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I think this should generally be true. The aggregation performed by model training is highly lossy and the model itself is a derived work at worst and is certai

I think this should generally be true. The aggregation performed by model training is highly lossy and the model itself is a derived work at worst and is certainly fair use. It may produce stuff that violates copyright, but the way you use or distribute the product of the model that can violate copyright. Making it write code that’s a clone of copyright code or making it make pictures with copy right imagery in it or making it reproduce books etc etc, then distributing the output, would be where the copyright violation occurs.

mannyv 3y ago
There's no difference between an art student looking through a museum or archives for ideas and an AI using the material for training. Same could be said for reading. A medical student reading through textbooks or a writer who reads is essentially what an AI is doing. You can ask an art student to create something in a certain style. You can get writes to write in a certain style. Equivalent.
- Retric 3y ago
  AI models will make 1:1 copies of training data where artists try and avoid doing so. It’s common to obscure this copying by intentionally inserting lossy steps, but making an MP3 isn’t a new work. It’s most obvious when large blocks of text are recreated, but the core mechanism doesn’t go away simply because you obscure the underlying output. “Extracting Training Data from Large Language Models” https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.07805 https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.07805
  - Ukv 3y ago
    > AI models will make 1:1 copies of training data where artists [...] In general I don't think this is the case, assuming you mean generations output from popular text-to-image models. (edit: replied before their comment was edited to include the part on text generation models) For DALL-E 2: I've never seen anyone able to provide a link of supposed copying. Even if you specifically ask it for some prominent work, you get a rendition not particularly closer than what a human artist could do: https://i.imgur.com/TEXXZ4a.png https://i.imgur.com/TEXXZ4a.png For Stable Diffusion: it's true that Google did manage, by generating hundreds of millions of images using captions of the most-duped training images and attempting techniques like selecting by CLIP embeddings, to get 109 "near-copies of training examples". But I'd speculate, particularly if you're using the model normally and not peeking inside to intentionally try to get it to regurgitate, that this is still probably lower than the human baseline rate of intentional/accidental copying. It does at least seem lower than the intra-training-set rate: https://i.imgur.com/zOiTIxF.png https://i.imgur.com/zOiTIxF.png (though many may be properly-authorized derivative works)
    - Retric 3y ago
      The more degrees of freedom the less likely independent creation rather than copping occurred. LLM’s recreating training material causes real issues such as Google’s dealing with PII leaks: https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/12/privacy-considerations-in-large.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/12/privacy-considerations-in-... If one prompts the GPT-2 language model with the prefix “East Stroudsburg Stroudsburg...”, it will autocomplete a long block of text that contains the full name, phone number, email address, and physical address of a particular person whose information was included in GPT-2’s training data.
      - Ukv 3y ago
        Privacy, where there's a problem if some original data can be inferred/made out (even using a white box attack against the model), is a higher bar than whether an image generator avoids copyright-infringing output under non-adversarial usage. Additionally, compared to image data, text is more prone to exact matches due to lower dimensionality and usually training with less data per parameter. While it's still a topic deserving of research and mitigation, by the time your information has been scooped up by Common Crawl and trained on by some LLM it's probably in many other places that attackers are more realistically likely to look (search engine caches, Common Crawl downloads, sites specifically for scooping credentials, ...) before trying to extract it from the LLM.
        Retric 3y ago
        The privacy issue isn’t just about the data being available as people’s names, addresses, and phone numbers are generally available. The issue is if they show up as part of some meme chat and then you as the LLM creator get sued because people start harassing them. In terms of copyright infringement the bar is quite low, and copying is a basic part of how these algorithms work. This may or may not be an issue for you personally but it is a large land mine for commercial use especially if you’re independently creating one of these systems.
        Ukv 3y ago
  - astrange 3y ago
    Inserting lossy steps seems to work pretty well though. https://twitter.com/giannis_daras/status/1663710057400524800/photo/1 https://twitter.com/giannis_daras/status/1663710057400524800...
    - deleted 3y ago
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- Trombone12 3y ago
  Indeed, if we don't care at all about "x is y" statements being true, they can be "applied" to reading. To determine if an art student and DALL-E really are the same, despite their very obvious difference (one has arms and is part of a net of social relations while the other is intellectual property), will take some actual arguments which I presume you of course had planned to provide in a second comment from the start.
  - kbelder 3y ago
    A shortcut to internet debates: Count up the snarky responses on each side... the side with the lowest total is probably correct. Usually the more snark, the less substance. Just a rule of thumb.
- antiterra 3y ago
  A student is a human and AI is not. We don’t have to apply the law equally to both regardless of how similar the method is.
  - verdverm 3y ago
    We also don't have to discriminate either, the opinions are varied across people and cultures.
- roughly 3y ago
  I've been wondering why this argument's not been sitting with me, and I think it's for the same reason that the courts have ruled that the FBI needed a warrant to put a tracker on someone's car, as opposed to following someone - the scale of action enabled is the differentiator. A student learning from other artists is still limited in their output to human-scale - they must physically create the new thing. An AI model is not - the difference between a student learning from an artist and an AI model doing so is the AI model can flood the market with knockoffs at a magnitude the student cannot meet. Similarly, the AI model can simultaneously learn from and mimic the entirety of the art community, where the student has to focus and take time. If this weren't capitalism - if artists weren't literally reliant on their art to eat, and if the market captured by the AI model didn't inevitably consolidate wealth - then we might be able to ignore that, but we do, and we can't ignore the economic effects when we consider scale like this.
  - MercurialBlue 3y ago
    I do agree with you, but honestly I don't even think that's the biggest problem with these arguments. I'm just sitting here wondering why it is even relevant whether the "AI" is "copying", "learning", "thinking", or whatever, why is any of that important? Does AI have human rights? Well, perhaps in a couple hundred years, if humanity manages not to self-extinguish by then. It's not like you can sue AI if you think it plagiarized your work, no. Obviously not, so why the hell are we discussing that? "AI" is just a piece of software, a tool, it doesn't matter what it's doing, what matters is what the user is doing, the fact of the matter is that these multi-billionaire corporations are taking everyone's honest work, putting it into a computer, and selling the output. They didn't do any "learning", they just used your data and made money out of it, it isn't a stretch to say they simply sold your work. EDIT: Perhaps one day the day AI will have human rights, make its own money, and pay bills. That will be the day any of this nonsensical discussion will be anything but useless.
