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Good luck to them. AI models are automated plagiarism, top to bottom. None of us gave OpenAI permission to derive their model from our writing, surely billion
by mattbee 4y ago
Good luck to them. AI models are automated plagiarism, top to bottom. None of us gave OpenAI permission to derive their model from our writing, surely billions of dollars worth, but they took it anyway. Copyright hasn't caught up so all that stolen value rests securely with OpenAI. If we're not getting that back, I don't see why AI competitors should have any qualms about borrowing each others' work.
- waselighis 4y agoOur writing, our code, our artwork... Furthermore, the U.S. Copyright Office (USCO) concluded that AI-generated works on their own cannot be copyright, so these ChatGPT logs are free game. It would be hypocritical to think that Google is wrong and OpenAI is not.
- lxgr 4y agoBut clearly everything generated by an AI isn’t automatically in the public domain. That would be a trivial way of copyright laundering. "Sorry, while this looks like a bit for bit copy of a popular Hollywood movie, it was actually entirely dreamt up by our new, sophisticated, definitely AI-using identity function."
- LegitShady 4y agoThe person using something similar to something else may be infringing but the ai work cannot be protected by copyright as it lacks human authorship. Those are two separate issues.
- raincole 4y agoUh, I think there is some confusion here. If I plagiarize a Hollywood movie, then I explicitly "give up" my copyright by "releasing" it to the public domain, it doesn't affect the movie at all. AI or not is irrelevant.
- ysavir 4y agoNo, but the original copyright holder would have to press charges against Bard. OpenAI wouldn't be able to take action there.
- LegitShady 4y agoits not even that on their own those works cant be copywritten. its that even when you make changes to those works, your changes might qualify for copyright but they do not affect the copyright status of the ai generated portions of the work. if you used ai to design a new superhero and then added pink shoes, yellow hair, and a beard, only those three elements would possibly be able to be protected by copywrite. your additions do not change the status of the underlying ai work which cannot be protected and is available for anyone to use.
- rhtgrg 4y ago> if you used ai to design a new superhero and then added pink shoes, yellow hair, and a beard Wouldn't that depend heavily on the prompt used (among other factors such as image to image and ControlNet)? You could be specifying lots of detail about the design in your prompt, and the AI could only be generating concept artwork with little variation from what you already provided. If I'm already providing the pose, the face, and the outfit for a character (say via ControlNet and Textual Inversion), generating <my_character> should be no different from generating <superman>, that is to say, the copyright already exists thanks to my work and the AI is just a tool, the output of which should have no bearing on who owns that copyright (DC is going to be perfectly able to challenge my commercial use of AI generated superman artwork).
- LegitShady 4y agoAccording to the copyright board a promot is not anymore than any person commissioning a work from an artist, which does not provide copyright, and the lack of human authorship for the design decisions still stops it from being protected by copyright.
- staticman2 4y agoCopyright.gov says the copyright office has started an initiative to examine AI copyright issues. That makes me think even the copyright board is not confident of their answer.
- eru 4y ago> Furthermore, the U.S. Copyright Office (USCO) concluded that AI-generated works on their own cannot be copyright, so these ChatGPT logs are free game. Doesn't this depend on where you or the AI live? The US ain't the world.
- bko 4y agoI don't get this sentiment. For some cases sure, if it repurposes your code that ignores the license fine. But it's rarely wholesale copying. It's finding patterns same as anyone studying the code base would do. As for the majority of content written on the internet through reddit or some social media, what's the harm in ingesting that? It's an incredibly useful tool that will add huge value to everyone. It's relatively open, cheap and highly available. It's worth to it's owners is only a fraction of the value it will add to society. It has the chance to have as big of an impact on progress as something like the microprocessor. I agree it's free game for other llms to use gpt output as training data and that's positive. Although it signals desperation and panic that the largest "ai first" company with more data than any org in history is caught so flat footed and has to rely on it. Do you really think it would be a better world in which a large LLM would never be able to be developed?
- mattbee 4y agoNo, but I believe a large language model is a work that is 99.9% derivative of its inputs, with all that implies for authorship and copyright. Right now it's just a heist.
- cornholio 4y agoIt's definitely a derived work as far as copyright is concerned: the output would simply not exist without the copyrighted training data. > It's finding patterns same as anyone studying the code base would do. No, it's quite unlike anyone studying data, because it's not a person with legal rights, such as fair use, but an automated algorithm. There is absolutely no legal debate that copyright applies only to human authors, or only to the human created part of a mixed work, there is vast jurisprudence on this; by extension, any fair use rights too, exist only for human users of the works. Derivation by automated means - for the express economic purpose of out-competing the creator in the market place, no less - is completely outside the spirit of copyright.
- fauigerzigerk 4y agoI don't think anyone would argue that an AI has fair use rights as a person, but corporations do.
