5 ms·

Upon reading the title, the first thing that comes to my mind is: "why not?". If we treat AI just like any another artist's tool, I don't see why it should sto

• luizfzs 7y ago
  Even though it's not related to IP, this may open precedence for making the creators of a given AI system be responsible for any outcomes of said AI (maybe that's the way to go). That said, car companies may prosecuted if their AI driven cars cause accidents (again, maybe that's the way to go). This discussion is on it's first steps and has a long way to go yet.
  • rahuldottech 7y ago
    I personally am definitely of the opinion that those who develop and train AI should be held responsible for the actions of said AI. That's the only way to ensure that such systems are kept in check. Case in point: the various YouTube "algorithm" fiascos that have taken place over the past several years. If AI systems you've put in place discriminate against certain demographics, you should 100% be held accountable for the same. Same thing when it comes to improperly trained/developed AI causing accidents or loss of life.
    • UnFleshedOne 7y ago
      Sounds similar to how parents are responsible for actions of their children up to a certain age. So the common intuition is on your side.
• jandrese 7y ago
  It might also get hairy if/when we make a sentient AI and have to decide if they can have property rights. Which is a thorny issue because even if we assign them rights, they themselves will be the intellectual property of someone else. An intellectual slave? Probably a good thing general purpose AI is still a few decades away at this point. Society is not ready for the rights implications. Not that I really expect people to have better answers to this in the future.
  • JamesBarney 7y ago
    Of all the things we have to worry about when we have general AI, whether or not they can own ip seems like a small one.
    • MiracleUser 7y ago
      famous last words before an ip ownership loophole allows an AI to enslave humanity
    • jandrese 7y ago
      Billions of dollars of lawyer time is wasted annually on this small issue with just humans. It's not as trivial as it seems at first. It turns out the AI's conquer humanity not through violence, but by highly optimized IP trolling. Hell, we already have a flavor of this on Youtube, where algorithms flag content all day long with little recourse for innocent victims.
    • autoexec 7y ago
      I agree. Until the AI itself can complain that someone is getting credit for their work, this isn't a huge issue. Once an AI gets to the point where it feels cheated and wants a cut we've got a very big problem.
  • throwaway_tech 7y ago
    >Which is a thorny issue because even if we assign them rights, they themselves will be the intellectual property of someone else. An intellectual slave? Its not that novel. Take a Corporation it may hire an employee, or contractor - or even unpaid intern - and have them develop copy all day long. That copy will be owned by the Corporation in the future, even if the employee/contractor/intern ceases to work for said Corporation (even if said employee/contractor/intern ceases to exist their work will be owned by said Corporation).
• GauntletWizard 7y ago
  There's going to be an argument about "derivative works". If I feed all 7 books of Harry Potter into an AI, and only that, and then it spits out something - That's clearly a derivative work. If I feed all of the New York Times Bestsellers for the past 50 years into an AI and it spits out something, there's much less of an argument that it's derivative of any one work. I've seen stuff like https://www.thiswaifudoesnotexist.net/ https://www.thiswaifudoesnotexist.net/ - It's both impressive and not. Sure, it's "new" and "Unique" every time, but if you were to take a trained eye to it, you'd see that a bunch of what it's done are very simple derivatives of an already derivative artform. Do I know which image it's stolen the basic shape from and which it's stolen the color palette? No, but if I spent a few hours looking through the training dataset I'd probably find another image that looked almost exactly like the one I'm looking at. These things are impressive because they can fool a cursory glance, and quite frankly, that's often enough.
  • PeterisP 7y ago
    "If I feed all 7 books of Harry Potter into an AI, and only that, and then it spits out something - That's clearly a derivative work." does not match the current legal interpretation in the industry. The general assumption is that machine learning models trained on some data are (usually - details matter) not considered derivative work from that data; so unless you have specific contractual restrictions (e.g. you got the date bacause you have a contract with the data owner saying what you'll do/not do with the models derived from it) then copyright does not prohibit you from using and distributing these models. That's the case even if it's trained on a particular dataset with a single, clear copyright owner. It probably starts with old precedent on copyrightability of statistics derived from creative work - things like word frequency, most common words, etc are not considered derivative works. Then we have statistical language models, of the kind that were used in statistical machine translation before the neural approaches overtook everything - and again, the established interpretation there is that statical models trained on a corpus are not considered derivative work from that data, because they essentially are a trivial extension of word sequence frequency counts... but they already are in the category of "feed all 7 books of Harry Potter into an AI, and only that, and then it spits out something", e.g. a simple hidden Markov model or trigram language model from Harry Potter books will easily hallucinate (very lousy quality) Potter-themed text, but the model that can do that is not considered derivative work. Though this all may vary in different jurisdictions.
