this post was submitted on 04 May 2025
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These endless "AI bad" articles are annoying. It's just click bait at this point.
Energy use: false. His example was someone using a 13 year old laptop to get a result and then extrapolating energy use from that. Running ai locally is the same energy as playing a 3d AAA game for the same time. No one screams about the energy footprint of playing games.
AAA game development energy use ( thousands of developers all with watt burning gpus spending years creating assets) dwarfs AI model building energy use.
Copyright, yes it's a problem and should be fixed. But stealing is part of capitalism. Google search itself is based on stealing content and then selling ads to find that content. The entire "oh we might send some clicks your way that you might be able to compensated for" is backwards.
His last reason was new and completely absurd: he doesn't like AI because he doesn't like Musk. Given the public hatred between OpenAI and Musk it's bizarre. Yes Musk has his own AI. But Musk also has electric cars, and space travel. Does the author hate all EV's too? If course not, that argument was added by the author as a troll to get engagement.
No, this is just playing into another of the common anti-AI fallacies.
Training an AI does not do anything that copyright is even involved with, let alone prohibited by. Copyright is solely concerned with the copying of specific expressions of ideas, not about the ideas themselves. When an AI trains on data it isn't copying the data, the model doesn't "contain" the training data in any meaningful sense. And the output of the AI is even further removed.
People who insist that AI training is violating copyright are advocating for ideas and styles to be covered by copyright. Or rather by some other entirely new type of IP protection, since as I said this is nothing at all like what copyright already deals with. This would be an utterly terrible thing for culture and free expression in general if it were to come to pass.
I get where this impulse comes from. Modern society has instilled a general sense that everything has to be "owned" by someone, even completely abstract things. Everyone thinks that they're owed payment for everything that they can possibly demand payment for, even if it's something that just yesterday they were doing purely for fun and releasing to the world without a care. There's this base impulse of "mine! Therefore I must control it!" Ironically, it's what leads to the capitalist hellscape so many people are decrying at the same time they demand more.
I'd say it can be a problem because there have been examples of getting AIs to spit out entire copyrighted passages. Furthermore, some works can have additional restrictions on their use. I couldn't for example train an AI on Linux source code, have it spit out the exact source code, then slap my own proprietary commercial license on it to bypass GPL.
Examples that have turned out to either be a result of great effort to force the output to be a copy, a result of poor training techniques that result in overfitting, or both combined.
If this is really such a straightforward case of copyright violation, surely there are court cases where it's been ruled to be so? People keep arguing legality without ever referencing case law, just news articles.
That's literally still just copyright. There's no "additional restrictions" at play here.
GPL is a license that uses copyright law as enforcement.
Yes, that's what I said. There are no "additional restrictions" from having a GPL license on something. The GPL license works by giving rights that weren't already present under the default copyright. You can reject the GPL on an open sourced piece of software if you want to, but then you lose the additional rights that the GPL gives you.