    - anshorei 3y ago
      > these multi-billionaire corporations are taking everyone's honest work, putting it into a computer, and selling the output And then there's the tens of thousands of people training models and making them freely available to everyone. What I fear most is that regulations introduced "to stop" the multi-billionaire corporations will in fact make sure they're the only ones with the resources to comply with the regulations.
- numpad0 3y ago
  I'm generally against "AI same as human learning" argument but I don't think you could quite monetize recreated copyrighted arts as an art student. Van Gogh is only okay because the original artist isn't quite around.
  - nancyhn 3y ago
    Can anyone monetize Van Gogh regardless? If a human or AI reproduces a Van Gogh painting or derivative, it's not worth anything on the market. Only original pieces, by a human artist, has real value. A Van Gogh painting is worth millions of dollars only because it was created by Van Gogh. A reproduction is approximately worth the paper it's printed on.
    - dendrite9 3y ago
      Sure they can: https://www.thevangoghstore.com/ https://www.thevangoghstore.com/ https://www.vangoghmuseumshop.com/en/shop https://www.vangoghmuseumshop.com/en/shop https://www.etsy.com/market/van_gogh_merch https://www.etsy.com/market/van_gogh_merch
      - pseudo0 3y ago
        The copies are commodities, produced and sold for approximately the cost of production. The original is a one of a kind, unique work that has its value increased by millions of imitations hanging on people's walls. That's the way I see AI-generated work going in the long run. The artists who have distinctive styles popular for image generation have seen a huge surge in attention, which I suspect will translate into making their original work more valuable.
- bakugo 3y ago
  One day we'll have a thread about AI where someone doesn't use the "machines deserve the same rights as people" non-argument. But this isn't that thread.
  - CatWChainsaw 3y ago
    Actually, the people who say things like this are arguing for the degradation of human rights, because there's significant overlap between this and "humans aren't special" and "AI is our successor species". It's nihilism all the way down but they're forcing the rest of the world on their little suicide charge and expecting everyone else to be just as enthusiastic about it as they are.
- musicale 3y ago
  > There's no difference between an art student looking through a museum or archives for ideas and an AI using the material for training. A few notable differences: 1. Scale: a single art student can't view millions of works in a week. 2. Duplication: a single art student's brain can't be cloned or downloaded into another art student's brain. 3. Speed: a single art student cannot draw or paint thousands of images in a week. 4. Ownership: the software is likely owned and controlled by a large corporation, while the art student (hopefully) isn't.
  - failbuffer 3y ago
    If an art student was able to gain those abilities, would you then argue they couldn't legally create art?
    - impomura 3y ago
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    - deleted 3y ago
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  - nl 3y ago
    These are all true. But they apply equally to a search engine index and that has already been found not to violate copyright and to be very useful to society.
    - musicale 3y ago
      > These are all true That was the point. Whether or not there is copyright infringement going on (or whether copyright law is an appropriate regulatory framework for ML models), I frequently see claims like "ML training is no different from what humans do" repeated, in spite of its incorrectness.
  - bastawhiz 3y ago
    Notably none of those things, if they did apply to the art student, are copyright violations. The speed, scale, versatility, and ownership of a machine learning model has no bearing on its ability to violate copyright.
- jtode 3y ago
  Big difference between the art student producing work and getting the credit vs you taking the art student's work and taking the credit for it. The AI is not a human, but what you are doing is the same thing, if you claim the output as your work because you wrote the prompt.
  - LadyCailin 3y ago
    I couldn’t help but notice you didn’t credit any web browser in this comment. And rightfully so. Software doesn’t need or care about being credited. Well, usually. Sent from my iPhone.
    - deleted 3y ago
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    - jtode 3y ago
      Lol sure buddy, that browser is ai powered and I didn't give the browser an address, I have it a prompt describing the type of site that I would like it to generate for me. Edit: and the browser have the same page to you and me. I bet you look at everything and think about how you can make lazy money with it.
- carom 3y ago
  Conflating training a model with human learning is wrong. When training a model you are deriving a function that takes some input and produces an output. The issue with copyright and licensing here is that a copy is made and reproduced numerous times when training. The model is not walking around a museum where it is an authorized viewing. It is not a being learning a skill. It is a function. The further issue is that it may output material that competes with the original. So you may have copyright violation in distribution of the dataset or a model's output.
  - bastawhiz 3y ago
    I don't fundamentally disagree with you, but what you are saying doesn't hold water. > a copy is made and reproduced numerous times when training. Casually browsing the web creates millions of copies of what are likely the same images and text that models are trained on. Computers cannot move information, they can only copy it and delete the original. Splitting hairs over the semantics of what it means to "copy" isn't a strong argument. > where it is an authorized viewing What exactly is an unauthorized viewing of a publicly accessible piece of content online that has been hyperlinked to? If we assume things like robots.txt are respected, what makes the access of that data improper? > it may output material that competes with the original An art student could create a forgery. I could craft for myself a replica of a luxury bag. But that's not a crime unless it's done with the intention of deceiving someone or profiting from the work. Intent, after all, is nine tenths of the law. It's an important right that you should be able to do and create things, even if the sale or distribution of the outputs of those things are prohibited. The ability for a model to produce content which couldn't be distributed shouldn't preempt its existence. > So you may have copyright violation in distribution of the dataset or a model's output And neither of those things are the act of training or distributing the model itself!
    - carom 3y ago
