8 ms·

This is intentional, as I think OpenAI is scared of legal blowback. Cutting edge AI models and datasets have largely been "for testing" and "for research" ever

This is intentional, as I think OpenAI is scared of legal blowback. Cutting edge AI models and datasets have largely been "for testing" and "for research" ever since they existed. Usage rights were extremely low on the researchers' list of concerns. But all of the sudden OpenAI and such are trying to commercialize models that (unlike a classifier or whatever) are very capable of stepping on rightholders’ toes... Hence I suspect all the talk of trade secrets is just a front.

Zetobal 3y ago
They forced others out of the skunk so I am fine with it. Forcing companies like Facebook in leaking weights of their models because they are over eager to release something is no small feat. For nothing else I applaud them for that.
weinzierl 3y ago
I find this a super interesting topic: My prediction is that we will eventually see a huge backlash against this copyright whitewashing. I think the current status quo is unacceptable but I fear the upcoming legislation will throw out the baby with the bathwater.
- proamdev123 3y ago
  What is “copyright whitewashing”? I’ve never heard that phrase before.
  - wahnfrieden 3y ago
    they mean laundering IP theft
    - weinzierl 3y ago
      Exactly, laundering was what I meant, I mistranslated from German.
  - ethbr0 3y ago
    Imagine a machine that takes in copyrighted works and, with the press of a button, outputs works which are substantially similar but not copyrighted. Copyright whitewashing. (I.e. pointing to your black box and claiming it's a clean room)
    - numpad0 3y ago
      But to reiterate existing talking points, using copyrighted works for AI weight generation is exactly the same thing as how human artists learn skills just because some people refer to the process as “learning” or “training”, and any counterarguments to this are meaningless fearmongering outdated Luddite rages, besides such uses are fair uses and transformative uses and explicitly allowed in some jurisdictions under specific terms not allowing blanket rights to regurgitation so it’s all lawful and financially fully exploitable. forwardslash sierra.
    - brookst 3y ago
      So, like Terry Brooks then?
    - chii 3y ago
      > which are substantially similar but not copyrighted. if it's considered substantially similar, then why is it not copyrighted? The difference must also be substantial. Therefore, it should be acceptable as a new works, rather than a derivative works.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
  - weinzierl 3y ago
    Actually, I only realize now, that it is a mistranslation from my mother tongue. What I meant to say is probably better expressed by 'content laundering' analogous to 'money laundering'.
- sfifs 3y ago
  One reading of the latest US Supreme Court ruling on the Andy Warhol estate's case is that the current legal frameworks already prevent this. The ruling focused on what was the commercial use case, not on what was the degree of transformation in Andy Warhol's artwork. The opinion appears to say that as the Prince painting was not explicitly licensed for the commercial use case of reproduction in magazine story and could conceivably have been substituted for the purpose of printing in the magazine to accompany a story by the original artist's photograph, it violated copyright. There was even an explicit distinction drawn between this work and the Campbell Soup paintings which were characterized as a social commentary and therefore fair use. There are likely class action lawsuits brewing based on this ruling because today when commercial artists in agencies create layouts, they generally license images & artwork.
  - judge2020 3y ago
    The way I read that, it was only ruled in favor because they were directed to recreate x photo with some changes. If the Scream painting were still copyrighted, it sounds like telling an AI to "create Edvard Munch's The Scream just with lighter colors" would be a copyright violation - but something like "create a new painting in the style of Edvard Munch" would still fall under "artists can't copyright a style".
    - bjt 3y ago
      The output isn't the only infringement, arguably. You could also argue (and I expect good lawyers will), that the numeric representation of the artist's works inside the model is already an infringing copy. (Just like the JPEG bytes stored on a server, even without them being blitted to a screen.)
      - zirgs 3y ago
        Models don't store any artist's works. They are way too small to do that.
        seanhunter 3y ago
- xyzzy123 3y ago
  In terms of actions, the US has gone as far as to kneecap a competitor's chip industry and restrict their GPU access. I reckon that behind closed doors there will be a strong sense that any kind of regulation that impedes AI development would not be in the national interest.
- taneq 3y ago
  It still seems odd to me that the standard advice for "how do I avoid copyright issues with example code" is "rewrite it in your own style", and we're happy with this, but now that we have an algorithm that can do this (using a stupendous amount of calculation, it's not like these things learn for free... yet...) this is suddenly somehow cheating. I think the protestations about copyright aren't entirely honest. People aren't mad that LLMs are "stealing their work", they're scared that LLMs are copying their ability to produce such work.
  - brucethemoose2 3y ago
    Its some of both. Stable Diffusion will rarely blatently copy a work, as it has no distinction between creative reconstruction and plagiarism. I think this applies to LLMs too, its just much harder for human brains to detect. At the same time, the artists and such who claim any of its output is illegal are being hypocritical. Nothing is made in a vacuum.
- brookst 3y ago
  Do you think people should be allowed to learn from books we read, music we hear, etc? If we’re extending copyright to be not only about reproduction of the work, but also providing part of a large knowledge base for future creators to build upon… why does it matter if it’s a neural network or human being doing the learning? I personally hope the copyright maximalists fail, because if they succeed in making “learning from a copyrighted work” without paying illegal, we end up in a dark place indeed.
