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> Copyrighted material, sexual content, political opinions, throw it all in and release it please! Why copyrighted material? Could we stop celebrating how tech

> Copyrighted material, sexual content, political opinions, throw it all in and release it please! Why copyrighted material? Could we stop celebrating how tech is going to steal everyone's copyrighted works in a massive effort to replace the artists who made it? Why does everyone here hate artists so much? Do they not deserve any rights over their IP, eg, the right to say no when someone wants to make derivative works that replace them from it?

paul_funyun 3y ago
I can't imagine what goes through the head of someone who thinks they don't have the right to say no. They don't have the right to be listened to or the right to use state power to enforce a colloquial notion of IP and rights with no basis in law or fact, but they surely have the right to say "No!" In all seriousness, they're afraid because they aren't very pleasant. AI will write things people will like and enjoy hearing. Preachy artists these days just make works they think people ought to want, and ought to like. Getting moralism out of art will be a great technological accomplishment.
- eropple 3y ago
  Moralism! In art! Heaven forfend. How dare that art have a message, right? Never in history, not once, before the Woke Tens and, I guess, the Woker Twenties did somebody have an opinion and encode it in allegory. It is a purely novel phenomenon and all known media before this dark age was absolutely without message and without any editorial lens to determine what is and is not to be depicted--for that, of course, would communicate values and ideas, and art simply did not do such a thing. More seriously: if you have this attitude for-reals and aren't Poe's Lawing me, perhaps you need a little more preaching aimed your way because your conception of art and the civic society is the closest thing I can think of to a humanities position being objectively wrong. The ideological soma of agree-with-you AI being desirable is scary enough stuff. Removing communication from art being a "great technological accomplishment" is fucking dystopic.
- CatWChainsaw 3y ago
  I want to see the world where this happens, where everything that made life enjoyable is corporatized, standardized, optimized, one-dimensionalized. Since it will happen over the course of your lifetime, you'll get to see it happen - as things that were fulfilling cease to be, an ennui you can't escape sets in because you built every wall of your cage one by one, and all you can do is regret. And then the Black Mirror helmet comes off your head, everyone else points and laughs at you, and then puts the helmet back on.
accrual 3y ago
I wonder if there's a future title like "AI Model Artist", "AI Model Contributor", "AI Model Author", "AI Model Creator" or something for creators who contribute to the models in use. While I love we can all immediately benefit from previous works, I feel for the countless artists and creators who's work has been integrated into models with zero compensation. There are already outstanding lawsuits seeking reparations, but this is new legal territory and there will be a lot to learn and decide in the future.
- __loam 3y ago
  I think if AI art damages the commons to an extreme extent, there's a real possibility that AI companies pay artists to make whatever the fuck they want to keep the training data coming.
LightHugger 3y ago
Modern copyright is not a good, it's an evil.
- Andrex 3y ago
  That depends on the jurisdiction, but in my view I err on the side of "but it's necessary." A society without copyright would be a much poorer one, and humans figured that out a long time ago.
  - nightski 3y ago
    I don't think you can look to the past to picture a future with AI.
  - CamperBob2 3y ago
    A society without copyright would be a much poorer one That was before "Attention Is All You Need" and the subsequent work on LLMs that grew out of it. Things are different now.
- threeseed 3y ago
  Authors, artists, actors etc whose work have been ripped off by mega corporations like Meta, OpenAI, Google etc would disagree. Copyright may need to be updated to cater for the new world of AI but that doesn't mean as a concept it is evil.
  - murki 3y ago
    How are Modern Copyright laws helping authors, artists, and actors in those cases?
    - threeseed 3y ago
      It's allowing them to sue OpenAI for copyright infringement: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jul/05/authors-file-a-lawsuit-against-openai-for-unlawfully-ingesting-their-books https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jul/05/authors-file-a...
bick_nyers 3y ago
Pretty much everything nowadays is copyrighted, by omitting such materials, what are you really left with? LLM is a tool much like the internet is a tool. Yes, someone can use it to steal, but stealing is against the law. Instead of encoding a criminal justice system into an LLM by omitting the possibility of stealing an artists work or omitting the knowledge of physics so someone can't learn how to build a bomb, we should instead just prosecute people for using it in that way intentionally. How often do people get prosecuted for ripping off an artists style? The criminal justice system "hated artists" long before LLMs and it's not the responsibility of the tech. companies to rectify that in my opinion.
- __loam 3y ago
  You're not addressing the massive abuse of the commons this still represents. If artists don't have the right to tell you to fuck off for using their work in training data, they're less likely to publicly show that work, which hurts them because they become less visible and hurts the AI because the training data gets worse.
  - smoldesu 3y ago
    They do have an option; they can choose to not publish their work. By digitizing your creation, you are creating a version of your work that can be distributed at practically-free prices with little effort. If that undermines or undervalues the art you make enough, you can choose not to share it. Even Open Source advocates don't really have the right to stop companies from using Open code. The license discourages it, but everyone from Tesla to Nintendo has been caught violating it's terms. Publishing stuff on the open web has always had consequences, unfortunately.
