On this week’s episode, I talked to Alex Reisner about his pieces in the Atlantic highlighting the copyrighted material being hoovered into large language models to help AI chatbots simulate human speech. If you’re a screenwriter and would like to see which of your work has been appropriated to aid in the effort, click here; he has assembled a searchable database of nearly 140,000 movie and TV scripts that have been used without permission. (And you should read his other stories about copyright law reaching its breaking point and “the memorization problem.”) In this episode, we also got into the metaphysics of art and asked what sort of questions need to be asked as we hurtle toward the future. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend!
great episode! this is a very important topic for the very near term. tech companies should not be allowed to do something normal citizens cannot with copyrighted material. I can't even show a movie to the scouts without getting permission!
Definitely an interesting discussion. As a creative myself who also does corporate work, I do see the efficacy of distinguishing between using A.I. as a tool in noncreative tasks (resumes, transcribing, translation, etc.) vs. replacing humans in creative fields. One bone to pick with your characterization of opensubtitles.org, however: I suppose it is used in the way you say (i.e., for piracy of modern TV shows), but for me it's invaluable in gaining access to obscure foreign films that are otherwise unavailable in English. I would buy them on disc if I could--I'd even import them--but when that's not an option, finding a copy online and adding subtitles is the only way to go.
What an interesting topic. I did closed captioning in the early 2000s and it was fun work but we were required to have 98% accuracy. Modern captions suck! I’m also glad to hear more and more people recognizing that AI is not the great replacement for humans it has been touted to be. That doesn’t mean companies won’t do it, but then, we already knew companies are evil.
What's next?