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The part that feels really obvious to me is that, if I made an AI that could generate music by looking through the entire (copyrighted) back catalog of the Beat

• aj3 5y ago
  You're giving AI too much credit, it's just a tool, it does not have it's own intentions. I.e. if you buy a piano or a guitar, you could play and record copyrighted music on it. That's not piano's or guitar's fault though, it's yours.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • sillysaurusx 5y ago
    It sounds like you might be the one giving it too much credit. AI is a glorified markov chain, which is essentially a compression algorithm. I agree that it can be an instrument (I've done it: https://soundcloud.com/theshawwn/sets/ai-generated-videogame-music https://soundcloud.com/theshawwn/sets/ai-generated-videogame...) but it's almost trivial to train a model that memorizes by rote. Suppose a model was trained solely on a single Beatles album. It could only spit out that album. That would be clear infringement, wouldn't it?
    • toxik 5y ago
      It’s funny that people say it’s a glorified Markov chain. No. It’s not. A Markov chain has some very specific properties that are absolutely not fulfilled by GPT-3 models. Just say “stochastic” if you want a buzzword. Stop appropriating Markov chains.
      • sillysaurusx 5y ago
        “It’s a stochastic” doesn’t flow, though I guess I could use "stochastic random walk." What properties does a gpt-3 model have that a Markov chain doesn’t? (Other than effectiveness.)
        • exdsq 5y ago
          ANNs aren't Markov chains
          • sillysaurusx 5y ago
            Well, yes. And apples aren't oranges, but they share a lot of similar traits. "Given a prompt, provide a completion" is what a Markov chain does. GPT-3 is exactly the same, in the sense that apples and oranges both satisfy your hunger.
            • tomrod 5y ago
              Is calculator.exe the equivalent to TI-84?
              • sillysaurusx 5y ago
                I would say that a TI-84 is a glorified calculator.exe. The TI-84 is usually more effective, but they’re both calculators.
        • toxik 5y ago
          Willfully misunderstanding your interlocutor seems ungracious, you apparently know stochastic is an adjective, so why did you try to use it as a noun? GPT-3 is conditioned on the entire input sequence as well as its own output, which is strictly NON-MARKOVIAN. In fact, the point in saying something is Markovian is exactly that: the state transition probability only depends on the current state.
          • 5y ago
  • alkonaut 5y ago
    A typewriter vs. a machnine that recites paragraphs of shakespeare are two different things.
    • j4yav 5y ago
      Neither of them unbind the content from the original license, though.
  • koonsolo 5y ago
    When I press 1 key and it plays copyrighted music, that is the piano's fault.
    • aj3 5y ago
      Even if hypothetically there was such a strange bug in your piano and you decided to exploit it by recording copyrighted music and redistributing it, you would be accountable for it, not a piano. This analogy train went too far, don't you think? All examples that I've seen on Twitter require quite an intentional manipulation by human for Copilot to produce something copyrighted. It does not recite Linux code by pressing 1 key.
      • hnmullany 5y ago
        If you have an electronic piano that requires a complex series of button pushes to produce copyrighted music - that's still a copyright violation. Copyright law has no notion that the difficulty of reproducing copyrighted content effects the fact of a violation.
        • akersten 5y ago
          > an electronic piano that requires a complex series of button pushes to produce copyrighted music Surely a judge presented with the "complex series of button pushes," otherwise known as playing an instrument, would hold the player accountable for any infringement and not the piano? These analogies have gone so far off the rails that I can't tell which side this thread is arguing for by now ;)
          • b3morales 5y ago
            I think the whole swirling discussion is a little confused because there are potentially two "ends" where infringement could happen, and different people are talking about each. And the article covers both. One end is GitHub's, at the input: Copilot's "database" was initialized from code that GitHub does not have copyright to. The contention at this end is that they are ignoring the licenses that would grant them the right to use that code.* The article, GitHub, and others assert that there's no copyright issue for creating a database of this kind (a machine learning model). The other end is the the developer taking Copilot's output. The article seems to take the (absurd IMO) position that there's also no copyright implications here, because the output is not copyrightable at all. *And personally this is the side that concerns me most.
  • alex_c 5y ago
    Funny you should say that, as there is a direct line connecting player pianos in the 19th century to copyright law in the 21st: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_license https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_license
• remus 5y ago
  I think the main point that the article makes is that for copyright to work you need some notion of a creative work, and so far it's generally accepted that snippets like i = i + 1 aren't creative enough to be covered by copyright. The interesting point is where you draw the line between what's boilerplate and what's creative, and legally it will presumably come down to showing that copilot crosses that line egregiously enough for someone to think they've got a successful chance at legal action.
  • j4yav 5y ago
    Since that article was written people have shown it will generate quite long coherent sections. It will even generate someone’s private about me page: https://twitter.com/kylpeacock/status/1410749018183933952?s=21 https://twitter.com/kylpeacock/status/1410749018183933952?s=...
    • nanna 5y ago
      But that about me page is the very definition of boilerplate text, so really it only gives weight to the argument that it's not producing original work.
      • dmurray 5y ago
        You got downvoted, but I kind of like this argument. There are a million "about me" pages, but Copilot did a good job of picking one for "generic software engineer". If it could just have changed a word or two to a synonym, it would be great.
        • stickfigure 5y ago
          That page was so generic that I could fully believe it was originally written by a GPT bot.
