Glaze vs. Nightshade: Implications for Artistic User Interfaces and AI-Generated Art Platforms
Zhao says he hopes Nightshade will be able to pollute future AI models to such a degree that AI companies will be forced to either revert to old versions of their platforms — or stop using artists’ works to create new ones.
“So it will, for example, take an image of a dog, alter it in subtle ways, so that it still looks like a dog to you and I — except to the AI, it now looks like a cat,” Zhao says.
The words used to describe the images in the metadata are usually used by models to identify them. For instance, a picture of a dog pairs with the word “dog.” “Yes, Zhao says.”
Nightshade is trying to confuse the training model by putting a small poison pill inside an artwork, like it’s adding a new item to an existing one.
So let’s get to some of the specifics in this case. So there were a number of different claims made by the artists who are suing these AI companies. One of them is this argument that these models are basically collage tools, that their images, their copyrighted works, get sort of stored in the model in some compressed form, and that this actually is a violation of their copyright. Because they’re not truly being transformed. They are being turned into these sort of things on the other side.
“Glaze is just a very first step in people coming together to build tools to help artists,” says fashion photographer Jingna Zhang, the founder of Cara, a new online community focused on promoting human-created (as opposed to AI-generated) art. It does interrupt the final output when an image is trained on my style, from what I saw while I tested with my own work. Zhang says plans are in the works to embed Glaze and Nightshade in Cara.
Articulating AI: Kudurru, Stable Diffusion, and Sarah Anderson vs. DeviantArt: War on AI for Generative AI
And then there’s Kudurru, created by the for-profit company Spawning.ai. The resource blocks scrapers’ addresses and prevents them from uploading anything, as well as sending back unwanted content, such as a Rickroll internet prank that uses an extended middle finger, or a music video for British singer Rick Astley.
“We want artists to be able to communicate differently to the bots and the scrapers used for AI purposes, rather than giving them all of their information that they would like to provide to their fans,” says Spawning co-founder Jordan Meyer.
McKernan says they have been waging a war on AI since last year, when they discovered their name was being used as an AI prompt, and then that more than 50 of their paintings had been scraped for AI models from LAION-5B, a massive image dataset.
Totally. And it’s been sort of a cloud hanging over the entire AI industry. And this week, we actually got an update on how the legal battle is going. Sarah Anderson, a cartoonist, was one of the artists that sued the Stable Diffusion image generator, along with two other companies, Midjourney and DeviantArt.
In the meantime, McKernan says the new digital tools help them feel like they’re doing something aggressive and immediate to safeguard their work in a world of slow-moving lawsuits and even slower-moving legislation.
If you don’t know anything about the order, you should know that we are watching you because it signals to the artificial intelligence industry from Washington. Right? This isn’t going to be the kind of social media where you have a decade to build and chase growth and spread your products all over the world before people start hearing about it. We are actually going to be looking at this in the very early days of generative AI.
How effective are new tools for protecting myself with an ax? An artist critic critic argues that AI companies should also respect artists’ opt out requests
“So I’m going to protect myself with an ax because my house keeps getting broken into, and I’m gonna use some of, like, mace and that sort of thing!” They say the new tools give defensive opportunities.
“These kinds of defenses seem to be effective against a lot of things currently,” says Gautam Kamath, a researcher at Canada’s University of Waterloo. “But there’s no kind of guarantee that they’ll still be effective a year from now, ten years from now. We don’t know for sure, even a week from now.
heated debates have been raging on social media platforms about how effective they are. The creators of the tools may be involved in the conversations.
“This is not about having a fun tool that can exist in a world where some people are indifferent to others and some people care but we can move on”, says the University of Chicago’s Zhao. This actually matters because it involves real people, their livelihoods, and they are involved in this. We’ll keep going as long as necessary.
But Yacine Jernite, who leads the machine learning and society team at the AI developer platform Hugging Face, says that even if these tools work really well, that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
data should be broadly available for research and development But AI companies should also respect artists’ wishes to opt out of having their work scraped.
His approach of trying to get as many perspectives into what makes a training data set is in correlation with the tool that allows artists to express their consent.
Several artists who used to work on Hugging Face have objected to the practice of having models shared on the platform and asked that they be removed. The developers don’t have to comply.
Still, many artists, including McKernan, don’t trust AI companies’ opt out programs. The artist said that they don’t all offer them. “And those that do, often don’t make the process easy.”
What Do We Need to Do Now? Analysing the Future with GPT 4, the Largest Language Model, and the Power of Artificial Intelligence
This transcript was created using speech recognition software. There may be errors while it has been reviewed. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions.
Do I want the government to say that if you’re going to train the largest language model, we want you to tell us? I lean on the side of letting someone know. Someone should pay attention to this. That is kind of where I am. Where are you?
