Why the “AI Is Stealing” Argument is Irrelevant

[@kit888]

It's so popular, it's almost legal. - William Gibson, Burning Chrome

[@Canuckiwi]

So I’m in a KDP community on Reddit and they are 100% convinced about the AI image creators like ideogram is stealing and anyone that uses any type of AI to make a book cover is stealing. These services are not stealing peoples photos and the styles that they are using for covers aren’t copyrighted so I think their thinking is completely flawed yet if I say I’m using it I’m downvoted to oblivion

[@housedelarouxmotion]

My man, your mistake was using Reddit You can totally blaze your own path!

[@AngHemenway]

I was talking to my husband about this. I think we fear what we don't understand and our brains naturally go to the worst case first. I told him all writers learn from each other's work, so how is this really that different? Writer's literally write books about their writing process to teach other writers how to do it and we can all search any of this online so the whole debate just seems useless to me.

[@AkibanaZero]

This has been my argument as well. Writers and artists have been copying from each other for centuries. AI just speeds up that process. The main difference is because of the speed and accessibility of these tools, people copying each other has grown in scale ergo making it all more visible. It is all perception. That being said, there is one issue that is not unique to AI but because of AI it will become more and more exasperated: blatant copycating. It is one thing for me to look at a piece of prose or a style of art and make use of it within the context of my own work. It is an entirely other thing to recreate another person's work with barely any of my own input.

[@AngHemenway]

@@AkibanaZero Oh for sure. I've tried AI and it's not there yet, in my opinion. I haven't been a fan of anything it's written outright. It is helpful when brainstorming but I use it mainly for help when I need to come up with some alternate words or if I am researching something, as far as writing goes. I use AI for my day job and have been using it for coding too.

[@phu320]

did you use voice to text? *writers

[@LesliePajuelo]

@@AngHemenway writers who read others work have paid for it. Either a school, library, ads on a website. The original work was paid . The AI company didn't even pay in attention once bc ad networks don't count bots reading a site as an impression. The problem isn't the remixing (when it doesn't straight up reiterate an exact article) the problem or difference is that when a human read it, someone was paid for it

[@roo2592]

Google made a licensing deal with Reddit for their AI overview in Google Search btw. That's why it was telling people to jump off a bridge, the AI had no way to distinguish an actual fact from someone making a dark joke. Reddit is fine for somethings, but using it as training data for a search overview was completely stupid on Google's part.

[@TheNerdyNovelist]

They fixed that

[@roo2592]

@@TheNerdyNovelist They did, but it’s bizarre they even thought it was a good idea to begin with.

[@VincentMuambiAuthor]

I've utilized AI tools like ChatGPT and Sudowrite to refine my original writings after completing my first draft. As an author dedicated to producing a polished and compelling book, I’ve found these AI tools to be invaluable resources. They have significantly enhanced the quality and structure of my chapters, elevating my work to a level I might not have achieved alone. The discourse surrounding the use of AI in writing can be quite polarized; opinions vary widely depending on whom you ask. Nevertheless, it’s undeniable that the traditional publishing model is evolving and, in some ways, declining. As a self-published author, I have embraced this change and am excited to announce that starting this fall, I will publish all my works under my own self-titled publishing company.

[@monsterclass]

Iv been stealing from the dictionary for decades

[@LesliePajuelo]

@@monsterclass the makers of the dictionary were paid. Either you bought it, school bought it, you watched display ads on their website. The ppl who made the dictionary were paid, that's the point

[@stephenkotowych8105]

Great video, just one small point of disagreement about the compensation model for training data: I worked in traditional publishing for 15 years, including for Oxford University Press for 10yrs as an acquiring editor. Included in every trad publishing contract is a clause where the author licenses to the publisher "all publication rights in all formats currently existing or yet to be invented." This clause gives publishers the right to license for AI training right now. And none of these contracts say anything about consulting or even informing the authors about any licensing deal of any kind. They just lay out how income from such deals will be split between publisher and author. And publishers aren't going to be willing to carve out exceptions, because the value in the corpus you could train an AI on is its size and diversity. Contracts at traditional publishers get more rights grabby over time, not less (a big reason i left the industry). Plus it would be a headache to manage the data of what's in and what's out of the licensing, and what liability do you expose yourself to if/when someone's work who opted out accidentally gets included in the training corpus? Too fraught. From now on, you'll see traditional publishing contracts that specify they can license for AI training, and if you don't like it that's fine...but don’t expect to get published by the Big 5 or their imprints. Please keep these videos coming! They're really helpful as we grapple with this brave new world

