4 ms·

The discourse around this stuff seems so insane to me. Am I wrong on this? It feels like the cat is out of the bag and the only way to have generally good outco

The discourse around this stuff seems so insane to me. Am I wrong on this? It feels like the cat is out of the bag and the only way to have generally good outcomes is to go ham on open source models. IMO there's a zero percent chance that generative AI can be meaningfully controlled and any efforts to restrict training will only result in fewer people having access to the good models. They will still be created, only by people who don't care about the ethics at all, or big corpos who seek to collect rent. I think the only way I see a good outcome is that the FOSS models are so good there's no money to be made competing.

vanderZwan 4y ago
I don't disagree with you, but this discussion was about Adobe using its customer's photos without their consent, right? (no, I do not consider the small print to count here. Not on a moral level) I feel like the discussion of ethical use of ML models, while a valid one, comes a couple of steps after that. Like, the hypothetical existence of good and fair FOSS models won't make this transgression by Adobe magically irrelevant, will it?
wongarsu 4y ago
How is open source supposed to compete with commercial players that can get a lot more data with unethical means (like say Adobe using all pictures their users sync with Lightroom). Face recognition had this problem for a long time: motivated companies with the right product, the right connections or the right amount of money can get much better datasets than what is available to researchers. Generative AI will face the exact same problem, along with the other difficulties of funding such models
deleted 4y ago
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tpxl 4y ago
I have absolutely no problem with generative models, not even for producing 'illegal' images and texts, but the copyright infringement by big players is disgusting. Microsoft (copilot), openai, Adobe, ... etc will wholesale breach copyright and not give a damn, but god forbid if you copy a line of their code they will use all their might to crush you. If they want to use copyrighted stuff for their models, they should license it.
- andybak 4y ago
  This comment is a bit hard to unpick. It's not clear that training violates copyright. However plagarism (created by any means AI or not) is already covered by existing IP law. (The difficult part is telling whether AI generated stuff infringes on the copyright of stuff in the training data. And the fact the onus is on the end-user of AI tools sucks...) However - if you're arguing that copyright law should be extended to prevent use in training - that's a much tougher sell and one where I'm not 100% sure of my position.
  - tpxl 4y ago
    > It's not clear that training violates copyright What is perfectly clear are two things: 1. Github Copilot will sometimes produce non-trivial inputs it was trained on as outputs 2. Those outputs will not conform to the license That is, in my mind, a clear violation. This could easily be solved by making training (or transformation or whatever) explicit in the license. Edit: I single out Github copilot because such examples were found. I'm not sure you can find such examples for things such as Stable Diffusion or DALL-E, but the operating principle is the same.
    - wongarsu 4y ago
      > I'm not sure you can find such examples for things such as Stable Diffusion or DALL-E DALL-E 1 will sometimes replicate watermarks (without being promted for it [1]). I'm not sure anyone has ever shown a 1-1 replication like what's shown with Copilot, but it's easy to get image models to create clearly derivative works (just ask for the Mona Lisa, or even a well-known modern work). 1: https://ibb.co/gz5RDkB https://ibb.co/gz5RDkB
  - ginko 4y ago
    >It's not clear that training violates copyright. Training a model essentially creates a derivative work from the input data. GPL licensed code requires keeping the same license for derivative work. BSD-style licenses at the very least require retaining the copyright statement. It feels pretty clear to me that the trained model and code generated from it would have to adhere to the original license. In a way ML is a bit like lossy compression. Would you think JPEG encoding and decoding an image strips the result of its original copyright?

vanderZwan 4y ago

I don't disagree with you, but this discussion was about Adobe using its customer's photos without their consent, right? (no, I do not consider the small print to count here. Not on a moral level) I feel like the discussion of ethical use of ML models, while a valid one, comes a couple of steps after that. Like, the hypothetical existence of good and fair FOSS models won't make this transgression by Adobe magically irrelevant, will it?

wongarsu 4y ago

How is open source supposed to compete with commercial players that can get a lot more data with unethical means (like say Adobe using all pictures their users sync with Lightroom). Face recognition had this problem for a long time: motivated companies with the right product, the right connections or the right amount of money can get much better datasets than what is available to researchers. Generative AI will face the exact same problem, along with the other difficulties of funding such models

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

tpxl 4y ago

I have absolutely no problem with generative models, not even for producing 'illegal' images and texts, but the copyright infringement by big players is disgusting. Microsoft (copilot), openai, Adobe, ... etc will wholesale breach copyright and not give a damn, but god forbid if you copy a line of their code they will use all their might to crush you. If they want to use copyrighted stuff for their models, they should license it.

andybak 4y ago
This comment is a bit hard to unpick. It's not clear that training violates copyright. However plagarism (created by any means AI or not) is already covered by existing IP law. (The difficult part is telling whether AI generated stuff infringes on the copyright of stuff in the training data. And the fact the onus is on the end-user of AI tools sucks...) However - if you're arguing that copyright law should be extended to prevent use in training - that's a much tougher sell and one where I'm not 100% sure of my position.
- tpxl 4y ago
  > It's not clear that training violates copyright What is perfectly clear are two things: 1. Github Copilot will sometimes produce non-trivial inputs it was trained on as outputs 2. Those outputs will not conform to the license That is, in my mind, a clear violation. This could easily be solved by making training (or transformation or whatever) explicit in the license. Edit: I single out Github copilot because such examples were found. I'm not sure you can find such examples for things such as Stable Diffusion or DALL-E, but the operating principle is the same.
  - wongarsu 4y ago
    > I'm not sure you can find such examples for things such as Stable Diffusion or DALL-E DALL-E 1 will sometimes replicate watermarks (without being promted for it [1]). I'm not sure anyone has ever shown a 1-1 replication like what's shown with Copilot, but it's easy to get image models to create clearly derivative works (just ask for the Mona Lisa, or even a well-known modern work). 1: https://ibb.co/gz5RDkB https://ibb.co/gz5RDkB
- ginko 4y ago
  >It's not clear that training violates copyright. Training a model essentially creates a derivative work from the input data. GPL licensed code requires keeping the same license for derivative work. BSD-style licenses at the very least require retaining the copyright statement. It feels pretty clear to me that the trained model and code generated from it would have to adhere to the original license. In a way ML is a bit like lossy compression. Would you think JPEG encoding and decoding an image strips the result of its original copyright?