  - sillysaurusx 3y ago
    I think AI aren’t people, and that they’re not even AI: it’s machine learning, and ML is a subset of AI that we haven’t really broken out of. ML is a tool, and asking whether ML should be allowed to learn on copyrighted work is equivalent to asking whether your computer is allowed to contain a copyrighted work: “it depends.” I’m in favor of getting rid of copyright entirely, since it’s become a far cry from what it was intended to be, but we have to acknowledge both sides of the arguments in order to proceed.
    - throwaway2037 3y ago
      I’m in favor of getting rid of copyright entirely This is extreme to me. What is your proposed replacement?
      - JieJie 3y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_alternatives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_alternatives
  - spacephysics 3y ago
    I agree we should either get rid of, or very least overhaul copyright. However, the line in the sand I draw is giving any kind of human-based rights to ML or AI. People already are thinking ChatGPT is close to human intelligence, and we know we haven’t even seen what’s truly possible. My fear is the typical oversimplification of complex technology will lend us to giving human rights to programs, and lead to a whole host of issues. We need to stop anthropomorphizing technology until we really hit a philosophical quandary. Giving in too early will just give power to less-than-polished tech and either slow down research, or further drain a country’s resources
- torginus 3y ago
  I would argue if the fair use argument holds up - that the most substantial value of these models lies in their training dataset. It would be morally reprehensible for anyone to block training open models based on the data provided by the public at large. Such legalization would be totally unacceptable.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    Why would that be morally reprehensible? Is it not as "morally reprehensible" that I have to restrict my use of the internet now in order to avoid having my works used in that way? That reduces the amount of information available to everybody, after all.
- yard2010 3y ago
  Or maybe, maybe the people in charge will wake up, do their job, accept the challenge and make modern cc laws? Oh forget about it we will forever live in the 90'
- _ea1k 3y ago
  > I find this a super interesting topic: My prediction is that we will eventually see a huge backlash against this copyright whitewashing. I think the current status quo is unacceptable but I fear the upcoming legislation will throw out the baby with the bathwater. Worse, they have the potential to push development toward countries that do not have such laws.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Razengan 3y ago
If a human learns to draw by studying the works of other artists, is that infringement?
- xyzzy123 3y ago
  If an algorithm processes a bunch of copyrighted data into a different form, is that not a derivative work?
  - judge2020 3y ago
    only if the output is definitively a derivative work of an existing work. If it's the culmination of a thousand photos, it would be akin to a human spending a month studying a certain historical artists' art and painting a modern Tesla in their style.
- jackvalentine 3y ago
  It could be, if the human uses their skills to draw infringing outputs!
  - a_bonobo 3y ago
    hence the entire Andy Warhol case! >Echoing a recommendation from Joe Biden’s administration, the supreme court focused on the specific use that allegedly infringed Goldsmith’s copyright – a license of Warhol’s work to Condé Nast – and said it was not transformative because it served the same commercial purpose as Goldsmith’s photo: to depict Prince in a magazine. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/may/18/andy-warhol-copyright-prince-paintings-lawsuit https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/may/18/andy-wa...
  - brookst 3y ago
    So why are we even arguing about this new form of copyright that restricts who can learn from a work? If an AI model produces an infringing work and someone distributes it, sue them like you would a human doing the same thing. This idea of training being a violation of copyright is insane.
jiggawatts 3y ago
Keep in mind that the architecture of LLMs is very simple, so there's not a lot of "secret sauce". What little there is, is jealously guarded. This is why OpenAI is keeping the parameter count of GPT 4 secret. It could be something stupid huge like 4 trillion parameters, which is the "secret" that makes it work so well. Or maybe it's just a few hundred billion, and they've done something else to make it smart. Just knowing the numbers might be sufficient for a competitor to create a GPT 4 clone. Without the numbers, they might have to go through a process of trial and error. At these scales, even a few extra training runs could cost $ millions in training, and delay competitors by months or even years.
- EGreg 3y ago
  GPT-4 was doing more than just predicting next words
  - pigeons 3y ago
    Like what?
    - EGreg 3y ago
      Lots of plugins and manual fine tuning by an army of people on tons of subjects
      - jiggawatts 3y ago
        Well yes. This is precisely the type of info that OpenAI is keeping secret, because it could turn out that it's smart because its huge OR smart because it is RLHF-ed to death. Knowing which is the secret sauce might be sufficient for a large org to reproduce it. E.g.: if the secret is that it has been trained on tons of "books", then Google could just throw Google Books at Bard 3.
        sillysaurusx 3y ago
        Or books3. :) (I put together a dataset of 190,000 books that I called books3, which llama eventually trained on. Usage rights are a big interest of mine, primarily because there’s a weird disconnect of people trying to claim copyright over models when the underlying data obviously wasn’t copyrightable.)
j45 3y ago
This, and keeping the mix Proprietary. If the progress of open-source options has shown anything - the talent wanting to work together will make progress.
jve 3y ago
Elon commented about commercialization of OpenAI: https://youtu.be/bWr-DA5Wjfw?t=3m38s https://youtu.be/bWr-DA5Wjfw?t=3m38s This short video perhaps should be its own submission
cactusplant7374 3y ago
Is there any poison pill type of defense for content creators?

