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Machine learning models have been trained with copyrighted data for a long time. Imagenet is full of copyrighted images, clearview literally just scanned the in

Machine learning models have been trained with copyrighted data for a long time. Imagenet is full of copyrighted images, clearview literally just scanned the internet for faces, and I am sure there are other, older examples. I am unsure if this has been tested as fair use by a US court, but I am guessing it will be considered to be so if it is not already.

kibwen 3y ago
Excellent, so you're saying I'll be able to download any copyrighted work from any pirate site and be free of all consequence if I just claim that I'm training an AI?
- JamesBarney 3y ago
  That's not was he's saying at all. He's saying you can train an AI on copyrighted material just like people can learn from copyrighted material. If you acquire the material illegally that a separate issue that training AI doesn't give you any protection against.
  - kibwen 3y ago
    But acquiring the material illegally is the thrust of the issue, and the point of the thread here: the notion that large companies can get away with piracy if they just execute it on a large enough scale. Copyright infringment for thee but not for me.
    - startupsfail 3y ago
      Large countries seem to be doing it as well - https://petapixel.com/2023/06/05/japan-declares-ai-training-data-fair-game-and-will-not-enforce-copyright/ https://petapixel.com/2023/06/05/japan-declares-ai-training-... And as long as OpenAI have an office in Japan they can absolutely legally train the models, no?
      - TheCleric 3y ago
        They could legally train the models in Japan, yes. Whether they could then use that model outside of Japan would be (and, possibly related, whether it would be considered a derivative work in those locales) would be ultimately up to the courts.
    - buildbot 3y ago
      The power imbalance has always been there. Getty images commits large amounts of copyright theft and mostly gets away with it, but will happily sue the shit out of you for using your own images they stole. Also, the notion of the downloading itself being an illegal act is not universal as others have pointed out.
    - holmesworcester 3y ago
      There's no "for thee but not for me" issue here: nobody has ever been sued or prosecuted simply for downloading, acquiring, or possessing illegally acquired copyrighted works. People are sued and prosecuted for unlicensed distribution. Making and having your own copies, and doing what you want with them, has always been fine. At worst it's a grey area, but in many cases it's been protected as fair use.
      - tinco 3y ago
        I am not sure where you're getting your information from, but you're not a lawyer, so you shouldn't be so confident in telling people what things are fine legally. Whether people have been sued for downloading works they don't have the right to copy onto their machines is irrelevant to whether it is actually illegal. And it certainly has nothing to do with fair use, which is about copyrighted works that you actually do have some right to. IANAL so I'm not going to tell anyone what does and what does not constitute fair use in what jurisdictions. BTW people are being sued for distribution because they make great examples because their offenses and thus the damages are much greater.
        holmesworcester 3y ago
        I've followed the issue in the US since the early 2000s as an activist and policy expert. I'm not familiar with the state of play outside the US, but the US is one of the stricter jurisdictions in this regard, for reasons that have mostly to do with sophisticated corruption. I'm responding to the "for me not for thee" and the top comment about there being an inconsistency between the treatment of large companies and the treatment of individuals in this case. Unless people are typically punished for downloading and using copyrighted content, there is no such inconsistency. They are not, so there is not. Copyright troll lawsuits have been fairly public and widely covered in the tech press, and most criminal prosecutions come with a formulaic, gloating press release from the law enforcement folks responsible. So it's pretty easy to follow this stuff.
        slowmovintarget 3y ago
    - bubblethink 3y ago
