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The existing licenses cover AI training just fine, what we lack is sufficient legal precedent and enforcement. An AI product - more specifically, the model weig

The existing licenses cover AI training just fine, what we lack is sufficient legal precedent and enforcement. An AI product - more specifically, the model weights - is a derivative work of the original works used for training; AI training is a process of algorithmic compression of the originals. Therefore, the resulting model should abide by all the license requirements imposed on the original - for example, if the model is trained on GPL code and can generate code, then any binary distribution should also be freely available for derivation in source format, and that includes all the algorithmically compressed training material (weights), which has become part of the model. If the source is AGPL, then that service cannot be made available on a website without disclosing said source and respective model weights. Any other interpretation of the nature of copyright - which by definition, only covers human produced material - is just a variant of the proverbial "man that can't understand something because their paycheck depends upon them not understanding".

EMIRELADERO 3y ago
What if the whole pipeline (scraping for training, the training itself, model distribution, and use to generate derivative works) is found to be a fair use (at least in American law)? Licenses wouldn't mean anything at that point, since it's because of copyright that they can make you accept them in the first place
- noobermin 3y ago
  Then every employee of openai should scrape the weights of GPT-4 and train their own neural nets. That would not be a derivative work and also be free use under this logic.
  - EMIRELADERO 3y ago
    Obviously this isn't tested in the courts (for now) but it is my opinion that model weights aren't even copyrightable.
    - zarzavat 3y ago
      I don’t think we need a court case for that. Model weights aren’t copyrightable by the trainer in the US. Copyright only protects works of human authorship, and training a network is not authorship. If the model weights encode other copyrighted works literally enough then they may be copyrighted by the author(s) of the works, that is a gray area. But the training process itself is not authorship and doesn’t confer copyright.
      - deleted 3y ago
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  - banana_feather 3y ago
    That's not how fair use works. This kind of use would facially fail three of the factors for fair use; it's not be transformative, it copies the original work in its entirety, and it harms the commercial market for the original work.
    - wnkrshm 3y ago
      how much do the weights have to change for it to be transformative? Edit: you arrive at the same question as taking an image with img2img and running it through a diffusion variant - keeping the composition, colors etc. but no the details
      - banana_feather 3y ago
        Much of the case law about the "transformative" factor focuses on "new meaning or expression", but it's about visual art, which is generally very difficult to reason about w.r.t. copyright. I think the example to look to for technology is Authors Guild v. Google, where "transformative" is more about non-expressive purpose, and it was considered transformative to copy a bunch of books to produce a search functionality, since the search functionality (which only displayed snippets) was a transformative purpose compared to the underlying creative expression in the books.
    - bhickey 3y ago
      Fair use doesn't enter into it if weights aren't copyrightable. They're machine generated by stochastic gradient descent. There's no human hand setting the weights. We won't know until something ends up before the USCO.
  - schoen 3y ago
    It seems credible to me to suggest that the model weights are a trade secret, but aren't copyrightable. There's lots of stuff that could be in that category for other companies. The employees would still have a contractual responsibility about their use of the model weights.
jl6 3y ago
It’s not clear to me that it’s any easier to judge this than in human cases of “inspiration vs infringement”. What part of the model weights can a lawyer point to and say “this bit clearly incorporates a substantial portion of my client’s work”.
- xyzzy123 3y ago
  I feel this argument is weakened by the fact that no one training these models feeds their own proprietary source code into publicly available models. Practically speaking I feel this is a strong hint that some degree of copyright laundering is taking place.
  - ShamelessC 3y ago
    > no one training these models feeds their own proprietary source code into publicly available models You are presupposing that the company’s own code would somehow be a massive boon for the model, resulting in lower loss overall. In reality, it would skew the model towards that company’s “mode” of coding which isn’t what “normal” programmers expect. In fact, they are most likely to expect the coding styles they learned from, and that is most likely to be found in public examples (GitHub, StackOverflow, textbooks, Reddit, etc.) This argument is so silly to me. Anyone who has worked at a large enterprise, whether it’s Google, Amazon or Target, knows that company code is effectively guaranteed to be extremely hard to work with. This happens for organizational reasons and really the best thing to do about it is admit that it’s happening rather than pretend it’s all perfect.
    - brvsft 3y ago
      The reason they don't train the model on their code is specifically because they don't want it accidentally spitting out snippets of their proprietary code, not because the code is "extremely hard to work with." I'm amazed you called that argument silly while countering with this.
      - ShamelessC 3y ago
mindcrime 3y ago