So I don’t want the government to get so far out ahead of things that it is prevented from doing all the things that Ben Buchanan just talked about, like helping to address climate change, for example, using the power of AI. If the government could do that, that could be a great thing. I don’t think we need to slam on the brakes so hard that we don’t allow for the possibility of that.
That’s the first part of it. The second part is an imitation of a GPT 5 where we just don’t know how well they’re going to do. Like, what we know is that there have been massive leaps in each successive version of these models.
What does the next massive leap look like? As humans, we’re really bad at conceiving of exponential change. Our brains think linearly. If we go one step closer to an exponential change, my brain feels like it is uneducated about what that will mean.
But then, a week will go by, and my everyday life looks the same as it has for a while, and I think, well, maybe society has actually just sort of adapting to this, and this isn’t quite the disruptive change that I was thinking. It’s not easy to say what the future will look like in the next three years. And so I try to just keep my eyes focused on, well, what happened today?
Let’s start with the first question. Is something changed that has made me less nervous? I kind of think about it all the time. It depends on the day. Sometimes when I use GPT 4, it does something amazing that makes me think the future is going to look different than it is today. What do we do now?
And now, I’m hearing you talk about the need for balance and trying to find the green shoots of what AI could do. So has your view changed on AI, or has something in AI itself changed in a way that makes you less nervous? And do you actually think that more regulation is needed?
So that seems like, to me, a pretty balanced view of AI. On one hand, it could help us with microclimate forecasting. On the other hand, it could cause some harm, especially when it comes to things like weapons and cybersecurity. Is that the kind of vibe you picked up from the White House visit as a whole, and is this the White House that is trying to be cautious and cautious in its dealings with artificial intelligence?
Source: Casey Goes to the White House + The Copyright Battle Over Artificial Intelligence + HatGPT
Is there still a lot to do on regulation of artificial intelligence, or does it matter if you’re in the US or the EU?
They still have a lot to do. Again, the policy reads very sweeping. What it means in practice, I think we’ll have to see how it plays out. But there are good ideas here.
Yes. This was a pleasant surprise, that’s right. Right? I don’t like a lot of what I see when writing about technology policy and proposed regulations. President Biden advocated removing Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act from the books when he was campaigning to be president, which would make companies like Google responsible for every person’s uploaded post on their platform. It was the worst kind of tech policy, because you are painting with the broadest possible brush, and you are ignoring any positive use cases, and you are just legislating with a giant hammer. This approach is not the one used by that approach. These are people who have done the homework, who have been very thoughtful.
Right. I think it’s going to be interesting to see how the US regulates this, but also how the European Union regulates this, as well as how they will attempt to regulate artificial intelligence, as soon as next year. And then, there’s this big AI safety summit that happened in the UK this week, where a bunch of AI researchers and executives and industry people and various government officials talked about some of the more existential risks. Europe may get ahead of the US when it comes to regulation of artificial intelligence, as it sets the standard when it comes to social media.
Source: Casey Goes to the White House + The Copyright Battle Over Artificial Intelligence + HatGPT
Does AI Really Make Bioweapons? Comment on Casey Goes to the White House + The Copyright Battle Over Artificial Intelligence + HatGPT
There was clearly going to be a point where the government stepped in. I think that arrived sooner than I would have thought, right? The government is slow andsclerotic.
That is correct. It has come to people’s attention that some of the big artificial intelligence players, including Sam Altman from OpenAI, are doing this behind their backs.
Some of them are. I have VCs who are texting me, saying that you can already make a bioweapon just by googling and that if you think that the AI makes that any easier, then you are a fool. This is what people are saying.
It’s a challenge for me to have good safety discussions about this stuff, and I don’t try to use the tools for evil. And so it’s hard to know what is the case here, but I’m with you.
Source: Casey Goes to the White House + The Copyright Battle Over Artificial Intelligence + HatGPT
Are Open Sources Demonstration or Proliferating? An interview with Arati and Cameron Goes to the White House
You’ve been invited to go to the White House this week to talk to some officials about the new executive order regarding Artificial Intelligence. And my first question, obviously, was where’s my invite? But my second question is, what was it like?
I talked to Arati, who directs the Office of Science and Technology Policy. And I just said, does the government have a stance on whether it wants to see more open-source development or more closed development? She told me that.
If I were still in the business, I would say the technology is democratizing. If I were still in the Defense Department, I would say it’s proliferating. Both are true.
According to Reed, Biden’s concerns about AI also grew after watching ‘Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning, Part I’ at Camp David,” which is a movie where there’s this sort of mysterious AI entity that wreaks havoc on the world. What do you think about this? Did you speak with advisers to President Biden about “Mission Impossible”?
