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Nonsense. Observations about certain characteristics of a copyrighted work are not covered under that work's copyright. If I take a copyrighted book and produce

by cheald 4y ago

Nonsense. Observations about certain characteristics of a copyrighted work are not covered under that work's copyright. If I take a copyrighted book and produce a table of word frequencies in that book, no serious person would claim that the author's copyright domain extends to my table.

Xelynega 4y ago
Is the copyright still not applicable if your encoding table has rules to reconstruct text from? No serious person would argue that copyright doesn't extend to the encoded version of the book and prevent me from profiting off it. I believe the same applies to AI generation of text/images. Just because you're encoding the data in statistical models doesn't mean that it's not encoded.
kranke155 4y ago
Everyone in HN keeps pretending like ML transformation = human inspiration. This is really funny - we don’t have AGI but we have an AGI-like capability to avoid copyright. Seems to be the only place where human rights and AI rights are matched is where it most benefits AI research. How interesting. A for profit computer program =! A human being.
- dTal 4y ago
  Can you articulate a meaningful (and more importantly legally provable) difference? Both human brains and these sorts of AI programs are intractable black boxes. Maybe you think computer programs lack some sort of divine spark, but even if we accept that it seems to me that it's not a given that humans apply their divine spark every time they create something either.
  - kranke155 4y ago
    That’s a bizarre definition. So because they’re both black boxes we suddenly treat them both the same legally? I don’t have to prove that an ML transform is equivalent to a human being. Divine spark isn’t necessary to protect you from copyright - we have laws that determine what you need to do and those laws have allowed IP to exist as a profitable area for a century. Here’s a simple question - if I were to take an image from an artist on artstation and announce my for money Warhammer tournament with it, without paying him, I’d be violating his IP rights. But if I build an ML engine I apparently can take 100 of his images, produce similar images and charge money for it. Magic! Explain to me - how did the artist suddenly lose his IP rights exactly ? I submit it is up to ML researchers to prove this isn’t the biggest IP land grab in history. Not for me to prove that somehow humans are different. We know humans are different and we’ve codified in law just how much new IP needs to be different in order to avoid copyright. That’s good enough for humans. But somehow ML enthusiasts want to say that if I feed an ML all the Disney movies and I get it to make it derivative work, it’s somehow protected? I can’t wait to see all the Mickey Mouse movies made by AÍ. Guess what - that’s never going to happen. If you think Disney or any other IP empire will let that go, I don’t know what to tell you. It’s absolute madness to say that anything that goes into an ML transformation is uncopyrightable. Or somehow I have no rights over my artwork because I don’t have the ability to sue OpenAI to oblivion like Disney does? Because that’s literally what we’re saying - those artists from artstation and Getty whose images were used were used exactly because they believed that they wouldn’t be able to sue - thanks to distinctions like your own! Disney won’t let that stand, they would sue and push for annihilation, but hey the 100,000 artists on artstation? F** them, they can’t sue us. Let’s use their shit. That’s basically where we’re at. Let’s work out an example. So this AI can be feed all of Lucien Freud’s works. Then it can produce Lucien Freud-like artwork. And in this process, where all that is missing is Lucien Freud’s own signature, it could potentially make a virtual replica of one of his most famous paintings! Thus I would have a copy of Lucien Freud! But completely copyright free. Are you for real? This cannot, absolutely cannot be allowed to happen. It is the biggest data theft in history, larger than Facebook or anything, to basically say that any human data when run through an ML transformation engine is no longer property of the human being who produced it but if the ML engineer. This is absolute madness if you consider the second order and third order effects. Essentially all human data that can be automated through ML would be automated to the gain of only the ML engineers involved. The intellectual property of millions of human beings producing the data would be nothing but compost. This will lead to an unsustainable situation, where no one but ML engineers will be able to make any profit in the world. Human beings must be compensated for their data, or we’re headed straight into a dystopia.
    - dTal 4y ago
      >But if I build an ML engine I apparently can take 100 of his images, produce similar images and charge money for it. Magic! You can pay a human artist to produce "similar" images too, and as long as they aren't too similar it's fine. You seem to be conflating - repeatedly - exact copies of a work with merely copying a style. Family Guy had an episode where Brian and Stewie visit a Disney universe, and everything was animated in the style of a classic Disney film. A bunch of humans did indeed watch a bunch of Disney films, and make a new animation based on what they saw. Did Disney - a notoriously litigious company - sue? Of course not. Copying a style is not infringement! I don't see why it's any different if an AI program does that.
      - kranke155 4y ago
        Parody is a well known copyright exemption. I just don’t see how you can go - this is just like a human being, let me make a million dollars out of it.
      - vineyardmike 4y ago
        > A bunch of humans did indeed watch a bunch of Disney films, and make a new animation based on what they saw. Did Disney - a notoriously litigious company - sue? Of course not. Why would Disney sue themselves? Disney owns family guy. In a world where Disney did not own it, Disney would probably sue if they used a cartoon mouse. "Style" may not be covered by copyright, but characters likely are. A human animator would know enough not to make a parody cartoon mouse look too Micky-like, but an AI wouldn't know to avoid that.
chlorion 4y ago
It wouldn't extend to your table, but if you used that table to generate a book of your own, it's very possible a serious person would claim the author's copyright extends to the generated book.
- kiicia 4y ago
  there is only one way frequency tables would return original work, all other versions would be gibberish, its like when using Huffman tables for compression where table itself is not equal to original data

by cheald 4y ago

Xelynega 4y ago

Is the copyright still not applicable if your encoding table has rules to reconstruct text from? No serious person would argue that copyright doesn't extend to the encoded version of the book and prevent me from profiting off it. I believe the same applies to AI generation of text/images. Just because you're encoding the data in statistical models doesn't mean that it's not encoded.