      There is quite a bit of precedent for "making copies of digital things is copyright infringement". Look at lawsuits from the Napster era. [1] What makes the use improper? Licenses. Terms of service. Mostly licenses though. For example, all the images on Flickr that were uploaded under Creative Commons licenses (e.g. non-commercial) have now been used in a commercial capacity by a company to create and sell a product. Similarly, code is on Github with specific licenses with specific terms. Copilot is a derivative work of that code, the license terms of that code (e.g. GPL, non-commercial) should extend to the new function that was derived from it. The reason I mention competition with the original is the fair use test (USA). When courts decide whether something is fair use they consider a few aspects. Two important ones are whether it is commercial, and whether it is a substitute for the original. When art models output something in the style of a living artist, it is essentially a direct substitute for that person. Sure, I can make a shirt with Spider Man on it and give it to my brother, but if a company were to use what I made or I tried to sell it, I would expect a cease and desist from Disney. Training the model may very well be a copyright issue. The images have been copied, they are being used. Whether that falls under fair use will likely be determined on a case by case basis in court. I do not believe closed commercial models like Copilot or Dall-e will pass a fair use test. There is a lot of money involved here though, so we will need to wait for years before we have answers. 1. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/sep/11/minnesota-woman-songs-illegally-downloaded https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/sep/11/minnesota...
krapp 3y ago
>The aggregation performed by model training is highly lossy and the model itself is a derived work at worst and is certainly fair use. I mean, I've literally gotten the Superman logo in Stable Diffusion without even trying, so it isn't that lossy.
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  And if you use it, you’re violating copyright. But you will find no copy of the logo in the model data. The model is way too small to contain its training imagery from an information theoretic point of view.
  - falcolas 3y ago
    > But you will find no copy of the logo in the model data. You wont find a copy of a plaintext in a cyphertext. But you can still extract the plaintext from the cyphertext.
    - fnordpiglet 3y ago
      That’s an example of a two way lossless transformation. The data is certainly encoded in cypher text and is directly retrievable and has no other purpose than to contain the original data. The model you can’t directly retrieve the original data, and it has more purposes than producing the original. It requires you to specifically manipulate it to produce the copyrighted material, and just because copyrighted material was used to train it doesn’t mean it can even reproduce a facsimile. I think a better counter example is mpeg and other lossy formats. But again, the format does nothing but carry the original even if it’s not a perfect reproduction. You can’t use it in any other way. Its expressed intent is the reproduction of the copyrighted material with no modification or improvement or derivation. These models are not trained with the intent or purpose of only producing the copyrighted materials. It requires your specific action to induce the reproductions if it’s even possible, but it generally serves other purposes in all other uses. This is more like a xerox than not - you can certainly violate copyright with a xerox. But the existence of the xerox itself isn’t to violate copyright. It’s for other purposes. The ambiguity obviously comes in that a xerox machine wasn’t built by scanning all documents on earth first. But I think the very act of mixing all the other images and documents together into the model, which again, is just a statistical aggregate of everything that was trained with mushed together, turns it into at worst a derived work that falls under fair use.
sandworm101 3y ago
No. Making a single copy for your own use is still a copyright violation. There are exceptions (fair use, nomitive use etc) but just because people are rarely sued for personal copying doesnt equate to that copying being permitted. And trademark issues, such as the other commenter generating the superman logo, are subject to a host of other rules.
- vosper 3y ago
  > No. Making a single copy for your own use is still a copyright violation. In some jurisdictions, perhaps, but not in all of them. There isn't one set of universal copyright law in the world. Eg in New Zealand you are allowed to make a single copy of any sound recording for your own personal use, per device that you will play the sound recording on. I'm sure there are other examples in other countries. https://www.consumer.org.nz/articles/copyright-law https://www.consumer.org.nz/articles/copyright-law
  - adhesive_wombat 3y ago
    This is the same in the UK (and not only for sound). If you own the copy, you can make personal copies. You can't share them, and you have to own the original.
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  Training a model isn’t making a copy for your own use, it’s not making a copy at all. It’s converting the original media into a statistical aggregate combined with a lot of other stuff. There’s no copy of the original, even if it’s able to produce a similar product to the original. That’s the specific thing - the aggregation and the lack of direct reproduction in any form is fundamentally not reproducing or copying the material. The fact it can be induced to produce copyright material, as you can induce a Xerox to reproduce copyright material, doesn’t make the original model or its training a violation of copyright. If it’s sole purpose was reproduction and distribution of the material or if it carried a copy of the original around and produced it on demand, that would be a different story. But it’s not doing any of that, not even remotely. All this said, it’s a highly dynamic area - it depends on the local law, the media and medium, and the question hasn’t been fully explored. I’m wagering though when it comes down to it, the model isn’t violating copyright for these reasons, but you can certainly violate copyrights using a model.
deleted 3y ago
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nl 3y ago
I strongly agree with this. There's a distinction between "learning from" and "copying". "Learning from" is a transformative process that distills from the observation. This distillation can be as simple as indexing for a search engine, or as complex as a deep neural network. Simply because a neural network can create something that is a copyright violation doesn't mean the training process itself it. A human can see a advertisement for a Marvel movie and then reproduce the Marvel logo. Redistributing (and possibly actually doing that reproduction) that logo is a copyright violation, but the learning process isn't. The neural network is a tool. It's reasonable to be concerned about the loss in employment by people who are affected by generative AI. But I think this is a separate issue to the copyright argument.
- madeofpalk 3y ago
  > A human can see a advertisement for a Marvel movie and then reproduce the Marvel logo. Redistributing (and possibly actually doing that reproduction) that logo is a copyright violation, but the learning process isn't. This then becomes about where the liability of that violation lies, and how attractive that is to companies. A human "learning" the marvel logo and reproducing it is violation. How does OpenAPI fit into this analogy?
  - williamcotton 3y ago
    The liability would lay with the company using the LLM product. This could mean that many companies won’t want to take on the risk unless there is decent tooling around warnings of infringement and listing sources.
    - fnordpiglet 3y ago
      I think liability lies with the person who uses the product to violate copyright. The hosting / producing company didn’t violate copyright if I use their model to make Mickey Mouse pictures. I did.
      - madeofpalk 3y ago
kmod 3y ago
