70 ms·

AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

• keikobadthebad 4y ago
  > Yes, that’s right, people crusading in the name of open source–a movement intended to promote freedom to use source code–are now claiming that a neural network, designed to save programmers the onus of re-inventing the wheel when they need code to perform programming tasks, is de facto unlawful. This is disingenuous... the issue for FOSS is the scrubbing the license off the code and then users not observing the terms copilot or whatever concealed from you... that is against copyright law. It's not a real problem? Great dump MS monorepo in there for public use.
  • slondr 4y ago
    'Disingenuous' is a very nice way of phrasing what that line is. Especially strange coming from a site which has 'copyleft' in its name.
  • carom 4y ago
    They need to 1) release the model weights as open source, and 2) license code produced by the model as open source. It is a derivative work of open source code. This is 100% a large corporation abusing and undermining the open source ecosystem. They can play by the rules or properly license a training dataset. People seem really eager to shill for a megacorp.
  • rom-antics 4y ago
    > dump MS monorepo in there for public use Here's a little(?)-known fact: the leaked Windows XP source code is hosted right on GitHub. Has anyone tried typing some win32 API function prototypes and seeing if Copilot fills in the function bodies? I'm not a Copilot user or I'd try it myself.
  • Arainach 4y ago
    Microsoft has never had a monorepo. There's a Windows monorepo, and a monorepo for chunks of Office, but even now that many teams are on Git they're still very much different repos with different build tools, different code search (maybe they fixed some of that in the last few years but none of my friends there have mentioned it if so), different coding standards, and more.
    • anonymousab 4y ago
      > There's a Windows monorepo, That's mostly what folks are referring to. We can't really take Microsoft at their word about systems like copilot if they're unwilling to trust it with their crown jewel.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• gitfan86 4y ago
  The idea that it is copyright infringement if you train a neural network on copyright data means Waymo, Bing, Google are all illegal. If you include any copyrighted information in your web crawler neural network or if your training data for your autonomous software includes pictures of billboards or t-shirts or anything in the real world that is copyrighted you are a copyright infringer.
  • mouse_ 4y ago
    Yeah but our current implementation of law is entirely subjective and exists solely to benefit those Fortune 500 organizations.
  • tester756 4y ago
    >Bing, Google ~~robots.txt~~ ai.txt for code repos? :P
    • captaincaveman 4y ago
      robots.txt lacks nuance about copyright, it doesn't really serve the same purpose.
  • chongli 4y ago
    I think it comes down to use. Web crawlers like Google are fine because they index the web and then the search engine directs users to the original source. If instead Google recycled all the content they crawled and hosted everything on google.com while scrubbing all attributions from the pages then they’d fall afoul of copyright law (specifically the moral rights [1]). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights
    • kossTKR 4y ago
      They already do though. I've read several articles about people's blogs plummeting after google adopted their text into an "info box", same as the Google News controversy a few years ago where newspapers lost traffic. It's all bad. They really should pay the "little man" not just publishers with lawyer budgets - same with AI.
• hbarka 4y ago
  I wonder if cave painters had notions of copyright, like hey don’t copy my animal drawing.
  • Hoasi 4y ago
    Pretty sure they did.
    • throwanem 4y ago
      On what basis?
      • lost_tourist 4y ago
        Human nature. We haven't changed that much in the past 50k years or so. Some people are very altruistic and giving, others not so much. An artist might club you over the head for stealing his techniques and ideas and copying them into a new portion of the cave or rock wall, others would have taught you and approved of your work.
        • seydor 4y ago
          thats not the case. almost all human works ever was not even attributed to the author. Nobody considered copyright when they recited Homer or published reprinted manuals until 1700 the concept is very new
          • LtWorf 4y ago
            > Nobody considered copyright when they recited Homer Really? Curious that we know the author's name then… seems like… attribution?
            • seydor 4y ago
              Correct, many literary works had famous authors but attribution has nothing to do with copy-rights. None of the authors of written texts, from greek tragedies, roman poets up to reprinted books had exclusive commercial rights to their writings, until the 16th cen.
• prettyStandard 4y ago
  Only speaking to the coding situation. It seems to me that if the "LLM Copilots" just observed the existing license there would be less of a problem here. Copilot, only recommend work based on $LICENSE or $LICENSE compatible license when I am working on $LICENSE code. What's the problem genius?
  • II2II 4y ago
    That only addresses part of the problem. Open source depends upon copyright in order to be enforceable. Copyright depends upon attribution. While I am confident that most (not all) open source authors would be happy if the license remains intact, what happens when someone infringes upon an open source license? Say that someone incorporates code generated by an AI based upon open source licenses into a closed source product.
    • prettyStandard 4y ago
      That's what I am saying. Stop doing that. Train co-pilot, or whatever, to follow the terms of the license.
      • bruce343434 4y ago
        That's tough when Jimmy is using copilot to generate code for his proprietary company codebase. AI is just a tool, do you also sue the company that sold the paintbrush with which an infringing painting was made?
        • LtWorf 4y ago
          Well microsoft claims that if you infringe it's your fault and not theirs. However they don't give you any way of NOT infringing when using their tool.
        • II2II 4y ago
          The thing is, we aren't really talking about AI here. We are talking about datasets being used to train AI and the companies offering the services of a trained AI. If a company trained their own AI on their own code, the discussion would be very different (likely centred on moral issues rather than legal ones). We probably won't ever have a discussion about companies submitting proprietary code to train an AI created by a third-party since there would be a contract between the two parties (and it is unlikely a company will submit proprietary code to train an AI that will be used by others in the first place). What we are looking at is a kin to a company that makes paint brushes, trains graphics artists, and contracts out their graphics artists to use those paint brushes. If it turned out that the graphics artists turned out derivative works without the rights holder's permission, you can be assured that people would want to "sue the company that sold the paintbrush". I'm not going to claim that my example is equivalent to what is happening with these AI services. And while you may be right about AI fundamentally being a tool, like a paint brush, I would suggest that is only true if you ignore the data that is fed into it.
• Jiejeing 4y ago
  > But other than netting a hefty fee for the lawyers who bring the suit, what is the endgame, exactly? Pay people whose works you want to extract value from, it is that easy… Unless the whole point of this "AI" bubble is to create monetary value for the companies and their shareholders without being held accountable. I do not mean that creating, configuring, tuning a model, or even compiling a massive dataset is not work, but it is the tiniest fraction of the work that went into whatever is present in the dataset. > also, for software authors, prohibiting ML training would be antithetical to the Open Source Definition. So that probably won’t work. A-ha, at one point I hope even AI zealots will be forced to acknowledge that the process is creating a derivative work and sure, train on my FOSS sources all you want, but the end result will need to abide by the licenses of all the sources browsed (have fun). > As the tech industry celebrates the frothy emergence of machine learning in a time of economic doom and gloom, let’s hope this nascent field doesn’t sink because of the copyright iceberg looming ahead. I am sorry to break this to the author, but not all fields and jobs need to exist. I have not seen much net positive from "AI" to society as a whole so far, with even less exciting things on the horizon.
  • a9h74j 4y ago
    > Pay people whose works you want to extract value from So, e.g., from Basic Attention Token (BAT) to Basic Authorship Token (also BAT)?
  • deleted 4y ago
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  • CuriouslyC 4y ago
    Trying to legislate model training is impossible and stupid. At worst some copyright holders will sue a company because a model is biased and produces close-enough replicas of something under copyright. Model builders will respond by penalizing models that reproduce copyright images too closely, and better curating data sets to avoid bias, at which point the issue will be moot.
