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AI tools like ChatGPT are built on mass copyright infringement
- MWil 3y agoseems more like AI tools should be (if they're not) built on the [insert best argument here for fair use]. then you'll know you're safe.
- DennisP 3y agoIf it weren't for our dumb copyright laws, we could train AI on all the world's books and scientific papers instead of whatever's available online, and take the next great leap in human progress.
- johndhi 3y agoIt is trained on books
- DennisP 3y agoBut how many? It's not like these companies are buying every e-book available.
- dragonwriter 3y agoThe problem with stuff that isn’t available online isn’t copyright laws (online training is done on copyright-protected work on the theory that such training is not a copyright violation for various reasons, notably, in the US, Fair Use, all of which would apply equally to books.) The problem with stuff that isn’t available online is the cost of getting it into a form that can be ingested.
- TheAceOfHearts 3y agoGoogle Books already has a massive archive of the world's books which aren't otherwise accessible. The work was already done and the copyright lobby won.
- runtime_blues 3y agoAnd thus eliminate the reason many (if not most) of these books and webpages existed in the first place. This may be fair in the short term, but on a longer timescale, it leaves us worse off unless LLMs master reasoning about and being creative with things not in their training set. Possible, but a crapshoot right now.
- CamperBob2 3y agoKeep in mind that success at this endeavor means that UBI becomes possible. With UBI we can expect to see more human creativity, not less, as humans are no longer forced to do a robot's job. Copyright law cannot be allowed to stand in the way of this. If it does, break it. It's that important.
- dragonwriter 3y ago> Keep in mind that success at this endeavor means that UBI becomes possible. UBI is always possible. The achievable minimum support level might be higher with this, but also, with this occurring without UBI existing first, so will the concentration of economic and political power in the hands of entrenched interests who would want to prevent UBI (since it would be redistributing resources outward from them.)
- eropple 3y agoIn absolutely no way, no way at all, does any of this imply that UBI will exist. It is no more reasonable to expect a society structurally against the idea that suffering should be avoided because we can avoid it to adopt UBI because of large language models than any other reason. Penury (for others) is a feature, not a bug, here. Couple "the cruelty is the point" with figuring out exactly who will be giving up resources for UBI, and you have a very long road to hoe to make that a reality.
- feoren 3y ago> Keep in mind that success at this endeavor means that UBI becomes possible UBI is already technologically possible. Yes, as automation becomes even more powerful and abundant, the feasible payouts from UBI will increase. That's never been the problem. The problem is that hundreds of millions of Americans (and a significant portion of everyone else in the world) would rather live in poverty as indentured servants to their rich masters than ever see those people benefit even a tiny bit from any government policy. Cruelty and suffering is literally what they want in the world; they fight tooth and nail to prevent anything that might uplift all of humanity (themselves included). They are deeply disturbed, horrible, irredeemable pieces of shit, and they're the majority. And the very tiny minority of people who could ever do anything about this are exactly the ones who are poised to take all the benefits from automation and AI. I'm not scared of AI. I'm scared of humans. And very soon, the humans who already own everything are going to have no need for the rest of us.
- balderdash 3y agoOr alternatively AI companies could license the copyrighted work like everyone else if they want to use it…
- smoldesu 3y agoLukewarm take: Copyright is based on mass freedom infringement. If you publish something, you should be prepared for others to reproduce it and take it without credit. This is particularly true on mediums like the internet, where the net cost of copying data is effectively nothing. I'll entertain arguments from either side of the infringement debate, but this opinion piece reads more like a reactionary defense of copyright rather than a measured response. These damages are... not that significant. It feels like Big Tech swooping in to defend Open Source not because they care about freedom, but because without it they would have no software. But instead of copyleft, it's copyright. Hmm.
- 1827163 3y agoYes, I have a similar attitude myself, to ignore copyright law for personal non-commercial usage. But if I want to do anything commercial, then I've got to respect it. That's my compromise stance on it.