An AI product - more specifically, the model weights - is a derivative work of the original works used for training; I don't think that's so obvious. Why would it be so, any more than for humans who learn from material? I mean, one might ask if your very comment here is a derivative work of the aggregate corpus of material you've previously read on the subjects of copyright, open source licensing, and AI. I suspect most of us would agree that it isn't so, but why treat the model weights of an AI so differently than the synaptic weights in your brain?
- pbalcer 3y ago
  When you want a clean room non-GPL implementation of something GPL that already exists, you ask the developers not to look at the original. I don't see how this is any different.
  - mindcrime 3y ago
    It's completely different. You're talking about re-implementing a specific piece of software. And that whole "clean room" thing isn't an absolute anyway... that's the level of paranoia you engage if you want to be super duper sure that you can't be accused of copying the original. What I'm talking about is closer to "you fire up your IDE (or Emacs) right now, and churn out 250 lines of code for some arbitrary piece of software. Is it a derivative work of every pieces of software whose source code you have previously look at?" Note that I'm not referring to the case where the AI spits out code that is identical to code taken from another project. I'm aware that that sometimes happens, and that is obviously a problem, just like it would if a human did it. What I'm arguing is only that it probably should not be taken as a given that AI generated code is automatically considered a derivative work. Here's a thought experiment: say an AI emits a single line of code tomorrow. You examine it, and then spend weeks, months, or even years searching all the open source code that's "out there". You fail to identify a line in any existing code-base that was clearly the upstream source for the line from the AI. So is that line a derivative work? If so, of what?
    - sokoloff 3y ago
jstummbillig 3y ago
> The existing licenses cover AI training just fine [...] An AI product - more specifically, the model weights - is a derivative work of the original works used for training The presumption is entirely debatable. A human is not considered derivative work of the original works they used for training. > Any other interpretation of the nature of copyright [...] which by definition, only covers human produced material Maybe copyright needs to leave the 1980s and evolve to deal with AI too? Maybe you do, too?
- hulitu 3y ago
  It deals with "AI" just fine. But not in the way Microsoft, for the extinguish phase, wants.
- JoshTriplett 3y ago
  A human is not copyrightable. And copyright is doing its job just fine in this context; AI training committing Open Source license violations en masse is the problem here. I'm all for copyright becoming substantially weaker or ceasing to exist, at which point AI training and lots of other things gets easier. As long as it does exist, however, AI training must respect it, and not become a copyright-violation laundering mechanism.
- pessimizer 3y ago
  > A human is not considered derivative work of the original works they used for training. No one has forced you to use humans as a comparison. A human is a citizen with other rights, and can own its own copyrights. Yet, you can still sue one for singing a song in front of other people. There were years of cinema that were distorted by the inability to have characters sing "Happy Birthday" to each other. edit: Suddenly, fair use now covers the ability to reproduce copyrighted material almost verbatim, but only when the new method to do so takes tens of millions of dollars of computer time to take advantage of.
  - circuit10 3y ago
    AI models don't always copy things verbatim. Clearly if they do and then you use that it's copyright infringement, but Google isn't illegal just because you can search for code that's under a license agreement (not that AI models are search engines). Then again, you can't download Google's index, but you also can't for many AI models... there's a lot of nuance here, I don't think it's clear one way or the other
alexvoda 3y ago
What about weak copyleft licenses like the LGPL? I think they are particularly vulnerable to this scenario. Also I think in general that software licenses were designed ignoring the isomorphism of code. Code can be data depending on use.
zarzavat 3y ago
A copyright license allows you to grant others permission to use your work, in situations where copyright law has given you an exclusive right. A license cannot give you more rights than you started with. Does copyright law give you the exclusive right to train a neural network with your work? This question is unresolved, and at least a significant number of people think that it is fair use, drawing analogies with search engine indexing whereby Google is permitted to copy websites for the purpose of creating an index to be searched. Yes, even if the website contains GPL code. The GPL is simply a list of conditions, that if followed, allow someone to legally use a work that they weren’t previously permitted to use. If they have another route to using the work legally then they need not follow the conditions in the GPL.
- slim 3y ago
  > Does copyright law give you the exclusive right to train a neural network with your work? Does copyright law give openai the exclusive right to exploit the output of ai trained on my data ? (the model, the weights, etc..)
  - zarzavat 3y ago
    The exclusive right? No. The right? Possibly. Since no court has ruled on the latter question yet, let’s do a choose your own adventure: Say that OpenAI trained a language detection model. The output of the model is simply a single vector that indicates which language that the input was written in. During training they use your copyrighted code as training data. Would you consider that to be infringement? 1) If yes: consider instead of using fancy and scary mathematics like “neural networks”, it is just tabulating and counting keywords. Is it still infringement? 1) If no: what’s different about a neural network that outputs code, vs a neural network that outputs a single vector? Perhaps it’s the output that is infringing, not the weights?
