6 ms·

Still on the fence for whether or not you should be able to opt out of training (I'm sure many artists would love to "opt out" of humans looking at their art if

by judge2020 4y ago

Still on the fence for whether or not you should be able to opt out of training (I'm sure many artists would love to "opt out" of humans looking at their art if the human intends to, or might, copy the artists' style at some point).

madeofpalk 4y ago
Should Github Copilot be trained on private, closed-source, proprietary code?
- grondo4 4y ago
  Yes, AI should be trained on every piece of information possible. Am I allowed to become a better programmer by looking at private, (illegally leaked) closed-source, proprietary code?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - mrelectric 4y ago
    You're obviously not
    - grondo4 4y ago
      Is that a joke? Yes you are allowed to read closed-source, proprietary code and become a better programmer for it. I've decompiled games to learn how they structure their code to improve the structure of games that I program. I had no right to that code and I used it to become a better programmer just like AI do. That's not copyright infringement. You have a right to stop me from using your code, not learning from it.
      - Dalewyn 4y ago
        Now granted most EULAs and Terms of Service documents aren't legally enforced, most software licenses explicitly prohibit decompiling or otherwise disassembling binaries. So, yes: They have a right to stop you from "learning" from their code. If you want that right, see if they're willing to sell that right to you.
        grondo4 4y ago
        > They have a right to stop you from "learning" from their code. They absolutely do not, and as pedantic as it may be I think it's very important that you and everyone else in this thread know what their rights are. If you sign a contract / EULA that says you cannot decompile someone's code than yes you are liable for any damages promised in that contract for violating it. But who says that I ever signed a EULA for the games I decompiled? Who says I didn't find a copy on a hard drive I bought at a yard sale or someone sent me the decompiled binary themselves? Those people may have violated the contract but I did not. There is no law preventing you from learning from code, art, film or any other copyrighted media. Nor is there any law (or should there be any law IMO) that stops an AI from learning from copyrighted media. Learning from each other regardless of intellectual property law is how the human race advances itself. The fact that we've managed to that automate human progress is incredible, and it's very good that our laws are the way they are that we can allow that to happen.
      - Alchemista 4y ago
        This is a pretty extreme stance. There is a fine line between "learning from" proprietary code and outright stealing some of the key insights and IP. Sometimes it takes a very difficult conceptual leap to solve some of the more difficult computer science and math problems. "Learning" (aka stealing) someone's solution is very problematic and will get you sued if you are not careful.
        skeaker 4y ago
        If you think that's extreme, wait until you hear my stance that code shouldn't be something that you can own (and can therefore "steal") to begin with.
  - madeofpalk 4y ago
    No https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design
    - grondo4 4y ago
      I didn't ask if can I use other people's proprietary closed source code, obviously they have the right to that code and how it's used. I asked if I can learn from that code, which obviously I can. There is no license that says "You cannot learn from this code and take the things you learn to become a better programmer". That's exactly what I do and it's exactly what AI do.
      - ghaff 4y ago
        If you study a closed source compiler (or whatever) in order to write a competitive product, and the company who wrote the original product sues you for copying it, as the parent suggests, you're on shaky legal ground. Which is why clean room design is a thing.
        nickelpro 4y ago
        A clean room design ensures the new code is 100% original, and not a copy of the base code. That is why it is legally preferable, because it is easy to prove certain facts in court. But fundamentally the problem is copyright, the copying of existing IP, not knowledge. grondo4 is completely correct that there is no legal framework that prevents learning from closed-source IP. If such a framework existed, clean room design would not work. The initial spec-writers in a clean room design are reading the protected work.
        ghaff 4y ago
        >The initial spec-writers in a clean room design are reading the closed-source work. Right. And they're only exposing elements presumably not covered by copyright to the developers writing the code. (Of course, this assumes they had legitimate access to the code in the first place.) Clean room design isn't a requirement in the case of, say, writing a BIOS which may have been when this first came up. But it's a lot easier to defend against a copyright claim when it's documented that the people who wrote the code never saw the original. Unlike with patents, independent creation isn't a copyright violation.
  - omoikane 4y ago
    One motivation for artists to create and share new work is the expectation that most people won't just outright copy their work, based on the social norm that stealing is dishonorable. This social norm comes with some level of legal protection, but it largely depends on a common expectation of what is considered stealing or not. Once we have adopted the attitude that we can just copy as we please without attribution, it would be much more difficult to find motivated artists, and we would have failed as a society.
  - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    > Am I allowed to become a better programmer by looking at private code? Your argument is based on the idea that you and AI should have the same rights? I do not see how this works unless AI going to be entitled to minimum wage and paid leave? Otherwise it is just a money grab
    - sebzim4500 4y ago
      He's not saying that he and the AI have the same rights, rather that he and the person running the AI have the same rights.
throwthrowuknow 4y ago