  - Kuinox 3y ago
    Go on youtube and type "copy arstyle". Now tell me how artists were not stealing from each other.
    - __loam 3y ago
      Artists are generally pretty encouraging to people entering the field and using their stuff as reference for new artists. That actually contributes to art. It's definitely not the same thing as a massive tech corporation trying to automate their livelihoods, but please keep making this flawed argument analogizing two completely different processes.
philipov 3y ago
We know who copyright is meant to protect, and it's not artists: it's Disney's shareholders. Pay writers and actors a fair cut, and then maybe people will take seriously that copyright is for artists.
- threeseed 3y ago
  It's both. Because we don't live in a child-like, black & white world. Copyright like many regulatory devices can be used for good, evil and everything in between.
ineedasername 3y ago
>Could we stop celebrating how tech is going to steal everyone's copyrighted works Copyright has a fair-use exception for transformative works. It is difficult to look at the LLM's of the day and think "No, they have not taken the copywritten works and transformed them into something completely new." There is no hate of artists. I don't know how you get from "It's not copyright violation" to "I hate artists". This is a matter of existing law. It is of course unsettled, the fair-use interpretation not yet tested in courts. But the same goes for affirming it's a violation of copyright. These questions will have their day in court, and until then there is no need to make arguments in an inflammatory tone that that borders on personal attack. In the meantime, maybe engage in a conversation about how copyright law would need to be changed to account for this new technology, not condemn people who see a reasonable interpretation of existing law the differs from your own.
- reverius42 3y ago
  So I can have a giant database of all the most recent copyrighted works, on my home computer, as long as I claim I'm using it for training a model? And if I happen to listen to some music or watch some movies too, who's going to know? I think an argument could be made that it's fine for an LLM to learn from copyrighted works, but maybe it should have to go to the library to do it. Having your own human-accessible copy of those works (at home, or at Meta), doesn't sound as acceptable to me.
  - ineedasername 3y ago
    Sure, I think you’re right, it’s reasonable to expect a company to at least buy a single copy of each book (or whatever it eats) it ingests if the work could not otherwise be legally obtained for free. Or something reasonable along those lines
    - NLPaep 3y ago
      Yes, let’s shut out the small players now go Microsoft can bilk us
madsmith 3y ago
I believe LLMs should be allowed to read/view/consume content and learn from it even if that content has a copyright. We phrase it like somehow the material is being copied into the LLM, but that’s not what it’s doing. It’s building a neural graph from the experience of consuming that content. What would the world be like if humans couldn’t learn, train the weights of the interconnects of their neural tissue, from any material with a copyright?
- api 3y ago
  It’s a form of lossy compression. Can I strip the copyright off an image by JPEG compressing it? At the very least I think LLMs trained on data that the trainer does not own or have rights to use in that manner should not be copyrightable.
  - bick_nyers 3y ago
    An LLM is a lossy compression of the internet and I think it should be treated as such. You can't copyright the internet itself.
  - madsmith 3y ago
    All knowledge is lossy compression. My thinking “the enemy gate is down” when considering the tokens “Ender’s Game” is my recalling a learned association of those tokens to the given token string. My knowing that doesn’t strip the copyright. My telling someone the meaning and context of the phrase generally doesn’t strip the copyright away from Orson Scott Card. I’m not reproducing his work but my knowledge of it. And it’s dependent on what I do with that knowledge and how if I’ve violated his copyright. We are prosecuting the LLMs for possessing fragments of knowledge. And we’re assuming that the recall of some of those fragments means a copy of that work is in fact contained within the weights.
- hmcq6 3y ago
  A mathematical transformation of the data is not enough to qualify as a transformative work. Saving a copy-written work in a lossy compression does not negate the copywrite.
Kuinox 3y ago
There is a lot of mental gymnastic, to submit an artwork publicly on the internet, allowing everyone to copy your arstyle, make derivative art of it, have other learn from it, but if ever a machine 'learn' from it, it's "stealing". It's not because you don't like a derivative work, that the derivative work is "stealing" your content. Saying it's stealing is wrong, it's lying to get your point accross. You blame "how tech is going to steal everyone copyrighted works", yet, they were already in the tech world: the internet.
- raincole 3y ago
  It's a lot of mental gymnastic to think machine learning = human learning. Especially on HN, where people should understand scale matters a lot in real world. It's generally consider ok to sell your fanart on comic festivals. But do you think it's okay that Disney starts selling fanart of One Piece without the publisher's permission? A car and a pair of legs both move you from A point to B point. So why do laws treat automobiles and pedestrians so differently?
  - Kuinox 3y ago
    > It's a lot of mental gymnastic to think machine learning = human learning. That's why I have put it in quotes. > But do you think it's okay that Disney starts selling fanart of One Piece without the publisher's permission? It's why it's called "fair use". Fanart isn't the only case of fair use. Parody for example allows it. And AFAIK, no court yet have decided that AI "learning" is not fair use or what the limite are.
- hmcq6 3y ago
  > have other learn from it, but if ever a machine 'learn' Why did you put one of those in quotes and not the other?
  - Kuinox 3y ago
    Because these two are similar, yet not the same.