    - deleted 3y ago
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    - slim 3y ago
tpmoney 3y ago
>An AI product - more specifically, the model weights - is a derivative work of the original works used for training; AI training is a process of algorithmic compression of the originals. I'm not so sure this is as obvious a conclusion as you think. Imagine for a moment an AI OCR program. If one goes to their local library and scans all the books there to generate the models used to OCR text, does that make the OCR model and application derivative works of the books? Does copyright give Tolkien's estate the right to prevent the distribution of AI based OCR if a published copy of The Hobbit was used in creating the model? Certainly with the right inputs, the model can be used to generate a verbatim copy of the work it was trained on, but is that sufficient to say that your OCR model is just an "algorithmic compression" of these books?
- initplus 3y ago
  This analogy isn’t quite right, it’s more like if you trained a font generation AI using commercially licensed fonts, or trained a literature generating model on samples of copyrighted fiction. The part that matters is that the model is being trained on the copyrighted features of the input, not the parts the copyright holder doesn’t care about.
  - regularfry 3y ago
    What it's trained on shouldn't matter at all. What should matter is what it's capable of outputting, and whether that covers works in which someone holds copyright - so something regurgitating its input would be problematic, but something not capable of producing the same format of output as its input should be in the clear. Otherwise you're talking about something that shouldn't come under copyright law.
- mrbabbage 3y ago
  I totally agree that it's not obvious that an ML model is a derivative work. the language of the Copyright Act uses "recast, transformed, or adapted" to describe derivative works, and a pile of model weights isn't clearly that, IMO. I think it's fair to say that inferences directly replicating the creative and expressive elements (because factual information isn't copyrightable!) of a copyrighted work infringe. but I don't think it's obvious that the model itself does. > If one goes to their local library and scans all the books there to generate the models used to OCR text, does that make the OCR model and application derivative works of the books? there is a court case [1] addressing an even more infringing use case: scanning and OCR'ing books to produce a searchable database. that case turned on fair use, however, and not whether the database was a derivative work. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,....
tensor 3y ago
With your definition you can kiss spam filters, search engines, and recommendation engines goodbye. Here is a very simple case. A spammer sends you text that has attached a license saying you may not use this text for any purpose other than to be read by a human. You flag this as spam and your spam filter updates its model weights using this text. Suddenly you are not allowed to do anything with your spam filter model weights other than read the weights yourself.
- lelanthran 3y ago
  They won't go away, they'll just be open source. (Before you object, my assertion without evidence is just as good as your assertion without evidence).
  - tensor 3y ago
    I didn't state anything requiring evidence. I merely continued the logic proposed by the OP. You are fully capable of verifying or refuting the continuation without extra information.
- eqvinox 3y ago
  > A spammer sends you text that has attached a license You have not chosen to receive that text, and therefore you are not bound by that license. It may mathematically seem to not make a difference, but legally it does.
  - tensor 3y ago
    That seems like a stretch. I mean if someone just put some source code in your mailbox you don't suddenly get the rights to use it however you want right?
    - eqvinox 3y ago
      > I mean if someone just put some source code in your mailbox you don't suddenly get the rights to use it however you want right? You're applying way too much logic to a legal problem. If you ask a lawyer or judge about this, their first question will be "what intent was that source code mailed under, and were you the intended recipient?" If someone mails you a bunch of source code by accident, and it's reasonably obvious to you that it was by accident (which it will frequently be, because who the f*ck mails source code around?), you may in fact be required to destroy it. On the other hand if someone mails you the same code and you have reason to believe their intention was to spread it out no strings attached, yeah, you get the rights to use it however you want… except if the sender didn't have the right to do that to begin with… P.S.: "no strings attached" is also something that is impossible in some jurisdictions, since what you're doing might be required to be a contract of some kind, and contracts require bidirectional considerations. But at this point you really need a lawyer to explain the actual situation… P.P.S.: this is like that joke about writing on a brick "by accepting this brick through your window, you indemnify the thrower against all possible charges or damage resulting from this brick" and then chucking the brick through some storefront window.
DropInIn 3y ago
It reads like your saying that if AI reads the source for a Floss project then the AI has to make any code it generates Floss as well... Which is like saying that if a person has ever read floss source then all projects they make must be floss... Which we all know is absurd. If your want to apply extant rules to AI then you have to actually think more than just superficially about the application bof the rule.
