11 ms·

I see this basic logic in almost AI ethics threads, and it starts with a big assumption: "humans learn from copyrighted source material without copyright violat

by naet 4y ago

I see this basic logic in almost AI ethics threads, and it starts with a big assumption: "humans learn from copyrighted source material without copyright violation". This then gets tenuously extended to "ai also learns, so it must not be in violation of copyright law". The first assumption is highly flawed though. Humans routinely do violate copyright law. Plagiarism is a huge problem in many sectors; un-cited direct copies of people's work in violation of fair use is a regular every day occurrence in the human world. It doesn't matter if you memorized the source material or if you transcribed it or if you copy and pasted it, if it isn't your source material and is someone else's, you've committed a violation of the law. Learning to produce original work and reproducing someone else's work is not the same thing. If an AI is ingesting and perfectly reproducing someone else's copyrighted works, it is in violation of copyright law in the same way a human would be if they reproduce someone else's copyrighted works.

iroh2727 4y ago
+1. And let's not forget too that "AI", that is, ML models, are not "autonomous" in the way that humans are autonomous. Sure, we use the word "learn" to describe what they do, which is one word that we also use to describe what people do. But ML models are always wielded by people or corporations for particular purposes. If a corporation was to directly publish some copy that appears plagiarized, we'd call that plagiarism. I don't see how adding a piece of code—one that's fully created, owned, and wielded by the corporation—as an intermediary changes anything. If anything, it looks like plagiarism-as-a-service, which seems worse (at least to my eyes). Of course, this matter is a bit confusing. Because, for example, (1) it's not always plagiarism, (2) defining what exactly is plagiarism even in the purely non-technological realm is difficult (and likely somewhat subjective), and (3) there is a lot of corporate marketing which suggests this "AI" is "autonomous" (presumably to distract from who exactly is autonomous in this picture). And of course ML art is quite useful for many things. But I mean, so are artists. Not long ago, a lot of Silicon Valley rhetoric was that the purpose of "technology" was to free up time so that people could be more incentivized to "do what people love to do" like, for example, artistic creation. But now it seems that rhetoric was just that: rhetoric, or what was needed to be believed/said at the time. And now at our present time, when technological "progress" has been followed a bit further (that is, when we've developed our machinery a bit further under the incentives of our present economic system), much rhetoric has conveniently shifted to something else, something largely contradictory, but again precisely to what is needed to be believed/said to continue following the same incentive structure.
- Vetch 4y ago
  The main reason AI will be reproducing copyrighted works while the original license is not trivial to identify will be that in those instances, humans are already violating copyright at a high rate. It's just flown under the radar thus far as required machinery to so easily surface violations was not available. Copilot is capable of going beyond retrieval and is competent at using variables, comments, types and local context to infer intention and generate appropriate code and even comment on it. Whenever copilot correctly predicts code of yours that's a novel combination of concepts, copilot has originated novel code. For esoteric concepts, you usually already have to know how to prime it but Copilot is especially useful when it helps you bump into things you didn't know you didn't know (one way to increase the odds of this happening is to write out your thinking so far in markdown or comments. You'd be surprised how helpful and clever Copilot can be in some instances). My point here is Github isn't charging $10/month for run of the mill retrieval. My opinion is code-gen LLMs contribute value and more open versions are worth building.
- t-vi 4y ago
  Indeed, the "learning". To my mind, the most simple (but still speculative) explanation of the "learning" phenomena - working examples and limitations / failures - we see is that the large models implicitly memorize the training inputs (or some derived features that can be used to approximately reconstruct the inputs) and then do something between interpolation and rather simple non-parametric learning. The effect is outputs are basically a somewhat sensical agglomeration of copy-pasted" snippets. That said I think the results are often useful and sometimes fascinating. We should not fool ourselves about the learning that these large neural nets do, though.
- melagonster 4y ago
  There is a common argument that "human just a better neural network", I don't know, did they mean we need to give GPT-3 or Dalle basic human rights?
  - visarga 4y ago
    I am not sure human rights fit the case, but it is one of the most remarkable developments. It is a self replicating distillation of our culture. If our human-based culture grew up and had a baby-culture...
zarzavat 4y ago
The law does not concern itself with trifles.[0] Programmers tend to think of copyright as a Boolean valued function. Either something is infringement or it isn’t. Judges think of copyright infringement as a real-valued function of many arguments corresponding to the circumstances of the parties (e.g. what actual damage was done?). A human quoting a human without attribution, without any profit made or identifiable damage, returns an infringement value very close to zero. Such cases, if anyone is petty enough to bring them, are likely to get dismissed. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_minimis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_minimis
- kelnos 4y ago
