The AI tools are often representing the output as something their customers can use without restriction. I'm pretty sure that wouldn't work in your analogy. If I'm an agency and a customer asks for jingles, can I recite large parts of lyrics of copyrighted songs for them to use...as if I made them up?
Google image search produces copyrighted and restricted use images. On clicking an image it includes a little caveat warning “Images may be subject to copyright. Learn More” - but no specific attribution or copyright claim. It’s possible if you go to the source where Google found it you’ll find the attribution there but also very likely you won’t.
If an AI tool just says ‘this might be subject to copyright’, is it all good?
Words to that effect appear, for example, in the GitHub copilot terms and conditions.
Yeah I’m understanding the nuance much more now. There is a difference between: is it okay to use copyrighted content to produce OpenAI’s product, and is a verbatim reproduction of a poem fair use.
That’s a naive ‘what color are my bits’[1] mistake - classic software developer mindset.
Level one programmer naïveté is just ‘bits are bits, it doesn’t matter where they come from. Bitwise identical things are indistinguishable’.
Level 2 naïveté is when you accept that bits have color depending on how they came to be arranged thus, and that there are processes that get rid of the old color on some bits, and replace it with a new one. But then you figure - like a programmer - that if you compose that process with some other process you can get rid of the colors you don’t like.
Enlightenment is realizing that the law cares not one jot for the specific processes you apply to bits or their colors but criminalizes (or at least proscribes) particular actions and cares about things like intent.
How is this any different than something like Photoshop? You can recreate (and therefore copy) a piece of art and it's infringement, but not on the part of Photoshop. Yet, Adobe is still well within the right to say you can use what you create with Photoshop. Why can't AI tool makers have the same claim?