This is the "guns don't kill people, people do" argument. Not saying that that proves things one way or another, just that assigning responsibility is not really a cut and dry question and many people think that it's important to look prior to the final interaction IANAL but I believe in the US tools that are designed to circumvent copyright are illegal, which makes sense to me inasmuch as one believes that copyright should be protected
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  Except these models are not designed to circumvent copyright, in fact their primary purpose is to generate non-copyright and non-copyrightable output. It can be induced to product facsimiles of copyright material, but that’s explicitly not the purpose or intent and requires positive action on the users behalf to occur.
  - kmod 3y ago
    I'm saying `A => B` (something should be illegal if it's primarily for crime) and you're saying `-A` (LLMs are not primarily for crime), which is not really a disagreement. My point is disagreeing with the GGP who argued that `-B regardless of A` (LLMs should not be a crime regardless of whether they facilitate crime, because it is the end-user who is committing the crime). I happen to mostly believe the conclusion (`-B`) but not the particular argument.
- DennisP 3y ago
  Photocopy machines are great at making copies of copyrighted material, and are completely legal in the US. The entire internet routinely makes copies every time you visit a web page. What's illegal in the US is selling tools for breaking DRM: https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/10/26/us-copyright-office-says-circumventing-drm-repair-certain-electronics-including-phones-smart-speakers-now-legal/ https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/10/26/us-copyright-office... From a quick google, open source tools for breaking DRM are legal, and so is breaking DRM for personal use: https://www.google.com/search?q=are+drm+defeating+tools+illegal+in+us&oq=are+drm+defeating+tools+illegal+in+us https://www.google.com/search?q=are+drm+defeating+tools+ille...
kelnos 3y ago
> The aggregation performed by model training is highly lossy and the model itself is a derived work at worst and is certainly fair use. Lossy or not, the training data provides value. If all the various someones had not spent time making all the stuff that ends up as training data, then the model it trains would not exist. If you are going to use someone else's work in order to make something that you are going to profit off of, I believe that original author should be compensated. And should also be able to decide they don't want their work used in that way. Note that I'm not talking about what existing copyright law says; I'm talking about how I believe we should be regulating this new facet of the industry. > Making it write code that’s a clone of copyright code or making it make pictures with copy right imagery in it or making it reproduce books etc etc, then distributing the output, would be where the copyright violation occurs. How is the end-user supposed to know this? Do we seriously believe that everyone who uses generative AI is going to run the output through some sort of process (assuming one even exists) to ensure it's not a substantial enough copy of something some copyrighted work? I certainly don't think this is going to happen. Regardless, copyright is about distribution. If the a model trained on copyrighted material is considered a copy or derived work of the original work, then distributing that model is, in fact, copyright infringement (absent a successful fair use defense). I'm not saying that's the case, or how a court would look at it, but that's something to consider.
- Dylan16807 3y ago
  > the training data provides value I wish it was easier to build on someone else's copyrighted value. Geforce Now shouldn't have to get permission from game makers to rent out server time for users to play games they already own. Aereo shouldn't have been legally obliterated for the way they rented out DVRs with antennas. Using a sample in a song shouldn't be automatic infringement.
- chii 3y ago
  > distributing that model is, in fact, copyright infringement is it? If i distributed digits of pi (to the umpteenth billion decimals), it theoretically contains copyright information in their digits. The distribution of the copyrighted material is the infringement, but not if the data is _meant_ to produce other effects, and it is reasonable that the data is used for some other purpose _other than_ to replicate the copyrighted works. > the training data provides value. and so does a textbook. A student reading the book (regardless of how that book was obtained - paid or not) does not pay royalties from the knowledge obtained.
__loam 3y ago
The collection of copyright works for the explicit purpose of processing them for a for-profit ML model has not been shown to be fair use, and the fact that many are being marketed as for profit products that meaningfully compete with the original works is a strike against them being fair use.
- robryan 3y ago
  Yeah, if the end result is that the majority of Google searches are answered by a llm trained on their index can they really claim that the whole thing is fair use?
grt_thr 3y ago
I guess I should just never have to pay for another movie since I can't play it back in my head flawlessly.
boringuser2 3y ago
Why should it be true? Remember, you're making an ought statement, not an is statement. Personally, I think it shouldn't be true because large language models are clearly economically and socially destructive. Pretty simple system.
pxoe 3y ago
Some licenses, like CC, have variants that prohibit production of derivatives, or prohibit commercialization, or require licenses or same requirements to be preserved in derivative works. Sweet to see people "warm up" to say stuff like 'well it's just a derived work'. Can we get tech to actually respect the licenses of used works next? It's something that's been asked for all along. Without just going, 'well, it's all fair use' - 'so we'll just ignore all licenses and won't even try to detect or respect licenses and whatever requirements they have'. Sure, it may be "unenforceable", but if tech keeps saying "fuck you" to the creators, and "fuck you specifically to the licenses, we won't even look at them or process them" - creators will keep saying 'well fuck you too' right back. otherwise, it's just talk with no follow through. just dropping words like 'fair use' as a 'get away from liability card', without actually engaging with intellectual property concepts. just to get to use works without respect to artist's will (as it could be expressed in a license), or sometimes even a mention, let alone "compensation" or other "consequence".
- jupp0r 3y ago
  Did you just argue against fair use in general? Everything you wrote applies to it as well. Copyright has limits, it's not like right holders get to determine what those are. It's a balance of rights of creators and users.
  - pxoe 3y ago
    is the use really all that fair, when thousands, if not millions, of works and artists get their works repurposed into services with "subscriptions" and "usage tokens" and other kinds of monetization, while directly competing with and against those very artists? or will it take until some markets would get completely destroyed and overtaken while people get displaced, for people to wake up and go 'wait, was that really "fair"? what happened?' and no, im not really arguing against it. fair use can be great. but shit like that, it's really pushing it to its limits on scope and scale of use and commercialization
    - jupp0r 3y ago
      I think societies haven't really determined what is fair in these cases. To give you a counter example: Millions of young artists look at art museums and incorporate what they see and learn into their own art. Creators of the images they look at get nothing from the proceeds young artists end up earning later in their lives. Is this unfair?

