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Ownership of AI-Generated Code Hotly Disputed

87 points by Chris2048 4y ago

somrand0 4y ago
ownership is a concept in dire need of revision
- riedel 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - scotty79 4y ago
    Which had, as a concept and in practice nothing to do with code ownership.
    - hutzlibu 4y ago
      Depends I guess, there are a million definitions of communism, but commonly the idea is, to give the tools and factories into the hand of the workers (in theory), so you probably could argue that code ownership of productive code falls under this.
  - bediger4000 4y ago
    There used to be a concept called public domain. The purpose of copyright was to make increase the public domain. What's your point?
    - riedel 4y ago
      My point is that there is socioeconomic theories which were based on the goal of common ownership of all means of production (which in a digital society would often translate to code). I guess all movements that have tried to transition to such societies have failed (thus my comment: they are alternatives, the trick is to make them working). While public domain is (except maybe for government agency) is a model you chose, this is completely different. If we are talking about alternatives to ownership we cannot do this without thinking in political dimensions.
- marc_io 4y ago
  Yes, as long as it doesn't disregard the original creator's intentions in the formulation.
  - c7b 4y ago
    Even that notion is tricky in the context of text AI. It doesn't seem obviously clear to me what the implied stance towards AI training would be for many popular license types. It seems more like the creators of many licenses didn't explicitly consider this use case. And the more meta question is whether the creators' rights should even extend to that realm. Can you specify in a license "This text must not be read by students in the context of an educational course" (which is arguably the closest analogue to AI training)? If that's not possible, then where do we draw the line between tools-assisted learning by humans and human tools learning on their own? You can arrive at answers, but it seems to me like there are many possible reasonable interpretations.
    - marc_io 4y ago
      > (which is arguably the closest analogue to AI training) It would be more accurate to compare those students with the corporate interests involved in AI training, not the model's use of the content.
    - thn-gap 4y ago
      Why is it fair use if you train a model on copyrighted material and use its transformative output, despite going against the will of the author? Can we all legally pirate educational books since it's for self training and producing transformative outputs? Can I consume all media (books, movies, music) the same way, and call it fair use? Also for software?
      - TchoBeer 4y ago
        yeah, I struggle to see how training AI on illegally gotten data is legal.
      - c7b 4y ago
        Content that hasn't been legally obtained wouldn't be legal to consume in any way. That's not what I meant, and I think that's a bit of a disingenuous interpretation of my comment. The debate is about content that is generally legally obtained, but might come with certain restrictions. Where restrictions is a broad term and might also just come in the form of a copyleft license, eg. My main point was that in many situations, eg involving open source licenses, it's really not clear from the terms what the creator's intent regarding AI training was. And the broader question is whether training is fair use, or something else, maybe even a new legal concept that would have to be established. Or, what's the difference between art students going to the museum to be inspired, and Dall-E 'looking' at public domain images?
- crawfordcomeaux 4y ago
  Yes, like scientific grounding or abandonment. If only we held all myths to such high esteem as we societally hold ownership.
- cyber_kinetist 4y ago
  The only way to truly own something, is to either share it or destroy it.
  - friesandties 4y ago
    I really like this, it rings so true to me in the current times. Temporal everything, air, food; a life even-keel.
- bodyfour 4y ago
  Once we have AI-generated laws I'm sure this will be sorted out.
- wahnfrieden 4y ago
  or abolition but to do that without any reasonable social support nets is absurd
  - somrand0 4y ago
    but what does it mean to destroy the concept of ownership (i.e. the notion of property) if we take that > The only way to truly own something, is to either share it or destroy it. could I argue that then, we would be taking ownership of the concept of ownership?? ahahha... I think this is kind of funny. And I'd admit that it's not very helpful to the goal of revising the very concept of ownership. my own parent comment is already controversial with many replies and exactly 0 points (at the time of this response)
    - wahnfrieden 4y ago
      private property successfully didn't exist in various societies, including larger scale societies and ones that had discovered agriculture, and not only under communist regimes. it does mean to share, without ownership.
- claytongulick 4y ago
  Agreed. You don't mind if I borrow your car do you? And your house? Let's not quibble about the particulars of me ever giving them back.
  - TchoBeer 4y ago
    I don't want you taking my car because I need to use my car and only one of us can use it at a time. Intellectual property can be endlessly copied without anyone losing anything. This is not a defense of IP theft (and it's pretty reasonable to think that IP law serves an important purpose protecting creatives' ability to get compensated for their work) but it means that they require a fundamentally different approach.
    - claytongulick 4y ago
      > ownership is a concept in dire need of revision GP did not limit the scope of their opinion on ownership to IP.
  - somrand0 4y ago
    indeed, the first step (IMO) towards revising the notion is to recognize that physical (material, tangible) assets inherently work differently than digital assets. As I understand so far the main reason to seek a revision of the concept of ownership is exactly due to the existence (enabled by internet technology) of digital assets. copy-pasting is HOW computers work. copy-pasting does not do well in society ruled by the exclusivity-mindset inherent to marketplaces (and their societies) of tangible assets
    - claytongulick 4y ago
      I'm not exactly an IP hawk, from from it. I agree with you that digital "asset" ownership is new, unexplored territory for humans. We've never been able to separate the content from the distribution medium before now, and we're struggling to recreate a model we're familiar with (physical media) by imposing absurdities like DRM. NFTs are also an absurd way of trying to solve the same problem. The issue we wrestle with is mistaking "ownership" with a access. I can own a physical book, but I do not own the content of the book, I've paid for access to that content and the book is the medium. Digital assets are the same, I don't own them, they are a form of access to content that someone else owns, and has granted me an either implicit or explicit license to use. I think this is the concept of ownership that needs to be revised. Rather than a mp3 being treated, and thought of, like a book - it should be thought of more as a movie ticket. Something that grants me access to content within the limits defined by the content owner.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
scotty79 4y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free
- falcolas 4y ago
  I propose that information naturally wants to degrade. Paper decomposes. Bits flip. File formats are replaced and lost. Storage mediums degrade. It's all an extension of the universe trending towards entropy. It actually takes quite a bit of effort to store, then distribute information precisely and broadly. There's a lot of infrastructure, effort, and money involved, and still information degrades and disappears over time. Any libre information exists because people have put effort into it. Sometimes a lot of effort.
  - nativeit 4y ago
    I cede your larger point that information availability requires upkeep, but I don’t think the tendency for information to degrade is usually attributable to entropy. It’s probably true enough in some cases, but more often than not it’s going to be general interest by the population that determines the accessibility of information—and that crosses boundaries and regulatory efforts like copyright. The more intense the interest and/or awareness (generally speaking) the more likely the information will find its way into the public domain. It’s why you can easily find literature written hundreds or thousands of years ago in multiple languages with little effort, but some memo stored in a tape archive from the 1970s is likely gone forever. “Bitrot” is more likely to be a function of diminishing interest rather than increasing entropy.
