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AI companies can ask for permission if they want to train their models on other people's works Do you ask for permission when you train your mind on copyrighte

by kirse 4y ago

AI companies can ask for permission if they want to train their models on other people's works Do you ask for permission when you train your mind on copyrighted books? Or observe paintings? Or listen to music? Do you ask for permission when you get new ideas from HN that aren't your own? Humans are constantly ingesting gobs of "copyrighted" insights that they eventually remix into their own creations without necessarily reimbursing the original source(s) of their creativity. Time to put the horse back in the barn, cars and trains are here.

jeroenhd 4y ago
I'm not a computer program.
- tehcheat418 4y ago
  I don’t think one can know that for sure. ;)
  - oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
    This is a better argument than your smiley implies. Given a work, we can't (or soon won't be able to) tell whether its creator was a human or an AI. So the only important thing that matters is whether the final work infringes copyright or not. Unless people are seriously arguing that nobody should be able to use AI to produce images even for their own private use.
owlbite 4y ago
I can't be trivially copy/pasted and replicated at scale.
- tehcheat418 4y ago
  Does that mean once you can be there is no ethical responsibility not to?
  - owlbite 4y ago
    Not sure where you're going with that question. Fundamentally the current accommodation of copyright has two main justifications: 1) Protect economic activity 2) Moral right to identify original author of a work The point of ease of replication speaks to (1) fundamentally breaking. A human can only produce so much output compared to an AI system. (2) is a much thornier subject, and not one I really feel qualified to speak on.
api 4y ago
Moral principles apply to living things. The living things in question are people at big companies training models to sell them as services from behind paywalls.
- Aerroon 4y ago
  Stability AI is a small enough company that it doesn't even have a wikipedia page. The Stable Diffusion model is freely available to everyone along with the source code.
  - api 4y ago
    It’s very much the exception. Most of this industry is “build a model on public data and make billions on it behind a paywall.”
bitwize 4y ago
> Humans are constantly ingesting gobs of "copyrighted" insights that they eventually remix into their own creations without necessarily reimbursing the original source(s) of their creativity. Yes, and humans are being found liable for copyright infringement for doing so. All that's needed to establish liability is access and substantial similarity; the bar for the latter can be very low indeed (see Williams et al. v. Bridgeport Music et al.).
- bornfreddy 4y ago
  Humans also (usually) remember where we saw something and can attribute the source. ML at this point doesn't do that.
  - arp242 4y ago
    I've been programming for 25 years. I really can't remember where I learned what for most of it.
    - bornfreddy 4y ago
      I doubt you can reproduce some function you saw 20 years ago verbatim, either. If you could, you'd know the source too.
- selestify 4y ago
  Perhaps the bar is different in different fields. In art, for example, collages are quite legal. And what AI art is doing is way beyond collages.
pavlov 4y ago
> “Do you ask for permission when you train your mind on copyrighted books?” I’m not able to read billions of books in less than an hour. Even if we agree that machine learning is like human learning, scale commonly matters in law.
- kirse 4y ago
  I’m not able to read billions of books in less than an hour. I think you underestimate the sheer volume of data + conclusions the brain ingests and processes on a daily basis, primarily through unconscious experience.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    The training set for GPT-3 is about 500e9 tokens; any given synapse in a human in their lifetime is going to fire about 2e9s * (10% * {100Hz to 1000Hz}) = 20e9 to 200e9 times.
    - sillysaurusx 4y ago
      It sounds like you agree with them, since there are a lot of synapses.
      - ben_w 4y ago
        Au contraire. While our brains are more complex than the networks, this has never been in dispute. The quantity of experiences needed to train GPT-3, however, is many more than we are capable of experiencing in a lifetime.
  - kennyloginz 4y ago
    Not not mention the millions of years building our nervous system.
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      100's of millions of years.
happymellon 4y ago
It gets called plagiarism, and there are lots of lawsuits preventing this.
- Panoramix 4y ago
  It's not plagiarism at all. The AI is trained on 5 billion images yet it stores only 4gb of data. Thus it is impossible that it stores the actual work. For any image that the AI generates, you can't point to any image in the training data that the image is derived from.
  - neovialogistics 4y ago
    Who's to say that GPT isn't just analogous, legally, to lossy compression algorithms, only with a particularly interesting interpretation of "lossy"?
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    There are some overfittings where you can point to source images, but that number is a lot smaller than 5 billion.
  - Winsaucerer 4y ago
    How did they train the AI without first storing the data? It's not in the model, but it was used without permission in the pipeline that lead to creating that AI model. I don't know if that counts as plagiarism, but there's clearly some use of this copyright material that the authors probably didn't envision and did not grant permission for. I have no idea what the law would be in cases like this
    - chii 4y ago
      > How did they train the AI without first storing the data? the data was originally permitted to be copied. The question isn't whether the training is violating copyright - as long as the data set had permission to be viewed (which it must have, since it was public). The question is whether the final result - the model/weights - is a derivative work of the training data set. If it is a derivative work, then the model must be in violation of copyright. But copyright law allows for sufficiently transformative work to be considered new, rather than derivative. So is training a model using methods like this constitute a transformative work?
tumult 4y ago
Computers aren't human. Software isn't people.
thewanderer1983 4y ago
This is the uncomfortable truth that no one on that side of the argument wants to address. Also, the fact that Artistic Freedom is now under attack by artists. Not that long ago Artists hated the Music Industry and Corporations such as Disney for weaponizing Copyright law against Artistic Freedom. Now artists are utilizing that same tactic against other artists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artistic_freedom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artistic_freedom
- MikusR 4y ago
  It's just humans being humans. Some years ago microsoft was using FUD against Linux. Now linux users are using FUD against microsoft.
  - rightbyte 4y ago
    My fire department is spreading FUD about forgetting to blow out candles. What is your point? If "Linux users" are right it is not FUD or the concept of "FUD" is pointless.
fsckboy 4y ago
thanks for sending your strawman in to do battle with his strawman. you don't need permission to train on books, but you do need to buy the books or take them from the library one at a time. "training" these machines so far is not like human learning as becomes apparent when they spit out source code that mirrors individual repositories. And you know that humans are required to both remix their own creations and follow copyright law at thbowe same time, and also adhere to the social and institutional stigmas against extensive uncreative cut and paste paraphrasals. when training AIs on copyright law trains them in obeying copyright law, they'll be ready for the Turing test, or even to be called AIs.
- oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
  > when they spit out source code that mirrors individual repositories That's not a problem, we already have copyright laws that prevent people from distributing mirrors of copyrighted works. They don't care about how the works were copied.
  - cycomanic 4y ago
    So you are saying we should prosecute MS because co-pilot is distributing the copyrighted work? Or in other words why is co-pilot spitting out the code to someone else (often with copyright notices removed), not code distribution?