Zetobal 3y ago

They forced others out of the skunk so I am fine with it. Forcing companies like Facebook in leaking weights of their models because they are over eager to release something is no small feat. For nothing else I applaud them for that.

weinzierl 3y ago

I find this a super interesting topic: My prediction is that we will eventually see a huge backlash against this copyright whitewashing. I think the current status quo is unacceptable but I fear the upcoming legislation will throw out the baby with the bathwater.

proamdev123 3y ago
What is “copyright whitewashing”? I’ve never heard that phrase before.
- wahnfrieden 3y ago
  they mean laundering IP theft
  - weinzierl 3y ago
    Exactly, laundering was what I meant, I mistranslated from German.
- ethbr0 3y ago
  Imagine a machine that takes in copyrighted works and, with the press of a button, outputs works which are substantially similar but not copyrighted. Copyright whitewashing. (I.e. pointing to your black box and claiming it's a clean room)
  - numpad0 3y ago
    But to reiterate existing talking points, using copyrighted works for AI weight generation is exactly the same thing as how human artists learn skills just because some people refer to the process as “learning” or “training”, and any counterarguments to this are meaningless fearmongering outdated Luddite rages, besides such uses are fair uses and transformative uses and explicitly allowed in some jurisdictions under specific terms not allowing blanket rights to regurgitation so it’s all lawful and financially fully exploitable. forwardslash sierra.
  - brookst 3y ago
    So, like Terry Brooks then?
  - chii 3y ago
    > which are substantially similar but not copyrighted. if it's considered substantially similar, then why is it not copyrighted? The difference must also be substantial. Therefore, it should be acceptable as a new works, rather than a derivative works.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- weinzierl 3y ago
  Actually, I only realize now, that it is a mistranslation from my mother tongue. What I meant to say is probably better expressed by 'content laundering' analogous to 'money laundering'.
sfifs 3y ago
One reading of the latest US Supreme Court ruling on the Andy Warhol estate's case is that the current legal frameworks already prevent this. The ruling focused on what was the commercial use case, not on what was the degree of transformation in Andy Warhol's artwork. The opinion appears to say that as the Prince painting was not explicitly licensed for the commercial use case of reproduction in magazine story and could conceivably have been substituted for the purpose of printing in the magazine to accompany a story by the original artist's photograph, it violated copyright. There was even an explicit distinction drawn between this work and the Campbell Soup paintings which were characterized as a social commentary and therefore fair use. There are likely class action lawsuits brewing based on this ruling because today when commercial artists in agencies create layouts, they generally license images & artwork.
- judge2020 3y ago
  The way I read that, it was only ruled in favor because they were directed to recreate x photo with some changes. If the Scream painting were still copyrighted, it sounds like telling an AI to "create Edvard Munch's The Scream just with lighter colors" would be a copyright violation - but something like "create a new painting in the style of Edvard Munch" would still fall under "artists can't copyright a style".
  - bjt 3y ago
    The output isn't the only infringement, arguably. You could also argue (and I expect good lawyers will), that the numeric representation of the artist's works inside the model is already an infringing copy. (Just like the JPEG bytes stored on a server, even without them being blitted to a screen.)
    - zirgs 3y ago
      Models don't store any artist's works. They are way too small to do that.
      - seanhunter 3y ago
xyzzy123 3y ago
In terms of actions, the US has gone as far as to kneecap a competitor's chip industry and restrict their GPU access. I reckon that behind closed doors there will be a strong sense that any kind of regulation that impedes AI development would not be in the national interest.