    • Taywee 4y ago
      I don't want anybody to feed any of my work into a model at all without following all the terms of the licenses of my work. If my work is used to generate, via a computer program, a derived output, then you need to follow my licenses. People keep pretending that AI is the exact same thing as a human learning, but it's really a lot more like a fancy compiler with highly non-deterministic output. AI is not a human.
• kragen 4y ago
  maybe one country or another will outlaw generative ai or ai art or media synthesis or whatever it ends up being called, but presumably they'll be left behind by rapid cultural and technical development in whatever countries don't the cat is out of the bag, the worms are out of the can, the feathers have blown away in the wind these developments seem very likely to be central to programming, all other kinds of engineering, conceptual art, scenography, costuming, technical illustration, and pornography, within a couple of years, even if (against all odds) development on the neural nets themselves makes no further progress; they enable you to do things in minutes that previously would have taken days, things which are core parts of the feedback loop driving these disciplines if every country in the world except thailand bans it then within ten years all your kids will be secretly watching prohibited thai movies with software secretly written in thailand on surreptitiously thai-designed computers, riding thai bicycles even if deepfakes mean that the most significant effect of ai art is enabling massive fraud, spam, and mitm attacks, banning it locally won't stop you from falling victim to it (fraud is already illegal) but just from developing effective defenses against it
  • echelon 4y ago
    100%. Furthermore, if we adopt current copyright laws to AI rather than understand the entire world is changing, only the largest AI companies will be able to leverage the technology to train their models. If it requires every film in existence to train a model, only Disney or Disney licensors will be able to operate. That's not good for competition. It might make it even harder to grow up as an independent creative or startup as it presents an impenetrable moat. As I currently see it, weakening copyright is the only way to assure democratic access to this technology.
  • lelanthran 4y ago
    If it really turns out to be a problem then copyright holders are simply going to add in a not-licensed-for-training clause in all their licenses[1]. Sure, existing works already licensed can still be used, but at least both parties (copyright holders and AI trainers) won't have anything to argue about. [1] Anyone from CC reading this? Make it the default.
• phoe-krk 4y ago
  > But the latest and greatest software trend–generative AI–is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law. About time. > If the AI industry is to survive, we need a clear legal rule that neural networks, and the outputs they produce, are not presumed to be copies of the data used to train them. But they are compressed lossy copies of all that data! That's the whole point of noise/denoise functions that neural networks are based upon. The whole mathematical foundation of training a neural network is "teaching" it how to recognize and/or create copies of data stored in the training set. > Otherwise, the entire industry will be plagued with lawsuits that will stifle innovation and only enrich plaintiff’s lawyers. When you're willingly breaking already established law en masse for profit in hope no one cares enough, be it copyright law or any other, you're not an "innovator", you're a criminal. The fact that you're a tech giant or a Bay startup doesn't matter in this regard; the only thing that matters is the notable amount of time required for the justice system to catch up with your novel tools for laundering intellectual property.
  • tomrod 4y ago
    Transgressors, perhaps, but not criminals. AI, especially generative AI, are not lossy copies but rather synthesizers. If anything, your comment highlights the need to evolve IP norms and laws.
  • thewakalix 4y ago
    How are you using the word “copy”? It doesn’t seem to match the standard meaning. For instance, most people would not consider a brief summary of a movie’s plot to be a “copy” of that movie, or protected under copyright.
    • phoe-krk 4y ago
      If you have an image, then train a neural network on that image, then use the neural network to reconstruct that image in detail, then the NN by definition contains enough information used to reconstruct that image - hence, a copy. With NNs trained on thousands or millions of data entries, this concept becomes fuzzy in the same way as you described - a short summary likely wouldn't be considered a copy, just like a 64x64 generated thumbnail wouldn't be considered in the same way a 4096x4096 hi-res image.
• BaculumMeumEst 4y ago
  > Like a cruise ship heading for a scary iceberg, AI is in trouble, and the problems are mostly below the surface. I'm not sure why the author is out here talking like a lawsuit brought by the author of Typography For Lawyers is going to bring down Microsoft like it's a foregone conclusion, but people are going to be training models on public data for personal gain from here out no matter what happens. The cat is out of the bag.
  • klabb3 4y ago
    Yes, so this mumbo jumbo scaremongering about how poor AI researchers won’t be able to make the world a better place isn’t remotely accurate. If copyright ends up being enforced, it’ll affect commercial deployment. We’re in for an inevitable paradigm shift soon anyway, so if we need any guardrails, we better install them before we open the floodgates.
    • LtWorf 4y ago
      I'd like to train an AI on microsoft's leaked code and put the model online. And see what microsoft thinks of that…
• broast 4y ago
  It seems inevitable then that we soon will have various large models in competition, with differently sourced legally licensed large training datasets. And opt-in open-source ones. And they will one day all hopefully be as good or better than the current models are now.
• quadcore 4y ago
  I have no clues about laws and stuff and as a software engineer, I'd say please replace me by machines i dont care all the contrary, let's go. But please, please, protect art making from machines. These paints made in those caves werent done during work hours, it was probably the first forms of leasure our ancestors experienced. The first forms of enjoyment in the rude life of early humans. I think there is some higher order aspect to art that's related to our essential well being. All Im saying is protect it; im not saying AI shouldnt be used. It could certainly render art making even more fun. Maybe limit the resolution of generated pictures for example.
  • deleted 4y ago
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  • Hoasi 4y ago
    While I appreciate your comment and the sentiment, and believe that artists whose work companies trained models on without their consent should get their rights honoured, I disagree that the art field needs any extra protection. There will be innovation outside of the latent space thanks to the AI art movement, that will be a positive development. An enormous body of artworks has zero online presence and exists outside of its reach, at least for now. However, art reflects its time, and generative, machine learning, text to image art will all influence artists in unseen ways. Offline artists are watching. Nobody needs a computer to do outstanding art. Even the most primitive tools can produce unmatched results in the real world. That's the beauty of making art. Models cannot even begin to touch it. Good artists have nothing to fear about ML as a tool, which is fantastic and promising as such. It's undoubtly diruptive. As image-making takes less time, the value of an individual image will tend to zero. Prices will go down, and artists will adapt. That's what they do. Sure, there will be a bunch of profeteers and imposters using AI. Art always had its share of those. Art is a dream field for fraudsters. A known issue since we commercialised art, because it carries intangible value. Hence why NFTs started with art. That doesn't make the whole initiative a fraud. That said, digital artists who have copyright issues should absolutely fight back. The gray areas around training model with art by living artists needs an open discussion.
  • thewakalix 4y ago
• scotty79 4y ago
  Copyright is eating everything since the beginning of computing and spitting out worse ghosts of things we might have in its absence. Sometimes we see glimpses of the world that we might have, in the form of open source, sci-hub and independent small sucessess against all odds created by people going against copyright behemoths.
• varelse 4y ago
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• deleted 4y ago
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• lamontcg 4y ago
  Or is AI eating Copyright?
  • Taywee 4y ago
    I think this is the better question, given that the current major use of AI is to launder copyright away from the work of mostly independent artists.
• dns_snek 4y ago
  > [...] and also, for software authors, prohibiting ML training would be antithetical to the Open Source Definition. So that probably won’t work. Of course. As an author of OSS, I'm more than happy to let your AI "learn" from my code as long as the trained model is released under a GPL compatible license.