• wongarsu 7y ago
  I would liken the AI with a photo camera. I can't paint very well, but I can take this miraculous machine and create a picture on the press of a button. Yet there is still artistic expression in deciding when an where to press the button, and at which angle you hold the machine when pressing the button. And we universally agree that whoever pressed the button owns the copyright of the created picture, even if most of the work is done by the machine. With AI in general and neutral networks specifically the same applies. There's some nuance to decide if the copyright belongs to the person who trained the network or the person who prompted this specific output. The easy solution is to say "both", and let people handle it with copyright assignments and license agreements. When we have AGI that thinks for itself we might want to rethink this, but that's in the far future.
  • scarejunba 7y ago
    Well, there has to be creative input, right? Suppose you take all my written works, train a model, then used that to generate text it doesn't sound meaningful to me that you now own that text. After all, someone else could easily and naturally do the same and they too could end up with similar enough weights that they generate similar text. That's not a creative act you did. We all do that.
    • UnFleshedOne 7y ago
      How about if I read and study all your books and then generate a new one perfectly in your style (maybe using one of the common plot template you use often). Would the new book be mine or yours? No AI involved, but the black box looks similar from the outside. How do they handle this now with writers and painters who imitate other artists?
      • scarejunba 7y ago
        Oh, that's a good one. I suppose you're right in that it would be undetectable that you used an ML model to make the text unless you said so and in that case we'd probably treat it as a creative work.
      • 7y ago
• criddell 7y ago
  So if the AI is the author, then who gets paid? If a copyright term is set in terms of the author's life, when does the AI stop being alive? I think until an AI expresses a wish for something else, we should assume all AI generated work is in the public domain.
  • rahuldottech 7y ago
    I'd argue that AI isn't the "author". It is simply a tool (like a camera). The person who fed it input and tuned its parameters ("pointed it at an object and pressed the shutter") is the "artist" and owns the right to the resulting artwork.
    • criddell 7y ago
      I'm not sure I agree. I think this is different than, say, a laser printer that just spits out my creative work. An AI isn't necessarily under control of the person that owns it. Who do you think owns the copyright of the famous monkey photo? It was the monkey that composed and took the shot. The person who owned the camera had no control over the creative aspects of the shot.
      • rahuldottech 7y ago
        I've commented about this elsewhere in the thread, but basically, it can be argued that a monkey is a conscious being, capable of original thought, whereas the same can't be said about AI/ML.
      • WilliamEdward 7y ago
        an AI is nothing but a model. It only creates the illusion of creating because we are incapable of calculating as much and as fast as they can, but ultimately the product is just the result of the model, and the model is a tool made by the human. Friendly reminder not to treat AI like humans. Ever.
        • criddell 7y ago
• marcus_holmes 7y ago
  Ok, but in the monkey-selfie case, the monkey was not considered to be a tool of the artist (the camera was, but as the artist wasn't operating the tool, that didn't matter). I think the more important question is about ownership and society. If an AI can produce value, does that value accrue to the owner of the AI? If yes, then we're in for another round of "let's sack all the workers and replace them with machines". Historically these haven't been fun, and have produced massive inequality, but eventually they produce richer, better-educated societies. If no, and we say (for instance) that "all value produced by an AI is public property", then we'd head off the beaten track, and possibly to a more equitable society. Or somewhere different, at least.
  • rahuldottech 7y ago
    Hm. In the monkey case, I think a case could be made that a monkey is "a conscious being" and "capable of true thought" and stuff along those lines, and hence something (someone?) who can own rights to their work. Can the same be said for AI/ML as they exist today? I'm not sure. The fact remains, AI needs to be developed and trained by someone, and that completely affects the resultant "artwork". That's why people use the "photographer and camera" analogy. Does the Dev not deserve credit for their work? (A thought experiment that I just came up with, not sure if it makes sense: Say you and I are locked in a room for a prolonged period of time. I tell you a bunch of stuff and you make some art based on it. Following the photographer/camera analogy, can it be said that you are my "tool"? Can I claim rights to what you come up with?)