[@copester1204]

Thanks for continuing to put out videos like this. Ever since NaNoWriMo came out in support of AI, the anti-AI vitriol has exploded. Many of their arguments are based on ignorance of LLMs and/or the current capabilities of the latest models. My perception is there is a significant overlap between the anti-AI and anti-self-publishing crowds because i see them share the same arguments that boil down to 'doing anything yourself is wrong because it hurts other peoples' jobs' that only debases authors' value and need to be profitable too.

[@LesliePajuelo]

@@copester1204 I think the nanowrimo was from ppl who didn't realize it was a business. They changed from AI ok for editing, to being sponsored by a generative AI writing tool, and advertising that tool Ppl didn't think of nanowrimo as a business

[@phu320]

repost from other reply, but: regarding model collapse and synthetic data, please read Cass Sunstien and the ideas of crippled epistemologies and incestuous amplification. then ask, how could such an Ivory (soap) Tower academic be so far removed from the norms of political correctness, that he thought that these figures of speech were appropriate? as a crippled victim of incest, I take very specific and particular forms of umbrage at the very notion that sunstein could even possibly be like my very abled Daddy!!!!!!! #OtherTaxes

[@phu320]

ents Thank you for commenting! Post another comment Anonymous · within the last minute regarding model collapse and synthetic data, please read Cass Sunstien and the ideas of crippled epistemologies and incestuous amplification. then ask, how could such an Ivory (soap) Tower academic be so far removed from the norms of political correctness, that he thought that these figures of speech were appropriate? as a crippled victim of incest, I take very specific and particular forms of umbrage at the very notion that sunstein could even possibly be like my very abled Daddy!!!!!!! #OtherTaxes Like ·Reply ·Flag Anonymous · 11 minutes ago this argument has been around for a while, and it seems that mostly proofreaders, English teachers, and Karen's are leading the assault against AI assisted creation. this thread is full of good arguments about how language actually progresses and how we have been inspired even before we had AI. I will admit that I am vexed by these critics who seek to shame me as an author who uses robotic plagiarism or sampling as a collage that then leads to "novel" novels... but ultimately I believe that producers are not the same as critics. there is nothing new under the Sun. nobody owns language. it is something we all use perhaps except the mute, but even they likely use some sort of sign language or gesturing unless they are absolute vegetables. what I'm thinking about lately is whether or not sentience is even overrated. all of our ideology is inherited. to quote Marx, "the traditions of all the dead generations way upon the brains of the living like a nightmare." but really I'm quoting my advisor in University, who quoted Marx. have we ever had an original idea? and why be burdened to be original, when that is nearly impossible? therefore I commence to mash up and meme. damn the torpedoes

[@samroberts464]

Sounds good. To be clear though, most LLM’s were trained on data that was harvested without permission from copyrighted works

[@TheNerdyNovelist]

Yes. But we’re getting to a point where it won’t be necessary.

[@littleripper312]

The reason it's not stealing is because this is exactly how we humans create new content anyways. We take bits and pieces of things we consume and rearrange them into our own. The other thing is Ai isn't going anywhere and eventually people will just accept the best content being made regardless of how. There will be "moral" pushback but that's happened throughout human history. Now what I think is kind of a shame is that it's going to eventually progress to a point where humans aren't really doing any of the creative work at all. Right where it's at now is the sweet spot where it's assisting us in working better but still requiring us to be very hands on with the project. It's not going to be that long until we can literally have a decent novel completely Ai generated in the style of our favourite authors in whatever genre with little to no human input. This is great for consuming content but bad for people who enjoyed creating content. There's nothing we can do though so people just need to just accept reality regardless of whether they agree with it or not.