> I'm sure many artists would love to "opt out" of humans looking at their art if the human intends to, or might, copy the artists' style at some point I’m pretty sure that would be a death knell for art. Where are these mythical artists who have never looked at anyone else’s art?
- omoikane 4y ago
  It's the same problem with fake copies of Van Gogh and so forth, except historically those fakes were produced at a much slower rate because of the time needed to master the skills to produce those fakes. With modern tools, those fakes could be mass produced, while the original artists are still alive.
  - judge2020 4y ago
    > It's the same problem with fake copies of Van Gogh and so forth, except historically those fakes were produced at a much slower rate because of the time needed to master the skills to produce those fakes. With modern tools, those fakes could be mass produced, while the original artists are still alive. Those people got in trouble for recreating specific works, or creating new works in his style and defrauding people by saying they were originals. Safe to say that not disclosing "this is not actually a work created by <artist>, just in their style" would be grounds for fraud, especially if you were to sell it.
zirgs 4y ago
I can train a LORA on my own PC in less than an hour. Good luck opting out of that.
- waboremo 4y ago
  What does that matter? Generate as much as you want for your own personal reasons. It's about actually being able to use that content legally (and commercially) that matters to most in this conversation.
  - zirgs 4y ago
    AI training is a one-way operation - you can't reconstruct the dataset from a model/lora/ti. Unless it's something really blatant like real people, widely recognised copyrighted characters like Batman or Iron Man - it's going to be hard to prove that someone used your art to train an AI model. I'm not required to publish my model or the datasets that I used anywhere.
- madeofpalk 4y ago
  I can trivially torrent movies at home also. But then going out and selling them is widely accepted as being "wrong".
egypturnash 4y ago
hi, I'm an artist, I do not give a shit about other humans looking at my work, I am delighted when a younger pro comes to me and thanks me for what they learnt from my work. That tells me they were fascinated enough with it to look at it and analyze it again and again. I made a connection with them via my drawing skills. I am catastrophically unhappy at the prospect of a corporation ingesting a copy of my work and stuffing it into a for-profit machine without my permission. If my work ends up significantly influencing a generated image you love, nobody will ever know. You will never become a fan of my work through this. You will never contribute to my Patreon. You will never run into me at a convention and tell me how influential my work was to something in your life. Instead, the corporation will get another few pennies, and that is all.
- teaearlgraycold 4y ago
  Is there a license that exists that you could put on your work to prevent its use in model training?
  - judge2020 4y ago
    If, as I alluded to, you and the SCOTUS (and other courts) interpret AI art as similar enough to humans where the 'training' process is analogous to a human looking at art and learning how to create good art (or even copy another artist's style), then the license you apply to art does not matter, because it'd just be "learning" about how art works, and not any actual usage of the original work. In this case the AI would be considered a human for the purposes of copyright infringement, where it would infringe on the original work if it recited or recreated any single work from memory without any substantial changes to turn it into either a parody (fair use) or its own work separate from the images it has learned from, even if it mimics the art style of any single artist (since artists can't copyright their styles).
    - teaearlgraycold 4y ago
      I think you’d consider those responsible for the model to be humans, the model to be a machine, and all outputs to be derivative works of the training set with the humans holding culpability.
spoiler 4y ago
It's not quite the same... And I'm not sure how people on HN of all places are failing to grasp that these algorithms aren't sentinet, much less people. I think this is incredibly cool technology, but using other people's property without their consent is stealing (I'm not talking about legality, but morality here). The second reason why it's not the same is that people can't look at X million pictures and become proficient in thousands of different art styles. So, again its not legality but more about ethics. I guess different people have lower moral standards than others, and that's always been part of the human condition. With all that out of the way, I think artists won't get replaced, because these tools don't really produce anything... Substantial on their own. An artist still needs to compose them to tell a story. So, all this nonsense about how it will replace artists is misguided. It can only replace some parts of an artist's workflow. I know there was an art competition where someone won with a piece that was AI-aided, but honestly it looked like colour sludge. The only thing that was really well executed in it was the drama created by the contrast from sharp changes in values near the centre of that work, and something vaguely resembling a humanoid silhouette against it. You could've called it abstract art if you squinted.
- ryanjshaw 4y ago
  I'm curious, do you hold the same beliefs about text? Do you think ChatGPT should not be allowed to read books and join ideas across them without paying the original authors for their contribution to the thought?
  - spoiler 4y ago
    I do! If they aren't in some way public domain, then the authors should have a say, or be if the work is purchased. I have a bit of cognitive dissonance on the subject of blog posts or articles in general, since those are kinda public domain? But I still think it should be opt in/out-able. I realise I'm also a bit of a hypocrite since I've enjoyed playing with these AI tools myself, and I realise they'd be nowhere as cool if they didn't have access to such large datasets.
    - lelandfe 4y ago

madeofpalk 4y ago

Should Github Copilot be trained on private, closed-source, proprietary code?

