Curiosity’s Wager 7: Entitlement: what makes this ours to use?
Part 7 of 10 in Curiosity’s Wager.
Entitlement concerns assuming we're entitled to use someone else's work. These tools make it easy to obtain, transform, and generate material. But ease doesn't settle the question, what justifies this use? I want to distinguish some existing concerns, describe how they meet me in my own work, and ask what arrangements we might want to shape together.
Copyright, plagiarism, permission, attribution, fair use, and intellectual property overlap, but they aren't interchangeable. Giving credit doesn't answer every question about permission, and the use being legally permitted doesn't settle every ethical question. The rules also differ across jurisdictions, of course. We need to distinguish established rules, disputed applications, and the broader questions about what ought to be acceptable, what we want to make acceptable.
There are substantial disputes about the material used to train models, and the terms on which it is used. Copyright itself reflects choices about how we organize society with multiple purposes and competing interests. We can question these arrangements and work with others to change them. We can also choose standards for our own work that go beyond what the law requires.
In my own work, I sometimes engage models in conversations to better understand how I'm using images and fair use implications. That conversation doesn't establish that a use is justified. It helps me identify questions to investigate and change how I'm building my tools, identify sources to consult and assumptions I might otherwise skip over. I don't have this all settled, but I want the ease of making something to prompt inquiry rather than become a reason to bypass it. Shared curiosity can help us ask what we owe the people whose work we build on. How should we acknowledge their contributions? What would meaningful permission or participation look like? How might someone find out where their work has been used or contest that use?
These questions may require changes to institutions and systems as well as choices in my own practice. My prior work studying search engines also engaged with these questions of these search tools changing how people experienced other people's work, making them available and accessible, but also reducing frictions in ways that people might not have intended.
And as we develop technology, we want to think about how we're reshaping these questions and who we're working with as we shape these new arrangements.
And there's a lot of questions. You know, there's a responsibility here. What justifies this use? What do I owe the people involved? And what might change my judgment?
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