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I don’t think this lawsuit would hinder innovation but it would greatly change it and who owns it. If an AI model is the joint property of all the people who c

I don’t think this lawsuit would hinder innovation but it would greatly change it and who owns it. If an AI model is the joint property of all the people who contributed IP to it, it’s a pretty hugely democratic and decentralizing force. It also will incentivise a huge amount of innovation on better, richer data sources for AI. If an AI model isn’t joint property of the IP it learned then it’s a great way to build extractive business models because the raw resource is mostly free. This will incentivise larger, more centralised entities. Much of the most interesting data comes from everyday people. A class action precedent is probably good for society and good for innovation (particularly pushing innovation on the edge/data collection side)

shanusmagnus 4y ago
If the resource is free and non-rivalrous, what is being extracted?
- saurik 4y ago
  The resource is not "free": it is provided under a license that attempts to lay out the terms the entity using the resource must comply with in order to get the benefit of using their product; just because this is a non-monetary compensation doesn't mean it is "free".
  - D13Fd 4y ago
    Authors of code (open source or otherwise) hold a copyright in that code. The purpose of the license agreement is to set out the terms on which the authors will permit others to take actions that would otherwise infringe copyright. Using code, photographs, documents, or other material to train a model isn't copyright infringement. The person operating the model is not violating the exclusive rights of the copyright author: they are not making copies or derivative works. Any other result means that all AI development based on training models is going to grind to a screeching halt, because essentially all training material—text, pictures, recordings—is copyrighted.
    - still_grokking 4y ago
      > The person operating the model is not violating the exclusive rights of the copyright author: they are not making copies or derivative works. How do they not make copies? Do you know how a computer works? Ever heard of RAM? (At least the German Urheberrecht recognizes this clearly: You can't do any processing on any data with the help of a computer without at least making temporary local copies, so there are exceptions to some rules. I'm quite sure common law copyright also recognizes this!) Also the claim that this is not a derivative work is actually one of the disputed claims here… > Any other result means that all AI development based on training models is going to grind to a screeching halt, because essentially all training material—text, pictures, recordings—is copyrighted. Exactly, it's all copyrighted! That's why you can't use it for whatever you like. That's the whole point of copyright. As a result this means that whoever wants to exploit that work in said way needs to buy (or get otherwise) a license! Nobody said that feeding AI with properly licensed work would be problematic. Only the original creators need to get their fair cut form the outcome of such process.
      - AnnasVirtual 4y ago
        you are clearly doesn't understand how machine learning works, if machine learning ok copyrighted data becomes illegal then most of our infrastructures will be down because most of it uses machine learning, the first that will affect many people is probably google search
        bobbruno 4y ago
        I believe this is the core point of the lawsuit - is Copilot really creating code from what it learned (which happens to, by some weird glitch, mimic the source code) or is it just a big overfitting model that learned to encode and memorize a large number of answers and spit them out verbatim when prompted? I think that losing this lawsuit has much more serious consequences for Copilot than just having to connect to a list of millions of potential copyright owners - it would mean the model behind it is essentially a failure. Personal opinion: the real situation lies somewhere in the middle. From what I’ve seen, I think Copilot has some ability to actually generate code, or at least adapt and connect unrelated code pieces it remembers to respond to prompts - but I also believe it just “remembers” (i.e., has a close-to-lossless encoding of the input) how to do some operations and spits them out as part of the response to some prompts. I hardly think the lawsuit will really explore this discussion, but it sounds like a great investigation into what DL models like transformers actually learn. For all I know, it might even give insight into how we learn. I have no reason to believe that humans don’t use the same strategy of memorising some operations and learning how to adjust them “at the edges” to combine them.
kmeisthax 4y ago
The problem of jointly-owned AI is that the actual value of a particular contribution to the training set is not particularly easy to calculate. We can't tie a particular model weight back to individual training set examples, nor can we take an output that's a statistical mix of two different peoples' work and trace it back to them. With current technology, the only licensing model we can offer is "give us your training set example, we'll chuck a few pennies at you out of credit sales and nothing more". We can't even comply with CC-BY because the model can't determine who to attribute to.

shanusmagnus 4y ago

If the resource is free and non-rivalrous, what is being extracted?

saurik 4y ago
The resource is not "free": it is provided under a license that attempts to lay out the terms the entity using the resource must comply with in order to get the benefit of using their product; just because this is a non-monetary compensation doesn't mean it is "free".
- D13Fd 4y ago
  Authors of code (open source or otherwise) hold a copyright in that code. The purpose of the license agreement is to set out the terms on which the authors will permit others to take actions that would otherwise infringe copyright. Using code, photographs, documents, or other material to train a model isn't copyright infringement. The person operating the model is not violating the exclusive rights of the copyright author: they are not making copies or derivative works. Any other result means that all AI development based on training models is going to grind to a screeching halt, because essentially all training material—text, pictures, recordings—is copyrighted.
  - still_grokking 4y ago
    > The person operating the model is not violating the exclusive rights of the copyright author: they are not making copies or derivative works. How do they not make copies? Do you know how a computer works? Ever heard of RAM? (At least the German Urheberrecht recognizes this clearly: You can't do any processing on any data with the help of a computer without at least making temporary local copies, so there are exceptions to some rules. I'm quite sure common law copyright also recognizes this!) Also the claim that this is not a derivative work is actually one of the disputed claims here… > Any other result means that all AI development based on training models is going to grind to a screeching halt, because essentially all training material—text, pictures, recordings—is copyrighted. Exactly, it's all copyrighted! That's why you can't use it for whatever you like. That's the whole point of copyright. As a result this means that whoever wants to exploit that work in said way needs to buy (or get otherwise) a license! Nobody said that feeding AI with properly licensed work would be problematic. Only the original creators need to get their fair cut form the outcome of such process.
    - AnnasVirtual 4y ago
      you are clearly doesn't understand how machine learning works, if machine learning ok copyrighted data becomes illegal then most of our infrastructures will be down because most of it uses machine learning, the first that will affect many people is probably google search
      - bobbruno 4y ago
        I believe this is the core point of the lawsuit - is Copilot really creating code from what it learned (which happens to, by some weird glitch, mimic the source code) or is it just a big overfitting model that learned to encode and memorize a large number of answers and spit them out verbatim when prompted? I think that losing this lawsuit has much more serious consequences for Copilot than just having to connect to a list of millions of potential copyright owners - it would mean the model behind it is essentially a failure. Personal opinion: the real situation lies somewhere in the middle. From what I’ve seen, I think Copilot has some ability to actually generate code, or at least adapt and connect unrelated code pieces it remembers to respond to prompts - but I also believe it just “remembers” (i.e., has a close-to-lossless encoding of the input) how to do some operations and spits them out as part of the response to some prompts. I hardly think the lawsuit will really explore this discussion, but it sounds like a great investigation into what DL models like transformers actually learn. For all I know, it might even give insight into how we learn. I have no reason to believe that humans don’t use the same strategy of memorising some operations and learning how to adjust them “at the edges” to combine them.

kmeisthax 4y ago

The problem of jointly-owned AI is that the actual value of a particular contribution to the training set is not particularly easy to calculate. We can't tie a particular model weight back to individual training set examples, nor can we take an output that's a statistical mix of two different peoples' work and trace it back to them. With current technology, the only licensing model we can offer is "give us your training set example, we'll chuck a few pennies at you out of credit sales and nothing more". We can't even comply with CC-BY because the model can't determine who to attribute to.