mym1990 3y ago
So if I lay out 10 images from an artist, or a variety of artists, and create a work, by hand, in a similar style, should I abide by your similar thought pattern? Almost all art is influenced by previous works, the only difference here is that the time horizon for a computer generating similar outputs is much, much shorter.
- pxoe 3y ago
  the way a program works isn't actually how a human would work, and those (false) equivalences, don't make the way a program works to be excusable. anyway, it doesn't matter, it's just distracting bullshit ultimately. meanwhile, a program operates in a series of very concrete tangible operations over bytes. was data of original works downloaded? yep. was that data processed? yep. was some kind of output based on that data created? yep. so what is that data, if not a derivative? and then, if some other data was created based on that derivative data - damn, that's a derivative of a derivative. is it not?
  - mym1990 3y ago
    Are you pretending to understand how human creativity works? Your last 1-3 sentences is literally what a human does, in some situations, or in many situations early in the development process of a style. If this was not the case, art school would not be the study of previous artists and styles, it would purely be the study of the physical world.
    - pxoe 3y ago
      there's "literally what human does (and that's why it's fine for AI to peruse all of your data, don't even question it lol)" (which is bullshit. cute for a sales pitch, but it will always fundamentally be bullshit), and then there are actual ways program work. and these two are pretty much disconnected, no matter how many 'analogies and parallels' are attempted to be drawn. we're not computers, and computers are not humans. if a person were to "do these steps" and "do creativity" in that way - as in, "downloading something" and doing a bunch of quantifiable, traceable operations, as part of their process - well, shit, that's still gonna be just the computer part of it. not 'human creativity' part. still. if there was that 'human creativity' in the loop of 'downloading and perusing a bunch of IP in a traceable way', it's the latter that would be questionable - and useable, for questioning of, for investigation, for lawyers. and unfortunately, computers and their "creativity" work pretty much entirely in that "quantifiable and traceable" way. the 'human creativity' could be chalked up to 'well i don't know'. 'program "creativity"' - very definite 'an executable did this and this, and spit this out'. and if it reproduces well, 'here's a memory snapshot, a complete step-by-step of the process'. can't do that with brains. very doable for software. it could be just a bunch of incomprehensible stuff, but it'd still be a complete byte dump. "it would purely be the study of the physical world" - well, it's still a very much existing option. would it make a difference if that was 'the only option available' or just 'one of the ways'? and AI studies the real world as well, through photographs, and 3d scans, and so on. art is influenced, and those aspects can be pointed out across artists, with some artists readily admitting, 'oh, I was inspired by so-and-so'. people do all kinds of shit with art, and get told off or even sued. art can be forged, with people making something in style and trying to pass it as a work of different artist and sell it. which can be a crime. is that surprising? and AI services try to sell their outputs as well.
ApolloFortyNine 3y ago
Imo, this kind of draconian interpretation will only lead to China being the world leader in ai (a country who has a history of not really respecting ip and copyright). I believe Japan has actually passed a very permissive ai law basically allowing AI's to learn off copyrighted content as well. But any country that essentially bans AI learning in this way will simply fall behind.
stale2002 3y ago
> is a derivative work of the original works used for training No it's not. No judge in the US has ruled training to be automatically infringement. > Therefore, the resulting model should abide by all the license requirements Or it could just be ignored because it is not infringement. > which by definition, only covers human produced material You've conflated 2 things. It could be the case that the new work created by the AI does not have copyright protections. But that is completely unrelated to if training on other works is infringement. Which no judge has said it is.
JamesLeonis 3y ago
You are absolutely right, and all of these commentators trying to counter you would fall apart if CoPilot was found using proprietary software in its training data. Its no wonder all these AI companies are playing fast-and-loose with licensing. To all those commentators: You really need to understand how this works. There is a reason all the big tech companies are fanatically allergic to GPL software. It is worth the legal fee for the lawyer to walk you through all of it.
lowbloodsugar 3y ago
>Any other interpretation of the nature of copyright - which by definition, only covers human produced material “By definition”? Your definition? or is that in the text of the law? Even if it is in the text of the law, are not corporations now legally people in the USA?
vasili111 3y ago
>AI training is a process of algorithmic compression of the originals. I would disagree with this. AI training is more like extracting information from data. Humans also extract information from data when learning. If human have access to data to learn and after create product to sell I think same human should be allowed to use that data to train AI after use AI to create and sell product created by AI.
- ballooney 3y ago
  Extracting information from data [that you assume contains redundancy] is _precisely_ what compression is.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

