Technology

I don’t understand how an AI reading a bunch of books and rearranging some of those words into a new story, is different to a human author reading a bunch of books and rearranging those words into a new story.

Ok, let's say for now that these things are actually similar. Is a human legally allowed to "rearrange those words" in any way they want? Not really, because they can't copy stuff like characters or plot structure. Even if the copy is not verbatim, it has to avoid being "too similar". It's not always clear where the threshold is; that will be judged in court. But imagine if your were being sued for copyright infringement because of perceived similarities between your work and another creator's. You go to court and say "Well I torrented the plaintiff's work and studied it with the express intent to copy discernible patterns in it, then sell my work based on those patterns". As long as the similarities are found to be valid, you're most likely to lose. The fact that you've spent years campaigning how companies can save a lot of money by firing artists and hiring your pattern-replicating service instead probably wouldn't help your case either. Well, that's basically what an honest defense of AI against copyright infringement would be. So the question is, does AI actually produce output too similar to its training data? Well, this is an example of articles you can find on the topic...

So based on the above thoughts, do you feel like we hold AI generation to the same standard as we do human creators? It doesn't seem so to me.

But there's a lot of reasons why we should hold AIs to higher standards instead. Off the top of my head:

• AIs have been created exclusively to replicate patterns in existing works. This is not the only function people have. So we don't have to wonder whether similarities between AI inputs and outputs are coincidental. We don't have to worry about whether overbearing restrictions might inadvertently affect some other function.
• AIs have no feelings or needs. We don't have to worry about causing direct harm to them and about protecting their rights. Forbidding a person from reading a book just in case they copy elements from it is obviously problematic, but restricting AI's access to copyrighted work is not directly harmful in the same way.

I think the the main difference is one being a human author and this is how humans function. We can not unsee or unhear things but we can be compelled to not use that information if the law requires so company secrets/inadmissible evidence in jury duty/plagiarism laws that already exist. And the other being a machine that do not have agency or personhood that has this information being fed to it ( created by other people ) for the sole purpose of creating a closed system for a company so it's shareholders can make money. It's this open for me but not for thee approach is the main problem people have. You have this proprietary "open ai" that microsoft invested 25 or so billion in so they can scrape other peoples work and charge you money for variations of it. I don't mind abolishing ip or patent laws all together so everyone can use and improve chatgpt with whatever they have. If you yourself are hiding behind ip laws to protect your software and disrespecting other peoples copyright laws that's what people see problematic.

Yes, this is my exact issue with some framing of AI. Creative people love their influences to the point you can ask them and they will point to parts that they reference or nudged to an influence they partially credit to getting to that result. It's also extremely normal that when you make something new, you brainstorm and analyze any kind of material (copyrighted or not) you can find that gives the same feelings you desire to create. As is ironically said to give comfort to starting creatives that it's okay to be inspired by others: "Good artists copy, great artists steal."

And often people very anti AI don't see an issue with this, yet it is in essence the same as the AI does, which is to detach the work from the ideas it was built on, and then re-using those ideas. And just like anyone who has the ability to create has the ability to plagiarize or infringe, so does the AI. As human users of AI we must be the ones to ethically guide it away from that (Since it can't do that itself), just like you would not copy-paste your influences into a new human made work.

The for-profit large-scale media blender is the problem. When it's a human writing Harry Potter fan fiction, it's fine. When a company sells a tool for you to write thousands of trash "books" for profit, it's a problem.

ML algorithms aren't capable of producing anything new, they can only ever produce a mishmash of copies of existing works.

If you feed a generative model a bunch of physics research papers, it won't create a new valid physics research paper, just a mishmash of jargon from existing papers.