6 ms·

It boils down to this: Do you need permission if you train your AI model with copyrighted things or not?

by Tepix 4y ago

gt565k 4y ago
Ehhh that’s like saying an artist who studies other art pieces and then creates something using combined techniques and styles from those set pieces is what ???? Now liable ???
- Tepix 4y ago
  That's like saying creating a thing that looks at one artists artwork and then copies her unique style ad infinitum may need permission first.
  - pigsty 4y ago
    Copying an artist’s style is very much not considered copyright infringement and is how artists learn. Copying a work itself can be copyright infringement if it’s very close to the original to the point people may think they’re the same work.
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    You don’t need permission. Style is not an owned thing.
- Taywee 4y ago
  An AI is not a person. Automated transformation does not remove the original copyright, otherwise decompilers would as well. That the process is similar to a real person is not actually important, because it's still an automated transformation by a computer program. We might be able to argue that the computer program taking art as input and automatically generating art as output is the exact same as an artist some time after general intelligence is reached, until then, it's still a machine transformation and should be treated as such. AI shouldn't be a legal avenue for copyright laundering.
  - CyanBird 4y ago
    Except the machine is not automatically generating an input > automatically generating art as output The user is navigating the latent space to obtain said output, I don't know if that's transformative or not, but it is an important distinction If the program were wholy automated as in it had a random number/words generator added to it and no navigation of the latent space by users happened, then yeah I would agree, but that's not the case at least so far as ml algos like midjourney or stable diffusion are concerned
    - Taywee 4y ago
      That's still automated in the same way that a compiler is automated. A compiler doesn't remove the copyright, neither does a decompiler. This isn't different enough to have different copyright rules. There are more layers to the transformation, but it's still a program with input and output. I'm not sure what you mean by "navigation of latent space". It's generating a model from copyrighted input and then using that model and more input to generate output. It's a machine transformation in more steps.
    - Retric 4y ago
      The output is probably irrelevant here, the model itself is a derivative work from a copyright standpoint. Going painting > raw photo (derivative work), raw photo > jpg (derivative work), jpg > model (derivative work), model > image (derivative work). At best you can make a fair use argument at that last step, but that falls apart if the resulting images harm the market for the original work.
      - PeterisP 4y ago
        It's not clear at all whether the model is a derivative work from a copyright standpoint. Maybe they are, may be they are not - it's definitely not settled, the law isn't very explicit and as far as I know, there is no reasonable precedent yet - and arguably that would be one of the key issues decided (and set as precedent) in these first court battles. I also wouldn't be surprised if it eventually doesn't matter what current law says as the major tech companies may lobby passing a law to explicitly define the rules of the game; I mean if Disney could lobby multiple copyright laws to protect their interests, then the ML-heavy tech companies, being much larger and more wealthy than Disney, can do it as well. But currently, first, there is a reasonable argument that the model weights may be not copyrightable at all - it doesn't really fit the criteria of what copyright law protects, no creativity was used in making them, etc, in which case it can't be a derivative work and is effectively outside the scope of copyright law. Second, there is a reasonable argument that the model is a collection of facts about copyrighted works, equivalent to early (pre-computer) statistical ngram language models of copyrighted books used in e.g. lexicography - for which we