  • neltnerb 4y ago
    That the original post elided this point really stood out. I don't hear complaints about code getting used for training. I hear complaints about code being used in proprietary products in what appears at first and second glance to be a code laundering scheme without attribution or their rights respected. If it was trained on the source code for Windows 11, AWS, and Google Search maybe everyone would feel more magnanimous. If those were used I have the feeling that the lawsuits would be much faster. I don't get how "I'm only sharing this under these conditions" is complicated to grasp. Maybe it's a technical annoyance but... good?
  • yazzku 4y ago
    This author really does not know two shits what they're talking about. Surprising this whole post isn't flagged. If your AI software is vomiting derivative works stripped of their original license, provided the license even allows derivative works, then yes, you need to lawyer up.
    • bollos 4y ago
      This AI boom feels very similar to that of crypto/Web 3.0 of a few years ago. Wouldn’t be surprised if the same people are behind the current AI/ML hype.
  • LtWorf 4y ago
    And the output!
  • smallerfish 4y ago
    I think this is exactly right, and also applies to any models based on web scraping. If you're scraping the web and building a set of weights based on language or images that people have developed, _fine_ as long as you release the model without charge and/or at cost (given that the cost of model training in this way is still expensive, earning back expenses is reasonable). Otherwise every word typed and every image uploaded is contributing to the development of products that will increase the power of mega-corps over time.
• Taywee 4y ago
  > If the AI industry is to survive, we need a clear legal rule that neural networks, and the outputs they produce, are not presumed to be copies of the data used to train them. Otherwise, the entire industry will be plagued with lawsuits that will stifle innovation and only enrich plaintiff’s lawyers Or maybe, get this, how about people running AI only feed them information that they legally have the right to use? How is it a bad thing that somebody can't legally steal other peoples' work without their permission because of pesky copyright?
  • candiodari 4y ago
    Copyright only governs publishing. So you have the right to train AI with any and all data you have access to, as far as copyright is concerned.
    • kube-system 4y ago
      Yes but using AI to generate works that can be used commercially is the way commercial AI companies plan to monetize AI.
      • threeseed 4y ago
        There have been leaks where OpenAI is charging $42/month to use their service. How much of that is going back to the copyright holders whose work their service derives value from ?
        • chii 4y ago
          > How much of that is going back to the copyright holders whose work their service derives value from ? how much of the earnings of the student of art goes to the textbook authors, paintings and learning materials he used to get to where he is today?
          • Groxx 4y ago
            Derivative works are their own things (when sufficiently derivative). And AIs are not humans - using an algorithm does not automatically remove the copyright. See also "I uploaded a movie to youtube but it's upside down, why did it get taken down".
• scotty79 4y ago
  If you draw a cat then you need to pay authors of every cat drawing you ever saw. Also all the owners of actual cats you saw. It's only fair.
  • Taywee 4y ago
    AI is not human. Machine learning isn't the exact same thing as human learning. Treating them as exactly the same is disingenuous.
    • LtWorf 4y ago
      Also, people occasionally invent new concepts, ai doesn't.
      • yosame 4y ago
        Well ChatGPT at least does all the time, it's just that those concepts are factually incorrect
  • akira2501 4y ago
    You can pay me to copy someone else's work if that's you really want. You cannot then use this copy commercially while pretending this indirection somehow grants you immunity from copyright laws. The fact that AI is involved does not change the basic principle.
  • kyleyeats 4y ago
    Prompt: "cat leaving bag, golden hour, trending on artstation, 4k"
    • terramex 4y ago
      I got you: https://i.imgur.com/5JMU164.jpg https://i.imgur.com/5JMU164.jpg
• blondin 4y ago
  i do not defend copilot for training on private repositories. or ignoring licenses. but, to me, there is a big flaw in these lawsuits. if we need to shut down these AI technologies, then our entire education field is in danger. the same arguments should apply to our education field. educating AI is the same as educating ourselves.
  • Jiejeing 4y ago
    No, because we happen to not be computer programs (or I hope so at least).
  • jimbo9991 4y ago
    Please elaborate on how this puts education in danger? I would be inclined to predict the opposite and that AI has the potential to be the greatest threat to education we have ever faced.
  • _ph_ 4y ago
    We don't need to shut down these technologies. But there needs to be a clear ruling to which extend they can use copyrighted materials without the consent of the copyright holder. And establish a framework on how such a consent could be established in case it is required.
• yazzku 4y ago
  This post reflects the author's very poor understanding of neural networks, software licenses and copyright law, and borders on misinformation. Please share this kind of shit on Twitter instead. If your AI is spitting derivative works or straight-up verbatim copies of the original, stripped of a license, and given the original license even allows derivative works, then yes, you better lawyer up. This applies to both software, art, or any copyright-protected work. Legality aside, it is also shitty and on the lower end of morals to abuse people's work/art in this way. AI systems that don't fuck with people and their work are perfectly fine. Stop fucking with people and you won't need lawyers.
  • spunker540 4y ago
    I don’t think it’s a big deal if your AI spits out copyrighted images. My scanner, camera phone, photoshop etc can also easily spit out copyrighted images. It’s ok if I just print them out for my wall at home, but if I try to sell them it becomes a problem. So then I guess these new AI models are only problematic if someone tries to sell them (as its essentially selling copyrighted works) but an open source model is probably fair game. Individuals can use it, but if you try to monetize you better not be infringing. Seems like something like YouTube’s content ID solution for detecting copyrighted works could be a “quick” fix here. You can sell access to your model but not to generate copyrighted works
    • yazzku 4y ago
      > but if I try to sell them it becomes a problem What do you think Microsoft is doing with Copilot and everyone's code on Github? They didn't spend millions of dollars and several weeks of training just for the amusement.
• interstice 4y ago
  If neural networks are claimed to be creating lossy copies of input data, what does that mean for human neural networks? Are we about to outlaw the concept of inspiration by accident?
• KirillPanov 4y ago
  Editorialized title is editorialized.
• b33j0r 4y ago
  Yes, genies can be put back into bottles. We’ve known this for millennia
• stretchwithme 4y ago
  I'm sure once AI understand copyright law, this will cease to be an issue. :-)
  • rishishah20 4y ago
    Absolutely. Even AI will easily Manipulate Everything.
• Sunspark 4y ago
  Apple sued Microsoft for the "look" of a GUI and lost.
• ggm 4y ago
  Maybe AI companies could pay IPR royalties?
• jrm4 4y ago
  This is an incredibly naive article; the author has no real meaningful appreciation of how relatively powerless copyright tends to be in reality when it comes to new technology. Google, Youtube, Facebook -- ANY big tech company whose bread and butter is "your work" all generally get a free pass here -- or more specifically, something like "the market" ends up being the primary driver of activity.
• jeroenhd 4y ago
  There's no part of AI that is being swallowed up by copyright. AI companies can ask for permission if they want to train their models on other people's works. It's not that hard, various image hosting sites have already added an opt-in/opt-out toggle to their services. Sites might even get away with using this stuff as compensation for free hosting. The fact of the matter is that the AI companies don't want to ask for permission, because people will say no. Or worse, ask for attribution or even payment. There is plenty of copyright free/public domain material out there, but what the customers of AI people want isn't available under those terms. The code to train an AI is not enough to make a product and these people have nothing to add themselves, so they take what others made and use that to make a profit. They can make or pay for their own paintings, their own pictures, their own music, but that would require putting in too much work or paying too much money. It's very possible that a judge will rule that AI models do not violate copyright. If that is the case, I hope new legislation will correct that oversight very quickly.