mannyv 3y ago

There's no difference between an art student looking through a museum or archives for ideas and an AI using the material for training. Same could be said for reading. A medical student reading through textbooks or a writer who reads is essentially what an AI is doing. You can ask an art student to create something in a certain style. You can get writes to write in a certain style. Equivalent.

Retric 3y ago
AI models will make 1:1 copies of training data where artists try and avoid doing so. It’s common to obscure this copying by intentionally inserting lossy steps, but making an MP3 isn’t a new work. It’s most obvious when large blocks of text are recreated, but the core mechanism doesn’t go away simply because you obscure the underlying output. “Extracting Training Data from Large Language Models” https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.07805 https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.07805
- Ukv 3y ago
  > AI models will make 1:1 copies of training data where artists [...] In general I don't think this is the case, assuming you mean generations output from popular text-to-image models. (edit: replied before their comment was edited to include the part on text generation models) For DALL-E 2: I've never seen anyone able to provide a link of supposed copying. Even if you specifically ask it for some prominent work, you get a rendition not particularly closer than what a human artist could do: https://i.imgur.com/TEXXZ4a.png https://i.imgur.com/TEXXZ4a.png For Stable Diffusion: it's true that Google did manage, by generating hundreds of millions of images using captions of the most-duped training images and attempting techniques like selecting by CLIP embeddings, to get 109 "near-copies of training examples". But I'd speculate, particularly if you're using the model normally and not peeking inside to intentionally try to get it to regurgitate, that this is still probably lower than the human baseline rate of intentional/accidental copying. It does at least seem lower than the intra-training-set rate: https://i.imgur.com/zOiTIxF.png https://i.imgur.com/zOiTIxF.png (though many may be properly-authorized derivative works)
  - Retric 3y ago
    The more degrees of freedom the less likely independent creation rather than copping occurred. LLM’s recreating training material causes real issues such as Google’s dealing with PII leaks: https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/12/privacy-considerations-in-large.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/12/privacy-considerations-in-... If one prompts the GPT-2 language model with the prefix “East Stroudsburg Stroudsburg...”, it will autocomplete a long block of text that contains the full name, phone number, email address, and physical address of a particular person whose information was included in GPT-2’s training data.
    - Ukv 3y ago
      Privacy, where there's a problem if some original data can be inferred/made out (even using a white box attack against the model), is a higher bar than whether an image generator avoids copyright-infringing output under non-adversarial usage. Additionally, compared to image data, text is more prone to exact matches due to lower dimensionality and usually training with less data per parameter. While it's still a topic deserving of research and mitigation, by the time your information has been scooped up by Common Crawl and trained on by some LLM it's probably in many other places that attackers are more realistically likely to look (search engine caches, Common Crawl downloads, sites specifically for scooping credentials, ...) before trying to extract it from the LLM.
      - Retric 3y ago
        The privacy issue isn’t just about the data being available as people’s names, addresses, and phone numbers are generally available. The issue is if they show up as part of some meme chat and then you as the LLM creator get sued because people start harassing them. In terms of copyright infringement the bar is quite low, and copying is a basic part of how these algorithms work. This may or may not be an issue for you personally but it is a large land mine for commercial use especially if you’re independently creating one of these systems.
        Ukv 3y ago
- astrange 3y ago
  Inserting lossy steps seems to work pretty well though. https://twitter.com/giannis_daras/status/1663710057400524800/photo/1 https://twitter.com/giannis_daras/status/1663710057400524800...
  - deleted 3y ago
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Trombone12 3y ago
Indeed, if we don't care at all about "x is y" statements being true, they can be "applied" to reading. To determine if an art student and DALL-E really are the same, despite their very obvious difference (one has arms and is part of a net of social relations while the other is intellectual property), will take some actual arguments which I presume you of course had planned to provide in a second comment from the start.
- kbelder 3y ago
  A shortcut to internet debates: Count up the snarky responses on each side... the side with the lowest total is probably correct. Usually the more snark, the less substance. Just a rule of thumb.
antiterra 3y ago
A student is a human and AI is not. We don’t have to apply the law equally to both regardless of how similar the method is.
- verdverm 3y ago
  We also don't have to discriminate either, the opinions are varied across people and cultures.
roughly 3y ago
I've been wondering why this argument's not been sitting with me, and I think it's for the same reason that the courts have ruled that the FBI needed a warrant to put a tracker on someone's car, as opposed to following someone - the scale of action enabled is the differentiator. A student learning from other artists is still limited in their output to human-scale - they must physically create the new thing. An AI model is not - the difference between a student learning from an artist and an AI model doing so is the AI model can flood the market with knockoffs at a magnitude the student cannot meet. Similarly, the AI model can simultaneously learn from and mimic the entirety of the art community, where the student has to focus and take time. If this weren't capitalism - if artists weren't literally reliant on their art to eat, and if the market captured by the AI model didn't inevitably consolidate wealth - then we might be able to ignore that, but we do, and we can't ignore the economic effects when we consider scale like this.
- MercurialBlue 3y ago
  I do agree with you, but honestly I don't even think that's the biggest problem with these arguments. I'm just sitting here wondering why it is even relevant whether the "AI" is "copying", "learning", "thinking", or whatever, why is any of that important? Does AI have human rights? Well, perhaps in a couple hundred years, if humanity manages not to self-extinguish by then. It's not like you can sue AI if you think it plagiarized your work, no. Obviously not, so why the hell are we discussing that? "AI" is just a piece of software, a tool, it doesn't matter what it's doing, what matters is what the user is doing, the fact of the matter is that these multi-billionaire corporations are taking everyone's honest work, putting it into a computer, and selling the output. They didn't do any "learning", they just used your data and made money out of it, it isn't a stretch to say they simply sold your work. EDIT: Perhaps one day the day AI will have human rights, make its own money, and pay bills. That will be the day any of this nonsensical discussion will be anything but useless.
  - anshorei 3y ago
    > these multi-billionaire corporations are taking everyone's honest work, putting it into a computer, and selling the output And then there's the tens of thousands of people training models and making them freely available to everyone. What I fear most is that regulations introduced "to stop" the multi-billionaire corporations will in fact make sure they're the only ones with the resources to comply with the regulations.
numpad0 3y ago