have solid old legal precedent that creating such models are not derivative works (again, as a collection of facts isn't copyrightable) and thus can be done against the wishes of the authors. Fair use criteria comes into play as conditions when it is permissible to violate the exclusive rights of the authors. However, if the model is not legally considered a derivative work according to copyright law criteria, then fair use conditions don't matter because in that case copyright law does not assert that making them is somehow restricted. Note that in this case the resulting image might still be considered derivative work of an original image, even if the "tool-in-the-middle" is not derivative work.
- TaupeRanger 4y ago
  Not at all, for many reasons. 1) the artist is not literally copying the copyrighted pixel data into their "system" for training 2) An individual artist is not a multi billion dollar company with a computer system that spits out art rapidly using copyrighted pixel data. A categorical difference.
  - brushfoot 4y ago
    Those reasons don't make sense to me. On 1, human artists are copying copyrighted pixel data into their system for training. That system is the brain. It's organic RAM. On 2, money shouldn't make a difference. Jim Carrey should still be allowed to paint even though he's rich. If Jim uses Photoshop instead of brushes, he can spit out the style ideas he's copied and transformed in his brain more rapidly - but he should still be allowed to do it.
    - astrange 4y ago
      > On 1, human artists are copying copyrighted pixel data into their system for training. That system is the brain. It's organic RAM. They probably aren't doing that. Studying the production methods and WIPs is more useful for a human. (ML models basically guess how to make images until they produce one that "looks like" something you show it.)
      - Mezzie 4y ago
        They do sometimes, or at least they used to. I have some (very limited) visual art training, and one of the things I/we did in class was manually mash up already existing works. In my case I smushed the Persistence of Memory and the Arnolfini portrait. It was pretty clear copycat; the work was divided into squares and I poorly replicated the Arnolfini Portrait from square to square.
    - Taywee 4y ago
      A human can grow and learn based on their own experiences separate from their art image input. They'll sometimes get creative and develop their own unique style. Through all analogies, the AI is still a program with input and output. Point 1 doesn't fit for the same reason it doesn't work for any compiler. Until AI can innovate itself and hold its own copyright, it's still a machine transformation.
- Double_a_92 4y ago
  That's still the question that it boils down to, even if the answer is a "No".
- alt227 4y ago
  Depends if the artist creates something new which looks exactly like one of the things he has studied.
- bakugo 4y ago
  No, it's not the same thing at all, in fact it's entirely unrelated. Say it with me: Computer algorithms are NOT people. They should NOT have the same rights as people.
ben_w 4y ago
If you do need permission, is Page Rank a copyright infringing AI, or just a sparkling matrix multiplication derived entirely from everyone else's work?
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  Page Rank doesn't reproduce any content claiming it's new. You can however disallow Google from indexing your content using robots.txt a met tag in the HTML or an HTTP header. Or you can ask Google to remove it from their indexes. Your content will disappear from then on. You can't un-train what's already been trained. You can't disallow scraping for training. The damage is already done and it's irreversible. It's like trying to unbomb Hiroshima.
  - CyanBird 4y ago
    That's actually interesting, adding Metadata to the images as a check for allowing or disallowing ai usage That might be a good way to go about it
    - ben_w 4y ago
      If you can make the metadata survive cropping, format shifts, and screenshots. Can probably do all that well-enough (probably doesn't need to be perfect) by leaning on FAANG, with or without legislation. But: opt-in by default, or opt-out by default?
- Lalabadie 4y ago