  • scheeseman486 4y ago
    The outcome you want will inevitably lead to entrenched intellectual property holders having an effective monopoly on the best AI tools. You know that Stable Diffusion lawsuit? Go check who the lawyers behind that work for; Disney wants that same outcome.
    • jeroenhd 4y ago
      People who made or bought out the content get to have the content. I don't necessarily see the problem with that except for the ridiculous amount of time copyright remains valid. If a company invests $250 million into an original movie, I don't see why they shouldn't have some say over their content for at least a couple of years. Not until 2150 or whatever the end date for modern works is supposed to be, but give it some time at least. OpenAI is the result of billions being thrown around. When it comes to billions, it doesn't matter if they come from Disney, Google, Microsoft or Amazon. None of these companies have our individual rights at heart, they only care about profits. In this rare occasion, the interests of the people and Disney align. The laws protecting the independent writers/programmers/artists are the same ones that protect Disney. The tools themselves work on arbitrary data sets. Anyone who can dig up enough public domain/attribution free pictures/code/text can train their own AI without even coming close to copyright issues. Hell, had these super smart AI people managed to find out a method of attribution, the data set would include massive amounts of works released under Creative Commons or open source licenses.
• henning 4y ago
  So, all neural network developers, get ready for the lawyers, because they are coming to get you. No, you dullard child. Get ready to get sued if you try to make billions of dollars via derivative works of other creators while breaking software licenses.
  • how_rude 4y ago
    How rude.
• okamiueru 4y ago
  I'm hooked on Stable Diffusion. It's the most impressive sudden leaps in technology in my 30 or so years of being old enough to understand it. Much of the power it has, is based on the material it is trained on, and I'm very appreciative of the work and effort that was made in order to make it what it is. And, it's only getting started. That said... I get it. Huggingface are working on a diffusion based model for music. And guess what? It's extremely important for them to only use opt-in or commissioned training data. Why? Because the music industry, unlike artists on artstation and the likes, have a lot of lawyers and can protect their copyrighted works. Why should it really be any different for visual arts? I honestly don't see why. That isn't to say I'm not going to keep on using stable diffusion, nor do I think there is anything that can be done to stop it. But, I do think artists should be compensated, and such models should not be based on the work of anyone, unless they want it to be.
  • jeroenhd 4y ago
    Monetary risk, that's why. Cross the wrong people and you'll find yourself extradited to another country and tried for copyright laws you didn't even know existed. I'm honestly surprised OpenAI models know about Disney properties.
    • okamiueru 4y ago
      No. I get why. I'm just saying that it's morally equivalent to use copyrighted music to train AI generated music, as it is to use copyrighted art to generate art. > Dance Diffusion is also built on datasets composed entirely of copyright-free and voluntarily provided music and audio samples. Because diffusion models are prone to memorization and overfitting, releasing a model trained on copyrighted data could potentially result in legal issues. In honoring the intellectual property of artists while also complying to the best of their ability with the often strict copyright standards of the music industry, keeping any kind of copyrighted material out of training data was a must. Reads very different to any statement made by Hugginface or the LION database regarding stable diffusion, which do not mention the concept of an artist or artist work a single time. And Hugginface are the only ones open about it. Midjourney and Dall-E and Imagen most assuredly doing the same for their black boxes.
• chrismorgan 4y ago
  > One possible best practice would be to allow authors to specifically opt out of use of their output for ML training. If it’s a copyright matter, I don’t see how that could work. It’d need to be opt-in, or covered by an explicit license grant (and terms and conditions are being ignored to the point that I gather some jurisdictions’ courts are pretty much striking down anything that a reasonable person wouldn’t expect to be there, and so it wouldn’t surprise me if such an approach would strike down any grant asserted in T&Cs). > for software authors, prohibiting ML training would be antithetical to the Open Source Definition If it’s a copyright matter, this wouldn’t be the case, because it wouldn’t be discrimination against a particular field of endeavour, but rather simply insisting on the terms of the license.
• hiAndrewQuinn 4y ago
  AI directly threatens the livelihoods of most white collar workers, most of us here included. Of course they'll use any means available to cobble together a cartel to maintain the human monopoly on production of intellectual and creative works. Now is the best time to do it, thanks to the incredible flashiness and popular awareness of these new bits of software.
  • mshake2 4y ago
    >AI directly threatens the livelihoods of most white collar workers, most of us here included. This reads like an argument from the English Luddites[0] 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite#Birth_of_the_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite#Birth_of_the_movement
    • hkal_ 4y ago
      Sure, but what happened to the luddites?
      • mshake2 4y ago
        >Mill and factory owners took to shooting protesters and eventually the movement was suppressed with legal and military force, which included execution and penal transportation of accused and convicted Luddites.
        • hkal_ 4y ago
          I meant what happened to them after the jobs were replaced with technology?
  • klabb3 4y ago
    That criticism applies to copyright generally, and I agree partly. However, what’s happening here is different. What people are reacting against is that (often dirt poor) artists unwillingly become part of a commercial supply chain, while corporations protect their IP the usual way, backed by the full force of the government even on foreign land. If copyright is abolished entirely, at least there’s some form of level playing field. But this becomes yet another step towards a more exploitative economic environment.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
  "And at least as of now, it is not possible to look at ML output and determine which inputs, nodes and weights created it."
• ianelbert 4y ago
  I think that we missed the real problem: it's not a responsability of the Ai model to not i fringe copyright, but is of the Ai user to not publish work that may i fringe copyright, like anything else... If with photoshop (or a pen ) i made a work that can infringe law, is photoshop's (or pen) fault or mine?
  • microtonal 4y ago
    it's not a responsability of the Ai model It's the responsibility of the maker for the AI model. They train the AI model on copyrighted material. So they should clear the licensing for using that material. IANAL, but since I also work in the ML domain, I tried to find out how this works when you have to follow EU laws. Past rulings [1] have considered 11-word snippets to be a copyright violation (which is by no means the lower bound). So, it is likely that if a copyright holder in the EU can show Co-Pilot or ChatGPT to reproduce a non-trivial fragment of code or sentence, that a copyright holder can sue them successfully. However, the sad fact is that these models are made by well-funded entities. So, they'll bury small copyright owners in lawyer busywork until they go bankrupt and settle with big copyright holders. So one possible net outcome will be that large entities can do large-scale copyright violation while individuals and small companies can't. We have seen this story before. And it helps to entrench big companies even more. I hope that the EU comes with some regulation to level the playing field. So either make it illegal for everyone (enforced by EU courts) or legal for everyone. [1] https://www.theregister.com/2009/07/31/ecj_rules_11_word_snippets_can_violate_copyright/ https://www.theregister.com/2009/07/31/ecj_rules_11_word_sni...
• snickerbockers 4y ago
  I'd be far more amenable to corporations training their AI on my content of those exact same corporations hadn't spent the last two decades aggressively defending their own IP with DRM and multi-million dollar lawsuits. So they can go fuck themselves, or alternatively they can make their super advanced AI reproduce my copyright statement and license every time it copies my code. Which shouldn't be difficult at all.
  • kerpotgh 4y ago
    [flagged]
    • dang 4y ago
      Would you please stop breaking the site guidelines so we don't have to keep banning you? I appreciate your good comments but bad ones destroy more than good ones contribute. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • oehpr 4y ago
    Indeed, they can go fuck themselves. But if copyright law gets put in place against AI, the only ones who will be able to enjoy the benefits of AI are the people who can go fuck themselves. The gatekeepers that will just add yet another line to their 10 billion line long EULA that will require you give up the rights to any art you possess for AI training, to the exclusive use of mega co. inc. ect.
