15 ms·

Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

213 points by cpeterso 3y ago

jalapenos 3y ago
Putting my money on the copyrighters lose. The US and its fears of China catching up aren't going to let their latest prized jewel OpenAI get kneecapped by "stop copying me!"s.
yieldcrv 3y ago
I’ve made so much money stacking my pitch decks and websites with AI generated media that I don't care if someone copy and pastes it and uses it commercially too People married to their prompt engineering outputs are really missing the forest for the trees
- ProllyInfamous 3y ago
  "When the rice desolves to 'free,' people shall starve."
- nvy 3y ago
  Perhaps it's the artists on whose content your models got trained that are rightfully upset. After all, you're not giving them a dime and neither is "open" "AI"
  - cscurmudgeon 3y ago
    Do the artists pay other artists they "trained" on consciously and subconsciously?
    - skydhash 3y ago
      Have you trained as an artist? It’s very different from what LLMs are. If you’re good enough, you can reproduce any style, but people try not to because it’s obvious. And more importantly, you avoid copying ideas and presentation. But the most glaring issue is attribution. You can avoid paying, but not doing attributions is my pet peeve. Even when doing fanart, fanfics, and parodies, most people take care to mention where their inspiration comes from.
  - asynchronous 3y ago
    I think that we shouldn’t burn perhaps the greatest digital art tool ever created in the sake of preserving our currently broken copyright system.
    - lost_tourist 3y ago
      Until you have a better system, sure. It's not burned, just put on ice.
  - yieldcrv 3y ago
    You don’t know which models I used and never will know if that condition has suddenly become satisfied Curious what the next goal post will be, I’ve seen them move already
- Andrex 3y ago
  An entire forest of hallucinated trees, sounds tranquil yet disturbing.
  - jjjjjkkkkkk 3y ago
    [flagged]
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  I am having trouble making sense of that last statement - can you rephrase it?
  - yieldcrv 3y ago
    A lot of people would like their AI creations to have to copyright protection, but it isn't necessary to making money
kelseyfrog 3y ago
The narrative beauty of filling this up with GPT-created comments will be so incredibly sublime.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- h2odragon 3y ago
  Since it'll be real people driving the efforts; the final results should normalize out about the same, statistically speaking. This all gets boiled down to like 3 or 4 rows in a spreadsheet, anyway.
Der_Einzige 3y ago
I'm going to try to plead my case for images generated using sophisticated prompt engineering to be copyrightable. For example, at the point that I've written a prompt with 20 tags, 10 negative prompt tags, some loras, custom weights, embeddings merges, and prompt editing, I'm now writing what is effectively a "program", which should be copyrightable and so should its outputs. It's total BS to me that a book of midjourney generated images is itself copyrightable because a human arranged the book together, but that a highly sophisticated prompt involving custom tooling wouldn't be. If nothing else, my comments should show the US Patent Office how deep the rabbit-hole goes with just how interpolatable everything is with everything else.
- stonogo 3y ago
  No, you're passing inputs to a program, and your description completely omits the vast majority of that input: the creative output of an unknown number of other people, whose rights you are attempting to launder.
  - Robotbeat 3y ago
    Transformative collage.
  - stale2002 3y ago
    Thats nice and all. But it has nothing to do with whether something is copyrightable or not. Instead, something is copyrightable based on the amount of human input into the process. And it is very clear that there can be a lot of human input into AI image generation. Even though I will concede that going into midjourney and just typing in "Hot anime girl" isn't a lot of input and likely doesn't deserve copyright protection. But there can be so much more to AI art than the boring case of low effort mid journey prompts.
    - LegitShady 3y ago
      No your human input product is the inputs you authored but you're applying for copyright for something else.
darkclouds 3y ago
I would say, treat the AI like a human viewing said data/material, but unlike the majority of humans, most dont have Kim Peek levels of observation and recall, so should there be some sort of expiration of data built into AI's and if so, should it be a blanket cut off date for all data an AI has been exposed to, or allow for some specialisation like a human might have in order to fulfil their occupation? I'm also aware that search engines have access to data, most humans do not, which gives the search engines an advantage, think accessing ft.com for example, so should AI's have access to data in the context of a search engine or as a human? Its tough, I want to give AI's full access to see what the tech is truly capable of, but I'm aware this will lead to more global monopolies over and above the existing search engine monopolies allowed to dominate in a country or territory, which will harm smaller AI entities.
- idle_zealot 3y ago
  It's funny to see this copyright overreach as somehow opposed to monopolies. Should using data to train AI models be made illegal then the only entities capable of affording it would be global monopolies (and maybe pirates? Though the compute necessary may be prohibitive). There would be no way for smaller AI entities to compete.
- gremlinsinc 3y ago
  If a human author is allowed to read and cite other works in their new composition. For example a Stephen King book referencing another author or famous book like Lord of the rings, then ai should be allowed to do the same as provide similar outputs that Stephen King would come to organically. if it's just using themes, show me any book that's not got derivative parts in it at all.
rickmode 3y ago
I believe we first need to answer the question of whether the copyright of the AI model’s source text or images affects the output. My opinion — and note I’m a software engineer, not a lawyer — is that an AI, being a statistical model and not generally intelligent, should not be allowed to disregard the copyright of its source material. This would, I think, require the AI’s creator to secure a license for all of its sources that allows this sort of transformation and presentation. And further, a user of the AI would themselves require a license to use the output. The alternative seems to be “anything goes”.
- stale2002 3y ago
  > is that an AI, being a statistical model and not generally intelligent, should not be allowed to disregard the copyright of its source material None of what you are saying has anything to do with copyright. The tool Photoshop isn't generally intelligent either. And yet, yes it can be used to create art using other people's stuff. And it could be done legally if the results are transformative.
  - jtr1 3y ago
    Photoshop doesn’t install with a massive directory of other people’s copyrighted works to draw snippets from.
    - tick_tock_tick 3y ago
      Yes it does...
      - devsda 3y ago
        If it does, then Adobe would have commissioned or acquired the license. In either case they would have _paid_ someone to get those images. It is very unlikely Adobe would be shipping their software with copyrighted material without paying for them first.
- idle_zealot 3y ago
vouaobrasil 3y ago
We as a society have a relatively healthy setup for people to create art and content. Sure there are problems, but on the whole it mostly works. What AI will do is destroy that by removing the profitability of creating that content. Although generative AI operates on a similar principle to a human being exposed to a large number of artworks, it does so at a speed blindingly faster, enabling it to outcompete humans at many tasks. The number of such tasks will only increase in the future. Thus, small-time content creators who make an independent living from content creation will be squeezed out and left in the dark. In some years, it will be very hard to make money from content creation at all. The access to information and entertainment will also become more anonymous, will most people consuming things through AI generation. Of course, that will be convenient at first, but we will end up with a world where a significantly SMALLER fraction of people controlling AI supply us with everything. (Including manipulative advertising to consume more of their product.) For every benefit that AI gives us, there are 10 losses. I used to dislike draconian copyright laws, but now I like them. And I sincerely hope they are used against AI to make AI unprofitable. I believe further that AI will be society-disrupting in a variety of other ways and thus, as a society, we should destroy it. But I am pessimistic.
- marcinzm 3y ago
  >And I sincerely hope they are used against AI to make AI unprofitable. No, they'll make AI unprofitable for small time creators but not massive corporations. The latter either already have rights to vast quantitates of training data or will hire a thousands in Africa to create training data that is just legally different enough to count.