paul_funyun 3y ago

I can't imagine what goes through the head of someone who thinks they don't have the right to say no. They don't have the right to be listened to or the right to use state power to enforce a colloquial notion of IP and rights with no basis in law or fact, but they surely have the right to say "No!" In all seriousness, they're afraid because they aren't very pleasant. AI will write things people will like and enjoy hearing. Preachy artists these days just make works they think people ought to want, and ought to like. Getting moralism out of art will be a great technological accomplishment.

eropple 3y ago
Moralism! In art! Heaven forfend. How dare that art have a message, right? Never in history, not once, before the Woke Tens and, I guess, the Woker Twenties did somebody have an opinion and encode it in allegory. It is a purely novel phenomenon and all known media before this dark age was absolutely without message and without any editorial lens to determine what is and is not to be depicted--for that, of course, would communicate values and ideas, and art simply did not do such a thing. More seriously: if you have this attitude for-reals and aren't Poe's Lawing me, perhaps you need a little more preaching aimed your way because your conception of art and the civic society is the closest thing I can think of to a humanities position being objectively wrong. The ideological soma of agree-with-you AI being desirable is scary enough stuff. Removing communication from art being a "great technological accomplishment" is fucking dystopic.
CatWChainsaw 3y ago
I want to see the world where this happens, where everything that made life enjoyable is corporatized, standardized, optimized, one-dimensionalized. Since it will happen over the course of your lifetime, you'll get to see it happen - as things that were fulfilling cease to be, an ennui you can't escape sets in because you built every wall of your cage one by one, and all you can do is regret. And then the Black Mirror helmet comes off your head, everyone else points and laughs at you, and then puts the helmet back on.

accrual 3y ago

I wonder if there's a future title like "AI Model Artist", "AI Model Contributor", "AI Model Author", "AI Model Creator" or something for creators who contribute to the models in use. While I love we can all immediately benefit from previous works, I feel for the countless artists and creators who's work has been integrated into models with zero compensation. There are already outstanding lawsuits seeking reparations, but this is new legal territory and there will be a lot to learn and decide in the future.

