CSDN Editor's Note: The futuristic specter of the past makes us cautious about our predictions of digital transformation.
This article is authorized to reprint Mr. Baoyu's personal blog (Weibo @Baoyu xp), link https://baoyu.io/translations/ai/artificial-intelligence-ai-future-chatgpt-napster-internet
作者 | Sarmad Qadri 责编 | 夏萌出品 | baoyu.io
The futuristic specter of the past makes us cautious about our predictions of digital transformation.
On March 6, 2001, Jennifer Huang, a student at New York University, downloaded music from the Napster website
We often hear now that the world is at a technological inflection point, and that we are fast moving into a future shaped by AI tools like ChatGPT. However, I suspect that in 2024 we will be reminded of the spectre of Napsteer – and the failures of the other digital future.
If you're under the age of 35 or over the age of 60, you probably don't know much about Napist. But once, it represented the future. Napst is a peer-to-peer file-sharing service. Between about 1999 and 2002, it used to be a representative of Futurism. Napist's logic is simple: someone buys a CD and uploads the song to a computer. The computer is connected to Napste's peer-to-peer network, which makes the songs available for free download by other users on the network. It's a bit like making countless mixtapes and spreading them around. But for the music industry, it's more like piracy.
The music industry is panicking because of this, and for good reason. With the cost of digital reproduction and distribution moving towards zero, where will music sales go? If all music is freely available, how can professional musicians make a living? This trend, which started with music, is likely to spread to the film and television industry. Creative industries are supposed to be protected by copyright law, but what does copyright law in the 20th century mean in the face of communication technology in the 21st century?
At the time, almost everyone believed that these emerging communication technologies were inevitable. If there was a conflict between traditional copyright law and new media, then copyright law would have to be adjusted. John Perry Barlow, one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the author of the lyrics for Grateful Dead, summed it up in an October 2000 article: "Nearly every traditional critic who commented on the Napst case thoughtfully asked the question: 'Is the elf out of the bottle?' but the better question would be, 'Is there really a bottle?' and the answer is, no. ”
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) disagrees. It has launched numerous lawsuits against Napster, Napster's clone products, and even individual users. However, these lawsuits seem to be just the struggles of technologically outdated industries. As Gramsci puts it, the old music industry is in decline, and the new one is struggling to be born. The future will undoubtedly be the unrestricted, reproduction of similar copyrighted works, shared free of charge for all.
These lawsuits don't completely end file sharing, but they do change the trajectory of the digital future. The RIAA became a bad guy in the eyes of the public, but it also managed to add a layer of uncertainty to pirated music. It can't shut down all file-sharing sites, but it does make it difficult for any single file-sharing platform to grow into a profitable business model.
While the lawsuits were going on, Steve Jobs entered a conference room and told the heads of all the major record labels that they would get a dollar for each song and Apple would get a piece of the pie, which was better than nothing. The record industry eventually accepted the offer, and the iPod defined music in the '00s. Subsequently, the iPhone replaced the iPod, and an iPhone app called Spotify found a monetization model for music streaming.
We live in a world that is completely different from what was envisioned in the days of Napster. Copyright law has not changed with new technologies, but rather the industries that rely on these new technologies have adapted to copyright law. This new status quo is not friendly to musicians or artists. Their interests are not represented at the negotiating table, this is obvious. Musicians in the '00s made a meagre amount of money from iTunes sales – better than when music was pirated, but nowhere near enough to make a living. Nowadays, struggling artists only get a tiny cut from Spotify's streaming.
Consider the similarities between this and today's generative AI: Like Napster, ChatGPT went viral almost overnight, largely driven by college students. Similar to peer-to-peer file sharing, these AI models are in a legal gray area. They were trained on a large number of copyrighted works and committed themselves to creating competing works without paying fees to existing copyright holders.
Litigation has been filed as to whether AI systems should be protected by the fair use doctrine. This is an issue that many lawyers are devoting a lot of time to research. I'm not a lawyer, and I don't pretend to know the exact legal answer to this question. The legal content involved in these issues is not simple.
But I can't help but be reminded of Mark Twain's famous quote: "History does not repeat itself, but it is always strikingly similar." ”
One of the arguments that AI advocates often say is that technologies like ChatGPT are here and there, and they are inevitable. This technique can no longer be resealed. If old copyright laws don't match the data scraping behavior of large language models, then our copyright laws will need to be adjusted.
All I can say about this is: remember the lessons of Napster. We are not living in the future envisioned by the Napster era. Nor do we have to live in a future that seems certain to AI advocates. At the moment, ChatGPT itself is still in a state of loss, and each problem it solves will bring more losses. It may be like Amazon in the future, turning its initial losses into a market monopoly. But it could also be the next WeWork, a company that has over-exaggerated its revenue expectations to the point of breaking even in the current rental market.
Recall that just a year or two ago, it seemed that the future of music and art was bound to be inextricably linked to Web3 and powerful blockchains. NFTs aren't just tokens for cartoon ape images, they're also seen as an emerging payment mechanism that promises to bring financial support to artists. However, with the bursting of the crypto bubble, all this seems to have vanished. The future of the digital world is so fragile.
As Napster's example shows, the trajectory of technology is never static. New technologies are also subject to traditional laws. Some digital revolutionaries may have circumvented existing regulations for a long time (like Uber and the gig economy as a whole), but their actions were quickly limited in the face of copyright laws. The direction of any emerging technology is not inevitable, especially when it challenges existing industry interests. Copyright law does not change to fit a vision of a digital future, but rather a digital future needs to adapt to copyright law.
The boundaries of our creative industries are being redefined. Hopefully, this time, artists will be truly involved in the decision-making process and have their own place.