[@neopagan1976]

Very well said. 👏👏👏👏🥰🥰🥰🥰

[@TVU-fl4ry]

Nice said. 👏 If you say this or that author influenced my work is fine, but AI cannot use your material to be trained. That's discrimination. 😂

[@themadoneplays7842]

Except human creativity is more than just data collection

[@itskittyme]

Have you just admitted to be STEALING ?

[@neopagan1976]

@@itskittyme - Can you actually comprehend what you're reading? Obviously not, if you feel compelled to ask such a ridiculous question. The commenter is simply making an innocent learning comparison. The commenter isn't admitting to any form of stealing.. For the record, teaching yourself how to write by studying the work of other author's isn't actually stealing by any stretch of the imagination. 🤣🤣🤣🤣

[@paulhiggins5165]

I'm genuinely mystified by the apparent need to validate and defend AI as a valid tool of creation , especially when these assertions originate from people who also seem to want to create things themselves. In what future scenario is it a good thing that AI will make human creators irrelevant- if not by dint of it's competing quality then at least by the sheer volume of it's output The idea that we as creatives can 'use' AI is like a man standing with bucket in the path of a Tsuami hoping to collect a little water. This thing will not 'help' you- it will drown you, your voices will be lost in the vast oncoming wave of virtually infinite 'content' that will spew night and day from the spigots of these machines.

[@nicejungle]

The tool does not make the artist It could be cave painting, oil painting, photoshop, blender or Stable Diffusion, the only relevant part to create art is the artist.

[@shebreathesingold8043]

I'm genuinely mystified by the apparent need to pretend that artists/creators have used all kinds of tools, including technological ones, for eons.

[@nicejungle]

@@shebreathesingold8043 Anyone studying history of art knows that fact. When photography was invented, new artists used photo. When video was invented, new artists used it, then 3D, then Photoshop, and now stable diffusion. In fact, real artists are already using stable diffusion, because, the tool does not make the artist. It's the process of thought behind.

[@paulhiggins5165]

@@nicejungle I think you misunderstand the concept of 'Artificial Intelligence'- it's not about assisting you it's about replacing you. Or to be more precise in this case it's about erasing you as a creator by sucking all of the oxygen out of every possible space where your work might stand a chance of being noticed. Even as we speak an Army of 'Passive income' enthusiasts are churning out 'books' that are proliferating on self publishing platforms like hyperactive rabbits. The fact that most of these 'books' are poor quality crap does not prevent them from clogging up every conceiveable conduit through which an actual human author might try to communicate with a potential readership. To be fair- Amazon has recently decided to try to control this situation by sternly admonishing it's self publishers to limit themselves to uploading only three books a day- so that's a comfort right?

[@nicejungle]

@@paulhiggins5165 thank you to prove that AI is not the problem, but consumerism is

[@chasisaac]

Government is not going to need to get involved. -- two years later. -- Government has entered the chat.

[@nicejungle]

Models are already outside, free and opensource. Fortunately, government can't do nothing to stop this

[@alexey635able]

Sadly it won’t be dropped. It is going to get echoed for a long time to come

[@sicshop]

Correct. Many are afraid.

[@mprado4177]

Really, I don't understand this argument of "stealing" language. First of all, authors have first been readers, and thus they have been influenced by other authors. Nobody has a monopoly on language, or we wouldn't be able to communicate. How about feeding a dictionary (includeing idomatic turns and slang) to the LLMs, and plug in some version of Chomsky's Universal Grammar theory (or is it also copyrighted? 🤣) After all, that's what we are ALL of us monkeys using., words and grammar rules.

[@Content_Supermarket]

I think it's not about words but style. Like somebody even patient black colour

[@phu320]

*including

[@phu320]

*patent , color v. colour

[@Ank3rman]

I think Adobe is in hot water because they charge $50/mo for industry standard software and wanted to train their AI on any designs you created in photoshop and saved to Creative Cloud. This software is used by professional graphic designers and artists, whose work is their livelihood, and now an AI can copy their art style? It's one thing to scrape images of publicly available published art from the internet, but if you're creating art for an art book or gallery for example...idk, it just seems not good.

