Publishers demand to be paid for AI using their work

Human artists also learn/train from other artists work. Should they also compensate all the artists whose work they have seen?
Just a thought.

Dwaric said:

Human artists also learn/train from other artists work. Should they also compensate all the artists whose work they have seen?
Just a thought.

In copyright infringement cases involving humans, the court determines if the alleged infringer was exposed to the prior work and then essentially assesses if the new work is creatively novel, or if it is simply derivative. The same process applies to AI. 

If an AI system catalogs prior works and then simply regurgitates catalog content in a cut-and-paste collage, then it’s infringement. At least based on what I’ve seen of current AI, that’s all it’s capable of. There is no actual learning followed by a creative spark in those algorithms. It’s like looking at a painting by an artist whose influences are way too obvious, or listening to a band playing songs with arrangements and vocal affectations that are indistinguishable from anything else on this week’s charts. 

Here, the onus is on the AI developers to prove how what they’re up to is not just derivative regurgitation that is nothing more than the sum of its parts. 

Dwaric said:

Human artists also learn/train from other artists work. Should they also compensate all the artists whose work they have seen?
Just a thought.

The "learning/training" lingo is just marketing. AI programs don't function without access to every letter/pixel of gigantic databases full of writing and art. There's no thinking, just brute force. No access to database = no production of writing or art. It's not a parallel to how humans create despite all of the marketing smoke and mirrors from the tech companies. Fair use laws don't apply because those laws were created for human capabilities, not for computer programs. 

Influences are in most cases clearly evident in human artists’ work in all disciplines and at all levels of competence, if you know what to look for. As Picasso said, “good artists borrow, great artists steal.” Just look at his work, and then look at the work of Georges Braque and Julio Gonzalez, whose work Picasso “stole” in this sense. There’s no shortage of examples in music and other art forms too. At this point, the most sophisticated automated systems can create works that are at least as original as what most humans are coming up with (which is a low bar), but of course there are humans pulling the strings here, designing the algorithms and training them, so you still easily argue that it’s just a more complex and technology-intensive form of human creation. 

AppleInsider said: AI tools search the internet for the basis of their responses to user requests, and the Wall Street Journal points out there is a "fair use" legal provision that might cover some of this.

"We've done a lot with fair use," said Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT. "[However, we're] willing to pay a lot for very high-quality data in certain domains [such as science]."

Fair use can't possibly apply here because the programs aren't capable of producing anything without the database. 100% of what they produce is entirely dependent on work that was created by human beings. The fact that 100% might be made up of 1% of the material from 100 different human beings doesn't matter. Look at Adobe: they've already admitted that "AI" producing art based on their stock library requires compensation to the artists that they license stock art/photos from.