5 ms·

Exactly. A lot of the difficulty here is how they skip is the hugely important issue: An entirely reasonable, if not fully tested, statement is the following:

• visarga 3y ago
  > is a result of unencumbered, massive, law-breaking, right-violating copyright infringement Why? Copyright covers expression not information, AIs can learn information from any source regardless of copyright. They should just not regurgitate copyrighted content, that's all. And much of what organic content is online is common knowledge, thus can't be copyright-controlled.
  • version_five 3y ago
    A lot of people are just upset because their local equilibrium has been disrupted and they think that means they lost a natural right. "You wouldn't look at a car and then remember what that looked like when someone asks you to draw another"
    • jrm4 3y ago
      These are not bad arguments, but I don't think they're conclusive. I am a lawyer, and I could absolutely see this going the other way. "You can't make these machine things without literally feeding this copyrighted information into them, therefore they do contain a copy. You can see this by when they reproduce, e.g. the "getty images" deal." *this is not legal advice, dangit commenter person below
      • londons_explore 3y ago
        It's just a race for which test case gets to the supreme court first really...
        • pmoriarty 3y ago
          ...and the Supreme Court could rule however it likes. It doesn't matter what anyone else says, or what any law says, what any lawyer or other judge says. They could be completely biased, could completely ignore everyone and everything else and rule however they want. I'm almost surprised they still bother to write any kind of "legal reasoning" in their ruling and don't simply focus on what the ruling is rather than why they ruled that way. But I guess such "reasoning" still serves a propaganda purpose and still provides a fig leaf for those who still believe in the quaint absurdity that "we are a nation of laws, not men."
          • londons_explore 3y ago
            Supreme court precedent seems to impact a lot of decisions... Plenty of companies who have legal teams will keep an eye on the legal landscape of court decisions, and use them to decide if our T&C's or contracts need rewriting, or if any precedent puts us at legal risk. Sure - the supreme court could overthrow its precedent anytime, but until it does, a lot of people will act as if what they say is the law.
        • dragonwriter 3y ago
          > It's just a race for which test case gets to the supreme court first really... Not really for practical purposes. In the long term, the Supreme Court can and does overrule its own precedent, so the first case on the specific issue to get to the Supreme Court doesn’t end the discussion. In the short-term, cases get resolved by lower courts and parties either lack funds to do the maximum level of appeals, or the Supreme Court chooses not to hear appeals (they tend to prefer an issue to be well-developed with circuit case law, often waiting till there is a conflict between the Circuit Courts of Appeal, before taking it up), so the state of the law prior to any specific ruling on the narrow topic by the Supreme Court matters quite a bit.
      • staunton 3y ago
        This is the first time I ever saw a comment including the text "I am a lawyer". Does that mean the comment technically contains "legal advice"?
        • lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
          As always, a lawyer is not necessarily your lawyer.
        • mike_d 3y ago
          If you choose to pay him, sure.
      • m4nu3l 3y ago
        > you can't make these machine things without literally feeding this copyrighted information into them, therefore they do contain a copy. They don't necessarily do. Think about that. You can take some copyrighted material and transform the information contained in it (for instance a fictional book). You can then write a summary. The summary contains information that was present in the original but it has been transformed and hence it's not a copy. The ML model contains information that has been generalized by some degree. So it's just a grey area IMO.
        • visarga 3y ago
          This is a great example. Summarizing or paraphrasing copyrighted content, or simply using it as a seed to generate input-output pairs - this kind of data transformation prior to training could solve the issues with copyright. It cleanly separates form from content.
        • mike_d 3y ago
          > The summary contains information that was present in the original but it has been transformed and hence it's not a copy. The summary also contains original thought, something is added to it by a human to make it unique. AI models are primarily deriviative. A better example would be: if I take 1,000 different copyrighted works and put them into a ZIP file, does that resulting file violate copyright?
          • version_five 3y ago
            That example is awful, whatever side of the debate one is on
          • kevin42 3y ago
            Let's say you take the harry potter books and create a spreadsheet with each word in it as a column, and the number of times that word appears. Would that violate the copyright? I'd be interested in the rationale if someone thinks it would.