Source: Casey Goes to the White House + The Copyright Battle Over Artificial Intelligence + HatGPT
What if Artificial Intelligence is the Key to Increasing Renewable Energy Development and Jobs in the Industrial Era? The Case for Casey Goes to the White House + The Copyright Battle Over AI + HatGPT
I think that it is more than green shoots. If we didn’t think there was significant upside, we wouldn’t be calibrating the policy so carefully. So look at something like microclimate forecasting for weather prediction, reducing waste in the electricity grid and the like, accelerating renewable energy development. There’s a lot of potential here, and we want to unlock that as much as we can.
And to be honest, that is just an issue where I am trying to learn and listen and read and talk to people. But I’m curious if you have a gut instinct on that.
It is crazy to me. It seems like these companies and the people running them have been hyping up the risks of machine learning recently. These are people who have been talking about this — some of them for many years.
Source: Casey Goes to the White House + The Copyright Battle Over Artificial Intelligence + HatGPT
Do we have to protect the public from what is going on in open-source technology? No. The public shouldn’t be worried about the public’s reaction
They went to the government. They freaked them out, that’s all. They said, regulate us now, and oh, by the way, here’s exactly how to do it. They are starting to get what they want. And the result is going to be that they are the winners who take all, and everyone else is left by the wayside.
Right. Basically, using regulation to draw a moat around yourself, such that smaller competitors who don’t have armies of lawyers and compliance people and people to fill out forms for the government — they can’t compete with you.
So I agree with you, but let me just sort of try to Steelman the other arguments, right? I am hearing from people that are in the open-source community. They think that we are seeing the beginning of regulatory capture.
If you have found a model that is dangerous, then you need to tell the government about it, and you have to do safety testing on it. I think that people objecting to this are not objecting to the specific models that are currently being used.
I would include all of them in that group. They are saying that we see a lot of potential avenues for harm here. And so instead of just putting it up on GitHub and letting anybody download it and go nuts, we are going to build it ourselves. We’re going to do a bunch of rigorous testing. We’ll tell you about the test, but we are not going to let everyone play with it.
So briefly, open-source technology can be analyzed. You can see what’s in the code. You can fork it, change it to your own liking. The people who love it think this is the safest way to do it.
If you can get a lot of people to watch and see that, you are going to build better technology and we are all going to be better off. Right? There are people that are closed in approach.
This issue has been going on in Silicon Valley for months, but it seems to have come to a point where it needs to be reported to the government. Let’s just talk about it. Because to me, I don’t get the backlash to this.
It’s not telling AI developers, you can’t make a very large model, you’re not allowed to. It isn’t saying you can’t make a large open source model. All it’s saying is, if you’re building a model that is bigger than a certain size, 10-to-the-26th-power FLOPS, or —
Source: Casey Goes to the White House + The Copyright Battle Over Artificial Intelligence + HatGPT
Floss – It’s a good time to fuck so hard, but what to do if you don’t
It is so enjoyable to say Floss. It is going to be giving 10 to the 26th-power FLOPS the next time one of my friends has a huge failure. You are going to have to tell the federal government if you fucked so hard.
And it turns out that one threshold for when these requirements kick in is when a model has been trained using an amount of computing power that is greater than 10-to-the-26th-power floating point operations, or FLOPS. I looked at it. That is 100 billionth of a second.
Absolutely. The industry, I would say, was surprised by this. The people I talked to at AI companies — they did not know that this exact thing was coming. They weren’t sure about the threshold where the rules would kick in. Would they apply to all models, big or small?
Source: Casey Goes to the White House + The Copyright Battle Over Artificial Intelligence + HatGPT
Good Lord, Good Thing, Good Food, Good Stuff, GOOD DONATE, GOOD PRESENCE, GOOD DETAY, GOOD ADS, GOOD LORD
I mean, from what I understand, they’re made out of recycled plastic, so I don’t know why they’re feeding them to children. Have you ever tasted one of those things? Good Lord.
Literally, yes. It was the only thing remaining at Target. So we bring home these Dots, and I’m testing the candy, as one does. So I bite into a Dot, and a tooth comes out.
You know, I could recommend, actually, a lot of good costumes for that — Phantom of the Opera comes to mind. There is anything with a mask that covers a lot of your face.
Source: Casey Goes to the White House + The Copyright Battle Over Artificial Intelligence + HatGPT
How bad is Halloween candy? Why should we chew it up? The case for the Biden administration to step in and outlaw Dots
You know what’s so funny about this is that every year, there is a panic around Halloween candy. It would be good if you could open up every wrapper and make sure there was no razor blade in it. And we always laugh. We say, oh, you people need to calm down. You went to get emergency dental work because you bit into candy.
Yes. Yes. It was very bad. The Dots are too sticky. We got to do something, and I’m calling on the Biden administration to step in and outlaw Dots.