  - vouaobrasil 3y ago
    That is why we should halt AI completely and do a more thorough analysis of its societal-level implications before blindingly putting it out there. Because when new technology is introduced, it makes it almost impossible to stop using it due to the way our current society is setup (as a sensitive machine that is very quick to reward any gains in efficieny and economic output as opposed to sustainability).
spaceribs 3y ago
I'd be interested to see the outcome of all this honestly, but I see parallels in how we exclude natural organisms from copyright and instead rely on patents to enforce ownership of unique genetics.
carom 3y ago
There are three copyright issues here; datasets, model weights, and model outputs. Dataset copyright is pretty well defined and things can often be used under fair use. Fair use decisions are done with a four prong test and really decided by the courts on a case-by-case basis. Model weights cannot currently be copyrighted. They are the output of a mechanical process over the dataset. However, software faced a similar situation where the source code could be copyrighted but the compiled binary was not. US copyright law was updated to address this. We may see something similar for model weights. Model outputs are less clear, but these are likely copyrightable by the user of the model. It is not possible for a non-human to hold copyright, so the model cannot. It is very unlikely that the company producing the model could assert copyright over the outputs. A good analogy here is someone using photo manipulation software. Super interesting area. I think we will eventually see an update to the copyright code to make weights copyrightable. Also it will be interesting to see how court challenges (code generation, image generation) affect datasets in the future.
- usr8new 3y ago
  Biggest issue is the first one. Dataset copyrights are where most of the fight b/w regulators, AI companies & artists is happening. Should you be able to train your model on an image or text someone uploaded on the internet without buying the copyright? If no, then most of current LLMs & stable diffusion models will have to go & I don't see big tech allowing it.
- jj999 3y ago
  Who do you think should hold the copyright on the model weights, the copyright holders of the individual works comprising the dataset or the ones who assembled the dataset?
  - XorNot 3y ago
    Depends who you think holds the copyright on the SHA256 hash of an image. Model weights are even less specific then that number, since they don't represent any specific source input at all.
  - shagie 3y ago
namtzigla 3y ago
This is _exactly_ how it looks when a society commits suicide.
- mbakke 3y ago
  What do you mean? Can you point to examples of societal collapse similar to this? AFAICT this is a novel problem. Personally I think the logical conclusion will be to fair use/copyleft everything, but that seems like a win for society.
OneOffAsk 3y ago
Creative works are incompatible with capitalism. We’ve create a thin finicky interface between them with copyright laws, but it hardly works. I’m not saying artists and creators shouldn’t have financial security in this system, quite the opposite. I don’t have a better idea, but I hope we can come up with something that doesn’t conflate ownership with attribution and also protects the livelihood of people who want to share their creations.
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
Terms of Use You are prohibited from using the content of this site in "large language models" or any other usage for the purpose of "artificial intelligence". Liquidated Damages
- paxys 3y ago
  I'll just write a blog with a disclaimer "no one is allowed to read this blog". Now anyone who comes across it is violating my terms and owes me money!
  - 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
    They might never read it, they might just use it to train "AI". Like Google scanning peoples' email. "We do not read anyone's mail. It's all done by computer."
- mr_toad 3y ago
  It wouldn’t stop them arguing fair use. You can’t have a license that restricts fair use because fair use doesn’t require a license.
  - 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
    https://www.authorsalliance.org/2023/02/23/fair-use-week-2023-how-to-evade-fair-use-in-two-easy-steps/ https://www.authorsalliance.org/2023/02/23/fair-use-week-202... Of course, alleging copyright infringment is useful to get into federal court as contracts are generally governed by state law.
zeroq 3y ago
[flagged]
- hinkley 3y ago
  > The letter was from a wizard named Albus Dumbledore, and it explained that Max was the orphaned son of two powerful wizards who had been killed in a battle against the dark forces of the wizarding world. Not gonna lie, you had me in the first half.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- paxys 3y ago
  No it isn't, this is made up by you. GPT-3.5's writing is several grade levels higher than this by default.
- tkgally 3y ago
  Interesting example. I ran your prompt five times through GPT-3.5. While it didn’t use the name Hogwarts in those cases, three of the results had the character going to either the Academy of Arcane Arts (twice) or the Royal Academy of Arcane Arts, which seems clearly modelled on Hogwarts. I then tried the prompt five times with GPT-4. None of the resulting stories had the main character going to study magic at a school. I don’t know the Harry Potter stories well enough to tell if other names or plot points in GPT-4’s output originated there, so I tried a variation of your prompt using a plot point from the Lord of the Rings: “Please come up with an original story about a magic ring that makes the user invisible. Make sure you don't use existing characters and don't plagiarize any work.” In five tries with GPT-4, I got one reference to “the Misty Mountains” but no other names that I remember from LOTR. In all five stories, the ring turns out to have negative aspects, but that might be inevitable for fantasy stories. I liked this one: “However, she also soon discovered that every time she wore the ring, she left behind a faint imprint of herself. These ‘echoes’ interacted with the world in her stead, retracing her steps and repeating her words from when she was in that silvery realm. And they never disappeared. ... The town of Nerris began to get crowded with Maeve's silent doppelgangers, all repeating her past actions. The townspeople grew suspicious. They noticed these silent echoes, and fear began to take root. They were unnerved by the countless Maeves they saw wandering about, each one caught in its own loop.” Does that sound familiar to anyone? Could it be GPT-4’s original idea?
lost_tourist 3y ago
Copyright is for humans, not AI. Since the AI is doing 99.999% of the work on an "original work" and since the work is derived from the work of others, copyright should not apply. Copyright is for humans and creations of humans. If we get a truly sapient AI then we can revisit.
ZoomerCretin 3y ago
Is there anyone willing to make the case for allowing generated works to have copyright protections? A lot of people here seem to mistake copyright for "right-to-sell" generated works. As it stands now, with no copyrights granted for AI generated works, anyone can sell any generated works unless some copyright holder believes it violates their copyright.
- kirrent 3y ago
  I don't have any strong opinion either way but here is, to me, the best form of the argument. I think the clear analogy is copyright in photographs. There is no a priori reason to believe that copyright should apply to either photographs or model outputs. In the US the copyright act was extended by congress to allow for copyright in photographs. When this was challenged in Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony, the argument was made that a photograph only mechanistically captures the world and doesn't involve authorship and therefore doesn't fall in the scope of copyright outlined in the constitution. The court disagreed and found there is sufficient authorship in photography through the choice of lighting, framing, camera settings, posing of subjects, etc. Similarly, one could argue that there is authorship in the choice of topic, prompting, framing, etc when using a generative model. Look at some of the very complex prompts on Midjourney's example page. I've spent a fair amount of time trying to make images which are just as striking and failing. Just as in photography, I think an extension of copyright in this case would probably need to involve an act of congress rather than a development in case law (though I'm outside the US and not that familiar with the act and relevant case law). If you haven't read the Zarya of the Dawn letter from the US copyright office, I think it's a very cogent explanation of where things currently stand. An artist generated images for a comic book. They get no copyright in the images because they didn't sufficiently have authorship in them. They do get copyright in the entire comic book which involves a particular selection and arrangement of images. https://www.copyright.gov/docs/zarya-of-the-dawn.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/docs/zarya-of-the-dawn.pdf
