It's off the old block. Just don't put it on your shoulder.
riskable
joined 2 years ago
You bring up a great point! When someone does that: Painting a replica and passing it off as their own, what law have they violated? They have committed fraud. That's a counterfeit.
Is making a counterfeit stealing? No! It's counterfeitting. That is it's own category of law.
It's also a violation of the owner's copyright but let's talk about that too: If I pay an artist to copy someone's work, who is the copyright violator? Me, or the artist that painted it? Neither! It's a trick question, because copyright law only comes into force when something is distributed. As long as those works never get distributed/viewed to/by the public, it's neither here nor there.
The way AI works is the same as if you took a book you purchased, threw it in a blender, then started pasting chunks of words out of it in a ransom note.
Woah! Piracy is not considered stealing. The MPAA and RIAA made that argument over and over and over again in the 90s and early 2000s and they lost. Thank the gods!
You would download a car!
If piracy was stealing, we'd all be waiting for our chance to watch TV shows in a queue of thousands.
Copyright violations are not theft. They never were and they never will be. Because no one is deprived of anything when something is copied. In theory, there could've been a lost sale as a result but study after study has shown that piracy actually improves sales of copyrighted works.
When an AI is trained on images that YOU—the artist—posted to the public Internet for the world to see it will either increment or decrement a floating point value by like 0.01. That's it! That's all it does.
How can that be considered "stealing"‽ It's absurd.
That's not "upscaling". That's having the AI color it in for you. Like a comic artist who has a colorer (person that literally does that).
Upscaling just makes the image bigger (resolution-wise). It uses the same exact technology as regular AI image generation though 🤷
There's degrees to everything. AI haters are at the point where they're arguing with digital artists over what counts as art and it's getting insane.
Don't say, "stolen". It's the wrong word. "Copied" is closer but really, "trained an AI model with images freely available on the Internet" is more accurate but doesn't sound sinister.
When you steal something, the original owner doesn't have it anymore. AIs aren't stealing anything. They're sort of copying things but again, not really. At the heart of every AI LLM or image model is a random number generator. They aren't really capable of copying things exactly unless the source material somehow gets a ridiculously high "score" when training. Such as a really popular book that gets quoted in a million places on the Internet and in other literature (and news articles, magazines, etc... anything that was used to train the AI).
Someone figured out that there's so much Harry Potter quotes and copies in OpenAI's training set that you could trick it into outputting something like 70% of the first book, one very long and specific prompt at a time (thousand of times). That's because of how the scoring works, not because of any sort of malicious intent to violate copyright on the part of OpenAI.
Nobody's stuff is being stolen.
Probably an anti-counterfeit watermark.
Data centers typically use closed loop cooling systems but those do still lose a bit of water each day that needs to be replaced. It's not much—compared to the size of the data center—but it's still a non-trivial amount.
A study recently came out (it was talked about extensively on the Science VS podcast) that said that a long conversation with an AI chat bot (e.g. ChatGPT) could use up to half a liter of water—in the worst case scenario.
This statistic has been used in the news quite a lot recently but it's a bad statistic: That water usage counts the water used by the power plant (for its own cooling). That's typically water that would come from ponds and similar that would've been built right alongside the power plant (your classic "cooling pond"). So it's not like the data centers are using 0.5L of fresh water that could be going to people's homes.
For reference, the actual data center water usage is 12% of that 0.5L: 0.06L of water (for a long chat). Also remember: This is the worst-case scenario with a very poorly-engineered data center.
Another stat from the study that's relevant: Generating images uses much less energy/water than chat. However, generating videos uses up an order of magnitude more than both (combined).
So if you want the lowest possible energy usage of modern, generative AI: Use fast (low parameter count), open source models... To generate images 👍
You know it was a joke, right? 😀
Pam Bondi couldn't put together a Lego set let alone a cash bounty system.
The power use from AI is orthogonal to renewable energy. From the news, you'd think that AI data centers have become the number one cause of global warming. Yet, they're not even in the top 100. Even at the current pace of data center buildouts, they won't make the top 100... ever.
AI data center power utilization is a regional problem specific to certain localities. It's a bad idea to build such a data center in certain places but companies do it anyway (for economic reasons that are easy to fix with regulation). It's not a universal problem across the globe.
Aside: I'd like to point out that the fusion reactor designs currently being built and tested were created using AI. Much of the advancements in that area are thanks to "AI data centers". If fusion power becomes a reality in the next 50 years it'll have more than made up for any emissions from data centers. From all of them, ever.
Regulate data centers already! Make it mandatory that they be self-powered by renewable energy. Problem solved.
Finally, a listicle that could save ~~lives~~ Christmas.
👍
Impossible to untangle the knots in it.