  The output of Pagerank for a given page is not another new page, that's curiously close in style and execution but laundered of IP concerns. A tool that catalogues attributed links can't really be evaluated the same way as pastiche machine. You'd be much closer using the example of Google's first page answer snippets, that are pulled out of a site's content with minimal attribution.
cardanome 4y ago
As a human, I can use whatever I want for reference for my drawings. Including copyrighted material. Now, as for training "AI" models, who knows. You can argue it is the same thing a human is doing or you could argue it a new, different quality and should be under different rules. Regardless, the current copyright laws were written before "AI" models were in widespread use so whatever is allowed or not is more of a historic accident. So the discussion needs to be about the intention of copyright laws and what SHOULD be.
- vgatherps 4y ago
  This would be a fairly novel law as it would legislate not just the release of an AI but the training as well? That would imply legislating what linear algebra is legal and illegal to do, no? And practically speaking, putting aside whether a government should even be able to legislate such things, enforcing such a law would be near impossible without wild privacy violations.
  - CyanBird 4y ago
    > That would imply legislating what linear algebra is legal and illegal to do, no? No, it would just legislate what images are and which ones are not on the training data to be parsed, artists want a copyright which makes their images unusable for machine learning derivative works. The trick here is that eventually the algorithms will get good enough that it won't be necessary for said images to even be on the training data in the first place, but we can imagine that artists would be OK with that
    - astrange 4y ago
      > The trick here is that eventually the algorithms will get good enough that it won't be necessary for said images to even be on the training data in the first place, but we can imagine that artists would be OK with that They shouldn't be OK with that and they probably aren't. That's a much worse problem for them! The reason they're complaining about copyright is most likely coping because this is what they're actually concerned about.
    - 4y ago
residualmind 4y ago
I would argue if people are allowed to see your art for free, so should AI models.
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  people are allowed to take a walk in the park, so why cars or tanks or bulldozers are not?
  - residualmind 4y ago
    A bulldozer destroys the park and other people's ability to enjoy it -- active, destructive. Passively training a model on an artwork does not change the art in the slightest -- passive, non-destructive Mind you, this is not talking about the usage rights of images generated from such a model, that's a completely different story and a legal one.
    - 6P58r3MXJSLi 4y ago
      > A bulldozer destroys the park and other people's ability to enjoy it hear hear... > Passively training a model on an artwork does not change the art in the slightest copyright holders, I mean individual authors, people who actually produced the content being used, disagree. They say AI is like a bulldozer destroying the park to them. Which technically is true, it's a machine that someone (some interested party maybe?) is trying to disguise as a human, doing human stuff. But it's not. > passive, non-destructive Passive, non-destructive, in this context means - passive: people send the images to you, you don't go looking for them - non-destructive: people authorized you, otherwise it's destructive of their rights.
- dotancohen 4y ago
  Bad argument. Being allowed to see art and being allowed to copy art are two different things. Being allowed to _copy_ is a reserved _right_, that's the root of the word copyright.
  - 4y ago
jefftk 4y ago
Which is also what the GitHub co-pilot suit is about: https://githubcopilotlitigation.com https://githubcopilotlitigation.com If you have views on whether they'll win, the prediction market is currently at 49%: https://manifold.markets/JeffKaufman/will-the-github-copilot-litigation https://manifold.markets/JeffKaufman/will-the-github-copilot...