    • phire 5y ago
      Bullshit. That not an existing aboutme page. You can go to davidcelis' website and verify that it's completely different. Copilot just picked a random person and linked to their social media accounts. You can search any large quote within that about me on Google and not find a match, it is unique. The only two examples of generating large sections of copyrighted work are the quake floating point hack and the zen of python. Both those examples are commonly known and copied and talked about, to the point that they have wikipedia pages.
• bdowling 5y ago
  > and it would output music that I could control to be very much or even exactly like the original recordings, or I could accidentally do it, that it wouldn’t really be a way to launder the original licenses/copyright into the public domain. The test for non-literal copyright infringement is "substantial similarity." If, after filtering out irrelevant and non-copyrightable elements, the allegedly-infringing work is substantially the same as the original work, then it infringes. If it infringes, then two common defenses are independent creation and fair use. In your hypothetical, the AI-generated work would infringe the original because you stated it would be substantially the same as the copyrighted work. You can't claim independent creation because the algorithm was dependent on the original work and you controlled the output of the algorithm to be exactly like the original work. Fair use is pretty much a non-starter, so I'll skip that analysis. So, no, you couldn't use an AI to launder copyrighted works into the public domain.
  • Aeolun 5y ago
    Unless you are Github, in which case having your AI copy code vertabim is ok?
    • bdowling 5y ago
      > Unless you are Github, in which case having your AI copy code vertabim is ok? You have to filter out any non-copyrightable elements before you do the substantial similarity analysis. For code, that means removing non-expressive elements like arithmetic or boolean expressions, looping, recursion, conditionals, etc. APIs are not copyrightable under the recent Supreme Court holding in Google v. Oracle. How much of your code is actually left after filtration?
      • ElFitz 5y ago
        I’d wager you’d get rid of over 90% of most codebases by removing all that. But perhaps there could be a way to make something that automatically converts these "non-expressive elements" into copyrightable elements? Output would probably be maddening to figure out though.
      • 5y ago
• Jarwain 5y ago
  Wouldn't the parallel be closer to having an ai remix a bunch of songs together?
• freshhawk 5y ago
  "Or maybe it is, but if so it essentially means the end of licensing because it would be trivial to make an AI that can take an input and produce the same output." Yes, this is what is pretty interesting to me. I said in a previous comment that I have a really good OS generating AI. It asks you your favorite color and outputs a disk image you can use as an installer. Right now it just happens to output a cracked version of Windows if you answer "blue". Who can know how that happened? It's a black box after all. Seems useful though, since Microsoft is loudly saying that if I distributed this it would have no license problems at all.
  • Spivak 5y ago
    I think this is peak programmer logic. You can’t just declare something a black box or declare something an AI — the courts, people, aren’t that stupid. Lawyer words aren’t that magic. If when you crack open Copilot it’s determined that it’s not actually learning and boils down to storing and regurgitating snippets of code no matter how few or many layers of indirection it’s still infringement. What your AI actually does is underneath all the indirection is what’s important.
    • logifail 5y ago
      > [..] not actually learning and boils down to storing and regurgitating [...] Some would say that pretty much _all_ learning involves "storing" and "regurgitating". Aside: my daughter started writing out her name at kindergarten a couple of years ago. One of the staff seemed a bit dismissive of this, and claimed what was happening wasn't really "writing" it was "merely memorising the shapes of letters and then reproducing them in the right order". <rolls eyes> I didn't bother to argue...
    • freshhawk 5y ago
      Yeah ... that was my point. What copilot does underneath the indirection is steal GPL code and derive "new" stuff from it in a way that launders the licenses. We know what it's doing, it's doing very well understood statistical inference techniques to derive outputs.
• lostgame 5y ago
  The Beatles are the farthest thing from public domain possible and would never be included in such an exercise. Valid point - most hilariously poor example to back that point up in recent memory.
  • lobocinza 5y ago
    Can put Beatles lyrics as comments. Copilot do look to copy those as well. People can bomb search results, some will certainly bomb Copilot.
• hyperpallium2 5y ago
  Unlike patents, for cooyright, independently created work is not infringing. So, if you build a model that really does actually model music, this could be argued to be independent creation. But there is also caselaw (involving George Harrison IIRC) on "unconscious copying", where having heard a piece is suggestive that it was not an independent creation, despite not being deliberately copied. So, training on a corpus that includes a specific piece is arguably a case of that. There"s an interesting question of whether a model is just a sophisticated statistical compression of a corpus, or whether it is a thing in itself. I would say, if it finds patterns that are disproportionately simpler than the corpus, it has found "something". But another view is of creation as involving a side-channel or one-time pad, in that music is created by a human and heard by a human, who have common information that has never been present in music before (e.g. specific aspects of common neurophysiology, auditory anatomy, exact heartbeat waveform, new sounds/rhythms in the world, new speech patterns, associations between existing melodic fragments and words/emotions/visuals/status etc). In this sense, truly new music is discovery of the Human Music Processing System, which ultimately involves the whole human and their social and physical experience.
• wang_li 5y ago
  You say AI, but this is just a database with a weird query language. The fact that it has to be trained on massive amounts of code and can only regurgitate variations of snippets of the training database back makes it quite clear that there is no intelligence in this thing. If it were intelligent, it’d be given the Lagrange specifications and then I’d be able to say “Write me an open world video game based around gang culture and I’d like it to run on the raspberry pie zero.”
• Dracophoenix 5y ago
  Oddly enough there's an Adam Neely video I saw some time ago that may address your points: https://youtube.com/watch?v=sfXn_ecH5Rw https://youtube.com/watch?v=sfXn_ecH5Rw