Aside from the legal question, however, there is also a moral or social question: is it ok to train a model on someone’s work without their permission? What if this means that they and others in their profession are no longer able to earn a living?
Every invention meant that someone lost a job. And although the classical reply is that new jobs were created, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the people who lost the old job had an advantage at the new job. So they still lost something, even if not everything. But their loss was outweighed by the gain of many others.
I don’t even think that an ideal society would compensate those people, because that would create perverse incentives—instead of avoiding the jobs that will soon be obsolete, people would hurry to learn them, to become eligible for the compensation.
Universal Basic Income seems okay, but notice that it still implies a huge status loss for the artists. And that is ok.
A more complicated question is what if the AI can in some sense only “remix” the existing art, so even the AI users would benefit from having as many learning samples as possible… but now it is no longer profitable to create those samples? Then, artists going out of business becomes everyone’s loss.
Perhaps free market will solve this. If there is no way to make the AI generate some X that you want, you can pay a human to create that X. That on one hand creates a demand for artists (although much fewer than now), and on the other hand creates more art the AI can learn from. “But what about poor people? They can’t simply buy their desired X!” Well, today they can’t either, so this is not making their situation worse. Possibly better, if some rich people wants the same X, and will pay for introducing it to the AI’s learning set.
(Or maybe the market solution will fail, because it simply requires too much training to become so good at art that someone would pay you, and unlike now, you won’t be able to make money when you’re just halfway there. In other words, becoming an artist will be an incredibly risky business, because you spend a decade or more of your life learning something that ultimately maybe someone will pay you for… or maybe no one will. Or would the market compensate by making good hand-made art insanely expensive?)
The permissions are only a temporary solution, anyway. Copyrights expire. People can donate their work to public domain. Even with 100% legal oversight, the set of freely available training art will keep growing. Then again, slowing down a chance can prevent social unrest. The old artists can keep making money for another decade or two, and the new ones will grow up knowing that artistic AIs exist.
Every invention meant that someone lost a job. And although the classical reply is that new jobs were created, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the people who lost the old job had an advantage at the new job. So they still lost something, even if not everything. But their loss was outweighed by the gain of many others.
I don’t even think that an ideal society would compensate those people, because that would create perverse incentives—instead of avoiding the jobs that will soon be obsolete, people would hurry to learn them, to become eligible for the compensation.
Universal Basic Income seems okay, but notice that it still implies a huge status loss for the artists. And that is ok.
A more complicated question is what if the AI can in some sense only “remix” the existing art, so even the AI users would benefit from having as many learning samples as possible… but now it is no longer profitable to create those samples? Then, artists going out of business becomes everyone’s loss.
Perhaps free market will solve this. If there is no way to make the AI generate some X that you want, you can pay a human to create that X. That on one hand creates a demand for artists (although much fewer than now), and on the other hand creates more art the AI can learn from. “But what about poor people? They can’t simply buy their desired X!” Well, today they can’t either, so this is not making their situation worse. Possibly better, if some rich people wants the same X, and will pay for introducing it to the AI’s learning set.
(Or maybe the market solution will fail, because it simply requires too much training to become so good at art that someone would pay you, and unlike now, you won’t be able to make money when you’re just halfway there. In other words, becoming an artist will be an incredibly risky business, because you spend a decade or more of your life learning something that ultimately maybe someone will pay you for… or maybe no one will. Or would the market compensate by making good hand-made art insanely expensive?)
The permissions are only a temporary solution, anyway. Copyrights expire. People can donate their work to public domain. Even with 100% legal oversight, the set of freely available training art will keep growing. Then again, slowing down a chance can prevent social unrest. The old artists can keep making money for another decade or two, and the new ones will grow up knowing that artistic AIs exist.