    - zabzonk 4y ago
      > So you are saying we should prosecute MS because co-pilot is distributing the copyrighted work? yes, isn't that what very many people are saying?
  - wnkrshm 4y ago
    It becomes a problem when violating content can be generated faster than it can be discovered and fined.
    - i_like_apis 4y ago
smolder 4y ago
[flagged]
- arp242 4y ago
  I don't think it will benefit "the little guys", because "the little guys" rarely have the resources and time to litigate in the first place, or lobby to lawmakers to make the details work in their favour. Copyright always benefits "the big corps". Everyone is so eager to get one up on Microsoft that they're forgetting the bigger picture.
  - smolder 4y ago
    The fact that the justice system is so inefficient that it doesn't serve people with less than a lawyers salary of money to waste isn't important to the conversation of whether it's fair or not for someone to ignore licensing and repackage your code as an "AI". If you want to talk about the big picture here, it's about privatizing gains and socializing losses, the goal of every bigcorp, which is just more reason to disallow this abuse.
    - sillysaurusx 4y ago
      Of course it’s material to the conversation whether people have resources in practice to use the tools of the justice system. It’s why small claims court is a powerful tool compared to a wrongful termination suit. What you’re asking for is going to only benefit corporations. They’re the sole entities that will be able to afford the regulation you’re proposing. It’s not even a hypothetical concern. Much of my notability came from books3, which contains almost 200,000 books, and is freely available to anyone. https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1320282149329784833?s=46&t=ZceDjnwKCrgh4jGkdKpP1w https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1320282149329784833?s=4... I couldn’t train a GPT competitor without that. Neither could you. But corporations could.
      - smolder 4y ago
        It should be up to the rights-holders what they allow their works to be used for. That way, I can say, "no, Microsoft, you can't pay me enough to allow your bot to train on my works" and at the same time allow you to train books3, thus taking power away from MS. If the rights-holders have no say, the barrier to entry is having big stacks of computers, and big corps win by default already.
pid-1 4y ago
> Do you ask for permission when you train your mind on copyrighted books? Yes, you do need to buy books, which gives you permission to read them.
- flawi 4y ago
  This is literally what the AI does as well. It didn't walk into a bookstore and steal all the books off the shelf, it read through material made available to it entirely legally. The thing that authors are trying to argue here is that they should get to control what type of entity should be allowed to view the work they purchased. It's the same as going "you bought my book, but now that I know you're a communist, I think the courts should ban you from reading it".
  - denton-scratch 4y ago
    > they should get to control what type of entity should be allowed to view the work they purchased No, that's not it. It's more like if I memorized a bunch of pop-songs, then performed a composition of my own whose second verse was a straight lift of a song by Madonna. I would owe her performance royalties. And I would be obliged to reproduce her copyright notice, so that my audience would know that if they pull the same stunt, they're on the hook for royalties too.
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      There are lots of people arguing against the training itself. And people arguing against all outputs, even when there is no detectable copying. I don't know how you missed those takes. You're arguing the wrong point here. Many people do want to say "no ai can look".
    - htfu 4y ago
      Only if you released it. You could definitely perform it in the shower without owing anything. And the 99% of your compositions that didn't wholesale mirror any specific song would be perfectly fine to release. Now, moving from holding the model creator culpable to the user would obviously be problematic as well, since they have no way of knowing whether the output is novel or a copy paste. Some sort of filter would seem to be the solution, it should disregard output that exactly or almost exactly matches any input.
atmosx 4y ago
> Do you ask for permission when you train your mind on copyrighted books? I pay the books directly (cash, credit) or indirectly (school books via taxes). I do pay the louvre to observe the painting. I also pay to listen music in ads (YouTube) or via subscription (YT Music and Spotify).
- oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
  But the datasets these tools are using are available to view for free. The AI isn't stealing physical books or paintings, it's viewing the same data that you or I can by sending an HTTP request, for free.
  - RandomLensman 4y ago
    Could an AI view you for free in a street or even through a window? Does that imply it can use that view data to create advertising using your modified likeness, for example? Just because you can view something for free doesn't mean you can use it anyway you want.
    - CBarkleyU 4y ago
      > Just because you can view something or free doesn't mean you can use it anyway you want. This whole thread really makes me want to pull my hair out. Difference between illegaly creating a (even temporary) copy of a copyrighted work (e.g. streaming a movie) vs. creating a derivative work of said copyrighted work: Two completely different things, with completely different legal outcomes. If OpenAI in any shape or form creates a temporary copy (<--- by copyright definition of what a copy is!) than this needs to be adressed with the former. If OpenAI creates a work that is considered to be a derivative work (<---- by copyright definition of what a derivative work is!) than that needs to be adressed with the latter. The crux of this whole thing is: Human minds cannot make a copy of a copyrighted work by definition of copyright laws (in Germany, I presume the same can be said for pretty much all western copyright laws), while anything that a computer does can be construed as making a copy.
noobermin 4y ago
This tired argument is very much like the "corporations are people" argument that convinces corporate lawyers and judges but literally no one else. Any lay person can tell a corporation is not a person, mostly because the power imbalance, the difference in their abilities and physical constraints, and while a lot of these arguments can be reasoned through the recognition of such is intuitive. Most people looking at AI can tell it is not like a mind or an artist, because of certain intuitive arguments which boil down to their surprising ability and their bizarre faults (drawing hands is still a struggle for most models) and current limits (you have to hack prompts instead of asking naturally due to their current limits). You can reason about people using these arguments because they are people, but you cannot use it when applying it to NN because they are not. I'd argue that the moment you start using the "people are AIs" argument, and you are then implying the converse is true "AIs are people," then you are assuming that there is some bidirectional here, and thus other qualities you assign to people, like, "people have rights" and "people deserve to be paid for their labor" and "people have rights to the work of their own hands" then must apply to AIs. And, therefore, the AI tools you are using deserve to be treated with the respect and dignity you had to treat artists and developers with before, and thus, should be paid for the work they create. That is, if they learned and created art in the same ways people create art. Just as we do not have that nursery does not own the art a child born there creates, or a university doesn't own the art an artist who studied there creates, you cannot make the argument that the work an AI creates is that of the "owner" or "trainer" of a model unless you are arguing slavery is in fact okay in this day and age. All of this of course hinges on the supposition that AIs are people, and that they learn as people do. So, you cannot have it both ways. You cannot keep treating AIs as people in your arguments, but then deny them agency that is due to people. The only way this is is that you deep down do not believe they are people, or that you think people do not deserve rights or deserve compensation for the work of their own hands.
