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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 canno

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
    I think neither I nor openai should have any exclusive rights and that would lead to the best outcome for humanity. the problem is sam altman is already lobbying to restrict access to ai (which maybe indicates that his lawyers think that they might not have exclusive rights)
    - regularfry 3y ago
      He's lobbying to build a moat around assets he already has. Rights don't come into it.
  - saagarjha 3y ago
    Seems similar to, say, a device that does radiocarbon dating of a painting and prints the result and one that takes a picture?
  - dweinus 3y ago
    > consider instead of using fancy and scary mathematics like “neural networks”, it is just tabulating and counting keywords. Is it still infringement? I've seen this analogy before. A NN, especially an LLM, is very different in method and outcome. If counting keywords allowed me to replicate copyrighted material, it would probably not be fair use. IANAL, but I imagine the fact that a NN can replicate or compete with the original work makes a difference.
- regularfry 3y ago
  There's a core question here: can the AI regurgitate your data? If it can, the AI can be said to be copying what it was trained on (ergo copyright is a factor). If it cannot, it's hard to see how copyright comes into it. How it's trained shouldn't come into it.
  - blowski 3y ago
    This is the problem, there is no easy analogy. If I’ve learned how to code from an open source course, I don’t breach copyright every time I write code in my career. If I clone the course, just replacing some of the examples and using synonyms then I probably have. ChatGPT is somewhere between these extremes and it’s unclear what the principle should be. Perhaps it’s like learning to play guitar by watching other guitarists, then releasing songs in the same genre.
    - rfw300 3y ago
      That’s because you’re a human. Copyright and fair use law was built for people, and letting AI models have the same privileges will lead to worse outcomes. What’s so wrong about saying that it isn’t fair use for a machine to learn from your copyrighted data?
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    - regularfry 3y ago
      I'm not making an analogy. It's a literal question. If I crank noise through a bunch of matrices and churn out the Mona Lisa because the Mona Lisa was in the training data, I've not painted the Mona Lisa. I've reproduced someone else's work through a fairly tortuous mathematical route. The matrices don't have agency, they can't lay claim to anything. Although I should probably say, for completeness: the matrices don't have agency yet.
faangsticle 3y ago
People say lots of things, especially when they see ways to exploit others so they can make money. Let this be a reminder that copyright exists to protect the rich, not the artists.
belorn 3y ago
It all depend on what analogies we use. If we see the algorithmic compression to be similar to converting a 4k video to a lower resolution, the legal system seems to view it as a copy despite it being a lossy compression. If we take the input data of a average website and look at the data inside a search engine indexing, it will likely contain more bits from the original than converting a 4k video down to a 144p, youtubes smallest video format. We do however view the index to be fair use while the 144p video to be similar enough to the original to be considered a copy. Those kinds of discussion always reminds me of early discussions around freenet. A file get encrypted and then split into 32KiB files. Multiple files can share identical 32KiB blocks, which means no single block can be definitively owned by a single file. The argument was then that this bypassed copyright law, since just copying blocks would not be proof of copying. This question is also unresolved, but given the outcome of all file sharing sites in the past, it is doubtful that it would succeed in convincing a judge. In the end that is what this is coming down to. What would a judge/jury say. All I know for certain is that the film and music industry will never accept an model that is trained on their products and that directly competes with their products by producing substitutes that are close or seemingly identical to the originals. They will not care a second if its similar to a search engine indexing. Unstable Diffusion is also a perfect example where politicians will likely do something if large companies start to generate money by producing porn that is trained on famous politicians, actors and celebrates.
- zarzavat 3y ago
  The difference is whether the use is transformative. In the case of compression, it’s clearly not transformative, because compressing an image just represents it in a different way. For a search index, it clearly is transformative. A piece of code and a search index are night and day different in every way. For a neural network it’s tricky and that’s why it’s a gray area. On the one hand, a neural network looks transformative because with a neural network I can do many different things that don’t involve any verbatim copying of the original work. If I ask ChatGPT to “write me a haiku about fishing on Mars” it’s not like it’s trawling through a database of copyrighted haikus and copying one someone already wrote about fishing on Mars. On the other hand generative NNs do sometimes spit out copyrighted works verbatim, which does show that there are pieces of copyrighted works inside - but that doesn’t mean that the whole thing is automatically infringing, for example courts could decide that just particular outputs are infringing whereas the weights and other outputs are not.