  I'm not convinced of what you wrote. Is it actually true that cases like that are dismissed? Or is it that the infringing party is ordered to stop, but not damages are awarded to the rightsholder? You've offered no examples of dismissal to back up your statement. I absolutely agree with you that copyright is not a boolean, but I don't buy the idea that a judge will just shrug and allow infringement to continue just because there was no commercial harm. I also think your example is just irrelevant to the case at hand. Sure, someone "performing" someone else's copyrighted words once may not be a big thing. But if Copilot is actually found to be infringing, these infringements will keep happening, over and over and over. Bottom line is that none of this has been tested in court. I think it's great that someone is working on doing just that. Maybe the end result will be that Microsoft's use is indeed fair use, and that Copilot users have no further obligations. But I'd like to hear a court decide that, not a bunch of armchair non-lawyers (myself included) on a random web forum.
  - abigail95 4y ago
    Louisiana Contractors Licensing Serv., Inc. v. Am. Contractors Exam Servs., Inc., 13 F. Supp. 3d 547, 554 (sorry i wrecked the citation and lost where i found it)
    - jfk13 4y ago
      Not necessarily where you found it, but sounds like https://willamette.edu/law/resources/journals/wlo/ip/2014/04/louisiana-contractors-licensing-service,-inc.-v.-american-contractors-exam-services,-inc.-.html https://willamette.edu/law/resources/journals/wlo/ip/2014/04...
williamcotton 4y ago
> If an AI is ingesting and perfectly reproducing someone else's copyrighted works, it is in violation of copyright law in the same way a human would be if they reproduce someone else's copyrighted works. "In computer programs, concerns for efficiency may limit the possible ways to achieve a particular function, making a particular expression necessary to achieving the idea. In this case, the expression is not protected by copyright." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction-Filtration-Comparison_test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction-Filtration-Compari... Consider the impact on innovation if Microsoft or Oracle were allowed to claim a copyright over utilitarian aspects of their works such as the Java or Windows API! BTW, Copilot seems to be reproducing copyrightable material when the tool reproduces comments verbatim!
- paphillips 4y ago
  In my opinion this is a key comment in this thread and everyone subject to United States law should read the Abstraction Filtration Comparison (AFC) legal test when refining their opinion. Also, I have no legal background, but as far as I know patent law != copyright law. Specifically within AFC, note the "idea/expression dichotomy" [1] which clearly states: "copyright law protects an author's expression, but not the idea behind that expression" Thus, if this tools spits out someone else's code verbatim it is a definite copyright infringement. If it outputs code that is similar but not verbatim then it "could" be an infringement, at your own risk, and to be determined by the courts. Simply expressing the same idea in a different way is not a definite infringement. Program code is naturally copyright-risky because the keyword/grammar space is constrained. It is far more difficult to accidentally duplicate verbatim the expression of one's ideas in a full language, such as English, than in C. And what of two separate programs (or constituent sub-parts such as functions) that by chance emit the same compiled binary? Personally, for now I won't use this tool due to the risk of accidental plagiarism, and because it is a black box: I can't examine any lineage or attribution metadata to understand the source(s) of what I would then be incorporating into my own body of work. Of course I doubt I could get that type of traceability information for any other trained ML model I might use, so perhaps I need to re-examine my policies heading into the future. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea%E2%80%93expression_distinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea%E2%80%93expression_distin...
Timshel 4y ago
I agree it's like people are not aware that clean room design is a thing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design).
- ghaff 4y ago
  Yes, it's a thing but how often is it actually done? I can imagine circumstances where a company might do so--say a cloud provider wants to clone some open source software and offer it as a service. But I'm pretty sure the practice isn't routine.
- autoexec 4y ago
  Not really a fix to the problem since as your own link shows you can still be dragged into court to defend against a copyright lawsuit which can cost someone tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars and there are no guarantees when you're up against a team of lawyers representing an entity with far more money and resources than you have. In the end, you can do everything right and still easily end up being screwed which isn't how anything should work.
kbelder 4y ago
>Humans routinely do violate copyright law. Plagiarism is a huge problem in many sectors; un-cited direct copies of people's work in violation of fair use is a regular every day occurrence in the human world. And we need to accept that and get over it, not get better at outlawing it.
- autoexec 4y ago
  I'd say we need to reject it, refuse to get over it, and demand changes to fix copyright law so that humans and AI don't need to risk violating the law in order to learn things and create new works based on what they've learned from what others created before them.
mgkimsal 4y ago
Seems like 'learning' and 'producing something with that learned information' are two different things. I can 'learn' all day long from copyrighted materials. I'm not violating anything, because I've not produced a copy that would be distributed or used. First/knee-jerk reaction to that above - no doubt there's more nuance buried someplace.

