Everyone has been all up in arms about AI crap, chatGPT, ai art generators,
and what not. Please, don't feed these things. I'm probably once again
preaching to the choir here, as most people on gopher/gemini/etc... are
already aware of this, so I won't go too much into detail, but if you're
looking for a good writeup on why to avoid AI tools, check out sunset's
gemlog entry "Just say no to robo God" (1) - it's hard enough for artists
to make a living in capitalist society as it is. But let me talk a bit more
about the copyleft licensing issues...
For those who don't know, Github's AI coding tool, copilot is trained on
all public code on github, and will spit out bits of code as a coding aid,
which also is a service they sell to for-profit companies. What this means
is that in the end, for example, whatever public GPL licensed software
you've put up on github may end up in proprietary software. This obviously
violates the terms of the GPL license, but their argument is that the terms
you agree to by using github state they can use your code like this, and
that the code AI spits out is a new unique work (it isn't, of course - and
it's trivial to get it to spit out an exact verbatim copy of your code).
And needless to say this is hugely problematic.
I'll go over some various arguments I've heard when talking to people about
this below. I know I'm not going to change anyone's mind but let me go over
some of it anyway. Conversation is important.
" People crying over AI violating GPL are silly because you'd think they'd
want the code to be available to everyone "
- We do! That's just the problem. If it ends up in proprietary code,
any improvements to that code won't be shared with anyone. Heck, even
worse. They could claim the code is theirs, and sue you for your original
work. This argument is akin to the people who cry they want less
governement, and less governement rules - but in practice what ends up
happening is that unregulated corporations end up in control of
everything and everyone, which works out to be the opposite of freedom in
the end. Sure, I don't want the governement to tell me what to do either,
but I do want them to limit the power of corporations and make rules like
"food needs to be edible". What we've seen is that corporations will try
to drive up profit no matter what, to the maximum extent allowable by law
and the market. Which in the end means that over time, across the board,
everything goes down in maintainability, sustainability and quality. The
market part of that equasion is easily manipulated, as it turns out
people are easy to fool, between marketing and social media and public
opinion manipulation. So the only thing standing in their way is the law.
Companies who make better products end up undercut in price so much, that
they can't survive. So the only thing that tends to survive is cheaper,
crappier, and in higher volume. You see this in software/tech but also in
all other industries. Our food is barely edible anymore. There's no more
craftmanship in anything. All products are made cheap and in bulk. That's
what unregulated industry gets you.
"
" I don't give a crap about GPL because all you're doing is giving code for
corporations to use and get free labour out of. "
This is basically the "don't use any license" argument Tomasino put forth
in an older phlog post of his (don't remember the link, I don't think it
was on the main tilde.black phlog) -I love tomasino to death, but I think
this was a bad take imho - (and yes, it is possible to disagree with
someone and still like them (*gasp*))- copyleft licenses actually prevent
exactly this. Most open source licenses like MIT etc,... however do not.
But the open source community has always embraced big corporations.
The Free Software community lesser so. One of the many reasons there's
always been some friendly tension between the two. As it turns out, when
corporations are forced to share their changes/additions to the code,
they suddenly are a lot less interested in the fuits of your labour. I
think copyleft can fix the problems Tomasino pointed out to some degree.
But most importantly, if they were to truly adhere to the GPL license and
publish their improvements then this is a good thing. Because now instead
of an act of exploitation it becomes an act of contribution. But this is
not happening though. Instead, what we're seeing is a lot of people
calling for the death of the GPL since that's the thought that's been
planted in many a software developer who've worked at these places. I
don't want to publish my work without a license, because I /want/ to see
other people improve on my work and contribute back - and using copyleft
is a signal and indication and invitation for them to do so, while at the
same time, for the most part, it keeps the corporate exploiters away
because they don't want to share.
" We shouldn't fight this because we don't want to endorse copyright, which
is an evil broken system. "
- Of course copyright is an evil and broken system. The beauty of
copyleft licenses is that it uses the broken system against itself. And
yes, we want it changed/fixed/gone/whatever, but until then, this is the
system we're stuck with, and the system we exist within. Imho, this is
kind of a nihilist argument that's like saying we shouldn't wake up in
the morning because we'll have to go to bed again in the evening anyway.
We're not endorsing copyright by using it against itself, nor making it
stronger in any way. It's not like we have a lot of options here. It's
corporations who buy the laws and politicians and have all the resources.
We need any tool we can get.
What can we do?
Would it be worth adding a 'no use in AI training' clause to copyleft
licenses? What would such a license look like? IANAL, but I think that
could get tricky. You'd also have to prohibit publishing the code on
services like github where the TOS give them the rights to use the code for
AI training ingestion. But I think it's a thought exercise and conversation
that needs to happen.
1: gemini://arcanesciences.com/gemlog/22-12-14/
Please donate to this campaign and/or help spread the word:
https://www.gofundme.com/f/protecting-artists-from-ai-technologies