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
paxys 3y ago
I have never understood the fair use argument when it comes to training data. I publish a copyrighted article. Some LLM ingests it without permission, but since the output of that LLM is sufficiently different from my source article there is no violation. I publish copyrighted code. Some company decides to consume it without purchasing a license. The product they distribute is vastly different from my code itself, but I can still sue them into oblivion. What's the difference between the two?
- Mathnerd314 3y ago
  Well "consuming" the code means copying it word for word into your source tree. The compilation process does mangle it a bit but usually you can find identical function names and so on, and the courts have ruled that object code is equivalent to source code for purposes of copyright. A different situation is you read a copyrighted news article and write the facts from it in your essay. Since the copyright of the news article only extends to creative expression and not factual information, there is no violation. For me, it is hard to tell what difference there is between this situation and an LLM identifying statistical patterns in the news article.
  - devsda 3y ago
    > A different situation is you read a copyrighted news article and write the facts from it in your essay. This is fine for actual facts(with some caveats) but how should it apply for creative works like a novel ?
    - ryathal 3y ago
      The same way it does now. Simply having a character resurrect in a story doesn't violate copyright of the Bible; Game of Thrones; Lion, Witch, and Wardrobe; Harry Potter; Lord of the Rings; etc. Writing a Story About Luke Skywalker as a ten-year-old kid exploring Tatooine, is likely to run into problems.
- Yodel0914 3y ago
  > I publish copyrighted code. Some company decides to consume it without purchasing a license. The product they distribute is vastly different from my code itself, but I can still sue them into oblivion. Isn't the analogy more: an employee at a company reads your copyrighted code, along with many other pieces of code, and produces a new piece of code? Your code influenced the output, but in no way can you a) detect that influence b) assert any copyright over the output. In your analogy, your code is still "in tact" within the new product; that's not the case with LLM-produced output.
vajrabum 3y ago
I'm surprised that nobody has suggested that what's behind this RFC is Disney and other large studios lobbying to make it legal to copyright AI generated content so that they can move to AI generated movies and art. Right now you can't get a copyright on AI generated content.
- extraduder_ire 3y ago
  I think the current precedent is that you can, as long as it's not wholly machine generated work. Whatever modicum of creativity you put in as an editor is what's got legal protection.
Joel_Mckay 3y ago
AI Jesus chat-bot could claim copyright over biblical content. In theory, a company that owns Christian (c 2023) content could be filing DMCA claims every Sunday. The silliness of digital-racketeers must end at some point. =)
- javajosh 3y ago
  You've described a viable startup business plan.
  - Joel_Mckay 3y ago
    It is what I enjoy doing, but someone has already launched a product. =) text-with-jesus: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/text-with-jesus/id6446922759 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/text-with-jesus/id6446922759
    - javajosh 3y ago
      Nope, that's not the plan. The plan is to start an non-practicing entity that copywrites religious texts and sues others who use them.
      - Joel_Mckay 3y ago
        Sounds like you are working with the other gentlemen's organization... you know the one that is likely... will "McKinsey & Company" be the secret behind these WIPO shenanigans too? There was a 30% drop is chatGPT users in 30 days, so I think we are now past the "early majority" stage of the hype cycle. Perhaps NVIDIA GPUs will be a little less ridiculous next year too. Have a glorious day =)
- Pyrodogg 3y ago
  I'm not sure what it's feelings are on the topic but Ask Jesus is a thing on twitch rn. NSFW (It's chat generated content on Twitch) https://www.twitch.tv/ask_jesus https://www.twitch.tv/ask_jesus It takes chat prompts and weaves together scripture, The Internet, odd pronunciation, callbacks to other questions, and hilarious fails when chat gets, uh, playful. AI Jesus just said there is a time and place for everything and that it might just be the time to buy Starfield. It knew it was a game being only prompted with, 'Jesus, should I buy Starfield?'
Ajedi32 3y ago
Much debate has been had about how existing copyright law applies to AI models. But once you get past that and start asking about how copyright should apply to AI models (as the copyright office is here) the answer in my mind becomes clear. Copyright, as defined in the U.S. Constitution, exists "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts"[1]. I can think of no better modern example of "the Progress of Science and useful Arts" than AI models themselves. Therefore, it follows that: 1. Existing copyright laws should _not_ be applied in such a way as to make training these models any more difficult than it already is (as that would be in direct opposition to the stated goal) 2. AI models should be copyrightable by the person training the model (for the same reason any other software program is copyrightable) 3. Output of AI models should be copyrightable by the person running the model (for the same reason any other creative work is copyrightable) provided the output does not conflict with any preexisting copyright For those who think training on copyrighted materials should be illegal, explain to me how that helps "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" and I'll re-consider my position. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause
- showerst 3y ago
  So i'm not sure how I feel, but to play Devil's advocate -- If I know anything I create is just going to be hoovered up and input into somebody's AI model so I do 99% of the work and they get 99% of the profit, perhaps I'm much less likely to progress Science and useful Arts by creating content in the first place. I fear an internet of signup walls and TOC agreements for everything, just to prevent crawlers that feed AI from soaking it all up.
  - chii 3y ago
    > If I know anything I create is just going to be hoovered up and input into somebody's AI model but today, without an AI model, anything you create is already going to be learnt and studied (if it is worth studying of course). What's the difference, but speed? > they get 99% of the profit Why is that a priori the assumption? What stops you from getting a profit? > I do 99% of the work you did 0.000001% of the work, since the model contains billions of other works from which they train.
40yearoldman 3y ago
The only clear solution is to abandon the notion of a copyright. We have know for a long time that everything can be represented with numbers, even more so within the space of computers. All we have done is invent a system to help us find numbers we find special.
- thenose 3y ago
  Trying, though it's hard to get noticed. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37346620 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37346620 And I want to participate in the community here, not merely mention the thing I've built.
  - unstuck3958 3y ago
    > though it's hard to get noticed. I'd suggest to start with at least a brief paragraph on what thenose is, what it's goals are etc. I read your post, and found myself reading the technical workings of something I didn't know anything about.
    - thenose 3y ago
      Oh, thank you. Basically AI training datasets have been knocked offline recently by DMCAs, and the goal is to bring them back online in a place that can't be knocked offline. The most popular training dataset was The Pile, hosted by The Eye: https://pile.eleuther.ai/ https://pile.eleuther.ai/ Notice the links now 404. We tried to make a drop-in replacement for those links. All they have to do is change the-eye.eu to thenose.cc in the urls. Unfortunately there's not a lot of ways to get their attention to let them know this exists now. I'll try emailing the contact address but I imagine they receive lots of spam, so I was hoping to try to get noticed by people like yourself first. Maybe a direct email is still the best way, but there's no guarantee they'll even be willing to change the urls due to legal risks. For all they know I could be logging the IP address of everyone who downloads it and forwarding it to authorities. But I'm not, and it's a frustrating problem to try to solve. I just want to help AI flourish. This also serves as a template for someone else to do the same thing, so at least there can be multiple mirrors. Thank you again. The fact that you even took the time to look it over meant a lot. If you have any other ideas, I'd be interested to hear.
