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You have a human you want to train to paint. You download an image of a painting and give it to the human to train it on, amongst many. The human, in the future

You have a human you want to train to paint. You download an image of a painting and give it to the human to train it on, amongst many. The human, in the future, may paint something that has vaguely or substantially similar qualities to the original painting. Has copyright infringement occurred in this instance? No: the downloading of the image for study in this particular instance is for sure, 100%, fair use protected by copyright law. Now, let's try something similar. You have a monkey you want to train to paint. You download an image of a painting and give it to the monkey to train it on, amongst many. The monkey, in the future, may paint something that has vaguely or substantially similar qualities to the original painting. Has copyright infringement occurred in this instance? Let's go further: You have a neural network you want to train to paint. You download an image of a painting and give it to the neural network to train it on, amongst many. The neural network, in the future, may paint something that has vaguely or substantially similar qualities to the original painting. Has copyright infringement occurred when that happens? I find it hilarious that in this thread, instead of asking the question of whether this is fair use, multiple posters have jumped to comparing this to thievery, promoting terrorism and posting of private information as an analogy to harm.

polotics 3y ago
Well good luck trying to teach your monkey to paint. Let me propose a simple vocabulary refresher: feeding into an human eye is "showing", feeding into a machine is "copying". calling this copying "training" is nice and cute, but training is what you do as a human. As submarines do not swim, LLM's do not train: they copy information and extract similarities inside a neural net. As for your mention of various "hilarious" scarecrows, it demonstrates that you know your logic is on shaky grounds.
- Kim_Bruning 3y ago
  WRT "teaching a monkey how to paint", I think the above poster is referring to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
- srslack 3y ago
  >As submarines do not swim, LLM's do not train: The neural network behind the LLM is "trained." Yes, it's a term of art, very observant. That doesn't change the fact that there's not a substantial reproduction of a work in it. LLMs "learn" to predict text by feeding them vectors, the resulting "weights" of that process could be thought of and implemented as a big walkable decision tree to predict the next token it weren't for combinatorial explosion, but there's no substantial reproduction, or "copy", in there. Is there a substantial reproduction, in your head, of a song or a text or a painting you can perfectly recall and can't seem to forget? Be careful, the copyright police will get you, the only way to delete it is to delete yourself! >feeding into a machine is called copying Copyright law deals in "reproductions" as far as I understand it. Feeding a copyrighted document as vectors into a program that reconfigures some matrix of vectors, and then using that matrices to output probability distributions into something tangible, where something tangible isn't a complete or substantial reproduction of the copyrighted work, is not a copyright violation. If you think it is, amend copyright law, or take it to court and let a judge settle the matter, and hope it's in your favor.
  - polotics 3y ago
    How is the copyrighted document being "fed as vectors" if not through a process of copy of the data that it contains? Indeed the semantics are surely going to get their day in court. The fact that you felt the need to qualify reproduction with the word "substantial" probably means that copyright will show how much "substance" is allowed to be, or not to be, copied. About your question: """Is there a substantial reproduction, in your head, of a song or a text or a painting you can perfectly recall and can't seem to forget? Be careful, the copyright police will get you, the only way to delete it is to delete yourself!""" This equivalence between "perfect" human recall, and a copy of the data input into an AI model is a bit of a strawman I think: it is the distribution of copied information that copyright protects against, the information has been uploaded in vectors, have fun demonstrating it is not being used in producing this or that model output. If I learn a popular song and do a cover, there is a copyright law for that, I owe rights.
    - srslack 3y ago

polotics 3y ago

Well good luck trying to teach your monkey to paint. Let me propose a simple vocabulary refresher: feeding into an human eye is "showing", feeding into a machine is "copying". calling this copying "training" is nice and cute, but training is what you do as a human. As submarines do not swim, LLM's do not train: they copy information and extract similarities inside a neural net. As for your mention of various "hilarious" scarecrows, it demonstrates that you know your logic is on shaky grounds.

Kim_Bruning 3y ago
WRT "teaching a monkey how to paint", I think the above poster is referring to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
srslack 3y ago
>As submarines do not swim, LLM's do not train: The neural network behind the LLM is "trained." Yes, it's a term of art, very observant. That doesn't change the fact that there's not a substantial reproduction of a work in it. LLMs "learn" to predict text by feeding them vectors, the resulting "weights" of that process could be thought of and implemented as a big walkable decision tree to predict the next token it weren't for combinatorial explosion, but there's no substantial reproduction, or "copy", in there. Is there a substantial reproduction, in your head, of a song or a text or a painting you can perfectly recall and can't seem to forget? Be careful, the copyright police will get you, the only way to delete it is to delete yourself! >feeding into a machine is called copying Copyright law deals in "reproductions" as far as I understand it. Feeding a copyrighted document as vectors into a program that reconfigures some matrix of vectors, and then using that matrices to output probability distributions into something tangible, where something tangible isn't a complete or substantial reproduction of the copyrighted work, is not a copyright violation. If you think it is, amend copyright law, or take it to court and let a judge settle the matter, and hope it's in your favor.
- polotics 3y ago
  How is the copyrighted document being "fed as vectors" if not through a process of copy of the data that it contains? Indeed the semantics are surely going to get their day in court. The fact that you felt the need to qualify reproduction with the word "substantial" probably means that copyright will show how much "substance" is allowed to be, or not to be, copied. About your question: """Is there a substantial reproduction, in your head, of a song or a text or a painting you can perfectly recall and can't seem to forget? Be careful, the copyright police will get you, the only way to delete it is to delete yourself!""" This equivalence between "perfect" human recall, and a copy of the data input into an AI model is a bit of a strawman I think: it is the distribution of copied information that copyright protects against, the information has been uploaded in vectors, have fun demonstrating it is not being used in producing this or that model output. If I learn a popular song and do a cover, there is a copyright law for that, I owe rights.
  - srslack 3y ago