EMIRELADERO 3y ago

What if the whole pipeline (scraping for training, the training itself, model distribution, and use to generate derivative works) is found to be a fair use (at least in American law)? Licenses wouldn't mean anything at that point, since it's because of copyright that they can make you accept them in the first place

noobermin 3y ago
Then every employee of openai should scrape the weights of GPT-4 and train their own neural nets. That would not be a derivative work and also be free use under this logic.
- EMIRELADERO 3y ago
  Obviously this isn't tested in the courts (for now) but it is my opinion that model weights aren't even copyrightable.
  - zarzavat 3y ago
    I don’t think we need a court case for that. Model weights aren’t copyrightable by the trainer in the US. Copyright only protects works of human authorship, and training a network is not authorship. If the model weights encode other copyrighted works literally enough then they may be copyrighted by the author(s) of the works, that is a gray area. But the training process itself is not authorship and doesn’t confer copyright.
    - deleted 3y ago
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- banana_feather 3y ago
  That's not how fair use works. This kind of use would facially fail three of the factors for fair use; it's not be transformative, it copies the original work in its entirety, and it harms the commercial market for the original work.
  - wnkrshm 3y ago
    how much do the weights have to change for it to be transformative? Edit: you arrive at the same question as taking an image with img2img and running it through a diffusion variant - keeping the composition, colors etc. but no the details
    - banana_feather 3y ago
      Much of the case law about the "transformative" factor focuses on "new meaning or expression", but it's about visual art, which is generally very difficult to reason about w.r.t. copyright. I think the example to look to for technology is Authors Guild v. Google, where "transformative" is more about non-expressive purpose, and it was considered transformative to copy a bunch of books to produce a search functionality, since the search functionality (which only displayed snippets) was a transformative purpose compared to the underlying creative expression in the books.
  - bhickey 3y ago
    Fair use doesn't enter into it if weights aren't copyrightable. They're machine generated by stochastic gradient descent. There's no human hand setting the weights. We won't know until something ends up before the USCO.
- schoen 3y ago
  It seems credible to me to suggest that the model weights are a trade secret, but aren't copyrightable. There's lots of stuff that could be in that category for other companies. The employees would still have a contractual responsibility about their use of the model weights.

jl6 3y ago

It’s not clear to me that it’s any easier to judge this than in human cases of “inspiration vs infringement”. What part of the model weights can a lawyer point to and say “this bit clearly incorporates a substantial portion of my client’s work”.

xyzzy123 3y ago
I feel this argument is weakened by the fact that no one training these models feeds their own proprietary source code into publicly available models. Practically speaking I feel this is a strong hint that some degree of copyright laundering is taking place.
- ShamelessC 3y ago
  > no one training these models feeds their own proprietary source code into publicly available models You are presupposing that the company’s own code would somehow be a massive boon for the model, resulting in lower loss overall. In reality, it would skew the model towards that company’s “mode” of coding which isn’t what “normal” programmers expect. In fact, they are most likely to expect the coding styles they learned from, and that is most likely to be found in public examples (GitHub, StackOverflow, textbooks, Reddit, etc.) This argument is so silly to me. Anyone who has worked at a large enterprise, whether it’s Google, Amazon or Target, knows that company code is effectively guaranteed to be extremely hard to work with. This happens for organizational reasons and really the best thing to do about it is admit that it’s happening rather than pretend it’s all perfect.
  - brvsft 3y ago
    The reason they don't train the model on their code is specifically because they don't want it accidentally spitting out snippets of their proprietary code, not because the code is "extremely hard to work with." I'm amazed you called that argument silly while countering with this.
    - ShamelessC 3y ago

mindcrime 3y ago

An AI product - more specifically, the model weights - is a derivative work of the original works used for training; I don't think that's so obvious. Why would it be so, any more than for humans who learn from material? I mean, one might ask if your very comment here is a derivative work of the aggregate corpus of material you've previously read on the subjects of copyright, open source licensing, and AI. I suspect most of us would agree that it isn't so, but why treat the model weights of an AI so differently than the synaptic weights in your brain?