kranke155 4y ago

Everyone in HN keeps pretending like ML transformation = human inspiration. This is really funny - we don’t have AGI but we have an AGI-like capability to avoid copyright. Seems to be the only place where human rights and AI rights are matched is where it most benefits AI research. How interesting. A for profit computer program =! A human being.

dTal 4y ago
Can you articulate a meaningful (and more importantly legally provable) difference? Both human brains and these sorts of AI programs are intractable black boxes. Maybe you think computer programs lack some sort of divine spark, but even if we accept that it seems to me that it's not a given that humans apply their divine spark every time they create something either.
- kranke155 4y ago
  That’s a bizarre definition. So because they’re both black boxes we suddenly treat them both the same legally? I don’t have to prove that an ML transform is equivalent to a human being. Divine spark isn’t necessary to protect you from copyright - we have laws that determine what you need to do and those laws have allowed IP to exist as a profitable area for a century. Here’s a simple question - if I were to take an image from an artist on artstation and announce my for money Warhammer tournament with it, without paying him, I’d be violating his IP rights. But if I build an ML engine I apparently can take 100 of his images, produce similar images and charge money for it. Magic! Explain to me - how did the artist suddenly lose his IP rights exactly ? I submit it is up to ML researchers to prove this isn’t the biggest IP land grab in history. Not for me to prove that somehow humans are different. We know humans are different and we’ve codified in law just how much new IP needs to be different in order to avoid copyright. That’s good enough for humans. But somehow ML enthusiasts want to say that if I feed an ML all the Disney movies and I get it to make it derivative work, it’s somehow protected? I can’t wait to see all the Mickey Mouse movies made by AÍ. Guess what - that’s never going to happen. If you think Disney or any other IP empire will let that go, I don’t know what to tell you. It’s absolute madness to say that anything that goes into an ML transformation is uncopyrightable. Or somehow I have no rights over my artwork because I don’t have the ability to sue OpenAI to oblivion like Disney does? Because that’s literally what we’re saying - those artists from artstation and Getty whose images were used were used exactly because they believed that they wouldn’t be able to sue - thanks to distinctions like your own! Disney won’t let that stand, they would sue and push for annihilation, but hey the 100,000 artists on artstation? F** them, they can’t sue us. Let’s use their shit. That’s basically where we’re at. Let’s work out an example. So this AI can be feed all of Lucien Freud’s works. Then it can produce Lucien Freud-like artwork. And in this process, where all that is missing is Lucien Freud’s own signature, it could potentially make a virtual replica of one of his most famous paintings! Thus I would have a copy of Lucien Freud! But completely copyright free. Are you for real? This cannot, absolutely cannot be allowed to happen. It is the biggest data theft in history, larger than Facebook or anything, to basically say that any human data when run through an ML transformation engine is no longer property of the human being who produced it but if the ML engineer. This is absolute madness if you consider the second order and third order effects. Essentially all human data that can be automated through ML would be automated to the gain of only the ML engineers involved. The intellectual property of millions of human beings producing the data would be nothing but compost. This will lead to an unsustainable situation, where no one but ML engineers will be able to make any profit in the world. Human beings must be compensated for their data, or we’re headed straight into a dystopia.
  - dTal 4y ago
    >But if I build an ML engine I apparently can take 100 of his images, produce similar images and charge money for it. Magic! You can pay a human artist to produce "similar" images too, and as long as they aren't too similar it's fine. You seem to be conflating - repeatedly - exact copies of a work with merely copying a style. Family Guy had an episode where Brian and Stewie visit a Disney universe, and everything was animated in the style of a classic Disney film. A bunch of humans did indeed watch a bunch of Disney films, and make a new animation based on what they saw. Did Disney - a notoriously litigious company - sue? Of course not. Copying a style is not infringement! I don't see why it's any different if an AI program does that.
    - kranke155 4y ago
      Parody is a well known copyright exemption. I just don’t see how you can go - this is just like a human being, let me make a million dollars out of it.
    - vineyardmike 4y ago
      > A bunch of humans did indeed watch a bunch of Disney films, and make a new animation based on what they saw. Did Disney - a notoriously litigious company - sue? Of course not. Why would Disney sue themselves? Disney owns family guy. In a world where Disney did not own it, Disney would probably sue if they used a cartoon mouse. "Style" may not be covered by copyright, but characters likely are. A human animator would know enough not to make a parody cartoon mouse look too Micky-like, but an AI wouldn't know to avoid that.

chlorion 4y ago

It wouldn't extend to your table, but if you used that table to generate a book of your own, it's very possible a serious person would claim the author's copyright extends to the generated book.

kiicia 4y ago
there is only one way frequency tables would return original work, all other versions would be gibberish, its like when using Huffman tables for compression where table itself is not equal to original data