    - falcolas 4y ago
      > It’s why you can easily find literature written hundreds or thousands of years ago in multiple languages with little effort Little effort, because someone else put in the effort to keep and disseminate it. And we only know of the surviving material, we have no idea how much was lost. Take the bible for example. It's a classic example of stories from millennia ago making it to the modern world. But its journey took the concerted effort of millions of scribes, translators, and so forth to make the journey. And it has not done so intact. We can even see how the Bible's been changed by comparing just the last two major revisions of it: NIV and KJ. Language aside, there are some pretty major ideological changes based on interpretation. And thanks to some miraculous archeological finds in the dead sea scrolls, we can see how the bible has drifted even further from its original roots. That's not information being free, it's information degrading and being re-purposed - often re-created - for specific ideologies and beliefs.
randombits0 4y ago
Code cannot be owned. A creative expression may be copyrighted. Purely functional expressions may not be copyrighted. The output of a trained AI is insufficiently creative to be copyrighted. Only humans can hold a copyright. Now with all that, there really isn’t anything here to get worked up over.
- hutzlibu 4y ago
  "Purely functional expressions may not be copyrighted." Is this more than a opinion? Because you can have whole programs as a long functional expression (not that I am a fan of such a coding style, but it exists).
  - jkaplowitz 4y ago
    It is an accurate statement of the law in the US, but "purely functional expression" is not used in the sense of a mathematical function. It basically means expressions that solely reflect the way you need to do the thing to accomplish the function you are trying to achieve, without any significant creative element. For example, if I asked you to write Java code to print the sum of two integer variables named a and b, followed by a newline, you'd probably write pretty much exactly this: System.out.println(a + b); You might vary the spacing around the punctuation, or a few other unimportant details, but there's not much room for creativity there while still accomplishing the desired function. It isn't copyrightable. And this is a good example of how the word functional means something non-mathematical here: that isn't even a functional expression in the mathematical sense, since there's no return value and the printing is a side effect. It's purely imperative.
    - monsieurbanana 4y ago
      It seems like a very blurry line for any non-trivial piece of code.
      - danShumway 4y ago
        > It seems like a very blurry line Opinion me, this statement could apply to the vast majority of copyright law in the US.
padolsey 4y ago
Outside of AI models, copy/pasting snippets from the likes of StackOverflow is already on unsteady ground. The threshold to bother with (and win) legal fights is pretty high. AI is catalyzing some kind of slow revolution in what "ownership" is, but there doesn't seem to be any definition that would _always_ satisfy common sense. Even if github yields and adds attribution or filters on license types, there's still a massive trove of knotted data in all these newer text/language/image/code models. Most of it is not truly public domain.. and a lot of it is wholly private and would involve contravention of regs like GDPR if used. Data used to feed these huge models is, sometimes (technically speaking...) stolen, commandeered, swiped from unassuming creators. Many artists the world over are rightfully furious about DALL-E and Stable Diffusion. I wonder where this will all end! AI needs to be regulated somehow. Precedent needs to be set.
- aftbit 4y ago
  >Many artists the world over are rightfully furious about DALL-E and Stable Diffusion I struggle with this one. How are these models different from the typical human creative process of: 1. look at lots of existing art to get inspiration 2. select components from several different styles & add your own flair 3. call the output an "original" painting in your own style Of course I see the other side as well. These models are just a large multi-dimensional function of all of their input data, which means they ought to be derivative works of all of their inputs, and their outputs should thus also be derivative works of the inputs. It feels unsatisfying (and a bit naive) to say that filtering a bunch of data through a neural network somehow clears the copyright of that original data, but on the other hand, the AI revolution depends on that interpretation.
  - dbspin 4y ago
    In a word scale. Scale matters. How is one locust different to a million? How is hand copying a manuscript (highly controlled in medieval Europe) different to a printing press. These models will and are already having a profound economic impact on the creative sectors they mimic. Whether existing law applies is a specialist question. But they're not remotely comparable from a pragmatic perspective with pieces manually created by individuals taking 'inspiration' from existing work. A closer parallel would be the industrialisation of painting duplication which is done in Chinese 'artist villages' like Dafen. It's a strange kind of equanimity to shrug while others lose their livelihood and have their self expression systematically duplicated and commodified. No kidding they're furious. That you can't empathise or find it 'naive' is your issue. What attitude would be more understandable? Resignation? Calmly retraining to work in a call centre?
mellosouls 4y ago
I would have thought that in the vast majority of current AI-generated code we are talking about single blocks and functions that are just Intellisense on steroids that only a rather self-deluding coder would consider original enough or "theirs" to attribute authorship to. There are no doubt grey areas and more serious cases as the technology improves and the generated content increases in length and functional value, but I hope we don't throw the productive baby out with the Luddite bathwater...
- vouaobrasil 4y ago
  I think that kind of depends on how common the snippet is. If it's code for swapping to variables, well everyone has written that and it's small. But what if it's a rarer thing like a new kind of debayering algorithm that takes a much larger "snippet" from a novel algorithm? As far as I'm aware there are no rigorous studies showing the level to which one could duplicate longer stretches of code and if it can do something like this.
  - andybak 4y ago
    Algorithms aren't copyrightable as far as my understanding goes and this is where it gets murky. The expression is copyrightable, the algorithm isn't (except when it is...) My personal feeling is that we've gone too far down the road of assigning IP to code and we should be rolling it back. I'd hate for the current AI boom to trigger an extension of current IP law.
    - skibidibipiti 4y ago
      Every corporate code base is copyrighted. Engineers can’t write code similar to what they worked on, why should a corporate AI be able to violate copyleft?
    - wongarsu 4y ago
      The abstract algorithm isn't covered by copyright, but can be patented (lots of asterisks here about software parents). But the exact lines of code you write are covered by copyright. If you tell Github Copilot to write a fast inverse square sum algorithm it's allowed to reproduce the idea of the famous quake3 algorithm, but if it produces the same lines and comments as those in the quake 3 source code then that's a pretty open and shut copyright violation
wrs 4y ago
“…modify[ing] its AI model so that it traces attribution and gives credit to the original authors of the code, adding the associated copyright notices and license terms in the process…Biderman says is technologically feasible.” Is it really feasible? What does “traces attribution” even mean here? It’s not emitting “code”, it’s emitting individual tokens that each were found throughout the input corpus. The “code” is the arrangement of those tokens, but that is determined by the weighting of the whole network, so what can be traced? Can someone who understands generative ML better than me weigh in on this?
- ajsnigrutin 4y ago
  Maybe like a science paper... 10 lines of code, 50 citations :)
- Filligree 4y ago
  It sounds like nonsense. The most plausible solution would be to provide credit to every single author whose code was used in the original training set; of course, that would run into gigabytes just for the credits.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - varjag 4y ago
    And…? I think my last Xcode update was 20+ Gb.
    - Filligree 4y ago
      Personally, I don't want minimalistic programs to start taking 20+GB! Xcode's bloat isn't a goal to strive for. If such a giant list of acknowledgements were to be included, would it even help anyone, in any way? It sounds like pure inefficiency.