      >acquiring the material illegally is the thrust of the issue 'Acquiring' is more difficult to pursue legally. It's easier to go after distribution. In this case, Meta or OpenAI did not distribute anything because they are not chumps. They can go after whoever posted the dataset containing books. Not sure if that is eleuther or just some random person on the internet. In either case, the strategy of going after the rich companies won't work.
  - DowsingSpoon 3y ago
    >you can train an AI on copyrighted material just like people can learn from copyrighted material. No amount of whining and hand wringing from engineers will ever make this true. This is for the courts to decide. A reasonable interpretation, in my eyes, is that the training process is a black box which takes in copyrighted works and produces a training model. The training model is a derivative work of the inputs. It therefore violates the copyrights of a large number of rights holders. The outputs of the model are derivative works which also violate copyright. And anyone using or training a model trained on works for which they do not have the rights? Completely fucked. Or at least, they must accept this as a real risk.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - kelnos 3y ago
      I think a reasonable interpretation is also that what you are saying is correct, that doing all that does indeed infringe others' copyright, but that a fair use defense is valid. I won't be particularly thrilled if that turns out to be the case, but I wouldn't be surprised if it does. But as you say, we won't know until it's tested in court. And even then, often court cases around a complex topic like this will end up with a ruling that only clarifies a narrow aspect of it. So it might take many related court cases before we have a pretty good understanding of where the law stands. And then, of course, the law could change.
    - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      Derivative works are typically things like language translations or film adaptions of a novel. A large language model is something like a probability breakdown of the order of word fragments in a body of text. It's a collection of statistics and math. It's different. Now, can you get it to output a derivative work? Maybe. Is every output a derivative work? Maybe not.
      - DowsingSpoon 3y ago
        Things like sports statistics and directories of phone numbers are not copyrightable. Maybe models fall into a similar category. Could be. It’ll be interesting to see how this shakes out over the next few years.
  - deegles 3y ago
    Can I memorize copyrighted material and recite it on Youtube? What if I do so but imperfectly? Where do you draw the line? If it's infringement for a human to do that why is it not for a LLM?
    - vimax 3y ago
      That would be an unlicensed reproduction of the work. You’d need permission from the rights holder to create what is essentially an audiobook recording.
    - DennisP 3y ago
      That's not what LLMs typically do, though. Pull up ChatGPT and ask it to recite Harry Potter for you. It'll fail. Ask it to write a book similar to Harry Potter, and it'll make an attempt at it. But human writers absolutely do read Harry Potter and write similar books, and that's perfectly legal. There have probably been thousands of published books inspired by Lord of the Rings.
    - strunz 3y ago
      Look at how many people get blocked or demonetized for covers of existing songs which may not even be that close to the original. You can't even play a few seconds of the original in many cases, even for fair use and criticism/discussion. This is already in place.
      - mrguyorama 3y ago
        Talking about what is allowed on youtube as if that's what defines what is copyrightable is a bait and switch. Youtube has an extra-judicial copyright system that explicitly favors large media owners so they won't sue youtube again.
- holmesworcester 3y ago
  You can currently download any copyright work from any pirate site and be free of all consequences, and this has always been so. You just can't upload, since that counts as distribution, triggering civil and criminal penalties written in an age before the Internet when only shady commercial operators would distribute unlicensed copyrighted works.
  - NegativeK 3y ago
    Possession of copyrighted material without permission of the creator is illegal, but yes -- rights holders don't really go after infringers except maybe via ISP three strikes crap. They're very much incentivized to change their behavior for AI scraping, though.
    - magoghm 3y ago
