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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 r

by 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
    [deleted]
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
    [flagged]
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- 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
    [deleted]
  - 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...

by mannyv 3y ago

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
  [deleted]

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
  [flagged]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
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
  [deleted]
- 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...