__loam 3y ago
I think if AI art damages the commons to an extreme extent, there's a real possibility that AI companies pay artists to make whatever the fuck they want to keep the training data coming.

LightHugger 3y ago

Modern copyright is not a good, it's an evil.

Andrex 3y ago
That depends on the jurisdiction, but in my view I err on the side of "but it's necessary." A society without copyright would be a much poorer one, and humans figured that out a long time ago.
- nightski 3y ago
  I don't think you can look to the past to picture a future with AI.
- CamperBob2 3y ago
  A society without copyright would be a much poorer one That was before "Attention Is All You Need" and the subsequent work on LLMs that grew out of it. Things are different now.
threeseed 3y ago
Authors, artists, actors etc whose work have been ripped off by mega corporations like Meta, OpenAI, Google etc would disagree. Copyright may need to be updated to cater for the new world of AI but that doesn't mean as a concept it is evil.
- murki 3y ago
  How are Modern Copyright laws helping authors, artists, and actors in those cases?
  - threeseed 3y ago
    It's allowing them to sue OpenAI for copyright infringement: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jul/05/authors-file-a-lawsuit-against-openai-for-unlawfully-ingesting-their-books https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jul/05/authors-file-a...

bick_nyers 3y ago

Pretty much everything nowadays is copyrighted, by omitting such materials, what are you really left with? LLM is a tool much like the internet is a tool. Yes, someone can use it to steal, but stealing is against the law. Instead of encoding a criminal justice system into an LLM by omitting the possibility of stealing an artists work or omitting the knowledge of physics so someone can't learn how to build a bomb, we should instead just prosecute people for using it in that way intentionally. How often do people get prosecuted for ripping off an artists style? The criminal justice system "hated artists" long before LLMs and it's not the responsibility of the tech. companies to rectify that in my opinion.

__loam 3y ago
You're not addressing the massive abuse of the commons this still represents. If artists don't have the right to tell you to fuck off for using their work in training data, they're less likely to publicly show that work, which hurts them because they become less visible and hurts the AI because the training data gets worse.
- smoldesu 3y ago
  They do have an option; they can choose to not publish their work. By digitizing your creation, you are creating a version of your work that can be distributed at practically-free prices with little effort. If that undermines or undervalues the art you make enough, you can choose not to share it. Even Open Source advocates don't really have the right to stop companies from using Open code. The license discourages it, but everyone from Tesla to Nintendo has been caught violating it's terms. Publishing stuff on the open web has always had consequences, unfortunately.
- Kuinox 3y ago
  Go on youtube and type "copy arstyle". Now tell me how artists were not stealing from each other.
  - __loam 3y ago
    Artists are generally pretty encouraging to people entering the field and using their stuff as reference for new artists. That actually contributes to art. It's definitely not the same thing as a massive tech corporation trying to automate their livelihoods, but please keep making this flawed argument analogizing two completely different processes.

philipov 3y ago

We know who copyright is meant to protect, and it's not artists: it's Disney's shareholders. Pay writers and actors a fair cut, and then maybe people will take seriously that copyright is for artists.

threeseed 3y ago
It's both. Because we don't live in a child-like, black & white world. Copyright like many regulatory devices can be used for good, evil and everything in between.

ineedasername 3y ago

>Could we stop celebrating how tech is going to steal everyone's copyrighted works Copyright has a fair-use exception for transformative works. It is difficult to look at the LLM's of the day and think "No, they have not taken the copywritten works and transformed them into something completely new." There is no hate of artists. I don't know how you get from "It's not copyright violation" to "I hate artists". This is a matter of existing law. It is of course unsettled, the fair-use interpretation not yet tested in courts. But the same goes for affirming it's a violation of copyright. These questions will have their day in court, and until then there is no need to make arguments in an inflammatory tone that that borders on personal attack. In the meantime, maybe engage in a conversation about how copyright law would need to be changed to account for this new technology, not condemn people who see a reasonable interpretation of existing law the differs from your own.