            • mike_d 3y ago
    • wahnfrieden 3y ago
      IP itself violates a natural right (Yes the idea of rights is also unnatural and absent from visions such as anarchy)
      • dragonwriter 3y ago
        Natural rights are a fiction to pretend that someone’s moral code is a privileged aspect of physical reality in a way every competing moral code is not.
        • __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
          That's going a bit far. They're just fictions that are privileged over certain other fictions--it's like how you can often cast magic missile in D&D but you can't usually cast expelliarmus, it comes down to which fiction we agree to inhabit.
        • ndriscoll 3y ago
          Even so, you can ask whether a given moral code is more principled than another (e.g. in the sense of having some algebraic structure), and use that to investigate what might be considered "more natural". For example, one might argue that if a "natural" right exists, then it ought to be symmetric under exchange of humans (or sentient beings or whatever). It's then "more natural" to conclude that you have a right to perform actions that have no interaction or consequences for other humans (e.g. to sing a copyrighted song to yourself in an empty room or downloading a song that you already have on CD but don't feel like ripping yourself) than those that do (e.g. taking food from someone because you'd otherwise starve).
          • dragonwriter 3y ago
            > Even so, you can ask whether a given moral code is more principled than another What does “more principled” mean of a moral code? How does one quantify “degree of principledness”? > and use that to investigate what might be considered "more natural". What does the preceding (being “more principled”) have to do with being “more natural”? And what significance does being “more natural” have? And none of that has any relevance to what is usually described as “natural rights”; its like taking existing words and coming upnwith entirely novel meanings and then a whole architecture around them, which is pretty advanced equivocation.
  • wheelie_boy 3y ago
    It seems very difficult to ensure that a model will never output any of the copyrighted content that it was trained on. I can only think of three ways, but perhaps there are others 1. Evaluate every output from the model to ensure that none of the outputs are copyrighted 2. Evaluate every input to a model to ensure that the inputs are either not copyrighted or properly licensed 3. Change the definition of copyright so that ML models can do whatever they want Nobody is doing #1, because that makes the business models not work. Established brands (like Adobe) are doing #2. I get the feeling that there are a lot of ML startups that are hoping that #3 will happen, but it seems unlikely
    • famouswaffles 3y ago
      Ensuring a model never outputs copyrighted content is unimportant and tangential. It's irrelevant. You don't look for a way to make humans output no copyrighted content, you address each time they do case by case. A model training being rendered fair use doesn't mean any of its output can be used for whatever regardless.
      • wheelie_boy 3y ago
        > you address each time they do case by case. That's what I listed as #1 - evaluate each individual output of the model to see if it violates copyright.
        • hnfong 3y ago
          I think when GP says "address each time case by case", they mean "you sue them when they infringe", instead of "this human has an illegal brain because it remembers Taylor Swift's songs". PS: your "#1" is really hard to do and I'd guess it is infeasible. Even Google (esp. Youtube) with their vast data capabilities, often gets it wrong.
  • wilde 3y ago
    Tell that to some illegal numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number
  • slaymaker1907 3y ago
    My issue with this take is that machines are not people. We only have lax rules for humans precisely because they are humans, not on the basis that they can learn. Copyrighted works are produced for people and given how human learning works, applying the derivative works rule to humans would be completely impractical and destroy the point of works with copyright. The same cannot be said for AI companies treating everything on the internet as fair use for training AI.
  • svachalek 3y ago
    When the web was young, there was a lot of information considered "public" like criminal record, marriage records, birth certificates, property records, etc. But those were still fairly veiled because of the amount of effort required to see them. Suddenly these were getting blasted all over the internet because now that was an easy thing to do, and everyone had to rethink what "public" meant. I suspect we're going to see the same kind of rethink about intellectual property in the age of AI.
    • pulvinar 3y ago
      Not sure about criminal records, but the other records are generally still public. Not blasted all over, but there if you know where to look. Not that we really had all that much privacy in the past, as anyone who's browsed old newspapers knows.