grondo4 4y ago
Yes, AI should be trained on every piece of information possible. Am I allowed to become a better programmer by looking at private, (illegally leaked) closed-source, proprietary code?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- mrelectric 4y ago
  You're obviously not
  - grondo4 4y ago
    Is that a joke? Yes you are allowed to read closed-source, proprietary code and become a better programmer for it. I've decompiled games to learn how they structure their code to improve the structure of games that I program. I had no right to that code and I used it to become a better programmer just like AI do. That's not copyright infringement. You have a right to stop me from using your code, not learning from it.
    - Dalewyn 4y ago
      Now granted most EULAs and Terms of Service documents aren't legally enforced, most software licenses explicitly prohibit decompiling or otherwise disassembling binaries. So, yes: They have a right to stop you from "learning" from their code. If you want that right, see if they're willing to sell that right to you.
      - grondo4 4y ago
        > They have a right to stop you from "learning" from their code. They absolutely do not, and as pedantic as it may be I think it's very important that you and everyone else in this thread know what their rights are. If you sign a contract / EULA that says you cannot decompile someone's code than yes you are liable for any damages promised in that contract for violating it. But who says that I ever signed a EULA for the games I decompiled? Who says I didn't find a copy on a hard drive I bought at a yard sale or someone sent me the decompiled binary themselves? Those people may have violated the contract but I did not. There is no law preventing you from learning from code, art, film or any other copyrighted media. Nor is there any law (or should there be any law IMO) that stops an AI from learning from copyrighted media. Learning from each other regardless of intellectual property law is how the human race advances itself. The fact that we've managed to that automate human progress is incredible, and it's very good that our laws are the way they are that we can allow that to happen.
    - Alchemista 4y ago
      This is a pretty extreme stance. There is a fine line between "learning from" proprietary code and outright stealing some of the key insights and IP. Sometimes it takes a very difficult conceptual leap to solve some of the more difficult computer science and math problems. "Learning" (aka stealing) someone's solution is very problematic and will get you sued if you are not careful.
      - skeaker 4y ago
        If you think that's extreme, wait until you hear my stance that code shouldn't be something that you can own (and can therefore "steal") to begin with.
- madeofpalk 4y ago
  No https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design
  - grondo4 4y ago
    I didn't ask if can I use other people's proprietary closed source code, obviously they have the right to that code and how it's used. I asked if I can learn from that code, which obviously I can. There is no license that says "You cannot learn from this code and take the things you learn to become a better programmer". That's exactly what I do and it's exactly what AI do.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      If you study a closed source compiler (or whatever) in order to write a competitive product, and the company who wrote the original product sues you for copying it, as the parent suggests, you're on shaky legal ground. Which is why clean room design is a thing.
      - nickelpro 4y ago
        A clean room design ensures the new code is 100% original, and not a copy of the base code. That is why it is legally preferable, because it is easy to prove certain facts in court. But fundamentally the problem is copyright, the copying of existing IP, not knowledge. grondo4 is completely correct that there is no legal framework that prevents learning from closed-source IP. If such a framework existed, clean room design would not work. The initial spec-writers in a clean room design are reading the protected work.
        ghaff 4y ago
        >The initial spec-writers in a clean room design are reading the closed-source work. Right. And they're only exposing elements presumably not covered by copyright to the developers writing the code. (Of course, this assumes they had legitimate access to the code in the first place.) Clean room design isn't a requirement in the case of, say, writing a BIOS which may have been when this first came up. But it's a lot easier to defend against a copyright claim when it's documented that the people who wrote the code never saw the original. Unlike with patents, independent creation isn't a copyright violation.
- omoikane 4y ago
  One motivation for artists to create and share new work is the expectation that most people won't just outright copy their work, based on the social norm that stealing is dishonorable. This social norm comes with some level of legal protection, but it largely depends on a common expectation of what is considered stealing or not. Once we have adopted the attitude that we can just copy as we please without attribution, it would be much more difficult to find motivated artists, and we would have failed as a society.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  > Am I allowed to become a better programmer by looking at private code? Your argument is based on the idea that you and AI should have the same rights? I do not see how this works unless AI going to be entitled to minimum wage and paid leave? Otherwise it is just a money grab
  - sebzim4500 4y ago
    He's not saying that he and the AI have the same rights, rather that he and the person running the AI have the same rights.

