us benefits, we provide you benefits. A one sided deal like you propose (we protect "your" medicine and yet get none ourselves) is the real moral stretch.
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