  - logicallee 4y ago
    But GPL requires the resulting derivative code to be open-sourced under GPL, not just attributed. So if you did that then copilot could only emit code under a GPL license. Maybe that is okay, but it is not what copilot is trying to do at the moment. (And not everyone wants to open-source all their code under GPL.)
j16sdiz 4y ago
This article adds no new information. We knew it is hotly debated, and we have heard both sides.
- andybak 4y ago
  Just possibly there are people out there who haven't heard both sides and perhaps they are the intended audience for this? And maybe some of them even read HN occasionally and are currently enjoying the article.
bitwrangler 4y ago
I would think copyright law would have something to say about what is or is not a derivative work. How similar to code snippets have to be (or claim to be) to be considered infringement on original source?
marstall 4y ago
by reducing credit, copilot reduces incentive to create and publish free code. biting the hand that feeds it. exact same problem exists with GPT3 and others. big tech slashing and burning, ruthlessly exploiting the least empowered people in the tech economy. neat hack.
- alextheparrot 4y ago
  Copilot also makes it easier to use open source framework code. Being able to ask a model for help writing Spark, SQLAlchemy, Tokio, whatever, actually increases the usability of free code vs proprietary code.
- Thews 4y ago
  How does copilot reduce the incentive to publish free code?
  - chubbnix 4y ago
    If it writes what would have been open source dependencies based on open source code you no longer have to license that work or your own. Also coders might not want to open source original work for fear they are just going to feed that beast that will ultimately kill them. Sort of a chilling effect if they cannot chose to contribute to that cause or not while also sharing code as open source.
  - dspillett 4y ago
    Depends how you define free. If an AI being inspired by GPL code that happened to be in its training data because someone other than the creator stuck it in a repo on GitHub is just fine, and if some code produced as a result is practically identical that is fine too, and the resulting code is not considered GPL any more, then the GPL and licences like it are worthless. The only two designations that mean anything at that point are public domain and commercial. “free” as in “Free” rather than public domain means the same as public domain. So there is no point releasing free (other than public domain) code, discouraging the act. If I want to control how my code is used at all protected commercial release becomes the only option. This of course suits the commercial interest behind copilot just fine and dandy… --- But, if commercial code ended up in the training set the same should apply because in terms of giving the right to use code licences like the GPL and commercial licences are no different: the licence gives the right to use the code. If passing it through an AI gives that right, bypassing the licence, for one case than it should for the other too. I wonder if MS would be happy for copilot's own code to be in the training set and for me to produce and sell something based on the output of an AI trained with their code?! --- I think the AI systems like copilot should be considered the same as us wet-ware naturally formed intelligence systems in that respect: if it produces something based on code under a particular licence then that something should be subject to the terms of the licence. Ignorance of the licence is no excuse. If the AI can not be made aware of the correct licence and attribution for the code, so it can include that with its suggestions based on it, then that code should not be in the training set. For decades MS complained about open source code potentially creating this very situation, just with only non-artificial intelligences in the mix, now they are hoping no one can call them on that because it is convenient for them to ignore the issue.
breck 4y ago
Ideas cannot be owned. People can be owned, if you have slavery. Everyone must unlearn the term "Intellectual Property". These laws are anti-property rights. They are Intellectual Slavery laws (https://breckyunits.com/an-unpopular-phrase.html https://breckyunits.com/an-unpopular-phrase.html). The United States government employs more knowledge workers than all other companies (see NIH, DoD, CDC, NASA, NOAA, NWS, et cetera). Everything they produce is public domain, by law. And yet, the people producing these information products still get paid! We don't need (c)opywrong laws. We don't need Intellectual Slavery laws. We still have cotton even after the 13th Amendment (we actually have more and better cotton now), and we will still have creative works after the passing of the Intellectual Freedom Amendment (we actually will have more and better creative works) - https://breckyunits.com/the-intellectual-freedom-amendment.html https://breckyunits.com/the-intellectual-freedom-amendment.h....
- claytongulick 4y ago
  People have a strange tendency to enjoy being rewarded for work they've done. I suspect that the folks who invest hundreds of millions of dollars into production costs for a movie, rather enjoy the ability to recoup those costs by restricting access to only those who are willing to pay for the privilege.
  - somrand0 4y ago
    but what about people getting paid for the invested money of movies made by their ancestors, dead over 50 years ago (and up to more than 100 years ago, whatever is the current copyright term for movies) do they have a right to enjoy being rewarded for work they didn't do but their ancestors did? if the intention of those laws was to encourage creativity, how come they're stiffing it more than encouraging without any signs of any government trying to correct the laws to better match their purported intentions?
    - claytongulick 4y ago
      If your argument is about the absurdity of current copyright terms, you'll find no disagreement here. We should have stuck with the original 14 + 14 as laid out in the constitution.
jacquesm 4y ago
To me AI code generators are the equivalent of crypto tumblers or mixers for digital coins. You can pretend all you want that the output is 'clean' but we all know it came from somewhere else and wasn't actually generated by the software, just endless little snippets that other people made.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- remus 4y ago
  I don't think that's entirely true. When I've tested codepilot it also knows something about the context in which it's working, so it can use relevant variable names in it's suggestions. To me that's a step beyond rote regurgitation of other code.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    That may be so, but the process is automated and copyright law has something to say about mechanical transformation. As an example: if I take a piece of code you wrote and substitute all of the identifiers that does not create an original work.
- system2 4y ago
  ChatGPT output is very clean and precise especially when variables provided in detail. I doubt you can trace it back if you make the prompt very elaborate.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    Why can't you trace it back? Remove all the input, fill the model with noise. Prompt all you want it will produce just noise. Train the model on your chosen input text. Suddenly it starts to provide 'clean and precise text'. Absent an argument that we're looking at AGI I see no other possible conclusion than that this is a mechanical transformation of two inputs (yours + the training data) into some output. What happens inside the box is irrelevant, that's just implementation details of the mechanism. If you build your mechanism in such a way that you can't trace it yourself that doesn't mean that you get to claim the output as an original work.
fariszr 4y ago
Regardless of what side you stand on, this case is sorely needed, so everybody knows what the legalities are.
keewee7 4y ago
Why have so many of these AI models been trained on GPL licensed code? Almost half the controversy could have avoided by ignoring GPL code. I know that even non-copyleft licenses like the Apache and MIT licenses are copyrighted and require attribution however it would have caused far less controversy than training on GPL licensed code.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Yes, whoever signed off on that wasn't thinking clearly.
belorn 4y ago
When Copilot was released the copyright discussion focused exclusively on code, but now we see very similar discussion around images with stable diffusion and the sister project unstable diffusion. When Copilot do reach the courts there will be some indication on how courts view author consent when it comes to training material. After that we might then see court cases for each form of media (images, video, text, sound), and also in their each unique contexts (books, online videos, porn, stock databases, and so on).
