This New York Times story is behind a paywall, but for those who can read it, I think it shows a clear parallel between concerns of photographers, illustrators, videographers, musicians about AI tools building a business on the backs of other people's work without compensating them.

This story is about writers for movies and TV: "Will a Chatbot Write the Next �Succession�? As labor contract negotiations heat up in Hollywood, unions representing writers and actors seek limits on artificial intelligence." 98% voted to approve a strike.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/business/media/writers-guild-hollywood-ai-chatgpt.html

One significant difference is that writers have a union representing them.  There are various points of leverage mentioned in the story which don't apply to stock agency contributors. One is the ruling that you can't copyright something generated by AI (referring to visual art) which may help keep human writers employed as the lack of copyright protection would discourage large financial investments in a project - anyone could then just copy it and the company with the investment would have no recourse.

There's also the writer's credit: "...it falls to the Writers Guild and not the studio to determine who receives a writer�s credit on a project, and that the union will guard this rite jealously. �We want to make sure that an A.I. is never one of those writers in the chain of title for a project,� "

So far, it seems that musicians and TV writers have large organizations who will go to bat for creator's rights; that may have benefits, if they succeed, for others without any heavyweight in their corner.

I'm beginning to see some common themes in the arguments for or against being able to copyright AI-created works, who is the creator of a work, and various analogies to past technologies and whether they produced original work.

Here's another article on the subject, again behind a paywall, arguing that the US copyright office's decision in the graphic novel was wrong. I don't agree with the point of view - I'm still stuck on the fact that none of the current generative AI tools would be able to produce if they hadn't ripped off masses of work to "train" themselves. The comments are lengthy and in many ways more interesting that the opinion piece The author also wrote �Creators Take Control: How NFTs Revolutionize Art, Business, and Entertainment.�. I haven't read that, but it doesn't surprise me that these two points of view come from the same person.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/04/27/artificial-intelligence-copyright-decision-misguided/

In talking about the use of prompts as creative intellectual labor, he writes:

"If the creator doesn�t like the result, she can refine the prompts � as Kashtanova did hundreds of times � until the image matches her intellectual conception. The more one uses prompts, the better one becomes at predicting the results. That�s why new jobs as prompt engineers have sprouted. Businesses seek the fruits of these creators� �intellectual labor.�"

The derivative nature of this creativity reminds me of the furor over Shepard Fairey's Hope poster (although that case was complicated by the fact that he lied about the source image in a legal action)

The article includes the by-now-common analogy to photography and discusses an 1884 supreme court case about a photograph of Oscar Wilde where the court concluded that photographs were not simple mechanical reproductions, but �representatives of original intellectual conceptions of the author.� I think the fallacy is in comparing the system behind generative AI to the equipment that takes a photograph (and even more off base if you include post-processing software that the creator of a photograph almost always uses. If generative AI systems were based on robots having gone out to paint and photograph Yosemite, the deep dark woods, etc., there'd be some fair comparison, but that's not what has been done.

The top three most liked comments on the article:

"Sorry dude. Copyright Office is right. You're wrong. Besides your analogies fail. A jazz artist is wholly creating their improvisations. A prompt "artist" is tweaking someone else's. In music that is called arranging not creating. Arrangements dont get copyrights."

"Exactly. I'm an engineer who does computer coding. If I ask chatGPT to create a code to, say, run a basic spectral analysis on gappy satellite altimetry data, using a specific non-FFT method, I absolutely SHOULD be allowed to USE the results (assuming they're right, which they might well not be for technical reasons, but I digress). But I surely shouldn't be able to COPYRIGHT that code. Because I didn't write it. It's literally made from a computer recombination of the work of other previous coders and mathematicians. It's not "mine", even if I can use it for free.

There's nothing sacred about art that makes it different than anything else. If you want to copyright it, make it yourself. Otherwise, be grateful that you can use the skill of other people (AI programmers and real artists) to get your work done well for you."

"And this is generally true of the current machine learning trained on big data model of AI. Every sentence, every image, comes from recombining the words and images the AI is trained on, a huge portion of which was nominally protected by copyright. Current AI models are the worst enemy of copyright in history."