    • marcus_holmes 7y ago
      The Dev, yes. As an independent act of artistic creativity, I don't think anyone has any problem with the dev owning the output of the AI. To answer your thought experiment: Should an Art Teacher get copyright rights on all their students' work? (what you propose is effectively art college) Agiain, to my mind the problem comes when someone (let's call him The Baron) employs a hundred Devs to make an AI that provides cheap legal advice, based on public-domain court records. People get cheap legal advice (society wins). The Devs get paid for their professional labour. A million lawyers go out of business. The Baron becomes astonishingly rich. Should The Baron get all that value? Should the Devs? Should the out-of-work lawyers?
• TuringNYC 7y ago
  I had a startup that tried to do so. Our acquisition was torpedoed after a claim by the owners of the training data that sufficient derived data rights were not granted to us -- that our derived data rights allowed us to operate the model but not to {sell the model, sell the company} without granting a [substantial] portion of the sale back to the owners of the original training set. In retrospect, and my advice to others, would be to try to get derived data rights way early on before there are big sums of money involved that make everyone greedy.
  • greggman2 7y ago
    Tell me more about "derived data rights". So you tell me the cost of materials and I factor in labor and come up with a price for my product. I derived my price from the data you supplied. And I can't use this price because it's derived data?
    • tylerhou 7y ago
      No, I give you a dataset. You make transformations on that dataset and you try to sell it. I say — "hey, I own your underlying data, so I should have ownership of your transformed data, and thus the proceeds of your sale."
      • bastawhiz 7y ago
        I suppose it would depend on the terms of the sale of the training data (if it was purchased) or how it was acquired (if it wasn't).
        • TuringNYC 7y ago
          We did not purchase the training data, we licensed it. In retrospect it was clear that we had obtained the license to use the data to train a model, but not entirely clear whether we had licensed the rights to commercialize the model (e.g., sell the weights on our fairly generic neural network.) That said, lots of things start getting confusing, when confusion means owners of the data might make millions off an acquisition. In this case, it was medical data. The owners were technically the sovereign that licensed the medical data to us. But technically, the medical images had been read by independent doctors who only granted an upstream license to the sovereign to use their reads for medical diagnoses for patient welfare -- not to downstream license the reads to help someone else train a model to theoretically put doctors out of business.
• baroffoos 7y ago
  Years ago I remember there was an article of someone using brute force to generate every possible phrase of a certain length so that from that point on no one could ever claim ownership of one since they had all already been created. Also I wonder what defines created. If I create a program that can generate every possible variation of x, do I get copyright when the program is run or do the results have to be saved. Or do I get copyright over the output of my program before it has even run since the result of the program is fixed we can know it would have resulted in the output even if it was never run. What if I just make a webserver with unlimited pages and given the correct url is entered it can output any result at all. That data was available on my website since it was created so do I have copyright over it? If we allow the output of programs which were not extensions of the users input (photoshop, a text editor) than in theory my program that outputs random numbers now has copyright over every possible work that could ever be created.
  • jonhohle 7y ago
    That gave me an idea for an app which would permute all phrases of any length randomly and have forward and back pointers to the next and previous word in the series. At the end of an _n_ word phrase, the next link would give you an _n_+1 phrase. If a crawler came along (like archive.org) it might index all permutations, giving you some evidence of when your site “coined” a phrase. The app may want to consult a recent USPTO dump you avoid known trademarks and copyrights. Sounds like a fun exercise.
  • stretchwithme 7y ago
    Creating an intelligible work through a random process takes a really long time. It took Earth hundreds of millions of years.
    • baroffoos 7y ago
      A lot of things that seem to fall under copyright are not particularly difficult to brute force. Looking at music for example. Most music follows a set of fairly basic patterns where each part of the music (drum beat, chord progression) is just a short arrangement of only a few choices. And yet the copyright system seems to take even a tiny piece of a song as copyrightable. It would not be difficult or time consuming for a script to generate every possible 4-6 chord progression and every single kind of melody which is close enough for copyright (Often these cases use very general terms like "A descending melody starting at C")
• Audoenus 7y ago
  The problem for me is by AI capability and volume. Stephen King is said to write somewhere in the ballpark of 2,000 words per day with about 100 books written. Scholastic Press publishes about 600 books per year. Now lets say in theory an AI were able to write 2,000 words per second and be able to produce thousands of books per day. This AI could have live access marketing data to tailor write books to specific demographics or even specific individuals. So how could a human author compete? I would think access to copyright would be the only edge a human could have. Now as for using AI and AI-based writing tools like the GPT2 program that autocompletes sentences for writers is no different then an artist tool like you said. https://transformer.huggingface.co/ https://transformer.huggingface.co/