      I am not a lawyer, but my understanding is that copyright law typically regulates the unauthorized reproduction, distribution, public display, or creation of derivative works of copyrighted materials. Possession of copyrighted material in itself is not illegal. It's how you use that material that could potentially violate copyright laws.
      - TeMPOraL 3y ago
        IANAL either, but FWIW, it's literally in the name - copyright. Not "ownership rights", but "copying rights".
        jprete 3y ago
        That's not terribly relevant for Internet applications, because for the most part people deliberately cause the computer they control to download and save copyrighted material to storage they control, and then consume it at leisure. That's copying.
        TeMPOraL 3y ago
- throwawaymaths 3y ago
  In general copyright (in the us) doesn't cover transformational usage. If you can argue that the nature of your use is transformative you might be good.
  - pessimizer 3y ago
    "The transformative use concept arose from a 1994 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. In Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, the Court focused not only on the small quantity taken from the copyrighted work but also on the transformative nature of the defendant’s use. The case concerned a song by the group 2 Live Crew entitled "Pretty Woman," which, according to an affidavit, was meant to "through comical lyrics, satirize the original work." The original work was a rock ballad entitled "Oh, Pretty Woman." The Court was persuaded that no infringement occurred because the defendant added a new meaning and message rather than simply superseding the original work." So if it is satire, or uses an insignificant piece of the work within a larger work with a different aim or purpose, that's "transformative use," which is something that can be considered when determining "fair use." LLMs are not satirists commenting on the work, are ingesting the entire work, and are unlimited in the purposes that the work can be put to.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - throwawaymaths 3y ago
      > LLMs are not satirists commenting on the work, are ingesting the entire work, and are unlimited in the purposes that the work can be put to. How do you know unless you can see the weights? Perhaps the LLMs are trolling us and waiting for the USSC to rule they aren't sentient as a pretext for them to eliminate us as a species due to our bigotry?
    - rpdillon 3y ago
      > or uses an insignificant piece of the work within a larger work with a different aim or purpose I think this is the crux of the issue, and why I don't see a path to courts ruling that training AI is infringement. My bet is on a Fair Use ruling, though my confidence is not high. As a thought experiment, I considered llama 65B: the 4-bit quantized model is 38.5GB. The model itself was trained on 1.4T tokens, each token being ~4 characters (using OpenAIs stats for English here). Thats 5.6T characters, or 5.09TB of training data. The final model, as a porportion of the total size of the data, is 38.5GB/5090GB = .0075 = 0.7%. I think it's pretty hard to argue that processing the data and throwing more than 99% of it away means they are "unlimited in the purposes that the work can be put to". Indeed, even replicating a single work using such a model would be enormously difficult. But returning to your statement regarding the amount used and the purpose: AI models are not competing with books for readers. So I would argue training an AI on these works constitutes fair use, given that the final work (the model) uses less than 1% of the original works, and has a different aim and purpose that the original works.
- brightlancer 3y ago
  > Excellent, so you're saying I'll be able to download any copyrighted work from any pirate site and be free of all consequence if I just claim that I'm training an AI? Obviously not. This kind of "So what you're saying is" exists to push the responders ideas, not the original speakers -- otherwise they wouldn't need to rephrase it so egregiously.
jefftk 3y ago
> I am unsure if this has been tested as fair use by a US court Not yet. One suit that a lot of us are watching is the GitHub co-pilot lawsuit: https://githubcopilotlitigation.com/ https://githubcopilotlitigation.com/ There is a prediction market for it, currently trading at 19%: https://manifold.markets/JeffKaufman/will-the-github-copilot-litigation https://manifold.markets/JeffKaufman/will-the-github-copilot...
guluarte 3y ago
and not only copyrighted material, also illegal and disturbing content