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  Most people aren't asking for copyright on the AI output, though. Also animals can be trained and make outputs and nobody accuses them of copyright infringement. That's a much better analogy here than leaping to the idea of treating one of these models like a human.
pvaldes 4y ago
> Do you ask for permission when you train your mind on copyrighted books? Or observe paintings? Or listen to music? The difference is that I buy books, pay for visiting museums and buy music in several formats, or pay it accepting to receive advertisement between songs. It Is expected that If I buy a book I will be allowed to read it without asking for a permission. What I don't do is copypasting paragraphs of other books to write a new book and claim that is mine. Is a different situation.
- _Algernon_ 4y ago
  If you pirate a book, learn from it and then create something using the information you learned, would that creation constitute copyright infringement? If so how far does the tainting go? Once you put your eyes on something which you haven't purchased, all future works could potentially be inspired by that experience and should therefore be considered infringement, following your logic.
  - cactusplant7374 4y ago
    The AI doesn’t understand what it consumes. That is why the models still can’t add two numbers.
    - _Algernon_ 4y ago
      What's the difference between acting as if it actually understands and "true understanding". I'd argue there is none, or at least that it doesn't matter. For instance there is nothing you could do to prove to me that you aren't just a black box acting on input in a sophisticated manner (eg. chinese room argument[1]), yet I give you the benefit of the doubt. GPT's lack of understanding of math may be a localized lack of understanding where it does "understand" other topics. I don't require you to display an understanding of quantum physics in order to prove that you're able to understand anything at all. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
      - cactusplant7374 4y ago
YPPH 4y ago
>Do you ask for permission when you train your mind on copyrighted books? Or observe paintings? I think this is a specious analogy at best. The two are remarkably different contexts. AI can work at a significantly greater rate. There's also a very large question about whether for profit commercial software should be afforded the same leeway we give to ordinary human behaviour.
belorn 4y ago
It could be time to give AI human-like rights. Human passports, human rights, 8 hour work schedule, weekends off, vacation time, and of course workers wages. If an AI reproduce a copyrighted work they should then be sent to robot jail, and the human who requested the work should be sentenced for conspiracy to commit copyright infringement. It might however be a bit early to let the horse back in the barn.
RandomLensman 4y ago
If machines were totally free to harvest all human work and expression for their owners' benefit, why should anyone ever allow any of their work out in open unless strictly necessary? Why go down the route of turbocharging new forms of rent seeking?
m1sta_ 4y ago
Your mind is not infinitely scalable. It's a factor. Your mind is able to be recognised an author under copyright law. The AI model is not. It's a factor.
poulpy123 4y ago
But I'm a person and not a trillion dollar company. There is no reason for the rules, laws and morality have to be the same for people and companies
hnlmorg 4y ago
> Do you ask for permission when you train your mind on copyrighted books? Or observe paintings? Or listen to music? Plenty of people have been successfully sued if their work is too similar to existing content. This isn’t a new concept that AI is throwing into contention, it’s literally just companies trying to side step copyright law because of “disruption”. Source: I work for a company in this field and we do gain permission from creators before training our models on their content. It’s very possible to operate this way but a lot of companies simply choose not to.
- rvz 4y ago
  Exactly. Somehow it is so 'hard' for many AI companies to ask for permission to use and monetize copyrighted images in the training set these days and instead of asking permission, they attempt to bypass copyright law and give out frequent useless excuses from AI bros like: 'but muh fair use tho', 'oh well genie's out of the bottle it's too late', 'oops, cat's out of the bag, but you can opt out now'. Little do some of them know that OpenAI was able to get permission from Shutterstock via a partnership to use their copyrighted images in the training set for DALL-E 2. [0] There is also a reason why Dance Diffusion was trained on only public domain music and copyrighted music which has the actual permission from the authors. [1] If they did otherwise and monetized on copyrighted music without the permission from musicians or record labels, they would be sued to the ground. With the recent cases of Getty, Shutterstock, and even as admitted by the CEO of Stability themselves [2], the way forward for using copyrighted images in the training set for commercial purposes, is via licensing. Neither Getty or Shutterstock are looking for banning it, despite the AI bros claiming that these companies are trying to. If not, just train only on public domain images to avoid these legal issues. [0] https://www.shutterstock.com/press/20435 https://www.shutterstock.com/press/20435 [1] https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/07/ai-music-generator-dance-diffusion/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/07/ai-music-generator-dance-d... [2] https://twitter.com/EMostaque/status/1603390169192833027 https://twitter.com/EMostaque/status/1603390169192833027
  - danielbln 4y ago
    Can we maybe drop the whole sneery "AI bro" lingo? HN is not the right place for that.[0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
KaiserPro 4y ago
> Do you ask for permission when you train your mind on copyrighted books yes, thats why I pay a fee to buy/borrow one (or someone pays the fee in the case of a library.) > listen to music again money is exchanged. > Humans are constantly ingesting gobs of "copyrighted" insights that they eventually remix into their own creations without necessarily reimbursing the original source(s) of their creativity. yes, and so long as they are not derived works, its not a problem. Copyright is there to allow you and me to develop things and make money from it. It is there to stop people stealing our work, which may have taken years to develop and sell it for a profit with none of the risk. Large corperations have abused this to make monster profits. Google have spent billions to try and persuade us that copyright is evil, because they didn't want to pay content producers to host their work (ie music and movies on youtube and local news site) The issue is this, I might have made a website that tells users how to make a specific type of metal work. I have a free ebook, and I run courses. I have spent many years to to perfect the art, create the tutoring content, recording videos. its advertising supported, and people are asked to consider buying a course, to support the creator. The AI company comes along and scrapes all the content, allows people to regurgitate it, with more or less accuracy. The creator now gets less traffic, less money and now cant afford to create more content. The AI people now skim all the money, and the consumer gets less useful information. Culture isn't free. Someone is paying for it, and if you stop paying them, then it doesn't get created.
- jstummbillig 4y ago
  You don't need to pay for or "borrow" anything to learn from copyrighted works. Nobody has had that expectation for years, and that is also not what copyright pertains to. It's not that AI breaks into libraries and isn't paying the fees. You can google an image of any great work of art and look at it for as long as you like, for free and take from it what you can and use all of that to create something else and get paid for that thing. The stuff that AI uses to learn is available to you, as a human. That is not being challenged in the least. As parent said: Everything is derived work. We are remix machines. It is how we learn and how we make money. Now with AI, apparently, we are offended, when something does it better and faster than we can? To me it seems, if we expect AI to pay additional fees, the question is: Why? I am not saying that it's not an important question. Google has built its entire business around information other people have provided. I would argue most people are quite happy with the existence of something like Google search and see it as a net positive in their lives. Does that make the business part okay? Where do we stand on this in regard to an open web? Is it okay for Google to do what they do (and if they do it well to win the space), or should there maybe be a license where people have to pay the owner whenever they are indexing a website? I don't know. Feels complicated. > If you stop paying them, then it doesn't get created. That's an interesting thought. But is it true and, more so, is it a problem? What if humans from here on will only be paid to create stuff that an AI can't?
