They frame it as though it’s for user content, more likely it’s to train AI, but in fact it gives them the right to do almost anything they want - up to (but not including) stealing the content outright.
So, they want to create AI written and narrated audiobooks that use the voices of well known voice actors without paying them for the privilege? How is that supposed to stand in court?
It wouldn’t be to save the cheap coat of a voice actor.
It’s so they can play the audio to their AI for free without having to say it was fed a copywritten text. It would also get better at telling stories, depending on the quality it was fed.
But the main advantage is training it to follow a long verbal narrative. And decide if it’s better to transcribe it for full reference, or just make a summary as the story goes and risk missing an important bit.
Then to repeat it in the AI’s “own words”. This would make a huge loophole for exploiting famous authors. If you feed AI the text, the author can argue it was trained on it. If the AI just listened to it and makes a summary and remembers the structure. Derivative works of famous authors can be claimed to be no different than a human emulating popular authors that they had read.
They’re just trying to find a way around using the full text, and reading it aloud might be enough.
Make the policy change, see if they can get it to hold up in the courts. AKA normal business practices for corporate America.
Voices can’t be protected by copyright but there may be a legal avenue for someone like Morgan Freeman to sue if a voice is clearly a knock off of his voice AND he can make a case for it damaging his “brand”.
I’d be impressed though if AI can write a novel without directly referencing a fictional person, place or thing that someone else made up. Stable Diffusion, for example, can make a picture of dog wearing a tracksuit running on the side of a skyscraper made of pudding in the middle of a noodle hurricane. But it didn’t invent any of those individual components, it just combined them.
Now I want that image of the dog framed and hanging in my house.
Jesus, that’s dark.
Edit: oh, my eyes skipped the word “image”
“Now I want that of the dog framed and hanging in my house.”
Are ya sure your brain didn’t skip a few more words?
;-P
This is why we need laws for likeness rights. Every person should own exclusive commercial rights to their own face, voice, etc.
No. This is very likely about translations.
The idea that they’ll be creating an unofficial sequel to your audiobook and selling it without your permission or something is a pretty ridiculous leap that would be very unlikely to actually hold up in court.
Meanwhile no one had to pay me a royality if they use my picture and they call themselves a news service.
Yeah I think they’re trying to slip one on us to train AI but we’ll see how rightsholders respond.
Are they already doing this for podcasters?
Yes, they are creating “derivative works” of podcasts when they translate them into new languages using AI:
This will be an unpopular opinion here.
I’m not against AI but the rules have to be in laws and regulations. First, AI can’t use copyrighted material without paying for it. It can’t either use material without asking individually.
The second point is that AI can’t created copyrighted material. Whatever an AI created, it’s free of copyright and everyone can use it.
Third, an AI can’t be a blackbox. It has to be comprehensive how it works and what the AI is doing. A solution would be to have source available code.
Fourth, AI can’t violate laws, create and push misinformation, and material used for misinforming.
And, of course, anything created using AI has to be indentified as such.
The money is in what the AI can do, the quality of the result, and the quality of the code. All the other things isn’t valuable.
Your third point is an active research topic, we can’t explain exactly what generative (and other) models do beyond their generic operation.
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I imagine that if AI devs didn’t sneak around copying people’s works in bulk but instead asked for permission or paid for a license, artists wouldn’t hate it like they do now.
My gut feeling says that’s not entirely true. Generative AI has so many qualities that make could it offensive to so many people, I think we were going to see a pushback from artists regardless. The devs’ shitty training practices just happened to give the artists a particularly strong case for grievances.
Yeah artists were fine with publishing companies doing this since the dawn of literacy but this time it is completely different
Maybe they just want to include clips of the audio book in user’s yearly review thing.
That’s plausible and I’m a little rusty on my IP here but I would call that a fair use. Derivative works use existing work in a new way, where the added creativity is sufficient to make the new work itself copyrightable.
IIRC this is because Spotify wants to generate translations for these audiobooks in the original voices. At least, that’s what I think I remember from a long time ago.
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I remember reading about voice actors being asked to sell their voice for something aimed related. Could be this.
This is probably so that they can create translated versions of them, so if your audiobook is only in English and you upload it you can check a box to have it also be available in other languages you’d never have been serving otherwise.
It’s almost certainly expanding on the same service they added for podcasters:
(A translation is a derivative work.)
Likely. They want something for nothing - free translation without paying a translator, licensing an official translation, paying a voice actor, etc. If the TOS only said that it would already be extremely problematic.
In fact the language is so much more broad than that.
I mean, at a certain point this kind of thinking becomes like the MPAA’s math around thinking every person downloading a movie from a streaming service was a lost sale.
Yes, this would mean a massive expansion of translated audiobooks without the labor that traditionally would have gone into creating them.
But we don’t have translations for the majority of audiobooks in the majority of languages because the costs of that labor has historically outweighed the benefits of a potential expanded audience in niche languages for the long tail of audiobooks.
Personally, I’d rather live in a world where there’s broad accessibility to information for all people regardless of their native languages, rather than one in which humanity tears down its own tower of Babel to artificially preserve the status quo.
That’s fair, and I have no problem with authors employing machine translation in order to translate their works. However, I happen to think that that should be the writer’s decision.
Most authors would much rather employ a professional translator to get it right instead of a computer to approximate it. He
However, I happen to think that that should be the writer’s decision.
I don’t know why you think it won’t be.
What, you think Spotify is just going to do it without the uploader choosing whether the feature is turned on or not?
The podcast translations are opt-in. Why do you think these won’t be the same thing?
What’s Spotify?
WINK
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Guess it’s time to get back on the apple music train
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Am I missing something? To me this just seems like standard legalese to avoid petty lawsuits. The derivative works clause even give transcription as an example.
The moral objection part seems more strange but maybe it has something to do with playlists or tagging.
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