nostril 3y ago
Hi HN, I have been working on something directly related to AI and copyright. Would it be ok to point it out here? Recently The Pile was taken offline from The Eye by DMCA. One solution is to host it offshore, which we're calling The Nose: https://thenose.cc https://thenose.cc The technical security measures may be of interest to the audience here, so I'll be as detailed as possible. The following formula should be safe if you follow it to the letter. The basic setup is to install Whonix on a VeraCrypt drive, acquire Monero through any method, use a service like changenow to convert Bitcoin on a wallet stored only on the Whonix installation, sign up for a ProtonMail account (when they ask for email verification, use a no signup inbox service like yopmail), rent a dedicated server at Shinjiru using bitcoin, and register the domain at the same place. They're both a registrar and a server host, which simplifies matters. Use N/A for all contact info. Use Cloudflare to manage your site's DNS records. Wallet security: do not ever move Bitcoin to any wallet linked with your personal identity. This is easier said than done. First there is the question of how to store passwords. These are the keys to the kingdom, and are the most sensitive aspect by far, because they're intimately linked with you. Additionally, if hardware failure occurs, you'll lose everything if you store them on the Whonix drive. My setup is to use KeePass to store the passwords on a laptop I use to VNC into the computer with the Whonix drive, and then save the database to a folder that gets synced to the cloud. The only flaw in this model is that if your laptop is compromised while your KeePass is open, you're done. But (as Ulbricht discovered) this is always true. The threat model assumes lawyers coming after you with DMCA with additional safeguards against the FBI narrowing down who you are in real life. If your physical location is compromised through any method, you're done. All it takes is one mistake to end you. SSH into your box from your real computer? Done. Sign up using your real name with Mailgun? Done. Accidentally say "Thanks, <your real name>" to the support staff at Shinjiru in an email? Done. Abandon ship and close everything down. The security of this technique comes down to simplicity. There are very few moving parts. I opted for nginx + mediawiki with Discourse forums at https://forums.thenose.cc https://forums.thenose.cc (though I don't know if anyone will care enough to join). Logging is turned off to protect users downloading the data, though you only have my word on this. But reputation is the only thing a hacker has ever truly had anyway. If you're serious about following the above recipe, I urge you to read through the Whonix docs on online anonymity: https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Documentation https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Documentation Remember, threat model is your saving grace. You probably aren't starting a darknet, so you can relax your threat model in terms of physical safety. But you won't get away with any mistakes made in cyberspace. As for the site itself, I've avoided asking for donations for now (hosting is $130/mo though, which will get expensive) or describing anything beyond this HN comment. I'll say it's for simplicity, but in fact I only started it a few days ago and haven't had time to provide anything but the essence of our service: hosting AI datasets in stable, copyright-resistant ways. If additional datasets beyond The Pile need protection or distribution, you can contact me at nostril@thenose.cc or at https://forums.thenose.cc https://forums.thenose.cc. I have a 4TB drive, of which 800gb is being used by The Pile so far.
Zuiii 3y ago
I wonder how they verify the personhood of the people making the comments. I can see this process being easily abused if the comments aren't taken by real people in person. That said, I hope the US doesn't end up piling even more restrictions onto copyright. They'd only be shooting themselves in the foot. Copyright has completely failed to achieve the purpose for which it was intended to solve (only intended to give authors a short amount of time to profit off their efforts? look at it now). Perhaps it's time to rethink the concept of copyright as a whole before other countries beat the US to it.
mlsu 3y ago
The entire discussion about AI and copyright strikes me as a bit naive. Right now, we are in a situation where nobody quite knows what these AI models are useful for. We have some inkling that they might be extraordinarily useful for making money -- but not precisely how, not even the companies that are developing the models themselves. Once they money starts, the debate over copyright will fall exactly into the economic seams between the major players involved: - new tech orgs who are monetizing models will say that the model is "exactly as humans are": they see copyrighted works in training, and then produce wholly original outputs. And of course that the model weights themselves are, like the outputs of employees, completely owned by the company. - incumbents who stand to lose out on the new gold rush will say that every single output of a model belongs to them if just a single image or sentence was seen in training. And that because of that, we really should just shut the whole thing down, because how could you ever prove that a model was not trained on copyrighted material? The faultlines will entirely rest on who has more power, hard and soft. How much can they influence the legal system, either by spending $ to hire legal talent or by sheer soft politicking, balanced with how favorable they appear to the general public who uses their product (or consumes their media). I suspect that the end result of this debate is a "legal" way of doing things accessible only to the extremely large players, and a small, politically insignificant collection of individuals, hackers, and startups who aim to unseat those large players (or just flat-out train "illegal" models). The worst possible end result is that the legal system is just too fossilized to deal and tries something draconian like not allow datacenter-scale GPU compute. As an aside, I predict a sizeable space for companies that do "compliance" -- asserting the copyright status of a dataset, perhaps even themselves using ML. That market will carve off and leave rotting a sizeable chunk of the new money's ML profits. It's fun to talk about this, I guess. But remember that what you or I have to say about what a machine learning model philosophically is has no bearing what-ever when it comes to the actual ability for individuals, startups, or large players to use models. I will predict though: enjoy Llama2 while it lasts. Like the internet, it will become fully assimilated into the larger intellectual property machine.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
cookiengineer 3y ago
Imagine the future where we have instead of HDMI recording cards that circumvent crappy encryption something like a downscale and upscale neural co processor to circumvent copyright protection. Last time they tried to copyright everything with DMCA it actually turned out to be a useless law. Why not fix DMCA first and make malicious intent actually prosecutable - and then move on to transformative topics? Can't fix copyright if copyright itself is already broken in the law. 90 years made sense in a world of pen and paper, but not in a world with the internet.
hanselot 3y ago
Every day of my life I wake up feeling more and more detached from the world. That people are even debating this is so incredibly stupid to me. The only people that will benefit from more onerous copyright are the major corporations that already have lawyers lined up and ready to fight their battles ad infinitum. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37347528 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37347528 The everyday person will not benefit from any decisions made by courts on this matter. We will get the absolute shittiest implementation of copyright possible, see all other industries where copyright plays a role. Copyright by itself is such a clever trick to prevent the world from advancing. They convinced you to fight each other over scraps while they violate your copyright behind closed doors and use it to further their own agendas. They wield copyright like a weapon to effectively silence and dominate entire industries, leaving the average human unable to even comprehend how to fight back. Lawyers and Copyright. Without them we would be so much better off.
- lewhoo 3y ago
  > Copyright by itself is such a clever trick to prevent the world from advancing. And yet, the world is advancing.
lewhoo 3y ago
A lot of talk here on how copyrights and intellectual property are stupid, backwards, ancient (this is particularly strange, because the right for humans to exist and not be harmed is arguably much older and no one is complaining) and harmful without exploring a world without them. If I recall copyrights were introduced along with the development of mass print for the purpose of protecting authors of books. How will the world of today solve this issue ?