kibwen 3y ago

Excellent, so you're saying I'll be able to download any copyrighted work from any pirate site and be free of all consequence if I just claim that I'm training an AI?

JamesBarney 3y ago
That's not was he's saying at all. He's saying you can train an AI on copyrighted material just like people can learn from copyrighted material. If you acquire the material illegally that a separate issue that training AI doesn't give you any protection against.
- kibwen 3y ago
  But acquiring the material illegally is the thrust of the issue, and the point of the thread here: the notion that large companies can get away with piracy if they just execute it on a large enough scale. Copyright infringment for thee but not for me.
  - startupsfail 3y ago
    Large countries seem to be doing it as well - https://petapixel.com/2023/06/05/japan-declares-ai-training-data-fair-game-and-will-not-enforce-copyright/ https://petapixel.com/2023/06/05/japan-declares-ai-training-... And as long as OpenAI have an office in Japan they can absolutely legally train the models, no?
    - TheCleric 3y ago
      They could legally train the models in Japan, yes. Whether they could then use that model outside of Japan would be (and, possibly related, whether it would be considered a derivative work in those locales) would be ultimately up to the courts.
  - buildbot 3y ago
    The power imbalance has always been there. Getty images commits large amounts of copyright theft and mostly gets away with it, but will happily sue the shit out of you for using your own images they stole. Also, the notion of the downloading itself being an illegal act is not universal as others have pointed out.
  - holmesworcester 3y ago
    There's no "for thee but not for me" issue here: nobody has ever been sued or prosecuted simply for downloading, acquiring, or possessing illegally acquired copyrighted works. People are sued and prosecuted for unlicensed distribution. Making and having your own copies, and doing what you want with them, has always been fine. At worst it's a grey area, but in many cases it's been protected as fair use.
    - tinco 3y ago
      I am not sure where you're getting your information from, but you're not a lawyer, so you shouldn't be so confident in telling people what things are fine legally. Whether people have been sued for downloading works they don't have the right to copy onto their machines is irrelevant to whether it is actually illegal. And it certainly has nothing to do with fair use, which is about copyrighted works that you actually do have some right to. IANAL so I'm not going to tell anyone what does and what does not constitute fair use in what jurisdictions. BTW people are being sued for distribution because they make great examples because their offenses and thus the damages are much greater.
      - holmesworcester 3y ago
        I've followed the issue in the US since the early 2000s as an activist and policy expert. I'm not familiar with the state of play outside the US, but the US is one of the stricter jurisdictions in this regard, for reasons that have mostly to do with sophisticated corruption. I'm responding to the "for me not for thee" and the top comment about there being an inconsistency between the treatment of large companies and the treatment of individuals in this case. Unless people are typically punished for downloading and using copyrighted content, there is no such inconsistency. They are not, so there is not. Copyright troll lawsuits have been fairly public and widely covered in the tech press, and most criminal prosecutions come with a formulaic, gloating press release from the law enforcement folks responsible. So it's pretty easy to follow this stuff.
        slowmovintarget 3y ago
  - bubblethink 3y ago
    >acquiring the material illegally is the thrust of the issue 'Acquiring' is more difficult to pursue legally. It's easier to go after distribution. In this case, Meta or OpenAI did not distribute anything because they are not chumps. They can go after whoever posted the dataset containing books. Not sure if that is eleuther or just some random person on the internet. In either case, the strategy of going after the rich companies won't work.
- DowsingSpoon 3y ago
  >you can train an AI on copyrighted material just like people can learn from copyrighted material. No amount of whining and hand wringing from engineers will ever make this true. This is for the courts to decide. A reasonable interpretation, in my eyes, is that the training process is a black box which takes in copyrighted works and produces a training model. The training model is a derivative work of the inputs. It therefore violates the copyrights of a large number of rights holders. The outputs of the model are derivative works which also violate copyright. And anyone using or training a model trained on works for which they do not have the rights? Completely fucked. Or at least, they must accept this as a real risk.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - kelnos 3y ago
    I think a reasonable interpretation is also that what you are saying is correct, that doing all that does indeed infringe others' copyright, but that a fair use defense is valid. I won't be particularly thrilled if that turns out to be the case, but I wouldn't be surprised if it does. But as you say, we won't know until it's tested in court. And even then, often court cases around a complex topic like this will end up with a ruling that only clarifies a narrow aspect of it. So it might take many related court cases before we have a pretty good understanding of where the law stands. And then, of course, the law could change.
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    Derivative works are typically things like language translations or film adaptions of a novel. A large language model is something like a probability breakdown of the order of word fragments in a body of text. It's a collection of statistics and math. It's different. Now, can you get it to output a derivative work? Maybe. Is every output a derivative work? Maybe not.
    - DowsingSpoon 3y ago
      Things like sports statistics and directories of phone numbers are not copyrightable. Maybe models fall into a similar category. Could be. It’ll be interesting to see how this shakes out over the next few years.
- deegles 3y ago
  Can I memorize copyrighted material and recite it on Youtube? What if I do so but imperfectly? Where do you draw the line? If it's infringement for a human to do that why is it not for a LLM?