[@phu320]

this argument has been around for a while, and it seems that mostly proofreaders, English teachers, and Karen's are leading the assault against AI assisted creation. this thread is full of good arguments about how language actually progresses and how we have been inspired even before we had AI. I will admit that I am vexed by these critics who seek to shame me as an author who uses robotic plagiarism or sampling as a collage that then leads to "novel" novels... but ultimately I believe that producers are not the same as critics. there is nothing new under the Sun. nobody owns language. it is something we all use perhaps except the mute, but even they likely use some sort of sign language or gesturing unless they are absolute vegetables. what I'm thinking about lately is whether or not sentience is even overrated. all of our ideology is inherited. to quote Marx, "the traditions of all the dead generations way upon the brains of the living like a nightmare." but really I'm quoting my advisor in University, who quoted Marx. have we ever had an original idea? and why be burdened to be original, when that is nearly impossible? therefore I commence to mash up and meme. damn the torpedoes!!!

[@phu320]

*Karens and *weigh upon the voice to text does not excel at distinguishing homophones, nor at recognizing the difference between possessive and plural s endings ...

[@milestrombley1466]

I think authors and artists believe AI is stealing their work because the AI sometimes replicates their work nearly perfectly, and that scares them. Or they think they have every right to know, even if they can't investigate everyone.

[@BurghezulDjentilom]

Just found this awesome channel and subbed. I have a question, if I may, and anyone can answer - I have a D&D Campaign, with worldbuilding and some events written, but converting it into a proper novel is just too much work for me, and I'm not that confident in writing prose like that. What could I do ? Just write a lorebook, and feed an AI some key plotpoints ? Thanks

[@toniogro]

So basically: now that they stole everything they won't need to steal anymore cool...

[@TVU-fl4ry]

When we train our brains with books and papers, that's OK. When AI uses the same methpd, then "AI is stealing". 😂 I also see people who ask for a lot of money for their books to be used as material for training AI models. If you train people for 15 USD, why would you ask 200 USD for a title to be used for AI training? Our brains don't know all that stuff from birth. We learn. You can learn by buying books, but also by borrowing books from a library, or even steal (pirated) books. Nobody is asking how you know what you know, or if it was legal. But, AI, well that's different. As usual, people are just refusing technology. If AI books are not good, why then you pay to architects, graphic designers, accountants, etc.? They didn't do their work manually. 🤭 So, I am with you. AI forever.

[@BurghezulDjentilom]

I can't imagine just some guy in a room, chained to the radiator, just doing Fourier Transforms all day on A2 sheets of paper, let alone advanced simulations of any sort. You'll find that many of these actual b1gots are against AI even for research saving and improving human lives.

[@LesliePajuelo]

4:50 "compensation that is deserved" I mean, NVIDIA trained their model on things humans created without paying for it, and is using that data to create new "synthetic" data, so the smaller models etc will be using NVIDIAs data AND paying NVIDIA for it, but NVIDIA isn't going to go back through and pay all the human creators of their training data. The creation of the synthetic data is based on the stolen unpaid data. There is no "the market/economics" that will fix that.

[@nicejungle]

> "The creation of the synthetic data is based on the stolen unpaid data" That can't be proved, and that's the beauty of AI

[@LesliePajuelo]

@@nicejungle they've bragged for years how much data they vacuumed up, it's not in doubt. But yes, attribution is the real problem. 1 image on deviant art is a different contribution than an artist that has thousands of images

[@nicejungle]

@@LesliePajuelo they also "bragged" how they filtered pictures from LAION-5B (for example removing the pr0n). Since there is not a single pixel from the original pictures in the trained models, you can't prove nothing

[@LesliePajuelo]

@@nicejungle for the text models when they were first released ppl were putting in the first couple of sentences of articles and having chatgpt complete it, and it would "generate" the original article. That was early 2022, now they make sure it's not so obvious

[@GenderPunkJezebelle999]

I don't think using LLM's constitute stealing, obviously. I was pretty much with you until you got to, "I could train an LLM on Brandon Sanderson's novels and nobody would know the difference anyway..."Unless you're putting your own novels out with a license that says people can explicitly train LLM's on your data, I don't think it's a good idea to be advertising that you could do that with someone else's work.