Source: Casey Goes to the White House + The Copyright Battle Over Artificial Intelligence + HatGPT
The White House. What did I learn about it, when I first went to the White House, and the President put the executive order into place?
Because here are the things — I went to the White House once when I was a child, part of a school tour. It’s very exciting. Remember very little of it. Here are the things I know about the White House. I know it’s where the president lives.
There is an office called the West Wing and an office called the Oval Office. I’m aware there was a dog at the White House that bit people.
[LAUGHS]: I was — let me tell you. From the moment I walked onto the grounds, my head was on a swivel. I’m saying, where is that dog? Because I wanted to meet him and pet him. Because what could be better for the podcast than if I’d been bitten by the President’s dog?
No. It is funny. You mentioned that there were treats. We went on the Monday before Halloween this week. I walked down with our producer, Rachel. We took in the sights and sounds. The grounds of the White House are filled with children in costumes.
So I do not see a dog, but I do see a LEGO, a Cheeto, a Tyrannosaurus, a Transformer, a lot of Barbies. I would say that Hollywood intellectual property is, you know, what we saw in the offices of the staffers throughout the executive office building. There was a Barbie room. The room was named after Harry Potter.
The hosts in the White House digital office had transformed their office into something called the Multiverse of Madness. And when you took a left, you were standing in Bikini Bottom from the SpongeBob Squarepants Universe. There were bubbles blowing everywhere.
And I’m setting this scene, because you have to understand, I am there to listen to the President talk about the most serious thing in the world. While interviewing his officials, we were hearing children screaming about candy. It was a dream of a day at the White House.
So amid all of the shrieking children and the costumes and the Multiverse of Madness, there was actually, like, a signing ceremony with the President where he did put this executive order into place.
That’s right. Yeah. The East Room of the White House is filled with people who work on advocacy for these issues and so we walked over to it after our interviews. The President and the Vice President came out. Schumer was the Senate majority leader.
Source: Casey Goes to the White House + The Copyright Battle Over Artificial Intelligence + HatGPT
[LAUGHS]: The Big Screaming Bullet that Cames to the White House + The Copyright Battle Over Artificial Intelligence
Yeah. And we could dive in in any number of places. I think the part of the order that has gotten the most attention is the aspect that attempts to regulate the creation of next-generation models. So the stuff that we’re using every day — the Bards, the GPT 4s — those are mostly left out of this order.
But if there is to be a GPT 5 or a Claude 3, presumably, it will fall under the rubric that the President has established here. When it does, it will need to inform the federal government that they have trained a model, and they will have to disclose what safety tests they did on it to understand what capabilities it has. So I mean, to me, that is the big screaming bullet that came out — is like, OK, we actually are going to at least put some disclosure requirements around the Bay Area.
[LAUGHS]:: Now, I’m not a lawyer, but I feel like I have a pretty good grasp of one of the issues that is at stake here, which is, who does the liability fall on? So if I use a program to make a counterfeit picture of money. I try to use it as a store even though it is not on Adobe. It is on me.
Something like that, or counterfeit money. That would be less protected, whereas you can use Photoshop to draw Disney characters and try to counterfeit money. But because it can also do all these other things, the courts are less likely to see that as an infringement. Is that what you’re saying?
I can see why you would think that is strange, but it is how you would make a general-purpose tool. So Photoshop being useful for lots of different things is more clearly a neutral tool than something that’s like, well, here’s a program that will draw Disney characters.
Source: Casey Goes to the White House + The Copyright Battle Over Artificial Intelligence + HatGPT
How protectable is your model if you’re big on data? The case of Westlaw, which is suing for the copying of its headers
So in some sense, the bigger your model is, the more data it was trained on, the more potentially protected you are from some of these claims. If you want to win a lawsuit against a creator or publisher, you should make your model as massive as possible, and use as much data as you can. Because then, they can’t come back and say, hey, that looks a lot like the specific thing that I made that is protected.
And the court said, we’re going to go to a jury on that. Westlaw has the set on which things are trained. It was also my point that these deals are not going to help individual authors. The people who wrote the summaries at Westlaw will not be getting any more money if Westlaw prevails.
There are situations where, for example, if you just train entirely on one artist, that might well be different. And that’s a design choice. And right now, there’s a case proceeding, brought by Westlaw, for the copying of its headers, where they write their own summaries of a court decision.
Source: Casey Goes to the White House + The Copyright Battle Over Artificial Intelligence + HatGPT
Getting More Copyright Rights isn’t a Problem of Capitalism, but a Possible Solution to the Problem of Social Media
You could either attribute it randomly, or pass it through a small amount of time that it looks close to an image. And I would just say, are you going to be able to go to Starbucks on that money? I wouldn’t place too many bets.
Here’s the thing. I’m extremely skeptical about these models. The publishers aren’t in the business of delivering most of the money to the authors or artists if they are done by them. The image won’t look the same in the data set because it’s the fact.