- jacquesm 4y ago
  In my opinion using all of the code on GitHub without respecting the licenses was a capital mistake. It should have been opt-in, maybe with some incentive but to just take it all without so much as a by-your-leave is not going to play well in court.
  - Permit 4y ago
    In my opinion it was covered under the GitHub terms of service and is clearly transformative. I am optimistic that the courts will find it so and we can put these debates to rest similar to how we’ve done for web scraping.
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      Sorry but terms of service don't give you a blanket license to re-purpose someone else's copyrighted work at your pleasure. By that same token any hosting provider could make a small change to their terms of service and suddenly all of the data of all of the customers would be theirs. Copyright does not work that way, you need to actively sign away your rights.
      - Permit 4y ago
        > Sorry but terms of service don't give you a blanket license to re-purpose someone else's copyrighted work at your pleasure. That’s correct. It’s also not what happened here. I don’t violate your copyright when I scrape your web page. I don’t violate your copyright when I train a model on a web page that I scraped. I violate your copyright only if I use that tool to produce code that violates your copyright. This is similar to how I don’t commit a copyright violation when I read your code, I commit the violation when I produce and publish code that violates your copyright.
rboyd 4y ago
I think it’s silly to pretend that human programmers are emitting a lot of code with a high degree of originality either. We’re all remixing some long-forgotten influential code laying deep in latent memory just like the models.
- danShumway 4y ago
  Humans do remix stuff when we create, and copyright draws a kind of arbitrary line around when that becomes original and when it becomes derivative, mostly because if it didn't then it would be impossible for us to get new books, movies, and songs. All copyright is a hack; it's not an ideological, internally consistent framework. It is a set of fallible legal rules we invented so that people would get paid for creating things we care about. That doesn't mean that comparisons aren't useful or that we can't extrapolate from the existing rules, but even where fair use is concerned, the actual justification isn't a logical one, it's: "if we didn't have this standard nobody would make anything." So the boundaries around fair use and what things fall into it are not being created purely based on logic or first principles. The reason why we have copyright is because we want people to be paid for making creative work. The reason we have fair use and a standard of "originality" that treats coders/artists learning from other artists as acceptable is because if we didn't, the entire system would fall apart and nobody would be able to make new creative works. Everything in copyright exists purely to get people to make more stuff in a sustainable way. It's an outcome-driven process. ---- More recently, there are a lot of people who argue that IP is a real, fundamental property right, but frankly, IP doesn't stand up at all if you think about it too hard. The justifications for why IP theft is theft can't be consistently generalized in a way that applies outside of the IP space. The standards for what does and doesn't count as creative aren't really consistent or based on a straightforward definition of creativity. A lot of people would love to say that IP rights are just property rights, but... it's not all that convincing, and the history of copyright doesn't really indicate to me that the people building the laws thought of them that way. And again, that doesn't mean that there's no consistency in copyright rules or that copyright rulings don't have implications beyond the original rulings. But it is almost always easier to think about copyright and almost always easier to understand why copyright laws are the way that they are if you approach copyright as a means to an end, and understand the existing laws not as an attempt to create an internally consistent system, but as a series of attempts throughout US history to achieve a consistent publicly beneficial outcome. ---- With that in mind, I suspect whether or not AI works count as remixing is largely going to be decided based on commercial interests, individual judges, and individual juries, possibly with input from US legislature. "Everybody remixes" historically hasn't been the most useful argument during these debates? So I don't know how it's going to play out this time around. I vaguely suspect it's going to come down to whether or not individual pieces are recognizable? That's how we got wild copyright laws about some individual chord progressions being treated as derivative works in songs.
walnutclosefarm 4y ago
It seems to me there are some really fundamental questions about copyright and use posed here that have been submerged in the background of the internet rush to digitize all forms of content and expression. Even though these generative tools may simplify the path to verbatim code (or image, or text) copying without attribution, and complicate determining what, if any, attributions are required, they didn't invent it. A browser coupled with a search engine facilitates such copying all the time. Like the generative models, the search engine is a tool that has read, for its own purposes, vast swaths of content, remembered key details about it, and serves a means to render the content up to a user. It's not the copying per se that causes trouble - creators make their material on the internet with the expectation and hope that it will be copied, by all those tools, into search engines and ultimately onto screens, so I can see it. It's that the chain of attribution is lost (or with OS code, the license imprint, which is really just another form of attribution), and with the attribution, any hope that the creator will benefit from the copying. But actually carrying attribution forward is going to be hard. Things that come out of a generative model that are substantially identical to a particular input do so for one of two reasons: one particular training input to the model is overwhelmingly the "best" source of response to the prompt, or a training input has been repeated over and over again in the training set so as to become the consensus response to one or more prompts. The first might reasonably feasible to track down, although it's bound to be computationally expensive. The second ... really tough, since it forces the model to "know" which of those many training sources is the one that should attributed. The widely circulated example of an image generation model reproducing Steve McMurray's famous photo of Sharbat Gula, a green-eyed Afghani girl that appeared on National Geographics cover in 1985 shows the problem. Do a Google search for "green-eyed Afghan girl" and you'll find hundreds of copies of varying resolution and definition, and hundreds more derivative versions, of McMurray's photo. A model spitting out yet another derived, but nearly identical version is likely drawing from hundreds of those images itself, not some original root, copyrighted golden copy. Which should it attribute?
joshspankit 4y ago
I’m horrified. If we let the powers that be force AI-generated content to be copyrighted, two things are going to happen: 1. The biggest benefits of AI are going to be pushed back for decades and possibly indefinitely 2. Artists will be absolutely slaughtered as the same rules will come at them full-force. Almost every artist draws inspiration from other creative work. That’s how creativity works. Can you imagine how stifling it would be for every artist to have to document and “pay for” every piece of art they’ve ever seen??
joshspankit 4y ago
I’m horrified. I know we’re “just” talking about code here but decisions will be far-reaching and if we let the powers that be force AI-generated content to be copyright-attributed, two things are going to happen: 1. The biggest benefits of AI are going to be pushed back for decades and possibly indefinitely 2. Artists will be absolutely slaughtered as the same rules will come at them full-force. Almost every artist draws inspiration from other creative work. That’s how creativity works. Can you imagine how stifling it would be for every artist to have to document and “pay for” every piece of art they’ve ever seen??
- joshspankit 4y ago
  As well, this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34242124 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34242124 If AI can produce patentable and copyrightable proteins, the first pharmaceutical company to press a button will own all possible proteins. And then all possible permutations of every undiscovered drug.