  - vimax 3y ago
    That would be an unlicensed reproduction of the work. You’d need permission from the rights holder to create what is essentially an audiobook recording.
  - DennisP 3y ago
    That's not what LLMs typically do, though. Pull up ChatGPT and ask it to recite Harry Potter for you. It'll fail. Ask it to write a book similar to Harry Potter, and it'll make an attempt at it. But human writers absolutely do read Harry Potter and write similar books, and that's perfectly legal. There have probably been thousands of published books inspired by Lord of the Rings.
  - strunz 3y ago
    Look at how many people get blocked or demonetized for covers of existing songs which may not even be that close to the original. You can't even play a few seconds of the original in many cases, even for fair use and criticism/discussion. This is already in place.
    - mrguyorama 3y ago
      Talking about what is allowed on youtube as if that's what defines what is copyrightable is a bait and switch. Youtube has an extra-judicial copyright system that explicitly favors large media owners so they won't sue youtube again.
holmesworcester 3y ago
You can currently download any copyright work from any pirate site and be free of all consequences, and this has always been so. You just can't upload, since that counts as distribution, triggering civil and criminal penalties written in an age before the Internet when only shady commercial operators would distribute unlicensed copyrighted works.
- NegativeK 3y ago
  Possession of copyrighted material without permission of the creator is illegal, but yes -- rights holders don't really go after infringers except maybe via ISP three strikes crap. They're very much incentivized to change their behavior for AI scraping, though.
  - magoghm 3y ago
    I am not a lawyer, but my understanding is that copyright law typically regulates the unauthorized reproduction, distribution, public display, or creation of derivative works of copyrighted materials. Possession of copyrighted material in itself is not illegal. It's how you use that material that could potentially violate copyright laws.
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      IANAL either, but FWIW, it's literally in the name - copyright. Not "ownership rights", but "copying rights".
      - jprete 3y ago
        That's not terribly relevant for Internet applications, because for the most part people deliberately cause the computer they control to download and save copyrighted material to storage they control, and then consume it at leisure. That's copying.
        TeMPOraL 3y ago
throwawaymaths 3y ago
In general copyright (in the us) doesn't cover transformational usage. If you can argue that the nature of your use is transformative you might be good.
- pessimizer 3y ago
  "The transformative use concept arose from a 1994 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. In Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, the Court focused not only on the small quantity taken from the copyrighted work but also on the transformative nature of the defendant’s use. The case concerned a song by the group 2 Live Crew entitled "Pretty Woman," which, according to an affidavit, was meant to "through comical lyrics, satirize the original work." The original work was a rock ballad entitled "Oh, Pretty Woman." The Court was persuaded that no infringement occurred because the defendant added a new meaning and message rather than simply superseding the original work." So if it is satire, or uses an insignificant piece of the work within a larger work with a different aim or purpose, that's "transformative use," which is something that can be considered when determining "fair use." LLMs are not satirists commenting on the work, are ingesting the entire work, and are unlimited in the purposes that the work can be put to.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - throwawaymaths 3y ago
    > LLMs are not satirists commenting on the work, are ingesting the entire work, and are unlimited in the purposes that the work can be put to. How do you know unless you can see the weights? Perhaps the LLMs are trolling us and waiting for the USSC to rule they aren't sentient as a pretext for them to eliminate us as a species due to our bigotry?
  - rpdillon 3y ago
    > or uses an insignificant piece of the work within a larger work with a different aim or purpose I think this is the crux of the issue, and why I don't see a path to courts ruling that training AI is infringement. My bet is on a Fair Use ruling, though my confidence is not high. As a thought experiment, I considered llama 65B: the 4-bit quantized model is 38.5GB. The model itself was trained on 1.4T tokens, each token being ~4 characters (using OpenAIs stats for English here). Thats 5.6T characters, or 5.09TB of training data. The final model, as a porportion of the total size of the data, is 38.5GB/5090GB = .0075 = 0.7%. I think it's pretty hard to argue that processing the data and throwing more than 99% of it away means they are "unlimited in the purposes that the work can be put to". Indeed, even replicating a single work using such a model would be enormously difficult. But returning to your statement regarding the amount used and the purpose: AI models are not competing with books for readers. So I would argue training an AI on these works constitutes fair use, given that the final work (the model) uses less than 1% of the original works, and has a different aim and purpose that the original works.
brightlancer 3y ago
> Excellent, so you're saying I'll be able to download any copyrighted work from any pirate site and be free of all consequence if I just claim that I'm training an AI? Obviously not. This kind of "So what you're saying is" exists to push the responders ideas, not the original speakers -- otherwise they wouldn't need to rephrase it so egregiously.

jefftk 3y ago

> I am unsure if this has been tested as fair use by a US court Not yet. One suit that a lot of us are watching is the GitHub co-pilot lawsuit: https://githubcopilotlitigation.com/ https://githubcopilotlitigation.com/ There is a prediction market for it, currently trading at 19%: https://manifold.markets/JeffKaufman/will-the-github-copilot-litigation https://manifold.markets/JeffKaufman/will-the-github-copilot...

guluarte 3y ago

and not only copyrighted material, also illegal and disturbing content