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
  I think neither I nor openai should have any exclusive rights and that would lead to the best outcome for humanity. the problem is sam altman is already lobbying to restrict access to ai (which maybe indicates that his lawyers think that they might not have exclusive rights)
  - regularfry 3y ago
    He's lobbying to build a moat around assets he already has. Rights don't come into it.
- saagarjha 3y ago
  Seems similar to, say, a device that does radiocarbon dating of a painting and prints the result and one that takes a picture?
- dweinus 3y ago
  > consider instead of using fancy and scary mathematics like “neural networks”, it is just tabulating and counting keywords. Is it still infringement? I've seen this analogy before. A NN, especially an LLM, is very different in method and outcome. If counting keywords allowed me to replicate copyrighted material, it would probably not be fair use. IANAL, but I imagine the fact that a NN can replicate or compete with the original work makes a difference.
regularfry 3y ago
There's a core question here: can the AI regurgitate your data? If it can, the AI can be said to be copying what it was trained on (ergo copyright is a factor). If it cannot, it's hard to see how copyright comes into it. How it's trained shouldn't come into it.
- blowski 3y ago
  This is the problem, there is no easy analogy. If I’ve learned how to code from an open source course, I don’t breach copyright every time I write code in my career. If I clone the course, just replacing some of the examples and using synonyms then I probably have. ChatGPT is somewhere between these extremes and it’s unclear what the principle should be. Perhaps it’s like learning to play guitar by watching other guitarists, then releasing songs in the same genre.
  - rfw300 3y ago
    That’s because you’re a human. Copyright and fair use law was built for people, and letting AI models have the same privileges will lead to worse outcomes. What’s so wrong about saying that it isn’t fair use for a machine to learn from your copyrighted data?
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - regularfry 3y ago
    I'm not making an analogy. It's a literal question. If I crank noise through a bunch of matrices and churn out the Mona Lisa because the Mona Lisa was in the training data, I've not painted the Mona Lisa. I've reproduced someone else's work through a fairly tortuous mathematical route. The matrices don't have agency, they can't lay claim to anything. Although I should probably say, for completeness: the matrices don't have agency yet.

faangsticle 3y ago

People say lots of things, especially when they see ways to exploit others so they can make money. Let this be a reminder that copyright exists to protect the rich, not the artists.

belorn 3y ago

It all depend on what analogies we use. If we see the algorithmic compression to be similar to converting a 4k video to a lower resolution, the legal system seems to view it as a copy despite it being a lossy compression. If we take the input data of a average website and look at the data inside a search engine indexing, it will likely contain more bits from the original than converting a 4k video down to a 144p, youtubes smallest video format. We do however view the index to be fair use while the 144p video to be similar enough to the original to be considered a copy. Those kinds of discussion always reminds me of early discussions around freenet. A file get encrypted and then split into 32KiB files. Multiple files can share identical 32KiB blocks, which means no single block can be definitively owned by a single file. The argument was then that this bypassed copyright law, since just copying blocks would not be proof of copying. This question is also unresolved, but given the outcome of all file sharing sites in the past, it is doubtful that it would succeed in convincing a judge. In the end that is what this is coming down to. What would a judge/jury say. All I know for certain is that the film and music industry will never accept an model that is trained on their products and that directly competes with their products by producing substitutes that are close or seemingly identical to the originals. They will not care a second if its similar to a search engine indexing. Unstable Diffusion is also a perfect example where politicians will likely do something if large companies start to generate money by producing porn that is trained on famous politicians, actors and celebrates.

zarzavat 3y ago
The difference is whether the use is transformative. In the case of compression, it’s clearly not transformative, because compressing an image just represents it in a different way. For a search index, it clearly is transformative. A piece of code and a search index are night and day different in every way. For a neural network it’s tricky and that’s why it’s a gray area. On the one hand, a neural network looks transformative because with a neural network I can do many different things that don’t involve any verbatim copying of the original work. If I ask ChatGPT to “write me a haiku about fishing on Mars” it’s not like it’s trawling through a database of copyrighted haikus and copying one someone already wrote about fishing on Mars. On the other hand generative NNs do sometimes spit out copyrighted works verbatim, which does show that there are pieces of copyrighted works inside - but that doesn’t mean that the whole thing is automatically infringing, for example courts could decide that just particular outputs are infringing whereas the weights and other outputs are not.