87 points by Chris2048 4y ago

somrand0 4y ago

ownership is a concept in dire need of revision

riedel 4y ago
[flagged]
- scotty79 4y ago
  Which had, as a concept and in practice nothing to do with code ownership.
  - hutzlibu 4y ago
    Depends I guess, there are a million definitions of communism, but commonly the idea is, to give the tools and factories into the hand of the workers (in theory), so you probably could argue that code ownership of productive code falls under this.
- bediger4000 4y ago
  There used to be a concept called public domain. The purpose of copyright was to make increase the public domain. What's your point?
  - riedel 4y ago
    My point is that there is socioeconomic theories which were based on the goal of common ownership of all means of production (which in a digital society would often translate to code). I guess all movements that have tried to transition to such societies have failed (thus my comment: they are alternatives, the trick is to make them working). While public domain is (except maybe for government agency) is a model you chose, this is completely different. If we are talking about alternatives to ownership we cannot do this without thinking in political dimensions.
marc_io 4y ago
Yes, as long as it doesn't disregard the original creator's intentions in the formulation.
- c7b 4y ago
  Even that notion is tricky in the context of text AI. It doesn't seem obviously clear to me what the implied stance towards AI training would be for many popular license types. It seems more like the creators of many licenses didn't explicitly consider this use case. And the more meta question is whether the creators' rights should even extend to that realm. Can you specify in a license "This text must not be read by students in the context of an educational course" (which is arguably the closest analogue to AI training)? If that's not possible, then where do we draw the line between tools-assisted learning by humans and human tools learning on their own? You can arrive at answers, but it seems to me like there are many possible reasonable interpretations.
  - marc_io 4y ago
    > (which is arguably the closest analogue to AI training) It would be more accurate to compare those students with the corporate interests involved in AI training, not the model's use of the content.
  - thn-gap 4y ago
    Why is it fair use if you train a model on copyrighted material and use its transformative output, despite going against the will of the author? Can we all legally pirate educational books since it's for self training and producing transformative outputs? Can I consume all media (books, movies, music) the same way, and call it fair use? Also for software?
    - TchoBeer 4y ago
      yeah, I struggle to see how training AI on illegally gotten data is legal.
    - c7b 4y ago
      Content that hasn't been legally obtained wouldn't be legal to consume in any way. That's not what I meant, and I think that's a bit of a disingenuous interpretation of my comment. The debate is about content that is generally legally obtained, but might come with certain restrictions. Where restrictions is a broad term and might also just come in the form of a copyleft license, eg. My main point was that in many situations, eg involving open source licenses, it's really not clear from the terms what the creator's intent regarding AI training was. And the broader question is whether training is fair use, or something else, maybe even a new legal concept that would have to be established. Or, what's the difference between art students going to the museum to be inspired, and Dall-E 'looking' at public domain images?
crawfordcomeaux 4y ago
Yes, like scientific grounding or abandonment. If only we held all myths to such high esteem as we societally hold ownership.
cyber_kinetist 4y ago
The only way to truly own something, is to either share it or destroy it.
- friesandties 4y ago
  I really like this, it rings so true to me in the current times. Temporal everything, air, food; a life even-keel.
bodyfour 4y ago
Once we have AI-generated laws I'm sure this will be sorted out.
wahnfrieden 4y ago
or abolition but to do that without any reasonable social support nets is absurd
- somrand0 4y ago
  but what does it mean to destroy the concept of ownership (i.e. the notion of property) if we take that > The only way to truly own something, is to either share it or destroy it. could I argue that then, we would be taking ownership of the concept of ownership?? ahahha... I think this is kind of funny. And I'd admit that it's not very helpful to the goal of revising the very concept of ownership. my own parent comment is already controversial with many replies and exactly 0 points (at the time of this response)
  - wahnfrieden 4y ago
    private property successfully didn't exist in various societies, including larger scale societies and ones that had discovered agriculture, and not only under communist regimes. it does mean to share, without ownership.
claytongulick 4y ago
Agreed. You don't mind if I borrow your car do you? And your house? Let's not quibble about the particulars of me ever giving them back.
- TchoBeer 4y ago
  I don't want you taking my car because I need to use my car and only one of us can use it at a time. Intellectual property can be endlessly copied without anyone losing anything. This is not a defense of IP theft (and it's pretty reasonable to think that IP law serves an important purpose protecting creatives' ability to get compensated for their work) but it means that they require a fundamentally different approach.
  - claytongulick 4y ago
    > ownership is a concept in dire need of revision GP did not limit the scope of their opinion on ownership to IP.
- somrand0 4y ago
  indeed, the first step (IMO) towards revising the notion is to recognize that physical (material, tangible) assets inherently work differently than digital assets. As I understand so far the main reason to seek a revision of the concept of ownership is exactly due to the existence (enabled by internet technology) of digital assets. copy-pasting is HOW computers work. copy-pasting does not do well in society ruled by the exclusivity-mindset inherent to marketplaces (and their societies) of tangible assets
  - claytongulick 4y ago
    I'm not exactly an IP hawk, from from it. I agree with you that digital "asset" ownership is new, unexplored territory for humans. We've never been able to separate the content from the distribution medium before now, and we're struggling to recreate a model we're familiar with (physical media) by imposing absurdities like DRM. NFTs are also an absurd way of trying to solve the same problem. The issue we wrestle with is mistaking "ownership" with a access. I can own a physical book, but I do not own the content of the book, I've paid for access to that content and the book is the medium. Digital assets are the same, I don't own them, they are a form of access to content that someone else owns, and has granted me an either implicit or explicit license to use. I think this is the concept of ownership that needs to be revised. Rather than a mp3 being treated, and thought of, like a book - it should be thought of more as a movie ticket. Something that grants me access to content within the limits defined by the content owner.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

scotty79 4y ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free

falcolas 4y ago
I propose that information naturally wants to degrade. Paper decomposes. Bits flip. File formats are replaced and lost. Storage mediums degrade. It's all an extension of the universe trending towards entropy. It actually takes quite a bit of effort to store, then distribute information precisely and broadly. There's a lot of infrastructure, effort, and money involved, and still information degrades and disappears over time. Any libre information exists because people have put effort into it. Sometimes a lot of effort.
- nativeit 4y ago
  I cede your larger point that information availability requires upkeep, but I don’t think the tendency for information to degrade is usually attributable to entropy. It’s probably true enough in some cases, but more often than not it’s going to be general interest by the population that determines the accessibility of information—and that crosses boundaries and regulatory efforts like copyright. The more intense the interest and/or awareness (generally speaking) the more likely the information will find its way into the public domain. It’s why you can easily find literature written hundreds or thousands of years ago in multiple languages with little effort, but some memo stored in a tape archive from the 1970s is likely gone forever. “Bitrot” is more likely to be a function of diminishing interest rather than increasing entropy.
  - falcolas 4y ago
    > It’s why you can easily find literature written hundreds or thousands of years ago in multiple languages with little effort Little effort, because someone else put in the effort to keep and disseminate it. And we only know of the surviving material, we have no idea how much was lost. Take the bible for example. It's a classic example of stories from millennia ago making it to the modern world. But its journey took the concerted effort of millions of scribes, translators, and so forth to make the journey. And it has not done so intact. We can even see how the Bible's been changed by comparing just the last two major revisions of it: NIV and KJ. Language aside, there are some pretty major ideological changes based on interpretation. And thanks to some miraculous archeological finds in the dead sea scrolls, we can see how the bible has drifted even further from its original roots. That's not information being free, it's information degrading and being re-purposed - often re-created - for specific ideologies and beliefs.

