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> These creators have not asked for a return, so what makes training an AI any different? Is every work in the training set licensed in a way that allows modif

by fouric 3y ago

> These creators have not asked for a return, so what makes training an AI any different? Is every work in the training set licensed in a way that allows modification and redistribution?

chii 3y ago
> licensed in a way that allows modification and redistribution? why does this need to be done? The training is not modification and redistribution. If somebody coerced an AI to output something verbatim (or close enough to be called a modification/derivative), they are infringing copyright as it currently exists. But the AI model itself does not constitute redistribution.
- fouric 3y ago
  > The training is not modification and redistribution. This is incorrect when you consider either the literal way that content licenses are written or the spirit in which they are written. In the literal sense, unless you yourself are privy to cutting-edge research that has solved the problem of "how do you know that the model won't reproduce some of its training data verbatim or with small modifications", no, you cannot guarantee that there won't be redistribution. In the spirit of the way that licenses are written - "redistribution and modification" is meant to control whether you can profit (not necessarily literally - "profit" here can mean in a reputational sense, or being able to build on the work of others before you) from someone else's work/content/effort - and training on the data of people who did definitely not explicitly consent to it, and have not indicated that they're ok with other people taking their work in general, is definitely against that spirit. And, regardless of both of the above - if training is neither modification nor redistribution, then it's a new case that isn't considered by existing content licenses, so the default is "assume consent not given" - training should never be performed on data that isn't explicitly licensed for it or without the creator's consent. Consent is given, never assumed - a license that says "you're allowed to redistribute this content, unmodified" does not say anything about machine learning, and given that you're claiming that training doesn't amount to redistribution - the license simply doesn't say anything about training, and therefore you cannot claim that the author intended for it to be used that way. The attitude raised above is that of entitlement - you feel like you are entitled to use (because training is definitely using) other peoples' work for your own gain without compensating them in any way, and certainly not on their terms.
fennecfoxy 3y ago
As long as it's not regurgitating it wholly then why is there a need for a license? If someone uses the phrase "and with that there's a tremendous implicit shift" for the first time in a copyright text, then after having read that my brain regurgitates it as I'm writing my own text, and I include that phrase. Is that plagiarism? Because it would be a ridiculous precedent to be honest, regurgitation is most of what our species does. I feel like, as other have pointed out, modern models learn in roughly the same way we do (but with very limited scope) and that idk, it's a shock to people that we do the same things as these models do? But because it's a model doing it and not a person it's intrinsically bad or something
- fouric 3y ago
  See my below comment, which covers: > As long as it's not regurgitating it wholly ...because (1) we currently have no guarantees that a model won't regurgitate it wholly (or enough that it's infringing according to the law and/or common sense) and (2) because the model itself is either (a) modification and redistribution of the content (in which case it violates those licenses) or (b) some new act not covered by existing copyright law, in which case the authors haven't consented to it because the licenses they've distributed their content under only cover the modification and redistribution cases. > regurgitation is most of what our species does Sure, there's a continuous spectrum from repeating a single new word ("jank") to a whole book - and one is clearly copyright infringement, and the other isn't - but you still have to acknowledge that partial reproductions of an artistic works can still be owned by the author. A single chapter of Harry Potter is still owned by J.K. Rowling. > But because it's a model doing it and not a person it's intrinsically bad or something You act like it's somehow not obvious that a model is not a person, and vastly different sets of moral codes and legal rules apply to each.

by fouric 3y ago

> These creators have not asked for a return, so what makes training an AI any different? Is every work in the training set licensed in a way that allows modification and redistribution?

chii 3y ago

> licensed in a way that allows modification and redistribution? why does this need to be done? The training is not modification and redistribution. If somebody coerced an AI to output something verbatim (or close enough to be called a modification/derivative), they are infringing copyright as it currently exists. But the AI model itself does not constitute redistribution.

fouric 3y ago
> The training is not modification and redistribution. This is incorrect when you consider either the literal way that content licenses are written or the spirit in which they are written. In the literal sense, unless you yourself are privy to cutting-edge research that has solved the problem of "how do you know that the model won't reproduce some of its training data verbatim or with small modifications", no, you cannot guarantee that there won't be redistribution. In the spirit of the way that licenses are written - "redistribution and modification" is meant to control whether you can profit (not necessarily literally - "profit" here can mean in a reputational sense, or being able to build on the work of others before you) from someone else's work/content/effort - and training on the data of people who did definitely not explicitly consent to it, and have not indicated that they're ok with other people taking their work in general, is definitely against that spirit. And, regardless of both of the above - if training is neither modification nor redistribution, then it's a new case that isn't considered by existing content licenses, so the default is "assume consent not given" - training should never be performed on data that isn't explicitly licensed for it or without the creator's consent. Consent is given, never assumed - a license that says "you're allowed to redistribute this content, unmodified" does not say anything about machine learning, and given that you're claiming that training doesn't amount to redistribution - the license simply doesn't say anything about training, and therefore you cannot claim that the author intended for it to be used that way. The attitude raised above is that of entitlement - you feel like you are entitled to use (because training is definitely using) other peoples' work for your own gain without compensating them in any way, and certainly not on their terms.

fennecfoxy 3y ago

As long as it's not regurgitating it wholly then why is there a need for a license? If someone uses the phrase "and with that there's a tremendous implicit shift" for the first time in a copyright text, then after having read that my brain regurgitates it as I'm writing my own text, and I include that phrase. Is that plagiarism? Because it would be a ridiculous precedent to be honest, regurgitation is most of what our species does. I feel like, as other have pointed out, modern models learn in roughly the same way we do (but with very limited scope) and that idk, it's a shock to people that we do the same things as these models do? But because it's a model doing it and not a person it's intrinsically bad or something

fouric 3y ago
See my below comment, which covers: > As long as it's not regurgitating it wholly ...because (1) we currently have no guarantees that a model won't regurgitate it wholly (or enough that it's infringing according to the law and/or common sense) and (2) because the model itself is either (a) modification and redistribution of the content (in which case it violates those licenses) or (b) some new act not covered by existing copyright law, in which case the authors haven't consented to it because the licenses they've distributed their content under only cover the modification and redistribution cases. > regurgitation is most of what our species does Sure, there's a continuous spectrum from repeating a single new word ("jank") to a whole book - and one is clearly copyright infringement, and the other isn't - but you still have to acknowledge that partial reproductions of an artistic works can still be owned by the author. A single chapter of Harry Potter is still owned by J.K. Rowling. > But because it's a model doing it and not a person it's intrinsically bad or something You act like it's somehow not obvious that a model is not a person, and vastly different sets of moral codes and legal rules apply to each.