- feikname 3y ago> If you publish something, you should be prepared for others to reproduce it and take it without credit. > the net cost of copying data is effectively nothing. Since the cost of including the author and the link to original work is so cheap I dont see why not have the courtesy of adding that info. They're are already doing the work for free, recognition is the least you could pay in respect for it. Granted, sometimes things are a complex tree of authorship transformations and it's an interesting question of how far back you d go for that but sometimes its pretty cut and dry too.
- oh_sigh 3y agoI find it somewhat problematic that the author does not disclose that she built her career not just around intellectual property, but specifically the business of licensing content. On one hand, that makes her an expert in the legal aspects of this case. On the other hand, generated content presents a substantial threat to her current income stream.
- naet 3y ago"As a former copyright startup founder equipped with a law degree and a long-standing career at the intersection of intellectual property (IP) law, media and tech..." Seems like the author was pretty clear to me about their history.
- version_five 3y agoNah, the same description (minus the startup) could apply to Micheal Geist who would have a very different perspective and would fall much closer to what most would consider a neutral student of technology and copyright law.
- version_five 3y agoThe time for copyright has long passed anyway. It's not clear to me that any infringement actually takes place in training AI, and I think we've all seen the arguments. But even if it did, it just means that "infringement" is a stupid construct that needs to be done away with. Intellectual property as a whole is a failed experiment that doesn't actually spur creation, which the the argued point for why the rest of us give up natural rights. FWIW, the author appears to be the founder or former founder of Licensy - you can guess what it's about, so I wouldn't take the article as a neutral legal opinion anyway.
- sokoloff 3y agoHow many blockbuster movies do you expect would be created if copyright infringement were "done away with"? How many songs would be created? Books authored? Copyright's current state might be excessive, but doing away with it entirely is almost surely not the answer.
- refulgentis 3y agoMotte and Bailey, broad claim is all copyright is destroyed and no production will be done, narrow claim is it’s disruptive economically that the AI gets to look at webpages.
- version_five 3y agoI don't belive the richness of culture would diminish in any way, and I can see a case that it would increase. Imagine that all the effort that goes to milking tired movie and song copyrights to extract value went into new stuff. Things might look slightly different, but I don't see that they could be worse.
- balderdash 3y agoIn order for your argument to be true - you either believe that: a) a copyright holder’s ability to monetize their work would not be impacted, or b) that all the people that currently make their living creating copyrighted works, would continue to invest their time and money to produce their works regardless of their ability to be compensated I personally find both premises to be unsupportable.
- koboll 3y agoCopyright infringement is when you take copyrighted work and distribute it directly, or so close to directly that it can't be said to be "transformative". Obviously LLM outputs are transformative, so this argument falls completely flat. As the writer is a copyright lawyer, it's hard to conclude anything other than they are knowingly lying, or at minimum wishcasting what they want the law to say instead of what it does say. I think the misconception stems from the laymen understanding of copyright clipping off the last part of that sentence so it's just "Copyright infringement is when you take copyrighted work". Proof of the success of industry campaigns to vilify things like taping broadcast television.
- version_five 3y ago"You wouldn't send an http GET request to a car"
- nonethewiser 3y agoThats true
- dragonwriter 3y ago... well, DELETE is more fun.
- dingledork69 3y agoLLMs are just a novel compression algorithm.
- fooker 3y agoHumans are just novel compression algorithms, our education systems reflect this! :)
- version_five 3y agoImagine someone built a 100 trillion parameter model, Greg, who is a personal assistant. Greg had a context length of a billion tokens, and he can search the web and tell you what he's found. His memory is so good that he can quote verbatim the full text of anything he's read. It's not even compression, it's just straight up storage. Should you have to pay royalties to everyone whose content you ask Greg to look at? What if Greg isn't an llm and he's your browser cache? Are you still infringing copyright?
- cft 3y ago"As a former copyright startup founder " did he mean he's an aspiring patent troll?
- oittaa 3y agoHe basically said the quiet part loud.
