AIs do not copy — there is no copyright infringement
A number of writers and artists are claiming AIs, such as ChatGPT or Sora are infringing copyright.
They don’t understand copyright. The clue is in the name. The law is there to prevent copying, verbatim, of a work. That is to prevent the reproduction of a complete work.
Some writers make their text public so it can be read by anyone. The people who read it can create a summary of what they just read. They would be able to answer questions on the text. They may even be able to quote small parts of it. But no human would be able to read it and then, from memory, reproduce the whole thing.
AIs do the exact same thing. They read, they can then summarise, maybe quote small parts, answer questions about it. They cannot reproduce or copy the whole work any more than humans can. Reading articles on the web is not copyright infringement. Viewing images, or YouTube videos is not a copyright infringement.
If you understand how AI neural networks work, then you would know they read, they remember the essence of the article, they form memories of the key points in their neural network (the weights in the neural network latent space) in exactly the same way you do. We know it’s the same because artificial neural networks are based on biological neural networks that make up your brain.
And just as a human can, they can copy your style. Artists can copy the style of others and nearly always do —the Cubism movement for example. Or Pointillism. They can do this because they see many works in this style and can create new works in that style. This is not only legal, it’s the basis for all creative work.
Some claim AIs can’t create something new, or original — that is one of the wildest, most ridiculous claims I’ve ever seen. Are they living in a cave — have you not interacted and had conversations with AI? Ask it to create something, based on a few ideas, and it creates something amazing — usually far better than most humans can. Have you seen the art AIs can now create? It is astounding, original, creative, and better than 99% of artists can create. If humans had created works of art like this (some very talented artists can) they are lauded as being very ‘creative’.
If I had engaged an artist to create an image about the copyright debate and AIs, and they created that work you see at the top of this page — I would be amazed, impressed and very happy to pay for it. As it is, I paid nothing, it took 30 seconds to create. But to say it’s not creative is ridiculous. I didn’t suggest the courtroom idea — it created that along with the robots heads, and the copyright symbol etc. Had a human created that, most people would call that a very creative work to a very simple brief.
Some even claim AIs are ‘Violating the basic rules of capitalism’ because they are not compensating artists whose work they are ‘inspired’ by. Seriously? They appear not to have an understanding of how AIs work, but also not to have an understanding of capitalism or the creative process.
Do you think that all the artists that copied Picasso’s cubist style — owe money to Picasso because they copied his style? That would be ridiculous as well as utterly stifling to the creative process. Even though Picasso’s cubist style was copied by hundreds, thousands of artists, Picasso said he copied the style from African art he saw when travelling.
Every creative work is based on (inspired from) the works of others.
The reality is those that make claims like this are just luddites. A new machine has been invented that will affect their work. A new loom is about to make a lot of jobs redundant. They just want to smash it. But just as the loom was a huge advance for humanity, so AI is an advance and will be a huge benefit for humanity.
Looms enabled unskilled labour to do the work of skilled artisans. Some artisans got put out of a job — but humanity as a whole benefited enormously — millions of people could now afford clothing and cloth. That’s capitalism.
Luddites are too small minded and concerned about their job to accept this.
