Fair, but in this case, it’s Raph Koster. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raph_Koster
He was Creative Director for the original SWG, and then Chief Creative Officer under Sony once they bought it.
He also was a lead designer for Ultima Online before that, and did work on multiple other games (Including EQ2) afterwards.
Nothing stopping you from setting out on your own.
There is limited worlds, but they aren’t static, the number of worlds (and which worlds) will change. The surface of the planets can (and will) also change. There’s someone in alpha right now cutting down a mountain (literally). There’s also a system for planets dying, and being restored.
You’re missing the training even a child has received to reach the state where they could do that. If you raised a child to 5 years completely by themselves in an empty room they wouldn’t be able to draw anything at all, let alone something based on pictures. The act of drawing a variation on a bunny from a picture requires they learn and practice fine motor skills, and it requires them to have an understanding of animals.
Humans get literally 150,000+ hours of training time before we even let them try to become an adult.
Jackson Pollock didn’t create paintings, Jackson Pollock’s art was story telling and showmanship.
Yes, in order to learn a spoken language you have to have heard it. However, languages evolve over time. You develop regional accents and dialects. All of the UK speaks English but no two towns speak the same way.
Just like different models have their own patterns of writing…
You’re thinking about LLMs like they’re equivalent to multiple people(or groups of people) but each LLM is equivalent to a single person. The training and resulting function of each one is as distinct as an individual human.
I could raise one of my children to perform the exact same functions as an LLM or art creation tool. Give them exactly the same image/text sets that these models are trained on, and have them practice for a decade or two. Then I could tell them “Hey I need a picture of an orange rabbit riding a bike” and they could draw me one, or write a story about the same topic. There’s clearly no copyright infringement in that process, so why would it be different for creating a machine to do the same thing?
“A person who has never looked upon a single painting in their life can still produce a piece but the same cannot be said for an art bot. A model must be trained on work that you want the model to be able to imitate.”
No, they really can’t. Go look a 1 year old’s first attempt at “art” because it’s nothing more than random smashing of colour on paper. A computer could easily generate such “work” as well with no training data at all. They’ve seen art at that point, and still can’t replicate it because they need much more training first.
Humans require books (or teachers who read books) to learn how to read and write. That is “vast quantities of information” being consumed to learn how to do it. If you had never seen or heard of a book, you wouldn’t be able to write a novel. It’s also completely ignoring the fact that you had to previously learn the spoken language as well (which is a vast quantity of information that takes a human decades to acquire proficiency in even with daily practice)
I’ll remind you the original article title literally contains the words “copyright law”
This discussion is entirely about legality, not ethics.
By your stupid logic, I have created nothing in my job designing automation systems, since I just look at what people currently do, program a computer to do those tasks instead, and I profit off those people no longer needing to do that job.
You want to keep everyone fully employed in needless tasks? Go join the Mennonites.
“Feeding something into a machine is not the same as looking at it” Most scientists would vehemently disagree. Human brains are just a complex and squishy computer. The fact that they’re biological makes no difference to how we function. Input goes in, processing occurs, output comes out. Even the term “Computer” started as a job title for a human prior to the invention of mechanical and electric devices.
The scope of the discussion is absolutely what would get you in trouble. That’s literally the entire post we’re commenting on. We’re not arguing if this SHOULD be allowed or not, we’re arguing about whether current laws prohibit it.
You keep harping on about parasites, is every person who creates a machine to do a task that competes with humans parasitical in your fucked up world logic? If we want to make a machine to build widgets, an engineer will study how widgets get built, design a machine to do it instead, produce the machine, then a company will use it to outcompete the original manual widget makers. Same process for essentially every machine we’ve ever invented.
You’re missing something even more basic.
The machine Person C has created is not infringing on anything by itself. It’s creation was not an infringement. “Extracting essence” isn’t a protected right provided by the copyright frameworks. Only the actual art it is used to create could infringe (which most of the generated images do not).
If the final art created is an infringement, the existing copyright system handles that situation just like an infringing piece of art created by a human. The person at fault is the person who used the machine to create an infringing work, not the creator of the machine.
In your scenario, if a human C came along and looked at the art from Person A and B, blended them together into their own style, there wouldn’t be any problem either. Even though they received no permission, and offered no credit nor compensation to the original creators. They would only get in trouble if they created an actual piece of art that was too similar to either of the specific artists works and therefore found to be infringing upon the copyright.
I think you’re missing a point here. If someone uses these to models to produce and distribute copyright infringing works, the original rights holder could go after the infringer.
The model itself isn’t infringing though, and the process of creating the model isn’t either.
It’s a similar kind of argument to the laws that protect gun manufacturers from culpability from someone using their weapon to commit a crime. The user is the one doing the bad thing, they just produce a tool.
Otherwise, could Disney go after a pencil company because someone used one of their pencils to infringe on their copyright. Even if that pencil company had designed the pencil to be extremely good at producing Disney imagery by looking at a whole bunch of Disney images and movies to make sure it matches the size, colour, etc? No, because a pencil isn’t a copyright infringement of art, regardless of the process used to design it.
You’re completely wrong, and I’ll tell you why.
None of what you said matters, perception filters, intent, intelligence… it’s all irrelevant to the discussion.
Copyright infringement only gives certain rights, and at least here in Canada using them to generate a model isn’t one of those. Rights are for things like distribution, reproduction, public performance, communication, and exhibition. US law says you can’t “Prepare derivative works based upon the work.” but the model isn’t a derivative work because it’s not really a work at all, you can’t even visually look at the model. You can’t copyright an algorithm in the US or Canada.
Only the created art should be scrutinized for copyright infringement, and these systems can generate both (just like a human can).
Any enforcement should then be handled when that protected work is then used to infringe on the actual rights of the copyright holder.
A human can absolutely copy previous works, and they do it all the time. Disney themselves license books teaching you how to do just that. https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/learn-to-draw-disney-celebrated-characters-collection-disney-storybook-artists/1124097227
Not to mention the amount of porn online based on characters from copyrighted works. Porn that is often done as a paid commission, expressly violating copyright laws.
A human is a derivative work of its training data, thus a copyright violation if the training data is copyrighted.
The difference between a human and ai is getting much smaller all the time. The training process is essentially the same at this point, show them a bunch of examples and then have them practice and provide feedback.
If that human is trained to draw on Disney art, then goes on to create similar style art for sale that isn’t a copyright infringement. Nor should it be.
I mean, Facebook already requires ID in many cases. https://www.facebook.com/help/159096464162185/
You’re required to prove your age in a bunch of real life scenarios too, like buying alcohol, tobacco, or a firearm.
It is a privacy issue, but the question is on the balance is the privacy concern worse than the harms being done by youth on social media?
Given that there are literally hundreds of university studies showing how bad this shit is for kids, and leaked internal documents from the social media companies themselves, I think it’s the better choice at the moment.