avianlyric 4y ago
> Do you ask for permission when you train your mind on copyrighted books? Or observe paintings? Or listen to music? Yes, that’s exactly what happens when you buy a book, or pay for a music subscription. The work is in the public domain, then global permission to observe and copy the work is already granted. > Do you ask for permission when you get new ideas from HN that aren't your own? You don’t need to. It’s implicitly assumed, by virtue of publishing in a public forum, that the author is providing permission for people read their comments and ideas, and remix them as they wish. That permission doesn’t include exact replication, but reading and understanding is assumed, otherwise why did the author publish it? > Humans are constantly ingesting gobs of "copyrighted" insights that they eventually remix into their own creations without necessarily reimbursing the original source(s) of their creativity. Correct. Literally everything produced by a human is automatically copyrighted. But the manner in which work is published creates implicit licenses for the public to consume those works. You publish in public, you automatically grate licenses for the public to consume and transform it. If a human transforms an idea, it automatically becomes a new idea with its own copyright. The same doesn’t apply to AI because they’re not human, and thus the law generally doesn’t recognise them an having ability to create or transform ideas. If you believe AI can create and transform ideas, then you need lobby for the law to recognise that ability, but right now, only natural humans have that ability according to the law
- hnlmorg 4y ago
  > You publish in public, you automatically grate licenses for the public to consume and transform it. No you don’t. That would fall under the category of “derivative work” which is still the intellectual property of the original author under most jurisdiction copyright laws. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work
  - chii 4y ago
    Unless the resulting "derivative work" is sufficiently transformative. Which, i would argue, training an AI/ML is. Therefore, using a training dataset does not constitute copyright violation. If the AI outputted an exact copy (or a close enough copy, that the laymen would agree it's a copy), then that particular instance of the AI's output is in violation of copyright. The AI model itself violate any copyright.
amelius 4y ago
> Do you ask for permission when you train your mind on copyrighted books? The law already makes many distinctions between humans and machines. For example, looking out the window to see when your neighbor is going to the supermarket: allowed; using a machine-vision system to store the movements of groups of people into a large database: not allowed. Also, "training the mind" and "training a machine learning system" are two completely different things, even though the language used is the same.
- Levitz 4y ago
  This is the crux of the issue, I believe. It seems to me that one side is arguing that people (as in, individual human beings) already do what the AI is being accused of, the other side argues that it's replicating work. The truth of the matter is that what is taking place is a different thing altogether. We do generally deal in a different way with "machine behavior" because we recognize it being automatic and reproducible matters.
bryanrasmussen 4y ago
>Do you ask for permission when you train your mind on copyrighted books? Of course not, and given my ability to train my mind on thousands of books in a few minutes and spit out a full book based on that training in whatever style one wants in a few minutes for that as well, it seems especially unfair that people act as though there might be a difference between the two situations.
dahart 4y ago
> Do you ask for permission when you train your mind on copyrighted books? […] Humans are constantly ingesting gobs of “copyrighted” insights This comment fundamentally and dangerously misunderstands Copyright Law. Insights are not copyrighted, nor are they copyrightable. Copyright law controls who gets to distribute a specific “fixation” or performance of work. It is not, and never was about preventing the spread of ideas. Authors and artists have always intended for you to read/observe/listen to their work when you legally acquire a copy. They just want you to not copy it verbatim, but go do your own original work if you want to distribute or sell something. The whole problem is that today’s NNs are specifically designed to remember and remix only the fixed performative parts of the work, and they, unlike humans, don’t understand the insights at all. They are just deterministic machines that copy and remix at a large scale. As such, it’s pretty clear the people training AI today should expect to have to ask permission before “training” (copying) other people’s work.
- jonkho 4y ago
  So if I visually look at a piece of work and “run” the NN training algorithm in my meat-space brain or even on pen and paper, do I need to ask for permission for doing so? Or is permission required only if silicon chips “run” the algorithm? Asking for a friend.
  - dahart 4y ago
    This isn’t what the comment I replied to was suggesting, which is important because the NN training algorithm isn’t how humans observe creative work, nor how we make insights. But, yes, the same standards apply whether your deterministic machine is silicon based, or meat based. Copyright law applies to both. If you reproduce significant parts of a fixed performative work, then you are in violation of the law. If your algorithm mixes enough snippets from enough sources, then it’s hard to tell, and you probably won’t get caught, but it doesn’t really change the fact that you’re mechanically copying. FWIW, copyright precedent in music seems to allow human-made remixes that involve multiple sources, as long as the work as a whole is original and doesn’t reproduce significant parts of the sources.
mauvia 4y ago
Training AI is closer to photographing an art gallery. Training AI without permission is sneaking a camera into an art gallery without permission.
avgcorrection 4y ago
> Do you ask for permission when you train your mind on copyrighted books? AI is not a mind. It’s a program. We might call it a “mind” as a metaphor, but it’s not really one. So any justification which presupposes that an AI should be able to do something (really: that the people who are running the AI programs should be able do something) because they are a “mind” is fallacious and doesn’t need to be interrogated.
weregiraffe 4y ago
>Do you ask for permission when you train your mind on copyrighted books? Or observe paintings? Or listen to music? Do you ask for permission when you get new ideas from HN that aren't your own? AI is not a mind. A mind is a physical object, a brain inside a skull inside a person. An AI is a computer program. And while a nerd who forgot how grass feels like might confuse the two, the courts won't.
sensanaty 4y ago
I can't quite place why I despise this line of reasoning/argument, but boy do I absolutely despise this line of reasoning. Are we really going to play devil's advocate so much that we consider these early day A"I" tools as equivalent to humans? I personally have absolutely 0 qualms about treating humans and these ML tools as completely separate entities governed by completely different laws. AI SHOULD be heavily restricted, we're already headed not towards any sort of apocalyptic singularity, but a singularity of pure, endless spam spewing forth from every orifice of the internet and elsewhere. If these megacorps behind this AI push want it to succeed, then they should be paying for access to the images/texts/music/videos/whatever they're trying to harvest en masse. I couldn't care less if an AI learns the same way a human does or any other anthropomorphising the AI crowd want to gaslight everyoen with.
silent_cal 4y ago
AI models aren't observing anything. The people who train them are copying other people's works to do so. By saying an AI model is "observing" images you're begging a question.