taneq 3y ago
It still seems odd to me that the standard advice for "how do I avoid copyright issues with example code" is "rewrite it in your own style", and we're happy with this, but now that we have an algorithm that can do this (using a stupendous amount of calculation, it's not like these things learn for free... yet...) this is suddenly somehow cheating. I think the protestations about copyright aren't entirely honest. People aren't mad that LLMs are "stealing their work", they're scared that LLMs are copying their ability to produce such work.
- brucethemoose2 3y ago
  Its some of both. Stable Diffusion will rarely blatently copy a work, as it has no distinction between creative reconstruction and plagiarism. I think this applies to LLMs too, its just much harder for human brains to detect. At the same time, the artists and such who claim any of its output is illegal are being hypocritical. Nothing is made in a vacuum.
brookst 3y ago
Do you think people should be allowed to learn from books we read, music we hear, etc? If we’re extending copyright to be not only about reproduction of the work, but also providing part of a large knowledge base for future creators to build upon… why does it matter if it’s a neural network or human being doing the learning? I personally hope the copyright maximalists fail, because if they succeed in making “learning from a copyrighted work” without paying illegal, we end up in a dark place indeed.
- sillysaurusx 3y ago
  I think AI aren’t people, and that they’re not even AI: it’s machine learning, and ML is a subset of AI that we haven’t really broken out of. ML is a tool, and asking whether ML should be allowed to learn on copyrighted work is equivalent to asking whether your computer is allowed to contain a copyrighted work: “it depends.” I’m in favor of getting rid of copyright entirely, since it’s become a far cry from what it was intended to be, but we have to acknowledge both sides of the arguments in order to proceed.
  - throwaway2037 3y ago
    I’m in favor of getting rid of copyright entirely This is extreme to me. What is your proposed replacement?
    - JieJie 3y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_alternatives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_alternatives
- spacephysics 3y ago
  I agree we should either get rid of, or very least overhaul copyright. However, the line in the sand I draw is giving any kind of human-based rights to ML or AI. People already are thinking ChatGPT is close to human intelligence, and we know we haven’t even seen what’s truly possible. My fear is the typical oversimplification of complex technology will lend us to giving human rights to programs, and lead to a whole host of issues. We need to stop anthropomorphizing technology until we really hit a philosophical quandary. Giving in too early will just give power to less-than-polished tech and either slow down research, or further drain a country’s resources
torginus 3y ago
I would argue if the fair use argument holds up - that the most substantial value of these models lies in their training dataset. It would be morally reprehensible for anyone to block training open models based on the data provided by the public at large. Such legalization would be totally unacceptable.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- JohnFen 3y ago
  Why would that be morally reprehensible? Is it not as "morally reprehensible" that I have to restrict my use of the internet now in order to avoid having my works used in that way? That reduces the amount of information available to everybody, after all.
yard2010 3y ago
Or maybe, maybe the people in charge will wake up, do their job, accept the challenge and make modern cc laws? Oh forget about it we will forever live in the 90'
_ea1k 3y ago
> I find this a super interesting topic: My prediction is that we will eventually see a huge backlash against this copyright whitewashing. I think the current status quo is unacceptable but I fear the upcoming legislation will throw out the baby with the bathwater. Worse, they have the potential to push development toward countries that do not have such laws.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Razengan 3y ago