I'm generally against "AI same as human learning" argument but I don't think you could quite monetize recreated copyrighted arts as an art student. Van Gogh is only okay because the original artist isn't quite around.
- nancyhn 3y ago
  Can anyone monetize Van Gogh regardless? If a human or AI reproduces a Van Gogh painting or derivative, it's not worth anything on the market. Only original pieces, by a human artist, has real value. A Van Gogh painting is worth millions of dollars only because it was created by Van Gogh. A reproduction is approximately worth the paper it's printed on.
  - dendrite9 3y ago
    Sure they can: https://www.thevangoghstore.com/ https://www.thevangoghstore.com/ https://www.vangoghmuseumshop.com/en/shop https://www.vangoghmuseumshop.com/en/shop https://www.etsy.com/market/van_gogh_merch https://www.etsy.com/market/van_gogh_merch
    - pseudo0 3y ago
      The copies are commodities, produced and sold for approximately the cost of production. The original is a one of a kind, unique work that has its value increased by millions of imitations hanging on people's walls. That's the way I see AI-generated work going in the long run. The artists who have distinctive styles popular for image generation have seen a huge surge in attention, which I suspect will translate into making their original work more valuable.
bakugo 3y ago
One day we'll have a thread about AI where someone doesn't use the "machines deserve the same rights as people" non-argument. But this isn't that thread.
- CatWChainsaw 3y ago
  Actually, the people who say things like this are arguing for the degradation of human rights, because there's significant overlap between this and "humans aren't special" and "AI is our successor species". It's nihilism all the way down but they're forcing the rest of the world on their little suicide charge and expecting everyone else to be just as enthusiastic about it as they are.
musicale 3y ago
> There's no difference between an art student looking through a museum or archives for ideas and an AI using the material for training. A few notable differences: 1. Scale: a single art student can't view millions of works in a week. 2. Duplication: a single art student's brain can't be cloned or downloaded into another art student's brain. 3. Speed: a single art student cannot draw or paint thousands of images in a week. 4. Ownership: the software is likely owned and controlled by a large corporation, while the art student (hopefully) isn't.
- failbuffer 3y ago
  If an art student was able to gain those abilities, would you then argue they couldn't legally create art?
  - impomura 3y ago
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- nl 3y ago
  These are all true. But they apply equally to a search engine index and that has already been found not to violate copyright and to be very useful to society.
  - musicale 3y ago
    > These are all true That was the point. Whether or not there is copyright infringement going on (or whether copyright law is an appropriate regulatory framework for ML models), I frequently see claims like "ML training is no different from what humans do" repeated, in spite of its incorrectness.
- bastawhiz 3y ago
  Notably none of those things, if they did apply to the art student, are copyright violations. The speed, scale, versatility, and ownership of a machine learning model has no bearing on its ability to violate copyright.
jtode 3y ago
Big difference between the art student producing work and getting the credit vs you taking the art student's work and taking the credit for it. The AI is not a human, but what you are doing is the same thing, if you claim the output as your work because you wrote the prompt.
- LadyCailin 3y ago
  I couldn’t help but notice you didn’t credit any web browser in this comment. And rightfully so. Software doesn’t need or care about being credited. Well, usually. Sent from my iPhone.
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  - jtode 3y ago
    Lol sure buddy, that browser is ai powered and I didn't give the browser an address, I have it a prompt describing the type of site that I would like it to generate for me. Edit: and the browser have the same page to you and me. I bet you look at everything and think about how you can make lazy money with it.
carom 3y ago
Conflating training a model with human learning is wrong. When training a model you are deriving a function that takes some input and produces an output. The issue with copyright and licensing here is that a copy is made and reproduced numerous times when training. The model is not walking around a museum where it is an authorized viewing. It is not a being learning a skill. It is a function. The further issue is that it may output material that competes with the original. So you may have copyright violation in distribution of the dataset or a model's output.
- bastawhiz 3y ago
  I don't fundamentally disagree with you, but what you are saying doesn't hold water. > a copy is made and reproduced numerous times when training. Casually browsing the web creates millions of copies of what are likely the same images and text that models are trained on. Computers cannot move information, they can only copy it and delete the original. Splitting hairs over the semantics of what it means to "copy" isn't a strong argument. > where it is an authorized viewing What exactly is an unauthorized viewing of a publicly accessible piece of content online that has been hyperlinked to? If we assume things like robots.txt are respected, what makes the access of that data improper? > it may output material that competes with the original An art student could create a forgery. I could craft for myself a replica of a luxury bag. But that's not a crime unless it's done with the intention of deceiving someone or profiting from the work. Intent, after all, is nine tenths of the law. It's an important right that you should be able to do and create things, even if the sale or distribution of the outputs of those things are prohibited. The ability for a model to produce content which couldn't be distributed shouldn't preempt its existence. > So you may have copyright violation in distribution of the dataset or a model's output And neither of those things are the act of training or distributing the model itself!
  - carom 3y ago
    There is quite a bit of precedent for "making copies of digital things is copyright infringement". Look at lawsuits from the Napster era. [1] What makes the use improper? Licenses. Terms of service. Mostly licenses though. For example, all the images on Flickr that were uploaded under Creative Commons licenses (e.g. non-commercial) have now been used in a commercial capacity by a company to create and sell a product. Similarly, code is on Github with specific licenses with specific terms. Copilot is a derivative work of that code, the license terms of that code (e.g. GPL, non-commercial) should extend to the new function that was derived from it. The reason I mention competition with the original is the fair use test (USA). When courts decide whether something is fair use they consider a few aspects. Two important ones are whether it is commercial, and whether it is a substitute for the original. When art models output something in the style of a living artist, it is essentially a direct substitute for that person. Sure, I can make a shirt with Spider Man on it and give it to my brother, but if a company were to use what I made or I tried to sell it, I would expect a cease and desist from Disney. Training the model may very well be a copyright issue. The images have been copied, they are being used. Whether that falls under fair use will likely be determined on a case by case basis in court. I do not believe closed commercial models like Copilot or Dall-e will pass a fair use test. There is a lot of money involved here though, so we will need to wait for years before we have answers. 1. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/sep/11/minnesota-woman-songs-illegally-downloaded https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/sep/11/minnesota...