by kirse 4y ago

jeroenhd 4y ago

I'm not a computer program.

tehcheat418 4y ago
I don’t think one can know that for sure. ;)
- oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
  This is a better argument than your smiley implies. Given a work, we can't (or soon won't be able to) tell whether its creator was a human or an AI. So the only important thing that matters is whether the final work infringes copyright or not. Unless people are seriously arguing that nobody should be able to use AI to produce images even for their own private use.

owlbite 4y ago

I can't be trivially copy/pasted and replicated at scale.

tehcheat418 4y ago
Does that mean once you can be there is no ethical responsibility not to?
- owlbite 4y ago
  Not sure where you're going with that question. Fundamentally the current accommodation of copyright has two main justifications: 1) Protect economic activity 2) Moral right to identify original author of a work The point of ease of replication speaks to (1) fundamentally breaking. A human can only produce so much output compared to an AI system. (2) is a much thornier subject, and not one I really feel qualified to speak on.

api 4y ago

Moral principles apply to living things. The living things in question are people at big companies training models to sell them as services from behind paywalls.

Aerroon 4y ago
Stability AI is a small enough company that it doesn't even have a wikipedia page. The Stable Diffusion model is freely available to everyone along with the source code.
- api 4y ago
  It’s very much the exception. Most of this industry is “build a model on public data and make billions on it behind a paywall.”

bitwize 4y ago

> Humans are constantly ingesting gobs of "copyrighted" insights that they eventually remix into their own creations without necessarily reimbursing the original source(s) of their creativity. Yes, and humans are being found liable for copyright infringement for doing so. All that's needed to establish liability is access and substantial similarity; the bar for the latter can be very low indeed (see Williams et al. v. Bridgeport Music et al.).

bornfreddy 4y ago
Humans also (usually) remember where we saw something and can attribute the source. ML at this point doesn't do that.
- arp242 4y ago
  I've been programming for 25 years. I really can't remember where I learned what for most of it.
  - bornfreddy 4y ago
    I doubt you can reproduce some function you saw 20 years ago verbatim, either. If you could, you'd know the source too.
selestify 4y ago
Perhaps the bar is different in different fields. In art, for example, collages are quite legal. And what AI art is doing is way beyond collages.

pavlov 4y ago

> “Do you ask for permission when you train your mind on copyrighted books?” I’m not able to read billions of books in less than an hour. Even if we agree that machine learning is like human learning, scale commonly matters in law.

kirse 4y ago
I’m not able to read billions of books in less than an hour. I think you underestimate the sheer volume of data + conclusions the brain ingests and processes on a daily basis, primarily through unconscious experience.
- ben_w 4y ago
  The training set for GPT-3 is about 500e9 tokens; any given synapse in a human in their lifetime is going to fire about 2e9s * (10% * {100Hz to 1000Hz}) = 20e9 to 200e9 times.
  - sillysaurusx 4y ago
    It sounds like you agree with them, since there are a lot of synapses.
    - ben_w 4y ago
      Au contraire. While our brains are more complex than the networks, this has never been in dispute. The quantity of experiences needed to train GPT-3, however, is many more than we are capable of experiencing in a lifetime.
- kennyloginz 4y ago
  Not not mention the millions of years building our nervous system.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    100's of millions of years.

happymellon 4y ago

It gets called plagiarism, and there are lots of lawsuits preventing this.

Panoramix 4y ago
It's not plagiarism at all. The AI is trained on 5 billion images yet it stores only 4gb of data. Thus it is impossible that it stores the actual work. For any image that the AI generates, you can't point to any image in the training data that the image is derived from.
- neovialogistics 4y ago
  Who's to say that GPT isn't just analogous, legally, to lossy compression algorithms, only with a particularly interesting interpretation of "lossy"?
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  There are some overfittings where you can point to source images, but that number is a lot smaller than 5 billion.
- Winsaucerer 4y ago
  How did they train the AI without first storing the data? It's not in the model, but it was used without permission in the pipeline that lead to creating that AI model. I don't know if that counts as plagiarism, but there's clearly some use of this copyright material that the authors probably didn't envision and did not grant permission for. I have no idea what the law would be in cases like this
  - chii 4y ago
    > How did they train the AI without first storing the data? the data was originally permitted to be copied. The question isn't whether the training is violating copyright - as long as the data set had permission to be viewed (which it must have, since it was public). The question is whether the final result - the model/weights - is a derivative work of the training data set. If it is a derivative work, then the model must be in violation of copyright. But copyright law allows for sufficiently transformative work to be considered new, rather than derivative. So is training a model using methods like this constitute a transformative work?

tumult 4y ago

Computers aren't human. Software isn't people.

thewanderer1983 4y ago

This is the uncomfortable truth that no one on that side of the argument wants to address. Also, the fact that Artistic Freedom is now under attack by artists. Not that long ago Artists hated the Music Industry and Corporations such as Disney for weaponizing Copyright law against Artistic Freedom. Now artists are utilizing that same tactic against other artists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artistic_freedom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artistic_freedom

MikusR 4y ago
It's just humans being humans. Some years ago microsoft was using FUD against Linux. Now linux users are using FUD against microsoft.
- rightbyte 4y ago
  My fire department is spreading FUD about forgetting to blow out candles. What is your point? If "Linux users" are right it is not FUD or the concept of "FUD" is pointless.

fsckboy 4y ago

thanks for sending your strawman in to do battle with his strawman. you don't need permission to train on books, but you do need to buy the books or take them from the library one at a time. "training" these machines so far is not like human learning as becomes apparent when they spit out source code that mirrors individual repositories. And you know that humans are required to both remix their own creations and follow copyright law at thbowe same time, and also adhere to the social and institutional stigmas against extensive uncreative cut and paste paraphrasals. when training AIs on copyright law trains them in obeying copyright law, they'll be ready for the Turing test, or even to be called AIs.

oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
> when they spit out source code that mirrors individual repositories That's not a problem, we already have copyright laws that prevent people from distributing mirrors of copyrighted works. They don't care about how the works were copied.
- cycomanic 4y ago
  So you are saying we should prosecute MS because co-pilot is distributing the copyrighted work? Or in other words why is co-pilot spitting out the code to someone else (often with copyright notices removed), not code distribution?
  - zabzonk 4y ago
    > So you are saying we should prosecute MS because co-pilot is distributing the copyrighted work? yes, isn't that what very many people are saying?
- wnkrshm 4y ago
  It becomes a problem when violating content can be generated faster than it can be discovered and fined.
  - i_like_apis 4y ago

smolder 4y ago

[flagged]

arp242 4y ago
I don't think it will benefit "the little guys", because "the little guys" rarely have the resources and time to litigate in the first place, or lobby to lawmakers to make the details work in their favour. Copyright always benefits "the big corps". Everyone is so eager to get one up on Microsoft that they're forgetting the bigger picture.
- smolder 4y ago
  The fact that the justice system is so inefficient that it doesn't serve people with less than a lawyers salary of money to waste isn't important to the conversation of whether it's fair or not for someone to ignore licensing and repackage your code as an "AI". If you want to talk about the big picture here, it's about privatizing gains and socializing losses, the goal of every bigcorp, which is just more reason to disallow this abuse.
  - sillysaurusx 4y ago
    Of course it’s material to the conversation whether people have resources in practice to use the tools of the justice system. It’s why small claims court is a powerful tool compared to a wrongful termination suit. What you’re asking for is going to only benefit corporations. They’re the sole entities that will be able to afford the regulation you’re proposing. It’s not even a hypothetical concern. Much of my notability came from books3, which contains almost 200,000 books, and is freely available to anyone. https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1320282149329784833?s=46&t=ZceDjnwKCrgh4jGkdKpP1w https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1320282149329784833?s=4... I couldn’t train a GPT competitor without that. Neither could you. But corporations could.
    - smolder 4y ago
      It should be up to the rights-holders what they allow their works to be used for. That way, I can say, "no, Microsoft, you can't pay me enough to allow your bot to train on my works" and at the same time allow you to train books3, thus taking power away from MS. If the rights-holders have no say, the barrier to entry is having big stacks of computers, and big corps win by default already.

pid-1 4y ago

> Do you ask for permission when you train your mind on copyrighted books? Yes, you do need to buy books, which gives you permission to read them.

flawi 4y ago
This is literally what the AI does as well. It didn't walk into a bookstore and steal all the books off the shelf, it read through material made available to it entirely legally. The thing that authors are trying to argue here is that they should get to control what type of entity should be allowed to view the work they purchased. It's the same as going "you bought my book, but now that I know you're a communist, I think the courts should ban you from reading it".
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  > they should get to control what type of entity should be allowed to view the work they purchased No, that's not it. It's more like if I memorized a bunch of pop-songs, then performed a composition of my own whose second verse was a straight lift of a song by Madonna. I would owe her performance royalties. And I would be obliged to reproduce her copyright notice, so that my audience would know that if they pull the same stunt, they're on the hook for royalties too.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    There are lots of people arguing against the training itself. And people arguing against all outputs, even when there is no detectable copying. I don't know how you missed those takes. You're arguing the wrong point here. Many people do want to say "no ai can look".
  - htfu 4y ago
    Only if you released it. You could definitely perform it in the shower without owing anything. And the 99% of your compositions that didn't wholesale mirror any specific song would be perfectly fine to release. Now, moving from holding the model creator culpable to the user would obviously be problematic as well, since they have no way of knowing whether the output is novel or a copy paste. Some sort of filter would seem to be the solution, it should disregard output that exactly or almost exactly matches any input.

atmosx 4y ago

> Do you ask for permission when you train your mind on copyrighted books? I pay the books directly (cash, credit) or indirectly (school books via taxes). I do pay the louvre to observe the painting. I also pay to listen music in ads (YouTube) or via subscription (YT Music and Spotify).

oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
But the datasets these tools are using are available to view for free. The AI isn't stealing physical books or paintings, it's viewing the same data that you or I can by sending an HTTP request, for free.
- RandomLensman 4y ago
  Could an AI view you for free in a street or even through a window? Does that imply it can use that view data to create advertising using your modified likeness, for example? Just because you can view something for free doesn't mean you can use it anyway you want.
  - CBarkleyU 4y ago
    > Just because you can view something or free doesn't mean you can use it anyway you want. This whole thread really makes me want to pull my hair out. Difference between illegaly creating a (even temporary) copy of a copyrighted work (e.g. streaming a movie) vs. creating a derivative work of said copyrighted work: Two completely different things, with completely different legal outcomes. If OpenAI in any shape or form creates a temporary copy (<--- by copyright definition of what a copy is!) than this needs to be adressed with the former. If OpenAI creates a work that is considered to be a derivative work (<---- by copyright definition of what a derivative work is!) than that needs to be adressed with the latter. The crux of this whole thing is: Human minds cannot make a copy of a copyrighted work by definition of copyright laws (in Germany, I presume the same can be said for pretty much all western copyright laws), while anything that a computer does can be construed as making a copy.

noobermin 4y ago

This tired argument is very much like the "corporations are people" argument that convinces corporate lawyers and judges but literally no one else. Any lay person can tell a corporation is not a person, mostly because the power imbalance, the difference in their abilities and physical constraints, and while a lot of these arguments can be reasoned through the recognition of such is intuitive. Most people looking at AI can tell it is not like a mind or an artist, because of certain intuitive arguments which boil down to their surprising ability and their bizarre faults (drawing hands is still a struggle for most models) and current limits (you have to hack prompts instead of asking naturally due to their current limits). You can reason about people using these arguments because they are people, but you cannot use it when applying it to NN because they are not. I'd argue that the moment you start using the "people are AIs" argument, and you are then implying the converse is true "AIs are people," then you are assuming that there is some bidirectional here, and thus other qualities you assign to people, like, "people have rights" and "people deserve to be paid for their labor" and "people have rights to the work of their own hands" then must apply to AIs. And, therefore, the AI tools you are using deserve to be treated with the respect and dignity you had to treat artists and developers with before, and thus, should be paid for the work they create. That is, if they learned and created art in the same ways people create art. Just as we do not have that nursery does not own the art a child born there creates, or a university doesn't own the art an artist who studied there creates, you cannot make the argument that the work an AI creates is that of the "owner" or "trainer" of a model unless you are arguing slavery is in fact okay in this day and age. All of this of course hinges on the supposition that AIs are people, and that they learn as people do. So, you cannot have it both ways. You cannot keep treating AIs as people in your arguments, but then deny them agency that is due to people. The only way this is is that you deep down do not believe they are people, or that you think people do not deserve rights or deserve compensation for the work of their own hands.