pbalcer 3y ago
When you want a clean room non-GPL implementation of something GPL that already exists, you ask the developers not to look at the original. I don't see how this is any different.
- mindcrime 3y ago
  It's completely different. You're talking about re-implementing a specific piece of software. And that whole "clean room" thing isn't an absolute anyway... that's the level of paranoia you engage if you want to be super duper sure that you can't be accused of copying the original. What I'm talking about is closer to "you fire up your IDE (or Emacs) right now, and churn out 250 lines of code for some arbitrary piece of software. Is it a derivative work of every pieces of software whose source code you have previously look at?" Note that I'm not referring to the case where the AI spits out code that is identical to code taken from another project. I'm aware that that sometimes happens, and that is obviously a problem, just like it would if a human did it. What I'm arguing is only that it probably should not be taken as a given that AI generated code is automatically considered a derivative work. Here's a thought experiment: say an AI emits a single line of code tomorrow. You examine it, and then spend weeks, months, or even years searching all the open source code that's "out there". You fail to identify a line in any existing code-base that was clearly the upstream source for the line from the AI. So is that line a derivative work? If so, of what?
  - sokoloff 3y ago

jstummbillig 3y ago

> The existing licenses cover AI training just fine [...] An AI product - more specifically, the model weights - is a derivative work of the original works used for training The presumption is entirely debatable. A human is not considered derivative work of the original works they used for training. > Any other interpretation of the nature of copyright [...] which by definition, only covers human produced material Maybe copyright needs to leave the 1980s and evolve to deal with AI too? Maybe you do, too?

hulitu 3y ago
It deals with "AI" just fine. But not in the way Microsoft, for the extinguish phase, wants.
JoshTriplett 3y ago
A human is not copyrightable. And copyright is doing its job just fine in this context; AI training committing Open Source license violations en masse is the problem here. I'm all for copyright becoming substantially weaker or ceasing to exist, at which point AI training and lots of other things gets easier. As long as it does exist, however, AI training must respect it, and not become a copyright-violation laundering mechanism.
pessimizer 3y ago
> A human is not considered derivative work of the original works they used for training. No one has forced you to use humans as a comparison. A human is a citizen with other rights, and can own its own copyrights. Yet, you can still sue one for singing a song in front of other people. There were years of cinema that were distorted by the inability to have characters sing "Happy Birthday" to each other. edit: Suddenly, fair use now covers the ability to reproduce copyrighted material almost verbatim, but only when the new method to do so takes tens of millions of dollars of computer time to take advantage of.
- circuit10 3y ago
  AI models don't always copy things verbatim. Clearly if they do and then you use that it's copyright infringement, but Google isn't illegal just because you can search for code that's under a license agreement (not that AI models are search engines). Then again, you can't download Google's index, but you also can't for many AI models... there's a lot of nuance here, I don't think it's clear one way or the other

alexvoda 3y ago

What about weak copyleft licenses like the LGPL? I think they are particularly vulnerable to this scenario. Also I think in general that software licenses were designed ignoring the isomorphism of code. Code can be data depending on use.

zarzavat 3y ago

A copyright license allows you to grant others permission to use your work, in situations where copyright law has given you an exclusive right. A license cannot give you more rights than you started with. Does copyright law give you the exclusive right to train a neural network with your work? This question is unresolved, and at least a significant number of people think that it is fair use, drawing analogies with search engine indexing whereby Google is permitted to copy websites for the purpose of creating an index to be searched. Yes, even if the website contains GPL code. The GPL is simply a list of conditions, that if followed, allow someone to legally use a work that they weren’t previously permitted to use. If they have another route to using the work legally then they need not follow the conditions in the GPL.

slim 3y ago
> Does copyright law give you the exclusive right to train a neural network with your work? Does copyright law give openai the exclusive right to exploit the output of ai trained on my data ? (the model, the weights, etc..)
- zarzavat 3y ago
  The exclusive right? No. The right? Possibly. Since no court has ruled on the latter question yet, let’s do a choose your own adventure: Say that OpenAI trained a language detection model. The output of the model is simply a single vector that indicates which language that the input was written in. During training they use your copyrighted code as training data. Would you consider that to be infringement? 1) If yes: consider instead of using fancy and scary mathematics like “neural networks”, it is just tabulating and counting keywords. Is it still infringement? 1) If no: what’s different about a neural network that outputs code, vs a neural network that outputs a single vector? Perhaps it’s the output that is infringing, not the weights?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - slim 3y ago

