Three US Senators introduced bill that aims to rein in the rise and use of AI generated content and deepfakes by protecting the work of artists, songwriters and journalists.
The recently introduced Content Original Protection and Integrity from Edited and Deepfaked Media (COPIED) Act is a bipartisan effort authorized by Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), according to a press alert issued by Blackburn’s office.
The COPIED ACT would, if enacted, create transparency standards through the National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST) to set guidelines for “content provenance information, watermarking, and synthetic content detection,” according to the press release.
Artist is defined as someone who can afford to defend their rights in court
It’s great for the guild of lawyers, they would describe the situation as billable hours…
It’s a bill to create technical standards by which anyone can mark their digital files with a rough analogue of a robots.txt that says “don’t train on this file,” and a requirement for AI training to obey that standard. It’s for everyone, because copyright is for everyone who creates pretty much anything.
Labour rights, privacy rights, antitrust enforcement, cooyrights, DRM, maybe more.
I’d just argue that it’s hard to say that this law is more or less important than that law, because it will depend on who you are. If you’re a tech worker you’d likely be focused on labour rights, if you’re an author it might be copyrights, for example. So we should protect all whose rights are violated.
The reason I’m skeptical of a copyright-based solution is that there’s a massive potential for collateral damage.
Like, the overall process of creating ChatGPT is not that different from the process of using ML to analyze how language use has changed over time, which I think is a completely positive thing for humanity and probably doesn’t ruffle anyone’s feathers.
I’m not sure how you write legislation that zeroes in on the exact harms posed by ChatGPT et. al. but doesn’t endanger these other efforts… and also doesn’t leave open an alternative, indirect route for OpenAI, Stability, et. al. to accomplish the same end goal without technically infringing.
There’s also the “giving a bullied kid more lunch money” criticism that Cory Doctorow is fond of using:
After 40 years of expanded copyright, we have a creative industry that’s larger and more profitable than ever, and yet the share of income going to creative workers has been in steady decline over that entire period. Every year, the share of creative income that creative workers can lay claim to declines, both proportionally and in real terms.
As with the mystery of Spotify’s payments, this isn’t a mystery at all. You just need to understand that when creators are stuck bargaining with a tiny, powerful cartel of movie, TV, music, publishing, streaming, games or app companies, it doesn’t matter how much copyright they have to bargain with. Giving a creative worker more copyright is like giving a bullied schoolkid more lunch-money. There’s no amount of money that will satisfy the bullies and leave enough left over for the kid to buy lunch. They just take everything.
Telling creative workers that they can solve their declining wages with more copyright is a denial that creative workers are workers at all. It treats us as entrepreneurial small businesses, LLCs with MFAs negotiating B2B with other companies. That’s how we lose.
You might be interested to see how FTC Chair Lina Khan thinks about this stuff, from a position which has a great deal of labor and antitrust regulatory power but no say in copyright: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mh8Z5pcJpg
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Not an “artist, songwriter or journalist” You’re on your own
You’re free to be pillaged for you data by ai
There is no ai without stolen data
I’m curious how they’re defining artist too. The definition for tax purposes is already a mess that barely covers anyone.
Artist is defined as someone who can afford to defend their rights in court
It’s great for the guild of lawyers, they would describe the situation as billable hours…
It’s a bill to create technical standards by which anyone can mark their digital files with a rough analogue of a robots.txt that says “don’t train on this file,” and a requirement for AI training to obey that standard. It’s for everyone, because copyright is for everyone who creates pretty much anything.
We desperately need AI regulation, but it needs to be focused on labor rights, privacy rights, and antitrust enforcement. Not copyright and DRM.
Why can’t we have all of it?
Maybe we can? Depends what you mean by “all of it”. Care to elaborate?
Labour rights, privacy rights, antitrust enforcement, cooyrights, DRM, maybe more.
I’d just argue that it’s hard to say that this law is more or less important than that law, because it will depend on who you are. If you’re a tech worker you’d likely be focused on labour rights, if you’re an author it might be copyrights, for example. So we should protect all whose rights are violated.
The reason I’m skeptical of a copyright-based solution is that there’s a massive potential for collateral damage.
Like, the overall process of creating ChatGPT is not that different from the process of using ML to analyze how language use has changed over time, which I think is a completely positive thing for humanity and probably doesn’t ruffle anyone’s feathers.
I’m not sure how you write legislation that zeroes in on the exact harms posed by ChatGPT et. al. but doesn’t endanger these other efforts… and also doesn’t leave open an alternative, indirect route for OpenAI, Stability, et. al. to accomplish the same end goal without technically infringing.
There’s also the “giving a bullied kid more lunch money” criticism that Cory Doctorow is fond of using:
Source: https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/21/off-the-menu/
You might be interested to see how FTC Chair Lina Khan thinks about this stuff, from a position which has a great deal of labor and antitrust regulatory power but no say in copyright: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mh8Z5pcJpg
I can’t imagine who possibly lobbied for this and why it’s focused only on artists and journalists