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I don't see how this would be enforceable in law without killing almost every AI company on the market today. The whole legal premise of these models is that t

I don't see how this would be enforceable in law without killing almost every AI company on the market today. The whole legal premise of these models is that training on copyrighted material is fair use. If it's not, then... I mean is Facebook trying to claim that including copyrighted material in a dataset isn't fair use regardless of the author's wishes? Because I have bad news for LLaMA then. "You need permission to train on this" is an interesting legal stance for any AI company to take.

doctorpangloss 3y ago
> The whole legal premise of these models is that training on copyrighted material is fair use. Not to diminish the conversation here, but not even a Supreme Court Justice knows what the legality is. You’d have to be a whole 9 person Supreme Court to make an accurate statement here. I don’t think anyone really knows how Congress meant today’s laws to work in this scenario.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > I don’t think anyone really knows how Congress meant today’s laws to work in this scenario. Congress, or more accurate, the drafters of the Constitution, intended that Congress would work to keep the Constitution updated to match the needs of modern times. Instead, Congress ossified to the point it's unable to pass basic laws because a bunch of far right morons hold the House GQP hostage and an absurd amount of leverage was passed to the executive and the Supreme Court as a result - with the active aid of both parties by the way, who didn't even think of passing actual laws to codify something as important as equitable access to elections, fair elections, or the right to have an abortion or to smoke weed when they held majorities. And on top of that your Supreme Court and many Federal court picks were hand-selected from a society that prefers a literal viewpoint of the constitution. But fear not, y'all are not alone in this kind of idiocy, just look at us Germans and how we're still running on fax machines.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
rcxdude 3y ago
From my non-legal-professional POV I can see an angle which may work: Firstly, llama is not just the weights, but also the code alongside it. The weights may or may not be copyrightable, but the code is (and possibly also the network structure itself? that would be important if true but I don't know if it would qualify). Secondly, you can write what you want in a copyright license: you could write that the license becomes null and void if the licensee eats too much blue cheese if you want. Following from that, if you were to train on the outputs of the AI, you may not be guilty of copyright infringement in terms of doing the training (both because AI output is not copyrightable in the first place, something which seems pretty set in precedent already, and possibly also because even if it was, it gets established that it is fair use like any other data), but if it means your license to the original code is revoked then you will at the very least need to find another implementation that can use the weights, or (if the weights can be copyrighted, which I would argue is probably not the case, if you follow the argument that the training is fair use, especially if the reasoning is that the weights are simply a collection of facts about the training data, but it's very plausible that courts will rule differently here). This could wind up with some strange situations where someone generating output with the intent of using it for training could be prosecuted (or at least forced to cease and desist) but anyone actually using that output for training would be in the clear. I agree it is extremely "have your cake and eat it" on the part of the AI companies: They wish to both bypass copyright and also benefit from the restrictions of it (or, in the case of OpenAI, build a moat by lobbying for restrictions on the creation and use of the models themselves, by playing to fears of AI danger).
- danShumway 3y ago
  These are good points to bring up. > This could wind up with some strange situations where someone generating output with the intent of using it for training could be prosecuted (or at least forced to cease and desist) but anyone actually using that output for training would be in the clear. I'll add to this that it's not just output; say that someone is using another service built on top of LLaMA. Facebook itself launched LLaMA 2.0 with a public-facing playground that doesn't require any license agreement or login to use. You can go right now and use their public-facing portal and generate as much training data as you can before they IP-block you, and... as far as I can tell you haven't done anything in that scenario that I can see that would bind you to this license agreement. So I still feel like I'll be surprised if any AI company that's serious about wanting bootstrapping itself off of LLaMA is going to be too concerned about this license (whether that's a good idea to do just because the training data itself might be garbage is another conversation). It just seems so easy to get around any restrictions.
Ajedi32 3y ago
I'd say it's enforceable in the sense that if you agree to the license then violating those terms would be breach of contract regardless of whether use of the LLaMA v2 output is protected by copyright or not. But there's nothing stopping someone else who didn't agree to the license from using output you generate with LLaMA v2 to train their model.
- danShumway 3y ago
  I don't want to dip too much into the conversation of whether weights themselves are copyrightable, but note that it's very easy in the case of LLaMA 1.0 to get the weights and play with them without ever signing a contract. If they turn out to be not copyrightable, then... all this would mean is downloading LLaMA 2.0 weights from a mirror instead of from Facebook.

