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> Photoshop will not regurgitate someone else's program practically line-by-line when you type the first 7 words of it into a prompt You could argue that the p

> Photoshop will not regurgitate someone else's program practically line-by-line when you type the first 7 words of it into a prompt You could argue that the people who have that specific bit of code would have a decent right to sue, because they have real definitive proof that their works are in that model in some form. But unless you have managed to make such an output for (insert work here), You have no real claim to copyright on that model. Which is why I made that Photoshop analogy. You can use it and get it to output someone's copyrighted work. The fact that you can do that doesn't make photoshop itself a problem. The act of making it spit out that copyrighted work, then distributing it, is the problem. The liability for that is going to have to be figured out in the court system. > A person with a camera and/or a copy of the original code, if anything. No, the model doesn't have a copy of the original code when it's running. It only has what it was trained on, as if you read a bunch of stuff on GitHub and later on use what you saw in there while you were writing your own stuff. And people totally do this as well, they will see things and learn from them and accidentally or unintentionally reproduce them when they are working later. Which is another reason I think you should treat the output of these models as if someone has actually done it themselves. If you can prove there was violation there, there was violation there. Otherwise, you can't claim the model just like you can't claim the person who learned from your stuff. > The fact that it compresses very well It doesn't. The data of these things are trained on is absolutely massive and the final files are not nearly so large. The compression ratio would be absolutely bonkers if that was what was going on here. What you're seeing is the effects of overfitting on specific examples, which doesn't represent the whole at all. This is finding an exception to the rule and taking it out of context. To say that the model itself is a derivative work is absurd. You've got a picture and you're going to claim that this AI model that was trained on 7 billion pictures or something like that is derivative of your work? > This is no different that compressing my program It is very very different than compressing your program. A compressed file is a compressed file, builds to be compressed and then decompressed to get the original file back. Again, except for the example where you own a work that is being reproduced by one of these models, proven, this is more like claiming a hash of your file in a folder with 100,000 other files is a derivative work of your file.

AshamedCaptain 3y ago
> You could argue that the people who have that specific bit of code would have a decent right to sue, Note that it is _my_ code that Copilot regurgitates, and at least 50 lines of it as I kept prodding it. I didn't actually put it in Github, but some scammer decided to mirror it there. It is a popular program, but not that popular, so I just can't accept the argument that "these models reproducing a copyrighted program is a rare situation". It is actually a frequent occurrence, and this dismantles the majority of this type of arguments. > Which is why I made that Photoshop analogy. You can use it and get it to output someone's copyrighted work. The fact that you can do that doesn't make photoshop itself a problem. Photoshop analogy is still not really working. These models have been trained on copyrighted programs and can reproduce portions of them on demand based on short prompts (or at least significantly shorter than the actual portion of the program). Photoshop _cannot_, unless you literally load the original artwork on it or literally reproduce it in the program action by action (or pixel by pixel). There is simply no way to argue that Photoshop is a derivative work of 3rd party X's artwork, specially if Photoshop creators didn't even have access to X's artwork; but there is ample opportunity that the model _is_ a derivative work of 3rd party programs, specially when by their own admission they used my program's code to build their tool. In addition, and based on a strict interpretation of today's legal definitions, I could build a case that model infringes on my copyrights, from the mere fact that my programs were used for the construction of the model. It doesn't really matter what you think about the particularities of the model; there was no human in the loop, and therefore it is impossible for the model to be anything other than a derivative work. For Photoshop I just cannot have a case (unless, e.g. the brushes of photoshop were "trained" by a program from my artwork). > The data of these things are trained on is absolutely massive and the final files are not nearly so large. The compression ratio would be absolutely bonkers if that was what was going on here Yet it happens. Is it a matter of numbers? Would a very clever compression algorithm suddenly strip from its output the copyright protections of its input? Unless it was a bonkers algorithm, like always decompressing to the same string, I rather doubt anyone would claim that. > You've got a picture and you're going to claim that this AI model that was trained on 7 billion pictures or something like that is derivative of your work? The model is literally trained on my picture; how can it _not_ be a derivative of my work? Not to mention that the discussion quickly goes moot when the model can reproduce _my picture_ (in this case, my code) on demand, as is the case here. If it could reproduce my code without having been trained on it, you could have had a (weak) case... something equivalent to clean-room reverse engineering. But this is not the case at all; these models have literally consumed copyrighted code as input.

AshamedCaptain 3y ago

> You could argue that the people who have that specific bit of code would have a decent right to sue, Note that it is _my_ code that Copilot regurgitates, and at least 50 lines of it as I kept prodding it. I didn't actually put it in Github, but some scammer decided to mirror it there. It is a popular program, but not that popular, so I just can't accept the argument that "these models reproducing a copyrighted program is a rare situation". It is actually a frequent occurrence, and this dismantles the majority of this type of arguments. > Which is why I made that Photoshop analogy. You can use it and get it to output someone's copyrighted work. The fact that you can do that doesn't make photoshop itself a problem. Photoshop analogy is still not really working. These models have been trained on copyrighted programs and can reproduce portions of them on demand based on short prompts (or at least significantly shorter than the actual portion of the program). Photoshop _cannot_, unless you literally load the original artwork on it or literally reproduce it in the program action by action (or pixel by pixel). There is simply no way to argue that Photoshop is a derivative work of 3rd party X's artwork, specially if Photoshop creators didn't even have access to X's artwork; but there is ample opportunity that the model _is_ a derivative work of 3rd party programs, specially when by their own admission they used my program's code to build their tool. In addition, and based on a strict interpretation of today's legal definitions, I could build a case that model infringes on my copyrights, from the mere fact that my programs were used for the construction of the model. It doesn't really matter what you think about the particularities of the model; there was no human in the loop, and therefore it is impossible for the model to be anything other than a derivative work. For Photoshop I just cannot have a case (unless, e.g. the brushes of photoshop were "trained" by a program from my artwork). > The data of these things are trained on is absolutely massive and the final files are not nearly so large. The compression ratio would be absolutely bonkers if that was what was going on here Yet it happens. Is it a matter of numbers? Would a very clever compression algorithm suddenly strip from its output the copyright protections of its input? Unless it was a bonkers algorithm, like always decompressing to the same string, I rather doubt anyone would claim that. > You've got a picture and you're going to claim that this AI model that was trained on 7 billion pictures or something like that is derivative of your work? The model is literally trained on my picture; how can it _not_ be a derivative of my work? Not to mention that the discussion quickly goes moot when the model can reproduce _my picture_ (in this case, my code) on demand, as is the case here. If it could reproduce my code without having been trained on it, you could have had a (weak) case... something equivalent to clean-room reverse engineering. But this is not the case at all; these models have literally consumed copyrighted code as input.