How did I learn to recognise things ?
The way that all humans do (to keep it simple I'm only talking about recognising humans):
* I saw my parents, relations, friends, ... I remembered these images (in whole/part/...)
* I went outside and saw many peoples' faces & body parts; some of those I remember. None of them gave me permission to remember them
* I saw people and 'classified' them as examples of: men, women, children, ... people who are: white, black, Indian, Chinese, ...
* I saw plenty of inappropriate images, some in person, some in publications. Some I still remember (here: details I redact)
The expectation is that AIs should have the understanding of a mature human. How can they gain that unless they are exposed to what I was and learned from ?
Questions:
* I wish to train my AI to understand recent films and modern books. Most of these have some copyright notice that forbids storing these in a 'mechanical or electronic system' (or similar words). Does this mean that I cannot show them to my AI ? If so can I view them myself? After all my neurons work on electricity and the difference between my brain and an AI is getting less & less.
* If an AI is only exposed to images/... where explicit permission has been granted by the subject: will that result in a biassed data set ?
* Should the 'experience' that goes into training an AI be regarded as private to the AI and thus beyond the reach of copyright, appropriateness considerations, etc ? Surely what is important is not having the AI reproduce these images in a way that identifies/embarrasses the original subject.
* Even the last point is arguable: political cartoonists frequently draw embarrassing but identifiable pictures of the likes of Boris. No one says that they should not, so should not an AI be allowed to do similar ?
In any discussion of this can we please ban the word 'obvious' (& synonyms), any assumptions should be made explicit & clear.