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Has there been some resolution to the copyright issues that I’m no aware of? In my conversations with execs that’s been a serious concern — basically that gener

Has there been some resolution to the copyright issues that I’m no aware of? In my conversations with execs that’s been a serious concern — basically that generated output from AI systems can’t be reliably protected. I refer to the concept that output could be deemed free of copyright because they are not created by a human author, or that derivative works can be potential liabilities because they resemble works that were used for training data or whatnot (and we have no idea what was really used to train). There was the recent court decision confirming: https://www.cooley.com/news/insight/2023/2023-08-24-district-court-confirms-human-authorship-requirement-sets-copyright-boundary-for-ai-generated-works#:~:text=On%20August%2018%2C%202023%2C%20Judge,copyrightable%20for%20lack%20of%20human https://www.cooley.com/news/insight/2023/2023-08-24-district... Seems odd to start making AI systems a data-at-the-center-of-the-company technology when such basic issues exist. Is this not a concern anymore?

judge2020 3y ago
We know that stuff generated from AI content is generally not your copyright, but there isn't any current ruling on whether or not you're free to use copyright-protected content to train a model in a legal way (e.g. fair use since it's been 'learned on', not directly copied). Some companies are using OpenAI gpt stuff, which is almost certainly trained on tons of copyrighted content and academic content, while other companies are being more cautious and soliciting models specifically trained on public domain/licensed content.
famouswaffles 3y ago
>There was the recent court decision confirming: https://www.cooley.com/news/insight/2023/2023-08-24-district https://www.cooley.com/news/insight/2023/2023-08-24-district... This decision seems specifically about whether the ai itself can hold the copyright as work for hire, not whether output generated by ML models can be copyrighted.
jay_kyburz 3y ago
If you are concerned somebody will steal your IP or infringe your copyright, they first have to be 100% sure that some text was indeed written by an AI, and only an AI. In practice, if you suspect something was written by an AI and are considering copying it, you would be safer to just ask an AI to write you one as well.
- winocm 3y ago
  There have been a few things that have been in the back of my mind that have been painfully bothering me for quite while regarding this subject. Are people really that different from an AI model when it comes to generating works? Isn't the underlying and overarching concept and process similar when it comes to this? (Optimizing for a certain select scenario or outcome by iteratively going through ideas and generating more over time.) What happens when both the model and human converge and it becomes truly indecipherable when it comes to telling the difference? Shower thoughts. I guess.
stale2002 3y ago
The copyright ruling that you are referencing is being significantly misunderstood. The only think that the ruling said is basically that the most low effort version of AI does not have copyright protection. IE, if you just go into midjourney and type in "super cool anime girl!" and thats it, the results are not protected. But there is so much more you can do. For example, you can generate an image, and then change it. The resulting images would be protected due to you adding the human input to it.
- happytiger 3y ago
  My understanding is that there are many more issues across both the training data and the output. https://www.theverge.com/23444685/generative-ai-copyright-infringement-legal-fair-use-training-data https://www.theverge.com/23444685/generative-ai-copyright-in... https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/openai-facing-another-copyright-suit-over-ai-training-on-novels https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/openai-facing-another-c... Etc…
  - stale2002 3y ago
    None of what you posted has been settled by any court. It is all a hypothetical issue that has not been enforced as of yet.
weinzierl 3y ago
So, the point that AI output might be a derivative work of its input is finally dead? I thought what execs were really afraid of was the risk that copyright holders will come around after some time and claim rights on the AI output even if it is only vaguely similar to the copyrighted work.
paxys 3y ago
Copyright is only an issue for creative works. If a company is automating a customer service chat or an online ordering process or a random marketing page/PR announcement or something of that sort via ChatGPT why would they even care?
- heisenbit 3y ago
  If the code that implements the automation resembles too closely copyrighted code it violates the rights of the creator. But who would know what happens behind corporate walls.
CobrastanJorji 3y ago
I think they're basically taking the "Uber" strategy here: primary business is probably illegal, but if they do it hard enough and at enough scale and create enough value for enough big companies, then they become big enough to either get regulations changed or strong enough to weather lawsuits and prosecutions. Their copyright fig leaf is perhaps analogous to Uber's "it's not a taxi service so we don't need taxi medallions" fig leaf.
- cmiles74 3y ago
  Or make as much money as you can, while you can.
  - segfaltnh 3y ago
    Yes but Uber doesn't make money.
    - earthboundkid 3y ago
      Don’t worry, neither does OpenAI.
- choppaface 3y ago
  Might be closer to the “Google” strategy, as Google also faced significant litigation with image search and publishers did a ton to shut down their large investment in Google Books. Moreover, Uber flaunted their non-compliance in contrast to sama testifying before Congress and trying to initiate regulatory capture early. There’s undeniably similar amounts of greed, although TK seems to genuinely enjoy being a bully versus sama is more of a futurist.
caesil 3y ago
You're referring to a Copyright Office administrative ruling. It's a pretty strange ruling at odds with precedent, and it has not been tested in court. Traditionally all that's required for copyrightability is a "minimal creative spark", i.e. the barest evidence that some human creativity was involved in creating the work. There really hasn't traditionally been any lower bound on how "minimal" the "spark" need be -- flick a dot of paint at a canvas, snap a photo without looking at what you're photographing, it doesn't matter as long as a human initiated the work somehow. However, the Copyright Office contends that AI-generated text and images do not contain a minimal creative spark: https://www.copyright.gov/ai/ai_policy_guidance.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/ai/ai_policy_guidance.pdf This is obviously asinine. Typing in "a smiling dolphin" on Midjourney and getting an image of a smiling dolphin is clearly not a program "operat[ing] randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author". If our laws have meaning, it will be overruled in court. Of course, judges are also susceptible to the marketing-driven idea that Artificial Intelligence is a separate being, a translucent stock photo robot with glowing blue wiring that thinks up ideas independently instead of software you must run with a creative input. So there's no guarantee sanity will prevail.
- choppaface 3y ago
  Not so much copyrighting generated output, it’s more about to what extent training is fair use as well as when the algo spits out an exact copy of training data.
  - caesil 3y ago
    That's a separate issue. What I linked above is an opinion specifically on whether generated output is copyrightable.
  - lucubratory 3y ago
    If the model produces content that would be a copyright violation in any other context, it doesn't stop being a copyright violation regardless of any of these decisions. No one has ever disagreed with that; it's the functional abolition of copyright and if you're okay with that, then you're not arguing for this stuff, you're arguing for the abolition of copyright. The argument is that if you trained the model with copyrighted data, and then you or someone else separately used the model to generate novel media which was not legally similar enough to any copyrighted work to make it a copyright violation, that that isn't violating copyright, it's fair use. Basically, using it to make your own original content is legal, and using it to create an unauthorised reproduction of a copyrighted work is illegal. Just like all other software.
graypegg 3y ago
If something is in the public domain, and you create something new with it, you have the rights to the new work, there isn’t any sort of alike-licensing on public domain works in most-if-not-all jurisdictions. This is why music engravers can sell entire books of classical sheet music from *public domain* works. They become the owners of that specific expression. (Their arrangement, font choice, page layout, etc) If the AI content is public domain, and the work it generates is incorporated into some other work, the entity doing the incorporation owns the work. It’s not permanently tainted or something as far as I know.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