  • nhchris 4y ago
    Your stance, if it becomes law, guarantees that only the giant corporations you hate will be able to negotiate licenses to train their AI. It guarantees that libre AI tools will be left far behind. Is that what you want?
    • snickerbockers 4y ago
      i think it's arrogant and selfish to assume that everybody has a stake in AI research. i want the license that the software i create (which has nothing to do with AI) to be obeyed. anyways, there's a lot of ways that AI researchers could engage with IP owners to come up with a fair way to use their work, but nobody's making that effort. If my content is part of an AI's training set (and especially if that AI has a tendency to output excerpts of its own training set verbatim, as github's copilot has been shown to do) then it's not unreasonable to set terms and conditions, which could restrict how the content is used for training and what sort of compensation (if any) I deserve. I'm of the opinion that it's time for new versions of GPL and CC licenses to be created which will enumerate how content can be used for AI training.
• jillesvangurp 4y ago
  US copyright law only applies in the US. AI can be developed outside of the US where other laws apply. So, the US using the straight jacket of copyright law to stifle innovation would only cause AI companies to move their business; or non US companies stepping up. I don't think that's actually going to happen though. The stakes are too high for that and this case seems quite weak. Copyright law has its limitations. But it also has a long history of being applied and interpreted that you can't just wish away. New legal interpretations have to be reconciled with that. So, any radical changes in that are not very likely to happen. Nor will politicians step up and change the law. First of all, few of them actually care or even understand most of this stuff. And secondly, they have plenty of other distractions and a worse attention span than a toddler. Mostly they just do what big companies tell them to do. So, the most likely outcome here is that these cases won't get very far. At best it might drag on for a few years while nothing really changes. During that time, AI will continue to develop and will get more embedded in society. And lets face it, this is not Oracle with really deep pockets unleashing an army of lawyers against the likes of Google but some isolated individuals. As legal cost ramps up, their enthusiasm might suffer a bit. Especially if they start losing cases.
  • errantmind 4y ago
    >> US copyright law only applies in the US This isn't entirely true, due to various entangled trade agreements that require countries to respect each other's intellectual property as a prerequisite. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention
    • zarzavat 4y ago
      They require countries to respect each other's copyrights, not each other's copyright law. The US, for example, does not enforce EU database rights. Moreover, you can in EU copy a book made by a US author who died 80 years ago even if that copyright is still valid in the US. Local laws are enforced by local courts. What the Berne Convention requires is that if I have a copyright in US it will be recognised in France, etc without having to re-register it in every country in the world. There is no part of the Berne convention that will prevent people from training models on US copyrighted works outside of the US. That is entirely a matter for local jurisdiction.
• wolframhempel 4y ago
  I think the underlying question is one of "degrees of derivation". There's a famous Carl Sagan quote: “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe” which hints at the problem: Nothing is created in a vacuum. Let's compare what Stable Diffusion does with what Franz von Holzhausen, head of design at Tesla, does. Franz didn't come into existence out of nothing and knew how to design cars. Instead he studied transportation design and worked at Volkswagen, General Motors and Mazda before joining Tesla. All these steps trained his (actual) neural network with inputs from copyrighted car designs. Based on these inputs he was able to create the designs for the Model S, Model 3, Model X and others. Does this mean that Mazda can now levy a copyright lawsuit against Tesla? It could, based on the reasoning employed in some of the Stable Diffusion suits, but it won't based on the lack of similarity between the cars of both brands. I believe that the law around AI will come to a similar conclusion. AI learning is neither fundamentally add odds with copyrighted material, nor confirming it. It will be a matter of degrees of derivation - how different is the output of the AI from its copyrighted inputs.
  • spoiler 4y ago
    I can't help but feel like you're slightly anthropomorphising an algorithm. It's a really damn cool and powerful algorithm, don't get me wrong, but it's still not a person. At the end of the day, it's also not the algorithm "benefiting" from it, but the corporation using the algorithm. It's also a bit hypocritical, because if you did the same thing to them as a human (in this example let's say be a Tesla copycat) you'd likely be sued into the ground because there's probably a patent somewhere in there.
    • kmac_ 4y ago
      The anthropomorphisation of the ML baffles me. This is not AI but a large ML model trained on often proprietary data. The whole discussion is ridiculous. There should be a lineage of model data so we should know what's the original source (at least for the "core" of the answer) in form of citations. I assume that the model loose that information during the training and that would be quite hard as everything is mixed together.
• wskish 4y ago
  There seems to be a very strong argument that even if (big ‘if’) AI models infringe copyright it is a transformative fair use. https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/fair-use-what-transformative.html https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/fair-use-what-transf...
• _ph_ 4y ago
  One important point for the discussion is: one cannot (at least not currently) directly compare these AI models with the human mind. A human learns, can reason about the learned things and can use that ability to create completely new pieces of work. There is some clear intelligence and reasoning and personal creativity involved. Now looking at the current state of AI models, they have shown to reproduce the training material in large verbatim pieces. On the other side, they lack any ability to reason about what they produce. Which for me is a big indicator, that they are clearly reproducing not producing on their own. Which creates the potential copyright issues. At minimum, the legality needs to be clearly specified, be it by court rulings or law changes. Ironically, to some extend this has been a long time problem with human creations too. There are plenty of lawsuits about music pieces "borrowing" too much from older creations, and recently there is a growing cases uncovered, where expecial thesis papers contain too much unattributed content. Probably no new thing, just so much more easily discoverable thanks to modern text search tools. So as a tl/dr: I don't think current AI models are comparable to human learning and the copyright questions around that need to be decided. If that means generally expanding fair use, having shorter copyright periods, I am all for it. But "AI" shouldn't be a tool for large tech companies to systematically evade license terms.
• devwastaken 4y ago
  Who's damaged? The suits have to prove that the heart of the work is being reproduced, and that this is damaging in some way. Currently AI generated images cannot be registered for copyright, so those images cannot even be protected and exclusively sold. Regardless the heart of the work isn't reproduced, it's a transformative work, which means it's protected by fair use. If its an image editor everyone is calm, but call it AI everyone loses their minds.
• xavxav 4y ago
  A half-serious thought I had is to allow AI to be trained on copyrighted materials but require all output to be public domain. It doesn’t solve attribution, and you could get a sufficiently advanced ai to “launder” copyright but at least it would prevent those corporations from leveraging public works into copyrighted projects
  • yosame 4y ago
    That's genuinely the best solution I've heard for this issue so far. It'd stop buisnesses from replacing artists with models wholesale, but it would allow people to keep using them, and allow the companies making the models to make money selling access to the models.
• janalsncm 4y ago
  I’ve taken a pretty fatalist position on this one: whatever’s going to happen, will happen. I have heavy biases that, even if I acknowledge them, are impossible to shake. My only hope is that somehow generative art, code, and all other media can somehow benefit the little guy rather than continuing to enrich the largest and most powerful, however unlikely it seems.
• imgabe 4y ago
  An artist keeping their work out of AI models will be like one from previous generations keeping their work out of museums. It will be a great way to ensure your work is forgotten by history and has no influence on the next generation of art. Like it or not, you can’t stop people from copying strings of ones and zeros. Time to let go of primitive notions of copyright and embrace that we’re all one species and we benefit by sharing our knowledge.
