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Related to both: how would you tell the difference? More importantly, how would you prove that in a court. When it comes to copyright infringements, the burden

Related to both: how would you tell the difference? More importantly, how would you prove that in a court. When it comes to copyright infringements, the burden of proof is on the copyright holder. I might claim the work of an AI as my own without informing anyone. And then when somebody copies my work I might sue them. How would they prove my work is not my own but created by an AI? If you fail to do that, a judge is going to rule in my favor. They'd have to. Or when an AI supposedly infringes on a copyrighted work, who do you drag into court for that (the AI, it's developers, or the user?) and what's your argumentation going to be? You have to prove that the work is clearly yours and not fair use (e.g. a snippet, fragment, or a loose resemblance). And then you have to prove illegal distribution of that work that goes beyond fair use. This is where the whole thing will fall apart IMHO. I'm sure the legal debates will drag out a long time but you can kind of see where this is going. The cat is out of the bag, and the volume of cases will soon be such that it will be hard to stay on top of them. While there are going to be a multitude of people who feel vaguely cheated, they might not have much of a solid basis for starting legal cases. A few might try but that might just nudge judges to put a stop to those cases with some tactical rulings. Enough people have attempted to abuse copyright for all sorts of reasons ever since the whole notion was formalized that any drastic changes in the way copyright works are both impractical and unlikely to survive a lot of scrutiny if/when that gets escalated to the supreme court. A lot of amateur lawyers with very fuzzy notions about copyright, the whole notion of property, ownership, intellectual property etc. are not going to really going to be able to change that. And of course copyright law is not just a US thing. Other countries have copyright laws too and there are treaties and trade agreements between countries. All kind of hint at a likely outcome: unless an AI is producing verbatim copies of something copyrighted, it likely is simply fair use, whether people like that or not. And when people copy work produced by an AI, it's up to them to ensure that the work is not copyrighted. And up to the copyright holder to go after them. The AI itself cannot be sued. And a neural network bears no resemblance to any copyrighted work whatsoever; so it's hard to argue that the creators of those can be a party in any such cases. I'm sure people will try. But I'm skeptical of those people getting very far. Creating some kind of exception for AIs in copyright law is going to be very hard and impractical. Getting international agreement on that even harder. At best it will take very long for anything to happen. By which time there will be so many AIs that outlawing them is not going to be practical or popular.

pipo234 4y ago
Interesting. Copyright and "intellectual property" have always been fuzzy subjects, and the legal frameworks have always struggled to catch up with changes in society and technology. The origins of copyright are (I think) about publishers re-printing stuff printed by other publishers. It has come a long way with photo copiers, audio tape and with "copy" being the essential primitive of any digital computer. And now AIs can recycle creative thoughts in some sense. I suppose at some point, it makes more sense to look at what kind of law we need in practice, rather than how existing law applies to reality. Should AI models be allowed to learn from publicly available resources, without permission? Probably yes. Should AI output be owned by the AI owner, or anyone? Probably no. Can we (the world) come to an agreement? From there, can we change laws to make this work the way it should?
- jillesvangurp 4y ago
  > Can we (the world) come to an agreement? From there, can we change laws to make this work the way it should? I doubt there is any consensus for this. Or even a consensus on this being a problem to begin with. The easiest thing for legislators is to do nothing. Predicting that they will do exactly that is almost a foregone conclusion. After all that is what historically happens any time somebody has some issue with the way copyright works. In light of that, all judges can do is rule consistently with previous rulings. And there are a lot of those. Disregarding those is not something they can do. There's going to be lots of haggling on the details but in the end, they can't just wipe out centuries of previous cases and change e.g. the very loosely defined notion of fair use just because it is convenient for some subset of copyright holders. Replace the word AI with "child" in the your comment and you kind of have the legal situation in a nutshell. If you stop thinking about AIs as special in any way and just focus on the outcome: a brain like thing producing content that may or may not infringe on some copyrighted work when it is distributed by someone. The distributing part is going to be done by people typically and it's what creates the infringement. The simplest thing for a judge is to simply look at the content, disregard the way in which it was produced, and compare it to the original work. Either that's going to be a clear infringement under pre-existing notions of that or it isn't. The way in which that copy was created exactly is not really material to the case. There's no need to make any exceptions for there being an AI involved in some way or not. Either the content is an infringement or it is not. Of course that would require judges and lawyers to be rational and logical, which is not an assumption I'd make lightly. But usually these things have a way of coming to some kind of conclusion that big stakeholders in society can live with.

pipo234 4y ago

Interesting. Copyright and "intellectual property" have always been fuzzy subjects, and the legal frameworks have always struggled to catch up with changes in society and technology. The origins of copyright are (I think) about publishers re-printing stuff printed by other publishers. It has come a long way with photo copiers, audio tape and with "copy" being the essential primitive of any digital computer. And now AIs can recycle creative thoughts in some sense. I suppose at some point, it makes more sense to look at what kind of law we need in practice, rather than how existing law applies to reality. Should AI models be allowed to learn from publicly available resources, without permission? Probably yes. Should AI output be owned by the AI owner, or anyone? Probably no. Can we (the world) come to an agreement? From there, can we change laws to make this work the way it should?

jillesvangurp 4y ago
> Can we (the world) come to an agreement? From there, can we change laws to make this work the way it should? I doubt there is any consensus for this. Or even a consensus on this being a problem to begin with. The easiest thing for legislators is to do nothing. Predicting that they will do exactly that is almost a foregone conclusion. After all that is what historically happens any time somebody has some issue with the way copyright works. In light of that, all judges can do is rule consistently with previous rulings. And there are a lot of those. Disregarding those is not something they can do. There's going to be lots of haggling on the details but in the end, they can't just wipe out centuries of previous cases and change e.g. the very loosely defined notion of fair use just because it is convenient for some subset of copyright holders. Replace the word AI with "child" in the your comment and you kind of have the legal situation in a nutshell. If you stop thinking about AIs as special in any way and just focus on the outcome: a brain like thing producing content that may or may not infringe on some copyrighted work when it is distributed by someone. The distributing part is going to be done by people typically and it's what creates the infringement. The simplest thing for a judge is to simply look at the content, disregard the way in which it was produced, and compare it to the original work. Either that's going to be a clear infringement under pre-existing notions of that or it isn't. The way in which that copy was created exactly is not really material to the case. There's no need to make any exceptions for there being an AI involved in some way or not. Either the content is an infringement or it is not. Of course that would require judges and lawyers to be rational and logical, which is not an assumption I'd make lightly. But usually these things have a way of coming to some kind of conclusion that big stakeholders in society can live with.