tpmoney 3y ago

>An AI product - more specifically, the model weights - is a derivative work of the original works used for training; AI training is a process of algorithmic compression of the originals. I'm not so sure this is as obvious a conclusion as you think. Imagine for a moment an AI OCR program. If one goes to their local library and scans all the books there to generate the models used to OCR text, does that make the OCR model and application derivative works of the books? Does copyright give Tolkien's estate the right to prevent the distribution of AI based OCR if a published copy of The Hobbit was used in creating the model? Certainly with the right inputs, the model can be used to generate a verbatim copy of the work it was trained on, but is that sufficient to say that your OCR model is just an "algorithmic compression" of these books?

initplus 3y ago
This analogy isn’t quite right, it’s more like if you trained a font generation AI using commercially licensed fonts, or trained a literature generating model on samples of copyrighted fiction. The part that matters is that the model is being trained on the copyrighted features of the input, not the parts the copyright holder doesn’t care about.
- regularfry 3y ago
  What it's trained on shouldn't matter at all. What should matter is what it's capable of outputting, and whether that covers works in which someone holds copyright - so something regurgitating its input would be problematic, but something not capable of producing the same format of output as its input should be in the clear. Otherwise you're talking about something that shouldn't come under copyright law.
mrbabbage 3y ago
I totally agree that it's not obvious that an ML model is a derivative work. the language of the Copyright Act uses "recast, transformed, or adapted" to describe derivative works, and a pile of model weights isn't clearly that, IMO. I think it's fair to say that inferences directly replicating the creative and expressive elements (because factual information isn't copyrightable!) of a copyrighted work infringe. but I don't think it's obvious that the model itself does. > If one goes to their local library and scans all the books there to generate the models used to OCR text, does that make the OCR model and application derivative works of the books? there is a court case [1] addressing an even more infringing use case: scanning and OCR'ing books to produce a searchable database. that case turned on fair use, however, and not whether the database was a derivative work. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,....

tensor 3y ago

With your definition you can kiss spam filters, search engines, and recommendation engines goodbye. Here is a very simple case. A spammer sends you text that has attached a license saying you may not use this text for any purpose other than to be read by a human. You flag this as spam and your spam filter updates its model weights using this text. Suddenly you are not allowed to do anything with your spam filter model weights other than read the weights yourself.

lelanthran 3y ago
They won't go away, they'll just be open source. (Before you object, my assertion without evidence is just as good as your assertion without evidence).
- tensor 3y ago
  I didn't state anything requiring evidence. I merely continued the logic proposed by the OP. You are fully capable of verifying or refuting the continuation without extra information.
eqvinox 3y ago
> A spammer sends you text that has attached a license You have not chosen to receive that text, and therefore you are not bound by that license. It may mathematically seem to not make a difference, but legally it does.
- tensor 3y ago
  That seems like a stretch. I mean if someone just put some source code in your mailbox you don't suddenly get the rights to use it however you want right?
  - eqvinox 3y ago
    > I mean if someone just put some source code in your mailbox you don't suddenly get the rights to use it however you want right? You're applying way too much logic to a legal problem. If you ask a lawyer or judge about this, their first question will be "what intent was that source code mailed under, and were you the intended recipient?" If someone mails you a bunch of source code by accident, and it's reasonably obvious to you that it was by accident (which it will frequently be, because who the f*ck mails source code around?), you may in fact be required to destroy it. On the other hand if someone mails you the same code and you have reason to believe their intention was to spread it out no strings attached, yeah, you get the rights to use it however you want… except if the sender didn't have the right to do that to begin with… P.S.: "no strings attached" is also something that is impossible in some jurisdictions, since what you're doing might be required to be a contract of some kind, and contracts require bidirectional considerations. But at this point you really need a lawyer to explain the actual situation… P.P.S.: this is like that joke about writing on a brick "by accepting this brick through your window, you indemnify the thrower against all possible charges or damage resulting from this brick" and then chucking the brick through some storefront window.

