Tools don’t commit crimes

Player Piano

A man walks up to a Steinway baby grand. He sits himself on the bench, grabs his phone, and begins recording. He then presses a sequence of keys and the piano begins to play Maxence Cyrin’s Where is my Mind. The man played the piece perfectly. To anyone listening who is familiar with Cyrin’s rendition, it is indistinguishable. After finishing the song, the man halts the recording. He posts it to his YouTube channel and collects revenue.

A man walks up to a Dell computer. He sits himself on the chair, grabs his phone, and begins recording; opens a web-browser; starts a new tab; and navigates to chat.openai.com. He then presses a sequence of keys and the computer displays the first page of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. He reads the page aloud and then pauses the recording. Another sequence of keys and the second page of the book appears. He begins recording and reads the page. This continues until he records the entire book. He posts it to his YouTube channel and collects revenue.

Both those scenarios infringed copyright. But the chatbot and the piano itself did exactly what the operators demanded that they do. Do we blame Steinway and OpenAI for crimes committed by someone else using their tools? Current plaintiffs in the AI lawsuits would emphatically tell you Yes! The New York Times, Thompson Reuters, various specific artists, Universal Music Publishing Group, all would like to have us believe that because a tool is capable of reproducing copyrighted material without authorization, then it has already committed copyright infringement. But tools do not commit crimes. People do.

AR’s, AK’s, & LLM’s

That sounds familiar, doesn’t it? We have all heard that same line from the gun lobby. However, there’s a key difference between Second Amendment arguments and the AI situation: chiefly, it’s a matter of the design of these products. ChatGPT, Bard, Bing, etc. were not designed with the express purpose of committing large-scale copyright infringement. The designers of Steinway pianos intended the pianos for creating music. The designers of Large-Language models intended their creations to respond to prompts and sound convincingly human. That’s it. AR-15’s and AK-47’s though were designed expressly for the purpose of extinguishing human life, which in the vast majority of cases involves breaking the law here in the US.

Hate the Players, not the Game

The solution to protect the profits of artists, corporations, or creators in general is not to penalize the tool-makers. Instead, we should focus on going after the people committing the crimes. The users are the problem here, not the machines.

That’s not to say that Microsoft, Google, and the other tech giants have no duty to minimize the methods by which people can rip-off creators. The companies have a duty to make it reasonably difficult for copyright infringers. They’ve implemented some guardrails already. That’s why in the current litigation, plaintiffs resorted to contrived prompts to get their desired outcome. But it’s trivial to find an exact match between two strings in terms of algorithmic complexity. The main reason why they haven’t done that is because adding more steps uses more compute and therefore adds even more cost to a currently unprofitable venture. Probably not as costly as the hourly bill-rate of their legal teams right now though.

Luke Data Engineer

Luke A man on a crusade against apathy. I created this website on April Fool's Day 2024, after noticing the sharp uptick in garbage writing on the internet. My day job is as a data something. I also do consulting work for small-business' trying to modernize their data situations and make a buck off them. I write a lot about technology, economics, my own antics, and opinions.  If my writing has entertained, informed, aggravated, or made you reconsider anything, then I consider this blog a fantastic success.

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