judge2020 3y ago

We know that stuff generated from AI content is generally not your copyright, but there isn't any current ruling on whether or not you're free to use copyright-protected content to train a model in a legal way (e.g. fair use since it's been 'learned on', not directly copied). Some companies are using OpenAI gpt stuff, which is almost certainly trained on tons of copyrighted content and academic content, while other companies are being more cautious and soliciting models specifically trained on public domain/licensed content.

famouswaffles 3y ago

>There was the recent court decision confirming: https://www.cooley.com/news/insight/2023/2023-08-24-district https://www.cooley.com/news/insight/2023/2023-08-24-district... This decision seems specifically about whether the ai itself can hold the copyright as work for hire, not whether output generated by ML models can be copyrighted.

jay_kyburz 3y ago

If you are concerned somebody will steal your IP or infringe your copyright, they first have to be 100% sure that some text was indeed written by an AI, and only an AI. In practice, if you suspect something was written by an AI and are considering copying it, you would be safer to just ask an AI to write you one as well.

winocm 3y ago
There have been a few things that have been in the back of my mind that have been painfully bothering me for quite while regarding this subject. Are people really that different from an AI model when it comes to generating works? Isn't the underlying and overarching concept and process similar when it comes to this? (Optimizing for a certain select scenario or outcome by iteratively going through ideas and generating more over time.) What happens when both the model and human converge and it becomes truly indecipherable when it comes to telling the difference? Shower thoughts. I guess.

stale2002 3y ago

The copyright ruling that you are referencing is being significantly misunderstood. The only think that the ruling said is basically that the most low effort version of AI does not have copyright protection. IE, if you just go into midjourney and type in "super cool anime girl!" and thats it, the results are not protected. But there is so much more you can do. For example, you can generate an image, and then change it. The resulting images would be protected due to you adding the human input to it.