  • arp242 4y ago
    I don't think that keeping your work out of AI will have any bearing on your work's success or lack thereof. It's not like people go "wow, great AI image, let's check out the 253,526 works this was synthesized from!" There is no publicity value in it.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• timokoesters 4y ago
  Or is copyright in danger of being swallowed up by AI? What would be the consequences?
• kennyloginz 4y ago
  I would be happy with a new robots.txt that applies to AI scraping. Sure, most people will ignore it, but if you can find someone profiting off your work, there are chances recoup in court.
• otikik 4y ago
  Skynet sending a lawyer back in time to save itself from copyright.
• dariosalvi78 4y ago
  I think that this cannot be stopped, copyright or not, the tool is too powerful and too useful. But I understand the moral dilemma: why would I, as a creator, be happy if someone is using my work to basically put me out of work? I think that the solution is easier than it seems. The real value websites like Getty provide is not the image in itself, but the labelling. Put the labels under a paywall and problem solved. For source code it's more complicated, but I guess that you could somewhat limit access to commit comments. In any case, the genie is out of the bottle.
• Marazan 4y ago
  "This training data is highly valuable" "ah, so you wish to pay for it?" "Lol no, ctrl-c, ctrl-v"
  • Panoramix 4y ago
    "This training data is available for free, but if you want to train your AI on it you need to pay" => Which means only Google, Microsoft, Meta and Disney will be able to train AIs. Thanks to lawyers, a technology that had the promise to democratize art will be used by large corporations to enslave us further.
    • dns_snek 4y ago
      That's backwards. Do you think these companies are actually willing to negotiate deals with each artist, content creator, website, and code repository? The scale of that alone would sink their business, not to mention the cost. Worst case scenario - you're right, they're willing to go through that and the authors actually get paid something rather than nothing.
      • Panoramix 4y ago
        Each artist? They will just have to negotiate with (or acquire) a few major hosts like ArtStation and Flickr.
        • dns_snek 4y ago
          1) That only applies to images, and crucially 2) content on those websites is published under various licenses that often require attribution, payment, or stipulate non-commercial use.
• ColinEberhardt 4y ago
  This whole legal debate exists because of ambiguity. Open source licences were written before large-scale training became a thing. Rather than settle this ambiguity on court, why not remove it altogether? Personally I think we should be adding new clauses to licences that either explicitly approve or prohibit the use of code for training of models.
  • MrStonedOne 4y ago
    [dead]
• benced 4y ago
  It’s interesting that we spent decades arguing against corporate IP control because it reduces the intellectual freedom of the human race but now that the corpus of data comes from everyday people instead of big companies (a direct effect of the internet democratizing the creation of content), people are suddenly pro IP control. It shows that a lot of people in this space only cared about standing up against corporations, they didn’t care about the philosophy behind the anti-IP movement,
  • neovialogistics 4y ago
    Perhaps standing up against corporations is itself a proxy for some even more deeply hidden system of human values. But what could human minds value, if not free and open IP or opposition to corporate entities?
  • barnabee 4y ago
    I’m very against IP laws and controls in pretty much all their forms. I think if we tried to calculate the cost to humanity of the things that don’t happen or aren’t created, are very expensive to do, or are restricted to people and companies with the right “rights” we’d uncover a tremendous tragedy. In addition to the first order effects (you can’t do X or have to pay to do Y), there are huge chilling effects on uses that are allowed (especially as companies regularly overplay their hand well beyond the protections they are actually afforded), and the cost of technology and people that exist only to enforce these rules. We should embrace the free sharing of information and maximisation of its value for all of humanity. If we worry about researchers, programmers, and artists not getting paid (and we should!) then we ought to pay them as a society for the public goods they create (as we partly do for science and research). Finding and implementing a good and democratically reasonable way to do this would be truly revolutionary. I hope that AI research and training only goes to prove the long term damage and futility of IP as a concept and accelerate its downfall.
    • iinnPP 4y ago
      This is also the opinion I reached after thinking about it for quite some time. I am, a wee bit, shocked people believe there can be impactful legislation on this. As if politicians who have been unable to curb PIRACY in any real sense would now be able to tackle an even tougher problem. This is despite well funded lobbying groups. Even large corps enable piracy without consequences. Further, the government frequently indicates a concern that China will beat the US at AI. There is an extremely bumpy ride coming for a group of people that have never had to deal with an unavoidable bumpy ride. I look forward to an increasingly logical viewpoint from people being struck by reality. Not maliciously, but societally. AI has indeed removed the "need" for copyright. Let Mickey die.
• jwildeboer 4y ago
  The interesting thing is how Heather Meeker carefully avoids mentioning the obvious approach that is perfectly compliant with laws and regulations around copyright and use: opt-in. If a new way of using information arises, asking for consent through opt-in is the obvious choice. But also the most costly one. That's why the "forgiveness instead of permission" approach is seen as somehow heroic, when it actually simply is abuse.
  • kragen 4y ago
    the question at issue in these lawsuits is whether the law requires permission (or equivalently forgiveness) or whether people are free to do as they wish in these cases
• flohofwoe 4y ago
  That's one thing I've been asking myself a lot recently: Is it realistic to expect that AI can properly attribute the source material in its output anytime soon? IMHO this is a non-negotiable requirement if the field wants to be taken serious. How can I trust the output if I cannot verify the correctness of the input? And then there's the legal aspect: in music, sampling is legal nowadays, but you have to ask the original author for permission and then pay royalties based on how much your own creation is based on the original sample. AI isn't much more than automated sampling, how can AI generated content ever hope to avoid a legal quagmire if it cannot properly attribute its source material?
• cpa 4y ago
  The Stable Diffusion suit alleges copyright infringement, stating that, “The resulting image is necessarily a derivative work, because it is generated exclusively from a combination of the conditioning data and the latent images, all of which are copies of copyrighted images. It is, in short, a 21st-century collage tool.” That characterization is the essence and conclusion of the lawsuit, and one with which many AI designers would disagree. I didn't expect to be defending copyright law, but the excerpt is ridiculous. It's clear that the images are a product of the prompt and training set. The legal side of fair use and copyrights is best left to the courts, but the real question is how to divide the profits. Because the training dataset is so large and the technology plays such a crucial role, it may not make sense to pay much (if anything) for each individual image in the training set. There's no clear cut answer.
• jacooper 4y ago
  > Yes, that’s right, people crusading in the name of open source–a movement intended to promote freedom to use source code–are now claiming that a neural network, designed to save programmers the onus of re-inventing the wheel when they need code to perform programming tasks, is de facto unlawful. This really shows you don't know the movement it self. People want credit, and sometimes put conditions to use their work(GPL and copyleft), and when the AI doesn't follow these guidelines, then its breaking these copyright laws. Not everyone is willing to willy-nilly give their code for nothing.
• amelius 4y ago
  China doesn't care much about copyright law. AI is safe.
• petesergeant 4y ago
  It’ll be a notable thing if China win the AI race because of ignoring copyrights
• RobotToaster 4y ago
  >"The Co-Pilot suit is ostensibly being brought in the name of all open source programmers. Yes, that’s right, people crusading in the name of open source–a movement intended to promote freedom to use source code–are now claiming that a neural network, designed to save programmers the onus of re-inventing the wheel when they need code to perform programming tasks, is de facto unlawful." Maybe people wouldn't be so angry about an AI trained on mostly open source code if said AI was open source, and not a proprietary SaaS.
  • vb-8448 4y ago
    > Maybe people wouldn't be so angry about an AI trained on mostly open source code if said AI was open source, and not a proprietary SaaS. Exactly, the point is this one. Open-source doesn't mean liability free, you still have to comply to the license!