by naet 4y ago

iroh2727 4y ago

+1. And let's not forget too that "AI", that is, ML models, are not "autonomous" in the way that humans are autonomous. Sure, we use the word "learn" to describe what they do, which is one word that we also use to describe what people do. But ML models are always wielded by people or corporations for particular purposes. If a corporation was to directly publish some copy that appears plagiarized, we'd call that plagiarism. I don't see how adding a piece of code—one that's fully created, owned, and wielded by the corporation—as an intermediary changes anything. If anything, it looks like plagiarism-as-a-service, which seems worse (at least to my eyes). Of course, this matter is a bit confusing. Because, for example, (1) it's not always plagiarism, (2) defining what exactly is plagiarism even in the purely non-technological realm is difficult (and likely somewhat subjective), and (3) there is a lot of corporate marketing which suggests this "AI" is "autonomous" (presumably to distract from who exactly is autonomous in this picture). And of course ML art is quite useful for many things. But I mean, so are artists. Not long ago, a lot of Silicon Valley rhetoric was that the purpose of "technology" was to free up time so that people could be more incentivized to "do what people love to do" like, for example, artistic creation. But now it seems that rhetoric was just that: rhetoric, or what was needed to be believed/said at the time. And now at our present time, when technological "progress" has been followed a bit further (that is, when we've developed our machinery a bit further under the incentives of our present economic system), much rhetoric has conveniently shifted to something else, something largely contradictory, but again precisely to what is needed to be believed/said to continue following the same incentive structure.

Vetch 4y ago
The main reason AI will be reproducing copyrighted works while the original license is not trivial to identify will be that in those instances, humans are already violating copyright at a high rate. It's just flown under the radar thus far as required machinery to so easily surface violations was not available. Copilot is capable of going beyond retrieval and is competent at using variables, comments, types and local context to infer intention and generate appropriate code and even comment on it. Whenever copilot correctly predicts code of yours that's a novel combination of concepts, copilot has originated novel code. For esoteric concepts, you usually already have to know how to prime it but Copilot is especially useful when it helps you bump into things you didn't know you didn't know (one way to increase the odds of this happening is to write out your thinking so far in markdown or comments. You'd be surprised how helpful and clever Copilot can be in some instances). My point here is Github isn't charging $10/month for run of the mill retrieval. My opinion is code-gen LLMs contribute value and more open versions are worth building.
t-vi 4y ago
Indeed, the "learning". To my mind, the most simple (but still speculative) explanation of the "learning" phenomena - working examples and limitations / failures - we see is that the large models implicitly memorize the training inputs (or some derived features that can be used to approximately reconstruct the inputs) and then do something between interpolation and rather simple non-parametric learning. The effect is outputs are basically a somewhat sensical agglomeration of copy-pasted" snippets. That said I think the results are often useful and sometimes fascinating. We should not fool ourselves about the learning that these large neural nets do, though.
melagonster 4y ago
There is a common argument that "human just a better neural network", I don't know, did they mean we need to give GPT-3 or Dalle basic human rights?
- visarga 4y ago
  I am not sure human rights fit the case, but it is one of the most remarkable developments. It is a self replicating distillation of our culture. If our human-based culture grew up and had a baby-culture...

zarzavat 4y ago

The law does not concern itself with trifles.[0] Programmers tend to think of copyright as a Boolean valued function. Either something is infringement or it isn’t. Judges think of copyright infringement as a real-valued function of many arguments corresponding to the circumstances of the parties (e.g. what actual damage was done?). A human quoting a human without attribution, without any profit made or identifiable damage, returns an infringement value very close to zero. Such cases, if anyone is petty enough to bring them, are likely to get dismissed. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_minimis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_minimis