The current head of the US Federal Trade Commission wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times (paywall) but there's a good summary in Ars Technica

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/05/we-must-regulate-ai-ftc-chair-khan-says/

There aren't very many comments in the NY Times - all comments are moderated, but even so only 267? An article about Tucker Carlson's texts had 2617 Comments are pretty negative about her approach - either because they are opposed to regulation in principle or because they don't see anything sufficiently specific about how to rein in tech companies. An example:

"There isn't a single specific suggestion in this article about how to regulate the use of AI.  It just lists the problems with which we are all already familiar.  If the head of a federal agency is going to place an article in the NYT, it should offer more than this."

There was one comment about content creators: "not a peep in this opinion about protection of intellectual property and creators work.   Just like streaming music, no doubt the AI lobbyists are on the job right now, making sure govt looks the other way as their clients appropriate the value of creative work."

This Wall Street Journal article (paywall) is about AI and advertising - along with the turmoil resulting from the shift from traditional TV to streaming and how the advertising dollars are following (or not). The reason I think this might have an impact on stock agencies is that a good chunk of our licenses are for advertising uses.

Digital Video Publishers Tout AI and New Metrics at NewFronts Sales Events
https://www.wsj.com/articles/digital-video-publishers-tout-ai-and-new-metrics-at-newfronts-sales-events-97a42c4f

A couple of interesting quotes:

"Players in free ad-supported television or ad-supported video on demand, smart-TV manufacturers like LG and Samsung, premium video publishers and others at the NewFronts all reported growing viewership and sought to convince buyers they deserved video ad spending..."


"As Writers Guild members marched outside of Peacock�s presentation, in part protesting studios� reluctance to regulate AI-generated material in television and movies, media executives sold AI as a technology to elevate buyers� advertising deals.
Roku described a new AI-driven feature that scans programming on its ad-supported Roku Channel to match advertisers, their products and their campaigns with relevant scenes in shows and movies.
�Imagine promoting a new phone line in the ad break after every time E.T. phones home, or advertising an apparel line every time Tim Gunn says �make it work� on �Project Runway,�� Julian Mintz, Roku�s head of U.S. brand sales, told ad buyers.""

Here is a 34 year old writer who lost his income because of Chatgpt

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/139o1q6/lost_all_my_content_writing_contracts_feeling/

I've just read it. One particular sentence struck me, and I couldn't resist commenting (on site) :

"For me, writing is like taking a sh*t: I don't have a choice."

We all do that, we just don't sell it.

Take it easy, plumber is quite a dignified profession. Perhaps more than selling words...

However I suspect that's just a prank: check his grammar, his spelling, his style, and then ask yourselves if anyone could really make a living out of that.

 This is a legal decision on what level of transformation constitutes fair use. As fair use is one of the arguments offered as to why generative AI images trained on copyrighted work is legally OK, I think it's worth adding to this list

https://petapixel.com/2023/05/18/supreme-court-rules-andy-warhols-prince-art-is-copyright-infringement/
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/supreme-court-andy-warhol-prince-copyright-1235495647/
https://www.billboard.com/pro/andy-warhol-prince-supreme-court-copyright-case-ruling/
https://www.cooley.com/news/insight/2023/2023-05-18-supreme-court-rules-andy-warhols-prince-portraits-not-fair-use
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/may/18/andy-warhol-copyright-prince-paintings-lawsuit
https://variety.com/2023/music/news/andy-warhol-prince-images-supreme-court-copyright-1235617622/

i have wondered if it was written by Chatgtp as a prank, but thought there are too many mistakes....

you can ask  chatGPT to include grammatical mistakes, misspellings.

this was done in an experiment to see if teachers could detect which essays were ai generated - the teachers failed!

Quote from: cobalt on May 07, 2023, 21:21

i have wondered if it was written by Chatgtp as a prank, but thought there are too many mistakes....

you can ask  chatGPT to include grammatical mistakes, misspellings.

this was done in an experiment to see if teachers could detect which essays were ai generated - the teachers failed!

OMG!

Never thought about that possibility!

Thank you to everyone who keeps posting useful links here.

As things develop this will be our own little documentary for future stock historians