- Animats 3y agoProbably not. Humans are trained by reading books and writing something similar, but not identical. Unless what comes out looks a lot like a specific thing that went in, it's probably not copyright infringement in the US. Artists making copies of famous pictures is a standard part of artist training. Tribute bands are a thing. Elvis impersonators are a mini-industry. The lawsuits so far tend to involve "passing off" new work as someone else's work, as with that ML-generated popular song passed off as a new work by a major artist. That's not a copyright issue. That's ordinary fraud. The bitching from writers and musicians reflects not that they're being ripped off, but that they're being out-produced. Authors didn't expect to be in the position of John Henry vs. the steam hammer. Now they are.
- feoren 3y agoIf I listen to 1000 pop songs and then write my own that's different from all of them, that's not copyright infringement. If I listen to 1000 pop songs and then write one that's nearly exactly the same as one of them, that absolutely is copyright infringement and I would most likely lose a lawsuit. The fact that I listened to 999 other songs does not absolve me of the infringement. Most modern neural nets, and certainly LLMs, are overparameterized, which means they are completely capable of regurgitating exact training instances. They can and do repeat copyrighted training data verbatim. It's absolutely copyright infringement when that happens. I anticipate AI researchers will soon come up with a way to ensure that outputs are a sufficient distance from all training inputs -- to essentially "block" direct regurgitation as valid output, with a tunable "max similarity" set to a safe distance. At that point we can start being more confident that our AI output is genuinely transformative and safe from (valid!) lawsuit. > The bitching from writers and musicians reflects not that they're being ripped off, but that they're being out-produced. This comes across as quite heartless. It will be interesting to see whether your view on this changes when AI starts making obsolete whatever you have spent your life specializing in.
- toomuchtodo 3y agoI do not mind being made redundant by AI. I'll go become an electrician, general contractor, or something else you're not going to automate in my lifetime. The problem isn't the automation, its what happens if the usual Capital subjects capture all the gains vs them being distributed as excess across the populace. EDIT: We should welcome automation and destruction of work where a machine can do it better. We fear it because of a broken socioeconomic system. Agree we should probably put breaks on anything so disruptive unless people impacted have some safeguards, because if you don't, what good is progress for progress' sake? It then becomes no different than bullshit jobs.
- lvl102 3y agoThis is why all of this AI stuff needs to be open source and in public domain.
- gmuslera 3y agoProbably the biggest copyright infringement is related to open licenses. Is the kind of code easier to scrape, but which licenses have some restrictions on how it can be used, like including the license file or that the code that you based on it must have the same freedoms as the original code (I.e. not using it in closed source commercial programs). Probably the same goes for open content licenses.
- fooker 3y agoIf it's a useful technology, no amount of lawyering will stop it. If you don't have it, your competitors will, and your people will use the competitors software anyway.
- kfarr 3y agoYouTube built an audience on mass copyright infringement over a decade ago, I think the cat is out of the bag.
- guardiangod 3y agoWhat distinguishes a transformation function like a human (20+ years of education with different input->output) vs a transformation function of a computer? (20k hours of training->output) What about musician training? Movie directors?
- feoren 3y agoI strongly doubt anyone will care about how many years you've trained as an author if you blatantly rip off Harry Potter and sell it. Who cares? Why would that even come up at trial? That has nothing to do with anything. It's just: (a) is it so similar to the original as to be considered derivative? (b) did the author have any exposure at all to the original? Movies, music, books: it doesn't matter. Lots of people are focusing on lots of red herrings in this thread. If the AI outputs its own copyrighted training data verbatim, it's copyright infringement, full stop.
- Riverheart 3y agoHumans aren’t software and laws were designed around humans for the benefit of other humans. Or at least the last time I checked nobody had forked my brain on GitHub or uploaded me to Sourceforge.
- bradreaves2 3y ago[dead]
- dataviz1000 3y agoThey output the most likely token (unless I'm mistaking) which means tools like ChatGPT are the ultimate prior art machines. They answer what is the most parallel amongst similar sources.For example, when I ask ChatGPT to build a state machine, the state machine it attempts to build is the sum of all prior art not any one specific copyrighted machine.
- Exuma 3y agoNow here's an opinion I don't care about.
- dragonwriter 3y agoIn the US, Copyright is not viewed as a natural property right but a contingent property interest for the limited purpose of promoting “the progress of science and useful arts”. Pointing out that a major advancement would be foreclosed by a proposed interpretation of the scope of copyright law is an argument that that interpretation is either an incorrect interpretation of the statute or an area where the statute conflicts with its Constitutional purpose. Of course, the Globe and Mail is Canadian, but, is Canadian law the applicable governing law here?