I can say that Doctorow wrote about the problem of capitalism, which is something I’m sure many people already know. That is, giving individual artists more copyright rights is like giving your kid more lunch money when the bullies take it at lunch. The bully is just going to take all of the money you give.
I think a development like that is really powerful because it isn’t based on legal requirements. I agree that there are certain things you can do in order to get paid. I mean, the classic thing about this is, only publishers with big piles of works can ever hope to get paid. It is not worth it to license on an individual basis.
Source: Casey Goes to the White House + The Copyright Battle Over Artificial Intelligence + HatGPT
Fair Use: Is the Rise of Voluntary Opt-outs Real? The Case for OpenAI and Causey Goes to the White House
Well, what I would say is, you’re seeing this rise of voluntary opt-outs. That is very similar to what happened with Google. That’s what the robot exclusion headers are. Although it’s probably fair use to scrape for many purposes, they still won’t do it.
People will definitely say that you have to license everything. The law does not always agree with that argument. Because litigation is expensive. What courts and other fair use cases have said is that even if you are willing to negotiate, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t fair use.
A few weeks back I was struck by the fact that Openai licensed old articles from the Associated Press. Presumably, many of these articles were already online and could have been scraped by OpenAI for free and used to train their future models. If you’re a lawyer for OpenAI and they say, we want to license that data, as a lawyer, are you thinking, hmm, this could create a perception that this work has value and that we should be paying to license all of it? Is the law strong enough to allow it to be a goodwill gesture without any additional liability?
But also, this is still very early days. The part of the claim that requires a fair use analysis isn’t different from the other claims that were about the outputs. No one should rest on their laurels right now.
Source: Casey Goes to the White House + The Copyright Battle Over Artificial Intelligence + HatGPT
Can You Sue Over This? Can You Get What You Want? The Case of Midjourney and DeviantArt before a Judge Makes a Decision
So this is the classic thing — can you sue over this? America is what it is. You can always try to recover your money. Right? Is it possible to win? That is a very different question. Is it possible to litigate? It was a completely different question.
True. This case has been going through the courts. And this week, a judge made a pretty significant ruling on Monday. The judge dismissed the claims against Midjourney and DeviantArt, two of the companies that had been sued, saying these claims are defective.
Right. The idea that a book author can make a movie or a translation of it should be covered, as well as the idea of derivative works.
Right. When it was first conceived, it was the idea of copying something you do not own but are able to profit from.
We have been talking a lot about things other than a copyright violation. It might help me just to remind myself, what is a copyright violation? Give me some cases of that are against the law.
Source: Casey Goes to the White House + The Copyright Battle Over Artificial Intelligence + HatGPT
What Does Google Tell Us About “Starry Night” and What Does It Really Matter About What I’m Doing and Where Is It Coming From?
So I would say, in some sense, though, it doesn’t really matter in the traditional fair use analysis. Because courts have generally said, if you’re doing something internally that involves a lot of copying, but if your output is non-infringing, then that’s a strong case for fair use.
It’s a little perplexing. When I talk to them, it does sound like there are no pictures in the model. There is a lot of data. When a data set has 500 versions of “Starry Night” it can get pretty good at creating something that is a lot similar, but for the average image, it’s not in there.
Companies and people working with Artificial intelligence have said that these models aren’t actually how they work. But this is the argument that the artists in this case are making. How do you feel about that argument?
But we have a robust system for attributing responsibility to the person who tried really hard to find the infringing copy on Google. There are some principles of safe design. The fact that they aren’t perfect doesn’t mean that they are responsible for the problem. I tried really hard to make something that looked like Sarah Anderson’s cartoons after a 1,500-word prompt, but I think that is on you, because you get people saying that.
So there’s lots of circumstances where, for example, people can use Google and say, I want to watch “Barbie.” It is not impossible to find the way to useGoogle to watch “Barbie” without the knowledge or consent of the person authorizing it.
Is the output actually illegal? Right? So if it is not, then no. And if it is, then actually, I want to start asking questions. Why and who’s responsible for it?
In such a situation, I think the question would be whether it was true that you get images of my life’s work for $0 if you type my name into Stable Diffusion.
Source: Casey Goes to the White House + The Copyright Battle Over Artificial Intelligence + HatGPT
Intellectual Property and the Rise of the Internet (Casey Goes to the White House + The Copyright Battle Over Artificial Intelligence + HatGPT)
And in many cases, it is making copies of those pages. It is caching those pages, so that it can serve them up faster. Intellectual property is what it is. When you enter a query into the internet search engine, it will spit out a result without reproducing the intellectual property.
So I think this is an interesting analogy to think about for a minute. Like, if I’m hearing you right, you’re saying, when you think about what Google does, it creates this index of the web, Right? Every page is looked at by it.