kelnos 4y ago
I'm not convinced of what you wrote. Is it actually true that cases like that are dismissed? Or is it that the infringing party is ordered to stop, but not damages are awarded to the rightsholder? You've offered no examples of dismissal to back up your statement. I absolutely agree with you that copyright is not a boolean, but I don't buy the idea that a judge will just shrug and allow infringement to continue just because there was no commercial harm. I also think your example is just irrelevant to the case at hand. Sure, someone "performing" someone else's copyrighted words once may not be a big thing. But if Copilot is actually found to be infringing, these infringements will keep happening, over and over and over. Bottom line is that none of this has been tested in court. I think it's great that someone is working on doing just that. Maybe the end result will be that Microsoft's use is indeed fair use, and that Copilot users have no further obligations. But I'd like to hear a court decide that, not a bunch of armchair non-lawyers (myself included) on a random web forum.
- abigail95 4y ago
  Louisiana Contractors Licensing Serv., Inc. v. Am. Contractors Exam Servs., Inc., 13 F. Supp. 3d 547, 554 (sorry i wrecked the citation and lost where i found it)
  - jfk13 4y ago
    Not necessarily where you found it, but sounds like https://willamette.edu/law/resources/journals/wlo/ip/2014/04/louisiana-contractors-licensing-service,-inc.-v.-american-contractors-exam-services,-inc.-.html https://willamette.edu/law/resources/journals/wlo/ip/2014/04...

williamcotton 4y ago

> If an AI is ingesting and perfectly reproducing someone else's copyrighted works, it is in violation of copyright law in the same way a human would be if they reproduce someone else's copyrighted works. "In computer programs, concerns for efficiency may limit the possible ways to achieve a particular function, making a particular expression necessary to achieving the idea. In this case, the expression is not protected by copyright." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction-Filtration-Comparison_test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction-Filtration-Compari... Consider the impact on innovation if Microsoft or Oracle were allowed to claim a copyright over utilitarian aspects of their works such as the Java or Windows API! BTW, Copilot seems to be reproducing copyrightable material when the tool reproduces comments verbatim!

paphillips 4y ago
In my opinion this is a key comment in this thread and everyone subject to United States law should read the Abstraction Filtration Comparison (AFC) legal test when refining their opinion. Also, I have no legal background, but as far as I know patent law != copyright law. Specifically within AFC, note the "idea/expression dichotomy" [1] which clearly states: "copyright law protects an author's expression, but not the idea behind that expression" Thus, if this tools spits out someone else's code verbatim it is a definite copyright infringement. If it outputs code that is similar but not verbatim then it "could" be an infringement, at your own risk, and to be determined by the courts. Simply expressing the same idea in a different way is not a definite infringement. Program code is naturally copyright-risky because the keyword/grammar space is constrained. It is far more difficult to accidentally duplicate verbatim the expression of one's ideas in a full language, such as English, than in C. And what of two separate programs (or constituent sub-parts such as functions) that by chance emit the same compiled binary? Personally, for now I won't use this tool due to the risk of accidental plagiarism, and because it is a black box: I can't examine any lineage or attribution metadata to understand the source(s) of what I would then be incorporating into my own body of work. Of course I doubt I could get that type of traceability information for any other trained ML model I might use, so perhaps I need to re-examine my policies heading into the future. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea%E2%80%93expression_distinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea%E2%80%93expression_distin...

Timshel 4y ago

I agree it's like people are not aware that clean room design is a thing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design).

ghaff 4y ago
Yes, it's a thing but how often is it actually done? I can imagine circumstances where a company might do so--say a cloud provider wants to clone some open source software and offer it as a service. But I'm pretty sure the practice isn't routine.
autoexec 4y ago
Not really a fix to the problem since as your own link shows you can still be dragged into court to defend against a copyright lawsuit which can cost someone tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars and there are no guarantees when you're up against a team of lawyers representing an entity with far more money and resources than you have. In the end, you can do everything right and still easily end up being screwed which isn't how anything should work.

kbelder 4y ago

>Humans routinely do violate copyright law. Plagiarism is a huge problem in many sectors; un-cited direct copies of people's work in violation of fair use is a regular every day occurrence in the human world. And we need to accept that and get over it, not get better at outlawing it.

autoexec 4y ago
I'd say we need to reject it, refuse to get over it, and demand changes to fix copyright law so that humans and AI don't need to risk violating the law in order to learn things and create new works based on what they've learned from what others created before them.

mgkimsal 4y ago

Seems like 'learning' and 'producing something with that learned information' are two different things. I can 'learn' all day long from copyrighted materials. I'm not violating anything, because I've not produced a copy that would be distributed or used. First/knee-jerk reaction to that above - no doubt there's more nuance buried someplace.