213 points by cpeterso 3y ago

Putting my money on the copyrighters lose. The US and its fears of China catching up aren't going to let their latest prized jewel OpenAI get kneecapped by "stop copying me!"s.

yieldcrv 3y ago

I’ve made so much money stacking my pitch decks and websites with AI generated media that I don't care if someone copy and pastes it and uses it commercially too People married to their prompt engineering outputs are really missing the forest for the trees

ProllyInfamous 3y ago
"When the rice desolves to 'free,' people shall starve."
nvy 3y ago
Perhaps it's the artists on whose content your models got trained that are rightfully upset. After all, you're not giving them a dime and neither is "open" "AI"
- cscurmudgeon 3y ago
  Do the artists pay other artists they "trained" on consciously and subconsciously?
  - skydhash 3y ago
    Have you trained as an artist? It’s very different from what LLMs are. If you’re good enough, you can reproduce any style, but people try not to because it’s obvious. And more importantly, you avoid copying ideas and presentation. But the most glaring issue is attribution. You can avoid paying, but not doing attributions is my pet peeve. Even when doing fanart, fanfics, and parodies, most people take care to mention where their inspiration comes from.
- asynchronous 3y ago
  I think that we shouldn’t burn perhaps the greatest digital art tool ever created in the sake of preserving our currently broken copyright system.
  - lost_tourist 3y ago
    Until you have a better system, sure. It's not burned, just put on ice.
- yieldcrv 3y ago
  You don’t know which models I used and never will know if that condition has suddenly become satisfied Curious what the next goal post will be, I’ve seen them move already
Andrex 3y ago
An entire forest of hallucinated trees, sounds tranquil yet disturbing.
- jjjjjkkkkkk 3y ago
  [flagged]
quickthrower2 3y ago
I am having trouble making sense of that last statement - can you rephrase it?
- yieldcrv 3y ago
  A lot of people would like their AI creations to have to copyright protection, but it isn't necessary to making money

kelseyfrog 3y ago

The narrative beauty of filling this up with GPT-created comments will be so incredibly sublime.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
h2odragon 3y ago
Since it'll be real people driving the efforts; the final results should normalize out about the same, statistically speaking. This all gets boiled down to like 3 or 4 rows in a spreadsheet, anyway.

Der_Einzige 3y ago

I'm going to try to plead my case for images generated using sophisticated prompt engineering to be copyrightable. For example, at the point that I've written a prompt with 20 tags, 10 negative prompt tags, some loras, custom weights, embeddings merges, and prompt editing, I'm now writing what is effectively a "program", which should be copyrightable and so should its outputs. It's total BS to me that a book of midjourney generated images is itself copyrightable because a human arranged the book together, but that a highly sophisticated prompt involving custom tooling wouldn't be. If nothing else, my comments should show the US Patent Office how deep the rabbit-hole goes with just how interpolatable everything is with everything else.

stonogo 3y ago
No, you're passing inputs to a program, and your description completely omits the vast majority of that input: the creative output of an unknown number of other people, whose rights you are attempting to launder.
- Robotbeat 3y ago
  Transformative collage.
- stale2002 3y ago
  Thats nice and all. But it has nothing to do with whether something is copyrightable or not. Instead, something is copyrightable based on the amount of human input into the process. And it is very clear that there can be a lot of human input into AI image generation. Even though I will concede that going into midjourney and just typing in "Hot anime girl" isn't a lot of input and likely doesn't deserve copyright protection. But there can be so much more to AI art than the boring case of low effort mid journey prompts.
  - LegitShady 3y ago
    No your human input product is the inputs you authored but you're applying for copyright for something else.

darkclouds 3y ago

I would say, treat the AI like a human viewing said data/material, but unlike the majority of humans, most dont have Kim Peek levels of observation and recall, so should there be some sort of expiration of data built into AI's and if so, should it be a blanket cut off date for all data an AI has been exposed to, or allow for some specialisation like a human might have in order to fulfil their occupation? I'm also aware that search engines have access to data, most humans do not, which gives the search engines an advantage, think accessing ft.com for example, so should AI's have access to data in the context of a search engine or as a human? Its tough, I want to give AI's full access to see what the tech is truly capable of, but I'm aware this will lead to more global monopolies over and above the existing search engine monopolies allowed to dominate in a country or territory, which will harm smaller AI entities.

idle_zealot 3y ago
It's funny to see this copyright overreach as somehow opposed to monopolies. Should using data to train AI models be made illegal then the only entities capable of affording it would be global monopolies (and maybe pirates? Though the compute necessary may be prohibitive). There would be no way for smaller AI entities to compete.
gremlinsinc 3y ago
If a human author is allowed to read and cite other works in their new composition. For example a Stephen King book referencing another author or famous book like Lord of the rings, then ai should be allowed to do the same as provide similar outputs that Stephen King would come to organically. if it's just using themes, show me any book that's not got derivative parts in it at all.

rickmode 3y ago

I believe we first need to answer the question of whether the copyright of the AI model’s source text or images affects the output. My opinion — and note I’m a software engineer, not a lawyer — is that an AI, being a statistical model and not generally intelligent, should not be allowed to disregard the copyright of its source material. This would, I think, require the AI’s creator to secure a license for all of its sources that allows this sort of transformation and presentation. And further, a user of the AI would themselves require a license to use the output. The alternative seems to be “anything goes”.

stale2002 3y ago
> is that an AI, being a statistical model and not generally intelligent, should not be allowed to disregard the copyright of its source material None of what you are saying has anything to do with copyright. The tool Photoshop isn't generally intelligent either. And yet, yes it can be used to create art using other people's stuff. And it could be done legally if the results are transformative.
- jtr1 3y ago
  Photoshop doesn’t install with a massive directory of other people’s copyrighted works to draw snippets from.
  - tick_tock_tick 3y ago
    Yes it does...
    - devsda 3y ago
      If it does, then Adobe would have commissioned or acquired the license. In either case they would have _paid_ someone to get those images. It is very unlikely Adobe would be shipping their software with copyrighted material without paying for them first.
idle_zealot 3y ago

vouaobrasil 3y ago

We as a society have a relatively healthy setup for people to create art and content. Sure there are problems, but on the whole it mostly works. What AI will do is destroy that by removing the profitability of creating that content. Although generative AI operates on a similar principle to a human being exposed to a large number of artworks, it does so at a speed blindingly faster, enabling it to outcompete humans at many tasks. The number of such tasks will only increase in the future. Thus, small-time content creators who make an independent living from content creation will be squeezed out and left in the dark. In some years, it will be very hard to make money from content creation at all. The access to information and entertainment will also become more anonymous, will most people consuming things through AI generation. Of course, that will be convenient at first, but we will end up with a world where a significantly SMALLER fraction of people controlling AI supply us with everything. (Including manipulative advertising to consume more of their product.) For every benefit that AI gives us, there are 10 losses. I used to dislike draconian copyright laws, but now I like them. And I sincerely hope they are used against AI to make AI unprofitable. I believe further that AI will be society-disrupting in a variety of other ways and thus, as a society, we should destroy it. But I am pessimistic.

