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I personally have a really hard time finding any meaningful difference or distinction between "AI" and "lossy compression". Copyright and "lossy compression" ar

I personally have a really hard time finding any meaningful difference or distinction between "AI" and "lossy compression". Copyright and "lossy compression" are pretty easy to reason about. Model "building" is "compression". Model "use" is "decompression". Everything about these AI models seems to be about the "lossy" part, but "lossy" is just an adjective to the main show. It's very difficult to not conclude that copyright of a trained model should be treated identically to the copyright of a zip file.

CamperBob2 3y ago
When you perform lossy compression, you feed it one file at a time, not every file in existence.
- fluidcruft 3y ago
  If you concatenate images into a stream container (say as tar) and then compress the stream, the compression coding will (generally) cross over the individual images. True, that's generally not lossy compression. But concatenating images is also how you create video. Lossy video compression does typically cross over frames. So I don't actually see a difference. If you want to think about mkv or mp4 instead of zip it's still the same concept. There's nothing stopping you from putting every available image into a video and figuring out how to compress it lossily. Maybe there's some bounds for how much information was lost? Obviously piping everything into /dev/null destroys the input. And piping /dev/random from a true random source creates information. So somewhere between that and lossless compression there's the nebulous "plagarism" threshold. And then there's another threshold that is copyright infringement that's considered "fair use". But the general structure of the "AI" this is about are fundamentally storage and retrieval.
  - freejazz 3y ago
    What does any of this have to do with creating a new expression?
    - fluidcruft 3y ago
      What makes anything new? Is anything created by "AI" actually new? How much entropy is in a prompt vs in the output?
      - freejazz 3y ago
        >What makes anything new? In copyright law? It's not being a copy
tomrod 3y ago
Some compression, yes, but the analogy oversimplifies. AI rerepresents input information in a transformative way (embedding, say) then creates new, derived and combined output from a new input (e.g prompt). It's not just lossy compression. It's potentially novel.
- skydhash 3y ago
  It’s compression + filtering. Nothing generative. Its output is like 99.99 % deterministic.
  - Philpax 3y ago
    Source?
  - tomrod 3y ago
    Linear regression is 100% deterministic after training and isn't lossless compression, but rather a linear projection of along a manifold in a (potentially transformed) input space. So, maybe not just compression+filtering, if level of deterministic behavior is to be the gauge.
- fluidcruft 3y ago
  Phrases like "transformative way" are meaningless woospeak to me. Everything is a transformation. Sulpose I run a linear convolution on ten images and average them. Is the result "new"? Does it not contain the original images? Subspaces and mappings don't create anything "new" any more than SVD does. This is just playing digital Ship of Thesius.
  - KHRZ 3y ago
    Congratulations, you just discovered that copyright is a weak and ill-defined concept.
    - fluidcruft 3y ago
      I think that unless you can clearly show that an "AI" is not a form of compression, the question of copyright is orthogonal. The copyrights that apply to a zip file may be ill-defined concepts to you, but it's not really important to the core question which is: how are model weights different from a zip file? If you put unambiguously copyrighted content into a zip file, most people would agree that the copyright applies to the zip file. So by analogy if you put copyrighted content into model weights, the copyright applies to the model weights. Issues such as what constitutes fair use comes up, but fair use is permissible copyright infringement, not absence of copyright. And that's where the question of how lossy a compression algorithm has to be to be considered "fair use". In all likelihood it's the specifics of the use itself (rather than technology or method details used) that matters.
chii 3y ago
Information is not copyrighted, just the expression of said information. So if you took a recipe book, extracted the recipe information, and listed out the recipe in a different format (such as a table), it's a new work. It does not violate the copyright of the recipe book you extracted the info from.
gwd 3y ago
> I personally have a really hard time finding any meaningful difference or distinction between "AI" and "lossy compression". If you feed a photo of your dog into a JPEG compressor and the result looked like a cat in the same style, I think you'd be pretty annoyed.

CamperBob2 3y ago

When you perform lossy compression, you feed it one file at a time, not every file in existence.

fluidcruft 3y ago
If you concatenate images into a stream container (say as tar) and then compress the stream, the compression coding will (generally) cross over the individual images. True, that's generally not lossy compression. But concatenating images is also how you create video. Lossy video compression does typically cross over frames. So I don't actually see a difference. If you want to think about mkv or mp4 instead of zip it's still the same concept. There's nothing stopping you from putting every available image into a video and figuring out how to compress it lossily. Maybe there's some bounds for how much information was lost? Obviously piping everything into /dev/null destroys the input. And piping /dev/random from a true random source creates information. So somewhere between that and lossless compression there's the nebulous "plagarism" threshold. And then there's another threshold that is copyright infringement that's considered "fair use". But the general structure of the "AI" this is about are fundamentally storage and retrieval.
- freejazz 3y ago
  What does any of this have to do with creating a new expression?
  - fluidcruft 3y ago
    What makes anything new? Is anything created by "AI" actually new? How much entropy is in a prompt vs in the output?
    - freejazz 3y ago
      >What makes anything new? In copyright law? It's not being a copy

tomrod 3y ago

Some compression, yes, but the analogy oversimplifies. AI rerepresents input information in a transformative way (embedding, say) then creates new, derived and combined output from a new input (e.g prompt). It's not just lossy compression. It's potentially novel.

skydhash 3y ago
It’s compression + filtering. Nothing generative. Its output is like 99.99 % deterministic.
- Philpax 3y ago
  Source?
- tomrod 3y ago
  Linear regression is 100% deterministic after training and isn't lossless compression, but rather a linear projection of along a manifold in a (potentially transformed) input space. So, maybe not just compression+filtering, if level of deterministic behavior is to be the gauge.
fluidcruft 3y ago
Phrases like "transformative way" are meaningless woospeak to me. Everything is a transformation. Sulpose I run a linear convolution on ten images and average them. Is the result "new"? Does it not contain the original images? Subspaces and mappings don't create anything "new" any more than SVD does. This is just playing digital Ship of Thesius.
- KHRZ 3y ago
  Congratulations, you just discovered that copyright is a weak and ill-defined concept.
  - fluidcruft 3y ago
    I think that unless you can clearly show that an "AI" is not a form of compression, the question of copyright is orthogonal. The copyrights that apply to a zip file may be ill-defined concepts to you, but it's not really important to the core question which is: how are model weights different from a zip file? If you put unambiguously copyrighted content into a zip file, most people would agree that the copyright applies to the zip file. So by analogy if you put copyrighted content into model weights, the copyright applies to the model weights. Issues such as what constitutes fair use comes up, but fair use is permissible copyright infringement, not absence of copyright. And that's where the question of how lossy a compression algorithm has to be to be considered "fair use". In all likelihood it's the specifics of the use itself (rather than technology or method details used) that matters.

chii 3y ago

Information is not copyrighted, just the expression of said information. So if you took a recipe book, extracted the recipe information, and listed out the recipe in a different format (such as a table), it's a new work. It does not violate the copyright of the recipe book you extracted the info from.

gwd 3y ago

> I personally have a really hard time finding any meaningful difference or distinction between "AI" and "lossy compression". If you feed a photo of your dog into a JPEG compressor and the result looked like a cat in the same style, I think you'd be pretty annoyed.