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It seems to me there is a gap in robot rights vs human rights: Google has scanned in much of the world's library collections - the search agent is allowed to l

It seems to me there is a gap in robot rights vs human rights: Google has scanned in much of the world's library collections - the search agent is allowed to look at all of it, but I am only allowed to see samples. How is it Google is allowed to keep a copy on hand, but is not allowed to show me? And now OpenAI has done the work of curating hundreds of gigabytes of publically viewable images (copied without regard for copyright, since of course that's how the internet works, but they have made a copy of each of these images for their training set) -- it seems strange to me that if I want to ask DALL-E, "what image in your training set is the nearest match to this output", copyright law prevents it from showing me (perhaps it could at least return the URL it recorded, and I can hope that Archive.org has taken on the risk of violating copyright on my behalf) In any case, intellectual property laws have created a world where the robots are compelled to withhold information from us mere mortals, with the excuse that they can't make one more copy for us.

briHass 5y ago
Is it really that surprising, though? The training data is more like 'inspriation' for human artists. Certainly, there are cases in music where sampling or melodies are a little too close to the original and spark lawsuits, but largely, very similar derivative works abound. Nothing about creating a derivative work, intentional or otherwise, would allow you to use the original in a way copyright protects. Even Fair Use, which is fairly permissive, doesn't allow for blatant disregard of the original copyright.
djmips 5y ago
That's an interesting thought experiment. Every human btain contains illegal copies of music and images. If you hum or sing or even think about an IP, in the future you will have to pay a license fee to a corporation.
- TaylorAlexander 5y ago
  It’s already illegal for you to sing a copyrighted song in front of a group of people. If you hear a Taylor Swift song and memorize it, then later sing it in front of a sufficiently large group of people I believe that is illegal. Now I don’t actually think intellectual property restrictions are good. I think they are quite harmful. But as long as they exist I don’t like the idea of big companies trampling over the IP rights of small creators. People currently depends on those rights. One of the reasons I want to see a large public dataset of explicitly licensed images is that if OpenAI is required to do this, they would have to spearhead a new culture of openness to get enough data. Imagine if they encouraged twitter to add a license option and then simultaneously encouraged users to add alt text and to license images with an open license! This would be a boon to people with sight disability who require alt text and it would expand a visual commons of openly licensed data. Instead we have one company making a big dataset full of copyrighted images (sharing something online does not waive copyright). I think a model based on explicit consent is healthier for everyone in society.

briHass 5y ago

Is it really that surprising, though? The training data is more like 'inspriation' for human artists. Certainly, there are cases in music where sampling or melodies are a little too close to the original and spark lawsuits, but largely, very similar derivative works abound. Nothing about creating a derivative work, intentional or otherwise, would allow you to use the original in a way copyright protects. Even Fair Use, which is fairly permissive, doesn't allow for blatant disregard of the original copyright.

djmips 5y ago

That's an interesting thought experiment. Every human btain contains illegal copies of music and images. If you hum or sing or even think about an IP, in the future you will have to pay a license fee to a corporation.

TaylorAlexander 5y ago
It’s already illegal for you to sing a copyrighted song in front of a group of people. If you hear a Taylor Swift song and memorize it, then later sing it in front of a sufficiently large group of people I believe that is illegal. Now I don’t actually think intellectual property restrictions are good. I think they are quite harmful. But as long as they exist I don’t like the idea of big companies trampling over the IP rights of small creators. People currently depends on those rights. One of the reasons I want to see a large public dataset of explicitly licensed images is that if OpenAI is required to do this, they would have to spearhead a new culture of openness to get enough data. Imagine if they encouraged twitter to add a license option and then simultaneously encouraged users to add alt text and to license images with an open license! This would be a boon to people with sight disability who require alt text and it would expand a visual commons of openly licensed data. Instead we have one company making a big dataset full of copyrighted images (sharing something online does not waive copyright). I think a model based on explicit consent is healthier for everyone in society.