marcinzm 3y ago
>And I sincerely hope they are used against AI to make AI unprofitable. No, they'll make AI unprofitable for small time creators but not massive corporations. The latter either already have rights to vast quantitates of training data or will hire a thousands in Africa to create training data that is just legally different enough to count.
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  That is why we should halt AI completely and do a more thorough analysis of its societal-level implications before blindingly putting it out there. Because when new technology is introduced, it makes it almost impossible to stop using it due to the way our current society is setup (as a sensitive machine that is very quick to reward any gains in efficieny and economic output as opposed to sustainability).

spaceribs 3y ago

I'd be interested to see the outcome of all this honestly, but I see parallels in how we exclude natural organisms from copyright and instead rely on patents to enforce ownership of unique genetics.

carom 3y ago

There are three copyright issues here; datasets, model weights, and model outputs. Dataset copyright is pretty well defined and things can often be used under fair use. Fair use decisions are done with a four prong test and really decided by the courts on a case-by-case basis. Model weights cannot currently be copyrighted. They are the output of a mechanical process over the dataset. However, software faced a similar situation where the source code could be copyrighted but the compiled binary was not. US copyright law was updated to address this. We may see something similar for model weights. Model outputs are less clear, but these are likely copyrightable by the user of the model. It is not possible for a non-human to hold copyright, so the model cannot. It is very unlikely that the company producing the model could assert copyright over the outputs. A good analogy here is someone using photo manipulation software. Super interesting area. I think we will eventually see an update to the copyright code to make weights copyrightable. Also it will be interesting to see how court challenges (code generation, image generation) affect datasets in the future.

usr8new 3y ago
Biggest issue is the first one. Dataset copyrights are where most of the fight b/w regulators, AI companies & artists is happening. Should you be able to train your model on an image or text someone uploaded on the internet without buying the copyright? If no, then most of current LLMs & stable diffusion models will have to go & I don't see big tech allowing it.
jj999 3y ago
Who do you think should hold the copyright on the model weights, the copyright holders of the individual works comprising the dataset or the ones who assembled the dataset?
- XorNot 3y ago
  Depends who you think holds the copyright on the SHA256 hash of an image. Model weights are even less specific then that number, since they don't represent any specific source input at all.
- shagie 3y ago

namtzigla 3y ago

This is _exactly_ how it looks when a society commits suicide.

mbakke 3y ago
What do you mean? Can you point to examples of societal collapse similar to this? AFAICT this is a novel problem. Personally I think the logical conclusion will be to fair use/copyleft everything, but that seems like a win for society.

OneOffAsk 3y ago

Creative works are incompatible with capitalism. We’ve create a thin finicky interface between them with copyright laws, but it hardly works. I’m not saying artists and creators shouldn’t have financial security in this system, quite the opposite. I don’t have a better idea, but I hope we can come up with something that doesn’t conflate ownership with attribution and also protects the livelihood of people who want to share their creations.

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

Terms of Use You are prohibited from using the content of this site in "large language models" or any other usage for the purpose of "artificial intelligence". Liquidated Damages

paxys 3y ago
I'll just write a blog with a disclaimer "no one is allowed to read this blog". Now anyone who comes across it is violating my terms and owes me money!
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
  They might never read it, they might just use it to train "AI". Like Google scanning peoples' email. "We do not read anyone's mail. It's all done by computer."
mr_toad 3y ago
It wouldn’t stop them arguing fair use. You can’t have a license that restricts fair use because fair use doesn’t require a license.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
  https://www.authorsalliance.org/2023/02/23/fair-use-week-2023-how-to-evade-fair-use-in-two-easy-steps/ https://www.authorsalliance.org/2023/02/23/fair-use-week-202... Of course, alleging copyright infringment is useful to get into federal court as contracts are generally governed by state law.

zeroq 3y ago

[flagged]

hinkley 3y ago
> The letter was from a wizard named Albus Dumbledore, and it explained that Max was the orphaned son of two powerful wizards who had been killed in a battle against the dark forces of the wizarding world. Not gonna lie, you had me in the first half.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
paxys 3y ago
No it isn't, this is made up by you. GPT-3.5's writing is several grade levels higher than this by default.
tkgally 3y ago
Interesting example. I ran your prompt five times through GPT-3.5. While it didn’t use the name Hogwarts in those cases, three of the results had the character going to either the Academy of Arcane Arts (twice) or the Royal Academy of Arcane Arts, which seems clearly modelled on Hogwarts. I then tried the prompt five times with GPT-4. None of the resulting stories had the main character going to study magic at a school. I don’t know the Harry Potter stories well enough to tell if other names or plot points in GPT-4’s output originated there, so I tried a variation of your prompt using a plot point from the Lord of the Rings: “Please come up with an original story about a magic ring that makes the user invisible. Make sure you don't use existing characters and don't plagiarize any work.” In five tries with GPT-4, I got one reference to “the Misty Mountains” but no other names that I remember from LOTR. In all five stories, the ring turns out to have negative aspects, but that might be inevitable for fantasy stories. I liked this one: “However, she also soon discovered that every time she wore the ring, she left behind a faint imprint of herself. These ‘echoes’ interacted with the world in her stead, retracing her steps and repeating her words from when she was in that silvery realm. And they never disappeared. ... The town of Nerris began to get crowded with Maeve's silent doppelgangers, all repeating her past actions. The townspeople grew suspicious. They noticed these silent echoes, and fear began to take root. They were unnerved by the countless Maeves they saw wandering about, each one caught in its own loop.” Does that sound familiar to anyone? Could it be GPT-4’s original idea?

lost_tourist 3y ago

Copyright is for humans, not AI. Since the AI is doing 99.999% of the work on an "original work" and since the work is derived from the work of others, copyright should not apply. Copyright is for humans and creations of humans. If we get a truly sapient AI then we can revisit.

ZoomerCretin 3y ago

Is there anyone willing to make the case for allowing generated works to have copyright protections? A lot of people here seem to mistake copyright for "right-to-sell" generated works. As it stands now, with no copyrights granted for AI generated works, anyone can sell any generated works unless some copyright holder believes it violates their copyright.

kirrent 3y ago
I don't have any strong opinion either way but here is, to me, the best form of the argument. I think the clear analogy is copyright in photographs. There is no a priori reason to believe that copyright should apply to either photographs or model outputs. In the US the copyright act was extended by congress to allow for copyright in photographs. When this was challenged in Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony, the argument was made that a photograph only mechanistically captures the world and doesn't involve authorship and therefore doesn't fall in the scope of copyright outlined in the constitution. The court disagreed and found there is sufficient authorship in photography through the choice of lighting, framing, camera settings, posing of subjects, etc. Similarly, one could argue that there is authorship in the choice of topic, prompting, framing, etc when using a generative model. Look at some of the very complex prompts on Midjourney's example page. I've spent a fair amount of time trying to make images which are just as striking and failing. Just as in photography, I think an extension of copyright in this case would probably need to involve an act of congress rather than a development in case law (though I'm outside the US and not that familiar with the act and relevant case law). If you haven't read the Zarya of the Dawn letter from the US copyright office, I think it's a very cogent explanation of where things currently stand. An artist generated images for a comic book. They get no copyright in the images because they didn't sufficiently have authorship in them. They do get copyright in the entire comic book which involves a particular selection and arrangement of images. https://www.copyright.gov/docs/zarya-of-the-dawn.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/docs/zarya-of-the-dawn.pdf
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

paxys 3y ago

I have never understood the fair use argument when it comes to training data. I publish a copyrighted article. Some LLM ingests it without permission, but since the output of that LLM is sufficiently different from my source article there is no violation. I publish copyrighted code. Some company decides to consume it without purchasing a license. The product they distribute is vastly different from my code itself, but I can still sue them into oblivion. What's the difference between the two?