DropInIn 3y ago

It reads like your saying that if AI reads the source for a Floss project then the AI has to make any code it generates Floss as well... Which is like saying that if a person has ever read floss source then all projects they make must be floss... Which we all know is absurd. If your want to apply extant rules to AI then you have to actually think more than just superficially about the application bof the rule.

mym1990 3y ago

So if I lay out 10 images from an artist, or a variety of artists, and create a work, by hand, in a similar style, should I abide by your similar thought pattern? Almost all art is influenced by previous works, the only difference here is that the time horizon for a computer generating similar outputs is much, much shorter.

pxoe 3y ago
the way a program works isn't actually how a human would work, and those (false) equivalences, don't make the way a program works to be excusable. anyway, it doesn't matter, it's just distracting bullshit ultimately. meanwhile, a program operates in a series of very concrete tangible operations over bytes. was data of original works downloaded? yep. was that data processed? yep. was some kind of output based on that data created? yep. so what is that data, if not a derivative? and then, if some other data was created based on that derivative data - damn, that's a derivative of a derivative. is it not?
- mym1990 3y ago
  Are you pretending to understand how human creativity works? Your last 1-3 sentences is literally what a human does, in some situations, or in many situations early in the development process of a style. If this was not the case, art school would not be the study of previous artists and styles, it would purely be the study of the physical world.
  - pxoe 3y ago
    there's "literally what human does (and that's why it's fine for AI to peruse all of your data, don't even question it lol)" (which is bullshit. cute for a sales pitch, but it will always fundamentally be bullshit), and then there are actual ways program work. and these two are pretty much disconnected, no matter how many 'analogies and parallels' are attempted to be drawn. we're not computers, and computers are not humans. if a person were to "do these steps" and "do creativity" in that way - as in, "downloading something" and doing a bunch of quantifiable, traceable operations, as part of their process - well, shit, that's still gonna be just the computer part of it. not 'human creativity' part. still. if there was that 'human creativity' in the loop of 'downloading and perusing a bunch of IP in a traceable way', it's the latter that would be questionable - and useable, for questioning of, for investigation, for lawyers. and unfortunately, computers and their "creativity" work pretty much entirely in that "quantifiable and traceable" way. the 'human creativity' could be chalked up to 'well i don't know'. 'program "creativity"' - very definite 'an executable did this and this, and spit this out'. and if it reproduces well, 'here's a memory snapshot, a complete step-by-step of the process'. can't do that with brains. very doable for software. it could be just a bunch of incomprehensible stuff, but it'd still be a complete byte dump. "it would purely be the study of the physical world" - well, it's still a very much existing option. would it make a difference if that was 'the only option available' or just 'one of the ways'? and AI studies the real world as well, through photographs, and 3d scans, and so on. art is influenced, and those aspects can be pointed out across artists, with some artists readily admitting, 'oh, I was inspired by so-and-so'. people do all kinds of shit with art, and get told off or even sued. art can be forged, with people making something in style and trying to pass it as a work of different artist and sell it. which can be a crime. is that surprising? and AI services try to sell their outputs as well.

ApolloFortyNine 3y ago

Imo, this kind of draconian interpretation will only lead to China being the world leader in ai (a country who has a history of not really respecting ip and copyright). I believe Japan has actually passed a very permissive ai law basically allowing AI's to learn off copyrighted content as well. But any country that essentially bans AI learning in this way will simply fall behind.

stale2002 3y ago

> is a derivative work of the original works used for training No it's not. No judge in the US has ruled training to be automatically infringement. > Therefore, the resulting model should abide by all the license requirements Or it could just be ignored because it is not infringement. > which by definition, only covers human produced material You've conflated 2 things. It could be the case that the new work created by the AI does not have copyright protections. But that is completely unrelated to if training on other works is infringement. Which no judge has said it is.

JamesLeonis 3y ago

You are absolutely right, and all of these commentators trying to counter you would fall apart if CoPilot was found using proprietary software in its training data. Its no wonder all these AI companies are playing fast-and-loose with licensing. To all those commentators: You really need to understand how this works. There is a reason all the big tech companies are fanatically allergic to GPL software. It is worth the legal fee for the lawyer to walk you through all of it.

lowbloodsugar 3y ago

>Any other interpretation of the nature of copyright - which by definition, only covers human produced material “By definition”? Your definition? or is that in the text of the law? Even if it is in the text of the law, are not corporations now legally people in the USA?

vasili111 3y ago

>AI training is a process of algorithmic compression of the originals. I would disagree with this. AI training is more like extracting information from data. Humans also extract information from data when learning. If human have access to data to learn and after create product to sell I think same human should be allowed to use that data to train AI after use AI to create and sell product created by AI.

ballooney 3y ago
Extracting information from data [that you assume contains redundancy] is _precisely_ what compression is.

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