Dylan16807 4y ago
Most people aren't asking for copyright on the AI output, though. Also animals can be trained and make outputs and nobody accuses them of copyright infringement. That's a much better analogy here than leaping to the idea of treating one of these models like a human.

pvaldes 4y ago

> Do you ask for permission when you train your mind on copyrighted books? Or observe paintings? Or listen to music? The difference is that I buy books, pay for visiting museums and buy music in several formats, or pay it accepting to receive advertisement between songs. It Is expected that If I buy a book I will be allowed to read it without asking for a permission. What I don't do is copypasting paragraphs of other books to write a new book and claim that is mine. Is a different situation.

_Algernon_ 4y ago
If you pirate a book, learn from it and then create something using the information you learned, would that creation constitute copyright infringement? If so how far does the tainting go? Once you put your eyes on something which you haven't purchased, all future works could potentially be inspired by that experience and should therefore be considered infringement, following your logic.
- cactusplant7374 4y ago
  The AI doesn’t understand what it consumes. That is why the models still can’t add two numbers.
  - _Algernon_ 4y ago
    What's the difference between acting as if it actually understands and "true understanding". I'd argue there is none, or at least that it doesn't matter. For instance there is nothing you could do to prove to me that you aren't just a black box acting on input in a sophisticated manner (eg. chinese room argument[1]), yet I give you the benefit of the doubt. GPT's lack of understanding of math may be a localized lack of understanding where it does "understand" other topics. I don't require you to display an understanding of quantum physics in order to prove that you're able to understand anything at all. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
    - cactusplant7374 4y ago

YPPH 4y ago

>Do you ask for permission when you train your mind on copyrighted books? Or observe paintings? I think this is a specious analogy at best. The two are remarkably different contexts. AI can work at a significantly greater rate. There's also a very large question about whether for profit commercial software should be afforded the same leeway we give to ordinary human behaviour.

belorn 4y ago

It could be time to give AI human-like rights. Human passports, human rights, 8 hour work schedule, weekends off, vacation time, and of course workers wages. If an AI reproduce a copyrighted work they should then be sent to robot jail, and the human who requested the work should be sentenced for conspiracy to commit copyright infringement. It might however be a bit early to let the horse back in the barn.

RandomLensman 4y ago

If machines were totally free to harvest all human work and expression for their owners' benefit, why should anyone ever allow any of their work out in open unless strictly necessary? Why go down the route of turbocharging new forms of rent seeking?

m1sta_ 4y ago

Your mind is not infinitely scalable. It's a factor. Your mind is able to be recognised an author under copyright law. The AI model is not. It's a factor.

poulpy123 4y ago

But I'm a person and not a trillion dollar company. There is no reason for the rules, laws and morality have to be the same for people and companies

hnlmorg 4y ago

> Do you ask for permission when you train your mind on copyrighted books? Or observe paintings? Or listen to music? Plenty of people have been successfully sued if their work is too similar to existing content. This isn’t a new concept that AI is throwing into contention, it’s literally just companies trying to side step copyright law because of “disruption”. Source: I work for a company in this field and we do gain permission from creators before training our models on their content. It’s very possible to operate this way but a lot of companies simply choose not to.

rvz 4y ago
Exactly. Somehow it is so 'hard' for many AI companies to ask for permission to use and monetize copyrighted images in the training set these days and instead of asking permission, they attempt to bypass copyright law and give out frequent useless excuses from AI bros like: 'but muh fair use tho', 'oh well genie's out of the bottle it's too late', 'oops, cat's out of the bag, but you can opt out now'. Little do some of them know that OpenAI was able to get permission from Shutterstock via a partnership to use their copyrighted images in the training set for DALL-E 2. [0] There is also a reason why Dance Diffusion was trained on only public domain music and copyrighted music which has the actual permission from the authors. [1] If they did otherwise and monetized on copyrighted music without the permission from musicians or record labels, they would be sued to the ground. With the recent cases of Getty, Shutterstock, and even as admitted by the CEO of Stability themselves [2], the way forward for using copyrighted images in the training set for commercial purposes, is via licensing. Neither Getty or Shutterstock are looking for banning it, despite the AI bros claiming that these companies are trying to. If not, just train only on public domain images to avoid these legal issues. [0] https://www.shutterstock.com/press/20435 https://www.shutterstock.com/press/20435 [1] https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/07/ai-music-generator-dance-diffusion/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/07/ai-music-generator-dance-d... [2] https://twitter.com/EMostaque/status/1603390169192833027 https://twitter.com/EMostaque/status/1603390169192833027
- danielbln 4y ago
  Can we maybe drop the whole sneery "AI bro" lingo? HN is not the right place for that.[0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

KaiserPro 4y ago

> Do you ask for permission when you train your mind on copyrighted books yes, thats why I pay a fee to buy/borrow one (or someone pays the fee in the case of a library.) > listen to music again money is exchanged. > Humans are constantly ingesting gobs of "copyrighted" insights that they eventually remix into their own creations without necessarily reimbursing the original source(s) of their creativity. yes, and so long as they are not derived works, its not a problem. Copyright is there to allow you and me to develop things and make money from it. It is there to stop people stealing our work, which may have taken years to develop and sell it for a profit with none of the risk. Large corperations have abused this to make monster profits. Google have spent billions to try and persuade us that copyright is evil, because they didn't want to pay content producers to host their work (ie music and movies on youtube and local news site) The issue is this, I might have made a website that tells users how to make a specific type of metal work. I have a free ebook, and I run courses. I have spent many years to to perfect the art, create the tutoring content, recording videos. its advertising supported, and people are asked to consider buying a course, to support the creator. The AI company comes along and scrapes all the content, allows people to regurgitate it, with more or less accuracy. The creator now gets less traffic, less money and now cant afford to create more content. The AI people now skim all the money, and the consumer gets less useful information. Culture isn't free. Someone is paying for it, and if you stop paying them, then it doesn't get created.

jstummbillig 4y ago
You don't need to pay for or "borrow" anything to learn from copyrighted works. Nobody has had that expectation for years, and that is also not what copyright pertains to. It's not that AI breaks into libraries and isn't paying the fees. You can google an image of any great work of art and look at it for as long as you like, for free and take from it what you can and use all of that to create something else and get paid for that thing. The stuff that AI uses to learn is available to you, as a human. That is not being challenged in the least. As parent said: Everything is derived work. We are remix machines. It is how we learn and how we make money. Now with AI, apparently, we are offended, when something does it better and faster than we can? To me it seems, if we expect AI to pay additional fees, the question is: Why? I am not saying that it's not an important question. Google has built its entire business around information other people have provided. I would argue most people are quite happy with the existence of something like Google search and see it as a net positive in their lives. Does that make the business part okay? Where do we stand on this in regard to an open web? Is it okay for Google to do what they do (and if they do it well to win the space), or should there maybe be a license where people have to pay the owner whenever they are indexing a website? I don't know. Feels complicated. > If you stop paying them, then it doesn't get created. That's an interesting thought. But is it true and, more so, is it a problem? What if humans from here on will only be paid to create stuff that an AI can't?