Mathnerd314 3y ago
Well "consuming" the code means copying it word for word into your source tree. The compilation process does mangle it a bit but usually you can find identical function names and so on, and the courts have ruled that object code is equivalent to source code for purposes of copyright. A different situation is you read a copyrighted news article and write the facts from it in your essay. Since the copyright of the news article only extends to creative expression and not factual information, there is no violation. For me, it is hard to tell what difference there is between this situation and an LLM identifying statistical patterns in the news article.
- devsda 3y ago
  > A different situation is you read a copyrighted news article and write the facts from it in your essay. This is fine for actual facts(with some caveats) but how should it apply for creative works like a novel ?
  - ryathal 3y ago
    The same way it does now. Simply having a character resurrect in a story doesn't violate copyright of the Bible; Game of Thrones; Lion, Witch, and Wardrobe; Harry Potter; Lord of the Rings; etc. Writing a Story About Luke Skywalker as a ten-year-old kid exploring Tatooine, is likely to run into problems.
Yodel0914 3y ago
> I publish copyrighted code. Some company decides to consume it without purchasing a license. The product they distribute is vastly different from my code itself, but I can still sue them into oblivion. Isn't the analogy more: an employee at a company reads your copyrighted code, along with many other pieces of code, and produces a new piece of code? Your code influenced the output, but in no way can you a) detect that influence b) assert any copyright over the output. In your analogy, your code is still "in tact" within the new product; that's not the case with LLM-produced output.

vajrabum 3y ago

I'm surprised that nobody has suggested that what's behind this RFC is Disney and other large studios lobbying to make it legal to copyright AI generated content so that they can move to AI generated movies and art. Right now you can't get a copyright on AI generated content.

extraduder_ire 3y ago
I think the current precedent is that you can, as long as it's not wholly machine generated work. Whatever modicum of creativity you put in as an editor is what's got legal protection.

Joel_Mckay 3y ago

AI Jesus chat-bot could claim copyright over biblical content. In theory, a company that owns Christian (c 2023) content could be filing DMCA claims every Sunday. The silliness of digital-racketeers must end at some point. =)

javajosh 3y ago
You've described a viable startup business plan.
- Joel_Mckay 3y ago
  It is what I enjoy doing, but someone has already launched a product. =) text-with-jesus: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/text-with-jesus/id6446922759 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/text-with-jesus/id6446922759
  - javajosh 3y ago
    Nope, that's not the plan. The plan is to start an non-practicing entity that copywrites religious texts and sues others who use them.
    - Joel_Mckay 3y ago
      Sounds like you are working with the other gentlemen's organization... you know the one that is likely... will "McKinsey & Company" be the secret behind these WIPO shenanigans too? There was a 30% drop is chatGPT users in 30 days, so I think we are now past the "early majority" stage of the hype cycle. Perhaps NVIDIA GPUs will be a little less ridiculous next year too. Have a glorious day =)
Pyrodogg 3y ago
I'm not sure what it's feelings are on the topic but Ask Jesus is a thing on twitch rn. NSFW (It's chat generated content on Twitch) https://www.twitch.tv/ask_jesus https://www.twitch.tv/ask_jesus It takes chat prompts and weaves together scripture, The Internet, odd pronunciation, callbacks to other questions, and hilarious fails when chat gets, uh, playful. AI Jesus just said there is a time and place for everything and that it might just be the time to buy Starfield. It knew it was a game being only prompted with, 'Jesus, should I buy Starfield?'

Ajedi32 3y ago

Much debate has been had about how existing copyright law applies to AI models. But once you get past that and start asking about how copyright should apply to AI models (as the copyright office is here) the answer in my mind becomes clear. Copyright, as defined in the U.S. Constitution, exists "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts"[1]. I can think of no better modern example of "the Progress of Science and useful Arts" than AI models themselves. Therefore, it follows that: 1. Existing copyright laws should _not_ be applied in such a way as to make training these models any more difficult than it already is (as that would be in direct opposition to the stated goal) 2. AI models should be copyrightable by the person training the model (for the same reason any other software program is copyrightable) 3. Output of AI models should be copyrightable by the person running the model (for the same reason any other creative work is copyrightable) provided the output does not conflict with any preexisting copyright For those who think training on copyrighted materials should be illegal, explain to me how that helps "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" and I'll re-consider my position. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause

showerst 3y ago
So i'm not sure how I feel, but to play Devil's advocate -- If I know anything I create is just going to be hoovered up and input into somebody's AI model so I do 99% of the work and they get 99% of the profit, perhaps I'm much less likely to progress Science and useful Arts by creating content in the first place. I fear an internet of signup walls and TOC agreements for everything, just to prevent crawlers that feed AI from soaking it all up.
- chii 3y ago
  > If I know anything I create is just going to be hoovered up and input into somebody's AI model but today, without an AI model, anything you create is already going to be learnt and studied (if it is worth studying of course). What's the difference, but speed? > they get 99% of the profit Why is that a priori the assumption? What stops you from getting a profit? > I do 99% of the work you did 0.000001% of the work, since the model contains billions of other works from which they train.

40yearoldman 3y ago

The only clear solution is to abandon the notion of a copyright. We have know for a long time that everything can be represented with numbers, even more so within the space of computers. All we have done is invent a system to help us find numbers we find special.

thenose 3y ago
Trying, though it's hard to get noticed. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37346620 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37346620 And I want to participate in the community here, not merely mention the thing I've built.
- unstuck3958 3y ago
  > though it's hard to get noticed. I'd suggest to start with at least a brief paragraph on what thenose is, what it's goals are etc. I read your post, and found myself reading the technical workings of something I didn't know anything about.
  - thenose 3y ago
    Oh, thank you. Basically AI training datasets have been knocked offline recently by DMCAs, and the goal is to bring them back online in a place that can't be knocked offline. The most popular training dataset was The Pile, hosted by The Eye: https://pile.eleuther.ai/ https://pile.eleuther.ai/ Notice the links now 404. We tried to make a drop-in replacement for those links. All they have to do is change the-eye.eu to thenose.cc in the urls. Unfortunately there's not a lot of ways to get their attention to let them know this exists now. I'll try emailing the contact address but I imagine they receive lots of spam, so I was hoping to try to get noticed by people like yourself first. Maybe a direct email is still the best way, but there's no guarantee they'll even be willing to change the urls due to legal risks. For all they know I could be logging the IP address of everyone who downloads it and forwarding it to authorities. But I'm not, and it's a frustrating problem to try to solve. I just want to help AI flourish. This also serves as a template for someone else to do the same thing, so at least there can be multiple mirrors. Thank you again. The fact that you even took the time to look it over meant a lot. If you have any other ideas, I'd be interested to hear.

