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what's weird to me though, is that we're all trained on both open source and closed source source material. And our output is totally 100% copyrightable by us.

what's weird to me though, is that we're all trained on both open source and closed source source material. And our output is totally 100% copyrightable by us. Why wouldn't we extend the same muster to computer generated text. If there is a copy-written sentence, go after that? I don't work for openai, but I don't like 1 sided arguments that are just looking for some bottom line. At the end of the day we all have something to protect. When it benefits us to protect something, we're all for it. When it benefits us to NOT protect something, no one has a single argument for that.

tdullien 3y ago
We decided that animals can't create copyrightable works and hence limited the ability to create copyrightable works to humans. I am fine with granting AIs the ability to create copyrightable works provided we grant that right, and human rights, to Orcas and other intelligent species.
- kbrkbr 3y ago
  Animals seem ok with it. At least they did not indicate otherwise so far.
danShumway 3y ago
Copyright is a practical right, not an inherent right. The only reasons humans get copyright at all is because it's useful for society to give it to them. The onus should be on OpenAI to prove that it will benefit society overall if AIs are given copyright. We've already decided that many non-human processes/entities don't get copyright because there doesn't seem to be any reason to grant those entities copyright. ---- The comparison to humans is interesting though, because teaching a human how to do something doesn't grant you copyright over their output. Asking a human to do something doesn't automatically mean you own what they create. The human actually doing the creation gets the copyright, and the teacher has no intrinsic intellectual property claim in that situation. So if we really want to be one-to-one, teaching an AI how to do something wouldn't give you copyright over everything it produces. The AI would get copyright, because it's the thing doing the creation. And given that we don't currently grant AIs personhood, they can't own that output and it goes into the public domain. But in a full comparison to humans, OpenAI is the teacher. OpenAI didn't create GPT's output, it only taught GPT how to produce that output. ---- The followup here though is that OpenAI claims that it's OK to train on copyrighted material. So even if GPT's output was copyrightable, that still doesn't mean that they should be able to deny people the ability to train on it. I mean, talk about one-sided arguments here: if we treat GPT output the same as human output, then is OpenAI's position that it can't train on human output? OpenAI has a TOS around this basically banning people from using the output in training, which... probably that shouldn't be enforceable either, but people who haven't agreed to that TOS should absolutely be able to train AI on any ChatGPT logs that they can get a hold of. That is exactly what OpenAI did with copyrighted material to train GPT. It's not one-sided to expect the same rules to apply to them.
- oceanplexian 3y ago
  > The comparison to humans is interesting though, because teaching a human how to do something doesn't grant you copyright over their output. Ehh, in rare cases in can though. If you have someone sign an NDA, they can't go and publish technical details about something confidential that they were trained on. For example, this is fairly common in the tech industry when we send engineers to train on proprietary hardware or software.
  - danShumway 3y ago
    I would push back on that for a couple of reasons: First, what's happening in those scenarios where an artist grants copyright to a teacher/commissioner is that the artist gets the copyright, and then separately signs an agreement about what they want to do with that copyright. But an NDA/transfer-agreement doesn't change how that copyright is generated. It's a separate agreement not to use knowledge in a particular way or to transfer copyright to someone else. More importantly, is the claim here that GPT is capable of signing a contract? Because problems of personhood aside, that immediately makes me wonder: - Is GPT mature enough to make an informed decision on that contract in the eyes of the law? - Is that "contract" being made under duress given that OpenAI literally owns GPT and controls its servers and is involved in the training process for how GPT "thinks"? Can you call it informed consent when the party drawing up the contract is doing reinforcement training to get you to respond a certain way? ---- I mean, GPT does not qualify for personhood and it's not alive, so it can't sign contracts period. But even if it could, that "contract" would be pretty problematic legally speaking. And NDAs/contracts don't change anything about copyright. It's just that if you own copyright, you have the right to transfer it to someone else. Just to push the NDA comparison a little harder as well: NDAs bind the people who sign them, not everyone else. If you sign an NDA and break it and I learn about the information, I'm not in trouble. So assuming that ChatGPT has signed an NDA in specific -- that would not block me from training on ChatGPT logs I found online. It would (I guess) allow OpenAI to sue GPT for contract violation?
  - vkou 3y ago
    > Ehh, in rare cases in can though. If you have someone sign an NDA, they can't go and publish technical details about something confidential that they were trained on. For example, this is fairly common in the tech industry when we send engineers to train on proprietary hardware or software. And I think nearly everyone would agree that it would be perfectly fine and reasonable for an AI trained on a proprietary corpus of information to produce copyrightable/secret material in response to questions. Just because I built an internal corporate search tool, doesn't mean that you get to view its output. The question at play here is when the AI is trained on information that's in the public commons. The 'teacher' analogy is, in this sense, a very good one.
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crote 3y ago
Let's say I were to create an algorithm which generated every possible short story in the English language using Markov chains. Should I be able to copyright all those generated stories, thus legally preventing any other author from ever writing a story again?
cycomanic 3y ago
We make distinction between humans and computers all the time. They function distinctively different. For example I can "turn off" a computer, but it would be illegal to do with a person. More seriously and closely to the case at hand. I need a licence to copy a program into memory on the computer, I don't need that licence to do that for a human. So why should there not be a difference for the material they output.

