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> AI are on the "infringing" rather than the "inventive" side of things Does it really matter? Once you embed copyrighted works into your learning dataset, any

> AI are on the "infringing" rather than the "inventive" side of things Does it really matter? Once you embed copyrighted works into your learning dataset, any model you ship and any "creation" of that model is by definition a derived work, must have a license from the original authors and must obey the terms of that license. The extent of derivation is immaterial. The AI crowd is on a hard collision course with an army of gavels.

Kim_Bruning 4y ago
That's definitely one legal theory. The theory used here though is that fair use permits transformative use. Normally copilot output should be sufficiently transformative. This particular situation appears to be a sort of bug (overfit). Note that AI models already work somewhat similarly to how humans work (becoming bug-for-bug compatible at times even :-P ). We may need laws to be amended in the opposite direction even, else it might become illegal for humans to learn too.
- blibble 4y ago
  the US concept of "fair use" is far from universal and is more liberal than in the vast majority of the rest of the world
- manholio 4y ago
  I think any legal theory that must equate people with machines to prove its point is dead in any real court. Laws are made by people for people, to protect people's interests, so the analogy is just about as effective as requiring a human to work 16 hours because a horse can, and both operate on similar principles. Of course everything a human learns and produces is a derivative of real world input, some of it copyrighted. But people agreed that this transformation is a form of fair use, as long as the derived work is sufficiently creative - where the key implicit assumption is that creativity is a human ability that warrants protection. Both the creator and the learner enjoy protection because they are human. In the AI case, the output of a program will certainly not receive protection by default - it will be protected only as a consequence of its human creator or user rights. It doesn't really matter how transformative and analogous to the human mind the program is, the output only deserves protection solely for its unique human created parts - the internal working and the extent of the craft embedded in a GPT3 text prompt. The first is unrelated directly to the work produced, and the second is laughable vs the artworks embedded in the model. If in the future AI advances to the point where it can be granted natural rights, this could change, but we are far far from that point.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    I think "natural rights" is an independent question, and AI passing such a test is likely to be independent from "does copyright still help people get rich from creative labour now that AI can do $thing at $quality?" Animals have (some, limited) natural rights, but can't hold copyright. Corporations don't have "natural" rights but can hold copyright.

Kim_Bruning 4y ago

That's definitely one legal theory. The theory used here though is that fair use permits transformative use. Normally copilot output should be sufficiently transformative. This particular situation appears to be a sort of bug (overfit). Note that AI models already work somewhat similarly to how humans work (becoming bug-for-bug compatible at times even :-P ). We may need laws to be amended in the opposite direction even, else it might become illegal for humans to learn too.

blibble 4y ago
the US concept of "fair use" is far from universal and is more liberal than in the vast majority of the rest of the world
manholio 4y ago
I think any legal theory that must equate people with machines to prove its point is dead in any real court. Laws are made by people for people, to protect people's interests, so the analogy is just about as effective as requiring a human to work 16 hours because a horse can, and both operate on similar principles. Of course everything a human learns and produces is a derivative of real world input, some of it copyrighted. But people agreed that this transformation is a form of fair use, as long as the derived work is sufficiently creative - where the key implicit assumption is that creativity is a human ability that warrants protection. Both the creator and the learner enjoy protection because they are human. In the AI case, the output of a program will certainly not receive protection by default - it will be protected only as a consequence of its human creator or user rights. It doesn't really matter how transformative and analogous to the human mind the program is, the output only deserves protection solely for its unique human created parts - the internal working and the extent of the craft embedded in a GPT3 text prompt. The first is unrelated directly to the work produced, and the second is laughable vs the artworks embedded in the model. If in the future AI advances to the point where it can be granted natural rights, this could change, but we are far far from that point.
- ben_w 4y ago
  I think "natural rights" is an independent question, and AI passing such a test is likely to be independent from "does copyright still help people get rich from creative labour now that AI can do $thing at $quality?" Animals have (some, limited) natural rights, but can't hold copyright. Corporations don't have "natural" rights but can hold copyright.