It boils down to this: Do you need permission if you train your AI model with copyrighted things or not?

by Tepix 4y ago

It boils down to this: Do you need permission if you train your AI model with copyrighted things or not?

Ehhh that’s like saying an artist who studies other art pieces and then creates something using combined techniques and styles from those set pieces is what ???? Now liable ???

Tepix 4y ago
That's like saying creating a thing that looks at one artists artwork and then copies her unique style ad infinitum may need permission first.
- pigsty 4y ago
  Copying an artist’s style is very much not considered copyright infringement and is how artists learn. Copying a work itself can be copyright infringement if it’s very close to the original to the point people may think they’re the same work.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  You don’t need permission. Style is not an owned thing.
Taywee 4y ago
An AI is not a person. Automated transformation does not remove the original copyright, otherwise decompilers would as well. That the process is similar to a real person is not actually important, because it's still an automated transformation by a computer program. We might be able to argue that the computer program taking art as input and automatically generating art as output is the exact same as an artist some time after general intelligence is reached, until then, it's still a machine transformation and should be treated as such. AI shouldn't be a legal avenue for copyright laundering.
- CyanBird 4y ago
  Except the machine is not automatically generating an input > automatically generating art as output The user is navigating the latent space to obtain said output, I don't know if that's transformative or not, but it is an important distinction If the program were wholy automated as in it had a random number/words generator added to it and no navigation of the latent space by users happened, then yeah I would agree, but that's not the case at least so far as ml algos like midjourney or stable diffusion are concerned
  - Taywee 4y ago
    That's still automated in the same way that a compiler is automated. A compiler doesn't remove the copyright, neither does a decompiler. This isn't different enough to have different copyright rules. There are more layers to the transformation, but it's still a program with input and output. I'm not sure what you mean by "navigation of latent space". It's generating a model from copyrighted input and then using that model and more input to generate output. It's a machine transformation in more steps.
  - Retric 4y ago
    The output is probably irrelevant here, the model itself is a derivative work from a copyright standpoint. Going painting > raw photo (derivative work), raw photo > jpg (derivative work), jpg > model (derivative work), model > image (derivative work). At best you can make a fair use argument at that last step, but that falls apart if the resulting images harm the market for the original work.
    - PeterisP 4y ago
      It's not clear at all whether the model is a derivative work from a copyright standpoint. Maybe they are, may be they are not - it's definitely not settled, the law isn't very explicit and as far as I know, there is no reasonable precedent yet - and arguably that would be one of the key issues decided (and set as precedent) in these first court battles. I also wouldn't be surprised if it eventually doesn't matter what current law says as the major tech companies may lobby passing a law to explicitly define the rules of the game; I mean if Disney could lobby multiple copyright laws to protect their interests, then the ML-heavy tech companies, being much larger and more wealthy than Disney, can do it as well. But currently, first, there is a reasonable argument that the model weights may be not copyrightable at all - it doesn't really fit the criteria of what copyright law protects, no creativity was used in making them, etc, in which case it can't be a derivative work and is effectively outside the scope of copyright law. Second, there is a reasonable argument that the model is a collection of facts about copyrighted works, equivalent to early (pre-computer) statistical ngram language models of copyrighted books used in e.g. lexicography - for which we have solid old legal precedent that creating such models are not derivative works (again, as a collection of facts isn't copyrightable) and thus can be done against the wishes of the authors. Fair use criteria comes into play as conditions when it is permissible to violate the exclusive rights of the authors. However, if the model is not legally considered a derivative work according to copyright law criteria, then fair use conditions don't matter because in that case copyright law does not assert that making them is somehow restricted. Note that in this case the resulting image might still be considered derivative work of an original image, even if the "tool-in-the-middle" is not derivative work.
TaupeRanger 4y ago
Not at all, for many reasons. 1) the artist is not literally copying the copyrighted pixel data into their "system" for training 2) An individual artist is not a multi billion dollar company with a computer system that spits out art rapidly using copyrighted pixel data. A categorical difference.
- brushfoot 4y ago
  Those reasons don't make sense to me. On 1, human artists are copying copyrighted pixel data into their system for training. That system is the brain. It's organic RAM. On 2, money shouldn't make a difference. Jim Carrey should still be allowed to paint even though he's rich. If Jim uses Photoshop instead of brushes, he can spit out the style ideas he's copied and transformed in his brain more rapidly - but he should still be allowed to do it.
  - astrange 4y ago
    > On 1, human artists are copying copyrighted pixel data into their system for training. That system is the brain. It's organic RAM. They probably aren't doing that. Studying the production methods and WIPs is more useful for a human. (ML models basically guess how to make images until they produce one that "looks like" something you show it.)
    - Mezzie 4y ago
      They do sometimes, or at least they used to. I have some (very limited) visual art training, and one of the things I/we did in class was manually mash up already existing works. In my case I smushed the Persistence of Memory and the Arnolfini portrait. It was pretty clear copycat; the work was divided into squares and I poorly replicated the Arnolfini Portrait from square to square.
  - Taywee 4y ago
    A human can grow and learn based on their own experiences separate from their art image input. They'll sometimes get creative and develop their own unique style. Through all analogies, the AI is still a program with input and output. Point 1 doesn't fit for the same reason it doesn't work for any compiler. Until AI can innovate itself and hold its own copyright, it's still a machine transformation.
Double_a_92 4y ago
That's still the question that it boils down to, even if the answer is a "No".
alt227 4y ago
Depends if the artist creates something new which looks exactly like one of the things he has studied.
bakugo 4y ago
No, it's not the same thing at all, in fact it's entirely unrelated. Say it with me: Computer algorithms are NOT people. They should NOT have the same rights as people.

ben_w 4y ago

If you do need permission, is Page Rank a copyright infringing AI, or just a sparkling matrix multiplication derived entirely from everyone else's work?