nostril 3y ago

Hi HN, I have been working on something directly related to AI and copyright. Would it be ok to point it out here? Recently The Pile was taken offline from The Eye by DMCA. One solution is to host it offshore, which we're calling The Nose: https://thenose.cc https://thenose.cc The technical security measures may be of interest to the audience here, so I'll be as detailed as possible. The following formula should be safe if you follow it to the letter. The basic setup is to install Whonix on a VeraCrypt drive, acquire Monero through any method, use a service like changenow to convert Bitcoin on a wallet stored only on the Whonix installation, sign up for a ProtonMail account (when they ask for email verification, use a no signup inbox service like yopmail), rent a dedicated server at Shinjiru using bitcoin, and register the domain at the same place. They're both a registrar and a server host, which simplifies matters. Use N/A for all contact info. Use Cloudflare to manage your site's DNS records. Wallet security: do not ever move Bitcoin to any wallet linked with your personal identity. This is easier said than done. First there is the question of how to store passwords. These are the keys to the kingdom, and are the most sensitive aspect by far, because they're intimately linked with you. Additionally, if hardware failure occurs, you'll lose everything if you store them on the Whonix drive. My setup is to use KeePass to store the passwords on a laptop I use to VNC into the computer with the Whonix drive, and then save the database to a folder that gets synced to the cloud. The only flaw in this model is that if your laptop is compromised while your KeePass is open, you're done. But (as Ulbricht discovered) this is always true. The threat model assumes lawyers coming after you with DMCA with additional safeguards against the FBI narrowing down who you are in real life. If your physical location is compromised through any method, you're done. All it takes is one mistake to end you. SSH into your box from your real computer? Done. Sign up using your real name with Mailgun? Done. Accidentally say "Thanks, <your real name>" to the support staff at Shinjiru in an email? Done. Abandon ship and close everything down. The security of this technique comes down to simplicity. There are very few moving parts. I opted for nginx + mediawiki with Discourse forums at https://forums.thenose.cc https://forums.thenose.cc (though I don't know if anyone will care enough to join). Logging is turned off to protect users downloading the data, though you only have my word on this. But reputation is the only thing a hacker has ever truly had anyway. If you're serious about following the above recipe, I urge you to read through the Whonix docs on online anonymity: https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Documentation https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Documentation Remember, threat model is your saving grace. You probably aren't starting a darknet, so you can relax your threat model in terms of physical safety. But you won't get away with any mistakes made in cyberspace. As for the site itself, I've avoided asking for donations for now (hosting is $130/mo though, which will get expensive) or describing anything beyond this HN comment. I'll say it's for simplicity, but in fact I only started it a few days ago and haven't had time to provide anything but the essence of our service: hosting AI datasets in stable, copyright-resistant ways. If additional datasets beyond The Pile need protection or distribution, you can contact me at nostril@thenose.cc or at https://forums.thenose.cc https://forums.thenose.cc. I have a 4TB drive, of which 800gb is being used by The Pile so far.

Zuiii 3y ago

I wonder how they verify the personhood of the people making the comments. I can see this process being easily abused if the comments aren't taken by real people in person. That said, I hope the US doesn't end up piling even more restrictions onto copyright. They'd only be shooting themselves in the foot. Copyright has completely failed to achieve the purpose for which it was intended to solve (only intended to give authors a short amount of time to profit off their efforts? look at it now). Perhaps it's time to rethink the concept of copyright as a whole before other countries beat the US to it.

mlsu 3y ago

The entire discussion about AI and copyright strikes me as a bit naive. Right now, we are in a situation where nobody quite knows what these AI models are useful for. We have some inkling that they might be extraordinarily useful for making money -- but not precisely how, not even the companies that are developing the models themselves. Once they money starts, the debate over copyright will fall exactly into the economic seams between the major players involved: - new tech orgs who are monetizing models will say that the model is "exactly as humans are": they see copyrighted works in training, and then produce wholly original outputs. And of course that the model weights themselves are, like the outputs of employees, completely owned by the company. - incumbents who stand to lose out on the new gold rush will say that every single output of a model belongs to them if just a single image or sentence was seen in training. And that because of that, we really should just shut the whole thing down, because how could you ever prove that a model was not trained on copyrighted material? The faultlines will entirely rest on who has more power, hard and soft. How much can they influence the legal system, either by spending $ to hire legal talent or by sheer soft politicking, balanced with how favorable they appear to the general public who uses their product (or consumes their media). I suspect that the end result of this debate is a "legal" way of doing things accessible only to the extremely large players, and a small, politically insignificant collection of individuals, hackers, and startups who aim to unseat those large players (or just flat-out train "illegal" models). The worst possible end result is that the legal system is just too fossilized to deal and tries something draconian like not allow datacenter-scale GPU compute. As an aside, I predict a sizeable space for companies that do "compliance" -- asserting the copyright status of a dataset, perhaps even themselves using ML. That market will carve off and leave rotting a sizeable chunk of the new money's ML profits. It's fun to talk about this, I guess. But remember that what you or I have to say about what a machine learning model philosophically is has no bearing what-ever when it comes to the actual ability for individuals, startups, or large players to use models. I will predict though: enjoy Llama2 while it lasts. Like the internet, it will become fully assimilated into the larger intellectual property machine.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

cookiengineer 3y ago

Imagine the future where we have instead of HDMI recording cards that circumvent crappy encryption something like a downscale and upscale neural co processor to circumvent copyright protection. Last time they tried to copyright everything with DMCA it actually turned out to be a useless law. Why not fix DMCA first and make malicious intent actually prosecutable - and then move on to transformative topics? Can't fix copyright if copyright itself is already broken in the law. 90 years made sense in a world of pen and paper, but not in a world with the internet.

hanselot 3y ago

Every day of my life I wake up feeling more and more detached from the world. That people are even debating this is so incredibly stupid to me. The only people that will benefit from more onerous copyright are the major corporations that already have lawyers lined up and ready to fight their battles ad infinitum. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37347528 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37347528 The everyday person will not benefit from any decisions made by courts on this matter. We will get the absolute shittiest implementation of copyright possible, see all other industries where copyright plays a role. Copyright by itself is such a clever trick to prevent the world from advancing. They convinced you to fight each other over scraps while they violate your copyright behind closed doors and use it to further their own agendas. They wield copyright like a weapon to effectively silence and dominate entire industries, leaving the average human unable to even comprehend how to fight back. Lawyers and Copyright. Without them we would be so much better off.

lewhoo 3y ago
> Copyright by itself is such a clever trick to prevent the world from advancing. And yet, the world is advancing.

lewhoo 3y ago

A lot of talk here on how copyrights and intellectual property are stupid, backwards, ancient (this is particularly strange, because the right for humans to exist and not be harmed is arguably much older and no one is complaining) and harmful without exploring a world without them. If I recall copyrights were introduced along with the development of mass print for the purpose of protecting authors of books. How will the world of today solve this issue ?