krapp 3y ago

>The aggregation performed by model training is highly lossy and the model itself is a derived work at worst and is certainly fair use. I mean, I've literally gotten the Superman logo in Stable Diffusion without even trying, so it isn't that lossy.

fnordpiglet 3y ago
And if you use it, you’re violating copyright. But you will find no copy of the logo in the model data. The model is way too small to contain its training imagery from an information theoretic point of view.
- falcolas 3y ago
  > But you will find no copy of the logo in the model data. You wont find a copy of a plaintext in a cyphertext. But you can still extract the plaintext from the cyphertext.
  - fnordpiglet 3y ago
    That’s an example of a two way lossless transformation. The data is certainly encoded in cypher text and is directly retrievable and has no other purpose than to contain the original data. The model you can’t directly retrieve the original data, and it has more purposes than producing the original. It requires you to specifically manipulate it to produce the copyrighted material, and just because copyrighted material was used to train it doesn’t mean it can even reproduce a facsimile. I think a better counter example is mpeg and other lossy formats. But again, the format does nothing but carry the original even if it’s not a perfect reproduction. You can’t use it in any other way. Its expressed intent is the reproduction of the copyrighted material with no modification or improvement or derivation. These models are not trained with the intent or purpose of only producing the copyrighted materials. It requires your specific action to induce the reproductions if it’s even possible, but it generally serves other purposes in all other uses. This is more like a xerox than not - you can certainly violate copyright with a xerox. But the existence of the xerox itself isn’t to violate copyright. It’s for other purposes. The ambiguity obviously comes in that a xerox machine wasn’t built by scanning all documents on earth first. But I think the very act of mixing all the other images and documents together into the model, which again, is just a statistical aggregate of everything that was trained with mushed together, turns it into at worst a derived work that falls under fair use.

sandworm101 3y ago

No. Making a single copy for your own use is still a copyright violation. There are exceptions (fair use, nomitive use etc) but just because people are rarely sued for personal copying doesnt equate to that copying being permitted. And trademark issues, such as the other commenter generating the superman logo, are subject to a host of other rules.

vosper 3y ago
> No. Making a single copy for your own use is still a copyright violation. In some jurisdictions, perhaps, but not in all of them. There isn't one set of universal copyright law in the world. Eg in New Zealand you are allowed to make a single copy of any sound recording for your own personal use, per device that you will play the sound recording on. I'm sure there are other examples in other countries. https://www.consumer.org.nz/articles/copyright-law https://www.consumer.org.nz/articles/copyright-law
- adhesive_wombat 3y ago
  This is the same in the UK (and not only for sound). If you own the copy, you can make personal copies. You can't share them, and you have to own the original.
fnordpiglet 3y ago
Training a model isn’t making a copy for your own use, it’s not making a copy at all. It’s converting the original media into a statistical aggregate combined with a lot of other stuff. There’s no copy of the original, even if it’s able to produce a similar product to the original. That’s the specific thing - the aggregation and the lack of direct reproduction in any form is fundamentally not reproducing or copying the material. The fact it can be induced to produce copyright material, as you can induce a Xerox to reproduce copyright material, doesn’t make the original model or its training a violation of copyright. If it’s sole purpose was reproduction and distribution of the material or if it carried a copy of the original around and produced it on demand, that would be a different story. But it’s not doing any of that, not even remotely. All this said, it’s a highly dynamic area - it depends on the local law, the media and medium, and the question hasn’t been fully explored. I’m wagering though when it comes down to it, the model isn’t violating copyright for these reasons, but you can certainly violate copyrights using a model.

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nl 3y ago

I strongly agree with this. There's a distinction between "learning from" and "copying". "Learning from" is a transformative process that distills from the observation. This distillation can be as simple as indexing for a search engine, or as complex as a deep neural network. Simply because a neural network can create something that is a copyright violation doesn't mean the training process itself it. A human can see a advertisement for a Marvel movie and then reproduce the Marvel logo. Redistributing (and possibly actually doing that reproduction) that logo is a copyright violation, but the learning process isn't. The neural network is a tool. It's reasonable to be concerned about the loss in employment by people who are affected by generative AI. But I think this is a separate issue to the copyright argument.

madeofpalk 3y ago
> A human can see a advertisement for a Marvel movie and then reproduce the Marvel logo. Redistributing (and possibly actually doing that reproduction) that logo is a copyright violation, but the learning process isn't. This then becomes about where the liability of that violation lies, and how attractive that is to companies. A human "learning" the marvel logo and reproducing it is violation. How does OpenAPI fit into this analogy?
- williamcotton 3y ago
  The liability would lay with the company using the LLM product. This could mean that many companies won’t want to take on the risk unless there is decent tooling around warnings of infringement and listing sources.
  - fnordpiglet 3y ago
    I think liability lies with the person who uses the product to violate copyright. The hosting / producing company didn’t violate copyright if I use their model to make Mickey Mouse pictures. I did.
    - madeofpalk 3y ago

kmod 3y ago

This is the "guns don't kill people, people do" argument. Not saying that that proves things one way or another, just that assigning responsibility is not really a cut and dry question and many people think that it's important to look prior to the final interaction IANAL but I believe in the US tools that are designed to circumvent copyright are illegal, which makes sense to me inasmuch as one believes that copyright should be protected