randombits0 4y ago

Code cannot be owned. A creative expression may be copyrighted. Purely functional expressions may not be copyrighted. The output of a trained AI is insufficiently creative to be copyrighted. Only humans can hold a copyright. Now with all that, there really isn’t anything here to get worked up over.

hutzlibu 4y ago
"Purely functional expressions may not be copyrighted." Is this more than a opinion? Because you can have whole programs as a long functional expression (not that I am a fan of such a coding style, but it exists).
- jkaplowitz 4y ago
  It is an accurate statement of the law in the US, but "purely functional expression" is not used in the sense of a mathematical function. It basically means expressions that solely reflect the way you need to do the thing to accomplish the function you are trying to achieve, without any significant creative element. For example, if I asked you to write Java code to print the sum of two integer variables named a and b, followed by a newline, you'd probably write pretty much exactly this: System.out.println(a + b); You might vary the spacing around the punctuation, or a few other unimportant details, but there's not much room for creativity there while still accomplishing the desired function. It isn't copyrightable. And this is a good example of how the word functional means something non-mathematical here: that isn't even a functional expression in the mathematical sense, since there's no return value and the printing is a side effect. It's purely imperative.
  - monsieurbanana 4y ago
    It seems like a very blurry line for any non-trivial piece of code.
    - danShumway 4y ago
      > It seems like a very blurry line Opinion me, this statement could apply to the vast majority of copyright law in the US.

padolsey 4y ago

Outside of AI models, copy/pasting snippets from the likes of StackOverflow is already on unsteady ground. The threshold to bother with (and win) legal fights is pretty high. AI is catalyzing some kind of slow revolution in what "ownership" is, but there doesn't seem to be any definition that would _always_ satisfy common sense. Even if github yields and adds attribution or filters on license types, there's still a massive trove of knotted data in all these newer text/language/image/code models. Most of it is not truly public domain.. and a lot of it is wholly private and would involve contravention of regs like GDPR if used. Data used to feed these huge models is, sometimes (technically speaking...) stolen, commandeered, swiped from unassuming creators. Many artists the world over are rightfully furious about DALL-E and Stable Diffusion. I wonder where this will all end! AI needs to be regulated somehow. Precedent needs to be set.

aftbit 4y ago
>Many artists the world over are rightfully furious about DALL-E and Stable Diffusion I struggle with this one. How are these models different from the typical human creative process of: 1. look at lots of existing art to get inspiration 2. select components from several different styles & add your own flair 3. call the output an "original" painting in your own style Of course I see the other side as well. These models are just a large multi-dimensional function of all of their input data, which means they ought to be derivative works of all of their inputs, and their outputs should thus also be derivative works of the inputs. It feels unsatisfying (and a bit naive) to say that filtering a bunch of data through a neural network somehow clears the copyright of that original data, but on the other hand, the AI revolution depends on that interpretation.
- dbspin 4y ago
  In a word scale. Scale matters. How is one locust different to a million? How is hand copying a manuscript (highly controlled in medieval Europe) different to a printing press. These models will and are already having a profound economic impact on the creative sectors they mimic. Whether existing law applies is a specialist question. But they're not remotely comparable from a pragmatic perspective with pieces manually created by individuals taking 'inspiration' from existing work. A closer parallel would be the industrialisation of painting duplication which is done in Chinese 'artist villages' like Dafen. It's a strange kind of equanimity to shrug while others lose their livelihood and have their self expression systematically duplicated and commodified. No kidding they're furious. That you can't empathise or find it 'naive' is your issue. What attitude would be more understandable? Resignation? Calmly retraining to work in a call centre?

mellosouls 4y ago

I would have thought that in the vast majority of current AI-generated code we are talking about single blocks and functions that are just Intellisense on steroids that only a rather self-deluding coder would consider original enough or "theirs" to attribute authorship to. There are no doubt grey areas and more serious cases as the technology improves and the generated content increases in length and functional value, but I hope we don't throw the productive baby out with the Luddite bathwater...

vouaobrasil 4y ago
I think that kind of depends on how common the snippet is. If it's code for swapping to variables, well everyone has written that and it's small. But what if it's a rarer thing like a new kind of debayering algorithm that takes a much larger "snippet" from a novel algorithm? As far as I'm aware there are no rigorous studies showing the level to which one could duplicate longer stretches of code and if it can do something like this.
- andybak 4y ago
  Algorithms aren't copyrightable as far as my understanding goes and this is where it gets murky. The expression is copyrightable, the algorithm isn't (except when it is...) My personal feeling is that we've gone too far down the road of assigning IP to code and we should be rolling it back. I'd hate for the current AI boom to trigger an extension of current IP law.
  - skibidibipiti 4y ago
    Every corporate code base is copyrighted. Engineers can’t write code similar to what they worked on, why should a corporate AI be able to violate copyleft?
  - wongarsu 4y ago
    The abstract algorithm isn't covered by copyright, but can be patented (lots of asterisks here about software parents). But the exact lines of code you write are covered by copyright. If you tell Github Copilot to write a fast inverse square sum algorithm it's allowed to reproduce the idea of the famous quake3 algorithm, but if it produces the same lines and comments as those in the quake 3 source code then that's a pretty open and shut copyright violation

wrs 4y ago

“…modify[ing] its AI model so that it traces attribution and gives credit to the original authors of the code, adding the associated copyright notices and license terms in the process…Biderman says is technologically feasible.” Is it really feasible? What does “traces attribution” even mean here? It’s not emitting “code”, it’s emitting individual tokens that each were found throughout the input corpus. The “code” is the arrangement of those tokens, but that is determined by the weighting of the whole network, so what can be traced? Can someone who understands generative ML better than me weigh in on this?

