> Or how about the information you and I have gained from books and the internet? Sure we might 'pay' for it once by buying a book
We've never as a society needed such a concept before, but publishing a book has always come with the implicit license that people who buy the book are allowed to both read the book and learn from the knowledge inside. Authors didn't write books about facts they didn't want people to learn.
But we now have a new situation where authors who never needed to specify this in a terms-of-use are realizing that they want to allow humans to learn from their work, but not machines. Since this hasn't ever been necessary before it's a huge grey area, and ML companies are riding around claiming they have license to learn to reproduce art styles just like any human would, ignoring whether the artist would have allowed one but not the other if given the chance to specify.
It's not that different from when photocopiers and tape recorder technology made it easy to copy documents or music, say from the radio, and we needed to grapple with the idea that broadcasting music might come with license to make personal recordings but not allow someone to replay those recordings for commercial use. It wasn't a concept that was necessary to have.
Now with AI, the copy is not exact, but neither was it with a tape recorder.
We've never as a society needed such a concept before, but publishing a book has always come with the implicit license that people who buy the book are allowed to both read the book and learn from the knowledge inside. Authors didn't write books about facts they didn't want people to learn.
But we now have a new situation where authors who never needed to specify this in a terms-of-use are realizing that they want to allow humans to learn from their work, but not machines. Since this hasn't ever been necessary before it's a huge grey area, and ML companies are riding around claiming they have license to learn to reproduce art styles just like any human would, ignoring whether the artist would have allowed one but not the other if given the chance to specify.
It's not that different from when photocopiers and tape recorder technology made it easy to copy documents or music, say from the radio, and we needed to grapple with the idea that broadcasting music might come with license to make personal recordings but not allow someone to replay those recordings for commercial use. It wasn't a concept that was necessary to have.
Now with AI, the copy is not exact, but neither was it with a tape recorder.