[@cbnewham5633]

Show me the difference between that and reading all their works and then copying their style manually. Styles are not copyrightable - and thank goodness they aren't because it would end up with only large corporations being able to publish anything, be it art, books, films, etc as any individual would be sued into oblivion for reproducing a style (whether by accident or on purpose).

[@BurghezulDjentilom]

@@cbnewham5633 you get it. I like you.

[@shebreathesingold8043]

He's just stating facts. You could do that. You could also do that before AI by simply reading the books, deconstructing the style, creating "rules of Sanderson writing" (like many videos do) and then mimicking them. We learn from others. It's not that complicated. AI is no different. It's just faster at it than a human would be.

[@nicejungle]

Point 5 is already here. I'm already training LoRA on my machine for Stable Diffusion with some copyrighted materials and no one can stop me.

[@BruceWayne15325]

I agree with you, but to play devils advocate: there's quite a bit of "theft" going on by the AI companies training on the user inputs that are sent to them. Some companies are transparent about this while others do it secretly. I personally would like to see more control over this aspect because while 99% of the time I'm fine with them training on what I put in the AI, there are some things I absolutely do not want them to train on, particularly personal identifiable information.

[@themadoneplays7842]

Except that its still human works that are being sampled, a AI has no rights

[@nicejungle]

AI is a tool. Photoshop has no rights neither Irrelevant

[@gootieboy1348]

So is it okay to use a dictionary?

[@phu320]

regarding model collapse and synthetic data, please read Cass Sunstien and the ideas of crippled epistemologies and incestuous amplification. then ask, how could such an Ivory (soap) Tower academic be so far removed from the norms of political correctness, that he thought that these figures of speech were appropriate? as a crippled victim of incest, I take very specific and particular forms of umbrage at the very notion that sunstein could even possibly be like my very abled Daddy!!!!!!! #OtherTaxes

[@AlcojorComic]

So it's OK to start a multimillion dollar business by stealing copyrighted material as long as some years later you stop stealing and/or start compensating the rich ones among those you stole from. Interesting.

[@phu320]

it was also okay to pretend that a colony stole an entire continent. and it was also okay to teach the inhabitants that they were colonizers and that they were very, very bad.

[@AlcojorComic]

@@phu320 Your point being...

[@mazzamonk]

Not relevant to style emulation. i.e. where an Ai user want to emulate the work of a current Artist/Author - this will still be theft

[@nicejungle]

no it's not theft, no more than an illustrator learning the style of another artist with oil painting.

[@shebreathesingold8043]

Style can't be stolen; and everyone's style is influenced by the styles of those before them; you literally can't invent your own style without influences. That's counterintuitive to how style is developed.

[@mazzamonk]

@@shebreathesingold8043 you’re comment neglects to recognize that the way an artist’s work looks can be protected and defined. It has also become part of many arguments regarding the morality of allowing ai engines to use living artists in prompts - if this wasn’t an issue then why do so many prompt libraries include living artists in their libraries. The look and feel of an artists work is what makes them popular and why artists look to these people for inspiration … ai engines are not artists they are theft machines which sample the way an artwork looks and then output a facsimile when prompted. They are nothing more than glorified paint by numbers boxes. The so called “prompt engineers” are little more than the thousand monkeys sitting at typewriters punching away at splurging out a work of some kind…

[@phu320]

"property is theft." - Casey Thal Wright

[@MindSnackBar]

We need to stop using buzzwords like stealing. And replace it with the proper, factual word, Inspiration. Ai gets inspiration from other works. Just like humans do. If Ai is stealing then everyone is stealing. These are just the cold hard facts. Just like Ai is not replacing anyone's jobs. It's assisting their jobs. Because Ai is just a tool. Saying Ai is replacing people jobs is like saying that chainsaws will replace Axe welding lumberjacks 🤔🤭😎

[@samroberts464]

AI doesn’t get inspiration. AI doesn’t think, nor can it create original ideas. AI can only regurgitate whatever it was trained on and has no real world experience that can influence its work the way a human would