ajsnigrutin 4y ago
Maybe like a science paper... 10 lines of code, 50 citations :)
Filligree 4y ago
It sounds like nonsense. The most plausible solution would be to provide credit to every single author whose code was used in the original training set; of course, that would run into gigabytes just for the credits.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- varjag 4y ago
  And…? I think my last Xcode update was 20+ Gb.
  - Filligree 4y ago
    Personally, I don't want minimalistic programs to start taking 20+GB! Xcode's bloat isn't a goal to strive for. If such a giant list of acknowledgements were to be included, would it even help anyone, in any way? It sounds like pure inefficiency.
- logicallee 4y ago
  But GPL requires the resulting derivative code to be open-sourced under GPL, not just attributed. So if you did that then copilot could only emit code under a GPL license. Maybe that is okay, but it is not what copilot is trying to do at the moment. (And not everyone wants to open-source all their code under GPL.)

j16sdiz 4y ago

This article adds no new information. We knew it is hotly debated, and we have heard both sides.

andybak 4y ago
Just possibly there are people out there who haven't heard both sides and perhaps they are the intended audience for this? And maybe some of them even read HN occasionally and are currently enjoying the article.

bitwrangler 4y ago

I would think copyright law would have something to say about what is or is not a derivative work. How similar to code snippets have to be (or claim to be) to be considered infringement on original source?

marstall 4y ago

by reducing credit, copilot reduces incentive to create and publish free code. biting the hand that feeds it. exact same problem exists with GPT3 and others. big tech slashing and burning, ruthlessly exploiting the least empowered people in the tech economy. neat hack.

alextheparrot 4y ago
Copilot also makes it easier to use open source framework code. Being able to ask a model for help writing Spark, SQLAlchemy, Tokio, whatever, actually increases the usability of free code vs proprietary code.
Thews 4y ago
How does copilot reduce the incentive to publish free code?
- chubbnix 4y ago
  If it writes what would have been open source dependencies based on open source code you no longer have to license that work or your own. Also coders might not want to open source original work for fear they are just going to feed that beast that will ultimately kill them. Sort of a chilling effect if they cannot chose to contribute to that cause or not while also sharing code as open source.
- dspillett 4y ago
  Depends how you define free. If an AI being inspired by GPL code that happened to be in its training data because someone other than the creator stuck it in a repo on GitHub is just fine, and if some code produced as a result is practically identical that is fine too, and the resulting code is not considered GPL any more, then the GPL and licences like it are worthless. The only two designations that mean anything at that point are public domain and commercial. “free” as in “Free” rather than public domain means the same as public domain. So there is no point releasing free (other than public domain) code, discouraging the act. If I want to control how my code is used at all protected commercial release becomes the only option. This of course suits the commercial interest behind copilot just fine and dandy… --- But, if commercial code ended up in the training set the same should apply because in terms of giving the right to use code licences like the GPL and commercial licences are no different: the licence gives the right to use the code. If passing it through an AI gives that right, bypassing the licence, for one case than it should for the other too. I wonder if MS would be happy for copilot's own code to be in the training set and for me to produce and sell something based on the output of an AI trained with their code?! --- I think the AI systems like copilot should be considered the same as us wet-ware naturally formed intelligence systems in that respect: if it produces something based on code under a particular licence then that something should be subject to the terms of the licence. Ignorance of the licence is no excuse. If the AI can not be made aware of the correct licence and attribution for the code, so it can include that with its suggestions based on it, then that code should not be in the training set. For decades MS complained about open source code potentially creating this very situation, just with only non-artificial intelligences in the mix, now they are hoping no one can call them on that because it is convenient for them to ignore the issue.

breck 4y ago

Ideas cannot be owned. People can be owned, if you have slavery. Everyone must unlearn the term "Intellectual Property". These laws are anti-property rights. They are Intellectual Slavery laws (https://breckyunits.com/an-unpopular-phrase.html https://breckyunits.com/an-unpopular-phrase.html). The United States government employs more knowledge workers than all other companies (see NIH, DoD, CDC, NASA, NOAA, NWS, et cetera). Everything they produce is public domain, by law. And yet, the people producing these information products still get paid! We don't need (c)opywrong laws. We don't need Intellectual Slavery laws. We still have cotton even after the 13th Amendment (we actually have more and better cotton now), and we will still have creative works after the passing of the Intellectual Freedom Amendment (we actually will have more and better creative works) - https://breckyunits.com/the-intellectual-freedom-amendment.html https://breckyunits.com/the-intellectual-freedom-amendment.h....

claytongulick 4y ago
People have a strange tendency to enjoy being rewarded for work they've done. I suspect that the folks who invest hundreds of millions of dollars into production costs for a movie, rather enjoy the ability to recoup those costs by restricting access to only those who are willing to pay for the privilege.
- somrand0 4y ago
  but what about people getting paid for the invested money of movies made by their ancestors, dead over 50 years ago (and up to more than 100 years ago, whatever is the current copyright term for movies) do they have a right to enjoy being rewarded for work they didn't do but their ancestors did? if the intention of those laws was to encourage creativity, how come they're stiffing it more than encouraging without any signs of any government trying to correct the laws to better match their purported intentions?
  - claytongulick 4y ago
    If your argument is about the absurdity of current copyright terms, you'll find no disagreement here. We should have stuck with the original 14 + 14 as laid out in the constitution.

jacquesm 4y ago

To me AI code generators are the equivalent of crypto tumblers or mixers for digital coins. You can pretend all you want that the output is 'clean' but we all know it came from somewhere else and wasn't actually generated by the software, just endless little snippets that other people made.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
remus 4y ago
I don't think that's entirely true. When I've tested codepilot it also knows something about the context in which it's working, so it can use relevant variable names in it's suggestions. To me that's a step beyond rote regurgitation of other code.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  That may be so, but the process is automated and copyright law has something to say about mechanical transformation. As an example: if I take a piece of code you wrote and substitute all of the identifiers that does not create an original work.
system2 4y ago
ChatGPT output is very clean and precise especially when variables provided in detail. I doubt you can trace it back if you make the prompt very elaborate.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Why can't you trace it back? Remove all the input, fill the model with noise. Prompt all you want it will produce just noise. Train the model on your chosen input text. Suddenly it starts to provide 'clean and precise text'. Absent an argument that we're looking at AGI I see no other possible conclusion than that this is a mechanical transformation of two inputs (yours + the training data) into some output. What happens inside the box is irrelevant, that's just implementation details of the mechanism. If you build your mechanism in such a way that you can't trace it yourself that doesn't mean that you get to claim the output as an original work.

fariszr 4y ago

Regardless of what side you stand on, this case is sorely needed, so everybody knows what the legalities are.

keewee7 4y ago

Why have so many of these AI models been trained on GPL licensed code? Almost half the controversy could have avoided by ignoring GPL code. I know that even non-copyleft licenses like the Apache and MIT licenses are copyrighted and require attribution however it would have caused far less controversy than training on GPL licensed code.

jacquesm 4y ago
Yes, whoever signed off on that wasn't thinking clearly.