The idea of taking large amounts of existing works and doing something new with them is fairly established. The question is, of course, whether we think that there’s something uniquely different about LLMs that justifies treating them differently. That is where I end.
The things that you can do are not fair in order to be very clear. Right? But Google, for example, with the book project, doesn’t give you the full text and is very careful about not giving you the full text. And the court said that the snippet production, which helps people figure out what the book is about but doesn’t substitute for the book, is a fair use.
Again, my view is, we actually have a set of tools for dealing with this. You can disagree with them. The rise of the internet is the largest factor in the background.
Source: Casey Goes to the White House + The Copyright Battle Over Artificial Intelligence + HatGPT
What Is The Point of View On The Copyright Implications Of AI Language Models That I Have Learned From Artists?
And I’m curious what you make of that argument. Because that’s something that I’ve heard from artists, from writers who are mad that their books were used to train AI language models. The copyright implications of how the models are trained is something we don’t know.
If it wasn’t within your contemplation, like, there’s room for accident and serendipity in human creation. But there’s also a point at which the serendipity is no longer yours.
First, are all of them the same thing, or does the fact that they look different show that, in fact, the prompt just didn’t specify enough to be firmly connected as a human creation to the output? And then, the second question I have for this point of view that the prompt should be enough to get copyright is, OK, so what about the ones you reject? You say that that is not what I wanted. Are they still yours?
I think the prompt should not be counted, although you can find people who disagree. I propose that you get a choice of multiple outputs that look quite different from each other. And so I have two questions.
These are the questions that people are writing. It’s a banana that is dressed like a detective in a 1940s noir movie, but he’s at Disneyland, right? And the output of that actually feels like it did have a little bit more human authorship in it to me. But I’m not a lawyer. Like, in your view, is that all sort of the same thing?
So at the risk of derailing, I am just super fascinated by this question. So I can see your point of view. If I type the word “banana” into DALL-E and get a banana, I would probably not be granted a copyright, even though I don’t have a lot to do with it.
And if you’re giving a copyright in a selfie, is that the same thing as giving a copyright in the footage from a security camera that’s running 24/7? Even though you occasionally have to draw lines, that is not a problem for the law, and we can just decide what the rules are going to be without disrupting anything.
So in terms of whether you can get a copyright for the output, we do have a history of saying, OK, at what point does a human being’s use of a machine break the connection between the human and the output? And my view is that a lot of AI output should be uncopyrightable, because it doesn’t reflect human authorship, which we’ve rarely considered before, but have sometimes had to decide, for example, what about a photograph?
Source: Casey Goes to the White House + The Copyright Battle Over Artificial Intelligence + HatGPT
Revisiting the cdot on CAsey Goes to the White House + The Copyright Battle Over Artificial Intelligence + HatGPT
So that is quite a shock, right? When we talk about this on the show it seems new and it has been in the context of that. But what about it struck you as conventional?
[LAUGHS]: Yes. So we decided to bring in Rebecca Tushnet. She is a professor at Harvard Law School. She works in the field of intellectual property and copyright law. I also read, according to her bio, that she is an expert on the law of engagement rings —
Yes. On the other hand, that is not true. But on the other, the core claim, the one that you mentioned at the top of this segment, is allowed to go forward. And so we are going to see these two sides hash it out, at least a little bit, about whether the artists have been wronged here in a way that can get them some money.
Source: Casey Goes to the White House + The Copyright Battle Over Artificial Intelligence + HatGPT
Why do I wear a tie? Casey Goes to the White House + The Copyright Battle Over Artificial Intelligence + HatGPT
This is a big question in the artificial intelligence industry right now. We are using these tools. We’re thinking, hmm, on some level, I actually helped make this thing without my consent. Uh, where’s my cut?
I will wear a tie next time. (LAUGHING) Actually, I have to say, our producer, in what was a transparent effort to get me in trouble, asked one of our minders at the White House, don’t most people wear a tie here? And the man looked very uncomfortable, because I think he wanted to not embarrass me, but he was like, yeah, pretty much everybody wears a tie.
I mean, look, here’s the thing. Not to stand for the federal government, but when it wants to, the government can be pretty frickin’ majestic. As a kid, you’re exposed to a lot of mythology about American history. It is like, now, you are in the room, seeing it happen. I will do it at the risk of sounding cringe, but I enjoyed my trip to the White House and watched democracy in action.
Source: Casey Goes to the White House + The Copyright Battle Over Artificial Intelligence + HatGPT
Is there still hope in the executive order of the Department of Commerce to look into the case of the White House + the copyright battle over AI?
It does the same thing when dealing with the possibility of bio weapons. I think it’s a good idea for them to identify what sort of version of this thing it might be easy to do with a much more powerful version, and then develop some mitigations today.