- anonyfox 4y agoI am strongly in favor of eliminating copyright completely everywhere, soooo I am pretty fine with that. The other direction should be more enforce-able: stuff derived from open data must also be made open again, like the GPL but for data (and therefore ML stuff).
- WoodenChair 4y agoRight but in a world where copyright does exist we arguably have the worst of both worlds. Small players are not protected at all from scraping and big players are leveraging all of their work and have the legal resources to form a moat.
- anonyfox 4y agosure, so instead of build even higher walled gardens, let all data be free for everyone :-)
- antibasilisk 4y agoThe smallest player is the user, and they should have real ownership over their computers.
- jsemrau 4y agoThat's the answer to the YC Interview question "What is your unfair competitive advantage" in a nutshell. Morally it might be wrong. From a business building perspective it's access that no one has.
- kmeisthax 4y agoYeah, I definitely like to see AI companies getting hit with their own medicine. The main problem isn't even "automated plagiarism": the pre-generative era was chock full of AI companies more or less stealing datasets. Clearview AI, for example, trained up its facial recognition technology on your Facebook photos, without asking for and without getting permission. On the other hand, I genuinely hope copyright never "catches up", because... 1. It is a morally bankrupt system that does not adequately defend the interests of artists. Most artists do not own their own work; publishers demand copyright assignment or extremely broad exclusive licenses as a condition of publication. The bullies know to ask for all their lunch money, not just a couple bucks for themselves. Furthermore, copyright binds noncommercial actors the same as it does commercial ones, which means unconscionably large damage awards for just downloading a couple of songs. 2. The suggested ways to alter copyright to stop AI training would require dramatic expansions of copyright scope. Under current law, the only argument for the AI itself being infringing would be if it memorized training data. You would need to create a new ownership right in artistic styles or techniques. This would inflict unconscionable amounts of psychic and legal damage on all future creators: existing artists would be protected against AI, but no new art could be legally made unless it religiously hewed towards styles already in the public domain. We know this because music companies have already made their domain of copyright effectively work this way[0], and the result is endless bullshit lawsuits on people who write songs that merely "feel" too similar (e.g. Blurred Lines) 3. AI will still be capable of plagiarism. Most plagiarists are not just hoping the AI regurgitates training data, they are actively putting other people's work into the model to be modified. A lot of attention is paid to the sourcing of training data, because it's a weak spot. If we take the training data away then, presumably, there's no generative AI. However, people are working on licensed datasets and training AIs on them. Adobe has Firefly[1], hell even I've tried my hand at training from scratch on public domain images. Such models will still be perfectly capable of doing img2img or being finetuned and thus copying what you tell it to. If we specifically want to regulate AI, then we need to pass laws that regulate AI, rather than just giving the music labels, movie studios, and book publishers even more power. [0] Specifically through sampling rights and thin copyright. [1] I do not consider Adobe Firefly to be ethical: they are training the AI on Adobe Stock images, and they claim this to be licensed because they updated the Adobe Stock agreement to have a license in it. Dropping a contractual roofie into stock photographers' drinks does not an ethical AI make.
- danShumway 4y agoI'm not a copyright maximalist, and I kind of agree that training should be fair use. Maybe I'm right about that, maybe I'm wrong. BUT importantly, that has to go hand in hand with an acknowledgement that AI material is not copyrightable and that training on other model output is fine. What companies like OpenAI want is a system where everything they build is protected, and nothing that anyone else builds is protected. It's wildly hypocritical, what's good for the goose is good for the gander. That some AI proponents are now freaking out about how model output can be legally used shows that on some level those people weren't really honestly engaging with artists who were freaking out about their work being appropriated to copy them. It's all just "learning from the art" until it affects somebody's competitive moat, and then suddenly people do understand how LLM weights could be seen as a derivative work of their inputs.
- seydor 4y agoThat shouldn't be hard. Are Google's results copyrightable?
- shagie 4y agoBuilding things and maintaining it as a trade secret can be protected as a trade secret. Trade secrets don't need to be copyrightable (e.g. list of customer numbers is a trade secret but not copyrightable). https://copyrightalliance.org/faqs/difference-copyright-patent-trademark/ https://copyrightalliance.org/faqs/difference-copyright-pate... > Trade secret protection protects secrets from unauthorized disclosure and use by others. A trade secret is information that has an economic benefit due to its secret nature, has value to others who cannot legitimately obtain it, and is subject to reasonable efforts to maintain its secrecy. The protections afforded by trade secret law are very different from others forms of IP.
- mattnewton 4y agoI am not a lawyer, but I don’t believe a trade secret would prevent someone from reverse engineering your model’s knowledge from it’s output though, in the same way that it doesn’t prevent someone from reverse engineering your hot sauce from buying a bunch and experimenting with the ingredients until it tastes similar.
- wendyshu 4y agoIs Stack Overflow plagiarism?