fnordpiglet 3y ago
Except these models are not designed to circumvent copyright, in fact their primary purpose is to generate non-copyright and non-copyrightable output. It can be induced to product facsimiles of copyright material, but that’s explicitly not the purpose or intent and requires positive action on the users behalf to occur.
- kmod 3y ago
  I'm saying `A => B` (something should be illegal if it's primarily for crime) and you're saying `-A` (LLMs are not primarily for crime), which is not really a disagreement. My point is disagreeing with the GGP who argued that `-B regardless of A` (LLMs should not be a crime regardless of whether they facilitate crime, because it is the end-user who is committing the crime). I happen to mostly believe the conclusion (`-B`) but not the particular argument.
DennisP 3y ago
Photocopy machines are great at making copies of copyrighted material, and are completely legal in the US. The entire internet routinely makes copies every time you visit a web page. What's illegal in the US is selling tools for breaking DRM: https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/10/26/us-copyright-office-says-circumventing-drm-repair-certain-electronics-including-phones-smart-speakers-now-legal/ https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/10/26/us-copyright-office... From a quick google, open source tools for breaking DRM are legal, and so is breaking DRM for personal use: https://www.google.com/search?q=are+drm+defeating+tools+illegal+in+us&oq=are+drm+defeating+tools+illegal+in+us https://www.google.com/search?q=are+drm+defeating+tools+ille...

kelnos 3y ago

> The aggregation performed by model training is highly lossy and the model itself is a derived work at worst and is certainly fair use. Lossy or not, the training data provides value. If all the various someones had not spent time making all the stuff that ends up as training data, then the model it trains would not exist. If you are going to use someone else's work in order to make something that you are going to profit off of, I believe that original author should be compensated. And should also be able to decide they don't want their work used in that way. Note that I'm not talking about what existing copyright law says; I'm talking about how I believe we should be regulating this new facet of the industry. > Making it write code that’s a clone of copyright code or making it make pictures with copy right imagery in it or making it reproduce books etc etc, then distributing the output, would be where the copyright violation occurs. How is the end-user supposed to know this? Do we seriously believe that everyone who uses generative AI is going to run the output through some sort of process (assuming one even exists) to ensure it's not a substantial enough copy of something some copyrighted work? I certainly don't think this is going to happen. Regardless, copyright is about distribution. If the a model trained on copyrighted material is considered a copy or derived work of the original work, then distributing that model is, in fact, copyright infringement (absent a successful fair use defense). I'm not saying that's the case, or how a court would look at it, but that's something to consider.

Dylan16807 3y ago
> the training data provides value I wish it was easier to build on someone else's copyrighted value. Geforce Now shouldn't have to get permission from game makers to rent out server time for users to play games they already own. Aereo shouldn't have been legally obliterated for the way they rented out DVRs with antennas. Using a sample in a song shouldn't be automatic infringement.
chii 3y ago
> distributing that model is, in fact, copyright infringement is it? If i distributed digits of pi (to the umpteenth billion decimals), it theoretically contains copyright information in their digits. The distribution of the copyrighted material is the infringement, but not if the data is _meant_ to produce other effects, and it is reasonable that the data is used for some other purpose _other than_ to replicate the copyrighted works. > the training data provides value. and so does a textbook. A student reading the book (regardless of how that book was obtained - paid or not) does not pay royalties from the knowledge obtained.

__loam 3y ago

The collection of copyright works for the explicit purpose of processing them for a for-profit ML model has not been shown to be fair use, and the fact that many are being marketed as for profit products that meaningfully compete with the original works is a strike against them being fair use.

robryan 3y ago
Yeah, if the end result is that the majority of Google searches are answered by a llm trained on their index can they really claim that the whole thing is fair use?

grt_thr 3y ago

I guess I should just never have to pay for another movie since I can't play it back in my head flawlessly.

boringuser2 3y ago

Why should it be true? Remember, you're making an ought statement, not an is statement. Personally, I think it shouldn't be true because large language models are clearly economically and socially destructive. Pretty simple system.

pxoe 3y ago

Some licenses, like CC, have variants that prohibit production of derivatives, or prohibit commercialization, or require licenses or same requirements to be preserved in derivative works. Sweet to see people "warm up" to say stuff like 'well it's just a derived work'. Can we get tech to actually respect the licenses of used works next? It's something that's been asked for all along. Without just going, 'well, it's all fair use' - 'so we'll just ignore all licenses and won't even try to detect or respect licenses and whatever requirements they have'. Sure, it may be "unenforceable", but if tech keeps saying "fuck you" to the creators, and "fuck you specifically to the licenses, we won't even look at them or process them" - creators will keep saying 'well fuck you too' right back. otherwise, it's just talk with no follow through. just dropping words like 'fair use' as a 'get away from liability card', without actually engaging with intellectual property concepts. just to get to use works without respect to artist's will (as it could be expressed in a license), or sometimes even a mention, let alone "compensation" or other "consequence".

jupp0r 3y ago
Did you just argue against fair use in general? Everything you wrote applies to it as well. Copyright has limits, it's not like right holders get to determine what those are. It's a balance of rights of creators and users.
- pxoe 3y ago
  is the use really all that fair, when thousands, if not millions, of works and artists get their works repurposed into services with "subscriptions" and "usage tokens" and other kinds of monetization, while directly competing with and against those very artists? or will it take until some markets would get completely destroyed and overtaken while people get displaced, for people to wake up and go 'wait, was that really "fair"? what happened?' and no, im not really arguing against it. fair use can be great. but shit like that, it's really pushing it to its limits on scope and scale of use and commercialization
  - jupp0r 3y ago
    I think societies haven't really determined what is fair in these cases. To give you a counter example: Millions of young artists look at art museums and incorporate what they see and learn into their own art. Creators of the images they look at get nothing from the proceeds young artists end up earning later in their lives. Is this unfair?