reverius42 3y ago
So I can have a giant database of all the most recent copyrighted works, on my home computer, as long as I claim I'm using it for training a model? And if I happen to listen to some music or watch some movies too, who's going to know? I think an argument could be made that it's fine for an LLM to learn from copyrighted works, but maybe it should have to go to the library to do it. Having your own human-accessible copy of those works (at home, or at Meta), doesn't sound as acceptable to me.
- ineedasername 3y ago
  Sure, I think you’re right, it’s reasonable to expect a company to at least buy a single copy of each book (or whatever it eats) it ingests if the work could not otherwise be legally obtained for free. Or something reasonable along those lines
  - NLPaep 3y ago
    Yes, let’s shut out the small players now go Microsoft can bilk us

madsmith 3y ago

I believe LLMs should be allowed to read/view/consume content and learn from it even if that content has a copyright. We phrase it like somehow the material is being copied into the LLM, but that’s not what it’s doing. It’s building a neural graph from the experience of consuming that content. What would the world be like if humans couldn’t learn, train the weights of the interconnects of their neural tissue, from any material with a copyright?

api 3y ago
It’s a form of lossy compression. Can I strip the copyright off an image by JPEG compressing it? At the very least I think LLMs trained on data that the trainer does not own or have rights to use in that manner should not be copyrightable.
- bick_nyers 3y ago
  An LLM is a lossy compression of the internet and I think it should be treated as such. You can't copyright the internet itself.
- madsmith 3y ago
  All knowledge is lossy compression. My thinking “the enemy gate is down” when considering the tokens “Ender’s Game” is my recalling a learned association of those tokens to the given token string. My knowing that doesn’t strip the copyright. My telling someone the meaning and context of the phrase generally doesn’t strip the copyright away from Orson Scott Card. I’m not reproducing his work but my knowledge of it. And it’s dependent on what I do with that knowledge and how if I’ve violated his copyright. We are prosecuting the LLMs for possessing fragments of knowledge. And we’re assuming that the recall of some of those fragments means a copy of that work is in fact contained within the weights.
hmcq6 3y ago
A mathematical transformation of the data is not enough to qualify as a transformative work. Saving a copy-written work in a lossy compression does not negate the copywrite.

Kuinox 3y ago

There is a lot of mental gymnastic, to submit an artwork publicly on the internet, allowing everyone to copy your arstyle, make derivative art of it, have other learn from it, but if ever a machine 'learn' from it, it's "stealing". It's not because you don't like a derivative work, that the derivative work is "stealing" your content. Saying it's stealing is wrong, it's lying to get your point accross. You blame "how tech is going to steal everyone copyrighted works", yet, they were already in the tech world: the internet.

raincole 3y ago
It's a lot of mental gymnastic to think machine learning = human learning. Especially on HN, where people should understand scale matters a lot in real world. It's generally consider ok to sell your fanart on comic festivals. But do you think it's okay that Disney starts selling fanart of One Piece without the publisher's permission? A car and a pair of legs both move you from A point to B point. So why do laws treat automobiles and pedestrians so differently?
- Kuinox 3y ago
  > It's a lot of mental gymnastic to think machine learning = human learning. That's why I have put it in quotes. > But do you think it's okay that Disney starts selling fanart of One Piece without the publisher's permission? It's why it's called "fair use". Fanart isn't the only case of fair use. Parody for example allows it. And AFAIK, no court yet have decided that AI "learning" is not fair use or what the limite are.
hmcq6 3y ago
> have other learn from it, but if ever a machine 'learn' Why did you put one of those in quotes and not the other?
- Kuinox 3y ago
  Because these two are similar, yet not the same.