It’s not a horrible problem today, but it might very well be in a few years. The government is making sure that it’s ahead of that. And the hope would be, well, maybe they’re able to develop some authenticity standards, so that when the stuff becomes more serious, we are prepared, right?
I believe that is true. I think there is still hope in this executive order. For example, it talks about using the Department of Commerce to try to develop content authenticity standards for the very meaningful reason of wanting to ensure that when the government communicates to its citizens, that citizens know that the communication actually came from the government. That’s kind of an existential problem for the government.
Source: Casey Goes to the White House + The Copyright Battle Over Artificial Intelligence + HatGPT
The Casey Goes to the White House + Executive Order ai Copyright (with an Appendix by Rachel Cohn, David Land, and Emily Lang)
One thing we know about the history of regulation in this country is that it’s almost always the biggest regulations that are passed in the wake of terrible damage. Right? Dodd-Frank had to be passed in the aftermath of the financial markets collapsing. A lot of our labor laws and labor protections came after things like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, when people died because there were not adequate safety protections at their workplace.
Nell Gallogly is the audience editor. Video production by Ryan Manning and Dylan Bergeson. Special thanks goes to Paula Szuchman, Pui-Wing Tam, and Jeff Miranda. You can tell us at hardfork@ny Times.com.
“Hard Fork” is produced by Rachel Cohn and Davis Land. We had help this week from Emily Lang. We’re edited by Jen Poyant. This is an episode that was fact-checked by a person. Today’s show was engineered by Rowan Niemisto, original music by Elisheba Ittoop, Sophia Lanman, Rowan Niemisto, and Dan Powell.
Source: Casey Goes to the White House + The Copyright Battle Over Artificial Intelligence + HatGPT
The Last Fate of Waymo: When a Barf Bag became a Glimpse over the Uber-Phienix Collider
I had no idea that the ride was very smooth. I was like, should I be expecting turbulence? Should I be buckling up extra tight? What is happening here? Well, all right. That is the last thing for Hat GPT.
This had become a beloved pastime for the people of this fair city. You’re out of luck if you can’t find a Waymo. It is true. I noticed that they now come with barf bags, which was a new thing that they had in the past.
I think it is not for turbulence. I think it’s for drunk people. I think it was a special event. There must be a story behind this. If you have — because if you vomit in an Uber, the driver has to clean it up, and they can charge you a cleaning fee.
Source: Casey Goes to the White House + The Copyright Battle Over Artificial Intelligence + HatGPT
The Sacramento-Cruise tragedy: The American self-driving car accident is a bad blow to the Autonomous Driving Industry
I think in general, regulators are just very on high alert for anything dangers involving self-driving cars. But this is a big blow to Cruise, I would say, which has struggled to convince people that its rides are safe. There have been many reports of traffic jams caused by Cruise vehicles.
The safe street rebels have won. This was what the future liberals wanted. We are left without these cars. This particular accident is very controversial. The victim was hit by another car before this happened.
“Cruise stops all driverless taxi operations in the United States.” The New York Times has something here. Cruise said last week that it would stop all US self-drive operations after California regulators told it to stop operating in the state.
Source: Casey Goes to the White House + The Copyright Battle Over Artificial Intelligence + HatGPT
How Do You Wanna Get Your Obituary Written Up? Casey Goes to the White House + The Copyright Battle Over Artificial Intelligence + HatGPT
All right, and now, we actually want to poll our listeners. Who do you think is to blame? Do you believe it was the humans or the artificial intelligence? There will be a poll underneath the article.
A Microsoft spokesperson told “The Guardian,” “We have deactivated Microsoft-generated polls for all news articles, and we are investigating the cause of the inappropriate content. A poll should not have appeared alongside an article of this nature, and we are taking steps to prevent this kind of error from reoccurring in the future.” What type of content is appropriate to have a stupid poll next to it?
It’s so dystopian. Oh, my god. Imagine you live a dignified life. You accomplish some things. Your obituary gets written up in a major newspaper. They attach a poll to it. Was Casey a good person? Are you ready to sound off in the comments?
I have this theory that the use of generative AI in news — it just — it always trends toward crap. You know what I mean? You think that it is so cheap and futuristic because you have this idea. And let’s put it into practice, and we’ll show innovative we are. And in practice, it always just trends toward crap. So this is —
And then, like, we know that they are very big on AI right now. So maybe they’re slapping, like, AI sort of things around the stories that they’re aggregating. Don’t do this if you’re writing about people dying. It should be very easy.
Oh, god. This sucks so much. Like, I sort of vaguely have a sense of how this could have happened, right? Microsoft runs msn.com There are some other news-aggregators. It pulls in stories from all over the place.
It was next to the article. The poll asked, what is the cause of the woman’s death? Readers were then asked to choose from three options — murder, accident, or suicide.