  • pfdietz 3y ago
    Copyright is for things that are the result of human creativity. If the weights come from running an algorithm on a training set (that one does not have a copyright to) then how can the weights then be copyrightable? They might be a derivative work, but that just means they infringe copyright, not that they are copyrightable themselves.
    • stale2002 3y ago
      The answer would be if the weights are transformative enough, and the copyright would come from the person who decided what images to include in the training set. The act of choosing to place images in a certain arrangement, such as a collage, can be copyrightable. The same could be said for the "act" of choosing what images to include in a training set and which parameters to use to train the model.
      • kevin42 3y ago
        Does that mean if someone copies a phone book but leaves out some numbers and adds some other numbers then it's a creative work?
        • stale2002 3y ago
          It would depend on how transformative the work is. There is in fact a whole art form where people cut out words from different newspapers and books, for example, and re-arrange those words to form new and interesting art. So there are ways in which such a work would be a creative work, and ways it which it would not, and it would depend on the particular instance and example.
        • saynay 3y ago
          The legal system is not like a computer program. The line between what is "creative" and what is not concrete, but is instead up to the interpretation of the judge who rules on it. So your phonebook modifications may or may not be considered "creative" depending on the judge and your ability to convince them. The more your modify it, the more likely you are to convince a judge it is a creative work, though.
• zitterbewegung 3y ago
  If I collect a set of copyright free data or public domain data would we conclude that the weights are also public domain?
  • jrm4 3y ago
    That seems fair. I was under the impression that there weren't too many out there like this.
  • jprete 3y ago
    No, that doesn’t follow at all. The argument is that either the training or the expression violated existing cooyrights through the making of unlicensed copies. It’s not based on open source licensing. Although OSS viral licensing may well apply if fair use is not a successful defense.
    • tedunangst 3y ago
      What copyright is violated by training on public domain data?
      • numpad0 3y ago
        DMCA works for free data too. It doesn’t matter if your gains are in the form of fiat or crypto or social currency.
      • jprete 3y ago
        If it's public domain, then no copyright is violated. I'm not talking about public-domain data; the G-G-GP specifically mentioned the possible legal interpretation that training on large amounts of publicly visible (but not public domain) data is itself a copyright violation.
    • zitterbewegung 3y ago
      So it doesn't follow the logic that the output of a computer program can be copyrighted if the input can ? It must not be a transformative work?
• ldoughty 3y ago
  > Every single one of these AI weight things itself is a result of unencumbered, massive, law-breaking, right-violating copyright infringement Maybe the popular and free ones. Adobe has a product in beta that uses "ethical training data" as a selling point.
  • jrm4 3y ago
    Interesting. I wonder what they mean by "Ethical" -- instead of e.g. saying "definitely free and open." I'm willing to bet "stuff they gathered from likely unwitting Adobe users."
    • themoonisachees 3y ago
      Adobe also happens to own Adobe stock, so maybe they simply trained on their own corpus. Who am I kidding this is Adobe of course they're fucking over their users
      • Dr4kn 3y ago
        They at least say they did and other copyright free artworks. They are a big company and know that they would get sued, so it should be in their interest to do it this way.
    • FooBarWidget 3y ago
      It means trained on data from stock photo sites they own, for which all uploaders agreed to terms of service which state that uploaded materials can be fed into AI training.
      • jrm4 3y ago
        So yes, exactly what I said. :)
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• hcks 3y ago
  > is a result of unencumbered, massive, law-breaking, right-violating copyright infringement Is there an official ruling? Or is it just a Reddit-style over exaggeration?
  • Dr4kn 3y ago
    There is no official ruling... yet. We are very early in this rapid public development. Laws and rulings take years or decades. They are trained on a lot of text. News sites, comments, books etc. Most books and news sites fall under copyright. Is this fair use? Who knows. Fair use is also an American thing. ChatGPT can be used in the EU, which doesn't have such a broad view of fair use. If you make a game only out of a lot of copyrighted assets without paying it isn't fair use. Are LLMs different? What about image generation, which you can prompt the models for specific styles of artists, which works are all copyrighted, but still used for training?