If a human learns to draw by studying the works of other artists, is that infringement?

xyzzy123 3y ago
If an algorithm processes a bunch of copyrighted data into a different form, is that not a derivative work?
- judge2020 3y ago
  only if the output is definitively a derivative work of an existing work. If it's the culmination of a thousand photos, it would be akin to a human spending a month studying a certain historical artists' art and painting a modern Tesla in their style.
jackvalentine 3y ago
It could be, if the human uses their skills to draw infringing outputs!
- a_bonobo 3y ago
  hence the entire Andy Warhol case! >Echoing a recommendation from Joe Biden’s administration, the supreme court focused on the specific use that allegedly infringed Goldsmith’s copyright – a license of Warhol’s work to Condé Nast – and said it was not transformative because it served the same commercial purpose as Goldsmith’s photo: to depict Prince in a magazine. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/may/18/andy-warhol-copyright-prince-paintings-lawsuit https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/may/18/andy-wa...
- brookst 3y ago
  So why are we even arguing about this new form of copyright that restricts who can learn from a work? If an AI model produces an infringing work and someone distributes it, sue them like you would a human doing the same thing. This idea of training being a violation of copyright is insane.

jiggawatts 3y ago

Keep in mind that the architecture of LLMs is very simple, so there's not a lot of "secret sauce". What little there is, is jealously guarded. This is why OpenAI is keeping the parameter count of GPT 4 secret. It could be something stupid huge like 4 trillion parameters, which is the "secret" that makes it work so well. Or maybe it's just a few hundred billion, and they've done something else to make it smart. Just knowing the numbers might be sufficient for a competitor to create a GPT 4 clone. Without the numbers, they might have to go through a process of trial and error. At these scales, even a few extra training runs could cost $ millions in training, and delay competitors by months or even years.

EGreg 3y ago
GPT-4 was doing more than just predicting next words
- pigeons 3y ago
  Like what?
  - EGreg 3y ago
    Lots of plugins and manual fine tuning by an army of people on tons of subjects
    - jiggawatts 3y ago
      Well yes. This is precisely the type of info that OpenAI is keeping secret, because it could turn out that it's smart because its huge OR smart because it is RLHF-ed to death. Knowing which is the secret sauce might be sufficient for a large org to reproduce it. E.g.: if the secret is that it has been trained on tons of "books", then Google could just throw Google Books at Bard 3.
      - sillysaurusx 3y ago
        Or books3. :) (I put together a dataset of 190,000 books that I called books3, which llama eventually trained on. Usage rights are a big interest of mine, primarily because there’s a weird disconnect of people trying to claim copyright over models when the underlying data obviously wasn’t copyrightable.)

j45 3y ago

This, and keeping the mix Proprietary. If the progress of open-source options has shown anything - the talent wanting to work together will make progress.

jve 3y ago

Elon commented about commercialization of OpenAI: https://youtu.be/bWr-DA5Wjfw?t=3m38s https://youtu.be/bWr-DA5Wjfw?t=3m38s This short video perhaps should be its own submission

cactusplant7374 3y ago

Is there any poison pill type of defense for content creators?