EGAIR – European Guild for Artificial Intelligence Regulation

I keep thinking that copyright lasts too long. It seems to me like any regulation around AI training is most likely to benefit a small handful of giant corporations, which will be the only ones that can afford to license content and train newer models. And the small handful of mega corporations that own the rights to most modern media will get their payday. In the end culture ends up being owned and controlled by a few big corporate interests.

I'm sympathetic to artists that want to exclude their works from giant training datasets that primarily end up benefiting the big players in AI without giving anything back. In a way, the first big digital data heist on mankind was executed by social media. Founders of various social media sites became extremely rich thanks to regular people's content being posted and shared (often illegally), without giving anything back to creators.

It's amusing that they actually use the word guild. If the medieval guilds had their way London would still only have one bridge. The irony here is that creatives have an advantage that workers in every other industry lack. Humans value and will continue to value artisinally produced goods. Creatives will always have that in a way that 18th Century weavers and spinners did not. That appreciation also leads to the creative industries being subsidised essentially everywhere in a way that is likely to increase over time rather than decreasing.

Will the rise of AI reduce opportunities for creatives? Almost certainly, but unlike essentially all other industries, it won't be wiped out by the rise of automation because humans won't stop liking things that are created by humans. As in music, there will be a shift to performance where customers / clients are engaged in the creative process. In many ways, it will be a return to something like the golden age of portraiture as people pay for engagement.

There are huge opportunities for creatives in the age of AI to create new art forms, created in new ways for new kinds of consumer. Creatives can choose to engage with that or to throw sabots. As London's liverymen show, guilds cannot stop the tide, the opportunity is to become something new that floats on the rising waters.

The manifesto, in summary:

1. Create a new type of copyright called "training right".

2. This "training right" also applies to names.

3. This "training right" also applies to all usage with AI, even if it doesn't involve training (e.g. as an input to the AI software, such as Img2Img).

4. All AI-generated materials to be captioned as such, and all their activities catalogued and logged.

5. Public domain is no longer public domain (public domain has no "training rights" by default), and freely licensed media is no longer freely licensed (freely licensed media has no "training rights" by default) because "it would not have been possible to foresee its use in a dataset to train an AI model".

This collective of stooges of the European content industry seems to be somewhat irrelevant. Never even heard of one of their "prominent" supporters. This seems like one of the thousand attempts to protect the very mediocre European domestic content industry. As a German, I have seen so many of such initiatives, often even funded by universities or state near bodies.

what the fresh hell is this now? What kind of unrealistic and dumb regulations will they now release with yet another costly initiative that European taxpayers don't even want or know exist

This talks about licenses and stuff, but it seems to forget what the current status quo is.

> People: I don't want my stuff to be used to train models.

> Companies: To use our service you grant us perpetual license to use your stuff in whatever way we want, and also the right to sublicense so we can sell your stuff to others while granting them the same rights.

> People: Sure, here you go! Here's my art/code/voice/face/photos/videos/telemetry!

> Companies: [use data according to the license that was granted to them]

> People: pikachu_face.jpg

So enforcing what the manifesto wants to enforce wouldn't change much, if anything at all.

Disclaimer: I have pirated others' stuff (e.g. anime, manga, novels, music, I have shared memes with others (that's distribution), etc), so I can't complain when others pirate my stuff without being a hypocrite. The most I can do myself is call them out for profiting off it.

I posted the website which seems somehow not updated; this reel is how it was brought to my attention: https://www.instagram.com/p/C8l-9RbshIE/

Copyright is such nonsense. No, you don't have a right that humans machines/can't learn from your artistry, that is just absurd.

Europe is hell bent on being left behind techwise eh?

"Currently 8.371 people signed the manifesto. (updated 2023/11/04)" hasn't been updated in a while?

How about an EGAI first my dudes. I keep getting embarrassed to share a continent with these people.

They're readying their sabots to throw in the machinery.

Is there another guild that lobbies for AI and against copyright monopolies?

I find people care way too much about material consequences. People should just care about ideals, no matter the actual consequences.

This is morally right, it doesn't matter what will happen in the material world. We will always have God and spirituality to comfort us.