A friend forwarded an article they came across about AI, which I found interesting, for different reasons than them. The article is about how an AI writing service got "caught" plagiarizing content, because the source was quite specific.
The first point I found interesting is that people still seem to think that AI is creating something new and unique. It is not. It is collecting the words of many others, and crushing it into a "line of best fit", essentially making a reduction of common themes that is only good enough to pass the inspection from the average layman, not those with specialized expertise and knowledge.
The article brings up the question of legal rights to content, as it is openly available fan fiction, created by individuals. The problem is that the AI services do not source their regurgitations and the AI developers like OpenAI are obviously not going to share the learning model openly, because that is their market value. So, while the AI tools are being leveraged to plagiarize content and then that content is monetized, the original creator doesn't even get a mention.
Even if the source work in question was never meant to be monetized, it is still someone's work and therefore, using it without permission is plagiarism - purporting it as original and monetizing it is theft.
In the article, the CTO of Sudowrite addresses this by saying;
I'd love for there to be a simple way to do fair compensation for content that was used to train GPT-3, but unfortunately, there is no mechanism that OpenAI provides for that,” he says. “If someone were to offer this, we'd try it out immediately.
Firstly, there is no "opt-in" to having your work scraped by these bots, and there is no opt-out. So, they can scrape and steal, making money for some users and for the AI companies, on the back of other people's work. But, as you could perhaps recognize, there are at least some protections that these fan fiction writers should be taking, even though they are not necessarily looking for monetization.
According to the article, just one of the websites (Archive of our Own), hosts over 11,000,000 pieces of work, which makes it a very large source for this kind of strange fiction - and a home for the community. The first thing they should be doing is ensuring that the content of their community is provably owned, by moving it all onto a blockchain, like Hive. This way, any new piece of work is immutably protected, timestamped and secure on a decentralized, censorship resistant blockchain.
Secondly, they would also have a chance to build some level of reward and monetization into their community, using a Hive-Engine token, which can be created specifically for their community and traded and used for various purposes on their site.
And thirdly, they could build a Hive interface to cater for their community to host the content, facilitate discussions and of course, be a distribution point through various mechanisms for their "FAN token" (or whatever they call it). This site would reside on the Hive Blockchain, but can be permissioned off so that the content only appears through that interface itself, rather than cluttering other feeds. Alternatively, they could create a community for posting through, which will only allow members etc to post directly. Both ways mean they can manage and moderate their community, keeping the experience similar for their userbase to now, with supercharged blockchain and crypto capabilities.
Why do this? Well, Hive is all about ownership and empowering communities to take back their content for their own - at least provably. It gives their userbase peace of mind in terms of having their content immutable and protected and no one can take it down, because it is securely distributed and decentralized. Also, it will introduce people to a community of people who value originality and, a community of people who are looking to build economies that are more equitable for users, especially creators. This can introduce their users to new technologies and new possibilities personally and economically.
11,000,000 pieces of written work would take some time to blockchain, but at least starting from the newer first, it could be done. And, because Hive transactions are free (with a little help from people who have stake like me), they will be able to get started with minimal costs and minimal disruption. I
I am sure if a community like https://archiveofourown.org/ was willing to explore the Hive community and make a shift over at some point, I will be able to wrangle some developer assistance to help their team (which are volunteers like us), to get set up. We already have some basic template models that could get them started and with a little tweaking from the devs, they could have their own Hive community for their specific type of content, up and running quite fast.
Creating accounts on Hive isn't free, but there are plenty of ways to get many thousands of them for free, again from people like me and others with stake for users. This can be set up in a similar way to what Splinterlands (a blockchained game on Hive) has done in the past in conjunction with Teams like 
Note: I have created
@archiveofourown already and hold the keys for if and when they are ready to claim it.
Remember from the article how the CTO was willing to compensate sources if there was a mechanism to do so? Well, now there could be a mechanism and a token in order to do it. For example, if an original source were to be paid one dollar, the payee would be able to buy one dollar worth of the designated token and transfer it to the account, freely and within three seconds. This could be automated - after all, they have AIs ;) Alternatively, they could also by a dollars worth of HIVE which is listed an several exchanges and transfer that to the Hive Account also.
To finish with, the more communities that give their userbase ownership and control of their self-generated content and protect them through blockchains, the more value flows back to the actual creators. This value is not just monetary, it is also in the form of the satisfaction of ownership and the peace of mind of content protection. However, with a decentralized Web3 future, there is the chance to empower creators again and set up a renaissance for content, bringing creator and audience into a more direct relationship of appreciation for each other. The content might not be to everyone's taste, but it can still exist on Hive and become a rich, diverse and user-owned community.
Empower Creativity and Reward Originality.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
I am emailing and sharing this post with them and hopefully, they will get back to me and I can show them around.