avianlyric 4y ago

> Do you ask for permission when you train your mind on copyrighted books? Or observe paintings? Or listen to music? Yes, that’s exactly what happens when you buy a book, or pay for a music subscription. The work is in the public domain, then global permission to observe and copy the work is already granted. > Do you ask for permission when you get new ideas from HN that aren't your own? You don’t need to. It’s implicitly assumed, by virtue of publishing in a public forum, that the author is providing permission for people read their comments and ideas, and remix them as they wish. That permission doesn’t include exact replication, but reading and understanding is assumed, otherwise why did the author publish it? > Humans are constantly ingesting gobs of "copyrighted" insights that they eventually remix into their own creations without necessarily reimbursing the original source(s) of their creativity. Correct. Literally everything produced by a human is automatically copyrighted. But the manner in which work is published creates implicit licenses for the public to consume those works. You publish in public, you automatically grate licenses for the public to consume and transform it. If a human transforms an idea, it automatically becomes a new idea with its own copyright. The same doesn’t apply to AI because they’re not human, and thus the law generally doesn’t recognise them an having ability to create or transform ideas. If you believe AI can create and transform ideas, then you need lobby for the law to recognise that ability, but right now, only natural humans have that ability according to the law

hnlmorg 4y ago
> You publish in public, you automatically grate licenses for the public to consume and transform it. No you don’t. That would fall under the category of “derivative work” which is still the intellectual property of the original author under most jurisdiction copyright laws. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work
- chii 4y ago
  Unless the resulting "derivative work" is sufficiently transformative. Which, i would argue, training an AI/ML is. Therefore, using a training dataset does not constitute copyright violation. If the AI outputted an exact copy (or a close enough copy, that the laymen would agree it's a copy), then that particular instance of the AI's output is in violation of copyright. The AI model itself violate any copyright.

amelius 4y ago

> Do you ask for permission when you train your mind on copyrighted books? The law already makes many distinctions between humans and machines. For example, looking out the window to see when your neighbor is going to the supermarket: allowed; using a machine-vision system to store the movements of groups of people into a large database: not allowed. Also, "training the mind" and "training a machine learning system" are two completely different things, even though the language used is the same.

Levitz 4y ago
This is the crux of the issue, I believe. It seems to me that one side is arguing that people (as in, individual human beings) already do what the AI is being accused of, the other side argues that it's replicating work. The truth of the matter is that what is taking place is a different thing altogether. We do generally deal in a different way with "machine behavior" because we recognize it being automatic and reproducible matters.

bryanrasmussen 4y ago

>Do you ask for permission when you train your mind on copyrighted books? Of course not, and given my ability to train my mind on thousands of books in a few minutes and spit out a full book based on that training in whatever style one wants in a few minutes for that as well, it seems especially unfair that people act as though there might be a difference between the two situations.

dahart 4y ago

> Do you ask for permission when you train your mind on copyrighted books? […] Humans are constantly ingesting gobs of “copyrighted” insights This comment fundamentally and dangerously misunderstands Copyright Law. Insights are not copyrighted, nor are they copyrightable. Copyright law controls who gets to distribute a specific “fixation” or performance of work. It is not, and never was about preventing the spread of ideas. Authors and artists have always intended for you to read/observe/listen to their work when you legally acquire a copy. They just want you to not copy it verbatim, but go do your own original work if you want to distribute or sell something. The whole problem is that today’s NNs are specifically designed to remember and remix only the fixed performative parts of the work, and they, unlike humans, don’t understand the insights at all. They are just deterministic machines that copy and remix at a large scale. As such, it’s pretty clear the people training AI today should expect to have to ask permission before “training” (copying) other people’s work.

jonkho 4y ago
So if I visually look at a piece of work and “run” the NN training algorithm in my meat-space brain or even on pen and paper, do I need to ask for permission for doing so? Or is permission required only if silicon chips “run” the algorithm? Asking for a friend.
- dahart 4y ago
  This isn’t what the comment I replied to was suggesting, which is important because the NN training algorithm isn’t how humans observe creative work, nor how we make insights. But, yes, the same standards apply whether your deterministic machine is silicon based, or meat based. Copyright law applies to both. If you reproduce significant parts of a fixed performative work, then you are in violation of the law. If your algorithm mixes enough snippets from enough sources, then it’s hard to tell, and you probably won’t get caught, but it doesn’t really change the fact that you’re mechanically copying. FWIW, copyright precedent in music seems to allow human-made remixes that involve multiple sources, as long as the work as a whole is original and doesn’t reproduce significant parts of the sources.

mauvia 4y ago

Training AI is closer to photographing an art gallery. Training AI without permission is sneaking a camera into an art gallery without permission.

avgcorrection 4y ago

> Do you ask for permission when you train your mind on copyrighted books? AI is not a mind. It’s a program. We might call it a “mind” as a metaphor, but it’s not really one. So any justification which presupposes that an AI should be able to do something (really: that the people who are running the AI programs should be able do something) because they are a “mind” is fallacious and doesn’t need to be interrogated.

weregiraffe 4y ago

>Do you ask for permission when you train your mind on copyrighted books? Or observe paintings? Or listen to music? Do you ask for permission when you get new ideas from HN that aren't your own? AI is not a mind. A mind is a physical object, a brain inside a skull inside a person. An AI is a computer program. And while a nerd who forgot how grass feels like might confuse the two, the courts won't.

sensanaty 4y ago

I can't quite place why I despise this line of reasoning/argument, but boy do I absolutely despise this line of reasoning. Are we really going to play devil's advocate so much that we consider these early day A"I" tools as equivalent to humans? I personally have absolutely 0 qualms about treating humans and these ML tools as completely separate entities governed by completely different laws. AI SHOULD be heavily restricted, we're already headed not towards any sort of apocalyptic singularity, but a singularity of pure, endless spam spewing forth from every orifice of the internet and elsewhere. If these megacorps behind this AI push want it to succeed, then they should be paying for access to the images/texts/music/videos/whatever they're trying to harvest en masse. I couldn't care less if an AI learns the same way a human does or any other anthropomorphising the AI crowd want to gaslight everyoen with.

silent_cal 4y ago

AI models aren't observing anything. The people who train them are copying other people's works to do so. By saying an AI model is "observing" images you're begging a question.