4 ms·

I don’t know what’s the actual legal status on LLMs right now, but here’s my thought: if you created artwork in Adobe Photoshop, does Adobe own your art work? I

I don’t know what’s the actual legal status on LLMs right now, but here’s my thought: if you created artwork in Adobe Photoshop, does Adobe own your art work? If you made a world in Minecraft, does Minecraft own your world? What about using the AI tools in Adobe Photoshop? Or WorldEdit in Minecraft? I’m sure these question can be easily answered by looking it up, so why would LLMs be any different? You have control over what the LLM generates (prompts).

AlecSchueler 3y ago
Thanks for saying this, this is my perspective as well and I've been kinda dumbfounded by all the questions about copyright from LLMs. They're just tools and computer programs right? Why would copyright be any different while using them than other tools. Never seen it questioned that Windsor & Newton could actually be the copyright holder for half the world's art.
- nucleardog 3y ago
  Because the inputs to the models are copyrighted works? If I open up Photoshop and make a new file, I own my art. So why would me opening up an existing PSD and moving all the pieces around and then claiming it as my own be an issue? I don’t think anyone would question this at all if the model were trained only on your own data. It’s the part where a bunch of other people’s stuff was involved that makes it fuzzy enough to be an open legal question.
  - AlecSchueler 3y ago
    I read your position as being the copyright should belong to the holders of the copyright for the training works? I can sort of see that but a) I'm also seeing it posited that the copyright could belong to either ht model or the company that produced the model (where does that logic come from?) and b) My own creativity is trained on the works of many others but my work is still my own, why is this different for an LLM?
basch 3y ago
It’s different because rules are written and enforced by humans not robots. So it’s whatever the copyright office says at the moment. I think a same result though is that any work translated by the original author counts as a translation that maintains but doesn’t extend copyright.
sorokod 3y ago
I'd say that the difference is in the ownership of the data the tool has as it does it's job. In the case of Photoshop, these are the algorithms possibly owned by Adobe and the bytes you feed it. In the case of LLMs it is the model which was built using data with disputed ownership and the bytes you feed it. Consider a hypothetical LLM that was trained on data having a single undisputed copywrite owner. What would be the legal status of it's output?
- AlecSchueler 3y ago
  > Consider a hypothetical LLM that was trained on data having a single undisputed copywrite owner. What would be the legal status of it's output? In that case the tool would almost certainly generate a derivative work, which would be a copyright violation. It's the same as if I took sick strong inspiration from a certain song that I wrote a new one with the same melody and chords, which has happened a bunch of times. But generally LLMs are most useful when they're trained on a broad enough corpus to avoid these issues.
  - sorokod 3y ago
    It's not really about the size of the corpus but about its ownership. Anyway, now consider an LLM that was trained on two corpuses(?) with two distinct undisputed owners.
    - AlecSchueler 3y ago
      What difference does that make? The question is whether the work that is produced is derivative or not surely.
      - sorokod 3y ago
        That is the question indeed.
        AlecSchueler 3y ago
Brian_K_White 3y ago
hell Pantone claims to own colors let alone art The question is more like this, if google books has an api that lets you retrieve one sentence from any book, and you use it to fetch whole chapters of valuable books written by actual insightful authors. Do you really deserve to claim to have written the book you patch together from that? Especially, do you really deserve to not only benefit from selling the new book, but not even acknowledge nor pay a percentage to the original authors?
- AlecSchueler 3y ago
  It depends how derivative my resulting book is. If I put all the sentences in the same order then I've created a derivative work, but if I create a meaningfully new work then I'd expect the copyright to be mine.
  - Brian_K_White 3y ago
    How do you know what deserves credit and what doesn't, when the tool doesn't tell you? How do I know whether you had the valuable insight to craft an artful line, or ot was handed to you and you glued it to another and another? When you write a program using a library, there is no such ambiguity or credit-washing. You wrote your app, the library authors wrote the library. copilot is essentially stripping that. You get to not only write your app, but look like, and even, apparently, feel like, you produced everything that went into it. All that stuff that was done by someone else and gifted to you, well that's all just the tools you the real artist used. It's absurd to credit a paint brush eh?

AlecSchueler 3y ago

Thanks for saying this, this is my perspective as well and I've been kinda dumbfounded by all the questions about copyright from LLMs. They're just tools and computer programs right? Why would copyright be any different while using them than other tools. Never seen it questioned that Windsor & Newton could actually be the copyright holder for half the world's art.

nucleardog 3y ago
Because the inputs to the models are copyrighted works? If I open up Photoshop and make a new file, I own my art. So why would me opening up an existing PSD and moving all the pieces around and then claiming it as my own be an issue? I don’t think anyone would question this at all if the model were trained only on your own data. It’s the part where a bunch of other people’s stuff was involved that makes it fuzzy enough to be an open legal question.
- AlecSchueler 3y ago
  I read your position as being the copyright should belong to the holders of the copyright for the training works? I can sort of see that but a) I'm also seeing it posited that the copyright could belong to either ht model or the company that produced the model (where does that logic come from?) and b) My own creativity is trained on the works of many others but my work is still my own, why is this different for an LLM?

basch 3y ago

It’s different because rules are written and enforced by humans not robots. So it’s whatever the copyright office says at the moment. I think a same result though is that any work translated by the original author counts as a translation that maintains but doesn’t extend copyright.

sorokod 3y ago

I'd say that the difference is in the ownership of the data the tool has as it does it's job. In the case of Photoshop, these are the algorithms possibly owned by Adobe and the bytes you feed it. In the case of LLMs it is the model which was built using data with disputed ownership and the bytes you feed it. Consider a hypothetical LLM that was trained on data having a single undisputed copywrite owner. What would be the legal status of it's output?

AlecSchueler 3y ago
> Consider a hypothetical LLM that was trained on data having a single undisputed copywrite owner. What would be the legal status of it's output? In that case the tool would almost certainly generate a derivative work, which would be a copyright violation. It's the same as if I took sick strong inspiration from a certain song that I wrote a new one with the same melody and chords, which has happened a bunch of times. But generally LLMs are most useful when they're trained on a broad enough corpus to avoid these issues.
- sorokod 3y ago
  It's not really about the size of the corpus but about its ownership. Anyway, now consider an LLM that was trained on two corpuses(?) with two distinct undisputed owners.
  - AlecSchueler 3y ago
    What difference does that make? The question is whether the work that is produced is derivative or not surely.
    - sorokod 3y ago
      That is the question indeed.
      - AlecSchueler 3y ago

Brian_K_White 3y ago

hell Pantone claims to own colors let alone art The question is more like this, if google books has an api that lets you retrieve one sentence from any book, and you use it to fetch whole chapters of valuable books written by actual insightful authors. Do you really deserve to claim to have written the book you patch together from that? Especially, do you really deserve to not only benefit from selling the new book, but not even acknowledge nor pay a percentage to the original authors?

AlecSchueler 3y ago
It depends how derivative my resulting book is. If I put all the sentences in the same order then I've created a derivative work, but if I create a meaningfully new work then I'd expect the copyright to be mine.
- Brian_K_White 3y ago
  How do you know what deserves credit and what doesn't, when the tool doesn't tell you? How do I know whether you had the valuable insight to craft an artful line, or ot was handed to you and you glued it to another and another? When you write a program using a library, there is no such ambiguity or credit-washing. You wrote your app, the library authors wrote the library. copilot is essentially stripping that. You get to not only write your app, but look like, and even, apparently, feel like, you produced everything that went into it. All that stuff that was done by someone else and gifted to you, well that's all just the tools you the real artist used. It's absurd to credit a paint brush eh?