happytiger 3y ago
My understanding is that there are many more issues across both the training data and the output. https://www.theverge.com/23444685/generative-ai-copyright-infringement-legal-fair-use-training-data https://www.theverge.com/23444685/generative-ai-copyright-in... https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/openai-facing-another-copyright-suit-over-ai-training-on-novels https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/openai-facing-another-c... Etc…
- stale2002 3y ago
  None of what you posted has been settled by any court. It is all a hypothetical issue that has not been enforced as of yet.

weinzierl 3y ago

So, the point that AI output might be a derivative work of its input is finally dead? I thought what execs were really afraid of was the risk that copyright holders will come around after some time and claim rights on the AI output even if it is only vaguely similar to the copyrighted work.

paxys 3y ago

Copyright is only an issue for creative works. If a company is automating a customer service chat or an online ordering process or a random marketing page/PR announcement or something of that sort via ChatGPT why would they even care?

heisenbit 3y ago
If the code that implements the automation resembles too closely copyrighted code it violates the rights of the creator. But who would know what happens behind corporate walls.

CobrastanJorji 3y ago

I think they're basically taking the "Uber" strategy here: primary business is probably illegal, but if they do it hard enough and at enough scale and create enough value for enough big companies, then they become big enough to either get regulations changed or strong enough to weather lawsuits and prosecutions. Their copyright fig leaf is perhaps analogous to Uber's "it's not a taxi service so we don't need taxi medallions" fig leaf.

cmiles74 3y ago
Or make as much money as you can, while you can.
- segfaltnh 3y ago
  Yes but Uber doesn't make money.
  - earthboundkid 3y ago
    Don’t worry, neither does OpenAI.
choppaface 3y ago
Might be closer to the “Google” strategy, as Google also faced significant litigation with image search and publishers did a ton to shut down their large investment in Google Books. Moreover, Uber flaunted their non-compliance in contrast to sama testifying before Congress and trying to initiate regulatory capture early. There’s undeniably similar amounts of greed, although TK seems to genuinely enjoy being a bully versus sama is more of a futurist.

caesil 3y ago

You're referring to a Copyright Office administrative ruling. It's a pretty strange ruling at odds with precedent, and it has not been tested in court. Traditionally all that's required for copyrightability is a "minimal creative spark", i.e. the barest evidence that some human creativity was involved in creating the work. There really hasn't traditionally been any lower bound on how "minimal" the "spark" need be -- flick a dot of paint at a canvas, snap a photo without looking at what you're photographing, it doesn't matter as long as a human initiated the work somehow. However, the Copyright Office contends that AI-generated text and images do not contain a minimal creative spark: https://www.copyright.gov/ai/ai_policy_guidance.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/ai/ai_policy_guidance.pdf This is obviously asinine. Typing in "a smiling dolphin" on Midjourney and getting an image of a smiling dolphin is clearly not a program "operat[ing] randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author". If our laws have meaning, it will be overruled in court. Of course, judges are also susceptible to the marketing-driven idea that Artificial Intelligence is a separate being, a translucent stock photo robot with glowing blue wiring that thinks up ideas independently instead of software you must run with a creative input. So there's no guarantee sanity will prevail.

choppaface 3y ago
Not so much copyrighting generated output, it’s more about to what extent training is fair use as well as when the algo spits out an exact copy of training data.
- caesil 3y ago
  That's a separate issue. What I linked above is an opinion specifically on whether generated output is copyrightable.
- lucubratory 3y ago
  If the model produces content that would be a copyright violation in any other context, it doesn't stop being a copyright violation regardless of any of these decisions. No one has ever disagreed with that; it's the functional abolition of copyright and if you're okay with that, then you're not arguing for this stuff, you're arguing for the abolition of copyright. The argument is that if you trained the model with copyrighted data, and then you or someone else separately used the model to generate novel media which was not legally similar enough to any copyrighted work to make it a copyright violation, that that isn't violating copyright, it's fair use. Basically, using it to make your own original content is legal, and using it to create an unauthorised reproduction of a copyrighted work is illegal. Just like all other software.

graypegg 3y ago

If something is in the public domain, and you create something new with it, you have the rights to the new work, there isn’t any sort of alike-licensing on public domain works in most-if-not-all jurisdictions. This is why music engravers can sell entire books of classical sheet music from *public domain* works. They become the owners of that specific expression. (Their arrangement, font choice, page layout, etc) If the AI content is public domain, and the work it generates is incorporated into some other work, the entity doing the incorporation owns the work. It’s not permanently tainted or something as far as I know.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]