doctorpangloss 3y ago

> The whole legal premise of these models is that training on copyrighted material is fair use. Not to diminish the conversation here, but not even a Supreme Court Justice knows what the legality is. You’d have to be a whole 9 person Supreme Court to make an accurate statement here. I don’t think anyone really knows how Congress meant today’s laws to work in this scenario.

mschuster91 3y ago
> I don’t think anyone really knows how Congress meant today’s laws to work in this scenario. Congress, or more accurate, the drafters of the Constitution, intended that Congress would work to keep the Constitution updated to match the needs of modern times. Instead, Congress ossified to the point it's unable to pass basic laws because a bunch of far right morons hold the House GQP hostage and an absurd amount of leverage was passed to the executive and the Supreme Court as a result - with the active aid of both parties by the way, who didn't even think of passing actual laws to codify something as important as equitable access to elections, fair elections, or the right to have an abortion or to smoke weed when they held majorities. And on top of that your Supreme Court and many Federal court picks were hand-selected from a society that prefers a literal viewpoint of the constitution. But fear not, y'all are not alone in this kind of idiocy, just look at us Germans and how we're still running on fax machines.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

rcxdude 3y ago

From my non-legal-professional POV I can see an angle which may work: Firstly, llama is not just the weights, but also the code alongside it. The weights may or may not be copyrightable, but the code is (and possibly also the network structure itself? that would be important if true but I don't know if it would qualify). Secondly, you can write what you want in a copyright license: you could write that the license becomes null and void if the licensee eats too much blue cheese if you want. Following from that, if you were to train on the outputs of the AI, you may not be guilty of copyright infringement in terms of doing the training (both because AI output is not copyrightable in the first place, something which seems pretty set in precedent already, and possibly also because even if it was, it gets established that it is fair use like any other data), but if it means your license to the original code is revoked then you will at the very least need to find another implementation that can use the weights, or (if the weights can be copyrighted, which I would argue is probably not the case, if you follow the argument that the training is fair use, especially if the reasoning is that the weights are simply a collection of facts about the training data, but it's very plausible that courts will rule differently here). This could wind up with some strange situations where someone generating output with the intent of using it for training could be prosecuted (or at least forced to cease and desist) but anyone actually using that output for training would be in the clear. I agree it is extremely "have your cake and eat it" on the part of the AI companies: They wish to both bypass copyright and also benefit from the restrictions of it (or, in the case of OpenAI, build a moat by lobbying for restrictions on the creation and use of the models themselves, by playing to fears of AI danger).

danShumway 3y ago
These are good points to bring up. > This could wind up with some strange situations where someone generating output with the intent of using it for training could be prosecuted (or at least forced to cease and desist) but anyone actually using that output for training would be in the clear. I'll add to this that it's not just output; say that someone is using another service built on top of LLaMA. Facebook itself launched LLaMA 2.0 with a public-facing playground that doesn't require any license agreement or login to use. You can go right now and use their public-facing portal and generate as much training data as you can before they IP-block you, and... as far as I can tell you haven't done anything in that scenario that I can see that would bind you to this license agreement. So I still feel like I'll be surprised if any AI company that's serious about wanting bootstrapping itself off of LLaMA is going to be too concerned about this license (whether that's a good idea to do just because the training data itself might be garbage is another conversation). It just seems so easy to get around any restrictions.

Ajedi32 3y ago

I'd say it's enforceable in the sense that if you agree to the license then violating those terms would be breach of contract regardless of whether use of the LLaMA v2 output is protected by copyright or not. But there's nothing stopping someone else who didn't agree to the license from using output you generate with LLaMA v2 to train their model.

danShumway 3y ago
I don't want to dip too much into the conversation of whether weights themselves are copyrightable, but note that it's very easy in the case of LLaMA 1.0 to get the weights and play with them without ever signing a contract. If they turn out to be not copyrightable, then... all this would mean is downloading LLaMA 2.0 weights from a mirror instead of from Facebook.