Source: Casey Goes to the White House + The Copyright Battle Over Artificial Intelligence + HatGPT
Is it a good legal argument for the corporations that manipulate the models to make infringing material? Absolutely. And how the next Mission Impossible movie might make a real difference
Yeah. Here’s what I’m going to say. I wish the next Mission Impossible movie would tell us how Congress succeeded in passing a law and inspire a lot of us to do literally anything. It would be great for this country.
And he stopped and was basically like, forget your family. It can fool you. He’s like — he’s like, he says, I look at these things, and I think, when the hell did I say that? That’s actually a direct quote.
One of the arguments heard from these companies is that they only make tools. The use of them can be illegal or not. But either way, we are shielded. Is it a good legal argument?
In general, yes. And so some of my questions are about the tweaked models that create infringing material or people are making, say, to generate porn. But in general, they are taking the models, and then tweaking them themselves to do that. And that’s on them.
Source: Casey Goes to the White House + The Copyright Battle Over Artificial Intelligence + HatGPT
Paying the Artists: The Casey Goes to the White House + The Copyright Battle Over Artificial Intelligence + HatGPT
For many years in our society, the artists and the writers have been living on easy street. But now, finally, along come these new technologies to take them down a peg, and they’re actually going to have to work for a living. So sorry to the artists and the writers out there.
You can’t solve a problem of economic structure by handing out rights to somebody who doesn’t actually have market power to exercise. The publisher will still say, if you want to publish with me, you have to give me all the rights. And you will say, I would love to be in print, so you’ll do that, which is why I think we need to talk about how we pay artists generally, rather than thinking that we can fix it with AI.
Right. Well, fascinating. And I hope we can have you back if the courts do upend our entire fair use doctrine and push these companies out of business. But —
You know, at the old Facebook offices, they had a big jar of them. I would grab a couple of candy when I was going down there.
Do you think they had a secret dossier on you that was like, Casey Newton from “Platformer” loves Peppermint Patties. Let’s get a big bowl out so he’ll be more favorable to us.
Those places buy so many things. They don’t need to bother with a report. You walk in. They’re like, oh, what’s your favorite food? Lobster bisque? We have that.
Source: Casey Goes to the White House + The Copyright Battle Over Artificial Intelligence + HatGPT
“Nothing Forever”: A Game About Artificial Intelligence and Hat GPT (with an Appearance by a Lady Goes to the White House)
One of our wonderful listeners said she is excited to see if there is a hat for Hat GPT. And now, we can actually just show, indeed, that there is a hat.
Absolutely. The show is healthy and thriving due to the fact that the hat will become more and more elaborate over time.
Hat GPT, of course, is the game where we draw news stories about technology out of a hat, and we generate plausible-sounding language about them until one of us gets sick of the other one talking and says, stop generating.
The computer program is broken, maybe forever. This one is from a media company. And this is about “Nothing Forever,” the 24/7 endless AI-generated episode of “Seinfeld” that has been running on a Twitch live stream for many months.
But you know, there’s something beautiful about a show that was famously about nothing, being recreated as an AI project that, over time, just evolved into almost literally nothing, and then got more popular when it did.
Source: Casey Goes to the White House + The Copyright Battle Over Artificial Intelligence + HatGPT
The Blue Sea Frontier: An Optical Barge-Based Computing Platform and the Biden Administration’s Executive Order on Big Artificial Intelligence
Alright, Kevin, all right. This next story is a tweet from something called Dell Complex, which describes something called the “Blue sea frontier compute cluster,” which is a barge. Are you familiar with a barge-based compute platform?
[LAUGHS]: So I saw this going around on social media the other day. I think it’s a sort of augmented reality corporation. I believe it is an art project, but it is basically people saying that they are so mad about the Biden administration’s executive order on big artificial intelligence that they are going to build a floating machine.
The project at the center of the controversy was a floating retail store that would travel from port to port.
[LAUGHS]: OK. I think of old-timey movies where people are waving at the ships as they come in, but it is just like a giant GOOGLE store pulling up with new Pixels.
Source: Casey Goes to the White House + The Copyright Battle Over Artificial Intelligence + HatGPT
Joe Biden became more worried about artificial intelligence after seeing a movie: Why do you think that voice cloning is terrifying? (Revisited version)
(LAUGHING) Stop generating. All right. The White House deputy said Joe Biden grew more worried about artificial intelligence after watching a movie. This is from “Variety.”
Bruce Reed is the deputy chief of staff for the White House and according to him, Joe Biden became worried and alarmed after he learned about the terrifying technology of voice cloning.
You know, it didn’t, although he talked — he appeared to deviate from the script when he was giving his remarks. It is possible that it could fool your family because it is only a three-second clip of your voice.