    • judge2020 4y ago
      You don't if you are creating an entirely new work of art based solely on the knowledge and patterns you've learned from looking at other code, ie. a human learning to code by looking at millions of pages of code on GitHub; whether or not AI can learn in this way is the point of contention for AI art/code/chat generators.
      • flohofwoe 4y ago
        If the AI "independently" comes up with a 1:1 copy of some piece of copyrighted code, would this be a copyright violation or not? There's a reason why some programmers don't even look at proprietary source code leaks as to not accidentally introduce copyright violations into their own code.
        • judge2020 4y ago
          > would this be a copyright violation or not? It would be. When a human does this, does it invalidate the human's ability to create any new work at all? Should we chain up anyone who violated copyright by perfectly recalling someone's art in memory and re-drawing it from heart, since we cannot trust them to ever create an original work again?
• jimnotgym 4y ago
  In summary: some people think it is copyright infringement, some do not. They can't agree. There is a lot at stake. Sounds like a courtroom is the right place to find an answer? That is the the US system isn't it?
• anoncow 4y ago
  AI could be the new Adsense. Unlike Adsense where you only get paid if you an ad is clicked, site owners could charge AI crawlers money per page.
• headsoup 4y ago
  Translation: people are trying to make it less profitable for us, please stop them.
• phkahler 4y ago
  >> One possible best practice would be to allow authors to specifically opt out of use of their output for ML training. That is legally the default. Creators own their copyrights. In many cases it is made explicit with a creative commons non-commercial use license. Remember, without a license you get nothing commercial - except the nebulous fair use. The real problem here is companies thinking they can consume large amounts of material and works simply because they can see them on the internet and obfuscate them by combining together.
• jeffrallen 4y ago
  Better headline: "New technology ignores existing societal norms and has to adapt itself when society rejects it." Sheesh.
• nailer 4y ago
  Flagged for obviously partisan take. "AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law" is perhaps the oddest take on the current situation: people's copyrighted work being in danger of being swallowed up by AI.
• avgcorrection 4y ago
  Say a person makes a program which completely automatically samples songs to eight bit, giving that “retro gaming sound”. Maybe that person uploads an album to YouTube and credits the original album in the description, saying that they do not own this work (the people who made that album do). This seems to be the standard practice for this kind of work. Will the person be able to monetize that video. Say a person makes a program which automatically makes a collage of movies with some music on top. The movies will be credited in the video description. An AI is also a program. First of all, why can’t it credit its inputs? And second of all, should it be allowed to facilitate monetization on behalf of whoever owns the program?
• raynr 4y ago
  This may be of interest to this crowd. Singapore has explicitly set out exceptions to copyright infringement in its new copyright act. Sections 243 and 244 of the Copyright Act 2021 [0] permit copies of works to be made for "computational data analysis", provided certain conditions are met. It's not clear how this will pan out - the definition of "computational data analysis" is broad in some ways, narrow in others, and the conditions need to be tested against real world scenarios. * * * * * [0] https://sso.agc.gov.sg/Act/CA2021?WholeDoc=1&ProvIds=P15-#pr243- https://sso.agc.gov.sg/Act/CA2021?WholeDoc=1&ProvIds=P15-#pr...
• davidashe 4y ago
  Premise of the article is roughly: if all this litigation continues, the AI industry could collapse. Serious naive question: How would that not be a desirable outcome for society? “AI” is becoming a scourge. AI’s value-add that we truly need is just detecting cancer right? Obviously I don’t want anyone to die from cancer if they could be saved. But AI in cancer detection is a detection-rate booster: cancer can be detected without it. A non-AI process could try to recover some of the lost accuracy. Weigh this against the misinformation potential of chatGPT, deepfake video fraud, discriminatory bias in ML model output, the surveillance potential of image recognition, addictive social media, the essential inscrutability of model output… (i could go on, but the research & reporting on AI as we have wielded it is voluminous) So if litigation kills AI, isn’t that cause for celebration, on-balance? Or shit, can’t we just legislate easier usage regulation for lifesaving medical data, so we can keep the cancer detection use cases and let the rest of the AI gold rush die?
• funstuff007 4y ago
  The title is missing the prefix "Generative".
• sebastien_b 4y ago
  The first few paragraphs makes this sound like it’s from an AI fanboy with a vested interest. Difficult to take seriously.
• mesmertech 4y ago
  It amazes me everytime, when it comes to AI images, ChatGPT there seems to be an aura of not giving a damn. But when it comes to code generation, the comments seem to turn into artists vs AI debate but for code.
• throwbadubadu 4y ago
  Wow, that title sounds like poor AIs need lawyers soon, or is it already lobbying for itself? We need the turing police!
• albertzeyer 4y ago
  I think this is indeed some dangerous development for AI, if such lawsuits are successful. I don't really see why humans are treated different than a computer, for this case. A human also learns from lots of copyrighted material. It's not possible that whatever a human has seen or has heard, will have no influence whatsoever on the human brain. So by the argument here, everything what a human does, ever, is always derived work from everything he/she has ever seen in his life. So, then another argument is, of course there needs to be some line. It's only derived work or breaks copyright if it is really similar enough. But if this is now the argument, where is the problem? We can just apply the same to the AI. Of course, this is somewhat ambiguous, where to draw the line, but it's just the same as for humans. Another argument is, the AI has in total seen much more visual data or text, than any human ever could in his/her life, so that is how the AI is in any case different. But I don't really see, why is this relevant? Some humans are reading more books than others. So those who have read more books are in danger, at some point to have read too much books? Where is that line? Another argument is, stochastic gradient descent works different than the human brain learning algorithm. I don't really see how the details of these technical difference are relevant here. Another argument is, the human learning is much more efficient in terms of data. But I don't understand how this is relevant here. Isn't this actually an argument in favor of the AI regarding this topic? Future research on AI might make the AI, its behavior and its learning, more similar to humans. But if we now have a law which says it cannot use public copyrighted data to learn, then the AI has a huge disadvantage to humans, because humans use such data all the time to learn.
  • flohofwoe 4y ago
    Agreed, AI needs to play by the same rules as humans. But this includes being held liable for obvious copyright violations (or any other sort of license violation) in court (the next question is who is liable, the company which offers the AI service, or the user of the AI service who commercially exploits the output which violates copyright). This is the exact same progress that music sampling went through.
• rosmax_1337 4y ago
  Copyright law should simply be discarded for something that makes more sense. I think something like laws about attribution where feasible, making strictly false attribution unlawful, and easy ways to support the actual artists in question (i.e. tax reform) are better ways forward.
• TimPC 4y ago
  If the AI wants to be exempt from being punished for training on copyrighted works the bare minimum standard is that it doesn’t accidentally copy and reproduce large portions of that work. There are quite a few examples of Stable Diffusion doing this so I think even that low bar is met. I think anyone sane doesn’t want to create AI immunity to copyright damages even when the network is “accidentally” producing copyrighted output. If you can’t adequately control your technology to avoid that case you shouldn’t get immunity to liability for your problematic outputs. I get that testing for every possibility is impossible and that neural net explainability is far behind neural net technology so it’s very hard to proactively identify and debug these technologies. But just because those are hard problems doesn’t give you the right to steal from copyright holders.
  • yosame 4y ago
    You can use a spoon to kill someone if you're motivated enough, but that doesn't make a spoon a killing weapon. Just because AI art models can reproduce copyright (if you try hard enough), doesn't mean that it's a copyright stealing machine.