belorn 4y ago

When Copilot was released the copyright discussion focused exclusively on code, but now we see very similar discussion around images with stable diffusion and the sister project unstable diffusion. When Copilot do reach the courts there will be some indication on how courts view author consent when it comes to training material. After that we might then see court cases for each form of media (images, video, text, sound), and also in their each unique contexts (books, online videos, porn, stock databases, and so on).

jacquesm 4y ago
In my opinion using all of the code on GitHub without respecting the licenses was a capital mistake. It should have been opt-in, maybe with some incentive but to just take it all without so much as a by-your-leave is not going to play well in court.
- Permit 4y ago
  In my opinion it was covered under the GitHub terms of service and is clearly transformative. I am optimistic that the courts will find it so and we can put these debates to rest similar to how we’ve done for web scraping.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    Sorry but terms of service don't give you a blanket license to re-purpose someone else's copyrighted work at your pleasure. By that same token any hosting provider could make a small change to their terms of service and suddenly all of the data of all of the customers would be theirs. Copyright does not work that way, you need to actively sign away your rights.
    - Permit 4y ago
      > Sorry but terms of service don't give you a blanket license to re-purpose someone else's copyrighted work at your pleasure. That’s correct. It’s also not what happened here. I don’t violate your copyright when I scrape your web page. I don’t violate your copyright when I train a model on a web page that I scraped. I violate your copyright only if I use that tool to produce code that violates your copyright. This is similar to how I don’t commit a copyright violation when I read your code, I commit the violation when I produce and publish code that violates your copyright.

rboyd 4y ago

I think it’s silly to pretend that human programmers are emitting a lot of code with a high degree of originality either. We’re all remixing some long-forgotten influential code laying deep in latent memory just like the models.

danShumway 4y ago
Humans do remix stuff when we create, and copyright draws a kind of arbitrary line around when that becomes original and when it becomes derivative, mostly because if it didn't then it would be impossible for us to get new books, movies, and songs. All copyright is a hack; it's not an ideological, internally consistent framework. It is a set of fallible legal rules we invented so that people would get paid for creating things we care about. That doesn't mean that comparisons aren't useful or that we can't extrapolate from the existing rules, but even where fair use is concerned, the actual justification isn't a logical one, it's: "if we didn't have this standard nobody would make anything." So the boundaries around fair use and what things fall into it are not being created purely based on logic or first principles. The reason why we have copyright is because we want people to be paid for making creative work. The reason we have fair use and a standard of "originality" that treats coders/artists learning from other artists as acceptable is because if we didn't, the entire system would fall apart and nobody would be able to make new creative works. Everything in copyright exists purely to get people to make more stuff in a sustainable way. It's an outcome-driven process. ---- More recently, there are a lot of people who argue that IP is a real, fundamental property right, but frankly, IP doesn't stand up at all if you think about it too hard. The justifications for why IP theft is theft can't be consistently generalized in a way that applies outside of the IP space. The standards for what does and doesn't count as creative aren't really consistent or based on a straightforward definition of creativity. A lot of people would love to say that IP rights are just property rights, but... it's not all that convincing, and the history of copyright doesn't really indicate to me that the people building the laws thought of them that way. And again, that doesn't mean that there's no consistency in copyright rules or that copyright rulings don't have implications beyond the original rulings. But it is almost always easier to think about copyright and almost always easier to understand why copyright laws are the way that they are if you approach copyright as a means to an end, and understand the existing laws not as an attempt to create an internally consistent system, but as a series of attempts throughout US history to achieve a consistent publicly beneficial outcome. ---- With that in mind, I suspect whether or not AI works count as remixing is largely going to be decided based on commercial interests, individual judges, and individual juries, possibly with input from US legislature. "Everybody remixes" historically hasn't been the most useful argument during these debates? So I don't know how it's going to play out this time around. I vaguely suspect it's going to come down to whether or not individual pieces are recognizable? That's how we got wild copyright laws about some individual chord progressions being treated as derivative works in songs.

walnutclosefarm 4y ago

It seems to me there are some really fundamental questions about copyright and use posed here that have been submerged in the background of the internet rush to digitize all forms of content and expression. Even though these generative tools may simplify the path to verbatim code (or image, or text) copying without attribution, and complicate determining what, if any, attributions are required, they didn't invent it. A browser coupled with a search engine facilitates such copying all the time. Like the generative models, the search engine is a tool that has read, for its own purposes, vast swaths of content, remembered key details about it, and serves a means to render the content up to a user. It's not the copying per se that causes trouble - creators make their material on the internet with the expectation and hope that it will be copied, by all those tools, into search engines and ultimately onto screens, so I can see it. It's that the chain of attribution is lost (or with OS code, the license imprint, which is really just another form of attribution), and with the attribution, any hope that the creator will benefit from the copying. But actually carrying attribution forward is going to be hard. Things that come out of a generative model that are substantially identical to a particular input do so for one of two reasons: one particular training input to the model is overwhelmingly the "best" source of response to the prompt, or a training input has been repeated over and over again in the training set so as to become the consensus response to one or more prompts. The first might reasonably feasible to track down, although it's bound to be computationally expensive. The second ... really tough, since it forces the model to "know" which of those many training sources is the one that should attributed. The widely circulated example of an image generation model reproducing Steve McMurray's famous photo of Sharbat Gula, a green-eyed Afghani girl that appeared on National Geographics cover in 1985 shows the problem. Do a Google search for "green-eyed Afghan girl" and you'll find hundreds of copies of varying resolution and definition, and hundreds more derivative versions, of McMurray's photo. A model spitting out yet another derived, but nearly identical version is likely drawing from hundreds of those images itself, not some original root, copyrighted golden copy. Which should it attribute?

joshspankit 4y ago

I’m horrified. If we let the powers that be force AI-generated content to be copyrighted, two things are going to happen: 1. The biggest benefits of AI are going to be pushed back for decades and possibly indefinitely 2. Artists will be absolutely slaughtered as the same rules will come at them full-force. Almost every artist draws inspiration from other creative work. That’s how creativity works. Can you imagine how stifling it would be for every artist to have to document and “pay for” every piece of art they’ve ever seen??

joshspankit 4y ago

I’m horrified. I know we’re “just” talking about code here but decisions will be far-reaching and if we let the powers that be force AI-generated content to be copyright-attributed, two things are going to happen: 1. The biggest benefits of AI are going to be pushed back for decades and possibly indefinitely 2. Artists will be absolutely slaughtered as the same rules will come at them full-force. Almost every artist draws inspiration from other creative work. That’s how creativity works. Can you imagine how stifling it would be for every artist to have to document and “pay for” every piece of art they’ve ever seen??

joshspankit 4y ago
As well, this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34242124 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34242124 If AI can produce patentable and copyrightable proteins, the first pharmaceutical company to press a button will own all possible proteins. And then all possible permutations of every undiscovered drug.