throwthrowuknow 4y ago

> I'm sure many artists would love to "opt out" of humans looking at their art if the human intends to, or might, copy the artists' style at some point I’m pretty sure that would be a death knell for art. Where are these mythical artists who have never looked at anyone else’s art?

omoikane 4y ago
It's the same problem with fake copies of Van Gogh and so forth, except historically those fakes were produced at a much slower rate because of the time needed to master the skills to produce those fakes. With modern tools, those fakes could be mass produced, while the original artists are still alive.
- judge2020 4y ago
  > It's the same problem with fake copies of Van Gogh and so forth, except historically those fakes were produced at a much slower rate because of the time needed to master the skills to produce those fakes. With modern tools, those fakes could be mass produced, while the original artists are still alive. Those people got in trouble for recreating specific works, or creating new works in his style and defrauding people by saying they were originals. Safe to say that not disclosing "this is not actually a work created by <artist>, just in their style" would be grounds for fraud, especially if you were to sell it.

zirgs 4y ago

I can train a LORA on my own PC in less than an hour. Good luck opting out of that.

waboremo 4y ago
What does that matter? Generate as much as you want for your own personal reasons. It's about actually being able to use that content legally (and commercially) that matters to most in this conversation.
- zirgs 4y ago
  AI training is a one-way operation - you can't reconstruct the dataset from a model/lora/ti. Unless it's something really blatant like real people, widely recognised copyrighted characters like Batman or Iron Man - it's going to be hard to prove that someone used your art to train an AI model. I'm not required to publish my model or the datasets that I used anywhere.
madeofpalk 4y ago
I can trivially torrent movies at home also. But then going out and selling them is widely accepted as being "wrong".

egypturnash 4y ago

hi, I'm an artist, I do not give a shit about other humans looking at my work, I am delighted when a younger pro comes to me and thanks me for what they learnt from my work. That tells me they were fascinated enough with it to look at it and analyze it again and again. I made a connection with them via my drawing skills. I am catastrophically unhappy at the prospect of a corporation ingesting a copy of my work and stuffing it into a for-profit machine without my permission. If my work ends up significantly influencing a generated image you love, nobody will ever know. You will never become a fan of my work through this. You will never contribute to my Patreon. You will never run into me at a convention and tell me how influential my work was to something in your life. Instead, the corporation will get another few pennies, and that is all.

teaearlgraycold 4y ago
Is there a license that exists that you could put on your work to prevent its use in model training?
- judge2020 4y ago
  If, as I alluded to, you and the SCOTUS (and other courts) interpret AI art as similar enough to humans where the 'training' process is analogous to a human looking at art and learning how to create good art (or even copy another artist's style), then the license you apply to art does not matter, because it'd just be "learning" about how art works, and not any actual usage of the original work. In this case the AI would be considered a human for the purposes of copyright infringement, where it would infringe on the original work if it recited or recreated any single work from memory without any substantial changes to turn it into either a parody (fair use) or its own work separate from the images it has learned from, even if it mimics the art style of any single artist (since artists can't copyright their styles).
  - teaearlgraycold 4y ago
    I think you’d consider those responsible for the model to be humans, the model to be a machine, and all outputs to be derivative works of the training set with the humans holding culpability.

spoiler 4y ago

It's not quite the same... And I'm not sure how people on HN of all places are failing to grasp that these algorithms aren't sentinet, much less people. I think this is incredibly cool technology, but using other people's property without their consent is stealing (I'm not talking about legality, but morality here). The second reason why it's not the same is that people can't look at X million pictures and become proficient in thousands of different art styles. So, again its not legality but more about ethics. I guess different people have lower moral standards than others, and that's always been part of the human condition. With all that out of the way, I think artists won't get replaced, because these tools don't really produce anything... Substantial on their own. An artist still needs to compose them to tell a story. So, all this nonsense about how it will replace artists is misguided. It can only replace some parts of an artist's workflow. I know there was an art competition where someone won with a piece that was AI-aided, but honestly it looked like colour sludge. The only thing that was really well executed in it was the drama created by the contrast from sharp changes in values near the centre of that work, and something vaguely resembling a humanoid silhouette against it. You could've called it abstract art if you squinted.

ryanjshaw 4y ago
I'm curious, do you hold the same beliefs about text? Do you think ChatGPT should not be allowed to read books and join ideas across them without paying the original authors for their contribution to the thought?
- spoiler 4y ago
  I do! If they aren't in some way public domain, then the authors should have a say, or be if the work is purchased. I have a bit of cognitive dissonance on the subject of blog posts or articles in general, since those are kinda public domain? But I still think it should be opt in/out-able. I realise I'm also a bit of a hypocrite since I've enjoyed playing with these AI tools myself, and I realise they'd be nowhere as cool if they didn't have access to such large datasets.
  - lelandfe 4y ago