    • TimPC 4y ago
      No but reproducing a copyrighted work is a valid basis for an infringement case which shouldn't hinge on whether stealing the copyright is intentional or whether the methodology to do so is a "copyright stealing machine". Granting AI immunity to copyright when it's known to produce examples of infringement seems like stealing other people's work to me even if the infringement is unintentional.
• kitanata 4y ago
  If your AI is capable of reproducing part or whole of a bit of content it was trained on, then your AI is subject to copyright. Training an AI to create derivative works, does not absolve you of violating the copyright of the authors your AI is building derivative works from. If this is too much of a legal burden for you, then don’t train your AI on work it may create derivative forms from. It’s a pretty simple problem. The folks claiming it is not either are being intentionally disingenuous or honestly do not understand the legal definition of derivative works in copyright. It’s settled law. You could… you know either a) don’t train on works you don’t have a license to or b) use some sort of adversarial training to ensure that the AI doesn’t replicate the work it is trained on.
  • rockemsockem 4y ago
    You seem to be very confident that you know exactly how the law is going to be interpreted in this case. If I were you I'd moderate that confidence a bit to cover the possibility that you are not in fact the top legal scholar you seem to think you are. I could see this go either way. There's the argument you put forth, and then there's the argument that a text to image model is a transformative work. You can use copyrighted works and make money off your product and still have a transformative work. The Google books case is, of course, good reading on the subject. My main point is that it is not at all clear which way the law will go on this.
    • kitanata 4y ago
      When AI spits out verbatim the works of an author which it is trained on, that is not transformational, that is plagiarism. Whether it is done by an AI or a human is immaterial. Now we can argue over hundreds of hypothetical situations where AI does produce transformational work that isn’t a derivative, and we would agree that AI can and often does produce transformational work, but that is not what we are arguing over today. We are talking about the cases where AI isn’t transformational and where it is producing derivative works. To claim that AIs never produce derivative works or that all output from an AI is only transformative is foolish when we have countless counter examples popping up every other day.
• rubyist5eva 4y ago
  good
• dcchambers 4y ago
  I think someone like Google has some potential serious leverage here... "Let us train our LLM on your content in order to prioritize your content in search results"
• chasing 4y ago
  > The Co-Pilot suit is ostensibly being brought in the name of all open source programmers. Yes, that’s right, people crusading in the name of open source–a movement intended to promote freedom to use source code–are now claiming that a neural network, designed to save programmers the onus of re-inventing the wheel when they need code to perform programming tasks, is de facto unlawful. The open source movement is wonderful in many ways, but its tendency to engage in legal maximalism to “protect” open source is sometimes disappointing. This early paragraph is so bone-headed, so smugly demonizing, and misrepresents the situation so badly that I had to stop reading. This paragraph isn’t analysis, it’s propaganda.
  • mountainriver 4y ago
    It kinda is, but from what I’ve seen the developers against this are highly egotistical and having a meltdown that the skills that make them special and on some level famous are becoming obsolete
    • chasing 4y ago
      What a gross and hateful (and false) way to frame this…
      • mountainriver 4y ago
        It's not false, I'm describing my experience, which I said
        • chasing 4y ago
          Sorry. Let me correct: What a gross and hateful way to frame this, especially given your apparently limited experience…
          • mountainriver 4y ago
            Wow that was a hateful way to frame that, especially given your knowledge of me
• MagicMoonlight 4y ago
  >Wahh wahh I can’t steal everyone’s data and profit off it. That’s a big sad. Unfortunately that’s called the real world. You also can’t break into someone’s home and film a movie in their house without permission. That doesn’t mean movies are illegal.
• JoeAltmaier 4y ago
  Let me fix that title: "Works are in danger of being swallowed up by AI"
• thunkshift1 4y ago
  ‘AI’ needs to be spanked by the copyright law
• aorth 4y ago
  > The Co-Pilot suit is ostensibly being brought in the name of all open source programmers. Yes, that’s right, people crusading in the name of open source–a movement intended to promote freedom to use source code–are now claiming that a neural network, designed to save programmers the onus of re-inventing the wheel when they need code to perform programming tasks, is de facto unlawful. The open source movement is wonderful in many ways, but its tendency to engage in legal maximalism to “protect” open source is sometimes disappointing. What a disingenuous framing of the open-source software movement. When I license a work I created as GPL or MIT or whatever, I do so because I imagine that some user or some company would use the software to build something based on my software and contribute their changes back to the community so that we can all benefit. This is standing on the shoulders of giants. Microsoft "using" my source code to build a for-profit programming-as-a-service bot was not what I had in mind. At the very least, the complaint that the model doesn't give credit to its sources is correct. We might need new licenses so people who write open source code can opt out of this type of usage. > The Stable Diffusion suit alleges copyright infringement, stating that, “The resulting image is necessarily a derivative work, because it is generated exclusively from a combination of the conditioning data and the latent images, all of which are copies of copyrighted images. It is, in short, a 21st-century collage tool.” That characterization is the essence and conclusion of the lawsuit, and one with which many AI designers would disagree. AI designers can disagree, but how about they try building an AI model without using someone else's images. The AI model is not even possible without the source images. Show a little gratitude. If you ask me, AI is not in danger of being swallowed by copyright law—it's in danger of being swallowed up by its own self-entitlements.
• sinity 4y ago
  It's not in any danger, unless US is truly r-d. And if so, if EU somehow isn't that stupid, they won't reverse rules they already made about data mining & scrapping. Which explicitly allow ML stuff. Also Japan - and they did it specifically to not hinder AI tech, few years ago. If everyone is somehow this r-d, there's China also.
• punyearthling 4y ago
  When I hear the copyright vs. AI debate, it's always centered on American copyright law, which isn't enforceable around the world (and it shouldn't be). How do you prevent AI models in Turkmenistan, for instance, from using US copyrighted works posted online to train?
• silent_cal 4y ago
  > The problem is that neural network models, and their outputs, are not copies of the original works. They are a set of probabilities (weights) that are trained based on thousands or even millions of data points. True, but in order to train these models you have to copy and save images that are for the most part copyrighted. So while the models are not copies of images, they are definitely derivative works.
• marmada 4y ago
  The good thing about all of this is that the law doesn't really matter. People will complain about copyright, but the tech is here and the law will follow. Does anyone really thing this anti-Copilot case has a chance of winning when my guess is that Copilot adoption is exponential over time. Strongest counter argument is the Supreme Court struck down abortion even though abortion was rising in popularity. So that's a bit worrisome.
• leobg 4y ago
  Wut? Actually, I find the opposite is true. AI is so profitable precisely because it is a way of circumventing copyright. Steal from one creator and you can get sued. Steal from thousands and you can’t. Obviously, creative people have always stolen from others. But it required a lot of time to immerse yourself in the work of others. With AI, it’s only a push of a button.
• ForestCritter 4y ago
  If it were a question of learning...When you ask AI art programs for a sunset, AI does not produce a sunset, it pulls imagery from its data bank. It may manipulate it, filter it, add to it, but the image itself was created by somebody, whether by hand or by photography or software. AI is learning to pull imagery, manipulate and collage it, not create it. If the AI companies contented themselves with supplying there own imagery to manipulate I would not mind, but stealing from any artist that has ever had their art on a web page is really not ok. AI is not learning to paint or draw like 'so and so', AI is taking existing created imagery and regurgitating it. If you feel comfortable stealing from original content creators...