- feoren 3y agoI don't take it as a given that it's necessary to use copyrighted works without permission to get most of the benefit of LLMs and other AI. There are many options: 1. The benefactors of these models can offer to pay a small fee to the copyright holders for inclusion of their work in the training set. Given that these models have the potential to be literally the most monetarily valuable products ever created in the history of mankind, paying the people who allowed them to exist doesn't seem like an unreasonable ask to me. Obviously people who refused would not have their works included. 2. The model can be trained on public works. Sometimes this is plenty, sometimes not. 3. Hordes of human beings can be paid to contribute to the training data set, Mechanical-Turk-style or just via direct employment. This is already necessary to curate and polish the input data. None of these seem like outlandish requests for something that will eventually be worth trillions of dollars per year. Consider the opposite: we give an exception to giant corporations and say "yeah feel free to just take whatever copyrighted work and use it however with no compensation." Artists and authors are being replaced by these outputs. What motivation do they have to create, knowing that their work will be immediately stolen by giant corporations for use in building the tool that makes them obsolete? How is that promoting “the progress of science and useful arts”? I would like to see more high-speed railway exist. By your argument, land ownership is problematic because it prevents cool things like high-speed rail, and therefore we should just plow on through everyone's land for the greater good without compensation. I say: Eminent Domain is a useful last resort to make cool things happen, but at least compensate the people you're trampling on.
- 3y ago
- riskneutral 3y agoTime for copyright laws to be rewritten then.
- headcanon 3y agoThe purpose of copyright is to incentivize the creation of art by fairly compensating the creators. If creators cannot be compensated fairly, then artists cannot devote their full efforts to being creative, and thus art and innovation stagnates. The problem is that under current copyright law, having to purchase a distribution license for everything an AI learns in its training data would be cost prohibitive, to say the least, which also stagnates art and innovation. I imagine a future where much of human effort is ultimately directed towards creating ground-truth data for a generative AI, whether that be text, pictures, art, or other media. I have a writer friend for whom this is happening already. We need to somehow incentivize ground-truth collection, and we don't have a way to do that right now apart from wages, which IMO is not sufficient. To me, the question is not whether or not AI violates copyright, because we're clearly in new territory here. The question is, how do we properly compensate folks who are creating that ground-truth data? Do we need to restructure our economy from the ground up, or is there a path from the current capitalist economic model to doing this?
- al2o3cr 3y agoCynical prediction: this will end up with copyright laws for words even dumber than the ones for music, where putting three notes in sequence can become EXCLUSIVE CORPORATE PROPERTY if you have enough lawyers.
- nobodyandproud 3y agoIf so, this proves that copyright as we know it today hinders progress of the arts and sciences.
- perrohunter 3y agoThere's no reproduction, it's just reading the text.
- thomastjeffery 3y agoThere are two ways to end up with a similar artwork: 1. Create enough art in the same restricted domain, and some works will happen to look similar to others. 2. Use aspects of a work in the process of creating another. Without enough process, the result will resemble the original. LLMs pretend to do #1: They first model a collection of works - called the training corpus - to implicitly generate a domain. Everything that is "hallucinated" by that model is restricted to that domain. The entire goal of an LLM is to resemble the training corpus. The only interesting part is "in what way" that resemblance appears. For example, an infamous paper illustrated that after being trained against valid Othello games (written as sequential piece positions), GPT can hallucinate a valid Othello game move. Does this mean that the game moves are novel art? Of course not! They are the result of the training corpus being modeled through a transformer. This is method #2 masquerading as method #1.
- nokya 3y agoFacebook was exactly built on the same premise: stealing massive databases from others (i.e., women profiles and photos hosted in student associations and sororities websites). Look how justice responded when MZ was sued: first, by his university, then by the justice system. None did anything. I'll let you just imagine what would have happened if MZ was of another ethnicity. Well, not only ethnicity but the other factor is a taboo even here.