peoplefromibiza 4y ago
Page Rank doesn't reproduce any content claiming it's new. You can however disallow Google from indexing your content using robots.txt a met tag in the HTML or an HTTP header. Or you can ask Google to remove it from their indexes. Your content will disappear from then on. You can't un-train what's already been trained. You can't disallow scraping for training. The damage is already done and it's irreversible. It's like trying to unbomb Hiroshima.
- CyanBird 4y ago
  That's actually interesting, adding Metadata to the images as a check for allowing or disallowing ai usage That might be a good way to go about it
  - ben_w 4y ago
    If you can make the metadata survive cropping, format shifts, and screenshots. Can probably do all that well-enough (probably doesn't need to be perfect) by leaning on FAANG, with or without legislation. But: opt-in by default, or opt-out by default?
Lalabadie 4y ago
The output of Pagerank for a given page is not another new page, that's curiously close in style and execution but laundered of IP concerns. A tool that catalogues attributed links can't really be evaluated the same way as pastiche machine. You'd be much closer using the example of Google's first page answer snippets, that are pulled out of a site's content with minimal attribution.

cardanome 4y ago

As a human, I can use whatever I want for reference for my drawings. Including copyrighted material. Now, as for training "AI" models, who knows. You can argue it is the same thing a human is doing or you could argue it a new, different quality and should be under different rules. Regardless, the current copyright laws were written before "AI" models were in widespread use so whatever is allowed or not is more of a historic accident. So the discussion needs to be about the intention of copyright laws and what SHOULD be.

vgatherps 4y ago
This would be a fairly novel law as it would legislate not just the release of an AI but the training as well? That would imply legislating what linear algebra is legal and illegal to do, no? And practically speaking, putting aside whether a government should even be able to legislate such things, enforcing such a law would be near impossible without wild privacy violations.
- CyanBird 4y ago
  > That would imply legislating what linear algebra is legal and illegal to do, no? No, it would just legislate what images are and which ones are not on the training data to be parsed, artists want a copyright which makes their images unusable for machine learning derivative works. The trick here is that eventually the algorithms will get good enough that it won't be necessary for said images to even be on the training data in the first place, but we can imagine that artists would be OK with that
  - astrange 4y ago
    > The trick here is that eventually the algorithms will get good enough that it won't be necessary for said images to even be on the training data in the first place, but we can imagine that artists would be OK with that They shouldn't be OK with that and they probably aren't. That's a much worse problem for them! The reason they're complaining about copyright is most likely coping because this is what they're actually concerned about.
  - 4y ago

residualmind 4y ago

I would argue if people are allowed to see your art for free, so should AI models.

peoplefromibiza 4y ago
people are allowed to take a walk in the park, so why cars or tanks or bulldozers are not?
- residualmind 4y ago
  A bulldozer destroys the park and other people's ability to enjoy it -- active, destructive. Passively training a model on an artwork does not change the art in the slightest -- passive, non-destructive Mind you, this is not talking about the usage rights of images generated from such a model, that's a completely different story and a legal one.
  - 6P58r3MXJSLi 4y ago
    > A bulldozer destroys the park and other people's ability to enjoy it hear hear... > Passively training a model on an artwork does not change the art in the slightest copyright holders, I mean individual authors, people who actually produced the content being used, disagree. They say AI is like a bulldozer destroying the park to them. Which technically is true, it's a machine that someone (some interested party maybe?) is trying to disguise as a human, doing human stuff. But it's not. > passive, non-destructive Passive, non-destructive, in this context means - passive: people send the images to you, you don't go looking for them - non-destructive: people authorized you, otherwise it's destructive of their rights.
dotancohen 4y ago
Bad argument. Being allowed to see art and being allowed to copy art are two different things. Being allowed to _copy_ is a reserved _right_, that's the root of the word copyright.
- 4y ago

jefftk 4y ago

Which is also what the GitHub co-pilot suit is about: https://githubcopilotlitigation.com https://githubcopilotlitigation.com If you have views on whether they'll win, the prediction market is currently at 49%: https://manifold.markets/JeffKaufman/will-the-github-copilot-litigation https://manifold.markets/JeffKaufman/will-the-github-copilot...