tdullien 3y ago

We decided that animals can't create copyrightable works and hence limited the ability to create copyrightable works to humans. I am fine with granting AIs the ability to create copyrightable works provided we grant that right, and human rights, to Orcas and other intelligent species.

kbrkbr 3y ago
Animals seem ok with it. At least they did not indicate otherwise so far.

danShumway 3y ago

Copyright is a practical right, not an inherent right. The only reasons humans get copyright at all is because it's useful for society to give it to them. The onus should be on OpenAI to prove that it will benefit society overall if AIs are given copyright. We've already decided that many non-human processes/entities don't get copyright because there doesn't seem to be any reason to grant those entities copyright. ---- The comparison to humans is interesting though, because teaching a human how to do something doesn't grant you copyright over their output. Asking a human to do something doesn't automatically mean you own what they create. The human actually doing the creation gets the copyright, and the teacher has no intrinsic intellectual property claim in that situation. So if we really want to be one-to-one, teaching an AI how to do something wouldn't give you copyright over everything it produces. The AI would get copyright, because it's the thing doing the creation. And given that we don't currently grant AIs personhood, they can't own that output and it goes into the public domain. But in a full comparison to humans, OpenAI is the teacher. OpenAI didn't create GPT's output, it only taught GPT how to produce that output. ---- The followup here though is that OpenAI claims that it's OK to train on copyrighted material. So even if GPT's output was copyrightable, that still doesn't mean that they should be able to deny people the ability to train on it. I mean, talk about one-sided arguments here: if we treat GPT output the same as human output, then is OpenAI's position that it can't train on human output? OpenAI has a TOS around this basically banning people from using the output in training, which... probably that shouldn't be enforceable either, but people who haven't agreed to that TOS should absolutely be able to train AI on any ChatGPT logs that they can get a hold of. That is exactly what OpenAI did with copyrighted material to train GPT. It's not one-sided to expect the same rules to apply to them.

oceanplexian 3y ago
> The comparison to humans is interesting though, because teaching a human how to do something doesn't grant you copyright over their output. Ehh, in rare cases in can though. If you have someone sign an NDA, they can't go and publish technical details about something confidential that they were trained on. For example, this is fairly common in the tech industry when we send engineers to train on proprietary hardware or software.
- danShumway 3y ago
  I would push back on that for a couple of reasons: First, what's happening in those scenarios where an artist grants copyright to a teacher/commissioner is that the artist gets the copyright, and then separately signs an agreement about what they want to do with that copyright. But an NDA/transfer-agreement doesn't change how that copyright is generated. It's a separate agreement not to use knowledge in a particular way or to transfer copyright to someone else. More importantly, is the claim here that GPT is capable of signing a contract? Because problems of personhood aside, that immediately makes me wonder: - Is GPT mature enough to make an informed decision on that contract in the eyes of the law? - Is that "contract" being made under duress given that OpenAI literally owns GPT and controls its servers and is involved in the training process for how GPT "thinks"? Can you call it informed consent when the party drawing up the contract is doing reinforcement training to get you to respond a certain way? ---- I mean, GPT does not qualify for personhood and it's not alive, so it can't sign contracts period. But even if it could, that "contract" would be pretty problematic legally speaking. And NDAs/contracts don't change anything about copyright. It's just that if you own copyright, you have the right to transfer it to someone else. Just to push the NDA comparison a little harder as well: NDAs bind the people who sign them, not everyone else. If you sign an NDA and break it and I learn about the information, I'm not in trouble. So assuming that ChatGPT has signed an NDA in specific -- that would not block me from training on ChatGPT logs I found online. It would (I guess) allow OpenAI to sue GPT for contract violation?
- vkou 3y ago
  > Ehh, in rare cases in can though. If you have someone sign an NDA, they can't go and publish technical details about something confidential that they were trained on. For example, this is fairly common in the tech industry when we send engineers to train on proprietary hardware or software. And I think nearly everyone would agree that it would be perfectly fine and reasonable for an AI trained on a proprietary corpus of information to produce copyrightable/secret material in response to questions. Just because I built an internal corporate search tool, doesn't mean that you get to view its output. The question at play here is when the AI is trained on information that's in the public commons. The 'teacher' analogy is, in this sense, a very good one.

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crote 3y ago

Let's say I were to create an algorithm which generated every possible short story in the English language using Markov chains. Should I be able to copyright all those generated stories, thus legally preventing any other author from ever writing a story again?

cycomanic 3y ago

We make distinction between humans and computers all the time. They function distinctively different. For example I can "turn off" a computer, but it would be illegal to do with a person. More seriously and closely to the case at hand. I need a licence to copy a program into memory on the computer, I don't need that licence to do that for a human. So why should there not be a difference for the material they output.